Good Neighbors(29)
We’ve not looked as much at Gertie Wilde, whom we might argue arrived at Maple Street with the most troubled history of all. Gertie’s parents were drug abusers. She was shuffled through the foster system until her father’s wife, Cheerie Maupin, agreed to keep her. Cheerie was problematic. She freely admits to having loaned Gertie out to men. It’s not so surprising, then, that Gertie would have missed all the signs of sexual abuse. It’s equally possible that she did recognize them, but chose to cover for her husband. Potentially, she even participated.
Maple Street
July 11–21
The search for Shelly Schroeder began at the moment of her fall, when parents and children shouted her name down the mouth of the hole: Shelly Schroeder! Shelly Schroeder! Where are you? It continued through the day, when police sectioned off the periphery and rescue workers attached to thick ropes belayed down. Oil-slick footprints tracked a reflective sheen all over the park until no grass was left. The day turned to night and into the next day without sign of life. The weekend passed. The oil and bitumen spread to the street.
As if fed, the hole grew. A gaping, excavated wound.
The media picked up the story, and quickly, blogs and streams unleashed news of the missing child, lost down a hole. “I can’t understand it,” Rhea told NBC’s local affiliate, and Maple Street watched on static-filled screens, her bereavement seeming worse, somehow, when pixelated in their living rooms. “She knew she wasn’t allowed out there. It doesn’t make any sense.”
Shelly Schroeder! Shelly Schroeder! Where are you?
Two more families left the block, for a total of seven gone. Those who remained felt the burden to represent. To support this lost child and her family. They doubled down, canceling trips to the beach, forgoing summer museum nights in the city. They stayed on Maple Street like sentries, as if Shelly, and the horrible sinkhole itself, belonged to them.
Never comfortable with uncertainty, the people of Maple Street struggled for explanations. They reviewed the events of that morning with their children, and they contrived reasons among one another, their voices respectfully soft. Why had Shelly been out there? Whose idea had it been?
They met at their curbs when hauling garbage, or on one another’s front porches. In the shadow of that ominous and active hole, their chitchat degenerated. The things they’d been worried about, the deep-down disquiets about their parents’ health and their children’s futures and their jobs and this falling-apart world, began to erupt.
Margie Walsh carped to Cat Hestia and Nikita Kaur about the state of things. About women’s rights and that poor girl in Buffalo who’d been beaten to death by fraternity brothers. She scratched invisible itches along her fingers when she spoke, her querulous voice uplifted. “Don’t you even care?” Margie asked a surprised Cat Hestia, then narrowed her gaze to Nikita Kaur. “I suppose you’d have us all in those ridiculous burkas if you could.”
Nikita, whose mom had taught astrophysics at the Indian Institute of Space Science and Technology at Trivandrum, India, was at a loss for words. Cat Hestia changed the conversation, fast, but Nikita stayed stuck on it, her body rooted, her face flushed. “Sikhs don’t wear burkas,” she said, even as Margie kept talking, tears in her eyes, about how unfair it is for girls in college. They go out into the world expecting adventure, and the patriarchy eats them.
Linda Ottomanelli fretted over her boys, following them from room to room as if, without her, they’d disappear. Jane Harrison wondered if she ought to educate the students at her preschool about sinkhole preparedness. Fred Atlas continued his morning jogs despite the heat. He had so much to run from. Sick Bethany watched from her shut window, looking out. To her, the hole was an especially terrifying thing.
More than anything, the Ponti men feared impotence. And so, they had a frank discussion. They felt it was their obligation to say out loud what no one else would admit: the child was dead. There was nothing to do but help those who’d loved her most. Fritz Sr. seemed ill-equipped for the task, so they inducted Dominick Ottomanelli and Sai Singh into their club. Like heroes, these men devised all variety of scenario in which to protect the Schroeder women from having to see Shelly’s body, once it was finally raised.
A week passed. Rescue crews descended with less urgency. Engineers inserted hydraulic pistons and shields to prevent the hole from collapsing, and their ropes stretched deeper and farther as they dove into surprisingly cold water. When they climbed back out in black wet suits like spacemen, their hands were always empty.
Ten days missing. The heat wave continued, straining the power company past its limits. Brownouts turned to blackouts, making the people of Maple Street glisten. Trapped on that crescent, their thoughts circled and distilled into the simplest expression of worry.
Shelly Schroeder, Shelly Schroeder. Where are you?
They thought her name in a constant loop and it didn’t just mean Shelly. It meant hope and life and death and community. It meant the future and the steady ground beneath their feet. It meant their validation and their justification. It meant their fear and their joy. It meant everything.
The girl became mythic and tragic, and they thought they’d found her on a Wednesday evening, drifted a quarter mile along an underwater stream. They felt the kinetic energy, heard the sirens, the calls through bullhorns. They stumbled out through front and back doors, even Peter Benchley in his wheelchair. They circled the hole’s lip just as darkness set, and they bore witness as people in a community are supposed to do.