by Lisa Unger
“Where is she?” he’d asked again.
“She’s gone, son. You know that.”
His father had turned then, and the man looked as though he’d aged ten years since Michael saw him the day before.
“Gone where?”
I hate you. I hate this place. I hate this life. The words came back, the echo of her desperate shrieking still bouncing off the ceiling and the walls. That’s when it started opening in him, that abyss of despair.
A hard knock on the window of his truck snapped him back to the present. Mrs. Miller. He rolled down the window, though he didn’t want to.
“Michael,” she said. “What are you doing just sitting there like that?”
“Sorry,” he said. “Just zoning out. Long day.”
“You didn’t tell me you were selling.” Her breath smelled of something stale. It was hard to see in the darkness, but he knew her hair to be dyed a preposterous shade of orange, her face a cracked mask of deep lines.
He’d always hated Mrs. Miller. It seemed as if she’d been the mean old lady next store forever, the keeper of lost balls, the frowner, the finger wagger, the parent caller. Would she ever die? Or would she just rattle about that house for millennia, torturing generations of neighborhood children?
“Yes, Mrs. Miller,” he said. He always tried to be polite. “It’s on the market.”
She issued an unpleasant snort. “Well, if you don’t clean it up, it’s only going to attract riffraff.”
Riffraff? Did people still use words like that? What did it even mean? He imagined some barefoot, downtrodden family dressed in rags, their belongings in garbage bags.
“I’m working on it, Mrs. Miller.”
Mrs. Miller looked back at the house, and he followed her eyes.
“He used to keep it up, before he got sick,” she said. There was an accusation inherent in the statement. But Michael knew enough about people like Claudia Miller to ignore the subtext. She didn’t know anything about him. And she certainly didn’t know anything about his father. No one did.
He opened the car door, and she backed away from him, her eyes widening a bit-at his height, he supposed. He towered over her. She wrapped herself up in her arms. He saw how the threadbare fabric of her housecoat clung to her small, shriveled body; he turned his eyes from her. There was something, not just about her physical appearance, that repulsed him. He started to feel that familiar rise of discomfort that he often had in personal encounters, a desire to flee into the house and close the door. But for a moment she didn’t move, and neither did he.
“Mrs. Miller, do you remember my mother?” He had to force the words out.
She looked up at him, startled. A brown paper bag danced noisily down the street, lofting and landing, lifting again in the wind that was picking up. Except for that, the neighborhood was quiet. It always was. No music blaring or dogs barking. People came home and went to work, might be seen tending to their properties on the weekends. But the things he remembered as a kid-the block parties, the gangs of boys and girls riding around on their bikes, playing in one another’s yards-had vanished. Each house was a bubble; people kept to themselves these days.
“Of course I remember her.” What did he hear in her voice? Disdain? Judgment? The woman who ran off on her family, the slut? Of course I remember her.
“Do you remember anything about the night she disappeared?”
Claudia looked down at her feet, continued backing away. “It was a long time ago.”
But Claudia remembered. Because everyone remembered Marla Holt. Every little boy thinks his mother is beautiful. But Marla Holt had been truly, luminously lovely. With chestnut hair that flowed like a river around her shoulders, with those dark eyes, with her hourglass shape, she filled the room when she entered. Men stared, smiled; women looked down at their nails. She wasn’t reed thin; she wasn’t glamorous. Her face wasn’t flawless. Her beauty was something that welled up from inside her, a kind of radiant heat. Even in the snapshots Michael had of her, he could see it. The camera worshipped the contrast on her face, the black eyebrows and red lips against the pale white of her skin. She complained endlessly about the size of her bottom, the constant maintenance she felt her appearance required-plucking, waxing, moisturizing, and exercising. He’d follow her on his bicycle while she ran around the neighborhood.
“I was designed for luxuriating, not for sweating,” she’d pant.
“Come on, Mom. One more mile. You can do it.”
As a boy he’d loved his father, of course. But it was his mother who put the stars in the sky.
“You told the police that you saw her leave,” he pressed. “That she got into a black sedan parked in front of the house, that someone was waiting for her and they drove off together. You said she was carrying a suitcase.”
She stopped moving, gave a single nod. “If that’s what I told the police, then that’s what I saw.” He noticed a tremor in her right hand.
“Do you remember anything else?”
“They were always fighting,” she said. “There was always yelling coming from that house. It used to drive me crazy.”
It was true. He used to hide under his covers and wait for his mother to come weeping up the stairs and close the door to her bedroom. That was the closing bell; the fight was over, and she was the loser again. His father never came after her. Michael never heard the soft tones of their making up. If they ever did make amends, it was in private.
“Did you see who was driving the car?”
“Such a long time ago, Michael,” she said. She shook her head sadly. “I’m an old woman. How can I remember?”
But she did remember, he could tell. She no longer wanted to look at him, was moving toward the safety of her house. Finally she turned and walked rapidly past the line of hedges that divided their yards. From behind the line: “Just don’t sell this place to any unsavory types. Think of the neighborhood.”
