“Didn’t Larry Loreno ever make it to news anchor?”
“Oh, yeah,” Jon says. “But his son died two years ago of leukemia. He took a long time off, and he hasn’t been the same since.”
Right before we pay the bill, Jon drops his smile, and I get my first real glimpse of the adult that grew behind the face. I’m afraid of what he’s going to say next.
“Are you all right, Mattie?”
I feel myself relax. “It’s not really that weird, is it?” I say. “My showing up like this?”
Jon shrugs. “I don’t know. Sort of. What made you call me?”
“There are maybe five people I remember well from when I lived here. You’re one of them.”
He nods, and a smile flickers over his face. “Guess we both grew up somehow, huh? Made it through.” He reaches out uncertainly and touches my shoulder.
Even today, I realize, I have underestimated Jon Goblin. He understands the oddly impersonal nature of the affection we both appear to be feeling. In the end, the inevitable question slips off my tongue with such ease that I barely notice saying it. “How about the Daughretys?”
“The Doctor died, you know.”
My tongue locks. I hold my breath and stare.
“I guess not,” Jon says, and I realize he’s trying to sound comforting, though he clearly has no idea why I’m reacting like this. “Lost control of his car and drove it into Cider Lake. Knocked himself unconscious or something and drowned in five feet of water.”
“When?”
“Nineteen ninety-two, maybe? Nineteen ninety-one. Not long ago. Nobody’d seen them for quite a while.”
“What do you mean? Why not?”
“Well, after everything...they just got weird, Mattie.”
“They were always weird.”
“You don’t understand,” he says, shaking his head. “Theresa went away for a while. A long time. I heard they moved to Cleveland or somewhere eventually. The Doctor had family there, I think. He came back every other week to look after the immunization clinic he set up downtown. The family didn’t want a funeral, but the mayor’s office organized this tribute day in Phil Hart Plaza. We all went. It was weird, like the fourth of July. He was a big deal because he did all this charity work in the city, so they had posters of him in a lab coat pasted all over the place. Kind of freaked me out.”
“Were...” I’m, having trouble with the words. “Did you see the rest of the family there?”
“I think Barbara was already gone. Or she didn’t come back for the tribute or something. Anyway, I didn’t see her.”
“Theresa?” I say, fast.
Jon looks right at me and shakes his head again, then lifts himself over the cane to his feet. He has remembered, I suspect, why this answer might be so important to me. “Mattie, I don’t know. No one does.”
Chapter 12 - 1976
In Detroit, Halloween is an anticlimax. The real danger comes the night before, on Devil’s Night, when all the city’s children slip out of their homes with a decades-old mandate to vandalize.
The first real snow of 1976 fell on Devil’s Night afternoon. From our front window, Brent and I could see it slanting with the wind, a spectral web across the oncoming dark. Occasionally, we saw the clustered shadows of teenagers moving through the strands of snow.
Arson had not yet become the Devil’s Night activity of choice, especially in suburban Detroit, but the mayhem was getting nastier every year, and the adults reacted accordingly. Mr. Fox turned his drainage ditch into a foxhole and sat there with a pump gun until well after midnight. Kevin Dent’s father booby-trapped trees by sawing the lowest branches almost all the way through, so that the slightest pressure—from a roll of toilet paper, say—would bring them crashing down on the perpetrators below.
Meanwhile, entire crates of eggs evaporated from local markets. Soap bars and shaving-cream cans were spirited out of bathrooms, and fist-sized rocks collected in school lockers. Editorials condemning the holiday and bemoaning the deterioration of civic responsibility in our city’s youth ran on the front pages of the News and the Free Press. By evening, everyone not out to wreak havoc had secreted themselves in their houses, and the entire city seemed submerged.
At our house, Devil’s Night was spent on alert. My father would deploy my mother by the back bedroom window and Brent and me by the big one in the living room. At the first sign of movement, we were instructed to wave a flashlight at my father’s spot behind the front door or, in my mother’s case, to just yell, and he would go bursting into the night whooping and bellowing like a Scooby Doo demon. Invariably, he’d be laughing when he returned. Devil’s Night seemed to trigger my father’s most singular skill as a parent: the ability to animate dead time.
