While he scanned the windows of my old house and wondered where the other members of my family were – whether my father’s leg still made him hobble – I saw the final vestiges of the animals and the women taking leave of Mr. Harvey’s house. They straggled forward together. He watched my sister and thought of the sheets he had draped on the poles of the bridal tent. He had stared right in my father’s eyes that day as he said my name. And the dog – the one that barked outside his house – the dog was surely dead by now.
Lindsey moved in the window, and I watched him watching her. She stood up and turned around, going farther into the room to a floor-to-ceiling bookshelf. She reached up and brought another book down. As she came back to the desk and he lingered on her face, his rearview mirror suddenly filled with a black-and-white cruising slowly up the street behind him.
He knew he could not outrace them. He sat in his car and prepared the last vestiges of the face he had been giving authorities for decades – the face of a bland man they might pity or despise but never blame. As the officer pulled alongside him, the women slipped in the windows and the cats curled around his ankles.
“Are you lost?” the young policeman asked when he was flush with the orange car.
“I used to live here,” Mr. Harvey said. I shook with it. He had chosen to tell the truth.
“We got a call, suspicious vehicle.”
“I see they’re building something in the old cornfield,” Mr. Harvey said. And I knew that part of me could join the others then, swoop down in pieces, each body part he had claimed raining down inside his car.
“They’re expanding the school.”
“I thought the neighborhood looked more prosperous,” he said wistfully.
“Perhaps you should move along,” the officer said. He was embarrassed for Mr. Harvey in his patched-up car, but I saw him jot the license plate down.
“I didn’t mean to scare anyone.”
Mr. Harvey was a pro, but in that moment I didn’t care. With each section of road he covered, I focused on Lindsey inside reading her textbooks, on the facts jumping up from the pages and into her brain, on how smart she was and how whole. At Temple she had decided to be a therapist. And I thought of the mix of air that was our front yard, which was daylight, a queasy mother and a cop – it was a convergence of luck that had kept my sister safe so far. Every day a question mark.
Ruth did not tell Ray what had happened. She promised herself she would write it in her journal first. When they crossed the road back to the car, Ray saw something violet in the scrub halfway up a high dirt berm that had been dumped there by a construction crew.
“That’s periwinkle,” he said to Ruth. “I’m going to clip some for my mom.”
“Cool, take your time,” Ruth said.
Ray ducked into the underbrush by the driver’s side and climbed up to the periwinkle while Ruth stood by the car. Ray wasn’t thinking of me anymore. He was thinking of his mother’s smiles. The surest way to get them was to find her wildflowers like this, to bring them home to her and watch her as she pressed them, first opening their petals flat against the black and white of dictionaries or reference books. Ray walked to the top of the berm and disappeared over the side in hopes of finding more.
It was only then that I felt a prickle along my spine, when I saw his body suddenly vanish on the other side. I heard Holiday, his fear lodged low and deep in his throat, and realized it could not have been Lindsey for whom he had whined. Mr. Harvey crested the top of Eels Rod Pike and saw the sinkhole and the orange pylons that matched his car. He had dumped a body there. He remembered his mother’s amber pendant, and how when she had handed it to him it was still warm.
Ruth saw the women stuffed in the car in blood-colored gowns. She began walking toward them. On that same road where I had been buried, Mr. Harvey passed by Ruth. All she could see were the women. Then: blackout.
That was the moment I fell to Earth.
