Authors: Laura McHugh
“Hi, Miss Arrowood.” His lips lost their color as they stretched into a smile, as though the blood had been pressed out of them. “Sorry to bother you,” Heaney said. “I wanted to let you know I was here before I gave you a scare creeping around the yard.”
“Oh, thanks.”
“You getting settled in?”
“Yeah.”
Heaney's gaze drifted over my shoulder, into the house. “Anything you need me to take care of inside today?” I shook my head. “All right, then. Thought I'd check.” He took a couple of steps back.
“Oh, wait, there is one thingâwere you watering the grass out there a minute ago? Or using the hose for something?”
“No. Did you want me to? Water the lawn? Orâ¦?”
I shook my head, and after waiting fruitlessly for me to explain why I'd asked about the hose, Heaney edged closer. He was only a few inches taller than me, our eyes almost level, his breath bracingly antiseptic, like he had just rinsed his mouth with Listerine. I tried to imagine him hanging out with my mom and dad in their high school days. How well had he known them? Aside from Mrs. Ferris, I didn't know any of my parents' childhood friends.
“Whatever you need, I'm here for you,” Heaney said. “Don't be afraid to ask. I want you to think of me as family.”
It was a nice sentiment, though it didn't strike me the way he'd likely intended.
Think of me as family.
Even at my lowest point in Colorado, I had refused to call my mother for help. I was still angry that someone else had called her for me. I watched Heaney go down the steps and into the yard, wondering if it had been hard for him to ring the bell after years of letting himself in; if he had felt, in a way, that the house belonged to him, the same as I had, all those years it wasn't mine. I listened again for the sound of running water, but wherever it was coming from, it had stopped. The house was too quiet, holding its breath.
I had been disappointed that it was Heaney at the door, though I wasn't sure whom I'd expected. Ben? Even if he hadn't heard people gossiping about my return, his parents still lived next door to Arrowood and had surely noticed the car outside, seen me coming and going. They would have told him I was back. Did it mean anything, that Ben hadn't yet come by? It had only been two days, and there were a dozen logical reasons for his absence, the most likely being that he didn't live here anymore. He and his sister, Lauren, would have moved away for college, and maybe they'd never returned. Ben had always wanted to illustrate comic books when he grew up, or work in animation. It would make sense that he had started a new life someplace else. I knew there was also a chance that Ben was here and didn't want to see me, though I didn't want to think about that.
I wouldn't have admitted to anyone that when the doorbell rang, a tiny spark flickered through the circuitry of my brain, the tenuous hope that the twins might magically show up on the doorstep now that I was home.
Josh Kyle's email had been nagging at me all day, a splinter needling its way beneath my skin. What evidence could he possibly have that would change my mind about Singer? Still, I wanted to know what he had to say. The moments surrounding my sisters' disappearance were so firmly stitched into my memory that they were bright and clear after so much else had come unraveled and faded away.
After the gold car had disappeared with my sisters inside it, I'd squatted under a tree and buried my face in my Hello Kitty T-shirt, trying to catch my breath. Something dug into my hip, and I pulled a half-eaten sucker from my pocket. Violet, Tabitha, and I had been to the bank with our mother early that morning, and each of us had received a Tootsie Pop from the teller. Violet hadn't liked hers, and after a few slobbery bites, she'd managed to get it stuck in Tabitha's hair. I'd worked the sucker free and shoved it into the pocket of my shorts. It was fuzzy with lint now, though I could still make out the marks of Vi's tiny teeth and a blond hair that must have been Tabby's. I held on to the sucker, a sticky talisman, as if it might make them reappear.
I don't know how long I waited before I ran home to tell my mother. Her face had gradually reddened at the bank that morning during a whispered conversation with the teller, and she had been in a twitchy mood all day. I was scared to tell her what had happened; I wasn't supposed to take the twins outside in the first place. It was my fault that they were gone, and in that moment, I was more upset about the fact that I had done something wrong and would get in trouble. It hadn't yet occurred to me that the twins might not come back, that I might never see my sisters again.
