The Heights
I
T WENT WITHOUT
saying in the Heights that Junior and Patsy Mackey were blessed. One look at their house, that Queen Anne with its gingerbread trim and its dramatic roof gables and its bay windows and that marvelous wraparound porch, said it all. Everyone anticipated the Holiday Parade of Homes that took place each Christmas so they could have a peek inside and, if they were lucky, perhaps a word or two with the Mackeys themselves.
In the meantime, unless someone was lucky enough to be a close family friend, glimpses would have to suffice. Anyone driving past could slow just enough to get a glimpse of the house and the wreath on the front door, which changed according to the seasons. Sometimes a car would turn onto Shasta Drive and then down the alley that ran behind the Mackeys’ house all for another look at the patio, its pavers cut from blue limestone shipped in from Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, at least so word had it at Burget’s Sand and Gravel. Along the edge of the patio a fishpond caught the water trickling down over a wall of that blue limestone. The lawn was always freshly mowed and edged, and Patsy Mackey’s rosebushes were glorious in the summer. No one could raise roses like Patsy, and why shouldn’t that be so? Just take a look at her children. Handsome and full of vigor. Everything about the Mackeys—their children, their roses, their patio, their house, the luminaries that lit their driveway during the Holiday Parade of Homes—announced that they were golden.
Sometimes people stopped their cars and took snapshots. It was that kind of home. They were that kind of family. Nearly nine years had gone by since President Kennedy had been assassinated, long enough for the shock to fade, but not so long to make people forget what it had been like to have a family like the Kennedys, who captivated a country with their charm, their wealth, their good looks. In Tower Hill, that was the Mackeys.
In the days after Katie disappeared, Pete Wilson, who took care of film developing at Fite Photography, said he couldn’t begin to count the number of rolls that came in with shots of the Mackeys’ house and yard. “It was like we’d all gone away,” he said. “The whole damned town of us, and all that was left was that house.”
What no one knew was that in the weeks leading up to Katie’s disappearance, Junior Mackey, at moments when there was nothing to keep him on the sunny side—no canasta parties, or basketball games at the high school, or home-staged talent shows featuring Patsy and Katie—found his heart seized and aching. He was the sort of man who, by nature, brooded over his mistakes; often the smallest, most commonplace things set him to sulking: catching his reflection in a window as he passed, hearing an owl calling in the night, or the creak of bedsprings as Katie or Gilley or Patsy turned over in their beds.
He crossed over then—left the life he thought was his and found himself, poleaxed and weak-kneed, stumbling about in a place where he saw himself, his true self, and he couldn’t, as much as he wanted to, look away.
It was then that he thought of the moment—all those years ago—when he and Patsy, both of them only eighteen, stood in the alleyway behind the doctor’s office in Indianapolis on a night when snow was dusting their heads, and she turned to him and said, “Gil,” said it like a plea, and he squeezed her hand and told her, “You can do this. Jeez, Patsy. It’s the best thing.”
That was the moment he now wished he could change. He wished he had said, “All right. Yes, we’ll go home. Yeah, sure. We’ll go home and we’ll get hitched and we’ll have this baby.” If only he’d said that. If only he hadn’t given a hang about what his father would say. His father, who had told him, “You’re going places, Junior. You don’t want to get tied down with a wife and a kid.”
Junior knocked on the door, three deliberate knocks as the doctor had requested. When the door opened, a smell of disinfectant and rubbing alcohol and fuel oil from a heating stove washed out into the alley. Junior put his hand on the small of Patsy’s back—he could barely bring himself to touch her there now—and pressed until she stepped from the alley and up the back stairway to the doctor’s office, where he asked Junior for the money.
“Stupid boy,” his father said when Junior told him that Patsy was in trouble. “You think with your head, not from down here.” He grabbed Junior’s crotch and squeezed. “Stupid boy,” he said again. “I’ll only bail you out of a jam like this once. If it happens again, you’ll have to own up to it.” Money, he told Junior, could buy whatever they needed, but above all else it could buy them convenience. What he didn’t say was that it could also buy secrets, enough secrets to last Junior and Patsy a lifetime. Secrets that reared up late at night, or sometimes, without warning, in the middle of the day. A gargle of Listerine, a swab of alcohol, a sniff of kerosene from a heater. All these things were enough to make Junior close his eyes and swallow hard because he had caused the child—their first child—to be taken away.
