Thunderstruck & Other Stories (2 page)

“I would die without you,” Joyce Goodby tells her son one morning. He knows it’s true, just as he knows he’s the only one who would care. Sometimes he thinks it wouldn’t be such a bad bargain, his mother’s death for his own freedom. Anyone would understand. Anyhow, it’s time to leave for school. She won’t die during the school day; at least, she hasn’t so far.

Across the street Santos shuts Johnny Mackers in a steamer trunk in the attic instead of walking him to kindergarten. Then Santos, liberated, guilty, decides to skip school himself. He walks to the corner and gets on the bus that says, across its forehead,
DOWNTOWN VIA PIKE
. He has
just enough change to pay his fare. The bus is crammed with people. A man in a gray windbreaker stands up. “Hey,” he says. “Kiddo. Sit here.”

Santos sits.

The world goes on. The world will. At any moment you can look from your window and see your neighbors. The fat couple who live next door will bicker and then bear hug each other. The teenage boys will play basketball with their shirts off. The elderly lady next door waits for the visiting nurse; her bloodhound snoozes in the sun like a starlet, one paw across his snout. You want to drape that old, good, big dog’s sun-warmed fawn-colored ears on your fists. You want to reassure the elderly lady, tease the fat couple, watch—just watch—those shirtless, heedless boys.
You have to get out
, your family says,
it’s time. It’s time to join the world again
. But you never left the world. You’re filled with tenderness, with worry for every living being, but you can’t do anything—not for your across-the-street neighbors, or for the people on the next street, or around the corner, or driving on the turnpike two blocks away, or in the city, or the whole country, the whole world, west and east and north and south. You are so unlucky you don’t want to brush up against anyone who isn’t.

You will not join a group. You will not read a book. You’re not interested in anyone else’s story, not when your own story takes up all your time. When the calamity happened, your friends said,
It’s so sad. It’s the worst kind of luck
, and you could tell they believed it. What’s changed?
You are as sad and unlucky as you were when it happened. It’s still so, so sad. It’s still the worst kind of luck.

The dead live on in the homeliest of ways. They’re listed in the phone book. They get mail. Their wigs rest on Styrofoam heads at the back of closets. Their beds are made. Their shoes are everywhere.

The paint across the door is still tacky. It’s dumb to even be here. Joyce swears she can smell the fiberboard headboard of the bed through the barrier cloth, the scratch-and-sniff stickers on the desk, the old lip gloss, the bubble bath in containers shaped like animals arranged on the dresser top, the unchanged mattress, the dust. The dress from Bloomingdale’s that had been hers and then Missy’s, in striped fabric like a railroad engineer’s hat. The Mexican jumping beans bought at a joke shop before the diagnosis, four dark little beans in a plastic box with a clear top and blue bottom that clasped shut like an old-fashioned change purse. You warmed them in your hands, and they woke up and twitched and flipped: the worms who lived inside dozed in the cold but threw themselves against the walls when the temperature rose.

“Worms?” Missy had asked. Her nose was lacy with freckles, pink around the rim. “How do we feed them?”

“We don’t,” said Joyce.

“Then they’ll starve to death!”

Quickly Joyce made up a story: the worm wasn’t a worm, it was a soul. It was fine where it was, it was eternal, and if the bean stopped moving that only meant the soul
had moved on to find another home.
Back to Mexico?
asked Missy, and Joyce said,
Sure, why not
. (Who knows? Maybe that’s why the worms woke up when they got warm—they thought,
At last we’re back home in Oaxaca
.) Back then, reincarnation was a comforting fable. In fairy tales, people were always born again as beasts, frogs, migrating swans.

Now Joyce feels the world shake and thinks,
Mexican jumping bean
. She can’t decide whether the house is the bean and she’s the worm, or the bean’s her body and the worm her soul.

Neither: someone has wrenched open the wooden storm door of the sun porch and let it slam behind him. Then the doorbell rings.

