Thunderstruck & Other Stories (16 page)

“They thought you killed Karen Blackbird, but you didn’t.”

“Blackbird? She Nathan’s wife?”

“Daughter.”

“Nathan Blackbird,” Manny said through his tears. “I always looked up to that guy. How’s he doing?”

On the first anniversary of Karen Blackbird’s disappearance—that is, the anniversary of the day he’d found Asher Blackbird—the Hi-Lo manager attended a support group
for families of missing people. It was held at a junior college, in a basement classroom full of atmospheric chalk dust. Twelve people were there, sitting in chairs with paddle desks attached, and they seemed thrilled to see him.

“Who have you lost?” a kindly woman in a Red Sox cap asked.

“My wife,” he answered. True enough, his ex-wife had moved the month before to Indiana, and cut off contact, though that wasn’t who he was thinking of when he looked for a missing-persons support group.

The kindly woman was royalty, the mother of Deanna Manly, the teenager who in the summer of 1959 left for her job as a lifeguard at an MDC pool and vanished entirely. Despite the fact that Deanna had been missing more than twenty years, longer than she hadn’t been missing, her mother wore a T-shirt bearing her daughter’s face, black and white with shining hair, looking like the famous person she became that summer.
BRING DEANNA HOME
, the shirt said. It was well washed and worn, and the Hi-Lo manager couldn’t tell what level of hope it represented.

Another woman was missing her ex-husband. She was tall and bony, with a nasal, insinuating voice and gnawed fingers. She couldn’t find her ex-in-laws, either, or the ex-friends she and her ex-husband had shared, who might have died of overdoses, or probably had. They weren’t in any phone book. She talked for ten minutes about how bad the marriage had been, how it had damaged her, how every day she couldn’t find him was a new injury.

“It’s the not-knowing that’s terrible,” she said.

“Excuse me,” said the Hi-Lo manager.

She looked at him and stuck the side of her index finger in her mouth.

“Do you even belong here?” he asked her.

She began to nibble that finger.

“Now—” said a middle-aged man in a plaid shirt.

“Hey,” said a woman next to him.

“Oh,” said Deanna Manly’s mother, laying her hand on the Hi-Lo manager’s arm. She looked like her daughter and, despite everything that had happened, decades younger than her age; she looked, in fact, like a police artist’s sketch of what Deanna would look like now, if she were alive, and for a moment the Hi-Lo manager wanted to say:
It’s you, Deanna, isn’t it? You’re here, and your mother’s missing
. “You can’t question someone else’s pain,” she told him. “Listen. It’s all valid. You can’t—you can’t compare one person’s grief to another’s.”

Of course you could. Losing a fifteen-year-old daughter was worse than losing a deadbeat, drug-addicted ex-husband. He looked at the twelve people in the room: he wanted to interrogate and rank them—the married couple, the older woman with the shapes of curlers in her hair, the guy who looked like a pedophile. The finger-biter’s feelings for her ex-husband were a bonsai tree—they may have started in something real, but she’d tended them so closely and for so long they were now purely decorative. Of course you could compare one person’s grief to another’s! All he wanted was for one single person to compare, to say to him, yes, your sadness
is
worse than anyone else’s. Your sadness is inestimable.

“Do you want to tell us your story?” asked Deanna Manly’s mother.

Then he remembered: he was a liar, worse than anyone.

So he told a nonsensical story stitched together from the life of Karen Blackbird, according to newspapers and magazines, and the days of his marriage. As he spoke, he believed even more strongly that there was a reason for his longing that had nothing to do with him: it was fate that had kept him from the people he loved. “She made a kind of chocolate cake with no flour,” he said at last, overcome.

“Oh, yeah,” said the woman with the missing ex-husband. “I make that.”

“What does this have to do with you?” said the Hi-Lo manager.

Deanna Manly’s mother put her hand on his arm again. “Those are wonderful, those flourless cakes. You must miss that.”

He was heartbroken to hear that one of the small miracles of his marriage was a perfectly common thing.

It wasn’t fair that only Karen Blackbird got a poster. Everyone wanted one.

