A Lily in the Light(25)
“Esme.” He pointed toward the pile of stuff on the table. “Most of those people are good, if not all of them, OK?”
“OK,” she mumbled as she opened Father O’Brien’s card, the priest who’d dunked her baby head in a baptismal font and put a communion wafer on her tongue every Sunday. How could anyone be good if Detective Ferrera didn’t even think her parents were innocent? Or her brother. The door closed behind him. His peppery smell hung in the room, and Esme found it strangely comforting. She wrote the first name on the list, then the next. He might be wrong, but at least he had a plan.
Chapter Six
The skeleton wreaths and jack-o’-lanterns had changed to cornucopias and bouquets of fiery leaves. There were bunches of colorful corn in reds and yellows, oranges and brown. Flint corn was Esme’s favorite, especially the blue kind. She’d taken a walk with Lily last year in their building looking for blue flint corn. “Why is our corn only yellow,” Lily had asked behind her web of hair. “Why don’t we eat the colorful ones?”
Christmas music was already playing on the radio, and twinkle lights hung in store windows. It was Nutcracker season. She could watch the dance of the snowflakes over and over again because it was her favorite. When the curtain rose and those snowflakes filled the stage, it was the best part of Christmas. But she didn’t want to watch The Nutcracker this year. Two weeks had passed, and even though she kept the list of names and brought it to Detective Ferrera every day, there were fewer cards now, fewer dishes outside their door, the gift baskets rummaged through. People were already forgetting.
Someone from Connecticut had donated a trailer. It sat outside their apartment building, parked on the street like a cave, the kind of clubhouse they would have wished for when they were younger, but this one was for Cerise and Andre.
“I thought you might like to use it as a command center,” he’d said. “We lost our son twelve years ago, and someone brought it to us. It helps”—he sighed—“not running things out of your house.”
His name was Joe. His son’s name was Joe too. Esme didn’t have to ask if they’d found him. She could tell by the way he’d folded into himself, like origami stuffed in a pocket for too long, that the answer was no. The walls of the trailer were covered in pushpin holes as thick and heavy as a sky of stars. Cerise spent most of her time in the trailer now, a shadow moving behind faded plaid curtains.
Old ladies whom Cerise called advocates flocked to the trailer and talked about rewards and second phone lines. They made more flyers and sent them places Cerise said were helpful. They said the FBI should be involved and rattled off names of organizations with weird combinations of letters, like a bowl of Alpha-Bits. They also talked about everything Detective Ferrera had done wrong: The police should have used bloodhounds instead of German shepherds because they have sixty times the tracking power. German shepherds can’t smell the air if a child’s been carried. Everyone knows that. Why didn’t they polygraph faster? Why wasn’t the media more involved? Why didn’t they put out the APB sooner? Where was the FBI?
They whispered things Esme wished she hadn’t heard: that bodies dumped in rivers floated up in the spring when the weather was warm, that police had to stuff them in body bags before taking them out of the water because they fell apart otherwise, that missing children who weren’t found within twenty-four hours usually never were. She overheard things about bodies found in burlap sacks on the beach, about a little boy in a drainpipe. She only heard a sentence or two before someone realized she was there with hands full of mail or thank-you cards or baskets of food, and there was silence again.
Not Lily, she wanted to say. She’s in a room with rainbow prisms and a tree house outside her window—but she didn’t think the old ladies would believe her. They enjoyed whispering too much. Esme stayed out of the trailer, except when she had to, and she slammed the door every time she came in or out so the old ladies would know when she was there and when she wasn’t. They could do whatever they wanted with their maps and pushpins, but she didn’t want to hear the rest.
It’d been two weeks without school, two weeks without dance, two weeks without Lily. The mirror version of life was sickening, like being upside down or walking on your hands for too long. Two weeks of milling around without any kind of time. Today was no exception.
“Mom and Dad are back,” Madeline said, looking through the shade in the living room.
Esme and Nick slid off the couch. No one wanted to help, usually, but now they were thankful for something normal. Downstairs, Andre’s cab waited at the curb, hazard lights flashing, the trunk filled with grocery bags.
They passed Cerise on her way in. She held the lobby door with her back, eyes red rimmed and blotchy. She’d been crying. The way she looked carefully over her shoulder and into the hallway behind them told Esme she didn’t want them to know.
“Mom?” Esme asked. Anxiety tightened her chest. Was there something new? Madeline slipped her fingers under Esme’s elbow and pulled her through the door.
“Come on,” she whispered. “If she wants us to know, she’ll tell us.”
Cold air slapped Esme’s face and stung her eyes. She looked back at her mother’s sagging shoulders, head hanging, grocery bags on either arm. If the bags weren’t so heavy, Esme suspected her shoulders would’ve been shaking, arms wrapped around her torso to keep herself in one piece. Cerise was carrying more than usual. Esme wondered if she’d taken more than she could carry to distract herself from whatever she was feeling.