“That’s what your son told me,” the inspector says.
“Doesn’t that tell you something?” his mother says.
A trooper in a bulky flak jacket comes in from the living room with a pair of double-barreled shotguns broken over his shoulders, and Glenn’s father gets up.
“Those were my father’s,” he says, “and I don’t appreciate you or anybody touching them.”
“Ithacas,” the inspector notes, intervening. “They are old. Knickerbockers. Beautiful guns.” He sniffs both breeches and, careful of their barrels, hands them gently to Glenn’s father. “Very sorry,” he says. “All of this is routine. I promise we will get you to the site as soon as we can.”
“Can I use the bathroom?” Glenn asks.
“Where is it?” the inspector says.
He follows Glenn in and, while Glenn goes, stands facing the other way, watching his eyes.
“You’re capable,” the inspector says. “You could do it.”
“Do what?”
“Take her from her mother. Tell me you wouldn’t.”
“I would never hurt Tara.” Glenn doesn’t like the way he says this—stagey, fake. It’s ridiculous to even talk about it.
“That’s not what I’m saying,” the inspector says.
“I didn’t do anything.”
“I know that. But you’ve thought of it.”
“No,” Glenn says, “I haven’t,” and wonders if he’s telling the truth.
In the kitchen his mother is wrapping the hamburg she’s been thawing for dinner. She has her coat on. His father’s gone out to warm the car. When the troopers come downstairs, the house shakes.
“So?” his mother taunts.
“We’ve seen everything we need to see for now.”
Glenn rides with the inspector in an unmarked car, his parents following a cruiser in the Fury. The defrost is on; flakes hit the windshield and disappear. On the dash sits a blue bubble like the one in his truck. He thinks of a girl Tara’s age he saved when he was working rescue. She’d been swimming in a plastic blow-up pool when her mother had to go answer the phone. Glenn spread her out on the lawn and administered CPR. He remembers feeling contempt for the woman, just as now he feels contempt for himself at not being able to protect Tara. It is, to some extent, his fault.
“Marchand,” the inspector says, “you want to tell me about the picture?”
“What picture?”
“Your drawing, the one over your bed.”
He means a sketch Elder Francis asked him to make during his counseling. How do you envision your personal relationship with Jesus? In it, the world is represented by a city under a sea of blood, the people chained to each other. Glenn shows himself drowning; the bubbles coming out of his mouth join into a blue ghost that floats up to heaven and whispers into the smiling Christ’s ear.
“It means I’m saved,” Glenn says.
“From what?”
“The world. Hell. Everything.”
“That’s a lot to ask from one guy,” the inspector says.
“It’s not like I have a choice,” Glenn says.
Turning into Turkey Hill with the entourage, he sees a line of men slowly combing the fields. The house is surrounded by cars—police, an ambulance, the rescue truck. Closer, he notices Brock’s Charger’s not there and that the Maverick’s window is broken. Immediately he thinks they’ve had a fight (over him, perhaps, over Tara). The inspector tells Glenn to wait until he comes around and opens the door.
“I don’t want you and the missis starting anything,” he warns. “Do and you’re gone.”
But inside, with so many people around, Annie is quiet. She sits on the couch with her wrapped foot up on the coffee table, on one side her mother, on the other a policewoman he recognizes from a recent trailer fire. The door’s open and it’s cold. The squawk and static of walkie-talkies is constant. Inspector Burns stands just in front of him, as if ready to step in.
“You don’t have her,” Annie asks, but it’s not an accusation. She looks exhausted.
“What happened?” he says.
“She just wandered off,” May explains.
“Swear to me, Glenn. You don’t have her.”
“I wouldn’t do something like that.”
“We picked him up at his work,” Inspector Burns confirms.
“Where’s Brock?” Glenn asks.
May throws her hands up in disgust.
“I don’t know. He was supposed to be at the Home but they say he isn’t there.”
“We have people en route,” the policewoman says.
The bastard, Glenn thinks, guessing right.
