The Wooden Sea (8 page)

He tipped back his bottle and took a long drink. Lowering it he burped and clumsily wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. "Nothing. I see a house, Frannie. You want some of my club soda?"

I limped through the crowd of workers to the house. The air smelled of freshly cut wood, burnt metal, and gasoline. It smelled of hammered nails and power tools just turned off, sweat in a flannel shirt, coffee spilled on stone. It smelled of many men working at hard physical jobs. I took hold of one of the long steel bars in the scaffolding and shook it till things rattled.

"What's this, Johnny? Do you see this?"

"I told you, it's a house."

"You don't see the scaffolding?"

"What's that?"

"Metal bars wrapped around the house. Like what they put on when they're fixing it, doing construction?"

"Nope. No cat folding. Just a house." He said those three words as if he were singing--da dee da--and gave one of his rare Johnny smiles.

I pointed to the boy on the ground. "Can you see him?"

"Who?"

"Johnny can't see me, I told you. No one can see any of this but you."

"Why?"

The boy flickered--was there, gone, there again like interference on a TV.

Then he began to fade. The construction workers too, as well as the metal spiderweb around the house. All of it began fading, growing dimmer, changing from solid to transparent to gone.

"Why only me?"

"Find the dog, Frannie. Find it and we can talk again."

I tried to step toward the kid but used the bad foot. The pain that flew up my leg almost buckled me. "Which dog? The one we buried? Old Verture?"

"Who you talking to, Frannie?" Johnny had his mouth over the bottle hole. He blew into it and made the low, sad toot of a boat leaving the harbor.

Everything had disappeared. The Schiavo house was no longer encased in a metal web. There was no sign of a construction site, workers, anything out of the ordinary. No bent nails on the ground, wood shavings, tools, electrical cords, discarded Coca-Cola cans. Just an empty house on a well-kept lot on a quiet street at three in the A.M.

Petangles blew into his bottle again. "How come you're out here tonight, Frannie? I never see you when I'm out walking." He tooted once more.

"Gimme that stupid bottle!" Snatching it out of his hand, I threw it as hard as I could. But even that disappeared, because wherever it hit, it didn't make a sound. I started walking home. He followed.

"Johnny, go home. Go to bed. Don't follow me. Don't come with me. I love you, but don't bug me tonight. Okay? _Not tonight."_

Bill Pegg turned into the school parking lot while I looked out the car window. When we stopped I reached down and flicked off both the siren and flashing light. After the motor died, we sat there a moment gathering strength for what came next.

"Who's the kid?"

"Fifteen-year-old girl named Antonya Corando--new student this year.

Eleventh grade."

"Fifteen in eleventh grade? She must be smart."

"I puess not so smart."

Bill shook his head and reached for his clipboard. I got out of the car and checked my pockets to see if I had everything I needed:

notebook, pen, depression. Ten minutes after I entered the office that morning, we got the call from the principal at Crane's View high school saying they'd found a body in the women's toilet.

She was sitting on the can and was discovered because the syringe she'd used was on the floor in front of the stall. Some girl saw it, looked under the door, and ran for help.

We walked into the high school and, as always happened when I went there, I shuddered. This had been the worst place in the world for six years of my life. Now a lifetime later--way past the Himalayas of youth and down onto the plains of middle age--I still got the creeps whenever I entered the building.

The principal, Redmond Mills, was waiting for us in the entranceway. I liked Redmond and wished there had been a principal like him when I was a student at the school. The high point in his life had been attending the Woodstock Festival. He wore his sixties sensibilities like too much patchouli, but better that than the old fascists who ran the place back in our day. Redmond cared a lot about the students, his teachers, and Crane's View. I often bumped into him at the diner across the street from the school at ten at night because he had just left work and was getting a bite to eat before going home.

Today he looked stricken.

"Bad news huh, Redmond?"

"Terrible! Terrible! It's the first time it's ever happened here, Frannie.

