by Lori Roy
During the day, the oil and steam of the factory dampen James’s clothes and body, and dust sticks to the thick, black hair on his arms, making his skin like gritty sandpaper. He will sometimes apologize for being so rough and coarse, and Grace will touch the hair on his chest or run a hand over his wrist and up his forearm so he’ll know she likes the feel of him. He’s the man she always hoped for, broad enough to fill a doorway, tall enough to look down on most around him, bristly enough that her skin, by contrast, will always feel smooth and young to him. What surprises her still is that he’s also a playful man. He’ll tease her over a ruined roast, chase her with the hose when she is trying to pull weeds from her flowerbeds, or press an ear to her growing stomach as if he can hear the baby inside. Touching the shadow on his lower jaw that has grown since morning, she kisses the rough cheek and frowns at his cupped hand. Shards of green glass sparkle in his palm. He jostles them as if they were a pair of dice.
Two blocks down, where Julia lives in the same style three-bedroom, two-story redbrick house with a porch off the front door and a detached garage out back, she finds broken glass in the alley almost every day. Usually green, sometimes brown. She says that over the past few months the glass has become as regular as leaves in autumn. It’s a sign of their changing neighborhood, one no one talks about. Grace nods in Mother’s direction so James won’t say anything he’d rather not. He greets Mother, drops the glass in the trash basket, letting the shards tumble from his hand one by one, and excuses himself to bathe before supper.
After a quiet meal, Mother gathers her purse and gloves. She’d just as soon not be caught in this neighborhood after dark, she says, and while James sees Mother to her car, Grace runs water to wash the dishes. Something begins to tug at her again. It might be the thought of those women on Willingham, but they are still a bus ride away, a safe distance from Grace’s life here on Alder. Or perhaps it’s the green glass. She has always assumed it was left there by the colored men who cut through the alley on their way to Woodward Avenue. She hears them during the day when James is at work and late at night when he is asleep and she is awake, nursing an aching back. The men always pass at the same time. They have a schedule. It must be the buses that drive their routine.
“You’ve missed a spot,” Grace says, nudging James who has returned to help her with the dishes. Soapy water drips from her rubber gloves.
“It’s time I do some checking, Gracie,” James says, setting the dish aside.
“Checking?”
“Not waiting until things get even worse. Time I get someone in here to tell me what this house is worth.”
“It’s just a few bottles,” Grace says. “A little broken glass.” But she knows it isn’t.
“I’ll find someone who can sell this place for us,” James says. “Someone who can get us a fair price.”
“But what about our friends? I’d hate to leave Julia. And Mother is so close.”
“Should be able to find something farther north with the money we make.” James wraps his arms around Grace’s round belly. His fingers are warm through her thin cotton blouse. “High time we face facts. Things are starting to add up in a way I don’t care for. No good to be the last ones standing.”
Wearing a pair of her nicer heels, Grace is the perfect height to rest against the broadest part of James. His white undershirt is soft against her cheek and smells lightly of bleach. She wants to ask if he, like the ladies who wouldn’t come to her luncheon, is worried the dead woman on Willingham means something to them. “I have brownies,” Grace says instead, because she’s not sure she wants to hear his answer. “Feel like dessert?”
James rolls his rough cheek against the soft spot at the base of her neck. She leans into him and lays her head aside so he can more easily kiss her there.
“And ice cream,” she says, closing her eyes and inhaling the spicy cologne he slapped on after he washed up. “I’ll bet I have some in the freezer.”
And then that nagging feeling, that certainty she had forgotten something or misplaced something, rises up. She drops her chin to her chest and shakes her head.
“Oh, James. Today is Elizabeth’s birthday. She wore the lavender dress. Not the yellow. Because it’s her birthday. The ice cream, I bought it for her. How could I forget?”
While Grace plates a dozen leftover brownies and grabs a gallon of ice cream from the freezer, James pulls the car into the driveway. It’s a short enough walk, but by the time they come home, it’ll be dark, so James insists on the car.
