As Mr. Harvey turned the key in the lock of his front door, she saw the light pencil sketch on the page in front of her. It
was a small drawing of stalks above a sunken hole, a detail off to the side of a shelf and how a chimney could draw out smoke
from a fire, and the thing that sunk into her: in a spidery hand he had written “Stolfuz cornfield.” If it were not for the
articles in the paper after the discovery of my elbow, she would not have known that the cornfield was owned by a man named
Stolfuz. Now she saw what I wanted her to know. I had died inside that hole; I had screamed and fought and lost.
She ripped out the page. Mr. Harvey was in the kitchen making something to eat—the liverwurst he favored, a bowl of sweet
green grapes. He heard a board creak. He stiffened. He heard another and his back rose and blossomed with sudden understanding.
The grapes dropped on the floor to be crushed by his left foot, while my sister in the room above sprang to the aluminum blinds
and unlocked the stubborn window. Mr. Harvey mounted the stairs two at a time, and my sister smashed out the screen, scrambling
onto the porch roof and rolling down it as he gained the upstairs hall and came barreling toward her. The gutter broke when
her body tipped past it. As he reached his bedroom, she fell into the bushes and brambles and muck.
But she was not hurt. Gloriously not hurt. Gloriously young. She stood up as he reached the window to climb out. But he stopped.
He saw her running toward the elderberry. The silkscreened number on her back screamed out at him. 5! 5! 5!
Lindsey Salmon in her soccer shirt.
Samuel was sitting with my parents and Grandma Lynn when Lindsey reached the house.
“Oh my God,” my mother said, the first to see her through the small square windows that lined either side of our front door.
And by the time my mother opened it Samuel had rushed to fill the space, and she walked, without looking at my mother or even
my father hobbling forward, right into Samuel’s arms.
“My God, my God, my God,” my mother said as she took in the dirt and the cuts.
My grandmother came to stand beside her.
Samuel put his hand on my sister’s head and smoothed her hair back.
“Where have you been?”
But Lindsey turned to our father, lessened so now—smaller, weaker, than this child who raged. How alive she was consumed me
whole that day.
“Daddy?”
“Yes, sweetheart.”
“I did it. I broke into his house.” She was shaking slightly and trying not to cry.
My mother balked: “You what?”
But my sister didn’t look at her, not once.
“I brought you this. I think it might be important.”
She had kept the drawing in her hand, crumpled tightly into a ball. It had made her landing harder, but she had come away
anyway.
A phrase my father had read that day appeared in his mind now. He spoke it aloud as he looked into Lindsey’s eyes.
“There is no condition one adjusts to so quickly as a state of war.”
Lindsey handed him the drawing.
“I’m going to pick up Buckley,” my mother said.
“Don’t you even want to look at this, Mom?”
“I don’t know what to say. Your grandmother is here. I have shopping to do, a bird to cook. No one seems to realize that we
have a family. We have a family, a family and a son, and I’m going.”
Grandma Lynn walked my mother to the back door but did not try to stop her.
My mother gone, my sister reached her hand out to Samuel. My father saw what Lindsey did in Mr. Harvey’s spidery hand: the
possible blueprint of my grave. He looked up.
“Do you believe me now?” he asked Lindsey.
“Yes, Daddy.”
My father—so grateful—had a call to make.
“Dad,” she said.
“Yes.”
“I think he saw me.”
I could never have imagined a blessing greater to me than the physical safety of my sister that day. As I walked back from
the gazebo I shivered with the fear that had held me, the possibility of her loss on Earth not just to my father, my mother,
Buckley, and Samuel, but, selfishly, the loss of her on Earth to me.
Franny walked toward me from the cafeteria. I barely raised my head.
“Susie,” she said. “I have something to tell you.”
She drew me under one of the old-fashioned lampposts and then out of the light. She handed me a piece of paper folded into
four.
“When you feel stronger, look at it and go there.”
Two days later, Franny’s map led me to a field that I had always walked by but which, though beautiful, I’d left unexplored.
