Sons of Liberty (12 page)

The next day, when Liza didn’t return home, Officer May and Officer Donnelley came all the way from the Guilford precinct and jotted Cliff’s and Rock’s comments into their matching spiral flip notepads. Although they produced their train ticket stubs and told the officers where Liza’s bike was, still locked under the train station, neither Rock nor Cliff mentioned the Seamus letter, the house on Manahasick, or the possibility that Liza could be in Los Angeles looking for movie parts. “Just remember you don’t need to tell more than what they ask,” Cliff had advised as they’d watched the squad car pull up to the house. Rock had been nervous anyway, waiting for the awful moment he would be tricked into spilling all his information.

The moment never arrived. The officers told them to call the station if they remembered anything else, but there was no word twisting, no threatening with prison on the grounds of being accomplices, the way Cliff had predicted. “We got a lot of runaways on our books,” Officer May said tiredly. “Not much you can do to find a kid who wants to stay lost, especially an older kid. Better to concentrate on the little ones, the kidnappings. If she said she was coming back, let’s just hope she means it. If you don’t mind, Mrs. Kindle, I’ll take another piece of that pumpkin bread.”

Go find her, Rock yelled inside his head. You don’t have time to hang out here stuffing your face. Go find Liza and arrest Timmy, you stupid cop. When Officer Donnelley had asked if there had been any reason Liza might have left home, Cliff had jumped at the chance. “Her stepdad’s a jerk,” Cliff had said. “He’s rough on her. You should be grilling him, not us.”

“A lot of kids don’t have it good at home and think they solve the problem by running away,” Officer Donnelley had answered. “But the streets aren’t usually a place that solves anybody’s trouble.”

“Good point, officer,” Cliff had answered sarcastically. He’d been almost totally silent for the rest of the questioning and had bolted upstairs as soon as the cops stood up to leave.

Later that week, Liza’s sixth-grade photo appeared in the
Shoreline Times,
with an accompanying article explaining that Eliza Beth Vincent was last seen at the New Haven train station at approximately 11:15
A.M.
, wearing green corduroy slacks and a light purple ski jacket.

“She sounds farther away when they call her Eliza.” Rock flipped the newspaper to the sports section so that he didn’t have to stare at her picture.

“Could be she found that Seamus kid after all,” Cliff said. “Maybe he was just taking trains around, like Liza said he did all the time.”

“Sure,” Rock agreed. He liked that thought.

His mind made a picture of Seamus, with bright hair like Ms. Manzuli and thoughtful eyes like Ben Franklin. He pictured Seamus and Liza riding a train out to Los Angeles and Liza offering him a roll of Certs and talking about her friends Cliff and Rock, who were going to come out and visit her when she won her Best Supporting Actress Oscar. Telling Seamus how tough Rock was, how he could beat up any kid in the seventh or eighth grade, how he could keep a fireball in his mouth over five minutes without taking it out.

“Maybe she’ll send us a postcard,” Rock said. “If she decides not to come back.”

“Yeah, maybe,” Cliff answered. “If she’s got to anywhere she wants to be.” But his voice was listless, dulling Rock’s pleasant images of Liza and Seamus rumbling safely across the country, bound for Hollywood parties and big breaks in movies needing blind people.

R
OCK FELT EACH DAY
that arrived and faded without any word from Liza as a slow crumble in his trust for her safety. He never wanted to talk about it, not even with Cliff, to speculate on what could have happened to Liza or where she might have landed. His mind formed a glittery picture of Hollywood and refused to think harder.

“She’s probably okay,” he would say in response to any murmuring and sympathetic remark made by his mother or the neighbors or kids at school. He closed his eyes and conjured up images of palm trees and warm breezes and people with fake white teeth. He thought about Liza wearing purple shorts and turning cartwheels down Hollywood Boulevard, her hands pressing over the warm concrete sidewalk squares embedded with the names of all those dead movie stars.

Their father’s low opinion of the Mobley family sank even deeper, as he began using them as a ready example of a family without discipline or principles or self-control.

“Tim Mobley’s a fool,” he was fond of saying. “Put your house in order, that’s my advice. But you can see disaster just looking at that family. Lazy white trash, unfit to raise decent children.”

