No, said Willa. It was a silo. She saw it.
“I guess they could do what they wanted—it was only a movie,” her mother had said, and then, more thoughtfully, “Hmmm, I suppose it probably happens now and then.”
School was one thing, and home alone with her mother was another, and in between were her mother's three friends, who were thin and pretty like her mother and drove out to the house on weekends with bags full of magic markers, envelopes, and petitions that few people in the little town would sign. Sasha was a real estate agent and divorced, and Karen was married and taught kindergarten at Willa's school, and Willa didn't know what Melissa did, except stare sadly at her mother's paintings and say, “Hello, Willa,” as if Willa's name were a password or something deserving of the utmost seriousness. Willa's mother gave her three friends homemade bread and sketched their faces on napkins. Sometimes they drank vodka and orange juice and stayed up talking late into the night. When Willa came downstairs in the morning she would find the women sleeping on the couch and floor, still dressed, still wearing rings and necklaces and sometimes even shoes.
At night when no visitors shared the house, Willa's mother told her stories. This had been going on a long time. First it had been her father and mother together. He would say a sentence: “Once there was a truck who lived alone in the Sahara Desert,” and her mother would add a sentence: “And he had no glass in his windows and at night the sand came blowing through, and he had no wheels,” and her father would add on, and then her mother, each of them perched on Willa's bed, always touching part of her—her knee or her foot, her hand or the small of her back.
Then, when she was seven, her father went to live with a woman he said he had loved in high school, and Willa only saw him twice a year when he left his new family, she left her mother, and they stayed in a hotel in New York and went to museums and the zoo. She always got blisters on those trips from so much walking. After her father left, her mother came home with a whole stack of glossy children's books. Willa couldn't stand the pictures of fat, dimpled children and pets, the stories about going to the dentist, getting a pony, or cleaning up your room.
“Tell me one,” she would say to her mother, and her mother would try, but she never knew how to start, and the stories stumbled along for a while until Willa grew bored and fell asleep. But over the years her mother improved, or else Willa just grew used to her way of telling. She gave her mother rules: no stories about zoo animals, vampires, or kids named Willa who lived on defunct farms. No stories about the end of the world. Instead, her mother told her more stories about objects—superballs looking for somewhere to bounce, a barn which threw up because of the smelly animals inside it, a snowflake in search of a twin. Sometimes her mother sat at the end of Willa's bed and leaned against the wooden railing. Other times she cupped herself against her daughter and talked right into her ear. Sometimes she slept there all night, squeezed onto the edge of the twin bed. Willa didn't like this, found it sad and embarrassing, though she couldn't say why, but she wouldn't kick her mother out. In winter they stayed warm that way, like pioneers, for the farmhouse was big and drafty in the middle of its field, and the wind came howling round.
————
After Willa filled the freezer with several loads of soup, she took her book on ants to the kitchen and settled by the wood stove. When the doorbell rang, she didn't look up, too busy with a glossy color photograph of a magnified ant with legs like shaggy black trees. But then her mother came back to the kitchen followed by a girl, or maybe a woman—to Willa the stranger looked young, though she carried a child who hid its face in her coat. Willa's mother showed the girl and baby to the living room, and then she returned to the kitchen and whispered to her daughter that this was a new friend, her name was Melody. They had met at a demonstration in St. Louis; Melody had worked in a nuclear power plant for four years, but now she had quit and was waitressing. She had come to the house for a lesson because she wanted to learn how to draw. Her son was blind and had just turned three.
“It should be fun for you,” said her mother after she had called Melody and the child back in. “Isn't he awfully cute? Would you do us a big favor and watch him while we draw?”
Willa had watched the tiny, silent granddaughter of the farmer down the road while the farmer rode his tractor, but she had never babysat for a blind child, had never met anyone who was blind.
“I don't, I mean—” she said. “I don't really know—”
“Oh listen to you, you're just being modest,” said her mother. She turned to Melody. “She's terrific with kids. Already she's babysitting at her age.”
