Lost (3 page)

She waited as long as she could, hoping for a time when she could be with her mother by herself. Night came into the house and the staircase grew steadily dimmer. The nurse left at six o'clock, telling Mamie's father she would return at eight. He followed her outside as far as the end of the walk, talking. Mamie dumped the clutter of paper dolls off her skirt and crept down the stairs. Standing at the window beside the front door, she saw that they were still talking. She hurried toward the sliding doors, faintly etched now with light. No sound came from the other side. Grasping one of the handles, she slid the door until she could slip inside. She noticed in a glance that the room was empty of flowers.

A single bedside lamp burned on an end table, its dark lampshade capturing much of the light. The oxygen tent was gone. The couch had been pushed up beside the wicker lounger, and on the couch a shape moved. Inching forward, she saw that it was her mother, nestled alongside Sherman. She was murmuring to him when she saw Mamie. They stared at each other. Quiet as a cat, Mamie stopped at the foot of the lounger, rigid. Finally, her mother broke the silence. “Sherman, look who's here,” she said, her voice croaky but kind. “Mamie's come to say good night.” Slowly she lifted her face from his. “Look how much better he is today. The color's come back to his cheeks. He's so much better—so much better off here at home where we can take care of him. What a fine boy he is. So strong. Mamie, don't be scared. Come on around here and say good night. Come on, now. He's fast asleep. He can't hurt you.”

With her hand trailing on the wicker, Mamie moved slowly up along the side of the lounger toward the place her mother had indicated with a nod.

“Now see,” her mother said even more quietly, “that wasn't so hard, was it? Go ahead. Tell him good night.” The stench of antiseptic and perspiration was stifling.

Everything seemed terribly wrong; nothing was the same as it had been. She could not see that Sherman was breathing at all. The sheets did not move upon his body, and his head—his lolling head was enormous with bandages. As she stood trembling at the bedside, peering over at his swollen, almost unrecognizable face, she was dumbstruck with how thoroughly everything had changed. Even her mother had suddenly been transformed. In the three days she had stayed in the room, her hair had turned white in places and her eyes smoldered in her gaunt face.

Tears ran loose in Mamie's eyes. “Mama,” she said, bracing herself. She stammered for breath; then she blurted it out: “Mama, is he still dead?”

Shooting across the narrow width of the lounger, her mother's hand sank into Mamie's hair, clasped the back of her head, and pulled her down across the white sheets until their faces were inches apart. “Don't you ever say that,” she whispered sharply. “Don't you ever. He's not dead and he's not going to die. You know how I know? Because”—wincing under her grip, Mamie begged to be let go, but her mother only tightened her hold—“because the good Lord tells us he will not give us something we cannot bear and—and I can't … bear … it.” All at once, she sounded absolutely exhausted. Her fingers relaxed their grip and Mamie pulled away with such force that she fell on the floor. She picked herself up and stared at her mother, but she didn't cry any more; she backed away, blinking the tears from her eyes.

Her mother had returned her attention to Sherman, crooning to him and straightening the bedclothes around him. Watching them while she rubbed her sore scalp, Mamie realized that she was completely on her own. She'd wanted to go to her mother, had waited these three days to sit on her lap and tell her everything—the truth about what she and Sherman had done together. But she couldn't now. She would do his bidding as he had asked, as he had taught her. She was afraid to tell her father, afraid of what he might do, and now that her mother had given herself to Sherman, there was no one left to tell it to—except, maybe, the Chinaman.

The next morning, in the hour before daybreak, Mamie awoke quite suddenly for no explainable reason. She sensed someone near, watching her, almost asking her to turn around. She peered through the half-light, this way and that, but there was no one. She rolled from her bed and padded down the hall.

The water drummed from the faucet as she filled the basin. Standing on her short red stool, Mamie doused her face, put soap on it, and rinsed it off. Toddy's hair was dark with a natural wave, but her hair was almost the same color as Sherman's—what her mother called dishwater blond. Staring at her own face in the mirror, she stretched the skin white over her nose and lowered her eyelids just slightly, trying to make Sherman's face. But where her nose was thin and straight, his was thicker, with a gristly lump in the middle from when he broke it; where her gray-green eyes were long-lashed and open, his were blue and droopy and quick. And besides, she thought, she had freckles. But trying to conjure his face caused her mind to whirl with memories.