“Cowboy George is sitting even higher on his horse these days,” Cliff scoffed later to Rock in private. “Sometimes all his hot air makes me wish I’d have gone with Liza when I had the chance. See what Cowboy George would have said to that. ‘Yep, my son Cliff was always lazy trash,’ ” he drawled. “’Good for nothing. Always took the easy road. A man’s home is his castle, never forget. Or do I mean corral? Sometimes it’s hard to remember, even when you know everything in the world, like me.’” Rock started laughing, the first easy laugh he’d had since Liza disappeared. “Seriously, though,” Cliff continued. “If I could have ditched town with Liza that day, I would have.”

“Why didn’t you?” Rock asked. “You want to go to San Diego, right? You could have taken off no sweat. You could have cashed that savings bond, gone to the airport, and bought a plane ticket, even.”

“Nah.” Cliff half-smiled. “I wouldn’t leave my whole entire family behind like that. I couldn’t ever do that.”

And although Rock nodded casually, as though Cliff’s decision were the obvious one, he was secretly relieved. Sometimes it seemed as if Cliff stood only a moment away from walking out the door and evaporating into another world, for good. You gotta give me some warning, he always wanted to say to his brother. Let me know when you’re going, let me know where I can find you.

The vase arrived via Saturday UPS, a giant brown box addressed to “The Kindle Family.” Rock signed for it himself.

“It’s from Aunt Louisa,” he announced, as Cliff and Brontie and their mother gathered around, picking at the tape with their fingernails. It was rare that packages arrived in the mail, especially large, unexpected ones.

“Look at this!” Their mother lifted the vase from its bed of packing peanuts and cradled it in her hands with awe. “Louisa made this herself. It’s so precious. I can hardly believe it.” She set the vase in the middle of the kitchen table.

But later that day, as Rock sat at the table eating lunch, the vase’s flashy presence made him feel fidgety. He couldn’t figure out why it bothered him, but eventually he even turned his chair to remove the vase from his vision. And even then, just knowing that the vase was inches away got him restless.

“I hate that stupid vase,” he burst out when he couldn’t stand it anymore.

“What … why?” His mother looked up from her book.

“I don’t know,” Rock answered honestly. He looked at the vase, trying to decide. His eyes then passed over the small rectangle of room: the thin metal runner dividing the discolored kitchen linoleum from the hardwood living-room floor and the yellowing columns of newspapers stacked by the fireplace. Some stacks stood as tall as tables, but his father refused to throw the papers away since they contained articles he wasn’t finished reading. Then Rock saw how his mother, folded up for warmth on the frayed sofa, looked as aged and worn as any piece of furniture in the room.

When Rock looked once again at the vase, presiding over the house in all its useless glamour, it reminded him of last spring when that Avon lady had bounced her Cadillac down the potholes of Linwood Drive and sold his mother a sackful of expensive makeup.

“You’re being silly, Rock. It’s a lovely vase,” his mother said, interrupting his memories.

“It’s stupid-looking,” Rock said. He stood and jerked his jacket off the back of the kitchen chair. Suddenly the tiny space of the cottage was beginning to suffocate him. “Because it doesn’t match this ugly house.”

“Where are you going?” His mother put down her book and started plucking nervously at the edge of her bathrobe sleeve as she watched him. “Why are you saying these awful things, Rock?”

“Because—because it’s all true.” Rock answered, zipping up his jacket. “This house is ugly, and cold, and it’s too small, and we don’t need a stupid vase.” He hated himself as soon as the words left him, hated the hurt they stamped in his mother’s face, but he kept speaking. “It’s like that dumb makeup you never wear. Why’d you buy that cruddy makeup if you weren’t ever going out anywhere, if you weren’t ever going to use it? Forget it, I don’t care why. I don’t want to talk about it.” He moved to the front door and opened it, allowing the cold air to blast any warmth the fireplace had been working to offer.

“Where are you going? Rock, come back. Rock, sweetie—I’ll put the vase away if it bothers you. You wouldn’t leave me, would you? You wouldn’t do that to me. Don’t leave here, Rock, without speaking to me.”

“I’m not leaving for real, I’m just going outside, okay? Get off my back.” He turned away from her then, from her beseeching eyes and twisting hands. He slammed the door, hard enough, he hoped, to crack the vase.

Outside was cold. Too cold to go biking, too cold for the JennAir. Out of habit Rock shuffled a few steps down toward the Mobley cottage, then turned and ambled to Liza’s old rappeling tree. The clothesline rope still hung on the fingertips of its branches. Rock caught the cord in his hands, twirling it in his fingers. He breathed deep and thought he caught a whiff of Liza’s Certs-and-apple smell, and then his insides felt like they were being squeezed so painfully, crushed by fists of missing her, of wanting just for a second to know that she was all right, that she was safe.