He knew he should move after her, try to get her to say more. But he’d leave that to Ray Muldune; the private detective’s services didn’t come cheap. And Michael had had enough social contact for one day-first the girl in the woods, then her mother. He had the drained and exhausted feeling that plagued him when he’d been aboveground too long.
Michael was happier underneath the world. This sunlit place above, where normal life was lived… now, that was scary, that was the place of monsters and nightmares. The modern world and most of the people that populated it made him uncomfortable. The people he knew-friends and acquaintances, if he could even call them that-seemed motivated by things he didn’t understand. They said one thing but appeared to be thinking something else, wearing smiles that never reached their eyes. The people he didn’t know, those he observed, were what he liked to call busy-addicted, engaged in one task but paying attention to something else-grocery shopping while talking on their cell phones, driving their cars while sending texts. Multitasking, they called it. When did it become a badge of honor to be too busy, to have too much to do?
The world was in a fearful rush; he’d never been able to keep the pace. Michael often felt confused, had the vague sense that there was something terribly wrong with him. He wanted to stop and look at the sky and the trees; he wanted to talk to the people he knew and met. But everyone seemed to speed past him, move around him. He was an obstruction on the superhighway of life. And that was on a good day. On a bad day, he felt that at any time strangers might start pointing and shrieking, identifying him as something unwanted. Sometimes he was nervous to the point of sweating, even in the most mundane encounters-at tollbooths, grocery checkout lines.
But below the ground there was another world. In the dripping darkness of the mines, there was solitude and silence. There he started to relax and expand, to become more fully himself. In that peculiar living darkness, all his senses came alive.
He listened to Claudia shut her door, then turned his attention back to his father’s house. For another moment he wavered again about the ho
tel. But then he started up the cracked and overgrown path. He stood on the stoop a second, took in the rusting letter box, the flickering porch light, and then he walked inside.
He always stooped when he walked through doorways, though he wasn’t quite that tall, just over six feet. But he’d hit his head on so many things that others cleared with ease that it was just habit to fold in his shoulders, to bow his head.
He let the door close behind him. He could still hear her voice-her enthusiastically off-pitch singing, her trying-to-be-stern tone, her mellifluous laughter. Long after she’d gone, he’d hear her when he came home from school.
Is that you, sweetie? Are you hungry?
And the sound of her ghost voice caused him to ache inside. After she left, this house was haunted by her, though only in the way all houses were haunted-by echoes and memories, energy trapped in the drywall and floorboards. But that was bad enough. It was reason enough to go away and never come back again, to leave his father to grow old and lonely, to leave him to become sick and to rot like the rest of the debris in the dump he’d made of their home.
The hallway was lined on both sides with piles of newspapers that reached to the ceiling, narrowing the passage by more than a foot on either side. Michael had to flatten himself and turn to make his way sideways down the hall, to avoid touching the wall of newsprint, heading toward the only habitable room in the house.
The sitting room, with her television and shelves of books, the coffee table she’d inherited from her mother, the framed landscapes she’d painted hanging on the walls, remained as he remembered it. The surfaces and fabrics in here were kept clean. The sofa and love seat were free from stain; the dusky pink carpet was still fresh and bright. There was no dust even on the books. The visiting nurse had told Michael that his father had pulled out the bed from the couch and slept on it at night, replacing it in the mornings until he grew too weak to do that. Their wedding picture (did they look stiff and unhappy even then?) sat on the end table, beneath a lamp she’d cherished, with its blue-and-white flowers painted on porcelain. It had shocked him when he returned from his father’s hospital room to find this oasis in the center of chaos, this eye in the storm. Michael would have thought the old man had forgotten her or tried to, but instead he’d kept her room like this, just as she’d left it.
He sat on the chintz couch and tried not to smell the old man’s sickness. But it lingered, even with all the other competing aromas. It was there-that smell of medicine and washcloth baths, antiseptic and something else, something rotting from within. Or maybe that was just his imagination.
He found himself thinking about Bethany Graves. He thought she had a quiet energy, not unlike his own. She was careful; she listened, then waited a second before she spoke, absorbing, it seemed, everything that he’d said, and maybe what he hadn’t said.
“What does that mean?” she’d asked after he told her he’d been digging up a body. He’d seen a glint of curiosity, more than a hint of caution.
“That’s what I do,” he told her. “I dig up the past. I’m a caver. The Hollows was originally settled as a mining town. There are tunnels everywhere-some of them just exploratory.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning that tunnels were blasted and then for whatever reason abandoned. When you find one, it’s like digging up a grave. Traveling back in time.”
“I’d heard that,” she said. “About the mines around here. Iron, right?”
She seemed interested. But he wasn’t a good judge of those kinds of things.
“Magnetite and some hematite,” he said. “This town has a fairly rich history. And there’s lore surrounding the vein I’m searching for. Two brothers, both looking to strike it rich. One of them did. One of them disappeared.”
