What Kara did then—I’ve known her since second grade—was stand fast and wheel away from the idea, playacting wide-eyed insult, like the choir girl had just been offered a joint.
But she was already unsnapping her jeans, I knew.
What she would tell me weeks later, like the worst secret ever, was that, when that stupid bird started screeching in its wire cage, she’d thought it meant Tad and Kim were home early, so she’d shimmied back into her jeans, stepped into her shoes at a dead run, dove over the back of the couch, because in movies like the one playing in her head, every step can get you caught.
It was the next morning before she realized she still had Kim’s crotchless panties on.
I went with her to bury them in the woods.
She doesn’t think I know, but she went back to dig them up, bury them somewhere different. It’s mostly what she does with her nights now: rebury those panties.
You don’t have to die to become a ghost.
But, Tad, with that stupid pigeon, the day I came to confess everything.
There he was by the mailbox, blubbering and crying in his ratty robe, everybody on the street pretending not to be watching through their mini-blinds. The pigeon just looking around like the pigeon-brain it was.
Kim said it had been hit by a car, probably. Meaning, even among pigeons, this one hadn’t been exactly quick. Now here it was at the edge of the street again. Except now it stood for something. Now it was a promise, an offering. Was its wing going to be good enough to fly? If it did fly, would that mean Ben was coming back?
It had been seven weeks, then. Still, when Tad scooped that pigeon up into the air, my heart went with it.
“Go,” I said into the bad taste of the cracked vinyl horn button of my steering wheel, and the pigeon reached out with its wings, cupped just enough air not to plummet headfirst into the asphalt, and then it remembered what it was.
It caught. It flew. It flapped into the sky.
Tad fell to his knees, his robe pooling around him, and Kim rushed out across the grass, hugged him from behind, and I tried to just stare right into the digits of my odometer.
I had to assume they were exactly sixty-six point six evil miles past where they’d been the night Ben went missing. The night Kara called me in a panic, crying so I could hardly understand her. The night I’d just spent half my babysitting money on a new skirt because there’d been only one left in mine and Kara’s size.
The shoes were from my mom, a surprise.
What I gathered on the phone from Kara was that he’d been in the bath, Ben, he’d been in the bath, and now he wasn’t!
They don’t train you for this in babysitting certification.
Losing your charge—how does this even happen, when you’re already attending to his every need, keeping him from every sharp corner, and enriching his mind and improving his eventual life in between?
It doesn’t happen. But it had.
I didn’t even check in with Mom that I was leaving—standard procedure when dusk was even close to dusking—I just breezed through the kitchen, got my keys from the hook without missing a step, and like that I was going to save my best friend’s life, to clean up this mess before it pooled big enough to lap up around my new shoes.
The reason I was supposed to check in on the way out, it was that the grainy light of dusk, that’s when accidents like to happen, according to my dad.
He was right.
For exactly one half of an instant, just past Pine, almost to Spruce—Tad and Kim Rogers live on Magnolia—for exactly one slice of inattention, one moment of looking behind that planter, behind those rosebushes, there was a blot in my headlights.
Then that blot was a sound. Then a bump.
How Ben had gotten nine houses down from his house is a complete mystery, even now. He had pants on too, which made even less sense. What four-year-old has shame enough to get dressed?
I should have stopped, I know. I know I know I know. Except I was screaming. Except my brain was just one white line of sound.
I whipped into the last turn before Magnolia—Evergreen Court—and I stopped down at the round curb at the edge of the culvert. Because the edge of the culvert was always crumbling away, there were no houses down there.
This whole thing would have gone a completely different way, had some lookyloo PTA watchdog been keeping vigil at a window.
I was alone, though. Alone with what I’d done, alone with what had just happened, with what was going to ruin my whole life if I let it. Finally I quit screaming and hammering my hands onto the dash.
In my mind, I was four hundred yards behind, on the street, administering CPR.
I still kind of am, I guess.
Except for the proof otherwise. The proof still stuck under the car, up in the wheel well.
Ben was that little, yeah.
I went cold all over. Cold and mechanical.
All I could see was my dad, looking up from his chair at the kitchen table, asking me what was wrong, dear?
“Everything,” I would have told him, I know. Everything.
And that would be unacceptable.
So, with my cold, mechanical hands and arms, with my new shoe pushing against the fender, I hooked a finger through Ben Rogers’s belt loop and extracted him from the front left wheel well of my handed-down Buick Regal.
He came out in one piece.
I dropped him into the culvert with all the open-lidded washing machines and sprung shopping baskets and sumac and general grossness.
Which I’m sorry for. So sorry. He deserved better. Anybody does.
Then, because my brain had gone cold and mechanical too, I did what I had to do: drove over to Elm.
Curtis Grant’s rangy yellow lab was loping around like always, trying to race every car that dared its street.
I dared.
And at a certain point in the race, I jerked the wheel over to the left, sucked that big yellow dog up into the wheel well, then let it cycle a bit before screeching the brakes loud, to draw people out into the street, alibi me.
Ben Rogers, his hair had been blond.
Nobody suspected anything.
I can’t say for sure—all I’ve got to go on’s what’s happening now—but here’s what I figure happened.
A boy is walking home from his half-day preschool early in May. His mom’s bopping along beside him in her cute way. Some days it’s his dad, since the mom and dad both manage to work from home, and know they get only so many “hold my hand”-walks total. But today it’s the mom, her hair in a messy bun on top of her head, a spring in her step because she’s basically living the dream, here. One she’s thankful for every day.
