The Last House on Needless Street(88)

I kept trying to tell Big Ted. I took him back to the yellow house with the green trim again and again but he still didn’t get it. I think he always knew somewhere deep down that it was Mommy. But he hoped so hard it wasn’t. Now he can’t avoid the truth any more. Bam, pow, like being hit with a punch.

I can hear Big Ted crying.





Ted





‘Don’t move. You’ll make it worse.’ Rob’s face is hung above me in the sky. It is even paler than usual.

‘We have to tell someone.’ My beard is wet with tears. ‘I know where she is. Please, please, we have to go now.’ Another good thing about Rob is that he does not waste time on questions.

Everything happens both quickly and slowly. We stagger back to the car, and Rob drives us to a police station. We have to wait there for a long time. I am still bleeding a little but I won’t let Rob take me to a hospital. No, I say, no, no, no, no, NO. As the ‘NO’s get louder Rob backs away, startled. At last a tired man with pouches under his eyes comes out. I tell him what Little Teddy saw. He makes some phone calls.

We wait for someone else to arrive. It is her day off. She hurries in, wearing fishing waders. She has been on her boat. The detective looks very tired and kind of like a possum. I recognise her from when they searched my house, eleven years ago. I am pleased by this. Brain is really coming through for me today! But the possum detective looks less and less tired the longer I talk.

I wait on another plastic chair. Still the police station? No, this is full of hurt people. Hospital. In the end it is my turn, and they staple me up, which is weird. I refuse the painkiller. I want to feel it. So short, this life.

By the time Rob drives me home, it is dawn. As we turn into my street I see a van stopped outside her house. Cars with beautiful red and blue lights, which play on the green trim and the yellow clapboard. The lady is crying and she holds her Chihuahua tight, for comfort. The dog licks her nose. I feel bad for her. She was always nice. Mommy never hurt the Chihuahua lady’s body, but she hurt her all the same.

They put up big white screens around the Chihuahua lady’s house, so that no one can see anything. I stay at the living-room window, watching, even though there is nothing to see. It takes some hours. I guess they have to dig deep. Mommy was thorough. We all stay there, awake and alert in the body, watching the white screens. Little Teddy cries silently.

We know when they bring her out, Little Girl With Popsicle. We feel her as she passes. She is in the air like the scent of rain.

The next-door-neighbour lady has not come back. She was calling the little girl’s name as she ran from me into the woods. That made me think. I told the possum detective about her. When they looked through her house and all her things I felt bad for her – even after everything. It was her turn to have all those eyes on her stuff. Then they found out she was the sister of Little Girl With Popsicle. When I heard, I thought, Now they’re both dead. I felt sure. I don’t know why.

They found Mommy’s yellow cassette tape in the sister’s house. It had her notes on Little Girl With Popsicle. The possum detective says it sounds like she was already dead when Mommy got her. Still, I can’t think about it.

I’m sure Mommy mistook the Little Girl for a boy. Mommy never messed with girls. So Mommy took her because of all those chances coming together. A haircut, a trip to the lake, a wrong turn. It makes my heart hurt and that feeling will never go away, I don’t think. Like a cut that never heals.

The possum detective and I are drinking sodas in my back yard. Our fingers ache after yanking out so many nails. Plywood lies in broken stacks all around us. The house is so strange with its windows uncovered. I keep expecting it to blink. It’s still warm in the sunshine, but cold in the shade. The leaves are thick on the ground, red and orange and brown, all the shades of Rob’s hair. Soon it will be winter. I love winter.

I like the possum detective but I’m not ready to let her in the house. Other people’s eyes make it a place I don’t recognise. She seems to understand that.

‘Do you know where your mother is?’ The possum detective asks the question suddenly, in the middle of another conversation about sea otters (she actually knows a fair amount about them). I smile because I can see that she is enjoying the conversation about sea otters, but also using it to be a detective and try to surprise me into telling her the truth. I like it; that she’s so good at her job. ‘Should I still be looking for her?’ she says. ‘You have to tell me, Ted.’

I think about what to say. She waits, watching.

I don’t know much about the world but I know what would happen if they find the bones. The excavation, the pictures in the newspaper, the TV. Mommy, resurrected. Kids will go to the waterfall at night to scare each other, they’ll tell stories of the murder nurse. Mommy will remain a god.

No. She has to really die this time. And that means be forgotten.

‘She’s gone,’ I say. ‘She’s dead. I promise. That’s all.’

The possum woman looks at me for a long time. ‘Well then,’ she says. ‘We never had this talk.’

I walk the possum detective to her car. As I’m going back to the house, I notice that the last ‘s’ on the street sign is wearing away. If you squint it might not be there at all. Needles Street. I shiver and go inside quickly.

The bug man is gone. His office is cleared out. I went to see. Now I talk to the bug woman. The young doctor from the hospital fixed me up with her. The bug woman comes to the house sometimes and sometimes I go to her office, which is like the inside of an iceberg, cool and white. It contains a normal amount of chairs. She is very nice and doesn’t look like a bug at all. But I still have trouble with names. And so much has changed. Maybe I need one tiny thing to stay the same.