No One Tells Everything (16 page)

You stare hard at the branches of the buckeye tree in the backyard. They are up there, the cicadas. Bulging red eyes. Short stubby antennae. But the wings are delicate and see-through, like lace or a dried-out leaf when all that’s left is the veins. You narrow your focus to one section, one twig, but the cicadas are too well camouflaged. You move to an oak but the branches are too high up to see anything.

You imagine what it’s like for them, all the same, calling out together, looking down on the neighborhood. You spin around until you’re dizzy and fall to your knees. When everything straightens out, you find a stick and poke around the yard, looking for one that might have strayed and gotten lost.

You don’t find a live one, but you do find an abandoned brown cicada skin clinging to the bark of a tree. You pluck it off and cradle the scratchy husk in your palm. Inside the house, the air conditioning gives you goose bumps—your dad likes it freezing—so you take a seat in the kitchen, in the sun, with a bag of Oreos.

You hear a car on the gravel driveway, the engine turn off, two car doors slam, your sister’s little feet slapping along the pathway to the house. You didn’t want to go to the pool—the kids, the games, your large pale body, the chlorine that stings your eyes.

Your mom likes to go to the pool and wear a bathing suit because she looks better than the other moms. She does aerobics all spring to get ready. If she goes in, she doesn’t get her hair wet. She says the chlorine’s bad for it but you know that’s not the reason. You remember when she used to take you in with your water wings, her hands firm under your arms, face to face, before you got too big and she didn’t like that you still wanted her to pull you around.

Your mom comes into the kitchen wearing a bright lime green sundress over her bathing suit, her large sunglasses that make her look like a fly are perched on top of her head. She’s drinking a Diet Coke. She finds you chewing with your chin resting on the table.

“Sit up, Charles,” she says, taking the cookies away. “How about some carrots.” But then she sees you’re looking eye to eye with your insect find. She screws up her face. “What is that? A locust? Ick. What are you doing with that? Take it outside.”

Caroline shrieks and runs upstairs in her pink bathing suit. She just turned five last week. She is a soft caramel-corn color from a summer at the pool.

“It’s not a locust,” you say. “It’s a cicada.”

“I don’t care,” your mother says, her eyebrows raised. “It’s disgusting and it doesn’t belong in the house.”

You take your cicada shell up to your room and set it on the carpet next to you as you open up the C Encyclopedia. You learn that there’s fossil evidence of cicadas from 65 million years ago and the ancient Greeks kept them as pets. Maybe you’ll catch one and keep it, you think. But the noise would probably keep you awake at night. A cicada can chirp so loud you can hear it from half a mile away.

“Charles,” Caroline says in the doorway, “I swam halfway across underwater without stopping.”

You take the insect body and thrust it at her with a monster growl. She screams and laughs and runs away, slamming her bedroom door down the hall.

You learn that male cicadas create their song by vibrating drum-like membranes on their abdomen. They’re calling for a mate. But once they mate, they die. You wonder why they look for a mate at all if it’s going to kill them. You’d think they would have figured it out by now. Or maybe they hope this time will be different.

You hear your father’s car in the driveway. He opens the front door and you listen for where he is in the house, first in the kitchen talking to your mom, and then walking up the stairs. He passes by your room, but comes back. You know he’s making himself do it, but at least he has come back and you are glad.

“What’re you reading about, champ?”

You warm to the old nickname he never uses anymore since you suck at sports and don’t care about bats or balls. You wonder if this will be the last time he calls you this.

“Cicadas,” you say. “Did you know that some people eat them?”

“Oh,” he says. “No, I didn’t. That’s something.”

Your father is looking out the window when he says this. He doesn’t like to look at you. His face is sunburned. He was out sailing on Lake Erie today but he didn’t invite you along. He squats down next to you but doesn’t sit.

“Did you ever hear the story about the cicada?” he asks.

You shake your head, thrilled to have him to yourself, soaking up his presence in your room even though you know he is biding his time before he can go.

“During the summer, the ant worked hard to gather food for the coming winter. But the cicada sang and made fun of the ant for working so hard. When the winter came, the cicada had nothing to eat and had to beg the ant for food,” he says.

