Lost Boy Lost Girl

charade goes on for a minute or two, and Mark turns away from the window. Before he disappears again, he looks over his shoulder and gives me a thumbs-up.”

Jimbo at last looked up at me. I saw anger and pain stamped into his good-natured face. “I pulled out my cell phone and called him, but his was turned off. So I left him this pissed-off message. When he finally did call me back, I was still angry. ‘Why did you wait so long to call me back?’ I said. He said, ‘I was busy with Lucy.’ ‘You’re a liar,’ I said, and he said, ‘She told me you’d say that.’ ‘Say what?’ I asked. ‘That I was lying to you. You can’t see her, that’s all, not unless she wants you to see her.’ I told him that was the biggest bunch of bullshit I ever heard and he said no, no, Lucy Cleveland wasn’t an ordinary person. ‘I guess not,’ I said, and I hung up on him.”

And that night, which was the night before Mark’s disappearance, he went to Jimbo’s house to try to explain—to give him his story. Lucy Cleveland wasn’t an ordinary person, he said. He wasn’t really sure what she was. But she had been waiting for him; he had called her into being. All Mark really knew was that Lucy Cleveland was everything to him, and vice versa.

Jimbo couldn’t stand listening to this stuff. He yelled at Mark. Mark just wanted him to think he was having sex with a gorgeous nineteen-year-old girl. It was like Molly Witt all over again, only worse, because now he was saying his sex partner could make herself invisible! He couldn’t dream up a more obvious lie if he worked at it.

Mark said he was sorry Jimbo thought that way, and went back home.

By the next morning, Jimbo regretted yelling at his friend. He’d had a bad night’s sleep, and he got out of bed long before the usual hour. After an agreeably surprised Margo had scrambled a couple of eggs for him, he went back to his room and called Mark.

“Good, you decided we’re still friends,” Mark said.

“I’m sorry I yelled at you. What do you want to do today?”

“I’m spending most of the day with Lucy Cleveland,” Mark said. “Sorry. I forgot, you don’t think she’s real.”

“She’s not real!” Jimbo shouted, and managed to bring himself back under control. “All right, let’s do it your way. Are you going to spend the entire day hooking up with your imaginary friend, or just part of it?”

“How about we meet around six-thirty at your house?” Mark said.

“If you think you can tear yourself away.”

For the rest of the day, Jimbo wavered between anger and a puzzled variety of forgiveness. He had the idea that Mark’s lie had been caused, in some way he did not really grasp, by his mother’s suicide. Maybe he was using fantasy to replace her; maybe he was so far gone he believed his own fantasy. Once again Jimbo found himself thinking that it was important for him to take care of Mark, insofar as Mark would permit it. Shortly after Mark turned up at his back door, which was closer to seven o’clock than six-thirty, it became apparent that Mark would allow him only a very little caretaking.

But the first thing Jimbo noticed when he answered his friend’s knock was the blissfulness that shone in his face, and the almost alarming degree of contentment and relaxation radiating from him. The second thing he noticed was that if Mark Underhill appeared to be the happiest young man on the face of the earth, his happiness had come at a price. Mark looked subtly older to him, somehow more defined than ever before, and so exhausted he could have fallen asleep leaning against the door.

“How’s Lucy Cleveland?” Jimbo asked, unable to keep from sounding sarcastic. But even as he registered his lack of belief in that invisible young woman, he felt jealousy moving through his system. Jimbo would have done anything to know that bliss, to have earned that spectacular exhaustion.

“Lucy Cleveland is extraordinary. Are you going to let me in?”

Jimbo backed away, and Mark entered. Margo Monaghan was out shopping for groceries, so the boys went into the living room, where Mark fell onto the sofa. He drew up his knees and curled around them as comfortably as a cat.

“Was this the last time you saw him?” I asked Jimbo.

He nodded.

“What kind of mood did he seem to be in? Besides happy, I mean. Was there anything more?”

“Yeah. I thought he looked kind of . . . I don’t know what the word is. Like he couldn’t make up his mind about what he was going to do next. ‘So how do you feel?’ I asked him.

“‘Tired, but happy.’ He uncurled and stretched out. He said, ‘You’d think I’d be able to sleep at night, but when I get on the bed all I can do is think about her, and I get so excited it’s impossible to fall asleep.’ Then he stared up at the ceiling for a little while. Then he said, ‘I have to think about something. I came here to think, but I can’t really talk about it.’

“I said, ‘Thanks a lot,’ and he said that Lucy Cleveland had asked him to do something.”

Mark refused to tell Jimbo what Lucy wanted him to do but he had—as do I—the feeling that it would have been on her behalf. According to Jimbo, he refused to say any more, except that he was thinking about the choice she had given him. Jimbo wondered if he was deliberating whether or not to tell him the truth, that he had invented Lucy Cleveland to impress his friend. But when Mark spoke, it was to another purpose entirely.

He chuckled, and Jimbo said, “Yo, is something funny?”

“I was just remembering something,” Mark said.

“This better be good.”

“When I was sitting in the living room over there, waiting for her to show herself—and I didn’t know anything about her then, I didn’t even know her name. Back then, she was just the Presence. All I knew was, she was in the house with me, and I knew she was getting closer. I’m sitting on the bottom of the staircase, and all my stupid shit is laid out in front of me. The hammer, the flashlight, that stuff. And I began to smell something really good.”

Mark sensed, knew, understood that the sudden arrival of this delicious odor meant that the presence in the house was on the verge of showing herself to him.

Mark went on: “I just couldn’t believe that I didn’t recognize the smell. It was completely familiar, like almost an everyday smell, but really, really good. I heard a footstep behind the closet door, so she had come down those hidden stairs and was about to walk out through the closet. The next thing I heard was the panel opening up and her taking two steps to the closet door.

“And that’s when I remembered what that smell was—when she opened the closet door and came out. You won’t believe what it was. Chocolate-chip cookies! When they’re still in the oven, but almost done. Bubbling up and already that nice brown color.”

To Jimbo, this was a sure sign that Mark had lost his mind. A beautiful woman who smelled like chocolate- chip cookies? How ridiculous could you get?

No, Mark told him, Lucy Cleveland didn’t smell like chocolate-chip cookies. Lucy Cleveland smelled sort of like sunlight and fresh grass and fresh bread, things like that, if she smelled like anything. The odor was an announcement, it was like a trumpet fanfare. It meant she was here, she was ready to enter.

Jimbo could only goggle at him.

Mark pushed himself off the sofa and said his father never noticed he wasn’t coming home at night. Philip had stopped attending to his curfew. Actually, he had stopped attending to Mark, and the two of them moved around the house like distant planets, connected by only the vestiges of gravity.

Jimbo asked him where he was going now, and if he wanted company.

No, Mark told him. He was just going out, so he would be able to think a little more. Being able to walk around might help.

Sometime between 7:15 and 7:30 Patrolman Jester observed my nephew seated on one of the benches lining the pathway to the fountain. He appeared to be working out some problem or decision; his lips were moving, though Patrolman Jester had no particular interest in what Mark was saying to himself. In any case, he could not hear it.

By the time Jimbo Monaghan had reached the point in his story where Mark was moving down the walk and