Johnny Mackers has escaped. He’s kicked his way out of the trunk, the one his great-grandmother emigrated from Ireland with, still lined with the napkins and tablecloths she thought she’d need for a new life. She once told Johnny a story about a monkey that belonged to a rich family she worked for, and though he knows that monkey died in the rich family’s house, he was sure the trunk smelled of monkey, as well as the inventory of every story his great-grandmother ever told him: whiskey, lamp oil, house fires, a scalded baby’s arm treated with butter, horse sweat, lemon drops, the underside of wooden dentures. The trunk turned out to be made of cardboard held together with moldy oak and cheap tin. He kicked one end to pieces and crawled out. The wreckage scared him. It was as though he’d kicked his great-grandmother apart before she’d had a chance to get
on the boat and sail to Boston and meet her future husband at an amusement park and have children.

He rings the doorbell once, twice. Last year in their old neighborhood he helped Santos sell mints for the Y; you were supposed to ring, count to ten slowly, and ring only once more. He counts to ten but quickly and over and over. To keep himself from ringing too many times, he runs a finger over the engraved sign by the bell. He doesn’t know what a solicitor is or that he’s one. The air of the sun porch is stale. He gulps at it. The front door opens.

“Lady,” he says, “do you wanna buy a rock?”

The rocks in Johnny Mackers’s hand have been lightly rubbed with crayon. He found them a week ago at Revere Beach with his father: at the beach they were washed by the water and looked valuable and ancient. Dry, they turned gray and merely old. The woman who has answered the door is the witch, of course, the dead girl’s mother. He’s come to her first of all the neighbors because she may be able to grant wishes, and Johnny has one. When it’s the right time, he’ll ask: he wishes his brother dead. She’s the cleanest person he’s ever seen and yet not entirely white. Everything about her is blurred, like dirt beneath the surface of a hockey rink.

He would do anything for her. He knows that right away, too. You have to, to get your wish granted.

He has cobwebs in his hair but she doesn’t smell them. She doesn’t smell the cigarette smoke or the fibers off the wall-to-wall carpet or the must that clings to him from the trunk, the usual immigrant disappointments, the rusty cut on his ankle that needs medical attention. What she smells
is little-kid sweat touched with sweet bland tomato sauce. Ketchup, canned spaghetti, maybe.

“Come in,” she says. “I’ll find my purse.”

Once he’s inside she doesn’t know what to do. She sits him at the kitchen table and offers him a plate of pebbly brown cookies. He eats one. He would rather something chocolate and store-bought, but his mother likes cookies like this, studded with sesame seeds, and he knows that eating them is a good deed. She hooks a cobweb out of his hair with one finger. He picks up another cookie and rubs the side of his cheek with the back of one wrist.

“You need a bath,” she says.

“OK,” he answers.

Now, Joyce. You can’t just bathe someone else’s child. You can’t invite a strange boy into your house and bring him upstairs and say, “Chop chop. Off with your clothes. Into your bath.”

The bathroom is yellow and pink. Johnny Mackers understands his new obedience as a kind of sanitary bewitching. He is never naked in front of his mother like this: his mother likes to pinch. “Just a little!” she’ll say, and she’ll pinch him on his knee and stomach and everywhere. Santos is right, their mother loves Johnny best. His hatred of kisses and hugs has turned her into a pinching tickler, a sneak thief. “Just a little little!” she’ll say, when she sees any pinch-able part of him.

“Bubbles?” Joyce asks, and he nods. But there’s no bubble bath. Instead she pours the entire bottle of shampoo into the tub.

So it’s true, what the neighborhood kids say. She does kidnap children.

He’s not circumcised. He looks like an Italian sculpture from a dream, a polychrome putto from the corner of a church. The tub is rotten, pink, with a sliding glass door that looks composed of a million thumbprints. Soon the bubbles rise up like shrugging, foamy shoulders, cleft where the water from the faucet pours in.

The almond soap is as cracked as an old tooth. The boy steps over the tub edge. “Careful,” Joyce says, as he puts his hand on the shower door runners. When Missy was born, Joyce was relieved: she loved her husband and son but there was, she thought, something different about a girl. Maybe it was scientific, those as-yet unused girl organs speaking to their authorial organs, transmitting information as though by radio. A strange little boy is easier to love than a strange little girl. The water slicking down his dirty hair reveals the angle and size of his ears. She soaps them and thinks of Missy in the tub, the fine long hair knotted at the nape, the big ears, the crescent shape where they attached to her head. The arch at the base of her skull.

“Your ears are very small,” she says.

“I know,” he answers.