“But ants don’t eat the same things as cicadas,” you say, confused by the story.

“No, it’s a fable. It’s not supposed to be real.”

“Oh,” you say. “Okay.”

You smile too widely and laugh, trying to make him happy.

“Do you understand? It’s a story with a moral. Don’t put off until tomorrow what you should do today.”

“Yeah. It’s good to do stuff right away,” you say.

Your dad smiles without smiling.

“Yeah,” he says. “Kind of.”

“Dad!” Caroline calls from down the hall. “Daddy!”

“Coming, pumpkin,” he says.

You turn back to your book as your dad leaves. After mating, the female cicada cuts slits into the bark of a branch and deposits her eggs. When the eggs hatch, the newborn nymphs drop to the ground, where they burrow in the dirt to begin another cycle. When they’ve matured, they build an exit tunnel to the surface and emerge into the world. They shed their skins, and they are adults.

You forgot all about your specimen and now you see that your dad has accidentally crushed the dried body with his shoe. Three legs are buried in the carpet. The torso is split in half. You gather up the remains and place them on your dresser like it’s an operating table. But the Elmer’s comes out too fast, drowning the leg you are trying to glue back on. You try to wipe it off on your sweatpants but then your fingers stick together and the cicada leg breaks in half. Glue oozes out from the overturned bottle and globs onto the carpeting. You will yourself not to cry. Don’t be a baby, you think. You pound your fist against your leg. You stupid baby.

You scoop up the hull fragments in your hand, take them into your bathroom, and flush them down the toilet. One brown, spiny leg floats in the bowl.

Outside, the chorus whines. You run as fast as you can across the big lawn, arms out, face up toward the sun, pumping your stocky legs, trying to get away from yourself.

But then you run out of breath and have to stop. You don’t feel any lighter. You feel the same.

———

After the stabbing had taken place, police believe Raggatt wrapped Shafer’s body in plastic bags and placed it in his Land Rover, where the body remained for seven days. He then moved the body and buried it in the backyard of a property at Long Beach, a place he was renting.

“I don’t think there is any rational interpretation,” Mr. Dubno said. “But that is not the issue. The issue is, is he responsible for what he did? Is he legally responsible? And I think that is going to be answered in the negative.”

———

I
t is a brilliant day, the warmest yet. The sky is cornflower blue, the air velvety from pollen and evaporating dew. Despite her botched run-in with Caroline, Grace wakes up feeling energized by purpose, newly committed. Her notebook pages bulge with scrawled notes, and she feels buoyed by the possibility of discovery, the rightness of her search.

She finds her mother in back of the house, kneeling between rows of tomato plants.

“Do you need any help?” Grace asks.

“Oh hi, Grace,” her mother says, sitting up on her heels. She brushes the hair off her face and unknowingly smears dirt across her forehead. “No. I’m okay.”

“What’s Dad up to?”

“He’s at the slides again. He got out the tray from our famous canoe trip.”

“The photos make it look like we had fun,” Grace says and laughs.

“Oh come on, we had fun,” her mother says, her eyes hopeful as she stands and stretches her back.

“Yeah, I guess,” Grace says, wondering what her mother has chosen to remember.

Her father had been in a sour mood the morning they set out in the car for a river in southern Ohio, hungover and distant behind his aviator sunglasses, his hair lightened from the summer sun. Her mother, in a white shirt and khaki Bermudas, held a large picnic basket on her lap like she was holding a child, smiling back at Grace and Callie, her dark hair kerchiefed from her tanned face. They had all been looking forward to this trip for weeks.

Despite the early hour, her dad drank four beers from his chilled six-pack on the drive down. Grace and Callie, already in their bathing suits, their thighs sticking to the vinyl of the backseat, baited each other across an imaginary dividing line. Callie tattled on Grace for touching her and their dad yelled at Grace to behave. In the front, their parents snipped at each other.

But by the time they got into the canoe, strapped into their bulging orange life vests, their dad’s spirits had brightened and he was the playful man his daughters adored. To their delight, he splashed them as he oared, and for a gilded moment, they floated on calm, dappled water. He looked over his shoulder and smiled at his wife, roping her in, and she smiled back. Everything, it seemed, was right.