The rest of that first day remains jumbled and patchy in my head. I don't know exactly what I said to my mother, or what she did when I told her. I can't remember my father coming home, or Grammy picking me up to take me to the Sister House. At some point that afternoon I must have fallen asleep, because I had a vivid dream that everything was fine, that the twins were safe after all. I would sometimes immerse myself in the memory of that dream, to feel again the warm flood of relief, however fleeting.
I didn't speak to the police the first day, or the next. Grammy said I was too distraught, and sick. I'd started vomiting again, and my fever returned. My mother told them my story, the one I had told her, about the gold car that had turned toward Main. When a policemanâwiry, ruddy-cheeked Detective Eckland, who had once visited my school with McGruff the Crime Dogâfinally met with me and asked me to tell him what I'd seen, my throat closed up and I began to wheeze. Hot tears gushed out and Detective Eckland fetched me tissues and cold water in a paper cup and a roll of Wild Cherry Life Savers, but nothing helped. Finally he repeated my account as relayed to him by my mother, and asked me to nod if it was correct. He had everything right except for the icy wound that lingered in my chest.
I stayed at the Sister House, where Aunt Alice closed the drapes and popped popcorn on the stove and Grammy read to me from
Anne of Green Gables
until her voice grew hoarse. The two of them sheltered me from what was happening outside. I wasn't aware, at the time, that the entire town was consumed by the kidnapping of the Arrowood twins; that bloodhounds searched the river bluffs, and that the night crew at the dam, where debris would often wash up, was put on alert for bodies. I didn't know that parents locked their children indoors, or that candlelight vigils were held in the streets, or that the Sisters of Perpetual Adoration, at their convent in Oskaloosa, had begun to pray in shifts, twenty-four hours a day, for my sisters' safe return. Our house and neighborhood were scoured for clues. The highway patrol was called in, and later, the FBI.
My father assured me in a broken voice, over the phone, that no one blamed me. I didn't believe him.
Days passed with no sign of the twins, and my parents did not come to take me home. I didn't return to school, either. Nana called from Florida and together we prayed to Saint Anthony, the patron saint of lost things, which Nana said included missing children.
Saint Anthony, Saint Anthony, please come down. Someone is lost and cannot be found.
I had said another prayer, silently, to all the burning saints, Anthony included:
May your flames light the way to bring my sisters back home.
Grammy and Aunt Alice did everything they could to comfort me, and I pretended that the twins were back at Arrowood with Mom and Dad, and that I would see them soon. My teacher sent a fat envelope stuffed with letters from my classmates, and I dug through them to find Ben's. He had drawn two rabbits with big, sad eyes, the paper smudged where he had erased and reworked the feet to get them right. My name was at the top of the page, embellished with curlicues. Below the drawing, Ben had printed a single sentence.
When are you coming bake?
He had always struggled with the silent e, adding it in all the wrong places, but I knew what he meant. No one had talked to me yet about going back. I stuck the letter inside my pillowcase, where I could hear it crinkling every time I rolled over in Grammy's bed, unable to fall asleep.
I had moments of happiness while in limbo at the Sister House. Upstairs, in Alice's half of the house, you could see the river from her bedroom window, through a gap in the trees, and we would sit on her bed dealing hands of Old Maid or playing Chinese checkers on a wooden game board with marbles she kept in a mason jar.
She and Grammy loved to cook, and after a lifetime of feeding families and visitors and boarders, they did not seem to know how to prepare food in small quantities, so there was always too much to eat. A typical lunch would have the table laden with pork chops and fried potatoes, corn cut from the cob, boiled cabbage, sliced tomatoes, rolls, sweet pickles, and pickled peppers. Chocolate pudding for dessert, or oatmeal cookies, or homemade fudge that they had boiled on the stove and poured onto buttered plates to cool. They also shared a love of plants, and their windowsills were crowded with things growing roots in old salad dressing bottles and mayonnaise jars. There were cupboards full of treasures to exploreâfossils and coins and antique postcards, and stacks of musty
Seventeen
magazines that had once belonged to my mother.
