The dead boy had been washed and laid out. Joni carried him from the river, hidden inside my sleeping bag, which she’d agreed to use as his shroud after a protracted row. If she really thought that giving up a warm sleeping bag was designed to assuage my guilt, then she failed to understand the depth of feeling that is churned up by running over and killing a small boy, and then scraping him off the road and pressing my face to what remained of him so I could listen for breath, and then lifting his mangled body into the car and coming home to explain to my children that the stains on the leather are from another child’s blood. Call me soft, but I just thought the sleeping bag would keep him warm in the earth. Symbolically speaking.
Peter and Charlie had raked up all the ashes from the fire and were scattering them in a thin line from the tents to the grave in the field. This would stop the ghost from returning, Joni said. Maggie and the Lost Boy were crayoning pictures of food and other useful household objects onto leaves. These were his grave goods. What the archaeologists of the future might make of our burial rituals, I could hardly imagine. Apparently, it was all authentic. And I was assured it would bring us closure. Joni seemed to have shut out the fact that Lola was still missing, and we had no idea who had taken Billy; the matter was anything but closed.
Still, the preparations kept the kids busy so I could concentrate on Billy. We were ostensibly fashioning half-arsed decorations out of grass, but really I was questioning him. I tried to make it light, keep smiling, not grind my teeth. But the fever was brewing in my belly again, and I fed it a slow-drip stimulant of information gleaned from Billy’s unreliable memory.
There was, without doubt, a man. No kids, just a man. Definitely no Lola.
There was a building. But there were also trees.
And there were steps: aloney steps.
“Aloney steps?”
“Yep.”
“Do you mean stony steps?”
“Nope. Aloney. Aloney steps.”
“I don’t understand, Billy. What are aloney steps?”
Shrug. His head bent lower over his knotted grass. His lips pursed with feigned concentration. I backed off and moved on.
“So tell me about the ice cream. Yummy!”
It was raspberry ice cream, of that we were certain. It was served in a blue bowl, which was a shame because Billy’s favorite color was yellow, but he overcame that disappointment to eat the ice cream with a spoon. The spoon had a horse’s head on the end of the handle. There was a second serving of ice cream, but then it was finished. He was allowed to lick the bowl. He was allowed to lick the carton that the ice cream came from. And he was allowed to sleep with the spoon because he didn’t have his toy, Rabbity, who was waiting for Billy here in the tent. The ice cream was yummy, yummy, in his tummy.
He couldn’t remember how he had gotten from the supermarket to the ice cream, or what the building that housed the ice cream looked like, or what the man with the ice cream was called.
“The trouble is,” said Charlie, when he came over to criticize our craft skills, “Billy has a rubbish remembery. All we know is, there’s a man with ice cream and stony steps.”
“Aloney steps.”
“What does that mean?”
Indeed. But the fact remained, this man with ice cream had kept my son for a whole night. Why? I had no idea if he was Fagin or Father Christmas, but he needed to be found and taught a swift lesson about boundaries.
“You need to sit with him.” Joni pointed toward my tent, where the dead child was crumpled inside my sleeping bag with all the dignity of a pile of laundry. “He should have someone sit with him.” She stood for a while with her arm out, and then dropped it. She stumped off down the track that led out of the camp, but after a few minutes returned and dived into the yurt. Then across into the food tent.
I’d offered to go out in the car again and just drive. Or Joni could go, and I’d stay with the kids. I didn’t want to scare her, but the only explanation I could find for Billy’s disappearance was that this man had used Billy to lure Lola into the open. Find this man with the ice cream and we’d find her. Plus, I had a few choice words to say to him about taking my son.
“We should be out looking for Lola,” I said. “This funeral can wait.”
“Where?” Joni asked. She waved at the trees, the empty fields, the track that curved up to the road in the shape of a question mark. “I don’t know where else to look,” she said, her voice moony, as though she were missing a shoe. She drifted for a moment toward the campfire, like she was floating from the shore. Then she seemed to surface; she spun round and started on about the vigil. Our new rituals, as she saw it. The privilege we had been given to restart society. The responsibility that came with it: we must show our children how to interpret our lives. And deaths. Get it right this time, not like before, everything twisted and masculine, all messed up. We must show the new generation how to grieve. How to take time to feel. How to honor ourselves.
Not that I disagreed with her, but what about science? If I could choose between a new religion or vaccines that would prevent deaths, machinery that would harvest food, a GPS that could locate Lola—I wasn’t ready to give up on civilization just yet.
Billy pulled away the map I was trying to study. This man must be nearby—otherwise how had Billy gotten back? But a three-year-old couldn’t explain, and the map didn’t help. It told me nothing. The longer I waited, the more questions flapped like black birds inside my head. About this man. And the Wild Things. Where they both were, how they connected, if either of them had Lola, what they wanted with her. There were no shortcuts to the answers. Siri couldn’t tell me. I would have to find out by old-fashioned legwork. But right now, Joni was fixated on the funeral. “A vigil, Marlene. You can do the first sitting. I’ll come when I’m done with the food.”
“Are we having a wake now? Will there be Guinness and a ceilidh band? Should we send out invites to the rest of the Wild Things? You never know, they might bring Lola back with them, as we’re not out looking for her.”