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‘Absolutely.’
‘When I have my vice principal’s hat on, I am scrupulously fair. I have to be. I never make any decision based on race. Here in the privacy of my own home, I believe I am entitled to my own opinion, however unpopular it may be.’
‘Absolutely,’ Jackie repeated. ‘I’m with you one hundred percent. Don’t say any of this stuff to my wife.’
Their sons looked at each other and began to back away.
‘But whatever you hear about my wife’s family – my late wife’s family – take it with a grain of salt. Those people were as crazy as bedbugs. I should have known better than to marry into a bunch of screwballs like that.’
His face white, Mark silently glided around the two men and vanished into the kitchen. Jimbo followed, looking stricken. The men never noticed.
When Tim flew back to New York the next day, it was with the sour, unpleasant feeling that Philip might after all have driven Nancy to suicide.
Half an hour before they landed at La Guardia, a delicious aroma filled the cabin, and the flight attendants came down the aisle handing out the chocolate-chip cookies. Tim wondered what Mark was doing and how he felt. Philip was incapable of doing what was right – the boy might as well have been all alone. Tim’s growing anxiety made him feel like hijacking the plane and making it return to Millhaven. He promised himself to send the boy an e-mail the minute he got home; then he promised himself to get Mark to New York as soon as possible.
Part Two THE HOUSE ON MICHIGAN STREET (#ulink_3ff25958-d301-577f-b034-216f586be716)
4 (#ulink_d10709b9-9620-575f-a167-af169b0ee8e2)
A WEEK BEFORE Tim Underhill’s initial flight to Millhaven, his nephew, Mark, began to realize that something was wrong with his mother. It was nothing that he could quite pin down, nothing obvious. Unless her constant air of worried distraction had a physical origin, she did not appear to be ill. Mark’s mother had never been an upbeat person, exactly, but he did not think that she had ever before been so out of it for so long. As she went through the motions of preparing dinner and washing dishes, she seemed only half present. The half of her taking care of things was pretending to be whole, but the other half of Nancy Underhill was in some weird, anxious daze. Mark thought his mother looked as though all of a sudden she had been given some huge new problem, and whenever she allowed herself to think about it, the problem scared the hell out of her.
On a recent night, he had come home shortly before eleven P.M. after being out with Jimbo Monaghan – ‘being out’ a euphemism for the one activity that had compelled him during these past days – hoping not to be punished for having missed his curfew by twenty minutes or so. Ten-thirty was a ridiculously early hour for a fifteen-year-old to have to be home, anyhow. In he had come, twenty minutes past his curfew, expecting to be interrogated longer than he had been AWOL and ordered into bed. However, Mark did not take off his shoes or tiptoe to the stairs. Some unacknowledged part of him regretted that the living room was dark except for the dim light leaking in from the kitchen, and that neither of his parents was ensconced on the davenport, tapping the crystal of a wristwatch.
From the foyer he could see a light burning at the top of the stairs. That would be for both his benefit and his parents’ peace of mind: if they woke up to see that the hallway was dark, they would know he had come home, and they could perfect the scolding he would get in the morning. The dim yellow haze in the living room probably meant that either his father or his mother had grown sick of lying in bed and gone downstairs to wait for their errant son.
He moved into the living room and looked through to the kitchen. Curiouser and curiouser. The kitchen did not appear to be the source of the light. The floor tiles and the sink were touched by a faint illumination leaking in from the side, which meant that the overhead light in the downstairs bathroom was on.
Riddle: since the upstairs bathroom is right across the hall from their bedroom, why would one of his parents come downstairs for a nocturnal pee?
Answer: because she was downstairs already, dummy, waiting to give you hell.
That light spilled into the kitchen meant that the bathroom door was either completely or partially open, thereby presenting Mark with a problem. He made a little more noise than was necessary on his journey across the dining room. He coughed. When he heard nothing from the region in question, he said, ‘Mom? Are you up?’
There was no answer.
