Lost Boy Lost Girl

until the principal had scarfed down enough free grub and made his good-byes.

When Mark glanced again at the front of the living room, Mr. Hillyard was boring the pants off the Rochenkos. The Monaghan family was beginning to come through the door. First Margo, as ever suggesting that some movie star had happened to walk in by mistake; then Jackie, grinning and red-faced, as ever suggesting that he wouldn’t at all object were you to offer him a wee dram of popskull; and finally Jimbo, who gave him a not-unfriendly glance of inspection.

Before he could signal Jimbo to meet him in the kitchen, his uncle Tim appeared beside him with an unexpected offer. “I think you should come to New York and stay with me for a week or so. Maybe in August?”

Pleased and surprised, Mark said he would love to do that and asked if Tim had mentioned the visit to his father.

“I will later,” Tim said. He smiled at Mark before cutting through the crowd in search of Philip.

For the next ten minutes, he lost sight of Jimbo as neighbors and coworkers patted his cheek or gripped his upper arm and uttered, over and over again, always with the sense of communicating a great truth, the same useless and depressing remarks. Must be awfully tough on you, son. . . . She’s in a better place now. . . . God has a reason for everything, you know. . . . Gee, I remember when my mom died.

Finally, he spotted Jimbo eyeing him from just inside the dining room arch and went over to talk to him.

“Are you okay?” Jimbo asked.

“More than you’d think.”

Their fathers stood, conversing quietly, only a few feet away, their backs turned toward the boys. On the other side of their fathers, Mr. Battley was flapping his gums at Uncle Tim.

“Good,” Jimbo said. “You know . . .” Jimbo’s wide mouth turned down at the edges, and his eyes shrank into a look of pure anguish. “Yo, I’m really sorry about your mom. I should have told you that right away, but I didn’t know how.”

Without warning, emotion surged up within Mark, searing everything it touched. For a couple of seconds, an abyss of feeling opened before him, and the sheer weight of the air on his shoulders threatened to push him in. Tears blinded him. He brought a hand up to his eyes; he exhaled and heard himself make a strangled, inarticulate sound of grief.

“Are you sure you’re okay?”

Jimbo’s voice rescued him.

“I guess,” he said, and wiped his eyes. His body was still reverberating with emotion.

Behind him, Jackie Monaghan said, “Wasn’t Nancy related to this weird guy who used to live around here? Somebody said something about it once, I don’t remember who.”

His father said, “Should have kept his mouth shut, whoever he was.”

“I sort of lost it for a second there,” Mark said, wondering what Jimbo’s dad was talking about. Now Jackie was saying that his mother’s relative had risked his life to save some children. Mark turned his head just in time to see Jackie tell his father that the kids were black. That would be that, he thought; the conversation would get ugly in a hurry.

“Well, it’s no wonder,” said Jimbo.

“No, it’s not the funeral,” Mark said. “I just understood something I should have seen before. Actually, I don’t know how I missed it.”

“What?” Jimbo asked.

Mark moved closer to Jimbo and whispered, “It was the house.”

“What do you mean, ‘the house’?” Comprehension flashed into his eyes. “Oh, no. No, man. Come on.”

“It’s the truth. You didn’t hear her chew me out for even thinking about that place. Ask yourself—why would she kill herself?”

“I don’t know why,” Jimbo said, miserably.

“Right. I didn’t stay far enough away, and something in there killed her. That’s what happened, Jimbo. We can’t dick around about this anymore. We have to go in there.”

In the silence of Jimbo’s inability to respond, both boys clearly heard Philip Underhill say, “I should have known better than to marry into a bunch of screwballs like that.”

Mark turned pale. Unnoticed by Philip and Jackie, he moved past them and dodged through the crowd gathered around the table. Jimbo hastened after his friend and caught up with him at the opening into the kitchen, where, surprisingly, Mark had come to a sudden halt.

When Jimbo reached Mark’s side, he was struck by the expression on his face. His mouth hung slightly open, and the side of his face visible to Jimbo had gone white. But for a small blue vein beating just above the V of hair at his temple, he might have been carved from marble.

Jimbo did not dare to look into the kitchen. After having glimpsed that being through his father’s field glasses, the last thing he wanted to do was to see it in Mark Underhill’s kitchen. The thought of that formidable presence standing before him sent fear washing through his stomach.

He had no idea how long he stood beside Mark Underhill, too afraid of what he might see to turn his head. Mark did not move; as far as Jimbo could tell, Mark did not even take a breath. To Jimbo, they seemed to stand, he immobilized by Mark’s immobility, for an eternity. Around them, the world, too, had become immobile; yet the blue vein in Mark’s temple beat, beat, beat. Jimbo’s tongue felt clumsy and enormous in his dry mouth.

Awareness of his own cowardice forced him to turn his head and face what had trespassed into Mark’s kitchen. Half the oxygen seemed to leave the space immediately around him, and the light faded as if a subtle rheostat had been more breathed upon than dialed. A faint odor of excrement and corruption, as of a corpse rotting in the distance, tainted the air.

A sound like buzzing, like insects, filtered in through the screen door.

But what he saw after he had turned his head was only Mr. Shillington leaning against the sink next to Mrs. Taft, who seemed depressed by what her neighbor was saying. When both of them stopped their conversation to stare at the boys, Jimbo saw annoyance in Mr. Shillington’s eyes, the shine of tears in Mrs. Taft’s. Two thoughts occurred to him at virtually the same moment: Mr. Shillington and Mrs. Taft were having an affair, and he just dumped her and For a second or two, time just stopped, so those seconds never happened.

At the center of his being, Jimbo felt as though some great machine had paused its workings, come to rest, then ponderously swung back into motion.

Beside him, Mark was saying, “His back is always turned.” The words reached Jimbo as if through the process of translation from a foreign language. When he had at last absorbed their meaning, he understood Mark’s sentence no better. The only man in the kitchen was Mr. Shillington, who was pretending to be happy that two teenage boys were staring at him.

“Something in Linda’s eye,” he said, and smiled. “Mrs. Taft has something in her eye, and I was trying to get it out.”

“Who?” Jimbo whispered to Mark.

“You didn’t see him?” Mark turned upon him in amazed disbelief.

“No, but something happened,” Jimbo said.

“Now, kid,” said Mr. Shillington. “Don’t go getting the wrong idea about this.” His long, bony face was undergoing an interesting color shift. Below the cheekbones, he was turning a blotchy red, but from the eyes up, he went white.

“Something happened, all right,” Mark said.

“No, it did not, ” insisted Mr. Shillington. Linda Taft shrank into herself, wrinkling her nose and glancing around.

“Sorry,” Mark said. “I’m not talking to you.” He looked back at Jimbo. “You really didn’t see him standing between them and the door, with his back turned?”

Jimbo shook his head.

“There was no one in this room but the two of us, Mark, until you and your friend barged in.”

“Well, we’re going to barge out now, so you can go back to your eye surgery,” Mark said. “Come on, Jimbo.”

Their eyes as large and innocent as those of sheep, Linda Taft and Ted Shillington watched Mark drag Jimbo