They stepped into the empty yard. All of the buses and children were long gone, and just a handful of cars remained in the lot, their windshields dusted with powdered sugar. The snow ticked against hard surfaces and, in the hush of afternoon, sounded like waves of static. Heavy clouds diffused the light, softened every angle, and flattened perspective. Sean felt as if he were moving through a picture, the flakes white hatches on a gray background. Even Norah, next to him, looked like a paper doll.
“She's very tall,” said Norah. “Aunt Diane. And intimidating somehow. Maybe it's the way she talks. You can almost hear the gears spinning in her head. She's thinking, boy. And I'm going to have to think faster and harder to keep up. And I'm going to need your help with her questions. You know what she called me? A fugitive.”
“Like from the FBI?”
“Maybe I'm a Most Wanted Girl?”
They slowed to let a car pass before crossing the road to the trail through the woods. When they reached the other side, Sean grabbed her by the wrist. “Hey, maybe it's your mother who's the fugitive—”
“My mother would be nothing of the kind. Still, I'll need your help with Auntie Di. Come over tomorrow after school. We're still partners in crime, eh, amigo?”
“Just so long as there's no more biting.”
She could not resist a smile. Taking her knapsack from her shoulder, she crouched on the sidewalk, unzipped a compartment, and rooted around the explosion of tissues, pencil stubs, and broken crayons. With a gentle hand, she scooped a small object and held it carefully in her palm, presenting to him a blue cup, delicate as porcelain, salvaged from a children's tea set. A pair of birds in flight, sharing a banner in their beaks, had been painted in expert hand on its surface, and but for a chip that marred its banded lip, it was a perfect miniature.
“This is for you,” she said. “I've carried it with me for years, the only memory of my former life, but I'd like you to have it to say that we are friends. When I am troubled, I whisper a prayer into the cup and fill it with my wishes. You need it more than I do.”
He hid the present from his mother, grateful for once that she came home hours later. In the silence of his room, Sean considered Norah's token, held the tapered bowl to his lips, and thought of all his wishes. He could not bear to whisper father into the cup, struck silent by the absurdity of her claims, by the failure of any prayer to bring about the desired answer. Why whisper when his heart shouted to no result? Still, he was glad for the gift, touched by the selfless gesture, and the teacup found a place of honor beside the circus cookie boxes filled with his collections of found objects. Later that night in the bathroom, he gingerly removed his shirt and stared at the red wound in his reflection. Sore to the touch, the ring seethed purple, and when he turned to get a better look Sean recognized the pattern her teeth had made. In the mirror, the bite mark looked just like a pair of wings.
23
The sisters circled around the subject of Erica, as they always had since her disappearance. From the very beginning Diane had suspected the truth, but she had remained circumspect those first few weeks in 1975 when nobody could be quite sure if Erica had run away or had been abducted or worse. The Quinns refused to believe theories proffered by the local police or later by the FBI, even after the confirmed sighting by the liquor store owner in Tennessee, the bedside description in Oklahoma, and the alleged confrontation with a waitress in a Texas café. Only when the evidence proved overwhelming could Margaret acknowledge to her sister that something terrible had happened to her daughter, and even then she maintained Erica's innocence throughout. After Paul passed away, the topic was rarely broached at all.
The summer following Paul's death, Margaret and Diane stole away together for a week at the shore, revisiting the beach house their parents had rented for a song when the girls were ten and eight. A weather-beaten clapboard, it seemed much smaller than they remembered, and the Atlantic too, less wild, less blue, everything diminished in scope and dwarfed by the decades of development along the coast. For four days they idled in the sun, doing nothing more arduous than soaking to the collarbone at low tide, watching the pipers dance to and fro, walking on the sand at sunset. On the fifth night, when the end of the respite began to touch their ease, Diane rustled a quarter bushel of steamed blue crabs, and they sat on the deck with their mallets and picks, a roll of butcher's paper to capture the shells, a six-pack of cold beer to wash down the tang of Old Bay.
“We haven't talked about him,” she said, hammering through a big claw. “Not all week. It's okay, if you don't want to….”
“Paul?” Margaret pried at a reluctant apron.
Diane reached out and touched her sister's forearm. “I know you blame him for Erica—”
“I miss him, I suppose, but I'm getting used to his not being there. He was going from me for so long that it seems like he left long ago. He didn't make her run away with that boy. If anyone's to blame, it's me. I should have stepped in between them, kept the peace. Talked to her like the woman she was becoming.”