Invisible Boy

by Cornelia Read

  You’d find a blue-and-white can of it atop the brown school-issued bureau of every partier on campus, alongside her requisite bottle of Visine.

  Astrid laid out two fat lines on the mirror and handed it to me along with a rolled-up twenty.

  I snorted them up, then put the mirror on the floor and pinched each nostril shut in turn, inhaling sharply to get it all down.

  “Thank you for that,” I said, licking my finger to swipe the last granules off the mirror, rubbing the slick of white into my gums.

  “Straight-arrow Maddie Dare giving herself a freeze,” said Astrid. “Who’d believe it?”

  “Fuck off.”

  For the most part I didn’t indulge. My own bureau-top was

  Ozium-free, my closet filled with nothing but dirty clothes. I valued my scholarship far too much to mess around, profoundly grateful to have escaped my then-stepfather Pierce’s needling daily assholery.

  Besides which, both my parents were stoners, so bong hits had never felt like much in the way of rebellion.

  Coke, I reasoned, was different. It wasn’t like there was ever a ton of it on offer, and it was so easy to hide, so hard to detect once ingested. No harm, no foul.

  Who’d believe it, indeed?

  Not the dorm parents, nor even the Disciplinary Committee. Lucky me.

  I gave Astrid the mirror back, then opened Understanding Poetry at a random page while she laid out a fresh brace of lines for herself.

  Maybe we’d bonded because she had even less of a home to count on than I did, and effectively the same lack of cash. My parents actually didn’t have any, and hers just kept spending it all trying to look like they had even more. As such, we’d learned early to elicit the kindness of strangers.

  “ Here is Belladonna,” I intoned, “ the Lady of the Rocks/The lady of

  situations.”

  She did one line, muttered “Byron,” and snorted up the next.

  “Try harder, Veruca.”

  Astrid rolled off the bed and walked over to her stereo. “If I have to listen to one more second of fucking ‘Norwegian Wood’ I’m going to shoot myself. Read me another couplet.”

  “What are you putting on?”

  “Vivaldi.”

  “What the hell’s Vivaldi?”

  “Your people have no culture, Madeline. If ever there were a race whose conscience remains woefully uncreated—”

  “I am highly conversant in the greatest hits of Puccini,” I said.

  “Mozart… Beethoven… And by the way, eat me raw.”

  She dropped the needle onto The Four Seasons, Side A, then opened the window and lit a Dunhill.

  “Not bad,” I said when the first violin started in, soaring above the string-section pack. “Got a good beat—you can dance to it.”

  “Read me another couplet, ungrateful bitch. That last one was a lousy hint.”

  I cleared my throat. “‘HURRY UP PLEASE IT’S TIME—’”

  “Eliot!” she crowed, triumphant.

  “Title?”

  Looking back over her shoulder, she threw me a smirk. “‘Teenage Wasteland’?”

  “ Exactemente, you goddamn genius.”

  “We’re going to rule the world, you and I.”

  “Of course,” I said. “No question.”

  “Say that like you mean it.”

  I picked at my jacket’s duct tape. “Sure.”

  At fifteen I’d discovered this small slice of world in which my natural impulses suddenly marked me not outcast, but leader. I’d seen my life come shining, from the west down to the east.

  I was now three years older, and reluctant as hell to leave this safe haven.

  I looked up at her. “I must admit to an increasing sense of panic that I’m doomed to become one of those awful little people who peaked in high school.”

  “Goddamn it, Madeline, we are the balls,” said Astrid, kicking me in the thigh. “Now and forever.”

  “Look,” I said, “in this place, you and I own any goddamn room we walk into. We can get up onstage and play the entire school like a fucking violin, conjuring forth any nuance of emotion we want—teachers, classmates, administration—off the cuff, pitch-perfect every time. Either one of us could snap our fingers and start a riot, or stop one dead in its tracks.”

  She nodded. “Absolute power.”

  It’s why we were friends. I mean, who the hell else could we have admitted this to?