“He's pretty much like any other kid, aren't you, Tiger?” said Melody, readjusting the child buried in her arms. “Better, even—he's good as can be. If he wants anything, you can just give a holler. We'll be right upstairs. Or, if you want, we can take him with us.”
“I'll watch him,” said Willa, for her mother was giving her that look.
When they went up to the studio, her mother and Melody left the child sitting on Willa's baby quilt on the kitchen floor, his back to Willa. For a while she hunched over her book and ignored the boy at her feet, but when she finished the section on carpenter ants, she lifted her head and stared at the child, who had settled on his stomach on the red and yellow quilt. As she stood and leaned over him, she saw that not only was he blind, but he had no eyes, just skin and a row of pale blond lashes where the eyes should have been.
Willa gasped and brought her hands up to her face, then stood for a moment peering into the darkness of her palms, trying to make herself look again. When she lowered her hands, she saw that the boy was sucking his thumb and using the end of his index finger to trace circles on his face. She stared. Did he have eyes under there, so that he wasn't actually blind at all, just confined to a view of his own pale skin? She moved closer to see if she could make out a bulge of eyeball above the fringe of lashes. The skin was smooth and flat like part of a back or stomach—as if nothing were missing, as if eyes had never been invented. Then the boy wrinkled his brow, seemed to be looking at her: Could he see through those eyeless eyes?
He could have been born that way, thought Willa. Not because his mother worked in a nuclear plant, but just because he was born that way. Paula, a fifth grader at school, claimed she had gone to a fair in Florida where they had people like this—Siamese twins joined at the head, children with flippers like dolphins and claws like lobsters, or as hairy as apes. Paula said she had seen the lobster family, three kids and two parents. They were ugly as anything, she said, but they loved each other, that family. They just stood there smiling like goons and holding claws.
As Willa leaned over the child, he reached a hand into the air.
“Ma?” he said.
And she said, “No.”
“Can you talk?” she asked, kneeling by him. “What's your name?”
He was perhaps the palest, blondest boy she had ever seen, his hair like milkweed puffs standing straight up on his head, his skin so white you could see veins running underneath it, could see how his blood was blue. He wore a red turtleneck and pink flowered overalls that should have been for a girl. From the way he clenched his fingers to his palms, it seemed he must be angry, or else cold. He did not answer her. As she leaned closer, he reached up and grabbed a fistful of her hair.
“No,” she said, starting to unclench his fist with her fingers, but he opened his palm and batted at her curls, swinging them back and forth.
“Girl,” he said, and she nodded yes.
He lowered his hand, and she rocked on her heels and looked at him. She could stare and stare, tilt her head to examine him, and it wouldn't matter, for this boy had skin in the place of eyes. He reached out again.
“What?” she asked, backing up. His face grew red as if he might begin to cry, though she couldn't imagine where the tears would go.
“What?” repeated Willa, and the boy lifted his arms toward her, so she bent down and scooped him up. He
was awkward in her arms, his legs dangling down, but surprisingly light. Willa was used to the house, wore four layers in winter, but this boy's whole body was shaking. With his arms tight around her neck as if he might pull her down, he began, quietly, to sob.
“Oh don't,” she said, wanting to drop him and run.” “Please don't cry. Don't cry—”
A thread of spittle ran down his chin; perhaps, she thought, his tears flowed like a waterfall down inside his head and out his mouth. She began to circle with him to warm him up, boosting him a little higher each time he threatened to fall.
“This is the kitchen,” she told him, and he stopped crying as she went to a bag of onions on the counter and had him touch the brittle skins. She held an onion under his nose, and he batted her hand away. She went to the fridge and pressed his cheek against the side. “Listen,” she told him, so he would hear it purr. She took him to the dining room where the table was covered with petitions, posters, and books.
“We don't eat here,” she told him. “Usually we eat in the kitchen.”
