Thunderstruck & Other Stories

by Elizabeth McCracken

  Why didn’t you leave?

  At that the boy looked confused. “I live there,” he said at last.

  Not anymore, you don’t, said the police. Don’t worry, we’ll find you somewhere good. Someplace that’ll feed you.

  In the meantime the kid stayed with Leonard Aude and his wife. He gained ten pounds the first two weeks.

  On every tree and telephone pole in the neighborhood:

  HAVE YOU SEEN KAREN?

  NAME: KAREN BLACKBIRD

  AGE WHEN LAST SEEN: 42

  HEIGHT: 5′2″ (ABOUT)

  WEIGHT: 100 LBS (ABOUT)

  That was all. It was all the manager of the Hi-Lo Market knew. He’d Xeroxed the photo from the local paper. The library’s photocopier was feeble, and Karen Blackbird looked frozen in a block of ice. He replaced the fliers every week, whether they’d been rained on or not, but forgot to include a number to call. They were like the refrain of some pop song as you passed them on the street, all question and no way to answer.

  Have you seen Karen? Have you seen Karen? Have you seen Karen?

  The Hi-Lo manager worked six days a week and waited for someone to come question him. No one did. Shouldn’t someone have asked him what he knew? He’d found the boy, he’d alerted the police. I could tell something was wrong, right away. He wouldn’t mention his initial anger—not that the boy was stealing, but that he was stealing so ineptly the Hi-Lo manager was obliged to collar him. He would describe the way the boy looked, hollow-eyed. A good kid, the Hi-Lo manager imagined saying.

  Surely the Hi-Lo manager had a right. Before he found the boy, he’d had an idea that the one good thing in his life was his love for his ex-wife. Most people didn’t know what that kind of love was like. He hadn’t known himself back when they were married, when he felt only as though he were doing it wrong, as though there were a curtain between them. Divorce had lifted that curtain, and now when they spoke on the phone he could suddenly declare, in his truest voice, “I love you,” and he could hear the breath knocked out of her, and then her answer—matter-of-fact because she couldn’t deny it—“I love you, too.” Then they’d just breathe at each other a while, across the perforated tops of the phones, breathe, breathe, and then she’d say, “What are you cooking yourself for dinner? Tell me.” Mostly he cooked hamburgers, but he learned a few other dishes so he could tell her something else.

  Then he found the boy. Shouldn’t that change his life?

  A locksmith replaced the front door lock of number 13, then added a hasp and a padlock. An orange-overalled man nailed a piece of plywood over the broken window. Who had hired them? One at a time, a woman, two men, and a teenage girl left funereal flowers on the front steps of the ramshackle house. Who for? No one mourned the dead man. They were ghouls, those flower leavers. They wanted to attend a funeral but there wasn’t one. Nathan Blackbird’s body was still waiting at the morgue for someone to claim it. The boy had been sent away to live in a new home, a clean one, in another town.

  Some fool—the manager of the Hi-Lo—came with a length of yellow ribbon to tie around a tree, like with the hostages a few years back. It was still in the early years of American ribbons. He was disappointed to see that there was no tree, and besides, someone had already tied yellow ribbon—but, no, that was just police tape. The Hi-Lo manager tied his ribbon around a bush.

  One of the neighbor girls came out to talk to him. She was blond and chinless and rubber-mouthed, with a thick lower lip.

  “He’s coming back,” she said to him.

  “Who?”

  “Asher Blackbird.”

  “Yeah?” said the Hi-Lo manager.

  She nodded. He had a sudden feeling of waking up in a hospital and knowing how bad your condition was by looking at your ward mates.

  “You know Karen?” he asked cautiously.

  She said, “Look.” She was pointing to a spot above her right eye, a blue-gray shadow.

  “What?” he said.

  “Pencil,” she said. “First day of school a kid slapped me on the back while I was erasing. Now, Karen,” she said, and flipped out her palm, “had the same thing, here.”

  “Pencil.”

  “In her palm. Right on this line.”

  “Lana!” a woman called from the porch next door.

  “Gotta go,” said the girl.

  A piece of pencil in her hand! In the coming months, the Hi-Lo manager would look at his own palm, expecting to see it there, a pencil point beneath the skin, twitching like a compass needle.