They stopped at a little island, where they skipped rocks after a lunch of crustless peanut butter sandwiches, chocolate chip cookies, and apple juice from a thermos, but Grace and Callie soon grew groggy and restless. Back in the canoe with so many miles to go, their parents started rowing faster, complaining about sore arms and the other’s crooked paddling. The beer ran out too soon. Callie threw a tantrum over not getting a chance to row. Their father gave in to her, as he always did, and as he stood to switch places, he lost his balance and the boat capsized, dumping them all into the water.

“Jesus Christ!” he screamed.

“Jack!” their mother hissed back at him, miraculously holding the camera above the water.

Her bra showed through her wet shirt and mascara ran down her cheek.

Callie started crying, which turned into red-faced sobbing. Grace told her to shut up and was quickly scolded by her mother. The picnic basket floated away in the current until it got stuck on some tree roots downriver. Her father’s wallet was a soaked brown square.

“Where are my goddamn keys? Goddamnit. The car keys.”

“Jack, please,” her mother said, quietly furious.

“Susan, I don’t want to hear it from you. This trip was your idea.”

They all peered into the water. Grace wanted to be the one to find the keys, to salvage something from the day, to win back her father. The canoe filled with water and sank. Her mother waded off to rescue the picnic basket.

“I found them!”

Callie jumped up and down in the water, jingling the keys above her head, her cheeks still glistening from tears.

“That’s my girl,” their dad said, patting her sun-warmed head.

With the help of passing teenagers, the canoe was emptied and righted, and they were back on their soggy way.

Memory is a finicky chronicler. Grace’s mother seems only to remember a snapshot of the four of them together in the boat, before they capsized, before Callie died.

Grace pulls apart the yellow tuft of a dandelion. Her mother resumes her weeding, unearthing a good-sized stone from the dirt.

“What are you going to do today, Grace?”

“More research. I have to make use of my time here.”

Her mother glances at her.

“You think that boy didn’t do it? Is that it?”

“I think he was bullied into a confession. He wanted to please people. I think he just gave up.”

“I only know what you’ve told me about it, but what about the police?” her mother asks.

Grace shakes her head dismissively.

“I mean, he knew the girl. He liked her. I think he felt guilty for something. But I don’t think he did what they accuse him of. He’s a good kid, Mom. Damaged. But not evil.”

Grace picks a lavender flower from the myrtle groundcover, sucking on it for any trace of honey. There is a faint sweetness.

“Isn’t that his lawyer’s job?” her mother asks, shading her eyes with her gloved hand. “To explain what happened?”

“It should be. But people believe what they want to believe. They’re going with an insanity plea.”

“So you think he might have killed the girl?”

Grace rubs her hands over her face.

“I don’t know,” she says finally. “Maybe he was a witness. Or it was an accident. But whatever happened, he’s not willing to fight for himself.”

She picks another flower and a bumblebee the size of a kumquat flies at her, buzzing around her head as she zigzags away.

“Just stand still and it’ll go away,” her mother says.

“Easy for you to say.”

Grace runs a circle around the garden.

“I’m just trying to understand, Grace. About what you’re doing.”

When Grace stops running, the bee flies away.

“You’re the one who used to say, ‘Love the sinner not the sin.’ He needs my help,” Grace says. “And there isn’t anyone else.”

Her mother sets her trowel down and wipes a lock of hair from her forehead with her wrist. Her mouth opens to speak but nothing comes out.

“I’m going to get the mail,” Grace says. “Do you have anything to go out?”

“No, but your father might. You should go ask him.”

Grace purses her lips at the thought.

“Oh, Grace?”

“Yeah?”

“I almost forgot, a nice boy called this morning for you.”

“What?” Her mind trips over itself.

“Brian something in New York. His number’s on the fridge.”

“Brian.” She exhales with puffed-out cheeks.

Her mom wants to ask, as another mother might, if he is a suitor or has that potential. But she’s not one to initiate conspiratorial conversation. She has always been rather Protestant in her reticence to pry into Grace’s business.