“Go look for her,” Annie says, “you know where she’d go.”
“Can I?” Glenn asks the inspector, who then calls a trooper over to shadow him.
“Find her,” Annie says.
“I will,” Glenn promises.
Barb is finishing her shift at the Rusty Nail when Roy Barnum walks in, takes a stool and orders a decaf, milk and sugar. He’s on duty and it’s free, house rule. Barb draws it off the urn, clanks it down. Roy slides a flyer across the counter, a grainy photograph in the center, a little girl in overalls, puffy cheeks, devilish smile.
“Put this up in a good spot for me?” Roy asks, but Barb has recognized Tara and, with one hand covering her mouth, stands speechless.
The road is lined with police cars—some state, Brock sees—and quickly weighing turning around, he double-parks in front of the house and hurries over the snow. Glenn. He imagines what he will have to do if Annie is dead. He thinks he will be heartbroken but in time recover. This is insane.
The yard is full of cops, one of them talking to Glenn.
“Brock,” Glenn says as if he’s his friend.
“What’s going on?” Brock asks the cop.
“Are you the boyfriend?”
“Where’s Annie?”
“Tara is missing,” Glenn says, as if it’s his fault.
Annie is inside, sitting with her mother. He wants to go to her but her mother won’t let him through. He wonders if they can smell the soap on him, the wine through his Juicy Fruit. Tara is missing. Nothing in the world goes right for him.
“Where the fuck were you?” Annie says.
“Work.”
“No you weren’t.”
A cop in a trenchcoat comes over and asks if he is Brock.
“Yes,” Brock says, sick of this shit, “I am Brock.”
The snow comes down sideways, blowing, smoothing over footprints in minutes. The Lifeflight is grounded. There is only another hour of light, and already it is poor. The woods crackle with volunteers. The news is on the radio; Rafe comes straight from work. The Friday AA meeting is here, the Women’s Methodist Alliance. Clare and Jerrell search the cannibalized pickups and tractors at the north edge of the cornfield; Brock and Glenn are with the inspector down below the pond. May and Regina, Frank and Olive talk in the living room, the public-access channel with its thermometer and clock on silently beside them. Barb has taped Tara’s flyer to the mirror of the Rusty Nail and driven out in her uniform, bare legs, heels and all. The hunt has spread across the interstate to the middle school grounds. Trucks file by the flares, the troopers’ orange-coned flashlights. The Army Reserve has promised two squads if this should go until tomorrow.
Yet it will not be any of these searchers who finds Tara, but a fourteen-year-old from the high school marching band, small for his size, generally ignored, in fact, myself, Arthur Parkinson, who, because she is dead, will not be a hero—will not, years from now, even be remembered around town as the one who found her—but who, with Annie and Glenn and Brock and May and Frank and Olive and Clare and Barb, will find Tar a again and again throughout his life and never ever lose her.
SEVEN
I REMEMBER NOT WANTING TO GO. It was a Friday and we had just taken the field. Thanksgiving we were playing Armstrong Township; in the cafeteria banners urged us to JUMP THE BEAVERS. We were standing arou
nd in groups warming up with rock riffs—“Satisfaction,” “Foxy Lady”—when the vice-principal came running over the footbridge. Mr. Chervenick blew his whistle and climbed the roll-away podium. We would make this up next Monday, he said, regardless of the weather. He stressed that participation in the search was not mandatory.
“Yeah right,” Warren said beside me.
No one in the band was cool or vicious enough to call Mr. Chervenick’s bluff. Most of us in the brass were glad; on a day so cold, it took faith to put your lips to the mouthpiece. We snapped our cases shut and marched back over the bridge. Two buses waited for us, chugging out clouds in the snow. We were to leave our instruments and bookbags in the lobby; the janitor would watch them.
The vice-principal, Mr. Eisenstat, rode with us. He brought the lost-and-found box and walked the aisle, asking if anyone needed gloves. We would need them, he said, when we got to the site.
