Life After Life A Novel

Joanna



DO YOU BELIEVE IN ghosts? Do you believe in the power of magic? Do you believe that a normal ordinary girl can disappear right before your eyes?

Joanna had run the words through her mind many times over the years, picturing her childhood friend Ben waving his wand and directing her in and out of boxes first in his garage and then on the school auditorium stage, pulling from his sleeves coins and lengths of scarves and puny bouquets picked from neighborhood yards when the neighbors weren’t looking. He said they were partners for life, bound by their secrets and knowledge; it was a vow, a pact, a solemn oath of loyalty. Now that she’s back home, thirty years and a million miles and a lot of mistakes and lessons behind her, she’s aware of it all as never before: the ghosts, the magic, all the ways a person might disappear.

The longest and most expensive journey you will ever make is the one to yourself. This is Joanna’s current mantra, in her head since a day four years ago when Luke stepped in and changed her life. He said it first. He said he would love nothing better than to purchase the ticket that would upgrade and jump-start her trip. He said so many things during the brief time they were together, things that are now dog-eared in her mind so that she thinks of them, repeats them, relies on them every day. Without him she could never have found her way back to this place, back to her father’s side in time to make amends, back to the flat, swampy land that has been home even in the years she spent elsewhere. All those years and miles away, and still she often fell asleep conjuring images of the Saxon River, that cold dark water winding its way through the Green Swamp and on down to the Carolina coast, the wide sandy shore and the white hot light of summer. Her parents had owned a modest cottage there, not on the ocean but with a view of the marsh, and coming back she’d decided it would be worth the forty-minute drive from town to live there, to wake to the briny ocean air she associated with freedom. She loved the glaze of salt that covered the windows, like ice in another lifetime and she had had so many—like a cat and, like a cat, she had returned home. The Incredible Journey, Luke called it; he shared her love for all the dog books and movies, would have loved her new business. She’d been left the beach cottage, her parents’ home, which she quickly sold, and the Dog House, a drive-through hot-dog franchise her dad had bought two years before he died, which she kept.

“It was an investment,” he told her. “If I’d known you would ever grace us, well, now just me, with a return home, maybe I would have gone in for hair or nails or tans, but I like a good hot dog and your mother liked a good hot dog and they aren’t easy to come by.” He said this before they knew he was dying, and so there was still plenty of time and room for the sarcasm and innuendo that had long forced them apart. And the hot dogs are good, no doubt about it, and the place is very popular with the kids from town looking for some place to go on their way to the beach. People love the way they can drive up and order something off the cute menu like, “I’ll have a Puppy, two Old Yellers, and a Chihuahua.”

“Never been much on hair and tans,” she told him, her skin so white from years spent in Chicago and then Maine and New Hampshire, her unruly hair a shaggy cropped cut she often did herself, coloring in the gray of her temples with a Sharpie.

“True,” he had said. He had shown her where everything was within the tiny structure. The young man he’d hired to manage the place was off in the corner chopping onions and filling the sauerkraut bin for the German shepherd, trying to pretend he wasn’t listening. “It would have made your mother so happy if you had ever taken her advice about anything—men, school, clothes, your hair, but no, that was just too hard, wasn’t it?”

“It was if I wanted to have any—hair, that is,” she tried to make a joke, resisting the big barbed hook he kept dangling in front of her. “Mom loved the Twiggy look. Skinny bodies and pixie cuts.” If she were in a therapy session, she might have said, What was that all about, you guess? Whose hair is it anyway? But she laughed again and shook her head in that way that said, No big deal, so long ago. “Mom wanted a little Jack Russell for a daughter and I was the plump mangy retriever who wanted to be an afghan hound.” She reminded her dad how they had both loved that photograph of a man on a park bench with a long-haired blonde—or so it appeared from behind—only it was really his afghan hound; she had clipped the picture from Life magazine and put it on her bulletin board beside the many dandelions magician Ben had pulled from behind her ear and ribbons she had won on the junior high swim team. “But,” she added, “I’ve always been in the Dog House.”

Her dad finally laughed and said her mother had said the same thing. The thought of her mother and the fact they had never made up hung in the air around them, as thick and heavy as she had told Luke it would, and her promise to him to be here, to stay here, was the only thing holding her in place. “I will haunt you if you break your word to me,” he said, still incredibly handsome and able to smile right up to the end. “I will make your life more miserable than it has ever been.”

“Whoa,” she had said, and stepped back from his bed. “That’s a tall order.” She waited for him to say something else, but he didn’t. “A mean order,” she added, leaning forward with the word mean and still nothing.

“Your mother said you chose to be in the doghouse,” her dad had said, but he did not add the sentence that had so often come out of one of her parents’ mouths: You made your bed, now lie in it. Or when she ran from what appeared to them a perfectly good life with a man she was lucky to marry to a relationship as quick and damaging as an electrical storm: Lie down with dogs and get up with fleas. “Yes, you chose the doghouse,” he said, the air reeking of onions. His old white apron—one her mother had once worn—was splotched with condiments, and she noticed how tired he looked and how his hands were smaller than she had remembered. “You did it all by yourself.”

When she was twenty, she would have argued with him; she would have yelled that they were rigid ignorant people who only cared about what everybody else thought—the neighbors, the relatives, the people at church—who gave a damn? Why couldn’t they just care about her? Why, when she got ninety-nine out of a hundred correct, were they so quick to study and scrutinize the one little failure, so much attention given to what was wrong instead of what was right, and when she was thirty she still would have gotten angry but would have just slammed the door or the phone receiver and taken it out on whatever poor soul was with her at the time, whatever they were doing in that moment—eating a holiday dinner, making love, planting trees—ruined and lost to that cavernous black hole. She would have had an extra drink or two and blamed her parents for the excess, but in her midforties, after life with Luke, she was finally able to see her father for what he was: a worn-out man who had worked very hard and lived the only way he knew how, rigid and unforgiving from his own upbringing, too scared to have ever ventured beyond that knowledge, frightened by the thought of death, ashamed of his weak nakedness, and in need of love with no sense of how to ask for it.

“Those are the ones who will need you the most,” Luke had pointed out, and sure enough, early in her training as a hospice volunteer, this became all too evident. Now it’s a scene she sees often as she sits bedside by those who have reached their final destination. It is a very simple equation that comes at the end, a focus on what they have and what they don’t have—a glass half full or empty—a weighing of one against the other. Sometimes the focus is just the magnification of what has always been there. But always, they are waiting for something: a face, a word, an apology, permission, a touch. Bics flicking with a frenzied vengeance at the great rock concert of life for just one more. One more song, word, sip of water. Some have many hands reaching from the bedside and others have none, and yet in that final moment, the air heavy and laden as molecules regroup and reshape in preparation for the exit, it is all the same. It is like the moment when a snake enters the yard and the birds fall silent. The silence begs your attention; it’s time to go. The journey is over.

“It’s okay,” she told her dad and ran an ice chip around his dry lips, his mouth turning toward the touch like a newborn seeking milk. “All my experience in the doghouse will help me run the family business.”

“Family business,” he mumbled, and laughed. He was too weak to say much. It was the end and she whispered to him what she had learned to whisper with great confidence—It’s okay to let go—only with him she had the desire to keep him just a little bit longer. She had never given up the idea that he might say he loved her. Each time she had said the words, he only smiled. This time he said, You are my little girl. They were in the house where she had grown up, a small brick ranch on a corner lot, flat yard full of spindly pine trees and bee-filled azaleas. The hospital bed filled what had once been her bedroom, his choice. He wanted to die where his wife had died, and she—in her illness—had chosen that room in order to keep their room intact, so that he could go to bed in a normal way as she lay dying at the other end of the house. “It worked for a while,” he had told Joanna. “There were some mornings I woke and for just a second would not remember. I would just think she had gotten up early like she always did and was washing clothes or something.”

Joanna held his hand and resisted asking the question she had asked so many times before: Why didn’t you call me? He always said she should have called them and then it all happened so fast. Her mother had back pain, that was all, and then they were told nothing could be done and she was dead in a month. “If she had asked me to call you, I would have,” he said. “But she didn’t and I didn’t want to cause her any more pain than she was already in.”

Joanna allowed herself to imagine that her mother had wanted to see her, that if she had been able, she would have said something, sent a message. Luke had told her she had to let it go, let it go along with her realization that the night her mother died coincided with her own one-night stand with someone whose name she could not even remember, a journalist from somewhere in the Midwest who had a passion for Russian literature and talked about his ex-wife all night, just another lonely heart who stayed at a boring party too long. Why don’t I just go throw myself in front of a train? she said when she woke up in his strange hotel bed to hear him leaving sloppy messages on his wife’s answering machine. Let it go.

She stared out the high narrow windows of what had once been her bedroom; as a child she had needed to stand on her bed or a chair to see out. Cars were passing the way they would on any normal Tuesday morning and the azaleas were blooming as they did every spring. A row of daffodils lining the concrete walk came up just as they had since she planted them at age five, her mother addressing the bulbs by their formal name—King Alfred—as she oversaw Joanna’s work, the depth of the hole, the teaspoon of bonemeal in each one. The years had left them spindly and bloomless, but there they were; in spite of everything, there they were. And that was when he died. She was thinking of those daffodils—King Alfred withered to a pauper—and the air in the room changed as it always does–sparked, clear, sudden—and with a last long sigh, he was gone.

