Lost (5 page)

He kept a notebook with him. When she came upon him jotting in it, he immediately put it away. It preyed on her thoughts. Now and then, as she crossed by a window, she would gaze in the direction of the dog pen or, while her father was at work, she would take the Chinaman a lump of sugar and talk to him. If the dog was in a good mood that day, she would even reach her fingers through the two layers of fence and stroke his stubby nose. But she didn't go into the pen.

Usually it was during supper that her father baited her. “Mr. Briggenschmidt said he had a gun that was stolen some time back.” They'd eat in silence, Toddy stealing glances at her and Mamie mechanically lifting her fork. “But I showed him the gun Sherman used and it wasn't it.” Afterward, Mamie was so tense she couldn't sleep. “Why don't you just tell him?” Toddy asked her late one night. “Because,” Mamie said, utterly exasperated, “Toddy,
I don't know!
” Finally, one night, she set down her fork and exploded at her father: “Daddy, I don't know where he got that gun! I don't know, I swear I don't. I wish you'd stop it. Please stop telling me—stop telling. I don't know!” The tears were streaming down her face. “I want you to stop it. I can't stand it. If I knowed where he got it, I'd tell, but I don't.… Okay? Okay?”

But he didn't stop, and her fear mounted and mounted.

On Tuesday evening, November eighteenth, Mamie took a bath by herself, sweetening the bathwater with splashes of perfume and a cake of L'Eau de Paree. Sitting before her mother's vanity with a powder puff in one hand and the atomizer in the other, she dampened and patted her face with still another coat of perfume. She cut her hair, using the fingernail scissors, until it looked worse than when she had started, but she liked it. She dressed herself in her very best Sunday clothes—her taffeta dress, her white shoes and socks—and she carried her blue plastic purse with thirty-one cents in it. She waited that evening on the stairs and on the settee and at the dusty dining-room table. Her mother went by and patted her head. When her father, who had been working overtime, came home at seven-thirty, he told her to go change out of her play clothes and come help him get ready for supper. She lay across her bed and cried. On that day she was seven years old.

Somehow Toddy realized what had happened. When they were getting ready for bed, he gave her a present. “It's for your birthday,” he said, and he handed her the old cuff-link box, unwrapped. “Go ahead. Open it.” Inside was his skull ring, like the Phantom's. A summer ago, he'd sold garden seeds and saved box tops and sent away for it; it had one red eye and one green eye. The ring was just like the Phantom's ring in the funny papers; it could dent your jaw and leave its mark forever. “But, Toddy,” Mamie said, “I can't take
this!
This's
your
ring you sent off for.”

“You have to,” he said. “I don't have nothing else you'd want.” The back of the ring was adjustable and he bent it to fit tighter on her finger. He told her it would probably turn her finger green, but in that moment it became her most favorite of all her favorite things. She wore it to bed.

At Christmastime, their parents had a disagreement that lasted several days. Their father wanted to have Christmas as always, with a tree and presents underneath; their mother said that since Sherman couldn't participate, she wanted to put it off until they could all be together again. The two younger children heard them arguing in the night after the lights had been turned out. In the end, their father decided it. He took Toddy and Mamie through the bright glittering stores, where they bought armloads of presents, but on Christmas Day the three large presents wrapped for their mother and the four wrapped for Sherman remained untouched under the tree all that day and the next.

In the evenings of those months, they listened to the radio: “Junior Miss” and “Lux Radio Theatre,” “Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy,” “The Shadow,” and then “Boston Blackie.” For New Year's Eve, they stayed up to listen to Guy Lombardo and the Royal Canadians.

The condition of the house fell steadily into decline. Balls of dust rolled underfoot. Their mother went through the motions of keeping herself going; that was all. She moved through the house like a hollow-eyed ghost. For a long time, Mamie and her father kept the kitchen halfway clean, tidying up each night after supper while Toddy did his homework. None of it seemed to matter. Their upside-down lives drifted on without any reversal in sight. Sherman lay unconscious on the wicker lounger. He was now thirteen.