  “Absolutely,” I said, then pointed at the window. “Out there, however, it’s a goddamn crap shoot. Entropy… chaos.”

  She crossed her arms, impatient. “Don’t be such a pussy.”

  “I’m not a pussy, I’m a realist. Our main ingredient is just charisma, Astrid, the very quintessence of ephemerality. ‘One shade the more, one ray the less…’ and hey presto, it’s gone.”

  “Bullshit,” she said. “The only thing that can take it away is allowing yourself to doubt it.”

  “Well, there you go, then. I’m dead meat.”

  Astrid blew a stream of smoke out the window, then turned back to me. “Take off your jacket.”

  “Why?”

  “So you can give it to me.”

  “I don’t want to fucking give you my jacket. The window’s open and it’s goddamn freezing in here. Besides which you’re already wearing a coat.”

  “Yeah, but we’re trading.” She stuck the Dunhill in the corner of her mouth and shook off her mother’s sable, holding it out toward me.

  “Fuck off. I like mine better.”

  “The hell you do,” she said. “It’s an ugly piece of shit with duct tape all over it.”

  “I happen to enjoy duct tape.”

  “Cocky bitch.”

  “Damn right,” I said.

  She took another drag and put her coat back on. “You know how many people would’ve traded?”

  I shrugged.

  “All of them,” she said. “Everyone but you, Madissima. So fuck doubt. The only thing you need to do is arise, go forth, and conquer.”

  “Tennyson. ‘The Passing of Arthur.’ ”

  “We are the best fucking minds of our generation,” said Astrid. “And I will never let you forget it.”

  She leaned out the window, blowing a plume of smoke into the frosty air before extending her sable-draped arms in a gesture of sublime grace, a benediction over those still asleep in the waning darkness.

  “Hear this,” she said into the night, “from Astrid and Madeline: We. Are. The. Balls.”

  She declaimed Eliot’s second-stanza blessing, then—softly—across all the campus below:

  “ Good night, ladies, good night, sweet ladies, good night, good night.”

  Then the sun came up, and, four hours later, the pair of us aced Hindley’s bullshit poetry test: ninety-eight apiece.

  It was hard, now, to remember the two of us—me and Astrid, as children—but harder still to recall the people she’d believed we would become.

  14

  I got from Jamaica Station to Prospect faster this time around. Not just because I knew my way, but also because the air felt a little crisper—there was a nice snap to it, heralding fall. Not enough to make me wish I’d brought a sweater, just adequate to walk at a brisker pace, freed from summer’s soggy oppression.

  Cate was just unloading her car when I turned into the little dead-end lane.

  She looked up and smiled. “You’re the first one here.”

  The other volunteers arrived moments later—half a dozen mellow-looking older folk wearing sturdy shoes and floppy hats. They might’ve just returned from an Elderhostel rafting trip down the Colorado: no-nonsense, ready for anything.

  Cate jumped right into describing the parameters of today’s

  mission.

  “All we know so far is that the child was three years old,” she said. “So we’re looking for anything that might help to identify him or her… clothing especially. Let’s work in pairs this week, and go slowly.”

  The Quakers no
dded.

  “If you uncover anything other than plant matter,” she continued, “even if it looks like run-of-the-mill garbage, bring it out to the edges of the cleared trail and leave it next to the little railings, here.” She pointed to the granite corner-marker of a family plot.

  “Didn’t Skwarecki say we shouldn’t touch anything we found?” I asked her, once the Quakers had paired off and moved away.

  “Her crew’s spent some time here since,” said Cate, “and she thinks if we do turn anything up, the stuff will most likely have been moved by animals. She’s coming by later to look over whatever we do find.”

  I tied a newly laundered bandanna around my forehead.

  “Nice,” she said, handing me a machete, gloves, and a garbage bag. “Makes you look like a pirate.”

  “Damn, and here I was going for Hendrix.”

  Cate laughed, picking up a set of clippers, and the pair of us headed off into the bushes.