The longest and most expensive journey is the one to yourself. Luke liked to add that some people never even purchase a ticket, some only get halfway, some stand like Moses glimpsing the Promised Land, which he maintained was, for all practical purposes, about as good as getting there. Clear vision, he said, and then added, “like Visine or Vaseline or Clearasil,” so pumped with morphine by the end that his language was like some haystack of non sequiturs filled with golden needles, fragile bits of truth and wisdom she needed to collect. For a long time her mantra had been F*ck you from the bottom of my f*cked-up heart, so clearly she had come some distance. California, New York, Chicago, New England. She did it all, but what she learned is that sooner or later you have to stop running, and when you do, the baggage comes slamming into you at freight train speed. She stopped running in New Hampshire four years ago, when she fell asleep assuming she’d be dead within the hour and then woke to the warm hand of a stranger and the distant wail of a siren. Only then was she able to slowly pull it all together. Only then did she buy the ticket.

Now when Joanna thinks about dying, she thinks of the day she almost did, the careful planning, the way the light looked there in the late-afternoon sky. It was only four but already nearing dark. It was her favorite kind of day and she had come to New Hampshire seeking it, seeking some resolution to what felt like a really lousy story. There was wood smoke in the air, birds rustling in the leaves, her breath visible as she stared at the distant outline of the White Mountains. There was a Chinese dogwood—bright red stems against the backdrop of snow—and it occurred to her that if she were staying, she would cut some and put them in a vase.

The hot tub on the deck was almost as big as the rented cottage and set inground like a pool. The rental person, a middle-aged soft-bodied guy who smelled like Febreze and chicken soup, told her the heater was busted and he hoped she wasn’t disappointed. “It’s got these powerful jets and holds up to ten men,” he said, clearly well versed in hot tubs and their potential, and she told him a big vat of poached men was the last thing she cared to think about at the moment, in fact it left her feeling nauseated. If he had meant to be flirting, and he may have been—she had always had such a hard time telling—that cooled it all. He handed her the key and a free DVD rental and she drove straight to the liquor store and then down the long wooded dirt drive to the small somewhat rundown cottage. Nothing worked quite right—burned-out porch light, two of the gas burners not working, the bed soft as pudding and stale-smelling—but what did it matter? She poured a glass of vodka and went outside. The giant ten-man hot tub with jets should have been covered, a light snow already falling, but it wasn’t her job. She was just a weekend renter, someone on a shitty vacation, a dog looking for a place to die. She took pills so it would all be an accident, just the right amount for a distracted insomniac to accidentally take. She had even practiced a couple of times. This is the right amount, sloppy notes told her, scrawled as she passed out. F*ck you from the bottom of your f*cked-up heart.

She closed her eyes and imagined the ocean, the rhythmic sound of her childhood, the rocking motion of waves against sand like the lava-wave lamp Ben had in his dorm room all those years ago—back and forth, back and forth, steady as a pendulum. He had not been expecting her visit and it was awkward in a way she would never have thought possible. They were partners, after all, best friends bound by the secret oath, she reminded him, and so he canceled his plans—clearly a date—and they ended up having a night together that pretty much finished the friendship if, in fact, anything had been left. He treated her no differently than he would’ve the girl who got stood up or probably any other average ordinary girl. He treated her like nothing. Now you see her, now you don’t.

She imagined a plug pulled from the ocean, sucking and swirling and spiraling downward, until all that was left visible there on the sandy floor was shell and rock and glass and bone. She felt the ice cold water—puzzling the irony of it being a hot tub—and she felt how heavy her boots were, full and heavy; she was thinking how people have drowned in little bowls of water and she was thinking of her childhood, the magic shows, the way Ben had her tie his hands and then his legs together before he jumped from the small bridge over the river where they used to all gather to swim. She had learned slipknots and they had practiced often; still, she held her breath as she watched him below the murky brown water, twisting and writhing like a snake. Those standing there would begin to count, and then there was nervous laughter, one boy already stripped of his shirt and ready to dive in and then poof! Ben broke the surface, grinning and twirling the ropes over his head.

He had been Houdini and she was his loyal assistant.

Ladies and gentlemen. Now I will make this normal ordinary girl disappear.

To disappear was her wish that night in New Hampshire. The night in Ben’s dorm room had meant nothing to him; it vanished into thin air and yet it haunted and weighed her down like a concrete sack of shit slung around her neck. She lay awake so many nights revisiting his hands on her body, his mouth grazing her skin, the words he half mumbled as he came and then collapsed, the warm wet weight of his body on hers. The haunting continued even as he ran ahead and never looked back.

So she got married. It was just that easy to set off in the wrong direction. It was like finding a seat on the train—leg room and a place for your baggage—the comfort of knowing a stranger wouldn’t plop down beside you. Done. Finis. One door slammed. And the china and flowers are all a great distraction, the best sleight of hand.

“Escape by matrimony,” Luke had said. “A very common vehicle in our society.” But the same can be accomplished with a job or a religion or a hobby, he added, and those things are easier to leave and change. People marry to change class, geography, luck, but when they stretch out at the end of the day, it’s still the same heavy hearts thudding along at their centers.

She was such a liar—a bad liar—and a bad friend, not to mention a horrible wife, and when that felt too wrong to think about anymore she left their home near Stanford where he was a graduate student. She had never fit in in California and she had never been good at breaking up with people. She couldn’t even change her hairstylist or mechanic for fear of hurting their feelings. So she just left, the kind of abandonment that makes those left relieved to be done with her, and once the pattern was established it was easy to continue: a sociopathic actor who burned himself out before he even got started, like a dud firework smoldering in its base, temp jobs and temp relationships, whatever blew her way. She got a divorce by proxy and told him to keep all the things since it was such bad luck that he had married her in the first place. Enjoy the fondue pot and wok; hock the silver. Then she got the call that her mother died and everything really spiraled out of control. Someone she worked with talked her into attending a grief circle and that’s when, like magic, she met a real person—a really great guy—widowed with a two-year-old daughter and a newborn. She wasn’t in love with him, either, but by then she believed she was someone who would never be in love—what did that even mean?—and should just hope for the best; she trusted him and he was certainly the kind of person you should love—easy to love, in fact—and wouldn’t she grow to fall in love with him, and if not, wasn’t just plain old love enough? It worked for a while, too, long enough that she had begun to relax with it all, long enough that she called her dad and said she couldn’t wait to see him. “Grandkids,” she told him. “Poof! You have grandkids!” He listened, and it seemed the sealed tomb was starting to open only for her to then have to slam it closed again. She made a mistake that had hurt someone and now someone else’s mistake would hurt her. It was logical enough, but it didn’t feel very logical that afternoon in late October when he sat, head in hands and crying the same way he had done in those earliest meetings when he talked about his wife. Joanna knew what was coming even before she heard the words. She could smell the end. He said that she had been so wonderful, such a good friend and lifesaver to them all. He said he knew that she couldn’t possibly understand and yet she did. She stood there in the center of that kitchen they had just redone and pressed her palms against the cool granite island top. She had always wanted a kitchen like this, new appliances and yellow walls and a big window over the sink where she hung a finger painting from preschool. She had imagined family vacations to Disney and trips into the city to go to shows; she had even imagined the kids all grown when she would tell them the long and winding road that had brought her to them. They called her Mama and she had tuned her mind to the Parent Channel and was well versed in Mr. Rogers and the Muppets and Raffi. She bought healthy food and drove the nicest, safest car she had ever driven, a used Volvo he insisted she keep; she had gotten her hair shaped and highlighted in a high-end salon, and for the first time since leaving she had been looking forward to returning home, proud of who she had become.

She assured him that she did understand. She told him that people do a lot of things in the name of grief. And then he asked the very hardest thing of her, that perhaps after a little weaning time, she let the kids go, she let this woman he was in love with be their mother. “I think it will be so much easier on them,” he said. “They’re so young. They’ll forget.” And she nodded mutely, the world thankfully fogged from her view of kids in the next room screaming and laughing. Mommy, Mommy. He promised to send her pictures of them. He promised to send her money. And she promised herself that she would get in the car and drive whatever way the wind blew. She didn’t want his money. There was no one expecting her. Why not just disappear?

MOMMY, MOMMY, SHE thought there in the cold icy water. I don’t want to go to Europe. Shut up and keep swimming. Mommy, Mommy, I don’t want to see Daddy. Shut up and keep digging. She had never liked those jokes. And yet there they were.

THE LAST GUY, always good for his word, had sent her a letter with photos just last year after she wrote to tell him where she was living and what she was doing, that if he ever headed southeast and wanted a really good hot dog to give her a call. It was the least she could do—unhook any regret he might feel. He, after all, had done her a favor; he had given her a glimpse of what a good life could look like. But she threw away the photos without looking, too hard, though she did like to think there might be a day in the future when some slight memory might come to the little daughter, materializing out of a smell or a fabric, perhaps something like her pink cashmere scarf the child loved to finger and rub against her cheek as she dozed off. She was wearing the scarf that night in New Hampshire, fingering the wet weight around her throat, and all she could think about is how worthless she felt and how she wondered what it would feel like to know you had lost two mothers. She had one photo in her wallet, one of those awful department store photos with the baby boy propped up like a sack of potatoes, his sister’s arms around him. She also had a photo she had carried in her wallet since junior high. It looks like a screen door—old-timey with crisscrossed panels—a broom propped in the corner near the latch. Ben is behind the door. She was waiting for him to practice their show and he paused before coming back out into daylight and she snapped it; all you can see is the shadow of someone, darkness beyond the door, but she knew he was there all the same.

“AND NOW I will make this normal ordinary girl disappear,” he said, and gestured to where she sat in the school auditorium. She came up on the stage wearing the clothes he had told her to wear, a navy scooter skirt and white Hang Ten T-shirt and plain Keds; her hair was in braided pigtails. Nothing loose that might snag, he had said. She was aware of all the students watching and waiting as she walked over to the chamber—a box in a box, one side cut away but carefully hidden. He turned it just right. He always knew how to turn it just right. He winked at her and she felt the great power of their friendship, the secrecy of their act. Abracadabra. Now you see her, now you don’t.