The news is already all over the school. That's all the kids are talking about."

"I bet."

"Did you know her?" Bill asked gently as if the dead girl had been the principal's daughter.

Redmond looked left and right as if about to say dangerous information and didn't want to be overheard. "She was a _nebbish, _Bill! Homework was her middle name. Her essays were always ten pages too long and she was supposedly cataleptic if she didn't make the high honor roll. See my point? That's what I

don't understand about this. She carried her books against her chest like she was in a fifties TV

show and was so shy she always looked down when teachers talked to her."

He turned to me and his face went cynical. In a loud, resentful voice he said, "I've got kids at this school who are devil worshippers, Frannie.

They've got swastikas tattooed on their necks and their girlfriends last took a bath when they
Page 42

were born. _Them _I could see killing themselves. But not _this _girl, not Antonya."

What immediately came to mind was an image of Pauline in the bathroom last night wearing only eye makeup and an attitude. Who knows what Antonya Corando did behind her closed doors when everyone diought she was doing calculus homework? Who knows what she dreamed, what she hid, what she pretended to be?

What on this earth did she hope to gain from sticking a needle full of heroin in her arm while sitting on a toilet?

"You didn't move her?"

_"Move her? _Why would I do that, Frannie? She's dead! Where am I going to put her, in my office?"

I patted his shoulder. "It's okay. Take it easy, Redmond." His eyes had crazy in them by then, but he was a gentle man. Why shouldn't they after what he'd seen that morning?

We walked down empty, silent halls. In contrast, through small windows in the classroom doors, I could see the bright, buzzing life of school everywhere. Teachers wrote on blackboards, kids in white aprons and plastic goggles worked over Bunsen burners. In a language lab two boys were horsing around until they saw us and disappeared fast. In another room a beautiful tall girl dressed in black stood in front of a class reading aloud from a large red book.

When she tossed her hair I thought, Oh boy, Frannie from last night would love her. I looked in another room and recognized my old English teacher. The old bastard had once made me memorize a poem by Christina Rossetti, which to this day I couldn't forget: _When I am dead, my dearest,_

_Sing no sad songs for me--_

Fitting for what we were about to see. Redmond stopped at a door and took a key out of his pocket. "I didn't know what else I should do, so I locked it."

"Good idea. Let's have a look."

Pushing it open, he held it for us to go first. The light, that false, bright, terrible light of a public toilet, made everything grimmer.

Nothing could hide here--no place for shadows, everything was on display.

There were six stalls but only one of the doors was open.

For her last day on earth Antonya Corando wore a gray Skidmore College short-sleeved sweatshirt, a black skirt, and a pair of Doc Martens shoes. That made me wince because they were the brand hip kids wore.

Pauline said dismissively that anyone who wore Docs was only trying to be cool. Poor square Antonya who always did her homework--buying a pair of those shoes had probably been a very
Page 43

large gesture for her.

And it must have taken courage for her to wear them when she knew how closely kids check out each other's clothing. Maybe she first put them on in the secrecy of her bedroom and walked around checking herself in the mirror to see how they looked, how she walked in them, how she came across as a Doc Martens girl.

But the worst part was her socks. They were fire-engine red with little white hearts all over them.

Her skin above the socks was a different white and so transparent you could see a swarm of fine blue veins just below the surface.

I am only a policeman in a small town. But over the years have seen enough violence and death both here and in Vietnam, where I was a medic to vouch for this--most times it is the small, irrelevant things that burn the horror into your heart. The dead are only that--finished. But what surrounds them afterward, or what they brought with them to their final minute, survives. A teenage girl overdoses on heroin but what flattens you are her socks with white hearts on them.

A man wraps his silver car around a tree killing him and his whole family, but what makes it unforgettable is diat that song you love, "Sally Go Round the Roses," is still playing on the radio in the wreck when you get to it. A blue New York Mets baseball cap spotted with blood on a living room floor, the scorched family cat in the yard of the burnt house, the Bible the suicide left opened to Song of Solomon on the bed next to him. These are what you remember because they are the last scraps of their last day, their last moments with a heartbeat.