A few nights into February, as Toddy set the supper table and Mamie laid out plates, their mother came from the living room. She stood in the doorway with her back to them, to Mamie and Toddy and their father. When she turned, her face was contorted and alive. She tried to speak, but her mouth just worked, her eyes opened wide. Toddy said, “Mama, what's wrong?”

“He talked to me,” she stammered. “Just now he talked to me. Our prayers are answered. Just now he said, ‘I'm in the light.' That's what he said. Of course, he sounded weak, but I heard him. ‘I'm in the light, the red light.' That's it—it exactly.”

They filed into the room and stood around the lounger, but Sherman looked no different from the way he had yesterday, and no sound came from him except his ragged breathing. It was like a terrible joke. Her mother studied their sad faces. “You don't believe me. I didn't believe it myself at first.” Tears stood in her eyes. “You think I made it up—it's all over your faces. But I didn't.… Just wait, you'll see.” She had begun to tap her foot. “You'll see.”

The following afternoon, she had the children stand with her beside the makeshift bed. “I want you to feel how much heavier his arm is. He's getting stronger. Really he is. So much stronger. I can see it.” The arm placed first in the upturned hands of Toddy, then in Mamie's, seemed heavy, but they didn't know how to gauge it.

It was another three weeks, toward the end of February, before Sherman opened his eyes. According to their mother, this time he said, “Oh, Mama, I'm so tired.” The doctor was called, and again the children were kept from the room overnight. To dampen their impatience, their father said that evening, “You can see him tomorrow. That's plenty soon enough. The doctor said we have to take it slow. And Mama wants to give him a bath first and cut his hair.” He headed back downstairs, but they trailed after him in their pajamas.

“Will he know who we are?” Toddy asked.

“Sometimes he will,” their father said with his hand on the bannister, and it seemed an odd and baffling reply.

It was noon the following day before they were called into the living room. The window shades had been lifted. The purity of the winter light magnified the room, making it appear vast and sparsely furnished. The couch had been pushed back against the wall; a plain spindle-back chair replaced it at the bedside. “Toddy, come on,” their mother said. “And, Mamie, close the door as you come in, sweetie. It's too drafty. We don't want him to catch cold.”

Mamie did as she was told. Charged with anticipation, but not knowing what to expect, she lagged behind Toddy. She kept her eyes fastened on the lounger as they went to join their father on its far side. She leaned forward as she walked, trying to peer around her mother's shoulder; after a few more steps she could see Sherman propped up on pillows, his head pitched slightly downward. She moistened her lips and bit them and swallowed hard.

All this time, her mother was speaking to Sherman in a soft voice. “He's doing just fine. Yes, he is. Just fine, but look how tired he is. He's slept so long he wore himself out. So tired …”

Vaguely nodding and swaying, his head lifted by slow degrees.

It was as if everything else disappeared. Only his incredibly blue eyes looked up from below his eyelashes, and the room began to slide around Mamie. The smart-alecky, devil-may-care glint that had been so much a part of him was gone; in its place was something hard, and cruel, and blunt. She wanted to scream, No! He's not all right. He's not just fine. His eyes're wrong. Can't you see? It's all wrong!

And for as long as that moment lasted, it was like a horrible dream that wouldn't go away.

Then, as if moving it through heavy air, Sherman lifted his hand toward her and her mother's voice broke through that first stricken impression. “Mamie, don't be bashful,” she said. “Take hold of his hand and tell him who you are, because he remembers you, really he does, but he's kind of confused. Everything seems so brand new to him. You'll have to help me watch out for him. Will you do that? Help me take care of him?”

Deliberately, Mamie nodded. She wanted to take his hand and help him, and then she did take it and she knew she must never tell them that he wasn't just fine, because he was her brother who had watched over her and taken her out into the night. Only he knew how to undo the trouble they were in; only he could help her return the things they had taken and not get caught. So for now he couldn't be anything but fine, because now that he was coming back, he was really all she had.