The water was cold and her clothes heavy, boots filling; there was a crack along the bottom of the hot tub like a broken highway to nowhere. Ben’s best trick had always been to make her disappear and that’s what she had done. He even tried to get in touch with her a few times, saying he wanted her to meet his wife, he had a baby daughter, he was so sorry her mother died, but she had already long disappeared. She was old news, bits of gossip her parents and then her dad had attempted to sweep from the stoop. She was reaching her hand out to trace that crack, no ropes, no cuffs, letting the key to the cottage drop from her hand, when something grabbed her hard; there was a sharp pain in her shoulder, deep and throbbing, and her mouth filled with water and that was all she remembered.

Later she would get a tattoo to remind her. A big purple blob of a tattoo—horseshoe-shaped—to replicate the bite of a huge dog. She later kept thinking of that old hymn, “Love Lifted Me,” love in the monstrous form of Tammy, 150 pounds of fur and jowls and drool. She would later learn that Tammy didn’t like for anyone to be in the water, always assuming they needed to be saved. Luke had taken her in when the young family she belonged to couldn’t break her of pulling their kids from the lake every time they tried to learn how to swim. The kids, bruised and tormented, got agitated when they saw her coming, and she read their agitation as trouble and fear and got to work, her big webbed paws propelling her to their rescue. Those kids had named her Nana after the dog in Peter Pan, but Luke decided to rename her in case she had any problems connected to all the times her name had been shrieked in anger. They were in the emergency room, and he told Joanna he had named her after a song he loved as a kid, “Tammy,” by Debbie Reynolds. He said that he played his old 45 every night and sang along in a way he hoped would soothe her.

“You have a turntable?” she asked, clearly impressed, or so he told her later.

“Tammy has a real missionary complex,” Luke said. “She wants to save everyone.” He was bone thin with a shaved head and big dark eyes, either a manic runner or a cancer patient. She didn’t mean to say that aloud, but she did because he told her he was both—not cancer per se, but he was dying and he had been a runner since the late seventies when he discovered that a good hard run could just about always make you feel better. She nodded. She knew this as well. She said run run fast as you can. He stood by her gurney and extended an equally bony hand—no ring, no watch. “Tammy and I have a lot of the same problems,” he said. “Fortunately she’s not dying and I don’t shit in the front yard.”

Joanna learned so much about him in the hours he sat there with her. He had grown up near Boston but spent his summers on Lake Winnipesaukee. He preferred the politics of Massachusetts and Vermont, but New Hampshire was backdrop for the best memories of his childhood, and he was convinced that if he claimed all the parts he really loved he would be able to make peace with everything else. “Too many people throw the baby out with the bath water,” he said, and she nodded, yes, the forgotten baby. She knew where that saying came from, too, though she felt too heavy to answer, the part about when spring came and the family needed to be clean and fresh, so the man bathed first and then the wife and then the children from oldest on down and by the time the baby got there the water was dark and filthy, the baby too hard to see. It was hard for her to see, too hard to open her eyes so she listened to all that he loved about New Hampshire. He loved Clark’s Trading Post, a family operation with trained bears and a photo shop where you could have your picture taken in old timey clothes. He loved the Flume and the Old Man of the Mountain; he had even helped raise money when there was still hope of saving the stone structure. He loved the mountains and he loved the lakes. He had once as a teenager worked part-time at Story Land where he ran the Polar Coaster. He came from a very conservative family who never accepted who he was even though his wild years in San Francisco were long behind him and he was in love for real for the first time in his whole life. Then he talked about David and she knew as she lay there listening that that is what love is supposed to sound like. She couldn’t see it, but she recognized it. It was all so clear.

After it was all over, she thanked him for saving her and he said that really Tammy saved her. All he did was let the giant dog out to pee. He said there were two kinds of creatures in the world—there are those in dresses fighting for the lifeboats and there are those making sure that others are okay, like the man in the footage of that plane crash in the Potomac who passed the life rope so many times he didn’t make it himself. “No doubt,” Luke said, “I love the feel of a skirt, especially something in crepe or silk, but the honest truth is that I really want to be a rope passer. I like to believe that’s what I’d do.” He pulled Tammy in close and kissed her big head. “Tammy is a rope passer. Tammy is a big voluptuous angel from heaven.”

Luke believed in a lot of things Joanna had always thought were bullshit—angels and spirits—and yet how could she doubt him there at the end when he reached his hand forward to those he said were waiting for him. “They’re here,” he said, and pointed to the darkened hallway. “They’re here.” He told her that there was a time when he believed nothing; the older he got, the less he believed and then the less he believed the more capable he was of believing. “Such a cool paradox,” he said.

“What?” she had asked, needing to hold on to his every word, and that’s when he talked about clarity and how it is impossible to see in the midst of chaos.

“Cool and calm,” he said, and pointed again. “It’s very calm over there in the hallway.”

After the rescue, Luke made her go to classes and to therapy. He said the price of a saved life was educating herself, healing herself, loving herself. It was impossible to get too angry once she knew the situation of his life. He really was dying and she felt foolish to have wanted to throw away what he wanted so desperately. “It’s always the way,” he said. “If you’ve got curly hair, you want it straight.”

She tried to explain that it was all an accident. She didn’t want to hurt anyone. She just wanted it all to be a quiet accident, just another mistake; that’s what she imagined her dad or Ben and others back home would say—so unlucky in love and in life, such a f*ckup, an accident waiting to happen. All she had wanted was to slip from the earth with as little trace as possible. She wanted to disappear. She had thought there could be something at the bottom of the hot tub luring her to lean in close and look—what could she toss in? She thought of her wedding band and engagement ring, something to flash and glitter against the cracked blue bottom, but she knew that would be wrong, placing too much weight on the loss behind her. Her recent husband would never have gotten over that. Her rolling in needed to be an accident—a necessary accident. The keys to the cottage would be good. She would have wandered onto the deck to see this giant ten-man hot tub and accidentally tripped and dropped her keys, leaned and reached and fallen in, maybe she hit her head, so many possibilities.

Luke said that this was exactly why she had needed to live. “There is a need for detail people like you,” he said. “A need for those with one eye on minutiae and one eye on the big picture. Besides,” he added, “we need you.” And then he made the offer. He wanted David to get everything he owned and he knew that his family would not let that happen. So, Joanna would marry him. She would nurse him while taking classes and getting some good therapy so she would be fit to go out into the world with a practical satisfying skill and start over. She would be his project and he would be hers. He said she would be their Eliza Doolittle. He said he and David would continue life as they had for almost two years and she would share the guest room with Tammy. “By the time I die,” he told her, “you are going to be a whole new person.” Ever the lawyer, he typed it all up, how at his death she would receive enough to begin her new life and she would sign everything else, including big Tammy, over to David.

THE FIRST NIGHT after the hospital, she sat on his couch wrapped in an old worn-out quilt like a washed-out ghost. That’s how he described her on the phone to David as he unwrapped a beef bone the size of her thigh for Tammy. You owe her, he said, and pointed to the massive furry beast with the large kind eyes. In the old Eastern tradition, you owe her your life. Tammy sat and drooled on her leg while waiting for the reward, the weight and warmth of her big heavy head a wonderful comfort. Hard to believe she was also responsible for the tight soreness through her shoulder, the sutures and doses of antibiotics.

“She bit the hell out of me.”

“Tammy doesn’t have hands,” he said. “If she did, she wouldn’t have needed to use her teeth.” He paused and laughed, waved the magic wand of a bone. “Of course, if she had hands, she wouldn’t have to rely on me at all and likely wouldn’t be living here. She would have her own apartment and job and drive a car.”

“And she wouldn’t give a shit.”

“Oh, I think she would.” He roughed up the fur along her big neck and delivered the bone to that cavernous mouth. “Tammy is all about love, aren’t you, girl? Tammy is a rope passer. Tammy is Love. There’s a sampler I’d like to embroider except I don’t think I have enough time, so we’re going to have her portrait painted instead.” He had slipped into a higher singsong voice reserved for Tammy. “Yes we are. Oh, yes we are.” The portrait was already commissioned and there were several times in weeks to come where Joanna wore a big fake fur coat that made her the right bulk and heft and sat in for Tammy while the artist worked on the backdrop of what Luke loved so much—the White Mountains and Lake Winnipesaukee. When the portrait was finished, they had a special unveiling and Tammy ate a ribeye, and when Luke and Joanna got married Tammy was there with a pink tulle collar and a bone even bigger than the one of the rescue night.

“What number husband will I be?” Luke asked. “Three? Four?”

“I think I’m up to five in my hometown,” she told him. “I hear they call me the Liz Taylor of Fulton only without the money, talent, and looks.” It surprised her that she was finally able to start laughing at things she had never imagined she could. Luke and Tammy were magic.

As they spoke their vows out on the deck, the hot tub next door in full view, Luke’s face was flushed, his eyes never leaving those of David who stood right behind Joanna with Tammy beside him. Then they ate and danced with a handful of locals down at Cleary’s, a local spot known for their clam rolls and homemade beer. That night, Joanna lay with big Tammy snoring beside her and fell asleep to the excited whispers of David and Luke in the next room. Legally, she was the bride, but spiritually everyone present knew otherwise. Spiritually, she had never had such a feeling of peace. “Who wears the garter in this family?” she had asked before going to bed. “Because I do not want to catch it.”

“You owe her big-time,” Luke said that first night, and pointed to Tammy. “We never would have heard a thing, just found you frozen and floating.” And this was when he began hatching the plan of what she would do with her life. If she didn’t value her life any more than that, then he would value it for her and tell her exactly what to do. “You are a gift to us!” he said. “You are our gift from God.”