“The site,” Warren gravely mimicked. We sat together in back under the curved sea-green ceiling, burnt from a long day’s partying. It was a Friday, which meant a celebration, and next week was Thanksgiving.
Neither fact made me happy. Band days I didn’t get to walk home from the bus stop with Lila, and weekends, though we lived in adjacent buildings, I didn’t see her. Schoolnights I lay awake thinking of what I would say to her the next morning, of how I would ask her to a movie. That never happened, of course, but Friday nights that winter seemed to me especially hopeless.
As for Thanksgiving, my mother hinted that this year we might not have dinner with my father’s parents in Pittsburgh. Slyly she’d been feeling me out about the Horn of Plenty, a buffet down Route 8 we used to go to for her birthday. It was all-you-can-eat. At the end of the steamtable a cook in a chef’s toque sliced a bloody roast beef under a heat lamp. I said it would be okay, but in a grunt, meaning it wasn’t.
“Look,” my mother snapped, “maybe you haven’t noticed, but things are different now.”
“I’ve noticed,” I said.
“Then just save your little smart-ass comments. I’m trying to tell you this as nicely as I can. Your father doesn’t seem to be showing much interest in doing anything as a family this year. I’d like to because I think it would be nice for you, but when I call your father and try to talk about it, all he does is put me off. I am going to try to set things up the way they’ve been, but I’m warning you that it might not happen. Now would you like that or should I just not bother?”
“Whatever,” I said.
“Whatever,” my mother challenged.
“It’s okay, I don’t care.”
“I don’t know why I try,” she said. “Obviously it means nothing to you that I have to ask these people to do us a favor when I would rather not talk to them at all.”
“It does mean something,” I said, but too late; she had turned away and plopped down on the couch and was lighting a cigarette. “The Horn of Plenty’s fine.”
“That’s shit,” my mother said, tossing her lighter at the table. It slid across a magazine and dropped to the carpet. My mother turned on the TV and wouldn’t look at me.
I’d seen and, more often, heard her fight like this with my father, but I had never been on the receiving end, and felt—rightfully or not—that she was taking advantage of my inexperience. I didn’t know how to fight back. The next morning she acted as if nothing had happened. I was still angry. Like the child I was, I was keeping score.
Warren, my only confidant, said mothers get nutty around holidays. We discussed it on the bus on the way over to the site. He was tired of my negativity, he said. We had blown a serious bone in the parking lot after last period, hoping to make practice bearable, and we were pronouncing on the world at large.
“Let’s say you’re your mother.”
“Let’s say,” I said.
“Okay, now I’m you and Thanksgiving is coming up. ‘I hate Thanksgiving, I don’t care if we have turkey, I don’t give a shit.’ I mean, is that what she wants to hear?”
“You mean me.”
“Yeah,” he said.
“I don’t say it like that. And that’s not the point. She thinks she’s doing me this big favor when she’s not.”
“Oh, so you want to go to the Horn of Plenty and eat cheese cubes for Thanksgiving.”
“My mother does.”
“You.”
“Me if I’m my mother.”
“Where do you want to eat for Thanksgiving?” Warren asked.
“I don’t care,” I said.
“Fuck you.”
“Yeah,” I said, “that’s pretty much what she said.”
“She’s right. I don’t see why you’re all pissed off.”
We crossed the interstate. Mr. Eisenstat came down the aisle, passing out flyers with a picture of the little girl. I didn’t like her first name and didn’t recognize the last. Mr. Eisenstat held up the flyer and spoke so we could all hear, even those of us like Warren and myself who were not interested. Everything he told us was on the flyer except one.
“She has been missing for between two and three hours.”
Warren looked out at the snow, looked back at me and shook his head. “She’s meat.”
“Frozen food,” I said. “Now look who’s being negative.”
We didn’t know where we were going. We hadn’t gotten far when the bus slowed and swung onto a road, trees on one side, an open field on the other. A man wearing irrigators walked the iced-over ditch, stopping to test for soft spots. In the field a brace of dogs pulled a man in a hunter’s cap along. People had parked off the road, facing the wrong way. Farther on was a house, but we didn’t come close to getting there. The bus stopped and Mr. Millhauser said, “That’s it.”