Later on, he’d take us into the garage and help me finish constructing the costumes that Brent and I would be wearing to school the next day. By now, I was designing the costumes for both me and my brother while my father mostly sat on the washing machine and made suggestions. My mother baked brownies and brought them out to us and then stood in the doorway and watched me take care of the final details. That year, after Mr. Fox finally left his drainage ditch and went to bed, his house was paint-bombed, and all the cars in the neighborhood got draped with frozen strung-together animal dung.
The next afternoon, Mrs. Jupp had organized a Halloween costume contest in the gym. My brother Brent wound up winning, which was fine with me. I’d spent more time on his costume than I had on my own, because I liked his more. I came as the Bird, along with half the other boys in the school and more than a few of the girls, although my hair design was more realistic: a perfect tease-woven mass of spaghetti string and gold glitter to give it the winking effect that Mark Fidrych’s
hair always had during night games. More spaghetti string was used for my brother’s costume. I stuck it to a giant papier-mâché plate that I had hooped around his collar, then spray-painted parts of it red, stretched a red shower cap over his head, dripped ketchup streaks down his face, and voilà! my brother, the walking meatball dinner.
Most of the reason Brent won, I think, was because his costume made Mrs. Jupp laugh. She wasn’t laughing at many of the costumes that year. Particularly in my grade, there was a marked increase in the number of shock outfits. Today, of course, no one would blink at the stuff we wore, but then, the scariest outfit we’d seen belonged to Tripp Gardiner, a fifth-grader who always went trick-or-treating with a hollowed-out pumpkin on his head. Every year, the face gouged into the pumpkin got a little less human.
This time, Tripp came to the gym with a hatchet wedged into the top of his pumpkin head. Mrs. Van-Ellis wrenched it out the moment she saw him, but he wasn’t the worst, not by a long shot. Jon Goblin—way out of character—came as a crone, with pink slime dribbling down his rubberized lips. And a Chippewa third-grader I barely knew named James Sea came as a wolverine, his body swathed in fur complete with scrapes and bite marks and a mouth full of teeth that may well have been dulled knife blades. Mrs. Jupp actually shuddered when she saw him, reached out to touch the fur, then shook her head and walked away.
She was everywhere that day, directing us, commanding us, attending to us in her Mrs. Jupp way. She almost seemed to know what was coming, as though she could feel it drifting down from the Upper Peninsula. After the costume contest came the habitual warnings. We’d had them before in regular assemblies, but Mrs. Jupp went through her entire list again. Once more, Officer Drum was sent by the Troy Police Department because someone thought his sheer bulk, combined with the scraggle of hair that hung between his massive shoulder blades, might help bad kids identify with him. As always, he warned us to check the packaging on our candy carefully.
“Sealed or no deal,” he chanted, and he made us chant it with him a few times.
No one was paying much attention, even when we were chanting, until he stopped suddenly and stood there, staring up and down the rows of children as if he were identifying bodies.
“He�
�s awfully good,” Spencer said to Theresa and me, and grinned.
Mrs. Jupp spoke for another fifteen minutes about not taking apples because they might have razor blades in them, but this was unnecessary. Adam Stork, the third-grader who’d been cut by one last year, had peeled back his bandages and shown everybody his tongue.
Theresa was sitting between Spencer and me, but her lone acknowledgment of the holiday was a black and orange hair ribbon instead of her plain black one. She’d said next to nothing the entire morning. Once, while Officer Drum was ranting, I glanced over and saw her sitting up straight on the bleachers, her mouth slightly open, and I started to laugh. I had never in my life seen anyone look so vacant.
“You look like a parking meter,” I told her, but she didn’t react.
