“Hal,” she said, every muscle tense as she stared at the increasingly familiar object on Fenerman’s desk.
“Yes.”
“Do you see that red cloth?”
“Yes.”
“Can you go and get it for me?”
When Hal looked at her, she said: “I think it’s my mother’s.”
As Hal stood to retrieve it, Len entered the squad room from behind where Lindsey sat. He tapped her on the shoulder just as he realized what Hal was doing. Lindsey and Detective Fenerman stared at each other.
“Why do you have my mother’s scarf?”
He stumbled. “She might have left it in my car one day.”
Lindsey stood and faced him. She was clear-eyed and driving fast toward the worst news yet. “What was she doing in your car?”
“Hello, Hal,” Len said.
Hal held the scarf in his hand. Lindsey grabbed it away, her voice growing angry. “Why do you have my mother’s scarf?”
And though Len was the detective, Hal saw it first – it arched over her like a rainbow – Prisma Color understanding. The way it happened in algebra class or English when my sister was the first person to figure out the sum of x or point out the double entendres to her peers. Hal put his hand on Lindsey’s shoulder to guide her. “We should go,” he said.
And later she cried out her disbelief to Samuel in the back room of the bike shop.
When my brother turned seven, he built a fort for me. It was something the two of us had said we would always do together and something my father could not bring himself to do. It reminded him too much of building the tent with the disappeared Mr. Harvey.
A family with five little girls had moved into Mr. Harvey’s house. Laughter traveled over into my father’s study from the built-in pool they had poured the spring after George Harvey ran. The sound of little girls – girls to spare.
The cruelty of it became like glass shattering in my father’s ears. In the spring of 1976, with my mother gone, he would shut the window of his den on even the hottest evenings to avoid the sound. He watched his solitary little boy in among the three pussy-willow bushes, talking to himself. Buckley had brought empty terracotta pots from the garage. He hauled the boot scraper out from where it lay forgotten at the side of the house. Anything to make walls for the fort. With the help of Samuel and Hal and Lindsey, he edged two huge boulders from the front of the driveway into the backyard. This was such an unexpected windfall that it prompted Samuel to ask, “How are you going to make a roof?”
And Buckley looked at him in wonder as Hal mentally scanned the contents of his bike shop and remembered two scrap sheets of corrugated tin he had leaning up against the back wall.
So one hot night my father looked down and didn’t see his son anymore. Buckley was nestled inside his fort. On his hands and knees, he would pull the terra-cotta pots in after him and then prop a board against them that reached almost up to the wavy roof. Just enough light came in to read by. Hal had obliged him and painted in big black spray paint letters KEEP OUT on one side of the plywood door.
Mostly he read the Avengers and the X-Men. He dreamed of being Wolverine, who had a skeleton made of the strongest metal in the universe and who could heal from any wound overnight. At the oddest moments he would think about me, miss my voice, wish I would come out from the house and pound on the roof of his fort and demand to be let in. Sometimes he wished Samuel and Lindsey hung out more or that my father would play with him as he once had. Play without that always-worried look underneath the smile, that desperate worry that surrounded everything now like an invisible force field. But my brother would not let himself miss my mother. He tunneled into stories where weak men changed into strong half-animals or used eye beams or magic hammers to power through steel or climb up the sides of skyscrapers. He was the Hulk when angry and Spidey the rest of the time. When he felt his heart hurt he turned into something stronger than a little boy, and he grew up this way. A heart that flashed from heart to stone, heart to stone. As I watched I thought of what Grandma Lynn liked to say when Lindsey and I rolled our eyes or grimaced behind her back. “Watch out what faces you make. You’ll freeze that way.”