He touched the tabletop and ran his fingers over a copy of a drawing that a Japanese war child had made of its mother. The mother had bright swollen lips; the skin on her hands hung loose like rubber gloves. Willa hated those pictures, had seen that one before and read the caption: HIGASHI YAMAMOTO, MY MOTHER 53 YEARS OLD. Willa's mother had promised to keep them hidden, but sometimes she forgot and left one lying around the house.
“Not for you,” said Willa, though she knew he couldn't see it, and she backed up.
She brought him to the front room where she used to sit with her mother and father counting trucks in the night, the lights coming toward them on the highway out of nowhere, the rush of sound, then everything growing smaller and smaller, less and less noisy, until it was quiet and they were just sitting there again. In summer they had watched from the porch, and then they could feel the wind of the passing trucks, like feeling the waves the motorboats made when she swam in Lake Michigan on vacations—more ripples than waves, really—and with the trucks it was not quite wind, but more a slight, brief wall of air. Her parents didn't argue when they sat there watching trucks. Her father didn't talk about his office, and her mother didn't talk about the rallies. It was the quietest time they had.
What a baby she'd been in her father's arms, thinking that under the ground was more ground, that in the silos was wheat, that her father would sit there forever in the green stuffed chair. She sat the boy down beside her in the creaking chair and told him to listen for trucks.
“Car,” he said, and she said, “A truck is a big car.”
“Plane,” he said, and she thought of the ones she took to New York to visit her father. The flight attendants always gave her coloring books full of drawings of pilots and suitcases—books meant for much younger kids. Willa knew she should save them for her father's little children, but since he always took her to the hotel, never home, she left the books and crayons on the plane with a wonderful feeling of spite.
He had two children with his new wife, one who was just hers and one who was both of theirs. This meant that Willa had a half-sister and a stepbrother, which should have added up to something whole, but though she knew their names were Katherine and William, which was so close to Willa, she had never seen them, not even pictures, and part of her was not convinced they existed. The boy squirmed in her arms, so she put him down and took his hand, but he stumbled, groping at the air, so she picked him up and carried him again, making her way unsteadily to the ant farm in her room.
She couldn't show him, really. She could press his fingers to the glass, but that wouldn't tell him anything, so instead Willa read to him from a library book about army ants, though her ants were simple garden ants. Army ants always moved in columns five ants wide, she told him, marching and marching for seventeen days; then they stopped and laid eggs until they were ready to march again. They had jaws like ice tongs and could eat a leopard, and almost all of them were female. The boy sat in her lap with a mild, interested expression on his face, so she told him about the replete ants who filled their abdomens with nectar until they swelled like grapes, then hung suspended from the ceiling of the nest. When the other ants were hungry, Willa said, they tapped on the mouth of the replete ant, and it spat out a drop of honeydew.
The boy looked a little bored, and he was still shivering, so she lugged him down to the basement where they could be close to the furnace's warmth. As he sat on the floor by the furnace, she kneeled beside him and lightly touched his hair, so like milkweed. How did he get to be so blond, she wondered; his mother had hair as dark as Willa's.
“Stand up, would you,” she told him, and when he did she took both his hands and led him slowly across the room. “See, you're not a baby, you're a big boy. You walk fine.”
“Fridge,” said the boy when they stood before it, for he must have heard it humming, and he reached out and placed his palms flat against the large white door.
“Did you know some children don't live with their parents?” Willa told him. “Either the kids get taken away, kidnapped when they're still young and cute, or else they run away when they're a little older and no one wants them.”
Holding the door ajar with her foot, she hoisted him up and guided his hand to the middle shelf of milk cartons. This was the shelf of the two to five year olds: Jason Mccaffrey with blue eyes and brown hair, Crystal Anne Sandors, DOB July 22, 1979, who was three and a half now, pouting like a brat and wearing tiny hoop earrings and pearls. Some of the children had been computer-aged, so that Billy, who was two when he disappeared from his aunt's shopping cart in Normal, Illinois, appeared three years later on the carton as a five year old, his face grainy and stretched-out, coated with wax.