The drawing had a dotted line to indicate a path. Searching nervously, I looked for an indentation in the rows and rows of
wheat. Just ahead I saw it, and as I began to walk between the rows the paper dissolved in my hand.
I could see an old and beautiful olive tree just up ahead.
The sun was high, and in front of the olive tree was a clearing. I waited only a moment until I saw the wheat on the other
side begin to pulse with the arrival of someone who did not crest the stalks.
She was small for her age, as she had been on Earth, and she wore a calico dress that was frayed at the hem and the cuffs.
She paused and we stared at each other.
“I come here almost every day,” she said. “I like to listen to the sounds.”
All around us, I realized, the wheat was rustling as it moved against itself in the wind.
“Do you know Franny?” I asked.
The little girl nodded solemnly.
“She gave me a map to this place.”
“Then you must be ready,” she said, but she was in
her
heaven too, and that called for twirling and making her skirt fly out in a circle. I sat on the ground under the tree and
watched her.
When she was done she came toward me and breathlessly sat herself down. “I was Flora Hernandez,” she said. “What was your
name?”
I told her, and then I began to cry with comfort, to know another girl he had killed.
“The others will be here soon,” she said.
And as Flora twirled, other girls and women came through the field in all directions. Our heartache poured into one another
like water from cup to cup. Each time I told my story, I lost a bit, the smallest drop of pain. It was that day that I knew
I wanted to tell the story of my family. Because horror on Earth is real and it is every day. It is like a flower or like the
sun; it cannot be contained.
A
t first no one stopped them, and it was something his mother enjoyed so much, the trill of her laughter when they ducked around
the corner from whatever store and she uncovered and presented the pilfered item to him, that George Harvey joined in her
laughter and, spying an opportunity, would hug her while she was occupied with her newest prize.
It was a relief for both of them, getting away from his father for the afternoon and driving into the nearby town to get food
or other supplies. They were scavengers at best and made their money by collecting scrap metal and old bottles and hauling
them into town on the back of the elder Harvey’s ancient flatbed truck.
When his mother and he were caught for the first time, the two of them were treated graciously by the woman at the cash register.
“If you can pay for it, do. If you can’t, leave it on the counter as good as new,” she said brightly and winked at the eight-year-old
George Harvey. His mother took the small glass bottle of aspirin out of her pocket and placed it sheepishly on the counter.
Her face sank. “No better than the child,” his father often reprimanded her.
Getting caught became another moment in his life that brought fear—that sick feeling curling into his stomach like eggs being
folded into a bowl—and he could tell by the closed faces and hard eyes when the person walking down the aisle toward them
was a store employee who had seen a woman stealing.
And she began handing him the stolen items to hide on his body, and he did it because she wanted him to. If they got outside
and away in the truck, she would smile and bang the steering wheel with the flat of her hand and call him her little accomplice.
The cab would fill with her wild, unpredictable love, and for a little while—until it wore off and they spied something glinting
on the side of the road that they would have to investigate for what his mother called its “possibilities”—he did feel free.
Free and warm.
He remembered the advice she gave him the first time they drove a stretch of road in Texas and saw a white wooden cross along
the road. Around the base of it were clusters of fresh and dead flowers. His scavenger’s eye had been drawn immediately by
the colors.
“You have to be able to look past the dead,” his mother said. “Sometimes there are good trinkets to take away from them.”
Even then, he could sense they were doing something wrong. The two of them got out of the truck and went up to the cross,
and his mother’s eyes changed into the two black points that he was used to seeing when they were searching. She found a charm
in the shape of an eye and one in the shape of a heart and held them out for George Harvey to see.
“Don’t know what your father would make of them, but we can keep them, just you and me.”
She had a secret stash of things that she never showed his father.
“Do you want the eye or the heart?”
“The eye,” he said.
“I think these roses are fresh enough to save, nice for the truck.”
That night they slept in the truck, unable to make the drive back to where his father was working a temporary job splitting
and riving boards by hand.