‘I’m sorry I’m late. We forgot what time it was.’ Emboldened, he took another step forward. ‘I don’t know why my curfew’s so early anyhow. Almost everybody in my class …’
The silence continued. He hoped his mother had not fallen asleep in the bathroom. A less embarrassing possibility was that she had gone upstairs without switching off the light.
Mark braced himself for whatever he might see, went into the kitchen, and looked at the bathroom. The door hung half open. Through the gap between the door and the frame, he could see a vertical section of his mother. She was seated on the edge of the bathtub in a white nightgown, and on her face was an expression of dazed incomprehension, shot through with what he thought was fear. It was the expression of one who awakens from a nightmare and does not yet fully realize that nothing she had seen was real.
‘Mom,’ he said.
She failed to register his presence. A chill slithered from the bottom of his spine all the way up his back.
‘Mom,’ he said, ‘wake up. What are you doing?’
His mother continued to stare with empty eyes at something that was nowhere in front of her. Folded tightly together, her hands rested on the tops of her clamped knees. Her shoulders slumped, and her hair looked dull and rumpled. Mark wondered if she could actually see anything at all; he wondered if she had drifted downstairs in her sleep. He came within a foot of the bathroom door and gently pulled it all the way open.
‘Do you need help, Mom?’
To his relief, increments of consciousness slowly returned to his mother’s face. Her hands released each other, and she wiped her palms on the fabric spread across her knees. She blinked, then blinked again, as if deliberately. A tentative hand rose to her cheek, and awareness dimly appeared in her eyes. Very slowly, she lifted her head and met his gaze.
‘Mark.’
‘Are you okay, Mom?’
She swallowed and again lightly stroked her cheek.
‘I’m fine,’ she told him.
5 (#ulink_af51f7b7-46b3-5ea2-9d78-3fde28c31edc)
NOT FINE, SHE was emerging from the aftereffects of a profound shock. Just now, a girl of five or six in ripped, dirty coveralls had materialized in front of her, simply come into being, like an eerily solid hologram. The child was inconsolable, her weeping would never stop, so great, so crushing, were the injuries this child had endured. Frightened and dismayed, Nancy had thought to reach out and stroke her hair. But before she was able to raise her hand, the sobbing child turned her head and gave Nancy a glance of concentrated ill will that struck her like a blow. Pure vindictive animosity streamed from her, directed entirely at Nancy. This happened. Having happened, it spoke of a ferocious guilt, as ferocious as the child herself.
Yes I am here, yes I was real. You denied me.
Nancy found she was trembling violently and was incapable of speech. She had nothing to say anyhow. Back in the shabby little suburban house in Carrollton Gardens, she could have spoken, but then she had remained silent. Terror rooted her to the side of the tub. Why had she come in here in the first place?
Having communicated, the little girl vanished, leaving Nancy in shock. She had never seen that child before, but she knew who she was, yes she did. And she knew her name. Finally, Lily had come searching for her, after all.
6 (#ulink_d5ef672c-734e-5b41-9778-35e792eecafb)
‘ARE YOU SURE?’ Mark asked.
‘I’m just … you surprised me.’
‘Why are you sitting here?’
Nancy raised her left arm and looked at her bare wrist. ‘You’re late.’
‘Mom, you’re not wearing your watch.’
She lowered her arm. ‘What time is it?’
‘About eleven. I was with Jimbo. I guess we forgot about the time.’
‘What do you and Jimbo do at night hour after hour?’
‘Hang out,’ he said. ‘You know.’ He changed the subject. ‘What are you doing down here?’
‘Well,’ she said, collecting herself a bit more successfully. ‘I was worried because you hadn’t come home. So I went downstairs … I guess I dozed off.’
‘You looked funny,’ he said.
Nancy wiped her eyes with the heels of her hands, her mouth flickering between mirth and despair. ‘Get yourself to bed, young man. I won’t say anything to your father, but this is the last time, understand?’
Mark understood. He was not to say anything to his father, either.
