Somewhere Beneath Those Waves (4 page)

I swung myself gracelessly from the house to the tree, scraping my hands and arms, bruising my legs, getting spider webs in my hair and dogwood leaves down the back of my shirt. When you had done it, it had looked so easy, so effortless.

I nearly fell twice climbing down, and when I was finally standing on the ground, my heart was racing and I was trembling all over. But Mom’s window was on the other side of the house; she wouldn’t see me.

I crossed the yard in the rain. The boxes were clumped sadly by the curb. I had to force myself to push the flaps back on the nearest one, and then I found that I couldn’t look inside. I couldn’t bear to look at your remains. The Army hadn’t found enough of your body to send it back home, or at least that’s what we were told. These cardboard boxes were all that was left. Blindly, I stuck my hand inside. My face was wet, and my hair was dripping down my neck. My fingers came in contact with something damp and soft, and I pulled it out.

Between the rain and the dusk, I could scarcely make it out. It was your teddy bear, the one you’d given up when I was six and you were twelve. Teddy bears were for babies, you said, but when Mom suggested you give it to me, you said, “It’s
mine
,” and it went in your closet. Standing out there in the rain, I remembered how that had made me feel, how small and stupid and worthless, as if I had to be something even more contemptible than a baby. And then the next day, you’d taken me to a movie, some stupid science fiction thing that Mom wouldn’t have let either one of us see if she’d known, and I’d felt ten feet tall.

My fingers tightened around the teddy bear, and I walked back to the house. It was only at the foot of the tree that I realized I couldn’t climb back to your window holding the bear in one hand. I tucked the front of my T-shirt into my shorts and put the teddy bear in my shirt. It lumped against my stomach, squashy and damp and neglected, and I climbed up.

Getting back in your window was even worse than climbing out had been, but I did it. I’d come too far to give up now, and I knew that if Mom caught me, she’d make me take the teddy bear back out to the boxes, or she’d do something else to destroy it. I could imagine her burning it: the stench of scorching plush, her face, remorseless and inexorable, lit from beneath by the flames. I crept back across your room, back along the four feet of hall that separated your door from mine, back into my own room. I eased the door shut behind me, and started breathing again.

And started looking for a place to hide the teddy bear from Mom.

17.

Sometimes when I dream of you, you are in my apartment, wearing your fatigues and dogtags, prowling through my living room as if it were a Vietnamese village. You look at the books on my shelves, pick up the knickknacks on my end table and turn them over as if they puzzle you. You go into the kitchen and inspect my refrigerator; you go into the bathroom and look in my medicine cabinet. The night before last, for the first time you came into my bedroom. You never used to remind me of a cat, but you prowled around my bedroom like a cat looking for another door. You seemed both restless and unhappy. You came and stood by the bed for a long time, staring down at me. I couldn’t read the expression on your face. Then you went prowling away again, opening my closet, looking through my dresser drawers. You found the teddy bear. You picked it up, turned it over the way you turned over my bookends, and put it back down with a little, tired sigh. You didn’t recognize it. It meant nothing to you.

18.

The dead men crowd around me as I walk. They do not touch me, do not even reach for me. Only their eyes yearn toward me, yearn toward warmth and memory. They do not remember who they are. They cannot read their own dogtags. I feel a cramping, agonizing need to read their tags, to tell them their names. But at the same time, I know they won’t remember what I tell them. The dead cannot remember themselves; that’s why the living have to. And I cannot be memory for all these men, although I could destroy myself finally in the process of trying. I cannot even be memory for you. I have lost you somewhere. The teddy bear is nothing but a teddy bear, a conglomeration of fabric and stuffing and glass as dead as you are. Nothing green and vital can grow from this teddy bear; it is not a magic talisman that can keep you near me or even let me pretend any more that you belong to me.

19.

I come to the Wall. The dead men press their hands against the panels and turn to me, terrible pain in their eyes.

“I can’t help you,” I say and flinch at the sound of my own voice. They can’t hear me; the only sounds they listen for are their own, the names they can no longer remember.

20.

Mom died a year ago. Cancer: it took her fast, devoured her body as if she were her own funeral pyre of dry wood and kerosene. I visited her in the hospital in Knoxville. We stared at each other, and I realized that while I look like Dad, and like you, I have her eyes.