He brought himself back from his misery by concentrating on what was around him—the blue limestone pavers, Patsy’s roses, the new bicycle he had bought for Katie, anything to keep him anchored in the here and now—and when he returned he loved his family more fiercely, determined not to surrender to regret.
It was Katie whom he cherished most of all—Katie, his darling girl. Soon Gilley would be making his own way through the world—already he had a head of his own. He didn’t want to sweat at the glassworks in the summers; he had no interest in that. Well, what could Junior do? He was disappointed. Sure. But boys were different than girls. A boy got his chest all puffed up, his head stuck on stubborn, and went off to prove he was his own man. But a girl? It was just like the old song said: her heart belonged to Daddy.
Nights, that summer, he lay with Katie on a blanket in the backyard, and he named the constellations. He pointed to the sky, and she followed the handle of the Little Dipper to the brilliant star at its end—the North Star, he said, Polaris, the star of the northern hemisphere toward which the earth’s axis pointed. He told her how someone, no matter how lost, could always find his way by looking for that star. Then he moved on to Orion, the hunter, and named the stars that marked his shoulders and feet. Katie loved the chant of their names: Betelgeuse, Bellatrix, Rigel, Saiph. He spoke them in a whisper as if they were too precious to say. In the silence that followed, she reached for his hand, and he let her take it. He closed his eyes and thought of that night all those years ago when he and Patsy had driven back from Indianapolis, and she had cried, and he had told her, “Don’t worry. We’re going home.” And now here they were: Junior and Patsy and Gilley and Katie. Life had gone on. It always did. That’s what you learned as you got older. Time. It kept moving. You couldn’t stop it. You couldn’t go back to the moments you wished you could change. They were gone. They left you in a snap. You knocked three times on a back-alley door. You put your hand on the small of a girl’s back, a girl you loved, and together, you stepped inside.
What was that joke? A snail comes into a bar. The bartender takes one look at him and gives him a swift kick out the door. A year later, the snail comes back into the bar. “Okay, wise guy,” he says to the bartender. “What was that all about?”
Katie rolled around on the floor in a fit of giggles the afternoon that her father told her that joke. It was the evening before the last day of school. Summer vacation—three glorious months—stretched out ahead of her. She was giddy with the thought of all those days. She and Rene Cherry would have tea parties in Rene’s playhouse; they’d invite their Barbie dolls. They’d make Ken and Barbie kiss and then giggle about it. Katie would do Barbie’s voice. “Oh, you smoothy,” she’d say, which is what her mother said sometimes when her father kissed her. And there would be sleep-outs in the pup tent in Katie’s backyard, and long afternoons on the front porch swing reading or playing another heartbreaking game of It’s Gotta Go. In a few weeks, the stores downtown would have their Moonlight Madness sales. They’d close off the streets around the square, and there’d be carnival rides and cotton candy and saltwater taffy and lemon shake-ups. This year there was supposed to be a live elephant. An elephant that you could ride. Holy moly. All of this and trips to Shakamak State Park to fish in the lake and the curlicue slide at the city park and whatever else she and Rene Cherry wanted to do. That was the joy of summer. It was yours. You owned it. If you wanted to laugh yourself silly over a corny snail joke, you could. If you wanted to roll around on the floor until your hair was a mess and you were dizzy, hey, who was there to stop you?
Katie heard her mother’s high heels clacking on the hardwood floor. From where she was lying, she could see her mother’s feet, still in her dress-up shoes, the ones she had worn for an after-school meeting with Katie’s teacher. The shoes were black and shiny. They had pointed toes. One foot was tapping the floor.
“Oh, Katie.” Her mother sighed. “Oh, dear.”
A gust of wind caught the front door, and it slammed shut. The curtains at the windows, which had been merrily lifting with the wind, sagged and flattened against the screens. Katie remembered the time right before Christmas vacation when her mother told her that she had to go into the hospital to have her tonsils out. It could happen like that. You could think you were sailing along, and then something could throw everything, as her father said, “all jabberwockers.”