When Mr. Symanski answers the door, his silver hair, usually smoothed straight back, hangs across his wrinkled brow. His white-collared shirt is untucked, his tie has pulled loose at the knot, and his pants are rumpled at the knees. He has shrunk in the year since Ewa died, the kind of withering that happens when a man loses his wife.
“I’m sorry to disturb you so late,” Grace says. “But I realized, after all the ladies left . . .”
She leans around Mr. Symanski so she can see into the living room, where Elizabeth usually sits in the evenings. She likes the brown wingback that used to be her mother’s. Ewa called it her fireside chair. It stands empty.
“I realized that today is Elizabeth’s birthday,” Grace says.
Mr. Symanski looks first at James and then at Grace. “I was sleeping.” He tugs on the pants hanging loosely at his waist. “I think I was sleeping.”
Like Grace did, Mr. Symanski leans to get a better look, as if Elizabeth is standing behind James.
“She is being with you?” Mr. Symanski says.
James steps forward. “Charles, it’s James and Grace. Are you all right?”
“Elizabeth, she is with you, yes?”
“No,” Grace says. “No, she isn’t. She came home. Hours ago. She left me hours ago. We came to wish her happy birthday.”
Mr. Symanski looks into the house to where Elizabeth would usually sit, her head lowered, not noticing someone at the door. The living room is dark. One of Ewa’s crocheted blankets lies across the sofa where Mr. Symanski was probably napping. No smell of anything baking in the oven. No radio. No voices.
“Elizabeth is being with you?”
James begins the search in the backyard. He starts in the garage, where it stays cool even on the hottest days, and checks behind the weeping forsythia that grows along the back porch. And while James searches outside, Grace helps Mr. Symanski to a seat in the kitchen and then hurries through the house, both hands supporting her heavy stomach. She opens every door, leans into each stale room, calls out Elizabeth’s name. She checks every closet, waves away the smell of mothballs that reminds her of Ewa. In the bedrooms, she checks under the beds, brushing aside the cobwebs that cling to her forehead and coughing at the dust kicked up when she throws back the patchwork quilts and lifts the lace bed skirts. She calls the neighbors, one on each side. They call more neighbors, and they, still more. The husbands set aside their newspapers and shut down their televisions. Ladies leave the dishes not yet washed and the laundry not yet folded. From upstairs, from down the hall, from in the cellar, Grace calls out for Mr. Symanski to stay put. Don’t worry. You know how she sometimes wanders. We’ll find her. We’ll find her in no time.
In the Symanskis’ front yard, James gathers the neighbors, and on the back of an envelope, he sketches Alder Avenue and Marietta one block to the south and Tuttle one block to the north. He draws six boxes, dividing up the area, assigns one man to each and tells them, “Get together as much help as you can. She’s small, you know. Check every porch, every garage. Behind bushes. Inside cars. She might be scared. Might want to hide.”
The men separate themselves into groups and some run north, while others run south. One group lingers and Orin Schofield gathers them across the street from the Filmore Apartments. Orin lives two houses down from Grace and James on the opposite side of the alley. He lost his wife three years ago. Grace takes him a roast with carrots and new potatoes the first and third Sunday of every month, always the s
ame thing because it’s one of the few dishes she can count on to turn out well for her, and while she cleans his kitchen, he talks about moving south to live with his daughter.
“I’d bet good money someone in there can tell you the girl’s whereabouts,” Orin shouts, pointing toward the Filmore. The top of his balding head is red though the sun has fallen low in the sky. If she could, Grace would tell him to take himself inside and sit in front of the fan. Your heart, she would tell him. The strain is no good for your heart. Continuing to shout, Orin shuffles up and down the sidewalk, dragging his tan suede shoes. Blue trousers pool at his ankles. As he walks, he leans on a three-foot-long scrap of wood as if it were a cane. James helped Orin replace the joists on his back porch last summer. The wood must be a leftover. Lifting the wood and stabbing it toward the apartments, Orin shouts again, “Good money says that’s the place to look.”