“There’s something I’ve never heard said.”

“So I’ll say it again. You are a gift—a messenger from God.”

“I’m a doped-up suicidal woman who is never wanted by the people she wants. What does any of that have to do with God?”

“Redemption,” Luke said, and reached for David’s hand. “We are witnessing redemption. She’s our project—our own little f*cked-up Eliza Doolittle.”

“Better than a smokehouse, I think,” David said. He was handsome and outdoorsy, his hair thinning at his temples the only indication that he was older than twenty. He was a local New Hampshire boy who had grown up ten miles away and was always delivering the commentary of his life: My school bus stopped there. That’s where I played Little League. That’s where a man ran a stop sign and totaled my Nova. He often rode by where his dad was buried in a small church cemetery and the house where he had grown up. His mother still lived there, but he only saw her at Christmas when she announced to all the relatives visiting from elsewhere that he was going to locate the perfect wife any day now. He was someone content in that small parcel of the world, even as an outsider within his own family, and she admired and aspired to his level of comfort.

“Better than a smokehouse,” Luke said. “Our final project. We will make her reappear,” he said the word very carefully. He told her how she had mumbled disappear over and over in the ambulance ride. Where did Ben go? She had asked the question so many times that Luke worried in the beginning that someone else had been there when she fell in the hot tub.

“Repeat the mantra.” Luke said. “I will reappear.”

Do you believe in ghosts?

Do you believe in the power of magic?

Do you believe this girl, this normal ordinary girl, can disappear?

I do, I do, I do.

Now the day Tammy saved her seems light years away, many many miles behind her, and yet she wakes to it and falls asleep to it. The touchstone. Tammy’s portrait, which David insisted she take, hangs over the mantel in her cottage, and several times a year she sends Tammy a gift and something for David, too—bones and CDs and a heavy wool scarf she knitted sitting bedside at Pine Haven. Tammy is getting old for her breed so David is talking about getting a puppy. “The big ones like Tammy don’t live long,” Luke had told her. “They have to cram a lot in.” David has been seeing someone who came to work at one of the resorts over the summer and then never left. He says he is happy and that he’s surprised by that. He thought he never would be again. And to think that now he could get married if he chose to do so.

In the summer when Joanna is wearing something sleeveless, some unknowing, kind person will often rush forward to ask what happened, hands held a safe distance from the big purple dog bite.

“It’s a tattoo,” she says, and sometimes she adds, without explanation, that it is meant to simulate a great big dog bite. It’s Tammy’s Teeth—something akin to Rosebud or Zuzu’s petals or whatever it is in life that reminds you that you are alive.





Notes about my Dad: Curtis Edward Lamb

Born: February 28, 1920 Died: March 15, 2008, 8:10 a.m.

Fulton, North Carolina

He loved the ocean and fishing and hot dogs.

It was a sunny spring day, daffodils blooming—some so old they were only green sprigs. King Alfred gone to a pauper. It was normal traffic for a normal morning. We were in the room where I had spent my childhood, the crack in the ceiling I used to trace in the near darkness still there, and it seemed in that moment that it might all crash in. I held my hand out to the crack, shocked at how like my mother’s hand it was. He said it first years ago, You have your mother’s hands and you have your mother’s eyes, and I couldn’t help but wonder all these years later if that changed the way I saw things, changed the way I touched things. “You are my little girl,” he said. These were his last words. I told him that I was sorry, but he seemed not to hear. I held his hand until the very end and with that last breath, the world lightened in a way that left me feeling sadder than I have ever felt.

“I’m so sorry,” I said, and I was. I was so sorry not to have done things differently, so sorry I couldn’t be the one to blink and break the stubborn stance that kept me from my mother. And for the first time I saw him for what he really was, a bridge between two places—the past and the present—the before and the after. The world I shared with my parents and the one I have all alone. I kept thinking of the draw bridge that used to separate Ferris Beach from the mainland, an old rough-hewn bridge that a single man, alone in a little tower, swung outward when a boat was too large to pass under. It swung and creaked and took forever. It was not ideal, but it was all there was.

[from Joanna’s notebook]





Curtis Edward Lamb



Doris is at the other end of the house and he has to move that way to find her, but when he gets there it is his daughter’s room and Doris isn’t there, nobody is there, just walls in need of paint and a closet full of Joanna’s old board games and rag dolls nobody has touched in years. So throw them out, he told Doris, but she couldn’t, she said she could not bear to throw them out. So call her, let’s call her, but no, she said, no. Joanna made her bed and she needs to lie in it. After all the sacrifices we made for her, the least she can do is lead a decent life. We do not owe her. She owes us. But she is our little girl, he said, and he says it again when he holds her hand. You are my little girl, and she squeezes tight while they wait in the hot-dog line. The Ferris wheel is all she can talk about and he has promised her that he will go with her, turning and turning and turning, the lights so bright and buzzing in the distance he has to look away.





Abby



ABBY PALMER BELIEVES THAT you should never have to wear church clothes on a weekday, especially in the summer, and that really you should never have to go to church, especially if your parents don’t go themselves but just drop you off on the curb, which is what hers usually do. Her dad said he did his time years ago. Her mom says an Episcopalian is a good thing to be. You should never have to do chores or any kind of work on your birthday and you shouldn’t have to have a birthday party if you don’t want one, especially a stupid suck-hole party like what her mom has planned: impersonators of famous First Ladies telling their stupid stories while the girls make bracelets out of stupid junk like old mahjongg and Scrabble tiles—when what you really want is a magic show and tarot card and palm readings. You should always be allowed to keep an animal who turns up on your doorstep looking for a home and that animal should never get lost or leave you. You should pick your own friends and not the ones your mother thinks are the right friends for you, and if you want friends who are a hundred years old, that is your business. Liking Lady Gaga is your business and so is eating a Slim Jim and some Yodels if that is what you want to eat. You should not have to listen to your parents fighting night after night or pretend the next morning that you didn’t hear anything so they can feel good about their own stinking selves. You should never leave home because bad things happen when you do, like the way her bedroom got redone while she was at camp last summer, turning a perfectly nice place into something white and starched and frilly in a way she is not or, worse, the way her dog, Dollbaby, vanished when she went with her dad to Wilmington to buy all the materials for their magic act. He is building a disappearing chamber for her party because that is what she wants even though her mom screamed and pitched a bitch and said that was a terrible idea and that her dad was doing it just for spite and to compete with her. “He is jealous of everything I do,” she yelled, which, looking at her stupid painting of Hillary Clinton, is hard to believe. Who would be jealous of that? Hillary Clinton should sue her for that.

Abby’s dad keeps telling her that there is no connection between their plan to have a disappearing chamber and Dollbaby being missing, but that is hard to believe, too. She can’t help but feel like she made it happen and now she would do anything to get her back.

Dollbaby is her best friend; she is the baby sister she has begged for and never gotten. Dollbaby has brown eyes and a bushy fox tail and a nose that often leads her away for hours. But still she has always come home and Abby’s dad always tells funny stories about where she has been: the dentist to get her teeth sharpened, the Dog House for a “Puppy to go,” the cemetery to look for bones. It’s like Dollbaby has a whole other life. She is on several mailing lists and has gotten free panty hose, tampons, toothpaste, and once was even asked to sign up for her own Visa card. No one is sure how Dollbaby got on the lists in the first place but she did, and Abby takes great care keeping up with it all; she has put all of Dollbaby’s mail inside the same jewelry box where she keeps the notes she has started finding in the cemetery next door: The time has come and Better late than never and I am with you even when you think I’m not. Creepy.

ABBY WISHES HER mother would wear mom pants, some nice high-waisted stretch denim mom pants. But no, her mom wears low rise. Her mom wears whatever the seventeen year old sitter wears. Molly once left her swimsuit at their house and Abby saw her mom trying it on, turning from side to side and sucking in so that her ribs stuck out. She didn’t see Abby see her, but she did later accuse Abby’s dad of looking at the babysitter in a way he shouldn’t. “You were flirting with a child,” her mother said, which was just gross-out gross and left Abby feeling sick. She liked Molly, too; she was nice enough and, most important, was actually nice to Abby and took an interest in Dollbaby and all that Abby knows about the cemetery next door and who is buried where, but now her parents had ruined it all. Molly would never be able to babysit again without her mother saying all those things. I saw how you looked at her little butt cheeks, and there was more but Abby started screaming so she couldn’t hear any more of it.

“Shut up,” she screamed. “Shut up, shut up, shut the hell damn f*ck up.”

It was right after that she went for her first session with Dr. Owens and that was kind of good. Her mother insisted on taking her, of course, and waiting there the whole time, complimenting the doctor on the decor of the office and the prestige of her degrees and any other bullshit thing that could be said. Abby just liked the white noise and the soft chairs and the knowledge that the next fifty minutes were only about her. Dr. Owens looked like an ordinary person, too, which was good. She could just as easily have been one of the cafeteria women at school or the soft round nurse in her old elementary school. It wasn’t as good as being with Sadie who lives next door at Pine Haven, but it was still worth going because for a little while anyway it had reduced the fighting to those times late at night when they thought she couldn’t hear.

But still, her mom kept calling Molly if she needed a sitter no matter how many times Abby begged to be left alone or over at Pine Haven where she knew everybody. Or, she had suggested, they could call Dorro from down the street. Dorro was middle-aged and overweight and there wouldn’t have been anything to fight about, but no, she kept hauling in Molly until Molly must have figured it out and stopped coming. The last time she was there, Abby’s mom had insisted that her dad drive Molly home and that, no, Abby could not ride with them. “Don’t worry, Moll,” Abby’s mother said, like the two of them might have been friends. “You can trust him to be a gentleman, and if he isn’t, well, you know who to come to.” She patted her chest and laughed and Abby slipped out of the house and into the cemetery before her dad returned because she knew there would be a fight. Dr. Owens listened, her brow wrinkled. It was clear that if she had a kid she wouldn’t be doing it that way and that was a good thing for Abby to know.

