had carried off the licorice I kept there. Strewn beneath my bed were the objects I’d kept hidden, and one of them only Buckley and Nate would recognize. Buckley unwrapped an old handkerchief of my father’s and there it was, the stained and bloody twig.
The year before, a three-year-old Buckley had swallowed it. Nate and he had been shoving rocks up their noses in our backyard, and Buckley had found a small twig under the oak tree where my mother strung one end of the clothesline. He put the stick in his mouth like a cigarette. I watched him from the roof outside my bedroom window, where I was sitting painting my toenails with Clarissa’s Magenta Glitter and reading
I was perpetually assigned the job of watching out for little brother. Lindsey was not thought to be old enough. Besides, she was a burgeoning brain, which meant she got to be free to do things like spend that summer afternoon drawing detailed pictures of a fly’s eye on graph paper with her 130- pack of Prisma Colors.
It was not too hot out and it was summer, and I was going to spend my internment at home beautifying. I had begun the morning by showering, shampooing, and steaming myself. On the roof I air- dried and applied lacquer.
I had on two coats of Magenta Glitter when a fly landed on the bottle’s applicator. I heard Nate making dare and threat sounds, and I squinted at the fly to try to make out all the quadrants of his eyes that Lindsey was coloring inside the house. A breeze came up, blowing the fringe on my cutoffs against my thighs.
“Susie, Susie!” Nate was yelling.
I looked down to see Buckley on the ground.
It was this day that I always told Holly about when we talked about rescue. I believed it was possible; she did not.
I swung my legs around and scrambled through my open window, one foot landing on the sewing stool and the other immediately in front of that one and on the braided rug and then down on my knees and out of the blocks like an athlete. I ran down the hall and slid down the banister as we’d been forbidden to do. I called Lindsey’s name and then forgot her, ran out to the backyard through the screened-in porch, and jumped over the dog fence to the oak tree.
Buckley was choking, his body bucking, and I carried him with Nate trailing into the garage, where my father’s precious Mustang sat. I had watched my parents drive, and my mother had shown me how a car went from park to reverse. I put Buckley in the back and grabbed the keys from the unused terra-cotta pots where my father hid them. I sped all the way to the hospital. I burned out the emergency brake, but no one seemed to care.
“If she hadn’t been there,” the doctor later told my mother, “you would have lost your little boy.”
Grandma Lynn predicted I’d have a long life because I had saved my brother’s. As usual, Grandma Lynn was wrong.
“Wow,” Nate said, holding the twig and marveling at how over time red blood turned black.
“Yeah,” said Buckley. His stomach felt queasy with the memory of it. How much pain he had been in, how the faces of the adults changed as they surrounded him in the huge hospital bed. He had seen them that serious only one other time. But whereas in the hospital, their eyes had been worried and then later not, shot through with so much light and relief that they’d enveloped him, now our parents’ eyes had gone flat and not returned.
I felt faint in heaven that day. I reeled back in the gazebo, and my eyes snapped open. It was dark, and across from me stood a large building that I had never been in.
I had read
Eight
For three months Mr. Harvey dreamed of buildings. He saw a slice of Yugoslavia where thatched-roofed dwellings on stilts gave way to rushing torrents of water from below. There were blue skies overhead. Along the fjords and in the hidden valley of Norway, he saw wooden stave churches, the timbers of which had been carved by Viking boat-builders. Dragons and local heroes made from wood. But there was one building, from the Vologda, that he dreamed about most: the Church of the Transfiguration. And it was this dream – his favorite – that he had on the night of my murder and on the nights following until the others came back. The
I could see all the way back to Mr. Harvey in his mother’s arms, staring out over a table covered with pieces of colored glass. His father sorted them into piles by shape and size, depth and weight. His father’s jeweler’s eyes looked deeply into each specimen for cracks and flaws. And George Harvey would turn his attention to the single jewel that hung from his mother’s neck, a large oval-shaped piece of amber framed by silver, inside of which sat a whole and perfect fly.
“A builder” was all Mr. Harvey said when he was young. Then he stopped answering the question of what his father did. How could he say he worked in the desert, and that he built shacks of broken glass and old wood? He lectured George Harvey on what made a good building, on how to make sure you were constructing things to last.