  Suddenly everything in the neighborhood, it seemed, was lost. Telephone poles were feathered with MISSING posters until you couldn’t see Karen Blackbird’s face. People didn’t take her down, they just tacked up their new losses over hers. Missing: A bobtailed German shepherd named Ponto. A watch with only sentimental value. A tabby cat named James who needed medication. Rodan, beloved parakeet. Please look. Please check your basements. Have you seen me? People wanted to help. They kidnapped the wrong animals, kept them in garages, and called phone numbers. “Are you sure it’s not Ponto?” a worried woman asked Ponto’s owner, who answered, “Lady, a dog is not a starfish. Tails do not grow back.” A neighborhood away, a ten-year-old girl wrote in block letters, Help find me! I am a German shepherd, I answer to “Auntie,” I am nervous and sometimes bite.

  They found a body.

  The body belonged—if that word made sense, if once you were dead your body still belonged to you—to a woman in her thirties or forties. She’d been lashed to a shopping cart and pushed into the Charles River. She was found three months after Karen Blackbird officially disappeared. Skeletal remains, they said. Someone had broken the dead woman’s cheekbone recently, and her femur some years before. She wore a T-shirt that said VIRGINIA IS FOR LOVERS. That survived, but anything else—tattoos, a bit of pencil in the palm, signs she fought back—had been boiled off by the river. There was Karen in the newspaper again, with her freckled shoulders.

  But the coroner decided the next day that the body wasn’t hers; it had been in the river for a year. There was no evidence anyone had reported this particular woman missing. She’d only been found.

  Someone always confesses eventually. In this case, his name was Manny Coveno. The mug shot printed in the paper convinced everyone: nose broken into several bends, a few days’ growth of black beard, a mole just below his right eye that looked like a thumbprint. He’d been picked up in Providence at the end of a week of heavy drinking: he’d wandered into the lobby of the Biltmore Hotel at three A.M. shouting, “I did it! I did it! I did it!”

  Even Manny didn’t know what he was doing in Providence, but his confession seemed plausible. He’d known Nathan Blackbird. They’d kept rooms in a boardinghouse called the Hollis Hotel till the woman who ran it died and the property was sold. Manny, homeless, went on the march. The few people who knew him said they couldn’t imagine him killing anyone. Still, he’d confessed.

  He was so drunk it took him two days to sober up, at which point he went into the delirium tremens. They sent a police stenographer to take notes.

  I strangled her. I stabbed her. Threw her body off the bridge. The bridge, the bridge by the trackless trolleys. Blackbird, Blackbird, Nathan Blackbird. I hated him. She took him away and I followed. She picked him up. I waited. I waited ten, eleven, fifteen years. I caught her. I caught her and I killed her.

  How?

  Oh, any way at all. I bit her. Nathan Blackbird. There was a guy—you can’t believe the things he’d do. He’s the devil. I swear to you, sir, he’s the devil, and me, too.

  Nathan Blackbird?

  Of course. He helped me. I helped him. I bit her. I killed her.

  Did you do anything else?

  Plenty.

  Did you rape her?

  “Oh, Jesus, sir,” said Manny Coveno, shocked, “I could never do a thing like that.”

  “Not that or the rest of it,” his sister said, trying to get him released. “He’s a child, he’s got an IQ of sixty-eigh
t. I’ll show you his records. They loved him in school. He lost his way!”

  “He lost his way, and we found him,” said the police chief.

  For four days Manny Coveno spoke. On TV, as he was taken from the police car to the jail, he looked less convincing, a little guy with the kind of skull-baring brush cut mothers force on their sons in the summer. But he had a lot to say. He smothered her. He shot her. With what kind of gun? A bullet gun. Gun that shoots bullets. He wrapped her body in a sheet and put it on a train. A boxcar. A subway. She had gone to heaven and he’d gone, too. He’d killed her with a blunderbuss. He’d killed her with a credit card. With poison. He’d hidden her under his bed, she was still there, she’d been there for ages. He had been in love with her—wasn’t everyone? In love with who, Manny? With the girl. The girl. That girl.

  On the fifth day, he woke up in his cell. His heart was calm. The walls were steady. He was astounded to hear that he’d been arrested for murder.