And as if life isn’t bad enough all the way around, now her mom is planning Abby’s birthday party like it’s her own stupid party. She wants something educational so all the other mothers will say how wonderful she is to “combine fun and education.” She says crap like that all the time, too. In celebration of First Ladies. What a lame and stupid idea from her lame and stupid mother. A party featuring the First Ladies and idiot shitty actors coming in to pretend to be them. The invitation says: Ladies First and then lots of crap about First Ladies, and it will be at the country club, which is a stupid place anyway unless it’s a pool party. Her mother is going to have a little table with knock-off purses for the mothers (who also are invited) to peruse and they all also will get their nails done and have make-overs.

“If we have to do that, then at least let C.J. be the person,” she had said, and reminded her mother who C.J. is, the woman who does nails and exercise classes over at Pine Haven and has the cute little baby named Kurt.

“You have got to be kidding,” her mother said. “The slutty mixed-race one with all the tattoos? Your dad might think that’s okay, but I do not. It is certainly not very First Lady–like.” She laughed at her own stupid joke.

Yeah, Eleanor Roosevelt was all about pedicures, Abby had told her dad later that night. What’s-her-face Carter in the cotton coat and all those designer purses. Her dad had held a finger up to his lips and then shook his head, let his tongue roll out to the side like a strangled victim as if to mime tolerating her mother’s whims.

“It’s humiliating,” she screamed, near crying, and not caring what her stupid mother heard. “It’s like it’s her party.”

“She said you love the First Ladies.”

“I wrote one shitty report last year in sixth grade because I had to. That’s all,” she said. “That was over a year ago. She doesn’t even know me.”

“It’ll be over soon,” he said, and stretched out across the foot of her bed. He was in the same spot where Dollbaby had slept for the past two years and she knew her dad thought of it, too, because he patted the place as if the dog were still there. Neither of them had gotten over her disappearance. They were only gone for five hours. Her mother said Dollbaby dug her way out of the yard and ran away. Her mother said that she had called every vet and every rescue place in this county and two over and not a trace. “I suspect something bad has happened to her,” her mother said. “Maybe it will be easier to just accept she’s gone.”

“I don’t even want a party,” she told her dad. “I want Dollbaby.”

“Me, too,” he said. “But you don’t turn thirteen every day.”

The only reason Abby was even having a big party was to compete with all the bat and bar mitzvahs she’d attended all through seventh grade. Everything was a competition for her mother, whether Abby felt the desire to compete or not. Her dad had grown up here, but her mother had not and it was very important that she establish herself in her own way and right. People should like and respect her for who she is and not because they remember when cute little Bennie was the fastest kid on the track team or won a prize one Halloween for being the solar system. Abby had heard it all so many times she could recite it back.

Her mother is like a topsy-turvy doll, one minute funny and happy and the life of the party and the next, somber and bleak and angry. She can’t even enjoy when her mom seems good because she has to get ready for what she knows is coming. Abby has often thought how wonderful it would be to have a sturdy mother who stays the same, dependable and comfortable with some meat on her body. A mother who doesn’t want to wear what is in the junior department at Macy’s, a mother who loves wearing some big stretchy mom pants. Her one friend, Richie Henderson, has been through divorce and predicted as much for Abby’s future, and after many sad and burdened months thinking about it, Abby has come to look forward to the announcement and the life that will follow. Richie says a lot of parents are much better alone. They try harder. They stop lying about everything.

“They’re all pretty stupid,” Richie said. “Even the smart ones are stupid a*sholes.” His mother teaches math and science and his dad is a doctor so it makes sense that he would know the truth. “You’ll see, Abby, it’ll be so much better when they’re apart.” And so she is wishing for that, wishing for separate homes and two different bedrooms, clothes for each house, a dog at her dad’s. When she blows out her candles, she’ll wish for Dollbaby to come home and then she’ll wish for a divorce. A big fat divorce.

If someone asked her what is the best part of her life, she would say first Dollbaby, which she can’t say anymore, and then story time with her dad and then all of her friends at Pine Haven and then Richie who only thinks about skateboards and science things. For as long as she can remember her dad either read or told a story at bedtime and even though she knows she’s too old, she has begged him to continue. He ends his stories with a magic trick from his old days as an amateur street magician. Her best birthday parties have been the ones where he performed tricks and then people just split a piñata and ate lots of candy and ran around the house and yard until someone got hurt or threw up or both and her mother made them calm down and sit out on the porch until their rides came. But those days are gone and she hates the way her mother is constantly wondering if she has started her period. No.

Her dad has told her that he is only doing one big trick for the party but promises that it will be his best ever. He has worked for weeks on the disappearing chamber, even when her mother begged that he just pull a rabbit out of a hat or something easy. “It’s a masterpiece,” he had told her, and then whispered so her mother couldn’t hear. “I am going to make all the First Ladies disappear.”

Her favorite tricks are the ones he calls sleight of hand, and even though she knows how he palms things and uses his sleeves to hide things, it is still really amazing.

Her parents met because of the magic tricks. Her mom was in college and he has said that he was sort of in college and she stopped on the corner with a crowd of sorority sisters to watch him doing magic. They had told Abby the story for as long as she could remember so their lines of dialogue were firmly etched on her mind, the way her mom described him as “that cute hippie-looking guy” and her dad said that her mom was the prettiest of these very pretty girls all decked out with straw bags and high heels and everything monogrammed, little gold pearl necklaces, which her dad said made them all look like a pack of hunting dogs marked by some lucky owner.

“Thanks a lot,” her mom would say, inserting correct descriptions like add-a-bead and espadrilles and Capezio, and then go on to describe her dad’s dirty bare feet and near-dead flowers strewn in with the few dollars and bits of change tossed in front of the dove’s cage. He owned Hawk long after his performance days. “He had quite a scene of groupies,” her mom said. “They all looked like girls who did things a good girl wouldn’t be doing.”

“Like what?” Abby asked numerous times, but clearly the conversation had nothing to do with her except to act as a bit of brain washing. It was more designed as one of those things to remind her dad how lucky he was to meet her when he did. She claimed to have saved him from being a street person, that she was amazed when she discovered he was prelaw. He once confessed in a fight that he was never prelaw and only said that because one of the “dirty girls” had told him that’s all it would take for him to get a date with one of the uppity girls. The promise of a career and good money was all you needed.

Then when they started dating, he did a trick a day for her. Flowers appearing out of his sleeve; Hawk materializing from his empty hat. Abby once heard her dad tell Sadie that he had a marriage founded on tricks and it changed the way she looked at everything. It is one of those things she plans to ask him about some night soon when he is near dozing at the foot of her bed. She will also ask him about a friend of his from childhood, Joanna, who owns the Dog House and sometimes works at Pine Haven. “Joanna and I were a lot like you and Richie,” he had said. “Best friends all through elementary school.” He said that she had always been a good loyal friend. True blue, he said. “And she could do everything I could do except pee standing up. A real tomboy.”

“Some would say butch.” Abby’s mother didn’t know she heard her say that, but she did. “Though she’s been married how many times? Four? Five. Clearly there’s something wrong with her. ”

When Abby outgrew regular bedtime stories, her dad started telling her about what the town used to be like. How once upon a time she might have looked out her bedroom window and seen into the cemetery because the hedge of myrtle wasn’t there and the tall pine trees were just saplings. This was before the retirement home was built on the other side of the cemetery and before the row of modest split-levels across the street from them were plowed down and replaced with gigantic brick homes with cathedral windows, enormous garages, and no yards. A mathematician had once lived in their house and her dad had found all kinds of numbers and scribbles on the wall in what had been his study but now is their guest room. Abby had the girl’s room, roses on the old wallpaper her mother fussed about for weeks, steaming and peeling every little scrap. The girl drove an old Checker cab painted dark green and last he heard was living and teaching somewhere in the Northeast.

He told how once in the cemetery there was a grave with a playhouse over it, how in 1940—almost twenty years before he was even born—the grief-stricken parents had the ten-year-old’s playhouse moved there, the grave within looking like a little bed, the grave of the baby they had lost in the early 1930s there beside her. And he promised to take her there and show it to her, which he did. The playhouse rotted and fell down years ago, but he could find the grave, and he also showed her the statue of Lydia, a beautiful young woman who was rumored to try to hold on to you if you sat on her stone rose-petal-covered lap. And now Abby goes there every day and speaks to them all by name. When her dad was a child there was a grown-up-sized rocking chair inside the playhouse and he and Joanna had thought that maybe the chair was for the father to come and sit at night so he could cry there by the graves of his children without anyone seeing him. They always hoped they might see him there or hear the rocker. It chills Abby to think about that, especially as she is passing down the path where the playhouse used to be.

She isn’t supposed to play in the cemetery. Her mother freaks out and says that’s where people go to do drugs and homeless people sleep. One woman’s purse got stolen out of her car while she was putting flowers on her husband’s grave. Those things may be true, but Abby hasn’t seen anything scary. She had been there that very day, in fact, and she finds lots of things but nothing like what her mother says. In the far corner where you can just barely see the brick of Pine Haven through the arboretum, there is a tiny area for Jewish people, rocks left on the various headstones like little notes to the dead. She arranges the rocks in circles and patterns, careful never to step on the graves. She visits Mary Young and her baby brother and Lydia, where there is a little stone off to the left under a bush marked JACK, our loyal friend. She knows that there had once been a statue of a German shepherd to go with the girl, but someone had stolen it years ago. Now there is just the flat stone.