A month passed before my father came to retrieve me. I'd barely been outside in all that time. He didn't speak in the car as we drove past tree after tree tied with yellow ribbons. The house was quiet, and my mother didn't come down to greet me. She'd been frazzled before, from lack of sleep and taking care of the twins, and would occasionally set meat out to thaw and forget to cook it, or send me to school without brushing my hair, but now everything was worse. She got more prescriptions in addition to the Xanax and sleeping pills, but they didn't seem to help. She stopped doing laundry. She wouldn't go near the twins' room, which was two doors down from mine, and so I began to put myself to bed each night, sometimes not brushing my teeth or washing my face, thinking that would somehow draw her up the stairs to scold me, though it never did. I would sneak into the twins' bedroom and touch the dresses in their closet, lie on the floor near their cribs, fold their blankets under my head so I could breathe in their scent as I slept.
At school my teacher, Mrs. Wagner, seemed on the verge of tears every time she spoke to me. She put stickers on all my papers, even the ones I didn't finish. My classmates kept their distance, as though my situation might somehow be contagious, except for Ben. He played hopscotch with me at recess, ignoring the boys who made fun of him. I knew by then that a man had been found in possession of a gold car like the one I'd described taking the twins. His name was Harold Singer.
The twins' second birthday came in December, and Grammy made a cake with pink frosting, which no one ate. It sat on the kitchen table, untouched, until it grew mold and someone threw it away. My mother couldn't bear to celebrate Christmas at Arrowood without Violet and Tabitha, so I was sent back to the Sister House for the holiday break. Aunt Alice put up her aluminum tree and we made popcorn-and-cranberry garlands to hang. I didn't have my embroidered Christmas stocking, and there was no mantel, so I taped a gym sock to the radiator, where Grammy assured me Santa would find it. I taped up socks for my sisters as well, and in the morning, all three lay on the floor, stuffed with oranges and nuts and Freedent chewing gum, things suspiciously unlike what Santa usually left at home.
My parents came for dinner that night, and Grammy and Aunt Alice prepared a spread of baked ham with mashed potatoes and gravy, green bean casserole, Jell-O salad, and rolls and apple pie. After we finished eating, Mom and Dad announced that we would be moving to Illinois. My father was pursuing a new business venture there, and it was becoming too difficult to stay at Arrowood, surrounded by memories of the twins. They were also concerned that it might not be safe to continue living in the same town where Harold Singer roamed free.
There was a snag in Dad's plan. He knew that Arrowood would be passed down to him when his parents died, but Nana and Granddad were still living. They had grudgingly retired to Florida before the twins were born, in hopes that the balmy weather would soothe Nana's crippling arthritis, and the house was still in their names. Since they weren't planning on moving back, Dad wanted permission to sell the house right away and collect the money. Granddad wouldn't allow it. The house had been in the family for nearly one hundred and forty years, and he didn't want it sold.
They flew up to visit us for the first time in a year, and I was shocked to see that Nana was in a wheelchair. She sat crying quietly in the foyer with my mother and me while Dad and Granddad shouted at each other in the study. Mom lay slumped on the stairs, eyes closed and mouth open as though she had fallen asleep, and I stood staring at Nana's shoes, sturdy orthopedic loafers that looked at odds with her delicate pearl-buttoned sweater set and tailored slacks. I knew that she must be having trouble with her feet, because prior to that day, I had only ever seen her wear heels.
Nana motioned for me to climb up onto her lap and I did, inhaling the comforting scent of talcum powder and Prell shampoo. Her fingers were twisted at odd angles, the joints knobby and swollen despite her prayers to Saint Alphonsus, the patron saint of arthritis sufferers. She tried unsuccessfully to smooth my hair, tug the wrinkles out of my shirt. Nana had wanted to come as soon as the twins went missing, but traveling was hard on her, and she and Granddad did what they could from Florida, calling in favors and hiring a private detective, who spent most of his time tailing Singer. Nana had been diligent about keeping in touch after they moved away, calling every Sunday to speak to me and the twins, though she had only seen my sisters in the flesh a handful of times.
Don't listen to the yelling,
she murmured, forcing a smile, her dry lips sticking to her dentures. Tears took an indirect route down her face, following the grooves and wrinkles, clinging to the bristly white hairs on her chin.
Everything will be fine.
Her voice wavered. She wasn't good at lying.