The Chalk Girl

‘She won’t be back.’

Coco shook her head. ‘Mallory loves me. She loves me.’

And now he watched her bow her head to – tie – her – shoelace. And when she was done, she looked up at him, so defiant. She stuck out her foot to show him this accomplishment of an awkward child-tied knot. ‘Is that superficial?’

Oh, God – her remarkable hearing. Every word said in the hall had been overheard.

Coco leaned toward him, eyes glittering and wet, and there was anger when she said with great dignity, ‘Mallory loved me.’

Past tense.

Stripped of all hope, the floundering child wrapped her arms around his neck. Her tiny body was shaking with sobs, her voice cracking as she recited a litany of deep pain. They sat there in the hallway for a very long time, Charles dying, Coco crying, grieving over every unfair loss, lost home, lost love.

The Harveys of Illinois had finished unpacking their bags in the downstairs apartment, and now they were surprised when the elevator doors opened upon the sight of a tiny child with swollen red eyes. Mrs Harvey picked up the little girl to carry her down the hall and through the open door to Charles’s apartment, saying all the while in tones of motherlove, ‘Everything’s going to be all right.’ In charge now, Mrs Harvey pulled a tissue from her purse and wiped Coco’s face clean of tears.

Charles was unprepared for the child’s reaction to this small kindness, and it killed him to watch it play out.

Coco’s fabulous smile was instant and wide – if not genuine – as she informed the Harveys that rats were carriers of bubonic plague. Next, she ran to the piano in the music room. She played them a song and sang for them, then danced back into the parlor and began a monologue of vermin trivia. How hard she worked, auditioning for a new home and negotiating for love to replace what was so recently ripped away. And the Harveys were blindly enchanted by a child’s ruthless pitch for survival.

Excusing himself, Charles retired to Coco’s bedroom, where he sat alone with his pain. The drapes were drawn, and the only light was the glow of fireflies. How bright. How odd. They should have begun to die off long before now, but there was not one dead insect in the jar.

Oh, fool. Would that he could die of foolishness.

It was so obvious. Mallory had been entering by stealth, by night – every night – to replenish the lightning bugs so that Coco would not wake up in a dark place.

The sorry man reached beneath the pillow and found Coco’s one-button cell phone. He pressed the button, and the connection was instant. ‘Mallory?’

And she said, ‘I signed Coco’s release form. You’ll find it on the kitchen table. Are you happy now?’

‘No,’ he said.

This summer afternoon would remain in his memory forever, a bookmark to a sad and curious passage that he must return to again and again. Well into his nineties and long after the death of Kathy Mallory, on every fine, warm day, he would sit in a garden where he would only suffer daisies to be planted. Sometimes his great- grandchildren would find him there, tearing petals from flowers. They would smile to see the old man playing a children’s game of loves me, loves me not, never suspecting that he grappled with an old problem of bugs in a jar.

He, who was whole and sane and fully human – he would never have thought to light a child’s way through the night with fireflies. And so he plucked the daisies bald, alternating Mallory’s possibilities, saying with one torn petal, ‘She had no heart,’ and with the next petal, ‘She did.’

Riker walked down a row of cages made of wood and chicken wire, flimsy protection for the artifacts of those who had died without leaving wills, all their goods condemned to probate limbo. He paused by the only storage space that burned with interior lights. His partner had been busy rewiring. Extension cords trailed down from a ceiling fixture and hooked up with table lamps to illuminate rooms of furnishings crowded into the space of an oversized closet.

The largest item was the Nadlers’ walk-in safe, and it was wide open. Evidently, Mallory had tired of following their boss’s instruction to wait for a proper work order to get the lock bored out. A huge drill lay on the floor, and the safe now had a gaping hole in its door – and a cop inside.

‘Find anything useful?’ He leaned into the safe and whistled at the walls of stacked-up comic books. On top of one of the shorter piles was a pristine Batman issue that was older than he was.

Mallory sat on the metal floor, reading handwritten lines in a small book. ‘The city would’ve found the Nadlers’ will if they’d bored out the damn lock fifteen years ago.’

‘Lucky thing they didn’t.’ Riker flipped through the comics in archival covers. ‘The mice would’ve chewed all of this to bits. This is no kid’s collection. It’s worth a fortune.’

‘Those belonged to the boy’s father. They’re mentioned in the will. But I found Ernie’s comics, too – what’s left of them.’ She pointed to the floor outside the safe and a box with mouse-chewed holes.

He hunkered down beside it and lifted the cardboard lid. The top layer had been shredded for a nest to bed down a litter of blind, newborn vermin. They wiggled and squeaked. But Riker, a good New Yorker, did not find them cute. He snapped on a latex glove and burrowed underneath them to pull out two comic books that were still intact. ‘Another Batman – like father, like son. And here’s a Superman.’

And now he realized that Mallory had been moving the furniture. All the effects of Ernie’s life were gathered in this corner around a boy-size bed, a matching nightstand and a cracked lamp in the shape of a ceramic superhero.

‘I found the Nadlers’ suicide note.’ Mallory walked out of the safe, holding the small leather-bound book that she had been reading. ‘This is Ernie’s diary.’ She pulled a folded sheet of paper from between the pages and handed it to him.

Riker opened the note and read the simple line written by one of the parents before they died, a goodbye of five words: For those who wonder why.

Mallory sat down on a wooden chair that matched the boy’s bedroom suite. ‘The pages of Ernie’s diary are dusted with glass fragments from a broken lightbulb.’ She opened the top drawer of the nightstand. ‘Look. More fragments in here. This is probably where he kept it. That’s why the drawer was open. So this is what happened. After Ernie died, the Nadlers got home from the hospital that night. They came into his room and sat down on that bed – and they read his diary. And when they were done, one of them threw it at the wall, and it cracked the lamp.’

‘And broke the lightbulb.’ Riker could see Ernie’s parents holding each other in the dark.

FORTY-THREE

They stand over me at the Losers’ Table – watching me eat a bite of my lunch. It won’t stay down, and Humphrey giggles when I throw up in my napkin.

I pick up my tray and carry it across the dining hall to sit down beside Toby Wilder, though I know he likes to eat his meals alone, and every other kid in school gives him the space of half a table. But he doesn’t even notice me. His eyes are closed to slits, and his fork conducts an orchestra inside his head.

I look up and there they are, settling down on the other side of the table, three stealthy crows come to peck me to death. Screw them. I eat my lunch, fearless. Humphrey wouldn’t dare pull any shit, not here, and Willy only stares at me with spider eyes. But Aggy just can’t help herself. She clicks her teeth nonstop, promising me another bite. I never rat her out for biting me – murdering a bum, sure – but not for something personal. Those clicking teeth get Toby’s attention. He opens his eyes, and the three of them sit up real straight. And then he says, ‘Get the fuck out of here, you freaks!’ And they leave the table, knocking over chairs to do it in a hurry. I will worship Toby Wilder until I die.

—Ernest Nadler