“Rock!”

Rock turned at the sound of his mother’s voice. He turned around, shocked by the image of his mother standing on the stoop and then walking toward him, slowly, so slowly that from a distance her movement seemed graceful, like slow motion, but then Rock saw that his mother’s entire body was shaking. In the winter sun, her face was candle white and her hands looked like rocks stuffed inside the pockets of her robe.

“Mom, where’re your shoes? Your feet are gonna freeze,” Rock said sourly. Just to look at her, to see his mother in the real outdoor light, angered him. She looked like an escaped mental patient. He wondered if this was the way she looked that time when she ran off to Arizona, and then a thought struck him, that perhaps his mother was planning to leave them again. Except that she never went anywhere, of course. He studied her, unsure.

“Rock, I’m trying,” she said to him. “Will you help me?” She pulled one hand from its pocket and her fingers uncurled, reaching out. Rock stopped, uncertain whether to go to her or run away, then walked toward her, marching with the even footfalls of a soldier. His mother broke into a jog that swallowed the remaining distance between them. He drew back as she grabbed his shoulder and struggled him into an awkward hug.

“You’re gonna freeze,” he said, breaking away from her.

“Why are you so angry with me?” she asked. “You have to talk to me, Rock.”

“Why are you so wicked weird, Mom?” Rock pushed his words past his better judgment. “How you sit in the house all day and cook and read and don’t have any friends. You know, I can barely remember the last time you went outside. And it’s not like it’s a”—he cast around for the right word and couldn’t find it—“a
good
house to sit around in. With so much else you could be doing. And don’t ask me what else, ’cause I don’t know exactly, except that it would be just about anything. Anything’s better. Anything.”

“Rock, I know—”

“You know who you remind me of?” Now that he’d started, he couldn’t stop, and his words burst from him with furious excitement. “That lady, the lady from
Jane Eyre.
That first wife, Mrs. Rochester. She haunted her house and then she set it on fire. Remember her, Mom? How she was such a freak?”

“No, Rock. You don’t mean to say this to me.” Tears filled his mother’s eyes and only made Rock more angry, more sure of her weakness.

“Yeah I do, it’s true, it’s true. You’ve got a problem, Mom.”

“I can’t … Rock, you need to promise me something.” Her fingers held his chin like a clothespin. “I will try. I want to get better. I want to find a way to be brave, but you must promise me. Promise never to leave me. Please don’t ever leave me, like Liza. My heart would break. Please, sweetie, promise me now that—”

“I’m not gonna promise anything,” Rock said loudly, pulling away. He began to run, past his mother and away from the house. “I’ll do what I want. Whatever I want.” He laughed, enjoying the bravery in the voice that spoke. “Whatever I want, Ma. You can’t stop me.” He would never be like his mother, too frightened to leave her home. He could go, just like Liza, like a patriot, like Robert Xavier Kindle, until something shot him down. And even then, he’d have known how it felt to run far, far away from whatever it was that made his house so cold and sad and impossible to leave.

Rock ran until his lungs burned and sweat greased his skin. He wasn’t far from Jake Robar’s house, so he decided to walk over and see if Jake was home. He was.

“You need to call your mother?” Mrs. Robar asked.

“She knows where I am,” Rock replied.

When it came time for dinner, he picked up the Robars’ kitchen phone and fake-dialed, pretending to call home to ask permission to stay and eat at the Robars’ house. Serves Mom right, he thought. He hoped she was calling every hospital in Connecticut, looking for him. He tried not to think about his father’s fury.

Mrs. Robar finally dropped Rock off at his house later that evening. The driveway was empty, he noticed. A bad sign. The sign of a blowout.

His mother did not speak to him as he walked in the door. She continued to sit at the kitchen table, folding clothes from a basket of clean laundry. She looked up at Rock with red-rimmed eyes, then returned to her folding.

Rock hung his jacket carefully in the closet. He knew how the house felt after there had been fighting. You could sense the tingle in the silence. The television was turned off, and Cliff’s radio was on too low. Brontie was awake and sitting at the table, playing her game of marching a crayon up and down her arm. The game was called “crayon contest,” Cliff had explained to Rock. Each crayon had to do a routine up and down Brontie’s arm, twirling and rolling its little crayon body for a score. Brontie acted as judge and all the contestants. The worst performer got snapped in half and the winner slept under Brontie’s pillow.