Commonwealth(48)

Jeanette could still see Caroline in the bathroom, hear the barking clarity of her directions. She could see how sweat had dampened Caroline’s hair at the temples and soaked through the collar of her yellow T-shirt. But she couldn’t see Cal anymore. In just a year his face had slipped away from her. “I wasn’t there,” Jeanette said.

“But you were there,” her mother said, as if Jeanette had forgotten.

“If you want to find the person who did it, you have to ask the same questions over and over again,” Franny had told Jeanette one summer when they were in Virginia. It was years ago, before Cal died. It was one of the police skills Franny was trying to teach her, along with breaking into cars and taking apart the phone receiver so that you could listen in on other people’s calls without their knowing. “Sooner or later someone always slips up,” Franny had said.

Jeanette wondered if her mother was trying to slip her up.

“He got tired of waiting for us,” she said. “He was going to go see the horses and we were going to catch up.”

“You caught up,” her mother said.

Jeanette shrugged, an awful gesture given the circumstances, disrespectful. “It was too late.” It was after Cal died that her mother finally lost her freckles, as if even they had abandoned her. Jeanette was looking at the bridge of her mother’s nose, trying to stay focused, trying to remember what she had looked like before all this happened.

“So who gave the pills to Albie?” their mother asked.

“Cal,” Jeanette said, surprised by how good it felt to tell the truth about something. “He always did that.”

With all that had happened that day, no one cared that Albie was missing except Ernestine. After checking in the attic and the cellar, she said he must have gone with Beverly. No one knew where Beverly was. She’d taken one of their grandparents’ cars and hadn’t told anyone she was leaving. If she’d gone into town she must have taken Albie with her. If it had been any other day the very thought of Beverly taking Albie with her anywhere, ANYWHERE, would have cracked the girls up.

*

The Goddamn Boys on Bikes is what the neighbors in Torrance called them, and later it was what they called themselves. They heard the words yelled after them as they cut over lawns, flashed between cars to the high-pitched skid of slamming brakes, swooped across grocery-store parking lots in fast, tight circles for the pleasure of terrorizing the mothers with loaded carts. People simultaneously wanted to kill them, believed that they had almost killed them, and were afraid of being killed by them. Albie, a member of the Mattaponi tribe, Raul, El Salvadoran born on this side to parents born on that side, and two black kids, the smaller, handsomer, sleepier-looking one called Lenny and the other, the tallest of the four, Edison. They had all started riding together when they were eleven and ten, when they were still just irritating boys whose mothers wanted them out of the house in the afternoon. They were dangerous right from the start, forcing the cars they cut in front of to swing hard into people’s lawns. One car jumped the curb and went straight into a phone pole while the boys sailed on, whooping the way they imagined the Indians would. The summer they were mostly twelve a car door opened unexpectedly and sent Lenny straight up in the air. The other three slammed on their brakes in time to see their young friend tumble gymnastically across the backdrop of blue sky. It should have killed him, would have killed him had he landed anywhere near his head, but instead he reached out his right hand to catch himself and snapped his wrist so that the bone came through the skin. Albie crashed not two weeks later, a sudden downpour pulling up the oil embedded in the pavement and sending his bike spinning out from under him. Albie broke his shoulder and tore back one ear, which required thirty-seven stitches to reattach. Edison and Raul pedaled carefully around the bike paths in the park for the rest of the summer, scaring no one, not even themselves. Edison came to Albie’s house to visit and stood beside the recliner in the darkened living room. Albie had to stay in the recliner pretty much all of the time because of his shoulder.

“Everybody has a bad summer sometimes,” Edison said, and Albie, who knew this to be true, gave his friend a Tylenol with codeine while they watched cartoons.

By the time they had graduated from Jefferson Middle School, Albie and Lenny and Edison were fourteen and Raul was fifteen. They were tall but not as tall as they would be. From a distance it was impossible to tell if the bicycles were ridden by boys or men. They went too fast, and since they were always trying to see which one could outdo the other, the pack of them shifted in furious rotation, like the lead men in a race.

The Goddamn Boys on Bikes stole less candy after middle school, concentrating instead on the cans of Reddi-wip they slipped into the kangaroo pockets of their sweatshirts when they went to Albertson’s. Later they would ball up together on the floor of Albie’s bedroom to take in the small, sweet kick of fluorocarbons, or huff airplane glue from paper lunch bags. Each of the four mothers despaired at the bad crowd her son had fallen in with and, with the exception of Teresa, each of the mothers believed the other boys were entirely to blame.

Then one hot day in the summer they were mostly fourteen, Raul’s bike slipped its chain. They were miles from home, on a narrow service road that ran beside a field that stretched out wide behind an industrial park. The boys waited while Raul squatted beside his bike and worked on the chain. The field was unmown and given over to tall grasses and various weeds, all of which had died months before. That was Torrance. Albie lay on his back on the pavement, which was maybe two degrees away from being hotter than he could stand. It felt good on his shoulder. He wished he had sunglasses but none of them had sunglasses. He took a blue Bic lighter out of the giant buttoned pocket of his long shorts. He had a little pipe in there too, with a little wooden slide over the tiny mesh basket, but that was just for show. He was long out of pot and out of the money he had stolen from Holly’s babysitting stash to buy more, so instead of getting high he raised his arm straight up and flicked his lighter at the sun.