7 (#ulink_c901ff41-7eb6-5ea9-917e-5480d237f0c5)
MARK’S OBSESSION HAD begun quietly and unobtrusively, as simple curiosity, with no hint of the urgency it would so quickly acquire. He and Jimbo had been out with their skateboards, trying simultaneously to improve their skills, look at least faintly impressive, and irritate a few neighbors. Over and over they had seen it proved that the average adult cannot abide the sight of a teenage boy on a skateboard. Something about the combination of baggy jeans, bent knees, a backward baseball cap, and a fiberglass board rattling along on two sets of wheels made the average adult male hyperventilate. The longer the run, the angrier they got. If you fell down, they yelled, ‘Hurt yourself, kid?’
Unsurprisingly, the city of Millhaven offered no skateboarding venues with half-pipes, bowls, and purpose-built ramps. What it had instead were parking lots, the steps of municipal buildings, construction sites, and a few hills. The best parking lots tended to be dominated by older kids who had no patience with newbies like Mark and Jimbo and tended either to mock their equipment or to try to steal it from them. They did have amazingly good equipment. Mark had seen a Ledger classified ad placed by a dreadlocked twenty-year-old hippie named Jeffie Matusczak who was giving up the sport to pursue his spiritual life in India and was willing to sell his two boards for fifty dollars apiece. They went on the Internet and spent the last of their money on DC Manteca shoes. Their outfits looked great, but their skills were drastically under par. Because they wished to avoid ridicule and humiliation, they did some of their skateboarding in the playground at Quincy; some on the front steps of the county museum, far downtown; but most of it on the streets around their houses, especially Michigan Street, one block west.
On the day Mark’s obsession began, he had pushed himself past the entrance to the alley, rolled up to Michigan Street, and given the board a good kick so that he could do the corner in style, slightly bent over, his arms extended. Michigan Street had a much steeper pitch than Superior Street, and its blunt curves had donated a number of daredevil bruises to the forearms and calves of both boys. With Jimbo twenty or thirty feet behind him, Mark swung around the corner in exemplary style. Then it took place, the transforming event. Mark saw something he had never really, never quite taken in before, although it had undoubtedly been at its present location through all the years he had been living around the corner. It was a little house, nondescript in every way, except for the lifeless, almost hollowed-out look of a building that had long stood empty.
Knowing that he must have looked at that house a thousand times or more, Mark wondered why he had never truly noticed it. His eyes had passed over its surface without pausing to register it. Until now, the building had receded into the unremarkable background. He found this so extraordinary that he stepped backward off his board, pushed sharply down on its tail, and booted it up off the street. For once, this stunt worked exactly as it was supposed to, and the nose of the skateboard’s deck flew up into his waiting hand. Jimbo rumbled up beside him and braked to a halt by planting one foot on the ground.
‘Stellar,’ Jimbo said. ‘So why did you stop, yo?’
Mark said nothing.
‘What’re you looking at?’
‘That house up there.’ Mark pointed.
‘What about it?’
‘You ever seen that place before? I mean, really seen it?’
‘It hasn’t gone anywhere, dude,’ Jimbo said. He took a few steps forward, and Mark followed. ‘Yeah, I’ve seen it. So have you. We run past that stupid place every time we come down this street.’
‘I swear to you, I have never, ever seen that house before. In my whole life.’
‘Bullshit.’ Jimbo stalked about fifteen feet ahead, then turned around and feigned boredom and weariness.
Irritated, Mark flared out at him. ‘Why would I bullshit you about something like this? Fuck you, Jimbo.’
‘Fuck you, too, Marky-Mark.’
‘Don’t call me that.’
‘Then stop bullshitting me. It’s stupid, anyhow. I suppose you never saw that cement wall behind it either, huh?’
‘Cement wall?’ Mark trudged up beside his friend.
‘The one behind your house. On the other side of the alley from your sorry-ass back fence.’
The wooden fence Philip Underhill had years ago nailed into place around a latched gate at the far end of their little backyard sagged so far over that it nearly touched the ground.