As Mrs. Jupp issued her final instructions, I leaned behind Theresa and asked Spencer, “What are we doing tonight?” I was surprised when he’d invited me over to trick-or-treat. We’d done all of our outside-of-school playing at my house; and among the kids I knew, only Theresa said less about her parents than he did. He talked about his neighborhood all the time, calling it real Detroit, whatever that meant, but he never mentioned his parents.
“Air hockey, for one thing,” he said.
“Sidecar air hockey?”
He smiled.
“Your mom’s not going to try and go trick-or-treating with us, is she?”
Spencer stopped smiling. “She might.”
“My mom hasn’t gone trick-or-treating with us since I was eight.”
“Yeah, well, bully for your mom. Shut up.”
“Is your neighborhood dangerous?”
“My neighborhood kicks the crap out of this one.”
I was about to ask him if his mother would make us go to bed early when Theresa blinked, tipped back so she was perched between us, and dropped her bombshell.
“I think I’ll come,” she said.
Neither Spencer nor I understood her at first. We weren’t even sure she was talking to us.
“If there’s trick-or-treating, I’m coming.” This time she smiled and inclined her head a little toward each of us.
Spencer leaned forward abruptly and stuck his face into hers to do what he always did, whenever he had an excuse.
“Duh,” he said.
No saying or gesture I brought home from school ever annoyed my mother more. I loved it. But one look at Theresa convinced me that it was time to get Spencer’s face out of hers, for his own safety. I shoved my hand against his forehead and pushed him back into his own space.
Theresa didn’t get annoyed. She blushed. I couldn’t remember ever seeing her blush. But she did that day, then narrowed her eyes. I’d never seen her do that before, either.
“I’m sleeping over too. My dad saw your mom driving out—”
“My mom?” said Spencer, skipping past by far the most interesting part of this conversation. I was pretty sure Theresa said she’d be sleeping in the same place that I was tonight. I started to sweat. She was wearing a friendship bracelet on her right wrist; the dark colors in the band emphasized the paleness of her skin.
Theresa was glaring at Spencer. “Your mother’s nice,” she said.
I still couldn’t get past the sleeping arrangements.
We were quiet for a while. Mrs. Jupp was talking about the safe-house hands again. “If anyone, anyone, ANYONE comes for you, just run, kids. Run.”
“We can play Murder in the Dark,” Spencer whispered.
“In the real dark,” I said.
Theresa had already gone back to staring at something neither one of us could see. But she was smiling faintly, like someone at the rail of a boat drifting toward the open ocean.
At dusk that evening, I knocked on the Daughretys’ door. No one answered, so I stood on the stoop in the swirling snow and wondered if Spencer’s mother would even let us go outside because of the cold. On the street, little kids were already out in their Spider-Man and Glinda the Good Witch and Mark Fidrych costumes, with their parents or older brothers trailing behind them. I was still watching them when the door opened behind me.
I turned and stuttered, “Oh, my God,” then staggered off the edge of the porch into the pricker bushes.
She was draped in lakeweed, her cheeks whited out with makeup, her lips painted purple. I couldn’t decide if it was her costume or her relentless, targetless stare that made her look so convincingly dead. My Mark Fidrych hair had caught on the pricker branches, and some of it came out when I yanked myself free.
“What the hell are you?” I finally managed to say, when I had climbed back onto the porch.
“Drowned girl.”
“Why didn’t you wear that to school?”
“I wanted to see you fall off the porch.”
Behind her, the Doctor appeared, beaming, the way he had after the last Mind War. “Got ya, didn’t she?” he said, mussing his daughter’s hair, but delicately, like a lady-in-waiting brushing a princess. Somehow, that gesture always felt very different when he did it to me. But Theresa just made a face and became even ghastlier.
Five minutes later, he loaded us into his Jeep, and we sped toward Ferndale with the canvas sides open. I said almost nothing because, without explanation, Theresa had climbed into the backseat and was riding beside me.
