The Summer of the Swans

by Betsy Byars

  “Hello, is this the police department? I want to report a missing child.”

  She looked up at Sara, started to say something, then turned back to her telephone conversation. “Yes, a missing child, a boy, ten, Charlie Godfrey. G-o-d-f-r-e-y.” Pause. “Eighteen-oh-eight Cass Street. This is Willamina Godfrey, his aunt. I’m in charge.” She paused, then said, “Yes, since last night.” She listened again. “No, I don’t know what time. We woke up this morning, he was gone. That’s all.” She listened and as she answered again her voice began to rise with concern and anger. “No, I could not ask his friends about him because he doesn’t have any friends. His brain was injured when he was three years old and that is why I am so concerned. This is not a ten-year-old boy who can go out and come home when he feels like it. This is not a boy who’s going to run out and break street lights and spend the night in some garage, if that’s what you’re thinking. This is a boy, I’m telling you, who can be lost and afraid three blocks from home and cannot speak one word to ask for help. Now are you going to come out here or aren’t you?”

  She paused, said, “Yes, yes,” then grudgingly, “And thank you.” She hung up the receiver and looked at Sara. “They’re coming.”

  “What did they say?”

  “They said they’re coming. That’s all.” She rose in agitation and began to walk into the living room. “Oh, why don’t they hurry!”

  “Aunt Willie, they just hung up the telephone.”

  “I know.” She went to the front door and then came back, nervously slapping her hands together. “Where can he be?”

  “My brother was always getting lost when he was little,” Mary said.

  “I stood right in this house, in that room,” Aunt Willie interrupted. She pointed toward the front bedroom. “And I promised your mother, Sara, that I would look after Charlie all my life. I promised your mother nothing would ever happen to Charlie as long as there was breath in my body, and now look. Look! Where is this boy I’m taking such good care of?” She threw her hands into the air. “Vanished without a trace, that’s where.”

  “Aunt Willie, you can’t watch him every minute.”

  “Why not? Why can’t I? What have I got more important in my life than looking after that boy? Only one thing more important than Charlie. Only one thing—that devil television there.”

  “Aunt Willie—”

  “Oh, yes, that devil television. I was sitting right in that chair last night and he wanted me to sew on one button for him but I was too busy with the television. I’ll tell you what I should have told your mother six years ago. I should have told her, ‘Sure, I’ll be glad to look after Charlie except when there’s something good on television. I’ll be glad to watch him in my spare time.’ My tongue should fall out on the floor for promising to look after your brother and not doing it.”

  She went back to the doorway. “There are a hundred things that could have happened to him. He could have fallen into one of those ravines in the woods. He could be lost up at the old mine. He could be at the bottom of the lake. He could be kidnaped.” Sara and Mary stood in silence as she named the tragedies that could have befallen Charlie.

  Sara said, “Well, he could not have been kidnaped, because anybody would know we don’t have any money for ransom.”

  “That wouldn’t stop some people. Where are those policemen?”

  Sara looked down at the table beside the television and saw a picture Charlie had drawn of himself on tablet paper. The head and body were circles of the same size, the ears and eyes overlapping smaller circles, the arms and legs were elongated balloons. He had started printing his name below the picture, but had completed only two letters before he had gone out to make the tent. The C was backward.

  Wanda had bought him the tablet and crayons two days ago and he had done this one picture with the brown crayon. It gave Sara a sick feeling to see it because something about the picture, the smallness, the unfinished quality, made it look somehow very much like Charlie.

  Aunt Willie said, “When you want the police they are always a hundred miles away bothering criminals.”

  “They’re on their way. They said so,” Mary said.

  “All right then, where are they?”

  Mary blinked her eyes at this question to which she had no answer, and settled the rollers beneath her scarf.

  “I still can’t get it out of my head that Charlie went back to see the swans,” Sara said.

  “He really was upset about having to go home. I can testify to that,” Mary said.