The neighbors wanted stacks of
MISSING
posters for every person they lost, even themselves.
Missing: former self. Distinguishing marks: expectations of fame, ability to demand love. Last seen wearing: hopeful expression, uncomfortable shoes
.

“The case is still open,” the police chief would say of Karen Blackbird whenever anyone asked, in a voice that suggested the case was a hole in the ground and the best they could hope for was that someone might fall in. But mostly people didn’t ask. Even her son said she was a woman who could have wandered off. Not on purpose: she would have gone to the corner, leaned against a tree in the late-summer swelter. Then to the next corner, to the bus stop. She might have met someone on the bus who belonged to a church, and followed him. She might have gone all the way to Canada. So what if she’d never done it before: she was the sort of person who thought that disappointing someone was to sin against him, which was how she’d ended up pregnant, why she’d taken in her angry father. She might have acquiesced to any number of people until she was far away from home.

Let her stay lost.

For ten years, the Hi-Lo manager wondered what he would say if he saw Asher Blackbird again.
I’m glad you made it
.
I hope you’re all right. Hey, son, hey, buddy: how’s your life?
They might bump into each other walking across the commons, or in a movie theater downtown. Not in the neighborhood, which had been razed and redeveloped, not a single old business left but the liquor store. In place of the Hi-Lo, an upscale pizza place that specialized in thin crusts; in place of the five-and-dime, one that featured deep dish. Everything gone, Mac’s Smoke Shop, the Boston Fish House, the Paramount Movie Theater, George’s Tavern. You couldn’t even call it a neighborhood anymore. It was just office space. The Hi-Lo manager wasn’t the Hi-Lo manager. He had a new job two towns over at a hardware store. He cut keys and sorted washers and was glad for the conversation: people talked in hardware stores, he found out.

Every year he went to the Blackbird place and left a bouquet on the steps. He didn’t want to, he didn’t even know who he was leaving the flowers for, but stopping seemed worse.

On the tenth anniversary of the day he found the boy, the Hi-Lo manager stood on the front walk of the house and looked at it: the same asbestos tile, the tilting gap-toothed porch railing. How could it have been so abandoned for so long? The neighborhood had gentrified. Even beat up, the place was worth a mint.

Then the front door opened.

A man stepped out, late twenties, with a hooked nose, wide shoulders, a tentative smile. He needed a haircut. He brushed his dark curls out of his eyes. “Can I help you?”

“Oh,” said the Hi-Lo manager. He stuck the flowers behind
his back, like a shy suitor, and noticed that the yard had been cleaned up, the broken window repaired. “I didn’t realize anyone lived here.”

The man nodded. “Since December. Fixing it up bit by bit. I know it doesn’t look it,” he said apologetically. “We’re focused on the inside. Got to do it before the baby comes. You live on the street?”

The Hi-Lo manager nodded. “It’s a good neighborhood for kids.”
Neighborhood
because he was about to say
house
and that wasn’t true: it was a catastrophic house for kids.

“I know,” said the man. “I grew up here.”

“In this neighborhood?”

“In this house.”

Unthinkingly, the Hi-Lo manager brought around the bouquet in its rattling cellophane, and handed it over. To Asher Blackbird. Of course. Everything about him was different but the nose. Asher Blackbird: a grown-up. Married, with a kid on the way. Of course he hadn’t touched the outside of the house. Like the Hi-Lo manager, he hadn’t given up hope. Karen might still come back. All that ruin said,
You can always live here, if you want
.

“Where have you been?” said the Hi-Lo manager, but Asher Blackbird was turning the flowers between his palms in a puzzled way. “Since, I mean.”

“Oh. Weymouth.”

“Weymouth.”

“Yeah,” said Asher Blackbird in an irritated voice. “I have family there.”

It was easy to be in love if you didn’t declare yourself. It was easy to be a coward. The Hi-Lo manager was lovesick,
faint. It had been years since his bodily self had been so pummeled by emotions, knees, heart, joints, stomach. He’d forgotten it was possible. He thought he might go deaf. “Asher,” he said. “You don’t remember me.”

“Have we met?” That was familiar, too, a look on his face both damning and embarrassed.

The Hi-Lo manager said, “I’m the one who saved you.”