I was the only mourner at her funeral; everyone else who had loved her was dead.

21.

I hid your teddy bear for years, moving it from secret place to secret place around my room. When I went to college, it went with me, packed in the bottom of a box full of sheets and pillowcases. I hid it from my roommate, knowing that I could never face explaining why I had brought a ragged, mildewy teddy bear with me. I liked my roommate fine, but when I was eligible to move into a single, I did. It was my secret—
our
secret—and I would rather have died myself than desecrate it by sharing it.

22.

I don’t know where your name is on the Wall and no longer believe that it matters. I choose a panel near the middle and leave the teddy bear in the border between the Wall and the path. I leave the dead men clustering at the Wall and walk away.

I look back. Like Orpheus, like Lot’s poor stupid wife. But this isn’t a story. There’s nothing there.

The Beansidhe does a lot of wailing during the crossing.

Not just for her own family, and insofar as a creature of her nature can feel guilt, she feels guilty. She is the O’Meara Beansidhe; in all the years of her existence she has cried O’Meara deaths and O’Meara deaths alone. But the grief is too much, death crammed upon death, and she wails for Mary Sullivan’s baby just as loudly as she wails for James O’Meara, whose mother’s death in childbirth she wailed for sixty-seven years ago. But it is James O’Meara’s coat she takes, after his daughter has laid him out; in its inside pocket is the acorn he picked up as he was leaving the dooryard of his house for the last time. He didn’t tell his daughter about it, didn’t tell his pinch-faced grandchildren. He didn’t tell the Beansidhe, either, but she knew.

She wraps his coat around her and wails for all the death she feels coming. For all the dead who soon will be.

The immigrants huddle together in the lower decks and even those with the Sight pretend they cannot hear her.

If a Beansidhe can hate, she hates them. Hates them for leaving Ireland, hates them for dragging her with them. Hates their pain, her addiction and poison, that lured her onto this terrible floating hulk so like the emptied-out carapace of a dead beetle. Hates them for holding her here with their grief, with the dying of their dreams. And she hates them most because a Beansidhe should not hate; they are changing her, making her less than she was. It is a Beansidhe’s nature to cry death, not to grieve. Not to
care
. And yet she cannot seem to stop caring, now that she has started, as if James O’Meara’s acorn has been planted in her own heart and has started to sprout.

Beansidhes do not sleep, neither do they dream. She curls up in a corner, in the reek of the bilge and the rats, tasting salt, tasting death, and pillows her head on James O’Meara’s ragged coat. In the pocket of the coat, where she can sneak her hand under and touch it, is the acorn. James O’Meara’s acorn. James O’Meara’s dream.

And when she reaches America, although it is against her nature, she will plant it for him.

Lilah Collier was washing the windows the first time the sheriff showed up.

It was April 9, 1930, a beautiful sunny Saturday in Hyperion, Mississippi, and Lilah was taking advantage of the weather. She had been the Starks’ housekeeper for four months, ever since she and her husband Butch came into town, and since Butch drank more of his paycheck than he brought home, she was hanging onto this job like grim death, even if she didn’t much like Cranmer Stark
or
his pale, nervous wife Sidonia. So she cooked for their fancy dinner parties and kept their house spotless, and if Mrs. Stark didn’t want the help talking to her little boy, then all right the help would keep her goddamned mouth shut. She felt sorry for Jonathan, a pale, silent child who always did as he was told, but not sorry enough to risk her job.

She was in the guest bedroom when the doorbell rang, and came panting down the stairs, only to pull up short when she recognized a lawman’s silhouette against the frosted glass. She wiped the sweat off her face, made a futile attempt at smoothing down her hair, braced herself for whatever disaster Butch had caused this time. Opened the door.

And the sheriff, a stocky, tired man with watchful blue eyes, said, “Mrs. Collier, I hate to trouble you, but is Jonathan in the house?”

“Jonathan? No, sir, he’s out with his mama.”

“You seen him today?”

“No, sir. Mrs. Stark, she left me a note. They was gone when I got here. What’s the matter?”

“Mrs. Collier, may I come in?”

She stood aside, her heart banging against her ribs, and when he hesitated in the front hall, led him back to the kitchen.