  Aunt Willie left the room abruptly. When she came back she was holding a picture of Charlie in one hand. It was a snapshot of him taken in March, sitting on the steps with Boysie in front of the house.

  “The police always want a photograph,” she said. She held it out so Mary and Sara could see it. “Mrs. Hutchinson took that with her Polaroid.”

  “It’s a real good picture of him,” Mary said.

  Sara looked at the picture without speaking. Somehow the awkward, unfinished crayon drawing on the table looked more like Charlie than the snapshot.

  “It was his birthday,” Aunt Willie said mournfully, “and look how proud he was of that watch Wanda bought him, holding his little arm straight out in the picture so everyone would notice it. I fussed so much about Wanda getting him a watch because he couldn’t tell time, and then he was so proud just to be wearing it. Everyone would ask him on the street, ‘What time is it, Charlie? Have you got the time, Charlie?’ just to see how proud he was to show them.”

  “And then those boys stole it. I think that was the meanest thing,” Mary said.

  “The watch was lost,” Aunt Willie said. “The watch just got lost.”

  “Stolen,” Sara snapped, “by that crook Joe Melby.”

  “I am the quickest person to accuse somebody, you know that. You saw me, I hope, when I noticed those boys making off with the Hutchinsons’ porch chairs last Halloween; but that watch just got lost. Then Joe Melby found it and, to his credit, brought it back.”

  “Huh! ”

  “There was no stealing involved.”

  Mary said, giggling, “Aunt Willie, did Sara ever tell you what she did to Joe?”

  “Hush, Mary,” Sara said.

  “What did she do?”

  “She made a little sign that said FINK and stuck it on Joe’s back in the hall at school and he went around for two periods without knowing it was there.”

  “It doesn’t matter what I did. Nobody’s going to pick on my brother and I mean it. That fink stole Charlie’s watch and then got scared and told that big lie about finding it on the floor of the school bus.”

  “You want revenge too much.”

  “When somebody deserves revenge, then—”

  “I take my revenge same as anybody,” Aunt Willie said, “only I never was one to keep after somebody and keep after somebody the way you do. You take after your Uncle Bert in that.”

  “I hope I always do.”

  “No, your Uncle Bert was no good in that way. He would never let a grudge leave him. When he lay dying in the hospital, he was telling us who we weren’t to speak to and who we weren’t to do business with. His dying words were against Jeep Johnson at the used-car lot.”

  “Good for Uncle Bert.”

  “And that nice little Gretchen Wyant who you turned the hose on, and her wearing a silk dress her brother had sent her from Taiwan!”

  “That nice little Gretchen Wyant was lucky all she got was water on her silk dress.”

  “Sara!”

  “Well, do you know what that nice little Gretchen Wyant did? I was standing in the bushes by the spigot, turning off the hose, and this nice little Gretchen Wyant didn’t see me—all she saw was Charlie at the fence—and she said, ‘How’s the retard today?” only she made it sound even uglier, ’How’s the reeeeetard,’ like that. Nothing ever made me so mad. The best sight of my whole life was nice little Gretchen Wyant standing there in her wet Taiwan silk dress with her mou
th hanging open.”

  “Here come the police,” Mary said quickly. “But they’re stopping next door.”

  “Signal to them,” Aunt Willie said.

  Before Mary could move to the door, Aunt Willie was past her and out on the porch. “Here we are. This is the house.” She turned and said over her shoulder to Sara, “Now, God willing, we’ll get some action.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  Sara sat in the living room wearing her cut-off blue jeans, an old shirt with Property of State Prison stamped on the back which Wanda had brought her from the beach, and her puce tennis shoes. She was sitting in the doorway, leaning back against the door with her arms wrapped around her knees, listening to Aunt Willie, who was making a telephone call in the hall.

  “It’s no use calling,” Sara said against her knees. This was the first summer her knees had not been skinned a dozen times, but she could still see the white scars from other summers. Since Aunt Willie did not answer, she said again, “It’s no use calling. He won’t come.”