LATELY AT NIGHT, before his magic trick and when he can’t think of any more town stories, her dad talks about historical events he finds interesting, many of them about disasters and the lessons people could have learned from them. Floods and hurricanes and fires, that amazing molasses story in Boston, people drowned in the hot thick syrup. Cheap and faulty construction and lies told, scrimping on things that would have made all the difference. The Cocoanut Grove fire in Boston and the chicken factory right nearby in Hamlet. Locked doors and bad codes. People locked in. She didn’t want to think about it but she did, and sometimes she couldn’t stop. Out on the interstate where she sometimes bikes on the service road, there is a billboard that says ARE YOU PREPARED TO MEET YOUR MAKER? Her dad always says, Not today, thank you. He says if you could read your life like a book, that you would be able to see what’s coming. Like a well-planned magic trick, it might seem spontaneous and random, but really things line up in a way that is logical. He said that everything has a purpose.

“So what’s the purpose of you and Mom screaming at each other?” Abby asked. “What is the purpose of Dollbaby getting lost?”

“And where does survival of the fittest come in?” her mother asked when she overheard that. “Tell me that one, Houdini.”

“It’s a puzzle,” he said. “A friend of mine has a theory that if survival of the fittest is all about the guys most likely to get to spread the most seed and populate, then the prize would actually go to the sociopaths of the world—those slick player types who bed anything that might breathe. Do you believe that?” They locked down in one of those awful stares that made Abby want to run from the room screaming, made her wish they would drown in hot molasses and shut up.

“So what friend do you have who actually talks philosophical thoughts? The hot-dog heiress?”

Her mother thought it was sick to talk about historical tragedies and threatened to take it up with the Abby’s therapist, whom she now refers to often, but her dad said people are most afraid of the unknown. It’s always best to know, he argued. “It’s why I believe in regular check-ups and asking lots of questions.”

Abby’s mom walked from the room and slammed the door. Her dad once said that she has two channels with no choices in between. There is “The Zany Madcap Adventures of Me” and there is “Nobody Loves Me, Everybody Hates and/or Is Jealous of Me.” He said the common denominator, of course, is me. Me, me, me. “I am so goddamned sick of it I could die,” he said, and now that is what she thinks as she passes through the stones and vines. I am so goddamned sick of it I could die.

“Everyone needs a mantra,” C.J. had told the residents of Pine Haven when they went to meditation class, which is something Sadie never misses. It is best when you use sounds that blank your mind. Sadie asked if it was okay if she imitated her old Singer sewing machine because it was her greatest meditation device for years. Absolutely, C.J. said, and so Sadie hums and Mr. Stone makes what he calls squirrel chatter, which annoys everyone and most just do the ordinary om, which Abby tries to do, but it almost always turns into a curse or what a crash would sound like if there was a twenty-car pileup on the interstate like that one in Tennessee when everyone was suddenly caught in a cloud of fog with no warning whatsoever. Could you see that coming? Her dad would say yes, you could. He would say that the makings of such weather and the traffic conditions could have been predicted. “You have to keep your eyes open at all times,” he said, but looked at her mother as he said it. “You don’t want to be caught unaware.”

Her favorites of her dad’s tricks are the ones he calls torn-and-restored, where it always ends with him saying, No worry, good as new. Abby wishes he would use it on himself. Good as new, he says. A pony prancing from a pile of crap, the phoenix rising from ashes, Jesus sprung from the tomb, the old dude we saw at the mall slapped with paddles and brought back to life.

DOLLBABY WAS A stray and though Abby’s mother tried and tried to get her to look at all the pictures in the newspaper from breeders, Abby held firm that this was the one she wanted. It was clear, after all, that Dollbaby had chosen her. Of all the kids, in this whole town, she was the one Dollbaby followed from the school where she had spent several days curled up outside the cafeteria doorway hoping for food. Who knew what Dollbaby actually was—a little of this and a little of that—the vet had said but she most resembled a Sheltie with her sharp little nose and bushy fox tail. The nose of a beagle, her dad had said the first time she ever picked up a scent and took off. She had clearly been abused and cowered at the sight of most adults and brooms and mops. She had the occasional accident in the house, but as Abby often pointed out to her parents, this was a temporary thing and would get better as Dollbaby got older and more used to living there. That was two years ago, when Abby was in fifth grade and before her parents started holding their late-night screaming matches. Now Abby is about to turn thirteen and Dollbaby has left as quickly as she came, likely gone for good, her mother had said because she had looked everywhere with no luck. Her mother said someone probably thought she was a stray and took her home.

“But she has a collar and a name tag!” Abby screamed, and her mother said her tag might have gotten lost.

“But I put pictures of her all over town!”

Her mother said the people could have come from out of town, that maybe Dollbaby ventured over toward Cracker Barrel off on the service road. “She did that another time, remember?” her mother asked. Abby’s dad was there beside her mother, holding her hand like everything was okay and like she was the one who had lost something. Like Abby wouldn’t remember Dollbaby at the Cracker Barrel? Like she wouldn’t have been terrified to imagine Dollbaby crossing the interstate all by herself. But that time, someone called, a woman from New Jersey and the woman sat right there in a big rocking chair with Dollbaby on her lap until they got there to pick her up. Abby’s dad offered the woman some money, but she said no thanks, she was just happy to have helped and for them to use the money, to buy something for Dollbaby, so they rode all the way out to the Dog House and got her an Old Yeller and sat and watched her lick the waxy paper clean.

“You are quite the dog, Dollbaby,” Abby’s dad said. “Playing Monopoly, going to the Cracker Barrel, eating at the Dog House.” The mention of Monopoly made them both laugh. Several months before, Dollbaby had eaten the race car and Abby’s dad made it their mission to find the car when it came out the other end. Finally, there it was, not a bit damaged, and they boiled it and then returned it to the box with the top hat and little dog and battleship. Her mother said it was outrageous and that someone with a real job wouldn’t have so much time to spend searching through dog shit. Her dad said it was fascinating and educational to imagine the journey the little race car took, like Jonah in the belly of the whale or Gepetto looking for Pinocchio. He said he had always gotten those two stories mixed up and now was eager to show Pinocchio on the big screen. He had reopened the old movie theater downtown and always ran kid movies on Saturday mornings. There was a time when this alone made people at school want to be friends with her, but those days were long gone.

Just earlier today, Abby’s mother said that if, and then she paused with the word, if Dollbaby is dead, they may never know. They will only know if someone takes the time to turn in the body. “I have left messages all over town,” her mother said. “So if they take the body to a vet or a shelter, we will hear. But I think for all practical purposes, we should probably assume she is dead.”

That’s when Abby got madder than she has ever been. “Never,” she screamed. “I will never stop looking for her!” She grabbed another stack of the posters she had made and went outside, slamming the door behind her. If only she had stayed home and helped her mother plan the stupid party, it might not have happened. Dollbaby would never have left if Abby had been out there in the yard or walking through the cemetery to Pine Haven. If only her parents would stop being so stupid. Dollbaby hates yelling and fighting. And Abby’s parents are stupid. Sometimes she hates both of them, something she only has the nerve to tell Dollbaby, who listens to every word. Her parents don’t allow sweets or sodas or TV unless it is educational, which isn’t the reason she hates them but it helps, and it is a big part of the reason why she started spending so many afternoons over at Pine Haven in the first place.

It is an easy walk through the cemetery and then the arboretum. She loves the cool shadiness of the cemetery, the huge trees, and old headstones to read along the way: Greetings stranger passing by, you are now as once was I; there is where the little playhouse used to be and the tall stone angel—MCKEITHAN—who once was vandalized and now stands with only one wing intact. There is a tiny lamb on top of a dark mossy stone: Thou hast won the victory without fighting the battle, hast gained the cross without having to bear the crown. It was a boy named Isaac Abbott who was born in 1832 and died a year later. She likes the old parts of the cemetery the best, though some of the stones are hard to read. The far corner, which is all overgrown, is where she had been told they buried slaves and suicides and unclaimed bodies like that guy called Spaghetti over in Laurinburg. They called him the Carny Mummy and her dad had once seen him preserved over there in a glass box. She wanted to go to Laurinburg to see him, but now he was buried; they even poured concrete in on top so nobody could dig him back up, that’s how famous he is. Somebody from the North had sent money to bury him sixty years after the fact because he thought it was disrespectful to Italian people. They said his name was Cancetto Farmica and not Carny Mummy and certainly not Spaghetti.

When she is way back under the dogwoods and pines and willows, she can’t see anything beyond the tip top eaves of her house. There is no street and no Pine Haven, no cars. Sometimes she and Dollbaby pretend that it is 1833 and they have come to bury Isaac. They say what a sweet boy he was and how sad he died so young. Abby has always been able to make herself cry and often she has enjoyed that, but it was a mistake to bring Haley White out here in the fifth grade and let her in on the game. Haley acted like she understood and also really respected and loved these people and then she went to school and announced to the whole class that all Abby’s friends were either really old or dead. Dollbaby growled the first time she saw Haley, and Abby should have paid attention to that. One day Dollbaby was sniffing and chasing something, probably a rabbit, and led Abby to a little section closed in by shrubs at least six feet tall where Stars of David are on the stones and little rocks are left like calling cards. Abby is especially drawn to the grave of Esther Cohen who not only has the most rocks but lately is the one who often has notes neatly folded inside the urn attached to her headstone. Clearly, Esther is the most popular and Abby feels both resentment and admiration since she herself is one of those girls who has always gotten the assigned class number of Valentine’s and none with anything really written to her except the ones she got from Dollbaby, which her dad had made—big loopy words with backward letters—where Dollbaby professed her great love and adoration and promised not to pee on the living room rug anymore.