“Buddy up,” Mr. Eisenstat instructed. “Stay in sight of each other. We don’t want you getting lost too.”
“What a zeke,” Warren said.
Once we were off, I saw the water tower. Mr. Chervenick marched us down the road six abreast as if we were filing through the stadium tunnel.
“We could have walked here quicker,” I said.
“You still have that roach?” Warren asked.
News crews were filming, and as we passed in back of each neatly dressed reporter, we gave the entire city of Pittsburgh the finger. A Red Cross canteen truck was handing out free coffee and hot chocolate; cups blew around the parked cars’ tires. We followed Mr. Chervenick past the house, unconsciously falling into step.
Orange horses blocked off the road just short of the turnaround. Police manned a long folding table with a map taped across the top, behind them a garbage can over which searchers were warming their hands. We waited at parade rest while Mr. Chervenick talked to a trooper with a clipboard. He came back and announced that we would go over an area below the pond which had already been done.
“If you find something you believe is important, do not touch it or move it. Get me or Mr. Eisenstat, and we will get the appropriate person to look at it. Please do not touch or move anything you believe is important; I can’t stress that enough.”
“Does everyone have a buddy?” Mr. Eisenstat asked, and when no one said anything, asked, “Who doesn’t have a buddy?”
The woods above the pond were full of old people in black baseball caps celebrating Pullman-Standard’s 70th anniversary. As we walked down the hill, the mixed group that had just searched our area passed us coming up, breathing hard.
The pond was frozen but not solid. In the middle a slick of gray water sat atop the ice. When Mr. Chervenick whistled for us to close ranks and stand at attention, we could hear the spillway.
“Everything from here down to the highway fence is our responsibility,” he said. “I imagine some of you are familiar with the terrain.” It got a small laugh, but not from myself or Warren. “Spread out and be thorough. This is a very small child. I will signal with five short reports for everyone to meet back here.” He blew once to dismiss us.
Warren and I wandered along, careful to stick to
existing prints. The snow was too cold to pack and crunched under our boots like someone grinding their teeth. I had only seen one dead person face-to-face, and that in a casket—my grandmother Sellars. My idea of a corpse came from the comic books I grew up reading—The Witching Hour, Weird War, The House of Mystery. I imagined finding the girl frozen and blue, one clutching hand sticking through the crust. Her eyes would be a transparent gray, robbed of color like a cooked onion. We inched along, looking in the snowy bushes, hoping to hear a shout from somewhere else. The bootprints stopped and so did we.
“She wouldn’t be down there,” Warren reasoned.
“Probably in the pond.”
In the woods above us a bullhorn blurted something. We both froze and waited but there was nothing. We kept going, slower now.
“So,” Warren said, “do you have that roach or what?”
I looked in my box of Marlboros, stirred the cigarettes around with a finger until I spied it. It was good-sized, the paper stained dark with resin. “Where’s a good place to do it?”
We both swiveled our heads for cops.
“Let’s go to the pipe,” Warren said, meaning where the creek went through the hillside and under the highway. The pipe was corrugated steel, around three feet wide. There was a caged storm drain beside it to draw off any extra water. The whole thing was hidden in a ditch, and when the security guards were coming you’d dive into it as if it were a foxhole and wait. You could pee there in privacy too when there was a kegger.
I hesitated, thinking it was a pretty good place for a little kid to drown.
“They probably looked there first,” Warren assured me. “They’ve got maps.”
As we made our way through the brush, we commented on the dwindling number of prints.
“At least there are some,” Warren said.
“Not many,” I said.
But when we reached the ditch, the snow on both sides of the creek was trampled and smudged with mud.
“See?” Warren said.
The ice on the creek stopped a few feet before the pipe. The water was high but still, brown as coffee. It poured into the storm drain with a sucking noise. Warren peeked over the rise to see if anyone was near us.
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