  “You don’t know your father,” Aunt Willie said.

  “That is the truth.”

  “Not like I do. When he hears that Charlie is missing, he will ...” Her voice trailed off as she prepared to dial the telephone.

  Sara had a strange feeling when she thought of her father. It was the way she felt about people she didn’t know well, like the time Miss Marshall, her English teacher, had given her a ride home from school, and Sara had felt uneasy the whole way home, even though she saw Miss Marshall every day.

  Her father’s remoteness had begun, she thought, with Charlie’s illness. There was a picture in the family photograph album of her father laughing and throwing Sara into the air and a picture of her father holding her on his shoulders and a picture of her father sitting on the front steps with Wanda on one knee and Sara on the other. All these pictures of a happy father and his adoring daughters had been taken before Charlie’s illness and Sara’s mother’s death. Afterward there weren’t any family pictures at all, happy or sad.

  When Sara looked at those early pictures, she remembered a laughing man with black curly hair and a broken tooth who had lived with them for a few short golden years and then had gone away. There was no connection at all between this laughing man in the photograph album and the gray sober man who worked in Ohio and came home to West Virginia on occasional weekends, who sat in the living room and watched baseball or football on television and never started a conversation on his own.

  Sara listened while Aunt Willie explained to the operator that the call she was making was an emergency. “That’s why I’m not direct dialing,” she said, “because I’m so upset I’ll get the wrong numbers.”

  “He won’t come,” Sara whispered against her knee.

  As the operator put through the call and Aunt Willie waited, she turned to Sara, nodded emphatically, and said, “He’ll come, you’ll see.”

  Sara got up, walked across the living room and into the kitchen, where the breakfast dishes were still on the table. She looked down at the two bowls of hard, cold oatmeal, and then made herself three pieces of toast and poured herself a cup of cherry Kool-Aid. When she came back eating the toast Aunt Willie was still waiting.

  “Didn’t the operator tell them it was an emergency, I wonder,” Aunt Willie said impatiently.

  “Probably.”

  “Well, if somebody told me I had an emergency call, I would run, let me tell you, to find out what that emergency was. That’s no breakfast, Sara.”

  “It’s my lunch.”

  “Kool-Aid and toast will not sustain you five minutes.” She broke off quickly and said in a louder voice, “Sam, is that you?” She nodded to Sara, then turned back to the telephone, bent forward in her concern. “First of all, Sammy, promise me you won’t get upset—no, promise me first.”

  “He won’t get upset. Even I can promise you that,” Sara said with her mouth full of toast.

  “Sam, Charlie’s missing,” Aunt Willie said abruptly.

  Unable to listen to any more of the conversation, Sara took her toast and went out onto the front porch. She sat on the front steps and put her feet into the worn grooves that Charlie’s feet had made on the third step. Then she ate the last piece of toast and licked the butter off her fingers.

  In the corner of the yard, beneath the elm tree, she could see the hole Charlie had dug with a spoon; all one morning he had dug that hole and now Boysie was lying in it for coolness. She walked to the tree and sat in the old rope swing and swung over Boysie. She stretched out her feet and touched Boysie, and he lifted his head and looked around to see who had poked him, then lay back in his hole.

  “Boysie, here I am, look, Boysie, look.”

  He was already asleep again.

  “Boysie—” She looked up as Aunt Willie came out on the porch and stood for a minute drying her hands on her apron. For the occasion of Charlie’s disappearance she was wearing her best dress, a bright green bonded jersey, which was so hot her face above it was red and shiny. Around her forehead she had tied a handkerchief to absorb the sweat.

  Sara swung higher. “Well,” she asked, “is he coming?” She paused to pump herself higher. “Or not?”

  “He’s going to call back tonight.”

  “Oh,” Sara said.

  “Don’t say ‘Oh’ to me like that.”

  “It’s what I figured.”