He sat down when she did, sighed, and said, “Mrs. Collier, it seems like Jonathan Stark has gone missing.”

“Missing?”

“Straight out of the middle of Humphreys Park, from what his mama says. Now, we got men searching, but we’re also trying to figure out what might make him run off. If he
did
run off. So, when did you see him last?”

Lilah told the sheriff what she knew. She’d given Jonathan his dinner early the night before, since his parents were having company: tomato soup and a cheese sandwich in his room. An hour and a half later, when there was enough of a lull in the dinner preparations, she’d gone up to get the tray. He’d been sitting upright in bed with the lamp on. She’d said good night to him, and he’d said good night back, being a polite child, and she’d gone out, and that had been that. No, she hadn’t seen him at all on Saturday. Saturdays were her half days, and she hadn’t come in until noon, when Mrs. Stark and Jonathan had already left.

“You sure of that, Mrs. Collier?”

“Sure of which?”

“That you didn’t see him today.”

“I done told you twice, they were already gone when I got here.”

“And what were you doing this morning?”

“My own cleaning. Do I need an alibi, sheriff?”

“Not ’cause I suspect you, Mrs. Collier, just so as I don’t have to start.”

“My husband was home. We left the house together—matter of fact, he drove me here.”

“Anybody else see you?”

“I was washing windows, so you might ask the neighbors. And Maddie Hopper can probably tell you I arrived when I said I did.”

“She already has.”

“Said you didn’t suspect me, sheriff.”

He put his pencil down and rubbed his eyes. He looked like a man who didn’t get enough sleep. “So far, Mrs. Collier, there ain’t nothing to suspect nobody of. But little boys don’t just vanish into thin air, and they don’t have that generous variety of enemies that adults might do. We’re asking these questions of any adult that knows Jonathan Stark, for the pure and simple reason that we ain’t got nowhere else to start.”

“His daddy’s a powerful man,” Lilah observed.

“Don’t I know it. And, yes, I think it’s a kidnapping, and, yes, I think we’re gonna be hearing from somebody here in another hour or so saying what it is they want. But it bugs the shit out of me, begging your pardon, that they could grab him in broad daylight in the middle of Humphreys Park and not have nobody the wiser. So I’m covering all my bases.” He looked her squarely in the eyes then. “Do you know anything that might help us?”

“Like what?”

“Damned if I know. Like anything that might explain where he went or why somebody took him or
anything
.”

“I don’t know nothing to explain that, sheriff. I’d tell you if I did.”

“I hope you would, Mrs. Collier. I sincerely do. Thank you for your time.”

He left her sitting there in her clean kitchen, gooseflesh crawling up and down her back.

No communications from kidnappers were received, not in the next hour, not in the next two weeks. No one was found who seemed to have any motive for harming Jonathan Stark; even his father’s enemies were equipped one and all with unassailable alibis. No one was found who had seen him after his mother’s last sighting of him at 12:30 p.m. in Humphreys Park. The park, which was not large, was searched with a fine-toothed comb, and the pond was dragged. No evidence of Jonathan Stark was discovered, although a remarkable assortment of other things came to light. As far as anybody could tell, Jonathan Stark
had
vanished into thin air.

Sidonia Stark took to her bed; Cranmer Stark took to drink. Lilah Collier took to cleaning the Stark house with a passion that surprised her. She had instructions to do nothing to Jonathan Stark’s room—not even to dust—and she obeyed, but the rest of the house became antiseptically spotless.

She began to have the feeling, alone on the first floor of the Stark house, that she was being watched. She told herself she was being stupid and high-strung (her father’s phrase for such airs was “being missish,” and it was a good way to get a casual clout across the back of the head), but every day she talked herself out of it, and the next day by noon the feeling would be back again. Something watching, something small and white. She’d find herself glancing around, as if she could catch it in a corner, but she never saw anything, never anything that wasn’t the curtains or a lace doily or her own dust rag left on a side-table. She sometimes got a feeling, towards dark, that there was something cloudy in her peripheral vision—sometimes on the left, sometimes on the right—but it was never something she was sure of. “Missish,” she grumbled to herself, and was glad to leave the house for the dubious security of Butch’s car.