“Look,” Sherman said.

“What is it?” she asked him.

“A button.”

“Whose button?” She laughed through her hands.

“Dad's. I just got it while he's asleep. Now it's your turn.”

“But what should I get?”

“Whatever you want. Anything you want. It's a game.”

She squinted at him. “What kind of a game?”

He said, “You have to get something from them while you're very close. It's like you trick them and you have to do it so they don't know. See? A hair would be good or—or something hard, like an eyelash.”

The house had seemed labyrinthine then, all hallways and hiding places where they could share their triumphs and laughs, and if discovered, they always knew where to meet later—in the attic below the circular window where the glass bulged out like an eyepiece. There, panting for breath, they would have a quick laugh before they revealed the surprises in their hands, buttons and ravelings and hairs. Afterward, standing on boxes, they gazed down through the distorting window on the pattern of the town, overlooking the streets and blocks all the way to Main Street, with the stream meandering beside it; gazed down like invincible rulers on their kingdom of Graylie in the land of Pennsylvania.

It was a game only she and Sherman had played; Toddy was always afraid he'd get in trouble. As Mamie remembered all this, stepping down from her stool and pushing it aside, it dawned on her where Sherman must've put their sack. Now she would do what he couldn't do. As she had promised.

She wasted no time. She changed all her clothes down to her underwear. She put on the simple smock-dress and buttoned the back, but got it crooked. She couldn't reach it; it pooched and gapped. Finally she left it that way. Very gently she shut the bedroom door behind her, slapped the damp hair from her forehead, and moved down the hall on sock feet, carrying her shoes.

She glanced into the room Toddy and Sherman had shared, and saw that the beds were neatly made. It seemed odd not to have Toddy there; she wished he'd just come back home. Ten feet farther and she entered her parents' bedroom, tiptoeing quickly to the bed. Her mother's side of the bed was empty, unrumpled. Her father's mouth hung partly open, his cheeks telling breath, and his eyes were crinkled skin. She backed away, easing the door shut so the knob barely clicked. The sun was coming up.

Retreating to the top of the stairs, Mamie opened a white door that looked like a closet door. As she turned the wooden latch, the trapped hot air engulfed her. She stepped into the swarming heat on the first step and pulled the door to, leaving it open a crack. Faint pencils of light cut the dark hemisphere of rafters above.

Feeling her way in the attic room, she lifted the curled shade on the back window to let in the early light; it was a pure, harsh light falling in a long trapezoid on the floor. “You can find it,” Sherman had said. She opened the chifforobe where they had hidden things before and rummaged through the clutter of old magazines and years-old dresses, found nothing. She searched the other side of the partition. Gingham quilt pieces, embroidery patterns and floss, a ragged clump of discharge papers, a newspaper print of
The Last Supper
, and more, but in all of it she couldn't find the paper sack. When she closed the chifforobe door, the air fumed with dust. She sneezed into both her hands.

Slowly, Mamie turned until she saw the camelback trunk standing on end. She pushed it aside a few inches and squeezed past. Picking up an old shirt, she wiped the cobwebs and dust from the large ox-eye window and looked down on the summer landscape, the wide perspective of houses to the meandering creek, and, at the other extremity, the highway and the blackberry patch where they had gone to pick berries the evening he … shot himself. She stood back, turning her head. Then she saw it.

Reaching as high as she could, she took the grocery sack with the wadded top from the exposed timber above the window. The top of the sack had been rolled and unrolled so many times it was as soft and pliable as chamois. One piece at a time, she emptied the contents of the sack to separate her few things from his, arranging them on the rough-sawed cross-member below the round window.

A half-empty pack of Lucky Strike cigarettes, his latest acquisition, the red target beneath the cellophane beginning to fade.

A marbleized fountain pen with the name J. T. Ivers burned in gold along its side.

A tie clasp in the shape of an ocean liner taken from the home of Mr. and Mrs. Bledsoe the same night she took the brand-new tube of lipstick encrusted with rhinestones. This she set aside.

A tiny spyglass, on a beaded chain, with a hootchie-cootchie dancer in it.