  “Listen to me, Miss Know-it-all. There is no need in the world for your father to come this exact minute. If he started driving right this second he still wouldn’t get here till after dark and he couldn’t do anything then, so he just might as well wait till after work and then drive.”

  “Might as well do the sensible thing.” Sara stood up and really began to swing. She had grown so much taller since she had last stood in this swing that her head came almost to the limb from which the swing hung. She caught hold of the limb with her hands, kicked her feet free, and let the swing jerk wildly on its own.

  “Anyway,” Aunt Willie said, “this is no time to be playing on a swing. What will the neighbors think, with Charlie missing and you having a wonderful time on a swing?”

  “I knew he wouldn’t come.”

  “He is going to come,” Aunt Willie said in a louder voice. “He is just going to wait till dark, which is reasonable, since by dark Charlie will probably be home anyway.”

  “It is so reasonable that it makes me sick.”

  “I won’t listen to you being disrespectful to your father, I mean that,” she said. “I know what it is to lose a father, let me tell you, and so will you when all you have left of him is an envelope.”

  Aunt Willie, Sara knew, was speaking of the envelope in her dresser drawer containing all the things her father had had in his pockets when he died. Sara knew them all—the watch, the twenty-seven cents in change, the folded dollar bill, the brown plaid handkerchief, the three-cent stamp, the two bent pipe cleaners, the half pack of stomach mints.

  “Yes, wait till you lose your father. Then you’ll appreciate him.”

  “I’ve already lost him.”

  “Don’t you talk like that. Your father’s had to raise two families and all by himself. When Poppa died, Sammy had to go to work and support all of us before he was even out of high school, and now he’s got this family to support too. It’s not easy, I’m telling you that. You raise two families and then I’ll listen to what you’ve got to say against your father.”

  Sara let herself drop to the ground and said, “I better go. Mary and I are going to look for Charlie.”

  “Where?”

  “Up the hill.”

  “Well, don’t you get lost,” Aunt Willie called after her.

  From the Hutchinsons’ yard some children called, “Have you found Charlie yet, Sara?” They were making a garden in the dust, carefully planting flowers without roots in neat rows. Already the first flowers were beginning to wilt in the hot sun.

  “I’m going to look for him now.”

&
nbsp; “Sawa?” It was the youngest Hutchinson boy, who was three and sometimes came over to play with Charlie.

  “What?”

  “Sawa?”

  “What?”

  “Sawa?”

  “What?”

  “Sawa, I got gwass.” He held up two fists of grass he had just pulled from one of the few remaining clumps in the yard.

  “Yes, that’s fine. I’ll tell Charlie when I see him.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  Sara and Mary had decided that they would go to the lake and walk up behind the houses toward the woods. Sara was now on her way to Mary’s, passing the vacant lot where a baseball game was in progress. She glanced up and watched as she walked down the sidewalk.

  The baseball game had been going on for an hour with the score still zero to zero and the players, dusty and tired, were playing silently, without hope.

  She was almost past the field when she heard someone call, “Hey, have you found your brother yet, Sara?”

  She recognized the voice of Joe Melby and said, “No,” without looking at him.

  “What?”

  She turned, looked directly at him, and said, “You will be pleased and delighted to learn that we have not.” She continued walking down the street. The blood began to pound in her head. Joe Melby was the one person she did not want to see on this particular day. There was something disturbing about him. She did not know him, really, had hardly even spoken to him, and yet she hated him so much the sight of him made her sick.

  “Is there anything I can do?”

  “No.”

  “If he’s up in the woods, I could help look. I know about as much about those hills as anybody.” He left the game and started walking behind her with his hands in his pockets.

  “No, thank you.”

  “I want to help.”

  She swirled around and faced him, her eyes blazing. “I do not want your help.” They looked at each other. Something twisted inside her and she felt suddenly ill. She thought she would never drink cherry Kool-Aid again as long as she lived.