The embarrassment evanesced. Asher Blackbird crossed his arms around the bouquet. “Saved?”

“Found.”

“Leonard Aude found me.”

“No,” said the Hi-Lo manager.

“I talk to him all the time. I talked to him last night.”

“No—before him. I’m the one who brought you to him.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“At the Hi-Lo Market. I was the manager. I caught you shoplifting.”

At that Asher Blackbird took a step off the porch stairs. He looked into the face of the Hi-Lo manager, who waited, waited, waited. Of course anyone’s face changed over ten years. Any moment, he’d be recognized.

“I was
starving
,” said Asher Blackbird at last.

“Yes, I know.”

“To
death
. To actual
death
. And what did you do? You had me
arrested
. Found?
Saved?
” He lifted the bouquet like a weapon, then flung it across the yard and into the street. “Get the fuck away from me before I return the favor.”

Then he was inside, the door closed behind him. A new door, the Hi-Lo manager saw now, with an oval window in
it. He stood there until he saw a pale blond woman come to the door and look out.

Asher Blackbird still lives in that house. The yard is tidy, the garbage long hauled away. The neighbors have heard he’s cleaned up the inside, too, painted the walls and sanded the floors and had a new kitchen put in. He’d have to, wouldn’t he? All those cupboards, the chains and locks he tried to pick. Maybe he took a sledgehammer to them.

The neighbors don’t know for sure. They’ve never been invited in, also being people who didn’t save Asher Blackbird.

He and his wife have two children. The little girl sleeps in Asher’s old room, and the little boy in Nathan’s. Which might sound gruesome, but these are old houses. Plenty of people have died in them.

The Hi-Lo manager thinks about knocking on the door again, explaining himself, but he’s waiting till he discovers the rest of the story. It’s all he has to give to Asher Blackbird. So far he’s leafed through descriptions of unidentified remains in thirty-seven states, files illustrated with postmortem photos, or pencil drawings that look inhuman.
Extensive dental work. Thin gold ankle bracelet. Peach-colored brassiere, “Lovable” brand. Surgical scar. Blue T-shirt that reads
,
VIRGINIA IS FOR LOVERS
.
Tattoo on left buttock:
ALMA FOREVER
.

Thirteen states to go. He’s saving up money, having blown his budget on a psychic who told him that it was Karen who’d locked the cupboards: she’d left with her
pockets full of tiny keys, scraps of paper scrawled with combinations. She’d planned to starve both of them to death. She moved to England; she has a daughter, to whom she is kind. She’s remorseless.

“No,” he told the psychic, “not Karen.” And then, because he didn’t want to hurt her feelings, “You must have looked at someone else’s future.”

Karen Blackbird was never seen in the neighborhood again. She was never seen anywhere again, except in California, where people see her all the time. A man grabs her arm and says, “Your family misses you, go home.” But it isn’t Karen Blackbird, just the actress who played her in the TV movie.

“Sorry, mister,” she says.

Karen Blackbird is a mystery. Karen Blackbird is everywhere. She is alive in South America, on a sofa, dreaming of the pleasures of her son, his thick hair, his emphatic nose, his sense of humor she didn’t always understand. She is dead by car crash, fire, murder, aneurysm, cancer, suicide, train wreck, drowning. She developed amnesia. She prayed for amnesia until she believed she had it. She is two mysteries at once—an open case in Massachusetts and an unidentified set of bones in a cemetery in Indiana, beneath a headstone marked
JANE DOE
. She is a flier that says,
Have you seen me?
and another that says,
Do you know me?
She ascended straight to heaven. She is the franking on every anonymous postcard sent anywhere.

·   ·   ·

Once upon a time there was a mother who had an undersized son. Sometimes even she forgot how old he really was. One night—the last night—she came into his room in her nylon pajamas. She kissed his head through his thick black hair. He was reading a book. She asked him what it was about.

“A woman miser,” he said. “Her son had to get his leg amputated because she wouldn’t pay for a doctor.”

“That’s terrible,” said Karen Blackbird. She wound a lock of his hair around her finger. He swatted at her hand absentmindedly, as though it were an insect. “Well,” she said, “I guess I’ll go. Night, Asher B. Make sure and miss me.”