Two cigars, one broken, but both with their bright chromoliths intact, which he liked.

A rubber, the use of which he would not tell her about; just what it was: a rubber.

A tissue with a red kiss on it taken from Marilyn Haupt's dresser at 3:00 a.m. one night. Mamie remembered that night in particular because the clock in that bedroom glowed in the dark and she wanted it, but Sherman said it would take up too much room and make too much noise in the sack. Marilyn Haupt didn't sleep with any of her clothes on.

A huge knobby class ring with mohair around it and the initials R.G.

A red-and-yellow box of bullets.

A five-dollar bill, four tens, twenty-seven ones, and two silver dollars.

A postcard from the Everglades; the scribbled handwriting on the back side neither of them could read, but they liked the picture of the alligator on the front. And, taken that same night, a love letter addressed to Miss Peggy Dunnhurst, 273 Stockton Ave., Graylie, Penn.

Matching hair barrettes with laughing clown faces whose eyes dangled on springs—her absolute favorite things, but Sherman had told her she could never wear them because they had belonged to Suzie Rawlings, who lived only two doors away. These she left among the array of Sherman's things to be returned to the sack.

A charm bracelet of state capitals, which she set aside not to wear but to keep and look at.

Three speckled bird feathers they had found in the street one clear morning.

A Gem razor, still in its green plastic case, and a green plastic dispenser of single-edged razor blades.

In a separate, smaller sack, a collection of old Army medals and ribbons.

Two chocolate bonbons in their white paper cups, which she promptly ate. They had melted so many times they tasted funny.

An empty bronze-colored locust shell split perfectly down the back. It was huge in her small hand, the largest one they had ever found. She fastened its claws into the front of her smock, wearing it like a pin.

In soft rolled wads, a pair of gray silk stockings.

Books of paper matches and wooden matches with chalky red tips.

Pieces from a Zippo lighter and a pocket watch Sherman had taken apart to see how they worked. And, at the bottom of everything, Mr. Atherton's small brown spiral-bound notebook half full of his cryptic notes and figures. The rubber band around it was notched and limp with age. It broke when she tried to remove it. Licking her thumb, she turned the small pages until she found what Sherman had written. On one page, his name had been repeatedly drawn in flamboyant curlicue letters. The next page contained his note.

I AM GOIN TO KILL THEM I NO WHERE A GUN IS AND SHELLS NOBODY WILL BE OK BUT US NALE THE WINDAS AN DOORS SHUT THAN SET IT ON FIRE

Mamie could read only part of it, but she knew what it said. She had watched him write it, laboring over each word, talking it out. Their father had asked her why Sherman had done it; now she tried to recall the day he'd written the note and everything leading up to it, because maybe hidden in the note, like a riddle, was
why
.…

One evening last spring, walking home from the baseball diamond, Sherman saw a pretty blonde woman getting into her car. The grocery boy had put her bags of groceries in the back seat, and he held the door open for her while she arranged herself behind the steering wheel. She wore a sleeveless blouse with a sailor collar, and Bermuda shorts. Her name was Lila Stiles; she was recently married and Sherman had noticed her many times before. On impulse, as he passed down the side of her low-slung car, he stuck his head through the open window and kissed her. With his quick left hand inside her blouse, he tugged at her brassiere. Moaning against the press of his mouth, she dug the heel of her hand into the chrome horn ring on the steering wheel and he fled under the blare of the noise. He arrived home out of breath, in a state of agitation. When he told Mamie about it, he said he thought his heart would stop when he did it—the feeling of power and excitement went way beyond anything they'd felt when they took things. It was like a jolt of lightning. He said he would try it again. Mamie asked to go along, but he said not with this. It was too dangerous.

Two days later, a woman stood at the corner of Main and Grand Avenue, freshening her lipstick. The usual flow of passersby moved easily about her. In one hand she held a compact before her face, in the other a tube of lipstick. Her purse was tucked under her left arm. Suddenly, in the small frame of her mirror, she saw a flurry of movement behind her. Her skirt flew high above her hips, exposing her completely from the waist down. Yelling, she whirled around and saw a young boy running away. Her purse lay spilled on the sidewalk.