So it was his father’s old sketchbooks that Mr. Harvey looked at when the not still dreams came back. He would steep himself in the images of other places and other worlds, trying to love what he did not. And then he would begin to dream dreams of his mother the last time he had seen her, running through a field on the side of the road. She had been dressed in white. White capri pants and a tight white boat-neck shirt, and his father and she had fought for the last time in the hot car outside of Truth or Consequences, New Mexico. He had forced her out of the car. George Harvey sat still as stone in the back seat – eyes wide, no more afraid than a stone, watching it all as he did everything by then – in slow-mo. She had run without stopping, her white body thin and fragile and disappearing, while her son clung on to the amber necklace she had torn from her neck to hand him. His father had watched the road. “She’s gone now, son,” he said. “She won’t be coming back.”
Nine
My grandmother arrived on the evening before my memorial in her usual style. She liked to hire limousines and drive in from the airport sipping champagne while wearing what she called her “thick and fabulous animal” – a mink she had gotten secondhand at the church bazaar. My parents had not so much invited her as included her if she wanted to be there. In late January, Principal Caden had initiated the idea. “It will be good for your children and all the students at school,” he had said. He took it upon himself to organize the event at our church. My parents were like sleepwalkers saying yes to his questions, nodding their heads to flowers or speakers. When my mother mentioned it on the phone to her mother, she was surprised to hear the words “I’m coming.”
“But you don’t have to, Mother.”
There was a silence on my grandmother’s end. “Abigail,” she said, “this is Susan’s funeral.”
Grandma Lynn embarrassed my mother by insisting on wearing her used furs on walks around the block and by once attending a block party in high makeup. She would ask my mother questions until she knew who everyone was, whether or not my mother had seen the inside of their house, what the husband did for a living, what cars they drove. She made a solid catalog of the neighbors. It was a way, I now realized, to try to understand her daughter better. A miscalculated circling, a sad, partnerless dance.
“Jack-y,” my grandmother said as she approached my parents on the front porch, “we need some stiff drinks!” She saw Lindsey then, trying to sneak up the stairs and gain a few more minutes before the required visitation. “Kid hates me,” Grandma Lynn said. Her smile was frozen, her teeth perfect and white.
“Mother,” my mother said. And I wanted to rush into those ocean eyes of loss. “I’m sure Lindsey is just going to make herself presentable.”
“An impossibility in this house!” said my grandmother.
“Lynn,” said my father, “this is a different house than last time you were here. I’ll get you a drink, but I ask you to respect that.”
“Still handsome as hell, Jack,” my grandmother said.
My mother took my grandmother’s coat. Holiday had been closed up in my father’s den as soon as Buckley had yelled from his post at the upstairs window – “It’s Grandma!” My brother bragged to Nate or anyone who would listen that his grandmother had the biggest cars in the whole wide world.
“You look lovely, Mother,” my mother said.
“Hmmmm.” While my father was out of earshot, my grandmother said, “How is he?”
“We’re all coping, but it’s hard.”
“Is he still muttering about that man having done it?”
“He still thinks so, yes.”
“You’ll be sued, you know,” she said.
“He hasn’t told anyone but the police.”
What they couldn’t see was that my sister was sitting above them on the top step.
“And he shouldn’t. I realize he has to blame someone, but…”
“Lynn, seven and seven or a martini?” my father said, coming back out into the hallway.
“What are you having?”
“I’m not drinking these days, actually,” my father said.
“Now there’s your problem. I’ll lead the way. No one has to tell me where the liquor is!”
Without her thick and fabulous animal, my grandmother was rail thin. “Starved down” was how she put it when she’d counseled me at age eleven. “You need to get yourself starved down, honey, before you keep fat on for too long. Baby fat is just another way to say ugly.” She and my mother had fought about whether I was old enough for benzedrine – her own personal savior, she called it, as in, “I am offering your daughter my own personal savior and you deny her?”
When I was alive, everything my grandmother did was bad. But an odd thing happened when she arrived in her rented limo that day, opened up our house, and barged in. She was, in all her obnoxious finery, dragging the light back in.
“You need help, Abigail,” my grandmother said after having
