The Summer That Melted Everything(48)

Every day, he asked her to go outside with him. Every day, she said no, but he was wearing her down with the way he described what she was missing. Simple things like the new bench outside Papa Juniper’s. The Fourth of July parade down Main Lane and its red, white, and blue confetti. The language of the farthest reaching echo shouted in the coal mines, the just-built windmill in the sunflower field outside town, the way the sky looked when standing on the last claim of Breathed land.

His observations and carefully detailed description of the world were making her antsy. Making her wring her hands and suddenly suck in her breath as if for the longest time she’d not been breathing.

I’d find her looking out the windows or craning her neck off the edge of the porch, longing to see beyond the limited landscape her stuck life afforded her.

At the very best, she’d linger on the edge of the porch, reaching her hand out and testing for rain before snapping it back to her chest, swearing she’d felt a sprinkle, when in reality, it was the slight falling from her own eyes.

Melancholy is the woman with ribs like nails and lies like hammers. My mother’s lie was that our house could be enough. That its countries could keep her from feeling like she was missing out. What a housebound woman fears is not the knife in the kitchen drawer. It is the outside being better.

“Stella, please come outside,” Sal begged.

“It looks to pour any minute.” She folded her arms and rubbed her hands up and down her mole-speckled shoulders as she paced in front of the sunny windows.

“You’ll never get her outside.” Dad was passing by and had overheard us on his way to his study. In his hand was a new box of pushpins. The bulletin board had gotten crowded with more papers, more pins, more lines zigzagging this way and that. The progressing investigation meant more stacks of interviews with the families of the missing black boys, of eyewitness statements, of theories and speculation. Stacks and stacks of paper that were taller than Sal, but never him.

The phone number for the hospital was still in his study because Dovey was still there. She’d been kept on suicide watch ever since losing the baby. She was also having a psychological evaluation after she took a black marker and drew a staircase on the wall of her hospital room. She had numbered the steps but didn’t get to her goal of seven million before Otis and the nurses stopped her.

Otis stayed with her, dividing his time between Columbus and Breathed. Even Elohim was taking the long drive to go see her. His visits were said to be doing a world of good. Of course, that would be thought. It’s easy to be the boulder rolling through what is left of the dandelion field when everyone has their backs turned and are looking at the already flattened ground.

“You’ll never get her outside,” Dad said again before closing the door of his study.

Mom frowned, angry that he’d given up on her and her fear so easily. Not like in the beginning, when he tried so desperately to get her out. Why didn’t he try anymore? she wondered. Doesn’t he still love me? Her anger shifted to nervousness, which put her face in a slope to the right that played favorably with the cluster of dark moles on that cheek side.

“Stella, you know it’s not going to rain today.” Sal held the curtains back even more, pointing out to the brown ground. “We are in a drought.”

She winced as if she was full of shards as she lay back onto the wall, closing her eyes. “What if I do go outside, and it suddenly and unexpectedly starts to rain?”

“Why are you so afraid of the rain, Stella?”

“Oh, you don’t wanna hear that.” She burst away from the wall, patting her cowlick and licking her hand to do the same to mine.

“No, Mom, stop.” I swatted her hand like it was an incoming wasp. “I said stop it already.”

“Fine. Hey, I know, let’s watch a movie.” She skipped, feigning cheer over to the cabinet full of our VHS collection. “What movie you boys wanna watch? Hmm? Something Wicked This Way Comes? How ’bout Mr. Mom? I just love that one. Oh, here’s Psycho.”

“Yuck, Mom.” Grand leaned in the doorway, along with his friend Yellch. “Anthony Perkins is in Psycho.”

“So?” Mom shrugged and we shrugged with her.

“I hear he’s a fag.”

Mom pulled Psycho out of its cover sleeve as she said, “I don’t want you readin’ tabloid trash, Grand. And what’d your father say ’bout usin’ that word?”

“I love that movie,” Yellch added his two cents before taking a bite of the peach in his hand, the juices slipping down his lanky wrist and dropping to the rug.

“Really?” Grand turned to Yellch. “You don’t mind Perkins? That he’s a—”

“Nah.” Yellch dragged his gapped teeth through the peach’s yellowed flesh.

Yellch was seventeen, soon to be eighteen like Grand. Both of them soon to be seniors in the coming year at Breathed High. While Grand was pitcher on the baseball team, gangly Yellch was first baseman. He was someone I always thought had the profile of Lake Superior looking out to the northeast. He wore these gold-rimmed eyeglasses that were round and old-fashioned, contrasting his dark, curly mullet.

His real name was Thatch. The reason for the change to Yellch was because of one day in 1975, when he was eight and Grand was nine. Yellch and his Jewish family had just arrived in Breathed. When they came, it was thought they would live Jewish lives. Maybe they’d want to build a synagogue, invite rabbis, constantly smell of matzo ball soup. These were the fears of a town that wasn’t comfortable with the Jewish identity.