  Ninety minutes on, we’d filled ten bags and lined up a five-foot, single-file parade of worthless-looking objets-du-garbage alongside the central trail.

  Cate topped up one more load, then spun the bag closed and retrieved a toothed plastic closure from her shorts pocket. I reached over to keep the bag’s neck shut with my fist so she didn’t have to cinch it one handed.

  She hoisted the load over her shoulder, Santa-style. “Ready for a break?”

  “Thought you’d never ask.”

  I gathered up our tools, slowly scoping out the hacked weeds underfoot as I walked back toward the trail edge. All I turned up was a root-beer bottle and a wad of disintegrating newsprint.

  There was nothing obviously connected to a child—no little toys, no tiny sweaters with name tags sewn in, no laminated photo-ID cards reading,MY NAME IS————, AND SKWARECKI SHOULD ARREST————.

  We hadn’t found a thing that required a second thought: bent cans and grimy bottles, the rusty blade of a garden trowel, a tangle of kite-string with silver Christmas tinsel inexplicably wound in—pointless, all of it.

  I placed my latest finds at the back of the sad little line of crap and sighed, shaking my head.

  Maybe the Quakers were having better luck, or maybe there hadn’t been anything to find in the first place.

  I wiped my hands on the back of my shorts and started trudging up toward the chapel, only slightly cheered by the promise of ice water.

  When I stepped inside the chapel I found Cate deep in discussion with Detective Skwarecki.

  Cate was looking at the floor and nodding, cup of water in hand, while Skwarecki gesticulated with what looked like the remaining half of a Chips Ahoy.

  I grabbed some water myself before walking over to join them.

  Cate looked up at me. “We may have a bit of good news.”

  “The Quakers got lucky?”

  “We’ve turned up a missing-persons report that could be relevant,” said Skwarecki. “It was filed last April here in Queens, by the mother of a three-year-old boy.”

  “So, right age,” I said.

  “The pathologist thinks the child we found was African American,” added Cate. “Which fits.”

  I looked at Skwarecki. “You can tell someone’s ethnicity from their bones?”

  “Broadly speaking,” she said. “You get different features distinguishing Caucasoid, Mongoloid, and Africanoid skulls, even in children.”

  “Like what?” I asked.

  “The shape of the nose holes, proportions of any nasal bones, whether the zygomatic bones—cheekbones—are curved or square. Even the chin’s angle means something. Our guy’s pretty confident that this child’s ancestry is African.”

  “Is there any way to tell for sure whether the woman who filed the report is the mother?” I asked. “Some kind of test?”

  Skwarecki shook her head. “Not with skeletal remains. With a blood sample we can at least establish the likelihood of two individuals being closely related.”

  “Sure,” I said. “Blood typing.”

  “Serology, or HLA,” she said, “but again, with these remains…”

  “What about DNA?” I asked.

  I’d read about it in the Times, but it was still pretty new.

  Skwarecki shook her head. “That takes a big sample of blood or saliva or semen from both individuals. And there’s a lot of argument on whether the results really even stack up forensically.”

  “I thought it was foolproof,” I said.

  She shrugged. “This guy Castro almost got off last year, killed a pregnant woman and her daughter. They thought they had him on DNA—blood on his watch—but his lawyer convinced the judge it was a lab screwup, not a match. That’s got everybody’s panties in a knot over guidelines, chain of evidence.”

  I slugged back the last of my water, discouraged.

  Cate asked, “So, in a case like this, how do you establish someone’s identity? You said there probably wouldn’t be dental records.”

  “It’s tough,” said Skwarecki. “Skeletal structure can’t even confirm gender, before puberty.”

  I peered into my now-empty water cup for a moment, like I’d find some useful advice printed at the bottom.

  Nope.

  I raised my eyes to meet Skwarecki’s. “Did the missing boy have any dental records?”

  “No,” she said. “I asked his mother this morning.”

  I thought about “our” child’s smashed rib cage and all the other fractures the ME said had never been set so they could heal properly. If he was the missing boy, it didn’t sound like he’d ever been taken to a doctor, either. Skwarecki had to be thinking about all of that too.