One block after we turned off Woodward, the shops and streetlights shed their Corridor sameness and became an actual neighborhood. We passed a record store with a giant black catfish painted on its green awning, and lots of shop windows with the words PAWN, GUNS printed on the glass. The houses looked older than the ones in our suburbs, though not necessarily rattier. Some had uneven porches or yards without grass, but not most. The streets had fewer lights, but the darkness didn’t frighten me. From the first frost until April, Detroit was always dark, no matter where you lived.
While Dr. Daughrety slowed to study street signs, I leaned over to Theresa and said, “Tell me about Spencer’s mom.” I got closer to her than I meant to, almost nudged her ear with my mouth, and a stray hair that had slipped from her black ribbon tickled my cheek. Her only answer was a smile stretching her purple lips.
Dr. Daughrety pulled up in front of a two-story wood-and-brick house with plowed dirt for a yard. The banister railing that ringed the upstairs veranda had warped outward, so the deck resembled a cupped palm. In the yard, strategically placed between mounds of dirt and snow, little Tonka dumpsters and bulldozers sat on their wheels and rusted. They looked hilarious crouching there, as though the enormity of their task had shrunk them. I pointed and laughed. Theresa laughed too. Even Dr. Daughrety smiled, although I wasn’t sure he understood what we were laughing about.
Spencer emerged from the house in his Fat Albert costume and red sneakers. His mother was right behind him, and for the second time that evening, speech and breath knotted in my throat and stuck there. She was a tall red-haired woman, too thin. A tall white red-haired woman, wearing a strange gold overcoat that flashed like metal.
“Should I get you a coat like that, Thrr-girl?” Dr. Daughrety murmured, more to himself than to his daughter, but he answered Mrs. Franklin’s wave with his own.
Theresa was already out of the car, and somehow I’d scrambled out too, although I couldn’t remember doing it, sunk as I was in the onrush of my own thoughts. Was Spencer adopted? She looked like him, a lot like him: same smile, same cheekbones, so high they created cavities under her eyes.
The Doctor stopped halfway up the walk to pat Spencer on the shoulder and nod at Mrs. Franklin. “Thanks for having my daughter,” he said, sounding like the herald in a King Arthur movie, announcing the arrival of the Queen.
“Thanks for bringing them both,” said Mrs. Franklin.
Dr. Daughrety nodded and sketched a wave, then turned to me, and for a single moment I thought he was about to apologize, though I had no idea why. Theresa moved past her father, but the Doctor grabbed her, spun her around, kissed her on the forehead, and touched her paint-swollen lips.
<
br /> “Be safe, you,” he said.
She wriggled free of his hands and marched up the walk into Spencer’s house while he stood and watched.
Spencer was a few steps away from me and closing in when I shook myself out of my stupor. I didn’t want him to get close enough to do the duh thing again, which he was clearly preparing to do.
“I’d have to hit you,” I said as he swooped toward my face and stopped. His smile was tentative, not his usual smile at all.
“You coming in?”
“I kind of want to play with those trucks,” I said, and he went blank for a second, then remembered the Tonkas and laughed.
“You would.”
“Where’s your dad?” I asked Spencer, but it was Mrs. Franklin who answered.
“Mattie, I’ve heard so much about you. Mr. Franklin travels. He won’t be here this time, I’m afraid. Come on inside, kids.”
Behind us, I heard Dr. Daughrety’s Jeep start, and I glanced back and saw him drive off.
“You have a white mom,” I whispered.
“And a working fireplace and an air hockey table.”
“And a white mom.”
“So do you.”
For half an hour or so, until it got nighttime-dark, we all played air hockey in Spencer’s basement while Mrs. Franklin set up cots and sleeping bags, two at one end of the room, one at the other, and whistled songs I didn’t know to herself. She didn’t speak to Spencer. He didn’t look at her. The air-hockey table made a soothing, breathy sound under the clack of paddles and puck.
Mrs. Franklin disappeared upstairs for a few minutes and came back down wearing the gold overcoat again, plus matching metallic-gold boots and a bright white scarf. Spencer glanced up from the air-hockey game he was losing to Theresa, saw his mother, and groaned.
The Snowman's Children Page 8