“I’M SORRY, HONEY,” her dad had said with the news of Dollbaby’s disappearance. He pulled her close and hugged her. He shook and cried as well, but it seemed he was crying about more than Dollbaby, and she almost screamed out her anger and hatred when she heard them again late that night, their voices filling the house even as they stupidly thought they were being quiet. You have no respect, she wanted to scream. It was what her mother had said to her when she got on that new white spread knowing her Nikes were covered in mud and maybe, hopefully, even some dog shit. You have to have respect, they both had said when she got in trouble for arguing with one of her teachers who mispronounced a lot of words like when he was talking about herbs until she quizzed him on why they were talking about herbs in history class and he said. “Erbs, girl!” he said, and then spelled, “A-R-A-B-S. Erbs!” The same teacher talked about the nigger river and said that evolution was the talk of the devil. Certainly, she didn’t respect that and she doesn’t respect her stupid idiot parents either.

This morning Esther has a lot of mail. The note that was there yesterday written in sloppy blue ink—See you soon—is still there. It has a smudged blot of lipstick—sealed with a kiss—and someone wrote WHEN? in all capital letters. The when looks angry, like it should be shouted. WHEN? Now there is a new one on the back of a Food Lion receipt. I can’t keep waiting. I deserve something better! Abby often stops to read the notes and then to sit up under the tendrils of the weeping willow growing closeby. Usually Dollbaby joins her and everything is fine, but today, she feels Dollbaby’s absence in a way that makes her feel a little scared, like the person who is writing these notes might be watching her from a tree or the Methodist steeple like that sniper she saw on television. Usually when she is out here, she thinks of all these dead people as neighbors you might call out and speak to, but it’s clear she is not the only person who comes out here. It could be Haley or some of those mean girls trying to play a trick on her and so she isn’t about to say a word to anybody except Dollbaby if she would just come home. Usually she would keep moving through the old part where the first family ever buried here—the Wilkins—have their own little iron fence with a gate, or she might climb up into a magnolia tree, lean and sling her leg up and over the big stone horse monument over General Fulton who founded this town and ride along for a while, or go sit on the lap of the lovely Lydia Edwards who died so young and now sits and stares in the direction of the newer graves and the arboretum. People say she once had eyes made of emeralds but somebody stole them and so now she is always watching whoever passes by to recognize the thief. “It’s just me, Lydia,” she used to always say until Haley went to school and told and then everybody started saying it back to her, It’s just me, Lydia, so now she just says it in her head, which Lydia totally gets if she gets anything. But now without Dollbaby, she can’t stand to be there all by herself and she feels like she needs to run as fast as she can. She puts the Food Lion note in her back pocket and takes off. She will collect the others later on her way back. She pats her leg for Dollbaby to follow out of habit and wills herself not to cry. She tries to whistle and sing so it won’t be so quiet. She sings her favorite Lady Gaga song, “Telephone.” She is passing the newer section now—graves without all the trees and vines. Newer stones with fancy-colored photographs of the dead people. Taco Bell in full view in the distance. Her favorite belongs to some people who lived in her house when her dad was a kid—Fred and Cleva Burns and their stone is cut to look like a giant ship: Break, break, break, it reads. Back when she talked aloud to everybody and not just in her head, she told Fred and Cleva how she had found some of their things and kept them in a special box. She has found bobby pins, which her mother would never use, and an old dried-up ink cartridge she didn’t even know what it was. She found a token from the Ferris Beach pavilion wedged in a crack in her windowsill and her dad said that place had been torn down for over twenty years.

Abby’s best friend, Sadie Randolph, has a beautiful pink granite stone with her husband Horace’s name and dates on one side and hers on the other. “All they’ll have to do is put in that final date,” she has said, which always makes Abby sad to even imagine. When she was still able to come out here, Sadie planted rosemary—for remembrance—and now it is huge and bushy, growing up between their names. Abby always breaks off a little and takes it with her. Sadie likes that.

The arboretum is lush and green, gravel paths and flowers and trees all carefully labeled. There are all kinds of fruit and flowering trees, lots of magnolias blooming. Abby’s favorite part is the long arbor that stretches the full length of the cemetery, built there, her dad had said, so that the people over at Pine Haven wouldn’t have to look out and see the cemetery. Now they just see a screen of Confederate jasmine and cross vines and wisteria. All the plant names are right there to read on little gold-etched tags that remind her of Dollbaby’s name tag that she had made at Petco while her mother still tried to talk her into a different dog—a brand-new teacup-sized this or that puppy with Dollbaby sitting right there to hear every single word. She had said she would take a puppy as well, that it could be Dollbaby’s pet, and with that her stupid mother finally shut up.

Some call the arboretum the tunnel of love, but Abby thinks of it as the tunnel of life from the dark shade of the cemetery, through the labeled vines and then out into the bright sunlight and wide flat asphalt parking lot of Pine Haven—the perfect place for roller skating or skateboarding, which she loves to do. She can skateboard as good as Richie Hendricks and sometimes the two of them do that for hours. He has always liked Dollbaby and she likes him because of that.

Sadie is always waiting for her with a Hershey’s bar or a big Whitman’s Sampler and a crisp dollar bill for the soda machine down the hall. The sodas only cost seventy-five cents so she always gives the returned change to Millie, a plump long-term resident with spiky hair who guards the machine all day long and begs for change. Millie has a pink and white blanket she carries around and calls it her African. “Don’t you touch my African,” she says, “not unless I say to touch it.” Sadie says she means to say afghan but that people who didn’t get enough school often make this mistake. One of the residents called Millie a Mongoloid, and the new woman who lives across from Sadie, Mrs. Silverman, who is from the North said, “Oh my God, where on earth have I landed? Is anyone here educated?”

Abby has been told that Millie is at least forty even though she looks and acts like a big kid and that no one ever comes to see her, that she has kind of been adopted by all the residents and workers just like Harley, the huge orange cat who prowls the grounds and who used to lead Dollbaby on some good chases through the cemetery. Used to everybody loved Harley, but now they’re afraid he will make them die so they scream and throw things when they see him coming. Sadie told Abby that was nonsense, and if they’d let her, she would keep Harley full-time with her so he wouldn’t have to mess with all the others being mean to him. “Harley has been falsely persecuted,” she said, and stroked his big fat head. She also told Abby that grown-ups often say things they don’t mean, like that they hate someone or that they wish someone had never been born, the kind of thing a kid would get in big trouble for at school.

Sadie really does know everyone who has ever lived in this town, even the old shriveled-up Indian woman who reaches and whines and tries to play with Abby’s hair when she passes. “Come heren right now, baby,” the woman says, her tongue moving and twisting like it can’t be still. “Come on come on come on.” Sadie says that Lottie has been off since an accident that gave her a bad hit to the head years before. Lottie lives in the part of the building set aside for those less fortunate with no family and nowhere to go, like Millie. Sadie says that part of the building is the last car on the train—the end of the line.

Sadie knew Abby’s dad when he was a boy in this town. She taught him in third grade as she did most everyone who grew up there, but she had taken a special interest in him when his mother died so young. Her mother had also died young so she said they needed to stick together and now Abby’s dad likes to tell anyone interested that they have done just that for over forty years. Sadie sometimes tells others who live at Pine Haven that Abby is her granddaughter.

Abby was afraid of Sadie’s new neighbor, Rachel Silverman, in the beginning, but now she likes her and spends a lot of afternoons curled up in the big common living room where people sometimes gather to talk. There are only a couple of men living at Pine Haven. Sadie says men just don’t keep very well and Rachel laughed and said Sadie talked about men like they might be a head of lettuce or loaf of bread. “Well, look around,” Sadie said, “only a few here,” and so it would be hard not to notice Mr. Stanley Stone who used to be a lawyer but now spends lots of time watching and reading about wrestling. People say he needs a haircut and a shave, but he says they should mind their own goddamned business. He says he likes to think of what he’d call himself if he ever got in the ring: Stony or Rocky or the Marble Man. “Get it?” he asked and struck a cowboy pose with his legs bowed out and his arm lassoing the air. “I’m mixing me some metaphors for you intellectuals. Marble like stone and Marlboro like a well-hung cowboy stud.” He looked at Mrs. Silverman when he said that, but she ignored him. Toby, who wears winter boots all year long and a fanny pack stashed with all kinds of things she is always eager to share repeated what he said and laughed until she cried. “Well hung,” she repeated. “Don’t listen, Abby.” But of course Abby did listen. She listens to everything they say. Mr. Stone’s son teaches at her school and so it’s weird to see him there with his crazy old dad acting as bad as Todd Reynolds who got in trouble in fifth grade for unzipping his pants and mooning everybody on the field trip bus.

Abby often tells her mother that she is at a friend’s house and that is true. These are her friends and Sadie’s suite is like a house, with her big overstuffed velvet chairs with doilies on the back and lots of needlework filling the walls. It even smells like Sadie’s old house where Abby once visited with her dad.

“Whose house?” her mother always asks. “Which friend? Is it someone you’d like to ask to sleep over?”

It is clear her mother doesn’t believe her. She spends a lot of time pushing Abby to call up or be friends with girls whose mothers Abby’s mom wants to be friends with. That’s what’s really going on. Now that she has lied about all those girls from time to time, there has been no choice but to invite them to her party. She cornered the one nice girl in that group in the bathroom the last week of school and confessed her situation. She figured the worst thing that happened would just be that the girl turned on her and she’d be even more of an unnoticed outcast than she already is. So once an outcast, who cares? It’s like Mrs. Silverman said to someone who wanted to convert her one day. “Surely whoever is in charge, if in fact there is an afterlife, is smart enough to know when people say they believe something at the last minute in hopes of a pass,” she said. “If there is a smart person in charge, then he or she will respect where I stand. And if that’s not the case, then why should I even care?”

