The Forgetting Time(74)

Maybe some of them had been healed that day, but she didn’t think so. She didn’t remember if they had. All she remembered was being shocked that the world had so much pain in it, and the unfairness that one family should take on so much of the suffering.

And her granddaddy was dead now. He’d gone to Tulsa to buy some tractor equipment and collapsed on the sidewalk with a heart attack, and since no one thought it strange to see a black man lying there or stopped to take him to the hospital, he died on the sidewalk under the hot sun. And her grandma died a few years later, from grief. And her mother a few years ago, from diabetes. And now Tommy, too, was dead.

And now it was her turn.

“I’m sorry—”

That was Charlie’s voice. Faint, troubled, carried on the wind; she’d know her own child’s voice anywhere.

Charlie was out there, somewhere, in trouble. Thinking it was his fault.

No, no, Charlie. Not your fault. My fault.

I should have checked on him sooner. I should have called the police. I was enjoying the quiet. I should have checked on him sooner and then I could have called the police because time was of the essence. Who didn’t know that? When a child was missing you needed to get on it right away, that was rule number one, the golden rule of the Amber Alert Bible. You called the police. Right away.

But she didn’t know he was missing and so it had been hours and hours by the time she had called.

Not your fault, Charlie.

She had to tell him. She had to tell him not to be sorry, that he had nothing to be sorry about.

I should have been a better mother to Tommy. And to you. To you.

All this time he’d been waiting for her, her Charlie. Years had gone by, and she’d left him alone, she’d lost track of him, and yet there he was, still waiting for her somewhere, waiting for her to say: not your fault, baby. My fault. All mine.

Can God set a table in the wilderness?

She opened her palm and looked at the twelve half-crumbled pills that had been clenched so tightly in her fist. She considered them for a moment, and then she ran into the bathroom. Threw all the pills into the sink, sending the water rushing down over them, pushing the white residue down the drain with her fingers. She washed her hands well and dried them. She straightened herself in the mirror, smoothing down her hair, wiping her face with a wet towel. Nothing to do for those eyes.

Then she walked down the stairs and out into the night to find the place where Charlie was.





Thirty-Two

The lizard was gone. That’s what Charlie had noticed first. Someone had taken Horntail from the tank in his room.

His high had faded now but for a jittery feeling that nothing was right and nothing would ever be right again. It was a familiar feeling. The feeling of not being stoned.

He was looking for the kid and he saw Horntail missing and then he knew. He just fucking knew where the kid was.

He slammed out the back door, through the yard, beyond the birdbath, until he reached the very edge of the woods. There was an old oak tree there that had wooden pegs pounded deep into its bark, and at the top of the pegs there were some planks of wood that his father had nailed together one day in an attempt to make a tree house. The tree house had never been completed—building the thing was more complicated structurally than his father had counted on. He had sworn up and down about stability and bracing and never finished it, and their mother had forbidden them to go up there, since it was only a floor and nothing else, without any sort of railing or walls to keep them from tumbling down. But he and Tommy snuck up there anyway, sometimes, when they didn’t want to be found. It was high up and in the summer you couldn’t see it through the leaves.

They used to call it their fort. They kept stuff up there—the diary Tommy wrote in for a few months, Charlie’s rock collection, gun and car magazines they had stolen from the dentist’s office. Sometimes Tommy liked to take Horntail there and let him run around like it was the jungle. Until last year Charlie used to go up to get high.

Now he had to push his big body through the hole.

The kid sat there on the planks of wood in the dark with his hands around his knees, Horntail lolling on his arm. The kid was a mess. His eyes and nose were running up a storm.

Charlie squatted down next to him. “They’re all looking for you, you know.”

“Our room is different.”

“What?”

“Our room. The stuff is gone.”

“What stuff?”

“The lizard books. My glove and my bats and my championship trophy.”

“Oh, you mean Tommy’s stuff. Well, we had it there for a while.”

He was afraid to look him in the eye. Did the kid have some kind of power like a weird kid in a movie? Maybe he saw dead people. Maybe the ghost of Tommy liked to hang around him. He didn’t much care which it was; it was all spooky and he wanted no part of it. He wanted to get this kid down into the house and out of his life.

“How come you took my stuff away?”

“I didn’t. Papa made Mama do it. He said it wasn’t good for me once I came back here.”

His face brightened. “You came back, too?”

“Well, I was staying at my grandma’s, you know, for the first six months or so. While Mama and Daddy were out looking for—for Tommy.”

Those long months at his grandma’s. He hadn’t thought of them in years. Kneeling on the shag carpet, Grandma’s gospel music playing on her old record player, wondering what was happening back home, if they’d found his brother yet. They never talked about that. “If anything happens we’ll be the first to know,” she’d said, “so let’s leave those folks alone to do what they have to do. All we can do is pray that he’ll come home.” She was bad off already by then, her feet swollen so much she could barely get down out of the armchair to kneel. He couldn’t pray, though. He was too scared.