‘Oh, yeah,’ Mark said. ‘The wall thing, with the barbed wire on top. What about it?’
‘It’s in back of this place, dummy. That’s the house right behind yours.’
‘Oh, yeah,’ Mark said. ‘Right you are.’ He squinted uphill. ‘Does that place have numbers on it?’
Rust-brown holes pocked the discolored strip of the frame where the numerals had been.
‘Somebody pried ’em off. Doesn’t matter. Check out the numbers on the other side. What are they?’
Mark glanced at the house closest to him. ‘Thirty-three twenty-one.’ He looked at Jimbo, then carried his skateboard up the low hill until he was standing in front of the abandoned building and read off the numbered address of the next house in line. ‘Thirty-three twenty-five.’
‘So what’s the address of this one?’
‘Thirty-three twenty-three,’ Mark said. ‘Really, I never saw this place before.’ He began to giggle at the sheer absurdity of what he had said.
Jimbo grinned and shook his head. ‘Now we got that out of the way –’
‘They had a fire,’ Mark said. ‘Check out the porch.’
‘Huh,’ Jimbo said. The wooden floor of the porch and the four feet of brick below the right front window had been scorched black. These signs of an old fire resembled a fading bruise, not a wound. The place had assimilated the dead fire into its being.
‘Looks like someone tried to burn it down,’ Jimbo said.
Mark could see the flames traveling along the porch, running up the bricks, then subsiding, growing fainter, dying. ‘Place wouldn’t burn,’ he said. ‘You can see that, can’t you? The fire just went out.’ He stepped forward, but not far enough to place a foot on the first rectangular stone of the walkway. There was a bemused, abstracted expression on his face. ‘It’s empty, right? Nobody lives there.’
‘Duh,’ said Jimbo.
‘You don’t think that’s a little unusual?’
‘I think you’re a little unusual.’
‘Come on, think about it. Do you see any other empty houses around Sherman Park? Have you ever heard of one?’
‘No, but I’ve seen this one. Unlike you.’
‘But why is it empty? These houses must be a pretty good deal, if you’re not completely racist, like my dad.’
‘Don’t leave Jackie out,’ Jimbo said. ‘He’d be insulted.’
A well-known foe of skateboards, Skip, old Omar Hillyard’s even more ancient, big-nosed dog, pushed itself to its feet and uttered a sonorous bark completely empty of threat.
‘I mean,’ Jimbo went on, ‘it’s not one of those places with whaddyacallems, parapets, like the Munster house. It’s just like all the other houses in this neighborhood. Especially yours.’
It was true, Mark saw. Except for the narrowness of the porch and the beetle-browed look of the roofline, the building greatly resembled the Underhill house.
‘How long do you think it’s been empty?’
‘A long time,’ Jimbo said.
Tiles had blown off the roof, and paint was flaking off the window frames. Despite the sunlight, the windows looked dark, even opaque. A hesitation, some delicacy of feeling, kept Mark from going up the walkway, jumping the steps onto the porch, and peering through those blank windows. Whatever lay beyond the unwelcoming windows had earned its peace. He did not want to set his feet upon those stones or to stand on that porch. How strange; it worked both ways. All at once, Mark felt that the house’s very emptiness and abandonment made up a force field that extended to the edge of the sidewalk. The air itself would reject his presence and push him back.
And yet …
‘I don’t get it. How could I miss seeing this place before today?’ He thought the house looked like a clenched fist.
Jimbo and Mark spent the next two hours rolling down Michigan Street, sweeping into curved arcs, leaping from the street onto the sidewalk, jumping off the curb back into the street. They made nearly as much noise as a pair of motorcyclists, but no one stepped outside to complain. Whenever Mark eyed the empty house, he half-expected it to have dissolved again back into its old opacity, but it kept presenting itself with the same surprising clarity it had shown when he’d first rolled around the corner. The house at 3323 North Michigan had declared itself, and now it was here to stay. His obsession, which in the manner of obsessions would change everything in his life, had taken hold.