This time it was math. She’d just barely squeaked by. “By the skin of your teeth,” her mother said. “The skin.” Katie rubbed her tongue over her teeth, which were hard and not like skin at all. “Miss Silver says you’re going to need help if you’re going to keep up next year.”
Katie sat up. “Help?” she said.
“That’s right,” said her mother. “A tutor. A summer tutor.”
Katie fell back on the floor, her arms stretched out to her sides. “I’ll die,” she said. “A tutor? In summer? I’ll just die.”
Patsy Mackey would think back to that moment often that summer, and in the years that would follow. She would remember how she and Junior, getting ready for bed that evening, agreed that Henry Dees was the one who could help them. Henry Dees, who lived in Gooseneck. A bit of an odd duck, that Henry Dees, but he got results. Patsy knew more than one mother who swore that her children would have never gotten through fractions, long division, or algebra without Mr. Dees.
“I’ll go down to Gooseneck tomorrow morning,” Junior said. He sat on the edge of the bed, watching Patsy at her vanity table. She was braiding her hair, which she still wore long, and even though he had watched her do this every night for nearly twenty years, it still fascinated him. She put her hands behind her head as if she were fastening a necklace, and her fingers separated her hair into three sections and then began to weave those sections together. He loved to watch this graceful crisscross, Patsy’s fingers gathering and twining, because when he did, he felt that the world held still, that the storm he sometimes felt brewing inside him died down. The hatred he felt for himself over what he had done that night in Indianapolis went away. He could forgive himself, forgive his father. He could sit on that bed and watch Patsy braid her hair, and he could think that he was, all things considered, a lucky man. “I’ll talk to Henry Dees,” he said. “Don’t worry. We’ll get Katie back on track.”
As they lay down in the dark and waited for sleep, Junior didn’t know that Patsy thought of the lost child, who would be a young man or woman now. She wondered what joys that child might have had, what miseries. Oh, that was all part of being alive, wasn’t it? The what-ifs? She remembered how scared she had been that night in Indianapolis. It was snowing, and she was wearing her new car coat, the camel’s hair her mother and father had given her for Christmas. She kept worrying that the snow would ruin the coat, and that was the part that made her feel silly now to recall it. How young she had been. What a fool. Worried about a coat on a night like that. Somewhere down the alley, a radio was playing. The song was Perry Como’s “When You Were Sweet Sixteen.” Sometimes, even now, a line or two of that song popped into her head, and she felt a tenderness for the girl she had been, the one who had believed Gil when he told her they had no choice. They couldn’t get married. Jeez, they were still in school. And how would he go to college with a wife and a baby to support?
She had gone ahead and made a life with him. She had lived so long that sometimes the night in Indianapolis seemed as if it had happened to someone else, not her. Then there were moments like tonight when the two of them lying together in silence became too much for her, and she knew with a heartbreaking sureness that it had been no one’s fault but hers. She should have been stronger. She shouldn’t have gone along with Junior’s plan—his father’s plan. But—and this was the part that caught her breath, made her feel like she was suffocating—she had been afraid to have the baby. Secretly, she had been glad for someone to tell her what to do. She wanted to ask Gil on these nights, when she knew that they were both having trouble falling asleep, whether he ever thought of that night, whether he ever wished that they had turned around and come home and never knocked on that doctor’s door, but she knew she couldn’t ask him that, couldn’t whisper a word about that night, and this was the saddest part of all. They could never admit that they shared the same regret, the same heartache. They could only talk of the here and now: Gilley’s golf game, a new variety of tea rose, and now Katie’s problems with math, which they would have to solve. What was it their high school calculus teacher had told them, something from a famous mathematician, something about what to do when you couldn’t solve a problem? Oh, yes.
If you can’t solve a problem, then there’s an easier problem you can’t solve. Find it.
THE NEXT
morning, the music was so loud at Mr. Dees’s house that Junior had to pound and pound on the door. The song playing was one he had heard Gilley play on his stereo—“Candy Man”—and for a moment he wondered whether he had made a mistake and gone to the wrong address.