  “Well, maybe I did it,” he said to his lawyer. “I don’t remember much of anything about anything.”

  “You didn’t,” said his lawyer, an awkward young woman named Slawson. She was a friend of his sister’s, and she was relieved to believe he was innocent, because he terrified her.

  The police had followed every single harebrained lead that Manny Coveno had given them. They’d even checked the former Hollis Hotel, much to the consternation of the new owner. It had all been nonsense. He’d hallucinated every detail.

  Manny began to cry. “Jesus,” he said. “Who did I kill?”

  “Manny,” said Slawson desperately. She felt her pockets for a handkerchief. “You didn’t kill anyone.”

  “Then why am I here? Oh, Jesus, I don’t want to kill anyone!”

  “They thought you killed Karen Blackbird, but you didn’t.”

  “Blackbird? She Nathan’s wife?”

  “Daughter.”

  “Nathan Blackbird,” Manny said through his tears. “I always looked up to that guy. How’s he doing?”

  On the first anniversary of Karen Blackbird’s disappearance—that is, the anniversary of the day he’d found Asher Blackbird—the Hi-Lo manager attended a support group for families of missing people. It was held at a junior college, in a basement classroom full of atmospheric chalk dust. Twelve people were there, sitting in chairs with paddle desks attached, and they seemed thrilled to see him.

  “Who have you lost?” a kindly woman in a Red Sox cap asked.

  “My wife,” he answered. True enough, his ex-wife had moved the month before to Indiana, and cut off contact, though that wasn’t who he was thinking of when he looked for a missing-persons support group.

  The kindly woman was royalty, the mother of Deanna Manly, the teenager who in the summer of 1959 left for her job as a lifeguard at an MDC pool and vanished entirely. Despite the fact that Deanna had been missing more than twenty years, longer than she hadn’t been missing, her mother wore a T-shirt bearing her daughter’s face, black and white with shining hair, looking like the famous person she became that summer. BRING DEANNA HOME, the shirt said. It was well washed and worn, and the Hi-Lo manager couldn’t tell what level of hope it represented.

  Another woman was missing her ex-husband. She was tall and bony, with a nasal, insinuating voice and gnawed fingers. She couldn’t find her ex-in-laws, either, or the ex-friends she and her ex-husband had shared, who might have died of overdoses, or probably had. They weren’t in any phone book. She talked for ten minutes about how bad the marriage had been, how it had damaged her, how every day she couldn’t find him was a new injury.

  “It’s the not-knowing that’s terrible,” she said.

  “Excuse me,” said the Hi-Lo manager.

  She looked at him and stuck the side of her index finger in her mouth.

  “Do you even belong here?” he asked her.

  She began to nibble that finger.

  “Now—” said a middle-aged man in a plaid shirt.

  “Hey,” said a woman next to him.

  “Oh,” said Deanna Manly’s mother, laying her hand on the Hi-Lo manager’s arm. She looked like her daughter and, despite everything that had happened, decades younger than her age; she looked, in fact, like a police artist’s sketch of what Deanna would look like now, if she were alive, and for a moment the Hi-Lo manager wanted to say: It’s you, Deanna, isn’t it? You’re here, and your mother’s missing. “You can’t question someone else’s pain,” she told him. “Listen. It’s all valid. You can’t—you can’t compare one person’s grief to another’s.”

  Of course you could. Losing a fifteen-year-old daughter was worse than losing a deadbeat, drug-addicted ex-husband. He looked at the twelve people in the room: he wanted to interrogate and rank them—the married couple, the older woman with the shapes of curlers in her hair, the guy who looked like a pedophile. The finger-biter’s feelings for her ex-husband were a bonsai tree—they may have started in something real, but she’d tended them so closely and for so long they were now purely decorative. Of course you could compare one person’s grief to another’s! All he wanted was for one single person to compare, to say to him, yes, your sadness is worse than anyone else’s. Your sadness is inestimable.

  “Do you want to tell us your story?” asked Deanna Manly’s mother.

  Then he remembered: he was a liar, worse than anyone.

  So he told a nonsensical story stitched together from the life of Karen Blackbird, according to newspapers and magazines, and the days of his marriage. As he spoke, he believed even more strongly that there was a reason for his longing that had nothing to do with him: it was fate that had kept him from the people he loved. “She made a kind of chocolate cake with no flour,” he said at last, overcome.