To call those children missing, Willa knew, only meant they were missing for somebody, even though maybe they were found for someone else. Just because they were not at home did not mean they were wandering the earth alone. There were too many of them, just look at all those cartons. First Crystal probably ran into Jeffrey, and then Crystal and Jeffrey ran into Vicki, and soon there were masses of them, whole underground networks. When she went to the supermarket with her mother she spotted them sometimes, kids poking holes in the bags of chocolate in the candy aisle or thumbing through a comic book—kids in matted gray parkas that once were white. They had large pupils and pale skin from living inside the earth.
They knew how to meet underground, these groups of children, knew how to tell a field with a hidden silo from a field of snow, how to comb through the stubble of old corn to find the way down, then slide behind the men in uniforms who guarded the silo like an enormous jewel. They could pass by the waiting dogs, for they were scentless from being frozen for so long. They were thin and coated with wax and could slide quite effortlessly through cracks. Underground they formed squads by age: the blue squad for the nine to eleven year olds, the brown squad for the babies who couldn't walk yet and were covered with mud and dirt. In the underground silos they found piles of wheat and hay left over from the days when the silos had been used on farms. They slept on the hay, woke in the morning with straw stuck in their hair. For breakfast they ground the wheat with stones, formed it into patties, cooked it into small round cakes.
The children knew Willa only as a sort of looming presence. They couldn't see her, but they could feel a shift in the atmosphere when she picked up their cartons, as if a cloud had cast its shadow or a truck swept by the house. They didn't understand how much she made them do; they thought they had their staring contests when they were bored, when really it was Willa pairing them up so they would stare into each other's eyes. Some of them she liked more than others, and these children received favors. The ones who had been there the longest got to sit at the front of the shelf. So far none of them had had to leave. This soup was not for eating. Her mother called it soup for a rainy day.
Someday Willa might have to join them. She did not know how to get there, exactly, but she knew she would fig
ure out a way. Her mother would not be with her, or her father. The larger you were, the harder it was to survive; she could tell that from watching her ants. At eleven, Willa was still quite runty for her age, though her mother made her drink glass after glass of milk. She put the boy down, and then she took out the missing children and told him about each one, placing them in a large ring around him on the concrete floor, as if it were a birthday party and time for Duck Duck Goose. When she got to Craig Allen Denton, REPORTED MISSING FROM THE HOSPITAL ON THE DAY OF BIRTH, 9/11/80, she stopped and stared at him, then wiped the frost from his face with her cuff.
Craig Allen Denton had a shriveled face as white as milk and eyes screwed into slits. His mouth was open in a howl, his fist clenched in a tight ball by his cheek. Willa looked at him again, held him under the light, then turned and stared at the child in her basement. The baby in the picture, she saw, was the toddler on the floor. Melody must have stolen him, or maybe Melody's baby had been switched with him.
Before, Willa had thought the baby in the photo had closed his eyes because he was crying. Now she saw that he had no eyes.
Somewhere, to somebody, this eyeless boy was missing. Melody had a son, and the boy had a mother, but still something was wrong. Something was always wrong, no matter how right things seemed. Willa had known this for a while, but still it gave her a headache to think of it. She pulled the boy onto her lap and rubbed her forehead against his hair.
“What's your name?” she asked, but he only sneezed.
When she heard a creaking on the stairs, Willa assumed it was a cat. She was showing the boy how to run his fingernail along the side of a carton and gather tiny flakes of wax. She was telling him about Gail May Joliet, DOB 3/12/71, EYES hazel, Gail May who had been computer-aged so that the edges of her face were visible now as a series of small black dots like poppy seeds. “Computer-aged,” said the print beneath, and in the wavery lines of her cheeks you could see how they had taken away Gail May's baby fat. Now she looked like a five year old whose cheeks had been carved away.
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