“There is a heaven,” the woman said. “And there are rules for getting in.”

“Do they lobotomize you at the gate?” Mrs. Silverman asked, which made Toby laugh even harder. Sadie explained to Abby what that meant, going in and scrambling part of the brain so people will forget the parts that make them sad. It made Abby cringe.

Mr. Stone said, “I’d rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy,” and Mrs. Silverman said that that joke was so old she was riding a dinosaur the first time she heard it. He turned pink and Abby felt kind of sorry for him until he raised his middle finger, another thing that would get a kid sent to detention for days. If Mr. Stone was in his son’s class, he’d be suspended. Abby could not stop thinking about the lobotomy, though, like the thought made her need to squeeze her eyes shut. It made her picture something like an ice pick. It was a terrible word to think about but one she could definitely use later on her parents or some of the mean kids. “Go get a lobotomy,” she will say, and then, “Oh, I forgot, you already did that.” If those girls turn on her at the party tomorrow she might use it just like she did in elementary school when she told Laurie Monroe, one of the meanest girls of all, that she had ancestors, that her epidermis was showing, that her mother is a thespian and performs in public and that she slumbered in her sleep. Her dad had taught her all of those; he said they worked when he was a kid and probably still would.

“Of course no such thing happens in heaven,” Mrs. Marge Walker had shouted. “They don’t want you all scarred up in heaven. They want you looking your best.”

“So what about her?” Sadie pointed to Lottie, but Lottie didn’t notice, just kept working that tongue in and out of her mouth like it had a life all its own. “I believe Lottie will be in heaven.”

“We don’t know that for sure,” Mrs. Walker said, a stack of pamphlets on her lap. “We have no idea what the scorecard of her soul looks like or what the rules are in her heaven.”

“Ah, segregation,” Mr. Stone said, and that time Mrs. Silverman turned and nodded in his direction like she was with him. He smiled at Mrs. Silverman, but she didn’t look at him, probably afraid he’d be mean again.

“Good, better, best,” Mrs. Walker continued. “I didn’t create the system. That’s just the way it is.”

“Well,” Mrs. Silverman said, “I think that if there is a heaven, then it has to be a socialist society; otherwise it wouldn’t be heaven but just more of the kind of unjust hell you’re always describing.” No one, not even Mr. Stone, said anything after that and Abby decided she would try to use everything she learned from watching Mrs. Silverman—hands on hips, one eyebrow raised, little words like if made to sound big and powerful.

ABBY HAD STARED out the big bathroom window as she described the situation she was in to the girl at school, Elise Conway, a girl whose dad was a doctor in town and who had more Girl Scout badges than anyone had ever had at her age in their town. The girl was really no better looking than Abby; in fact they kind of looked alike—both a little plump but still not really needing a bra. Elise also had freckles over her nose and her ears stuck out enough that Abby once had heard a boy call her Dumbo. Abby could see the car-pool line already forming and focused on the steeple of the Methodist church while she waited for the girl to respond. She felt that heavy sick feeling as she waited, similar to hearing the news about Dollbaby but not as bad. Nothing is as bad as that, she told herself.

“Is your dad really a magician?” Elise asked. “And can he really let people in the movies anytime he wants like you said?”

“He’s the best magician,” Abby said, scaring herself with the realization that this would soon be put to the test. “And he practically owns the theater. I can go anytime I want day or night and I can just take whatever I want from the candy counter.” That was not an entire lie. She could take stuff, she just had to pay for it.

“And do you really know someone who reads palms and tells the future?”

“Yes,” Abby said, and put her hands on her hips. “And if you help me, I can take you to meet them.” And of course she was thinking of that young woman C.J. with all the tattoos and nose and lip rings, who did all the old peoples’ hair and nails. Abby saw her shuffling a deck of tarot cards one day and she also said she loved the Ouija board even if it does only conjure the slowest most stupid spirits. “They deserve to talk, too, right?” C.J. had asked Abby. “Likely my relatives would be there with them, which is why I do it.” She laughed and then looked at Abby’s palm, studied it for a long time and then looked her right in the eyes in a way that was kind of creepy but cool. “You are very lucky,” she said. “You may not see it for a long time, but trust that your good luck will come.” The memory gave Abby a rush of courage so she continued.

“I’ll take you to meet them if you’ll come to my party and act like we’re friends. Maybe get some of the other people to come, too.” She turned from the window and made eye contact. “I have fifty dollars saved and I’ll use it all to buy Girl Scout cookies or whatever it is you’re selling.”

Abby gave most of the cookies to Sadie and some of the others so her parents wouldn’t know what she did. She went door to door, leaving them with a note that said to have a nice day. All the girls accepted the invitation to her party and now all she has to do is show up tomorrow and get it over with, hope it all can just happen and be over, and then she can go back to searching for Dollbaby. That’s the worst thing of all. Even if the party sucks and people have a terrible time and call her lame and stupid, it won’t be nearly as bad as not having Dollbaby. She stands at the end of the arbor and squints out at the bright parking lot. “Here’s to a long and happy cookie-filled life,” Stanley Stone said when she gave him two boxes of Thin Mints, and for just a second he seemed normal, like who you would want to be your grandfather, but then, when he saw Toby and Sadie, added that sex was the real secret to long life. Sadie asked that he please hush and not say such things with Abby present, but he just shrugged and stared at Mrs. Silverman who said puhhleeeze. Then she said that sanity was the real secret.

Toby said that sanity is good, but she thinks the secret to long life is water, water, and more water. Drink water all day long to keep your body all flushed out. “May your pee always run clear and carry no trace of a scent except when you go somewhere fancy and eat asparagus.” She said that a person should be able to hide, go underground at any second, and not be detected.

“That’s why animals don’t eat asparagus,” Mr. Stone told Abby, like he might be teaching a class.

“Yes, that would be one reason,” Mrs. Silverman said, and raised a pretend gun to her head. Ever since then, though, Abby drinks enough water to have clear pee. She is almost as obsessive about clear pee as she is touching all of her favorite stones and monuments in the cemetery and checking the notes in Esther Cohen’s urn.

SOMETIMES LATE AT night, Abby sneaks out through the cemetery and the arboretum and stands outside Sadie’s window. Sadie once got her to listen to a song playing on the radio about a man in a nursing home who had the bed by the window and spent the day describing the world out there to his roommate only there wasn’t anything there at all. When the man in the song died and his roommate got a turn by the window, he saw nothing but a brick wall, but he continued what had been started and described a pretty world for the new person just brought in. “That’s what I do, Abby,” she said. “I try to paint a pretty picture.”

“What about my parents?” she asked. “Can you paint a pretty picture of them?”

Sadie pulled her close and whispered in her ear. “I am going to try, sweetheart. I promise you I will try.”

The morning sun is bright and Abby can hear strains of music or television coming from different windows. She hears the sound of Richie’s skateboard even before she sees him. She waits for him to lift his hand first before she waves. He has built a really good ramp and is able to clear several feet before landing. He has his hair pulled back in a ponytail and a big scab on his knee. His Billabong T-shirt is orange and blue. Some people think he’s a loser, too, and maybe that’s why she likes him. Even if he is a loser, he went and got his bike and rode all over town putting up pictures of Dollbaby. REWARD, it said with a picture of Dollbaby she took last Christmas: Dollbaby with a rawhide chew shaped like a stocking. Abby promised that there would be a big reward even though she had spent all of her money so people would show up at her stupid party, trusting that her parents would give her whatever she needed if they were lucky enough to get a happy call. Every time the phone rings she freezes and in her mind she repeats the words she needs to hear, the same words the woman from New Jersey at Cracker Barrel said. I have your little Dollbaby. I’ll hold her until you get here.

Abby needs her own phone and is supposed to get one for her birthday. She is about the only kid without one, not that anyone will ever call her, but at least she can look like she’s busy, hold it up to her ear in the cafeteria or at the bus stop so she won’t just be standing there trying to think of something to say or what to do with her hands. She will act like she’s talking to a friend and maybe her nosy mother will leave her alone. That would be easy enough: Oh my God! You’ve got to be kidding. Like don’t I know that! That would make her mother so happy, just like it made her so happy when she found Michelle Obama goody bags to give everybody. Abby has to be home for lunch to finish filling them, but until then she can just visit Sadie and then keep looking for Dollbaby. She holds her hand up to her ear to practice talking. She pretends it’s the woman at the Cracker Barrel saying she will sit right there and hold that sweet Dollbaby until they can pick her up. Richie has stopped skating and is shielding his eyes against the sun, waiting for her to walk over. She can tell he thinks she really has a phone, so she eases her hand down and into her back pocket. Call all you want, but there’s no one home. When she starts walking, he starts skating again. She will sit on the curb and watch him for at least ten minutes or so before she goes inside to visit Sadie. He will ask how things are and she will stick out her tongue and hold a fake gun to her head like she saw Mrs. Silverman do. She will tell him that there’s no news about Dollbaby and he’ll say, “That sucks,” and then she’ll tell him how her parents were at it again late last night, she could hear them through the hole around the base of the radiator in her room, and he’ll say, “They’re so f*cked up,” which always makes her feel good even though it makes her feel kind of sick, too, and then when she thinks she might start crying, she thinks about Sadie and the way she will be waiting with a dollar bill and a big box of candy and how she can curl up on the daybed and just listen to Sadie talk or watch whatever is on the television. She does this every day.