What I found out was that I did remember how to get to that prefab house. Maybe my mind didn’t know, but my feet certainly did ’cause they carried me right on out of that parking lot, down Prospector Drive. The suitcase didn’t bother me, nor did the blustery air. I was on autopilot, or cruise control as Daddy used to say about driving the truck when I asked how come he didn’t get tired with all that driving. My mind was stuck on Momma and this expectation that she was still alive as I trudged past the old brick buildings I remembered from when I was a kid, under leafless trees that spotted First, Second, Third and Fourth Streets, beside the carbon copy white homes and low-lying telephone wires. In time the trees and the homes began to multiply, the small, nearly deserted town drifting away. And then onto Spruce Street with its mobile homes and open land and billboards, nearly a mile’s walk with cars soaring by at speeds that made the hair whirl around my head.
My legs burned by the time I arrived at Canyon Drive. My fingers were numb, my nose oozing snot from its nares. My arm was nearly asleep from the weight of the suitcase, my leg likely lacerated from where it rubbed back and forth, back and forth, all along the way.
The house was smaller than I remembered, the white siding more like oatmeal than snow. What once felt like an entire stairwell to the front door were instead only four small crooked steps, the aluminum handrail missing half its winding, taupe spindles. There was a basketball net, which there never used to be, a Honda hatchback in the drive. Red. Not the Bluebird I was used to seeing.
I stood, on the opposite side of Canyon Drive, staring at that house that used to be mine. Gathering the courage to turn the knob on the front door, hoping and praying I’d find Momma on the other side, though of course, deep down, somewhere far inside, I knew she was dead, but I tried hard to ignore that notion, to imagine the what-if instead. There was a split-second thought: if I didn’t try, I’d never know, and that was a good thing, ’cause not knowing was better than proof that Momma and Daddy were dead. I’d been eight years old, a stupid kid after all. Maybe all those things they told me had been a lie, just one of all the other lies Joseph told me. I made believe Momma had been searching for me all this time, that my face had been like one of those other missing kids they plaster on the back of milk cartons, the black-and-white images with an age progressed photo beside it, what some smarty-pants thought I might look like when I was sixteen. If you think you have seen Claire, please call 1-800-I-am-lost. I imagined the wording: Claire was last seen at her home on Canyon Drive, in Ogallala, Nebraska. Her hair is the color of snot, her eyes a bizarre blue. She has a small scar under her chin, a space between her two front teeth. She was last seen wearing...
What was I wearing, that night Amber Adler came to tell me my parents were dead? That periwinkle T-shirt I used to own, the one with the bright red tube of lipstick and the frisky inscription: SWAK, kiss marks flecking its edges. Or maybe a party dress or a polka dot tank top or maybe...
This is what I’m thinking about when the door to that prefab home jolts open, the sound of kids arguing annihilating the silence. The sound of a mother’s voice—not my mother, but a mother: stern and tired—telling them to Shut. Their. Mouths. Please.
There they were, three of them—no four, I saw then, the mother carrying an infant in a seat in her arms—pouncing down those four crooked steps like a litter of playful kittens. The two freestanding children elbowed one another all the way down the stairs, calling each other names: fart-face and booger-brain. It was two boys, each in jeans and tennis shoes, thick winter coats and fur bomber hats. The mother had a blanket—pink—draped over that baby. A girl. Maybe the girl she always wanted, I thought, as the mother propelled the boys forward with a gentle shove and told them to hurry. Get in the car. They were going to be late. One of the boys spun then suddenly crying huge crocodile tears. “You hit me,” he screamed at his mother.
“Daniel,” she said, her tone flat. “Get in the car.” But he continued his outburst right there, at the bottom of the steps, as the older boy climbed into the hatchback as he was told, and the mother secured the baby carrier into the car. The boy, Daniel, maybe five or six years old, crossed his arms across himself and pouted, that bottom lip of his almost covering the top one. I stared in awe, thinking how I never, ever would’ve talked to Momma that way, never would’ve called Lily a fart-face or booger-brain. I decided then and there that I didn’t like this little boy, not one bit at all. I didn’t like the way his wayward brown hair crept from the edges of his bomber hat, or the way his too-big coat hung farther down on the left side than the right, the sleeve on the left completely covering a gloved hand. I didn’t like his navy blue boots or the nasty frown on his long face.
But what really bothered me was that he thought whatever errand they were about to run was the worst thing in the world that could happen. Clearly he’d never met a man like Joseph.