She soaps the shoulder blades that slide beneath the boy’s dark skin and is amazed to see that he’s basically intact, well-fed, maybe even well-loved.

(Of course he is. Even now his mother is calling his name on the next block. Soon she’ll phone the police.)

“What’s your name?” Joyce asks.

He says, “I don’t know.”

“You don’t know your name?”

He shrugs. He looks at his foam-filled hands. Then he says, “Johnny.”

“What’s your last name?”

“Lion,” he says. He drops his face in the bubbly bath water, plunges his head down, and blubs.

When he comes up she says, smiling, “Your clothes are filthy. You’re going to need clean ones. Where were you?”

“Trunk.”

“Of a
car
?”

“Trunk like a suitcase,” he answers. He pounds the sliding glass shower door, bored with questioning.

It’s after school. Mrs. Mackers, the owlish pincher, is back on Winter Terrace, asking the neighborhood kids if they’ve seen Johnny, the little boy, the little boy on the trike. She doesn’t know where Santos is, either, but Santos is old enough to take care of himself (though she’s wrong in thinking this—Santos even now is in terrible trouble, Santos, miles away, is calling for her). The last teenage boy she asks is so freckled she feels sorry for him, a pause in her panic.

No, Gerry Goodby hasn’t seen a little kid.

He’s looking up at Missy’s window; he always looks at it when he comes home, shouldering his lacrosse stick like a rifle. He didn’t remember to pull down the blinds all the way before closing the room up and it always bothers him. You can see the edge of the dresser that overlaps the window frame, a darkened rainbow sticker, and just the snout-end of an enormous rocking horse named Blaze who used
to say six different sentences when you pulled a cord in his neck. Blaze had been Gerry’s horse first. It seemed unfair he had to disappear like that. Someday, Gerry knows, they’ll have to sell the house, and the new owners will find the tomb of a six-year-old girl pharaoh. It’s as though they’ve walled in Missy instead of burying her in the cemetery, as though (as in a ghost story) he will someday see her face looking back out at him, mouthing,
Why?
Gerry, in his head, always answers,
It’s not your fault, you didn’t know how dangerous you were
.

But this time he sees something appearing, then disappearing, then appearing again: the rocking horse showing its profile, one dark carved eye over and over.

Not only that: the front door is open.

The barrier cloth has been slit from top to bottom. Beyond it is the old door with the brassy doorknob still bright from all its years in the dark. Beyond the door is Missy’s room.

“Hello,” says his mother. She’s sitting on the bed, smoothing a pair of light yellow overalls on her lap. There’s a whole outfit set out next to her: the Lollipop brand underpants Missy had once written a song about, a navy turtleneck, an undershirt with a tiny rosebud at the sternum. The dust is everywhere in the room. It’s a strange sort of dust, soot and old house, nothing human. Even so, compared to the rest of the house, this room is Oz. The comforter is pink gingham. The walls are pink with darker pink trim. Dolls of all nations lie along one wall, as though rubble from an earthquake has just been lifted from them. The
50-50 bedclothes are abrasive just to look at. He inhales. Nothing of Missy’s fruit-flavored scent is left.

But his mother doesn’t seem to notice. She has—he’s heard this expression but never seen it—roses in her cheeks. “Look,” she says, and points.

A boy. He’s fallen through the chimney or he’s a forgotten toy of Missy’s come to life. What else can explain him here, brown and naked next to the rocking horse he’s just dismounted, a gray towel turbaned around his head. He’s pulling two-handed at the cord that works Blaze’s voice box, but Blaze has had a stroke and can’t speak, he just groans apologetically before the boy interrupts him with another tug. Through the half-drawn shades the police lights color Winter Terrace: blue, less blue, blue again.

Outside, the neighborhood kids sit on the sidewalk, their feet in the gutter, daring the cops to tell them to move along. The little smoking kid, the one who likes to swear, is missing. The kids are working on their story.
When did you last see him?
a policeman asks, but the fact is the woman, who is not crying yet, will get her boy back. That is, she’ll get one of her boys back: the one she hasn’t missed yet is missing for good, forever, and by tomorrow morning he will be his mother’s favorite, and by tomorrow afternoon the police will have questioned everyone on the street, and the neighborhood kids will pretend that they remember Santos, though they can’t even make sense of his name. He will pass into legend, too.