Lost Boy Lost Girl

himself upright. The ground beneath him swayed right—left, then right—before settling down.

Everything inside Mark’s body and most of his appendages seemed to be trembling, hands knees stomach heart viscera. It was almost funny, watching his hands jitter. The way his knees were jumping around, he was amazed that the legs of his jeans were not shaking. All of a sudden he was sweating like crazy.

Let’s pretend we have a clean slate,he thought. Let’s go up and look at that place as though nothing had happened before this moment.

He was going to waste a couple of minutes standing in front of a house that was rotting away from within. After he got tired of standing there, he would walk away.

A sentence from his uncle’s book popped into his mind: “What was at stake here, he thought, was the solidity of the world.” All right, how solid is the world? This time, he told himself, he would look at that house as never before. What could be seen, he would see; if it was nothing but an empty shell, he would go away knowing that his imagination really needed to be held in check.

Set thirty feet before him on its slightly tilting lawn, the house appeared subtly to shift its ground without actually moving in any way. Mark stood stock-still, as immobile as Skip had been a few minutes earlier. The house looked exactly the same, but it had altered itself nonetheless. In some internal fashion he had no hope of identifying, the house had adjusted to his presence. Mark waited. Chill drops of sweat glided down the sides of his chest. Unconsciously, he had balled his hands into fists, and the muscles in his calves and upper arms became unbearably taut. His eyes seemed to grow hot with the concentration of his staring. Mark’s entire body felt as if he were straining against an immovable force.

He dared not blink.

Then he wondered if he had missed it anyhow—a faint change in the texture of an area of darkness beyond the right front window. Too vague to be defined, the difference nearly escaped his notice. Mark could not be certain that he had not invented what he thought he had seen. Now the darkness behind the window presented a uniform charcoal gray. A second later, he thought he saw the slight alteration occur again, bringing with it this time a suggestion of solidity and movement.

The thought of that bulky figure from the top of Michigan Street hanging back in the darkness while looking out at him caused a sudden pressure in his bladder. Behind the window, an indistinct portion of the general shadow drifted forward and acquired an unmistakable solidity. Another step brought into greater visibility what could almost be identified as a human head atop a human body perhaps smaller and slimmer than that of the creature who had so alarmed him. With another gliding step, the dark figure emerged into sharper, though still uncertain, focus.

To Mark, the figure seemed too small and slight to be anything but a girl. The person inside the house had come forward to see him, as well as to be seen by him. She hung unmoving in the obscurity beyond the window, declaring her presence, exactly as the house had declared itself. Look at me, take me in, I am here. The house and its inhabitant had chosen him. That he had been chosen implied an invitation, a summons, a pact of some kind. Something had been decided, he knew not what, except that it had been decided in his favor.

Mark stepped forward, and the being inside the house filtered backward into darkness and invisibility. If he wished to hold on to its approval, he could go no farther.

Behind him, a voice said, “Yo, don’t you ever do anything else?”

Startled, Mark jumped. Jimbo stepped up beside him and laughed. He jabbed the nose of his skateboard into Mark’s back. “You jumped a mile!”

“You surprised me,” Mark said. “What are you doing up so early anyway?”

“My mom freaked when she saw the paper this morning. Remember the cop showing us that picture of the missing kid?”

“Shane Auslander,” Mark said. “Yeah, I saw that story, too. I bet she wants you never to go back to the fountain.”

“I had to promise her,” Jimbo said. “You look like shit. Honest to God. Didn’t you get any sleep last night?”

Mark could not tell Jimbo about anything that had happened to him since they had last seen each other. It felt completely private, like a secret only he could know. “I slept fine. Like a baby. Like a log. Like the dead. Now tell me something, bro. Do you think that house is really empty? Completely empty?”

“Here we go again,” Jimbo said. “Wanna go to the dump and shoot rats?”

“No, do you? I mean it.”

Jimbo cast an irritated glance at the house, then looked back at Mark. “Isn’t that what got you started in the first place? That it was empty?”

“That was part of it, yeah. That the place was empty. In a neighborhood like this, you’d think an empty house would stick out.”

“More like it fades out,” Jimbo said. “Honest, I don’t get what the big deal is here.”

“Maybe I ought to get inside there one of these days. Find out for sure.”

Jimbo raised his hands and stepped back. “Are you nuts? You want to see inside? Take a look in the window.”

Mark knew he could not do that. The force field kept him at the distance of the sidewalk. It would be easier for him to break in than to walk up the path, mount the steps, and stare into the window through which he had seen that shadowy figure.

“Let’s go to my house, so I can get my board,” he said.

For the rest of the day, they rolled down the handicapped ramps and wide concrete steps of an abandoned construction site located on Burleigh, a short bus ride away. Mark forced himself not to speak about 3323 North Michigan Street, and Jimbo was so grateful that he took pains to veer around the subject whenever it threatened to draw near. They had the place to themselves. No older kids showed up to make fun of their technique or to try to bully them out of their equipment. No aloof, silent loner appeared, as sometimes happened, to shame them with the chasm between their skills and his. Both Mark and Jimbo made three failed attempts to jump across a three-foot gap in a concrete railing; they scraped their wrists and acquired bruises on their shins, but did no serious damage to themselves. Around noon, they rolled down the block to a BK for bacon double cheeseburgers, fries, and chocolate shakes, and while they feasted they agreed that Eminem had changed hip-hop forever, yo, and that Stephin Merritt was the best singer of Stephin Merritt songs. After their lunch, they trundled back on their handsome boards to the construction site and rubbed their sore spots and decided to take another shot at that gap in the concrete railing. Both of them made it across on their first after-lunch attempt, and in the words of Eminem, they asked the world if they could have its attention, please? For the rest of the afternoon, leaving aside a few minor falls, it was as if they could not make a mistake, either of them, and they rode the bus back to Sherman Boulevard in happy and proud exhaustion, fondling their scrapes and bruises like medals. They would never again share a day of such uncomplicated pleasures; it was the last time they were ever able to enjoy themselves in this way, together, like the boys they were.

9

By speaking when he knew he should remain silent, Mark brought some of the coming difficulties down upon himself. After dinner, his father escaped into his “den,” he claimed to read an article in the latest Journal of Secondary Education, but just as likely in order to leaf through the old issues of People and Entertainment Weekly piled in his magazine rack. Coasting along on autopilot, Nancy had put together a mushroom soup–tuna casserole with a crust of crumbled potato chips identical to those that would feed her husband’s guests on the afternoon of her funeral. When Philip scuttled off, she stacked their three plates and carried them into the kitchen. She seemed so distracted that Mark wondered if she would remember how to work the dishwasher.

He followed her into the kitchen, where she was dreamily running water over the plates. Her face, which had been concentrated into a brooding network of lines, twitched into an unconvincing smile at the sight of him.

“Are you all right, Mom?” he asked.

She responded with a phrase she would repeat two nights later, when Mark would find her seated on the edge of the downstairs bathtub. “I’m fine.”