He got to the Wildes’ house, only they had no ramp. He hoisted himself down, his stumps on footrests, then rolled to the ground. Dragged himself by the arms, his belly against black, sticky mud. Pulled himself up the first set of steps, panting from unaccustomed exertion, wondering if he’d imagined all this. If he was about to arrive at the Wildes’ door in the middle of the night, and they’d think he was psychotic.
He wrapped his stumps under him. They hurt—fire where his knees ought to have been. Not enough mirror therapy today. He banged on the wood just below the doorknob.
Knock! Knock!
The air was still and hot. It reminded him of the bad place. An oil field, on fire. A kid offering a nail bomb to his CO like an apple, changing all their lives forever.
Knock! Knock!
The boy who answered wore a dingy tank top and no shoes, and for a moment, he was sure this was a trick. He was back in-country. The past had folded over. Followed him six thousand miles and fifteen years.
The boy stood with his hands in his pants. He shook with shock. Larry. That’s right, this was the neighbor child. Larry Wilde.
“S’okay,” Peter panted. “You’re okay. Your mom and dad home?”
The girl with the bandage on her hand appeared beside him. Julia. “My mom’s hurt,” she said. “We can’t get an ambulance and we’re scared to move her ’cause of the baby.”
It took Peter another beat. So this was real after all. How strange, that it should be a relief to him.
From Interviews from the Edge: A Maple Street Story, by Maggie Fitzsimmons,
Soma Institute Press, ? 2036
“I love the New Yorker magazine, but that article and the book that came after aren’t true to life. I don’t think like a computer, in binaries. I didn’t pick a side. Hate one family, love the other. It’s not how rational people engage with their surroundings.
“We were bystanders that summer, watching something bad unfold. Those searchers out there were a constant reminder. Some of the newspeople came to us for comments. We didn’t have any. What could we say that they didn’t already know?… People who’d never lived in our town, who’d never met anybody involved, they kept writing about it online. They had all these theories about how Shelly had escaped and run away, or was faking it. The global warming occultists were worse. Who gets possessed by a hole? Everywhere we went, people at work and the grocery store and our extended families asked us about it. Especially, they asked about Arlo. We knew that we had to do something, take it back from them, because if anyone had earned an opinion, it was us…
“Look at it the other way. What if we’d done nothing? Acted like it was Rhea’s problem. The press and all those blogs would have come down on us just as hard. You can’t get away with being a bystander anymore. There’s too much information. You have to take a stand or people think you’re guilty, too… We didn’t mean anything by the brick. If they were innocent, no harm done. And if they were guilty, well, we’d put them on notice.” —Margie Walsh
“People talk a lot about health effects, but I’m fine and it’s been years. No cancer or what have you. None of my buddies have it, either… What I noticed about those people—the ones you call the people of Maple Street—is that they didn’t have respect. They shoved their way all over like they thought looking busy meant they were helping. They kept asking all these questions. They made us nervous. They made that woman, Rhea Schroeder, nervous, too.” —Alex Figuera, Garden City Fire Department search supervisor on Shelly’s case
“We moved to a short-term rental as soon as Sterling Park caved in. My eldest had asthma. I didn’t want to take any chances.
“I wasn’t as friendly with the people who stayed. They had their own clique. Their children all played together. Rhea was their Top Dog. I never got a bad feeling about her. She was always polite. Some people say that now, that she’d seemed dangerous. But I never saw that side [of her] and that’s not why I left…
“Would it have happened if the rest of us had stayed? I’ll bet they’d have felt more self-conscious. The brick thing wouldn’t have happened… And I suppose all the worse things after that wouldn’t have happened, either.
“They acted like good neighbors, but they weren’t. They’ve all written blogs and gone on chat shows and cashed in and I don’t judge that. Everyone’s doing their best in this economy. But there’s not a single account by any of them that they went over to Rhea’s house and asked how she was doing. Not a single mention that they offered to take care of Ella or drive FJ to lacrosse practice. Nobody ever invited Fritz for a beer. Even Linda Ottomanelli, who claimed to be Rhea’s best friend, never set foot inside that house. Not for the entire four weeks. Honestly, were any of them really friends?” —Anna Gluskin
Maple Street
Monday, July 26
In the hangover-like aftermath of the brick, the people of Maple Street turned inward. They went to work and cleaned their floors and paid their bills and neatly arranged the things that, over the long search for Shelly, had gone untended.