  “Oh, yeah,” said the woman with the missing ex-husband. “I make that.”

  “What does this have to do with you?” said the Hi-Lo manager.

  Deanna Manly’s mother put her hand on his arm again. “Those are wonderful, those flourless cakes. You must miss that.”

  He was heartbroken to hear that one of the small miracles of his marriage was a perfectly common thing.

  It wasn’t fair that only Karen Blackbird got a poster. Everyone wanted one.

  MISSING: ONE WORLD WAR II VET, PLAYED SKY MASTERSON IN GUYS AND DOLLS, CAPABLE OF BENCH-PRESSING 220 POUNDS, AFFECTIONATE BUT HOTHEADED. PLEASE CALL IF SEEN.

  MISSING: FAVORITE CHILD, SIX FEET TALL, MAY BE TALLER BY NOW.

  MISSING, ENDANGERED: FIVE-YEAR-OLD GIRL, ONE LAZY EYE, FASCINATED BY TYPEWRITERS, SMELLS OF CHAPSTICK, LAST SEEN WEARING A HOSPITAL GOWN.

  The neighbors wanted stacks of MISSING posters for every person they lost, even themselves. Missing: former self. Distinguishing marks: expectations of fame, ability to demand love. Last seen wearing: hopeful expression, uncomfortable shoes.

  “The case is still open,” the police chief would say of Karen Blackbird whenever anyone asked, in a voice that suggested the case was a hole in the ground and the best they could hope for was that someone might fall in. But mostly people didn’t ask. Even her son said she was a woman who could have wandered off. Not on purpose: she would have gone to the corner, leaned against a tree in the late-summer swelter. Then to the next corner, to the bus stop. She might have met someone on the bus who belonged to a church, and followed him. She might have gone all the way to Canada. So what if she’d never done it before: she was the sort of person who thought that disappointing someone was to sin against him, which was how she’d ended up pregnant, why she’d taken in her angry father. She might have acquiesced to any number of people until she was far away from home.

  Let her stay lost.

  For ten years, the Hi-Lo manager wondered what he would say if he saw Asher Blackbird again. I’m glad you made it. I hope you’re all right. Hey, son, hey, buddy: how’s your life? They might bump into each other walking across the commons, or in a movie theater downtown. Not in the neighborhood, which had been razed and redeveloped, not a single old bu
siness left but the liquor store. In place of the Hi-Lo, an upscale pizza place that specialized in thin crusts; in place of the five-and-dime, one that featured deep dish. Everything gone, Mac’s Smoke Shop, the Boston Fish House, the Paramount Movie Theater, George’s Tavern. You couldn’t even call it a neighborhood anymore. It was just office space. The Hi-Lo manager wasn’t the Hi-Lo manager. He had a new job two towns over at a hardware store. He cut keys and sorted washers and was glad for the conversation: people talked in hardware stores, he found out.

  Every year he went to the Blackbird place and left a bouquet on the steps. He didn’t want to, he didn’t even know who he was leaving the flowers for, but stopping seemed worse.

  On the tenth anniversary of the day he found the boy, the Hi-Lo manager stood on the front walk of the house and looked at it: the same asbestos tile, the tilting gap-toothed porch railing. How could it have been so abandoned for so long? The neighborhood had gentrified. Even beat up, the place was worth a mint.

  Then the front door opened.

  A man stepped out, late twenties, with a hooked nose, wide shoulders, a tentative smile. He needed a haircut. He brushed his dark curls out of his eyes. “Can I help you?”

  “Oh,” said the Hi-Lo manager. He stuck the flowers behind his back, like a shy suitor, and noticed that the yard had been cleaned up, the broken window repaired. “I didn’t realize anyone lived here.”

  The man nodded. “Since December. Fixing it up bit by bit. I know it doesn’t look it,” he said apologetically. “We’re focused on the inside. Got to do it before the baby comes. You live on the street?”

  The Hi-Lo manager nodded. “It’s a good neighborhood for kids.” Neighborhood because he was about to say house and that wasn’t true: it was a catastrophic house for kids.

  “I know,” said the man. “I grew up here.”