And what Michael had told her was true. He was interested in finding the abandoned shaft where some believed a body might have been buried. It was a story Mack had told him, a tale the old man had supposedly unearthed in his exhaustive research. Michael had never been able to find anything about it in the few history books about the industry and the area. But according to his father’s deductions, the tunnel was probably somewhere around where Michael had been digging today. He knew that his father had written about the legend in one of his articles about the area mines, but Michael hadn’t been able to find it in the mountain of papers in Mack’s office.
His father, a geology professor, had a pet interest in the area mines and their history. He had wanted to document that part of the region’s history and wrote voluminously, compiling interviews with the old-timers still living in The Hollows, taking copious photographs, collecting any old documents he could find. He contributed articles to history journals and magazines, had hoped to one day write a book. But it wasn’t exactly a sexy topic. Mack was never able to find a publisher, and even interest in his articles dried up over time. But he kept writing.
Michael was sure that if he could dig past the piles of junk mail and circulars and catalogs and bills and bills and bills that formed a literal wall around his father’s desk, he’d find those articles, which Michael had always loved reading. They had to be under there. Clearly his father had never discarded anything.
Of course, Michael also had the business of settling his father’s estate. He had a meeting with the lawyer, Hank Barrow, an old friend of Mack’s. Their recent phone conversation had been grim.
“Your father was a good man, Michael,” Hank had said. “But his affairs are a disaster. I’m going to do this work pro bono. After the medical bills, though, I don’t know what will be left for you and your sister.”
Yet neither of these things was keeping him in The Hollows. He’d had a passing interest in that tunnel for years. And his father’s matters could be settled from afar. But when he learned from his sister that his father was ill and about to die, that she couldn’t (wouldn’t) with two children travel home to see it through, something powerful drew him back.
They’d both been estranged from Mack, for myriad reasons. But Michael wasn’t drawn home to make amends, or to find peace. He wanted answers to questions he had never dared ask about his mother’s disappearance.
“What happened to her, Dad?” He’d asked in the hospital room while his father lay dying.
Mack had looked at him as if through a fog. The hospital room was dim except for the light washing in from the hallway. The man in the other bed was snoring. His father was in a palliative state, only pain relief now. There was no treatment for a body so riddled with cancer.
“You know,” he said. “You know.”
“No, I don’t,” Michael said. “She left that night, and we never heard from her again. Not a phone call. Not a card. I’ve looked for her, Dad, for years. She didn’t run off. She never divorced you, never changed her name. She never worked again. Cara’s looked for her, too. We’ve hired people to find her.”
He locked eyes with his father. But he wasn’t sure his father could see him. The old man’s gaze was unfocused and watery.
“She may not have loved you,” Michael said. “She may have wanted to leave you. But she loved us, Cara and me. She did love us.”
“She did love us,” his father said. But it was just an echo, a meaningless repetition of Michael’s words.
Michael wasn’t sure how long he sat there with his father, who looked as shriveled and empty as a corn husk. How long did he just sit listening to his father’s rattling breath? Michael dozed in the chair, saw the night nurse come in briefly and cast him a sad smile. She thought him the dutiful son, sitting at his father’s deathbed.
But he wasn’t that. He was a grave robber, waiting for the night watchman to drift off once and for all. Then, and only then, could he dig his fingers into the earth and exhume the truth.
chapter nine
Willow could tell that her mother liked Principal Ivy. Bethany seemed to have a thing lately for geeky-looking guys.
I’ve had my fill of cool, Willow. These days it’s kindness, honesty, a
nd stability that impress me. Read: boring, snorts-when-he-laughs, totally lame. Not that her mother actually dated. She never went anywhere that didn’t have something to do with work. She didn’t even seem to have any friends anymore, except her agent-who was so annoying that Willow wasn’t sure how anyone could stand him.
Mr. Ivy wasn’t a total geek. Still, that sweater had to go. Argyle? Really? He could do something about his hair, too. Maybe mess it up a little. That careful look, parted on the side, brushed back from his face-not working for him.
“I know you’ve been having a hard time adjusting to the move and the new school. So I’m going to be lenient here. Of course, your friend Jolie was suspended last week for cutting school. But that was her third offense. I don’t think we have to go there. Do we?”
Willow shook her head vigorously, did her best to seem contrite. She wouldn’t really mind being at the house for a week, watching television and sleeping late. On the other hand, her mother would make her life a homeschooling hell. So she might as well just come here.
“We really appreciate your understanding, Mr. Ivy,” said her mother. Bethany was doing her good-conservative-mom routine. She was even wearing a skirt.
“Please, call me Henry.”
Oh, brother. He had the goofy smile men often had around her mother.
Willow looked around Mr. Ivy’s office, blanking out on whatever small talk he and her mother were making now. There was a wall of pictures-Mr. Ivy with various students, accepting an award, dressed in the school-mascot costume, with the Wildcat costume’s head tucked under his arm. There was a case of trophies, not for sports but for things like the chess and science clubs and the debate team, dorky stuff like that.
“She’s a good student, Mr. Ivy… I mean, Henry,” her mother said. Could she be any more overeager? “And very bright. But she is struggling.”