And those things remain after they're gone, the final snapshots in their album. Antonya went to her drawer that morning and specifically chose the red socks with the white hearts.

How could that image not crush you, knowing where she would end up three hours later?

Redmond began to cry. Bill and I looked at each other. I motioned him to take the principal out.

There was no reason for him to be in the bathroom anymore.

"I'm sorry. I just can't believe it."

My assistant Bill Pegg is a good man. A few years ago he lost his daughter to cystic fibrosis and that ordeal turned him into a different person. He now has a special manner with the shocked or grieving; a way to keep them balanced in the first unbearable minutes after real horror has entered their lives. When they're trying to understand the new language of grief, as well as cope with the loss of gravity, the _weightlessness _that comes with desolation or great suffering.

When I asked Bill how he did it he said, "I just go there with them and tell them what I know about it. That's all you can do."

After they left and the door hissed shut I went over to Antonya. 1 got down on one knee in front of her. If someone had come in then how silly it would have looked--like I was proposing to a sleeping girl sitting on the toilet.

One arm hung straight down at her side. The other lay across her leg.

I assumed she had been right-handed, so I looked at her left arm to see if I could find the needle mark. Her head rested against the white tile wall, eyes closed. The needle mark was a small red welt just below the crease lines in her left elbow. I unconsciously felt for a pulse. Of course there wasn't one.

Then I reached up and touched that mark.

"This is where you died, stupid kid." Holding her elbow in my hand, I ran my thumb tenderly
Page 44

over the mark and whispered to her, "Right here."

"I'm not stupid."

Empty-headed, refusing to believe, I automatically looked up from her arm upon hearing the soft, slurry voice.

Antonya's head rolled slowly from left to right until it faced me. She opened her eyes and spoke again in that same, not-quite-there voice.

"I wasn't supposed to die."

"You're alive!"

"No. But I _can _still feel your hand. I feel your warmth." Her voice was a halting whisper, a trickle. Her tap had been turned off but some water was still left in the pipe, a dribble. "Tell my mother I didn't do this. Tell her they did it to me."

"Who did it? Who's _they!"_

"Find the dog." Her eyes stayed open but emptied. Every trace of life oozed out, into the air, back into life. I saw it go. Nothing specifically happened, but I knew exactly what was going on.

Life left her and then she _was _gone.

Still on one knee I stared, willing her back, willing her to come back and help me understand.

"Frannie?" Bill stood in the doorway, holding it open with an arm.

"The ambulance is here and I've called the girl's mother. I'm going over there now. Is that okay?"

"Yeah."

"Fran, you okay?"

"Yeah. Listen, tell Redmond I want to look in her locker. And if she had a gym locker, in there too."

I waited there while they got the body ready to move. They took their time. I was making notes when one of the ambulance guys said, "Whoa!

Check this out!"

Looking up, I saw him holding a feather--_the _feather I had already seen too many times. I took it out of his hand and had a closer look to make sure.

"Where'd this come from?"

He gave a dirty chuckle and raised his eyebrows. "Fell out from under her skirt! Do you believe that? What's she doing with a feather up her dress?" he leered.

"I'll keep this." I put the feather between the pages of my notebook and closed it.

From the expression on his face the guy thought I was joking. He whined, "Aw come on, Chief, I
Page 45

want it."

"Finish up and stop _fuckin' around!"_

Smiles fell off their faces and they were done in five minutes.

I followed the gurney as they rolled it down the hall. Classes were still in session, so luckily we didn't have to go by a slew of gawking kids.

Passing the principal's office, I stopped and went in. His secretary immediately handed me a slip of paper with Antonya's locker number and combination written on it. The woman said none of the kids were given permanent gym lockers anymore because the school was too overcrowded now and there weren't enough to go around.