They knew from that day that he would never be the same as before the shooting, and yet it was like an unspoken secret they kept to themselves. Their mother acknowledged nothing but the glory of his improvement, and the others, the children and their father, realized instinctively what had to be done. With subtle, innocent glances, they communicated what they couldn't say out loud, what they couldn't have put into words if they'd wanted to, except to admit that he was different; changed. The glint was gone. They missed his smirky smile, his cockiness, and the gleam of mischief in his eyes, but with their silence they wove a cocoon around the truth—around the pain and sorrow and disappointment.

Within the week, their mother was more like her old self than she had been in eight months. Humming, she tied an apron around her waist and put her hair up in a scarf triangle She went to work downstairs, mopping and cleaning, and she cooked expansive suppers, complete with dessert. As soon as Sherman could sit up for any reasonable length of time, she tied pillows to the back and the seat of her granddaddy's rocker, and when their father came home from work, he carried Sherman to the dining room and placed him in the padded rocking chair. In that way, he was with them each evening.

With his blank blue eyes, Sherman appeared more confused than docile, and when he did not looked confused, Mamie saw the hardness in his glance that chilled her to the heart.

Seldom was he cross, even more seldom did he complain, but he had frightening spells where he blacked out. In the beginning, only the simplest acts made sense to him. Did the sandwich taste good? “It's good,” he'd say, staring into the distance. When he slumped back on the pillows and their mother asked if he was tired, “I'm tired,” he'd say, “… sleepy,” as if the connection between the two words were abstract and difficult. And when it was nine o'clock and he wasn't sleepy, she gave him medicine to put him to sleep. In time, he did remember who they were and called them by name—their mother initially, then Toddy, then Mamie and their father. It took a long time; he seemed to have to dredge their likenesses from the depths of his memory. But every day he grew a little stronger and a little more aware.

And their mother's praise of him never faltered. Her cheerful patter embraced him completely. Even in the early morning, as their father shaved to go to work, they sometimes heard her. “There goes Jimmy Porterfield to deliver his newspapers. See him? There he goes. One day you'll ride a bicycle just like his.” She spent most of her time coaxing him to walk another step, to take one more bite; she urged him to speak without slurring. “How strong you'll be,” she would say. “As good as new. That's my good boy.” As if she could leave the past behind. But Mamie thought, Not for long will he be good. Not for very much longer.

During those months, those slow, rainy months when winter telescoped into spring, Mamie gently shared her things with him, even when he had no patience and tore her paper dolls or sent the toy lead soldiers she'd chosen for his Christmas present flying under the swipe of his hand. When their mother was out of earshot, she told him about the Chinaman. “I took him one of your old socks,” she said, “so he'll remember you.” In the chair too high for her, she sat beside his bed, talking quietly as their mother hovered nearby, or when he was finally able to walk from the chair to the couch to the doorway, she stood with him. She wanted to talk to him, really talk to him, but the chance didn't come and he was very reticent about talking to her. In all those early months, he didn't think to ask what had happened to him. “I'm hurt,” he would say. “Yes,” their mother would say, “you hurt yourself. But we're going to fix it. You'll be good as new.” And the room would start to slide behind his gaze and Mamie would want to cry out, No, no, he's not! He's changed! He's not good … not good.

At the supper table early that summer, their mother said, “He's getting too strong for me. It wears me out just to have him lean on me. He's almost as tall as I am, and solid as a rock.”

“Five foot two and eyes of blue,” Toddy said.

One day weeks later, when the doctor had been to examine him, the doctor said to their father, “Walk with me out to the car. I have one of the prescriptions in my other case.” But they didn't reach the car; they stood on the sidewalk with their backs to the house and seemed to stay out there endlessly. A little over a year had passed since that awful night in the blackberry patch. It was the middle of August; school would start soon. The doctor carried his coat, blotted his face with a handkerchief. And Mamie watched them through the blur of the ticking window fan. Finally, the black sedan drove away and their father came in empty-handed. “What did the doctor say, Daddy?” Mamie asked. With his fingers, he smoothed the sweat from his eyebrow. “Oh,” he said, preoccupied, “nothing's very clear-cut right now. We have to decide what to do about Sherman.”