This boy, see—you have to understand what a walking-talking miracle he is.
It’s been four years, so everybody in town has kind of got accustomed to him, but there was a time.
My mom explained it to me in hushed tones over the breakfast table one day. Evidently, you used to have to get blood tests before you got married. They told you it was to get the bride and groom clean bills of health—no gonorrhea here, sir, ma’am—but the whispery part of it, the reason my mom waited for my dad to be gone to say it, was that she’d heard the test was to make sure mixing blood with this other person wasn’t going to create some sad monster.
“Eugenics?” I asked my mom, because I’m all A’s and not a Nazi, and in reply she’d covered my hand with both of hers, heated her eyes up to match her the downturned lines of her mouth, and said it hadn’t been a bad idea. Some people’s blood just shouldn’t touch, even in a petri dish. It was as easy and as obvious as that.
In the case of this boy, his mom and dad, as perfect as they were, they weren’t the genetically compatible kind of perfect. The doctor figured it out about halfway through the pregnancy and had the necessary sit-down with the couple.
They understood what needed to be done. That didn’t mean they could do that, however.
Instead, they brought it before the church, and it became this big test-of-faith thing, where the whole congregation got together in the main chapel and held hands and prayed together, with this mom-to-be—already showing, she’s got such a small frame—with her in a middle pew, her head leaned into her husband’s shoulder, both of them crying freely.
The end result was that, very much against medical advice and second-opinion medical advice, they let this doomed pregnancy keep happening. No medicine because there is no medicine, but a lot of prayer, which my dad, never one not to know a detail or object to a wrong one, explained to me.
What we call “prayer” these days, he said, well, a whole long time ago, it was considered spells.
“Like witches?” I asked.
This was a long time ago, he explained. But, before industrialization and technology and all the wonders of our modern world, people, they’d figured out a different way of engineering their world. With magic. My dad said it like a dare, like I should object here. Like he was all ready for me to. I told him to just tell me already, please. Not like he wasn’t going to anyway. The power of spells, he went on with a shrug like this was the most obvious thing, it came from a group of like-minded people all like chanting and wishing for the same thing. The power of positive thinking, basically. That was my takeaway: happy thoughts don’t just make you feel good. They can actually fix things, sometimes. Or change them, anyway.
But then witches got uncool—probably because of Halloween or The Wizard of Oz, I don’t know—our religion took over the good part of the world, and now a spell is a prayer: a whole chapel of people holding hands in a circle, chanting under their breath, wishing hard for one, single, specific thing.
For one whole half of a pregnancy, that one specific thing was this boy.
And, lo and behold, it worked. This mom became a mom over thirty-eight sweaty hours, and what the nurse carried out to the now-dad, it was a bouncing baby boy, perfect in every way. It was a miracle. It proved the power of prayer. That year the new baby had a special role in the nativity play, even, so we all forgot he wasn’t who everyone was pretending he was.
This is that boy, that mom.
And they’re just walking along that early May day, preschool over at last, his tiny graduation robe flapping, the whole broad expanse of summer opening up before them.
But first there’s this bird, the one the mom is trying to steer the boy away from.
It’s probably crawling with bird-mites and avian flu and just basic germs. People don’t call them rats of the sky for nothing.
The mom wouldn’t be a mom if she told the boy to leave the poor bird there to die, though. Better that it die in a shoe box in the bathroom down the hall from the boy, right? It’s the time-honored tradition. It’s how the world works. There would be a funeral later in the week, and then, soon, the bird would be replaced with a healthy puppy the boy can grow up with.
Just as soon as this dirty bird dies.
Except it doesn’t.
This is the important part, the part I’ve thought about and thought about.
The bird doesn’t die, even though that’s what hurt birds kids smuggle home have been doing since forever.
Why?
It’s residue.
The boy, he’s this big miracle. And he’s still got some of that church juice. All the chanting that let him develop naturally in the womb, that kept him symmetrical, that lined his genetic ladder back up so he could climb it into this world, it infused him, I think. If he’d have been a four-year-old craps player, then the dice would have always rolled in his favor, I’m pretty sure. Not because he was telling them to, but because he wanted to win.
What I see when I look back to the rest of that May, it’s the boy, creeping from his bed after lights out, making his way down to the bathroom to whisper love to this bird. Or what he thinks is love.
Really, it’s the leftovers of the spell that kept him whole. The magic still cycling through him. And it’s being wasted on a dirty, broken bird, yeah. But it works all the same.
The bird refuses to die. To the parents’ consternation—they kind of want a puppy, just for the soft-focus postcards those photos will make: boy and dog, the endless summer.
But maybe this bird, maybe it’s a lesson of sorts for them, right? Maybe they’re supposed to learn from it that love and happiness comes in all kinds of packages. Sermons don’t always come from the pulpit.
What really matters, it’s how the boy dotes on the bird, they tell each other. Like talking themselves into it. And how long does a pigeon live, anyway? This will come to a natural end soon enough, one way or another.
Maybe they name the pigeon, maybe they don’t, it doesn’t matter. I’d guess that naming a bird is like naming a turtle, or a snake, or a fish. Or your second-favorite hairbrush.
What the boy called it the one time his eventual killer babysat him, it was “Mine.” And I guess it was.
Only, it didn’t stop there, I don’t think.
I’m pretty sure that stupid bird, it’s still his.
It’s something, anyway.