The men point to each side of the simple two-story brick apartment building, seemingly most worried about the shrubs and overgrown grass that run along the west side. Around back, they’ll find a thick stand of poplars hugging a narrow stream that runs east to west. The sun has set but the sky still glows with the last of its light. They’ll want to get a good look before darkness settles in. For the past year, these neighbors have been talking, some louder than others. More than being afraid of the coloreds living in the apartments, they are afraid of one buying and moving into a house, because that would be a lasting change and their lives would never be good again, never be the same. They have to stick together. If one falls, they all fall. That’s what the loudest neighbors say. Pointing this way and that, the men, a half dozen at least, split into two groups and flank the apartment building, disappearing around back for a time, reappearing in front.
“What’d you find?” Orin shouts, waving one fist in the air.
The men hold up their hands. Nothing. Most of the apartment windows are dark. The doors remain closed. No one from the Filmore comes out.
“You’ve got to go on in there.” It’s Orin again. “Nothing’s going to stop you.”
And then the police arrive, two black-and-white cars, two officers in each. They tell the men to stay clear of the Filmore.
“No one is allowed in there,” an officer says.
Leaving the group of six to linger on the curb, Orin Schofield still shouting and wielding his plank of wood, James escorts the officers into Mr. Symanski’s house. They sit around the kitchen table, and it takes him and Grace some time to explain about Elizabeth.
“No, she’s not a child,” Grace says. “A woman. Twenty-one years old. No, twenty-two today. But she’s like a child. She’s lost all the same. I saw her last. She left my house. Walked home. It’s such a short trip. That’s the last I know.”
The police insist Mr. Symanski stay at the house and not join the other men. James agrees.
“She’ll need a friendly face when we bring her home,” James says.
“Yes,” Grace says, resting a hand on Mr. Symanski’s shoulder. “James will see to it. He’ll see Elizabeth home.”
But really James must worry about Mr. Symanski’s heart. He won’t let Grace join the search either.
“See to him,” James says, nodding at Mr. Symanski. “Put on some coffee. Answer the phone. And keep yourself in the house.”
So while James goes outside to show the officers his map, Grace hunts for the coffee. She dumps the old grounds in a can she finds under the sink, rinses and fills the pot, brews a fresh batch. In the refrigerator, she finds a loaf of bread, cheese, and the sliced roast beef she delivered this past Wednesday. Like Orin Schofield, Mr. Symanski always gets the same dish. Spreading extra butter on the sandwich, she cuts it in half and slides it toward him.
“How long since you last ate?” she asks.
Mr. Symanski looks at the small white refrigerator as if it might give him the answer. “I am not knowing,” he says, then picks up one half of the sandwich but doesn’t take a bite.
Not worried that coffee will keep Mr. Symanski awake tonight, Grace pours him a cup. No one will sleep until Elizabeth is home. She adds cream and two sugars because that’s the way James takes it, and presses one of Mr. Symanski’s hands between both of hers. Perhaps Mr. Symanski would prefer bourbon, but James said coffee.
“Please,” she says. “You really should eat.”
As more people arrive to help in the search, Grace points them toward the police cars parked outside the house. One officer stands there, talking into a small radio. Grace calls after each neighbor, reminding him to check behind the bushes and in every garage because that’s what James said to do, and she jots down the name of every person who joins the search.
The neighbors continue to look well past dark. They carry flashlights and kerosene lanterns. Children from nearby streets swat at mosquitoes, and the ladies run home to flip on porch lights and kitchen lights, everything to light up the street for Elizabeth. Teenagers shuffle up and down Alder, the bright orange tips of their cigarettes glowing in the dark. In the kitchen, Grace scrubs the counter with baking soda while Mr. Symanski and two officers talk across the table. One officer has dark hair that curls on the ends, one strand cupping the top of his left ear. His name is Officer Warinski. The other officer, whose name is Thompson, has straight brown hair that was probably once blond, and he slouches as if he has always been the tallest. Both wear heavy, dark shoes that will leave scuff marks.
The curly-haired officer, Officer Warinski, points at Grace and then at the table. After Grace has taken a seat, the officer asks if Elizabeth would have had a plan and if anything is missing from the house that the girl might have sold for money. Hunched over the table, propped up by his elbows, his face resting in his hands, Mr. Symanski shakes his head.