  “So how did this lady manage to lose her son?” I asked. “Were they, like, at the beach? In a department store?”

  I wanted to give this woman I’d never seen the benefit of the doubt. Maybe she had no connection to the battered bones we’d found. Maybe she was honestly grieving the most horrifying kind of loss life could throw at any parent. For a minute I sure as shit hoped so, even if it meant we’d never know whom the Prospect child belonged to.

  But then I thought it would be better to know, better to make sure Skwarecki got who did it.

  “She said she was out looking for work,” said Skwarecki.

  “Please tell us that this woman didn’t leave her three-year-old home alone,” said Cate.

  “She didn’t,” said Skwarecki, shutting her eyes for just a moment and looking very, very tired when she opened them again. “She told me she’d left him with someone she trusts, absolutely.”

  I felt cold, suddenly, like the ice water in my stomach had suddenly leaked out into the veins snaking up through my rib cage, coursing onward into my lungs and heart.

  I looked at Skwarecki. “Boyfriend or stepfather?”

  She closed her eyes again, for longer this time. “Boyfriend. A guy named Albert Williams.”

  15

  And this Albert Williams boyfriend says what?” I asked. “A toddler ran to the corner deli for cigarettes?”

  Cate put her hand on my forearm. “Madeline, we don’t know these people are to blame.”

  I looked down at my sneakers.

  Cate removed her hand. “Detective Skwarecki, what did the man say had happened?”

  “Williams’s version is they were sitting on a bed watching TV together and he fell asleep. When he woke up, the door was open and the boy was gone.”

  I shook my head, breathing out through my nose.

  “The front door?” asked Cate.

  “Motel-room door,” said Skwarecki. “A place the county’s using for temp housing, out by LaGuardia. The mother’d been there maybe a month.”

  “That’s where you spoke with her today?” asked Cate.

  “No,” said Skwarecki. “She gave her grandmother’s address and phone number on the report. I met her there.”

  “And where does the grandmother live?” I asked.

  “Maybe ten blocks from here,” said Skwarecki. “Two-family house—
the grandmother owns half.”

  She smiled a little, for the first time that day. “That is one very tough little old lady, let me tell you. She’s kicking some major butt on the little boy’s behalf.”

  “More than his mother?” asked Cate.

  “His mother… well…” Skwarecki looked up at the ceiling. “Let’s just say she’s not gonna get hired by IBM anytime soon. Or Seven-Eleven.”

  “How do you mean?” asked Cate.

  Skwarecki shrugged. “Work homicide? You know from crackhounds.”

  “This just breaks my heart,” said Cate.

  I put my arm around her shoulders and turned to Skwarecki. “Do you think we found her little boy?”

  “How she looked this morning? You gotta wonder how she even knew he was gone.”

  “But the woman filed a missing-person’s report, didn’t she?” asked Cate. “For all we know, she turned to drugs out of grief— after she lost her son.”

  “Sure,” said Skwarecki, humoring Cate. “But it was the grandmother made sure that got filed. Dollars to doughnuts.”

  “She came down to the station, the grandmother?” I asked.

  “With his mother, the first time,” said Skwarecki. “She’s been back a lot since, solo. That’s how I got the report so fast. Desk sergeant says everyone knows her downstairs. She brings cookies.”

  “And was there anything in the report that could help us identify the little boy?” I asked.

  “What he was last seen wearing,” said Skwarecki.

  Cate looked up. “Given your description of his mother, do you trust her account of what he had on?”

  “The grandmother confirmed it,” Skwarecki said. “She’d just bought him new clothes, and checked to see what was missing: little red overalls, blue-and-white striped T-shirt, white socks, and a pair of sneakers with ALF on them.”

  “That puppet on TV?” asked Cate.

  Skwarecki nodded.

  The sneakers got to me. I looked down and started blinking really fast, but I could still feel tears welling up in the corners of my eyes.