The two of them slept curled into each other as they did with some frequency, making the inside of the cab an awkward nest.
His mother, like a dog worrying a blanket, moved around in her seat and fidgeted. George Harvey had realized after earlier
struggles that it was best to go limp and let her move him as she wished. Until his mother was comfortable, no one slept.
In the middle of the night, as he was dreaming about the soft insides of the palaces in picture books he’d seen in public
libraries, someone banged on the roof, and George Harvey and his mother sat bolt upright. It was three men, looking through
the windows in a way George Harvey recognized. It was the way his own father looked when he was drunk sometimes. It had a
double effect: the whole gaze was leveled at his mother and simultaneously absented his son.
He knew not to cry out.
“Stay quiet. They aren’t here for you,” she whispered to him. He began to shiver underneath the old army blankets that covered
them.
One of the three men was standing in front of the truck. The other two were banging on either side of the truck’s roof, laughing
and lolling their tongues.
His mother shook her head vehemently, but this only enraged them. The man blocking the truck started rocking his hips back
and forth against the front end, which caused the other two men to laugh harder.
“I’m going to move slow,” his mother whispered, “and pretend I’m getting out of the truck. I want you to reach forward and
turn the keys in the ignition when I say so.”
He knew he was being told something very important. That she needed him. Despite her practiced calm, he could hear the metal
in her voice, the iron breaking up through fear now.
She smiled at the men, and as they sent up whoops and their bodies relaxed, she used her elbow to knock the gear shift into
place. “Now,” she said in a flat monotone, and George Harvey reached forward and turned the keys. The truck came to life with
its rumbling old engine.
The faces of the men changed, fading from an acquisitive joy and then, as she reversed back to a good degree and they stared
after her, uncertainty. She switched into drive and screamed, “On the floor!” to her son. He could feel the bump of the man’s
body hitting the truck only a few feet from where he lay curled up inside. Then the body was pitched up onto the roof. It
lay there for a second until his mother reversed again. He had had a moment of clarity about how life should be lived: not
as a child or as a woman. They were the two worst things to be.
His heart had beat wildly as he watched Lindsey make for the elderberry hedge, but then immediately he had calmed. It was
a skill his mother, not his father, had taught him—to take action only after calculating the worst possible outcome of each
choice available. He saw the notebook disturbed and the missing page in his sketchbook. He checked the bag with the knife.
He took the knife with him to the basement and dropped it down the square hole that was drilled through the foundation. From
the metal shelving, he retrieved the group of charms that he kept from the women. He took the Pennsylvania keystone charm
from my bracelet and held it in his hand. Good luck. The others he spread out on his white handkerchief, and then he brought
the four ends together to form a small hobo sack. He put his hand inside the hole under the foundation and got down on the
floor on his stomach to push his arm in all the way to the shoulder. He groped, feeling with the free fingers of his hand as
the other held the hobo sack, until he found a rusty jut of a metal support over which the workmen had poured the cement.
He hung his trophy bag there and then withdrew his arm and stood. The book of sonnets he had buried earlier that summer in
the woods of Valley Forge Park, shedding evidence slowly as he always did; now, he had to hope, not too slowly.
Five minutes at the most had gone by. That could be accounted for by shock and anger. By checking what everyone else thought
to be valuables—his cuff links, his cash, his tools. But he knew no more time than that could be overlooked. He had to call
the police.
He worked himself up. He paced briefly, drew his breath in and out rapidly, and when the operator answered he set his voice
on edge.
“My home has been broken into. I need the police,” he said, scripting the opening of his version of the story as inside he
calculated how quickly he could leave and what he would carry with him.
When my father called the station, he requested Len Fenerman. But Fenerman couldn’t be located. My father was informed that
two uniforms had already been sent out to investigate. What they found when Mr. Harvey answered his door was a man who was
tearfully upset and who in every aspect, save a certain repellent quality that the officers attributed to the sight of a man
allowing himself to cry, seemed to be responding rationally to the reported events.