the heart. She was sweet and honest and cute…how could he not help her? Of course, right away he was wondering what her mom would say when she saw her little girl talking to this strange man.
“I’m Chrissy,” the girl said. “And I have to build the wall to keep the ants out. If the ants get in, I can’t build the castle. Because the ants will eat everyone.”
“Oh, I get it.”
“What’s your name?”
“Mitch.”
“Oh.”
“Where’s your mom and dad, Chrissy?”
“My mama went up to the stand to get ice cream. She’ll be right back.”
“Your dad?”
“Oh, he’s in heaven,” Chrissy said, filling her bucket.
Mitch had felt a sharp pain in his belly at that. This girl didn’t have a dad and the idea of him being gone, being dead, was just part of her little world. There was something terribly wrong about that.
“Are you gonna help, Mitch?” she said.
Swallowing, feeling emotional depths he’d never knew existed, Mitch kneeled in the sand, wanting to protect this little girl from the pain of life itself. He showed Chrissy how to dip wet sand from the water’s edge and create a wall of blocks, wetting them down and cementing them into place. Chrissy was fascinated by his engineering process. Just a wonderful, easy kid that smelled of sunscreen and wet sand.
“You’re pretty good at this,” she said.
“We used to do it when we were kids.”
“Okay…tell me.”
So as they amassed a wall that was easily three feet in height and four feet in length and topped it with a battery of sticks and reeds, Mitch found himself talking about building things when he was a kid. How he and Tommy used to build things from sand, clubhouses from scrap wood, how they’d dug forts under the ground and tree houses high in the air. And as he told her about it, he found that he really liked telling her. There was no bullshit to kids, he soon realized. They really were interested in things. They did not pretend interest. Up until that day, Mitch hadn’t given kids much thought. They were little people that skipped up the sidewalk, hollered and screamed like they knew you drank too much the night before, and banged on your door for candy come Halloween.
But suddenly it was all different.
Sitting there, Chrissy just fascinated by him, he wished she were his daughter. That he could take her to carnivals and movies, pick her up after school and cook hot dogs in the backyard for her and all her friends. Regale her with the silly stories of his own youth which she seemed just enrapt by.
About fifteen minutes later, a voice said, “I see you’ve made another friend, Chrissy.”
A tall, striking redhead was standing there and after introductions were made, Mitch learned that her name was Lily.
“I…uh…Chrissy needed some help,” he said, feeling very uncomfortable. “I was just helping her.”
Lily nodded. “I know. I’ve been watching.”
Mitch didn’t say anything.
He supposed Lily had been scoping him out.
“You have to be careful these days,” she said.
“Sure.”
“You’re a real natural with her,” Lily said. “Do you have kids? You must.”
Mitch just shook his head. “No, but I’m having fun. I think I might go buy one.”
They both laughed.
Chrissy said, “Is that where you get kids?”
But Mitch was staring into Lily’s deep green eyes and wanting to swim in them and knowing, somehow, that he was going to get the chance. He liked Lily and she seemed to like him and isn’t that just the way it worked sometimes? Love just found you purely by accident and took you away?
“Mama,” Chrissy said. “We have work to do.”
So then the three of them spent the next two hours working on the wall and building a fine castle behind it, listening to the waves and the gulls and the incessant monologues of a five year-old girl who could speak at dizzying length about the secret lives of butterflies, Popsicle sticks, and the shapes of clouds in the sky. And, the nefarious activities of giant ants, of course.
And that’s how Mitch came into their lives, just a few short years after Chrissy’s father had died in a car accident.
That’s how it happened.
That’s how he had fallen in love with Lily and married her.
And that was the day that Chrissy first captured him and owned him, had owned his heart every day since.
3
That afternoon in Witcham, there was a seeping grayness that was gunmetal, quicksilver, and leaden. Gray rain fell and gray mist rose from the puddles and sluicing pools of debris and that uniform grayness flooded the city, keeping it and holding it with a gravestone stillness, a waiting, and an expectancy. It pressed itself against rain- specked windows and slid over roofs with a sly whispering and climbed stripped trees in dingy coils. Leaves fell before its dead breath and covered the ponds and leechfields in a multicolored mantle that went first brown and then ultimately gray as everything else.
Deke Ericksen, dressed in dripping foul-weather gear that belonged to his father, arrived on Kneale Street by foot, struggling through puddles until finally he stood at the door of the Barron house and knocked. Standing there, feeling the damp down into his bones, he listened for sounds of life and heard not a one. He might as well have been knocking at the door of a tomb.
C’mon, Chrissy, he thought, I walked six blocks in this to see you.
Somebody had to be home…didn’t they? Sure, a lot of people were abandoning the city with what was going on, but Chrissy would have said something to him…wouldn’t she?
Deke looked around, seeing nothing but rain and dripping trees, lots of houses that looked empty. He shook the water from himself and tried the knob. It was open. He stepped into the house, feeling the warm dryness in there reaching out to him.
“Anybody home?” he called out.
Somebody was there, he could sense that much. Somebody was nearby maybe holding their breath or peering from a half-closed door.
“It’s me,” he said, “Deke…Deke Ericksen, Chrissy’s friend.”
And then a voice, weak and low, said, “Deke?”
The living room.
Deke hung his rain gear from the coat tree by the door. He stepped out of his boots and went through the archway. Chrissy’s mom, Lily, was sitting on the sofa, knees pulled up, a slightly puzzled expression on her face. Damn, she wasn’t looking right. She looked thin, thinner even, and pale like her blood had been sucked out. Her red hair was pulled back into a ponytail and she was staring off into space.
Deke had not seen her since the funeral of Chrissy’s aunt Marlene, but the physical change since then was almost spooky. There was no substance to her, like she was a shadow cast by someone else.
“Hi, Mrs. Barron,” Deke said. “Just popped around to see Chrissy. She around?”
Lily blinked a few times, then looked at him. “No…no, she’s gone, Deke. She went out with Heather and Lisa, hasn’t come home yet. Mitch went to look for her. I’ve been waiting and listening.”
Deke licked his lips. The bait had been tossed out, but did he want to bite it? Did he really want to know why she had been listening? No, he certainly did not. But it would have been childish and rude to simply say, okay, gotta