“Elizabeth doesn’t know how to use money,” Grace says. “She doesn’t know what it is.”
Together, the officers, Grace, and Mr. Symanski walk to Elizabeth’s room. Again, the curly-haired Warinski does the talking. He asks if anything is missing. Officer Thompson holds a yellow pencil and a small pad of lined paper. Officer Warinski wonders aloud if Elizabeth had been planning a trip and asks Grace and Mr. Symanski for the names and telephone numbers of Elizabeth’s friends.
“She hasn’t any,” Grace says. “Only me. Me and a few of the other neighbor ladies. She’s like a child, frail, not well. You must understand that.”
Back in the kitchen, the taller officer bobs his head in the direction of the coffeepot, signaling he would like a cup. Both officers and Mr. Symanski return to their seats at the table. Officer Warinski brushes aside the curl that again grabs on to the top of his ear. He stretches his hands into the air, cups his head, and tilts his chair, balancing on the two hind legs. His skin is smooth like a boy’s.
“One more time,” he says to Grace. “You last saw her when?”
Placing an empty cup in front of each officer and pouring until both are full, Grace glances at Mr. Symanski. He stares down into his own empty cup, his hands wrapped around it as if warming himself. Grace pushes the sugar bowl and creamer across the table toward the officers.
“She comes every day for lunch,” Grace says. “Like always, she came. It gives Mr. Symanski time to catch up on chores or to nap. I rang him when she arrived and later sent her away because of all the talk.”
“The talk?”
“Talk of the woman found dead on Willingham Avenue. Most of our husbands, they work down there. Elizabeth left me at about one thirty. I rang Mr. Symanski again. One ring on the telephone to let him know she was on her way.”
Across the table, Mr. Symanski’s silver hair has fallen across his forehead and into his eyes.
“But I got busy,” Grace says. “I think he never rang back. I’m supposed to listen for him to ring back so I know she made it home.”
The curly-haired Warinski asks twice about the telephone rings that Grace and Mr. Symanski exchange. Grace explains that in the year since Ewa died, Grace and Mr. Symanski have taken to trading
rings to signal Elizabeth’s safe arrival. She wanders too far sometimes, twice walking past Grace’s house, going as far as Woodward before she was spotted. The officer squints at Grace. He doesn’t understand.
“Elizabeth wanders. Those rings, it’s how we know she’s safe. We ring when she leaves or when she arrives. The other rings back to signal she made it safe and sound.”
“And did you ring Mrs. Richardson?” the officer asks Mr. Symanski. Before Mr. Symanski can answer, the officer says to Grace, “Did he ring to signal that the girl was on her way for lunch? Did he ring that she made it home? Did he ever ring?”
Grace shakes her head. She’s certain she phoned Mr. Symanski after Julia and Elizabeth left the house. She must be certain. She let it ring once just as she always does, but did he ring her back? Did he ever ring her at all? Did he know Elizabeth had come? Did he know she left his house?
“I don’t know,” Grace finally says, rubbing one palm to the bridge of her nose. “I don’t remember. But I rang when she arrived and when she left. I know I did. I’m certain of it.”
The taller officer slouches even when seated. He reaches across the table and taps his pencil in front of Mr. Symanski. “Sir?”
“I can’t remember things,” Mr. Symanski says. “It is being so shameful I can’t remember. I was sleeping. Sometimes I am sleeping too long.”
“So,” Officer Warinski says. He leans forward, the chair’s front legs hitting the linoleum with a thud. “Elizabeth made her own way home when she left your house?”
Grace starts to say yes but stops. She mirrors the officer’s movement, slides forward on her chair and presses her hands flat on the tabletop.
“No,” she says. “No, she didn’t. I asked Julia Wagner to see Elizabeth home. She didn’t stay for lunch. The twins, Julia’s nieces, are here. She had to get home to them. Julia saw Elizabeth last.”
Officer Thompson stands and says he will go speak to Mrs. Wagner. Grace is relieved, happy that this thing she has remembered will amount to something good. Julia will be able to tell them what happened. She’ll be able to help.
