Lost (17 page)

Now he would get a map.

PART TWO

8

Just past noon on November 17th, the icy drizzle changed to snow. It was Saturday, but the stores were nearly deserted, there was very little traffic, and the snow spilled out across the sidewalks and curbs like rippling hand-snapped sheets. Under brooding clouds, the highway through Fielding Heights, Pennsylvania, slowly lost its boundaries. The blue Buick entered the city limits at low speed.

Leona had been behind the wheel since they'd left the motel at dawn, and the monotony of travel had put Mamie back to sleep by midmorning—curled on the seat beside her under a blanket. As she drove, Leona watched the shifting alterations in the winter light and listened to the sound of the falling snow. It was like the beating of tiny wings, she thought, or an all but inaudible, wet, packing hiss. It made her so drowsy she could hardly keep her eyes open. She pulled the Buick to the curb and let it idle, relaxed against the seat and closed her eyes.

The strain of these days, the physical and nervous exhaustion, had drained her. They had been traveling for four days now, but the roads were often slick; the going was slow. At this rate, it would take longer than she'd planned to reach the place where she knew they would be safe. She hadn't been sleeping well in the motels at night, and during the day, the frightening reminder of the cracked window at her side clung to her always. With the roads becoming more and more hazardous, she knew she shouldn't go on, especially in her state of increasing fatigue, but it was almost as dangerous, she thought, to nap in the car on a city street in broad daylight. She needed to find a place where she could rest undisturbed for a little while—just long enough to regain her judgment and her strength.

But the calming hiss of the snow dispelled her logic. With her eyes closed, she heard Mamie's soft, sleeping breaths, and it was like the hypnotic music of a mermaid lulling her down into a whirlpool of sympathetic escape. For another few minutes, before she tended to Mamie and tried to go on, she dreamed of being tended to herself. It was an old memory, one that came to her rarely. She heard herself saying his name: “Alfred …” and her heartbeat caught in her throat; she could feel his warm embrace. Brimming with excitement, she wanted to tell him about the baby—news that would change their lives forever—but he touched her lips with his fingers and she arched beneath him, happy to be with him, happy in her body. Then, deep in the quick of her being, the yearning stirred, her old yearning for the sweetness she had only begun to enjoy. And had never forgotten. She wanted to be held that way again, to be sustained by a loving whisper. Yet she knew that if she didn't resist, she would slip even deeper toward the dark burgeoning sleep she needed so badly. Her yearning diminished to a thin ache in her thighs but the memory of innocent passion lingered like a vivid fantasy. With all the strength she could muster, she forced herself up.

She pressed the heels of her hands to her eyes, shook the cold from her hair, and straightened the blanket on Mamie. When she drove up the slippery main thoroughfare, she passed only a few cars—those that did venture by must have been handled by drivers familiar with the dimensions of the sloping street. The cars seemed to lunge forward in slow motion, tires softly walloping in the snow. At the center of each intersection, under dangling traffic lights, stood a massive corn-shock and many of the shopwindows were still decorated with cutout goblins and witches.

After only a few minutes, Leona knew she couldn't go on, not in this foul weather as tired as she was. Mamie was waking up. Still looking for a place where she could rest, Leona noticed the lights chasing through the bulbs of the Old Mill Run movie marquee and the small cluster of people buying tickets. Gene Autry and
Mighty Joe Young
, a matinée double feature.

“Why don't we go to the picture show?” Leona said, carefully making a U-turn, and going back. “Yes,” she went on after a moment, “I think we should go, don't you?”

Rubbing her face, Mamie sat up, awake and rigid, staring out the window.

In the lobby they bought tickets and a red sack of popcorn for Mamie. Leona was aware that she moved rather guardedly, watching and holding on to Mamie's hand. It made her uneasy to be out with the child in public. But I can't keep her prisoner in the car, she thought, and she felt some protection in the drifting matinée crowd. A uniformed usher showed them to seats Leona chose at the side of the theater; she sent Mamie in first and took the aisle seat herself. The cartoon was ending. As soon as Mamie was comfortable, Leona settled lower in the seat until her knees touched the back of the seat ahead. If Mamie tried to leave, she would have to go past her.

There was another interlude before the first picture began; a time for the Jan Garber orchestra to perform on the screen. The music was soft and romantic, as lazy as a stream. Maybe a third of the seats were taken, but against the glow from the screen, the other moviegoers were shadowlike; faces, when they turned, were only half exposed. So for now, enclosed in semi-darkness, they were safe. Leona shut her eyes.

Her sleep was half sleep, the gray figures of the mammoth screen flickering on her eyelids and wandering thoughts. She took Mamie to the rest room between features, and afterward gave her chewing gum from her purse when she seemed restless. It was toward the end of the second movie that Leona heard a small creaking noise at the side of the screen and saw a crack of light in the exit passageway; the outside door was quickly opened and shut. She thought she heard whispering; a shadow appeared at the exit doorway and retreated. What was going on?

She straightened in her seat. After a moment, she saw emerging from the exit doorway two small children, one holding something. They stopped, whispered to each other, and then moved forward along the front-row seats, the vast screen making outlines of their heads and shoulders. They're sneaking in, Leona thought, amused and touched. They looked very small to be taking such risks and she wondered about them. Don't get caught, she wanted to tell them, or you'll be in hot water. They seemed so small and frightened. She watched them until they vanished in the dark.

At the bottom of the theater, the children stood very still, watching as the pale reflection of the movie struck the empty seats and illuminated the faces in the closer rows. “I can't see him,” the little girl whispered. “There's too many faces in here.” The boy turned to her, holding out a wrinkled photograph. “He's gotta be here,” he said. “He's gotta be. We just have to find him.” They edged forward and hesitated beside a man in an aisle seat, looking at him and then looking at the photograph. The two didn't match. Then they saw a woman and a little girl sitting together watching them, and as they went past, the woman said, “Is something wrong? What's the matter?”

But they didn't answer. Still holding the photograph before them, they went up the long aisle ramp, searching through the screen-lit faces for that one face—the only one who could make everything all right again, the way it used to be.

The letters they had waited for weren't like the other letters their mother sometimes received; they were blue envelopes of thin, crackling paper and she had to slice them open with a razor blade to read what they said. The letters didn't have any sheets of paper in them, either. The words were written on the inside of the envelope and it had to be taken apart carefully. They were like magic to Patsy and Walter.

When these letters came, their mother tore them or cut them crooked more than once hurrying to get them open, and she had to tape the bad places. She would read them through greedily, her eyes sparkling. There were parts of the letter she would read aloud to them and parts she couldn't. “Now here, for a little bit,” she would explain, “he writes just to me, something for just your daddy and me to know, private things,” then she would go on reading. The children stood next to her and watched and listened as she pointed to the tiny words and read. If they asked, or if she noticed they were puzzled, she stopped and told them what a canteen was and that Korea was clear on the other side of the ocean. In the end, their daddy always wrote that he loved them, and she choked sometimes and hugged them to her soft, sweet-smelling dress.

Lifting them up, she would carry them to the framed picture hanging from a red, gold-tasseled cord above the divan, and it was like a game they played over and over. She would tell Walter that the man in the picture with the Army cap on his forehead was his father, Private First Class Jerome Aldridge, and she'd ask if he remembered his daddy. “I remember him,” Patsy would say. “You do, doncha, Walter?” She was a year older, ready to start school in the fall, and she liked to help him make up his mind. Walter remembered his dad coming with their mother to meet them after the picture show, the same serious-looking man who wore the uniform and brought the goldfish in the white paper box full of water, and how they had fixed it a place to live in a mason jar. The next day, the man had called them into his mother's bed to read the Sunday funny papers. But sometimes Walter, who was barely five years old, acted as if he didn't know because he liked to hear his mother answer for him, “Oh, of course you don't, but you will. You'll remember when he comes home for good. You're just like him.”

“When he comes to the train station and we go to meet him,” Patsy said.

“That's right,” their mother would say. “There'll be hundreds of people milling about, hundreds upon hundreds, and then we'll see him in the crowd and we'll all be together.”

Walter always asked, “But what if we can't find him?”

“Then we'll just have to take this picture with us, and we'll look at the soldiers and we'll look at the picture, back and forth, until they match and then we'll know we've found the right daddy.”

And then Patsy would say, “But, Mommy, who do I look like, though? Am I gonna look just like you?”

“Oh, no!” their mother would exclaim. “With your red hair, you'll be lots prettier than me, like—well, like Hedy Lamarr.” And sometimes she picked up a magazine from the coffee table and showed Patsy the picture of the beautiful catlike woman.

If it was Saturday, they had to hurry or they'd be late when the Turnbull girls came for them. Their mother would help them put on their coats, and then she'd stand on the porch, waving, as they left for the matinée double feature at the theater two blocks away. And she was always there waiting under the overhang of glittering lights when they came out blinking from the show, eager for them to tell her everything that had happened, starting with the cartoon and the cowboy story, the jungle show, and the newsreel with the train in it, and the hundreds upon hundreds of cheering people just like she said it would be; and she always picked the cowboy story to hear first, and she would say, “Oh, no, they didn't!” and “Oh, surely not!” and laugh as they went back home through the late afternoon. “What happened next?” And Patsy—and then Walter—would tell her. “Oh, boy, I bet you were scared then, huh? So what happened next?” And they would laugh and tell her everything. It was the best time.

For an eternity then, two or three weeks, no letters came, and when she was cross with them she told them she was at her wits' end, she had tied herself up in knots. She said they would just stop waiting for the letters and they pretended to, but another kind of letter came, and when she read it, she turned white and fell down in a chair. She held the letter up to read it again, but her hand was shaking too much and she wadded it up. In the cupboard she found a bottle with dust on it. The bottle was half full and she couldn't get it open with her shaking hands. She kept squinching her eyes to get the tears out, and they were asking, “What's the matter, Mommy? Who's it from?” Finally she grabbed up her dresstail and twisted the cap off with that. She drank from the bottle till it was empty, roaming the house from room to room, like the goldfish in the jar, with them tagging after her, asking. And she said, “I'll tell you. But please … give me a little time to think.”

She pressed the letter flat against her knee, then folded it and put it in her purse. She sat them on the divan, arranged their clothes, their legs sticking straight out. “Now, listen carefully,” she said. “Mommy has to go out now for a little while and I can't take you with me and I don't have time to find somebody to stay with you. Now, I want you to sit right here. Don't move off this couch. Will you do that for me?” They both nodded. “I'll come back or send somebody just as soon as I can. But I want you to stay sitting right here. You promise? Tell Mommy you promise.”

“I promise,” Walter said softly, with his chin in his shirt collar, and Patsy said she promised too.

Leaning over, with the burnt smell on her breath, she kissed them. She went into the bedroom and quickly reappeared with white crescents of powder on her face and a sweet air of perfume. Without taking her coat, she hurried out the door, clutching her purse. The mail flap clacked.

A stillness settled through the house, the light changing and shifting ever so slowly on the window blinds; the two clocks ticked—the one on the living-room shelf and the one in their mother's bedroom. Her absence was everywhere in the house, but only one thought sank in Walter's mind: something awful's happened and Mommy's not coming back. The thought kept repeating itself. And eventually he muttered his fear to Patsy, who looked just as scared as he was. “She said she'd come back,” Patsy whispered. But she had never before left them like this. The afternoon droned on. The sound of the street outside came to them muffled—the throbbing passage of cars, school kids yelling on their way home. And no one came. His fear burrowed in and he wanted to go to the toilet. “You better not,” Patsy said. “You promised.” It was getting dark. Still he tried to wait. She's not coming home. Nighttime came into the room, and he couldn't hold on any longer. “I have to,” he said, and slid off the couch, but it was too late: the hot, yellow stench fumed around him, and wet stripes darkened his pants legs. Tears flooded his eyes and his nose was running and he hid his wail in his hands.