So Kara and me, we’ve always been inseparable, right? Since grade school. You date one of us, you’re dating both of us. You give one of us detention, the other’s showing up too.
I guess Ben’s disappearance is kind of where that stopped.
The investigation did come to my front door, of course. Tad and Kim Rogers’s telephone records would have led the cops here anyway, but it didn’t need to go that far. I volunteered that Kara had called me in a panic. While I said it I was holding Kara. She was crying so hard she couldn’t breathe, and there was snot on her lips and she was hitting her fists into my shoulders, these weak little nothing hits, like she was trying to fight her way out of a plastic bag. I just pulled her tighter, closer.
I wouldn’t tell her about Curtis Grant’s dog until the end of the week. But I told the cops right away. They hadn’t been called to Elm when I’d let my car roll up onto the sidewalk—there was no real damage, no call to respond to—but Animal Services had showed up to document.
My dad met me there, took over the scene like he always has to. I drove his car home, and he took mine to the carwash, fed quarters through the pressure-sprayer until all the evidence was gone, gone, gone.
All I could think about was Ben Rogers, down in the culvert with the trash.
I kept picturing him crawling into the open mouth of one of the washing machines. Using it like a cocoon, like a chrysalis.
I know from Mr. Simonson’s psych course that what’s really growing in the belly of that machine is my guilt, of course. I knew right away, I mean, the first time I thought it.
It doesn’t help. Especially at night.
But I never went back. That’s rule number one, pretty much: Do Not Return to the Scene of the Crime, Young Woman.
For all I knew, the cops had found Ben Rogers right away, that first night. They’d found him and were letting him decompose there now, shifts and shifts of them pulling overtime to sit in some close-by attic, their spotting scope set up behind the rose window up there. Waiting for me—no, waiting for whoever would be stupid enough to confess by showing back up.
Instead, I go find Kara for her parents, when they call. And they call a lot. They think she’s still out there looking for Ben.
I tell them everything will be okay, it’ll all be all right, I’m there for her.
It’s not completely a lie.
The first few times, I did follow her flashlight out into the trees. But then I watched from those trees before moving in.
It was the panties. Those guilty crotchless panties.
I’m pretty sure what Kara was actually burying and reburying—what she was literally still carrying around like psychic baggage, Mr. Simonson—was the memory of her strutting around that bedroom, playacting like she was Kim Rogers, making steamy eyes at her husband.
Doing all that while her son was . . . what? Not drowning, not electrifying himself with a light socket, not falling into the sharp corner of the bed frame with the delicate bones of his still-growing head.
Not anything, really.
She tried to talk to me about it once or twice, what could have happened. To get me spitballing with her. What the police and neighborhood and the whole town was somehow missing. Had some demon-monster oiled up through the bathtub drain, spirited Ben Rogers back down to hell with it? That, really and truly, was Kara’s best and most rational guess.
A demon-monster.
What it was, she explained to me out in the woods, crying, her shovel fallen over beside us, what it was was the world, calling in its marker. Ben Rogers wasn’t supposed to have happened, he was a cheat, one the church had slipped past the guard gate. And so the world was reeling that life back in, to keep things balanced.
Translation: Ben Rogers died for all of us. He was still the star of that live-action nativity from four years ago.
Translation of that? Kara was the hero of this story, for letting that happen. For enabling it. For taking on the guilt of it.
It’s what she wanted me to say.
Except—well.
She couldn’t see it, but that demon-monster she was so sure of, it already had her in its embrace. It was patting her back, its chin on her shoulder, its dead eyes looking out into the darkness.
The darkness stared back, just as empty.
Fast-forward past the awkward parts now. Move past Kara, staking out Tad and Kim Rogers’s house, waiting for Kim Rogers to step out. Don’t watch her pathetic attempt to stand in (lay in) for Kim Rogers, there on the porch, Tad Rogers all the way up to jeans and sandals now, in the grief-cycle. She was trying to trade herself. She was trying to say she was sorry. She was fumbling at the buttons of his jeans. It was inappropriate, but I could hardly call it an attempt at seduction.
I know because I had that house staked out as well.
When you see the part where Kara slashes at her wrists in the bathroom later that day, just keep moving. She doesn’t really mean it. She means something, definitely—she means that she hates that Tad Rogers had no choice but to call her parents, and then Preacher Dan. She hates that Kim Rogers knows what happened. She hates that she ever took a stupid babysitting certification course.
But mostly she’s still just saying sorry.
Has she finally started wearing those surely rotten panties by now? I honestly don’t know. In the Dark Ages, they had hairshirts, I understand. It was how you did penance. These are different Dark Ages, though. Maybe in these, you slither into your guilt both legs at once, lying on your back on your queen bed, and then you hide it under your hip-huggers.
Nobody would know, right?
I hope she is wearing them, really. Serves her right. She should have been watching Ben Rogers every single second, like that course had told us to. If she had, then none of this would have ever happened.
I wouldn’t keep finding myself in the garage, I mean, staring at our washing machine. Waiting for the lid to crack open.
More important, that stupid pigeon would be dead by now. Instead of whatever it is.
Don’t misunderstand—I’m not claiming to be able to tell one pigeon from another pigeon.
But I don’t have to, either.
This pigeon, it can tell me from all the other people on the street.
I know because, maybe nine weeks into it, maybe ten—you lose track—there I am sitting in my Buick, no headlights, no parking light, no dome light. What I’m doing is kind of idly watching Kara’s flashlight cut through the trees out there.
School started last week, but she’s not going. Instead she’s out in the night, like trying to find the doorway into another, better world. One in which little dead boys get to still be alive.
I’d guess Tad and Kim Rogers are looking for that same door.
I shouldn’t smile, though. I’m sure I’d be destroyed, if I were Kim Rogers. And angry, too.
That little bitch who let my son die?
I’d take an eraser to her barely sketched-in life, you can count on that. Anybody would.
The punishment on me for even just thinking that the first time, it was an eyeball, splatting into my windshield. At first I didn’t know what was happening—had I parked under a pear tree? do raccoons throw things? was somebody else out here with me?—but then I kicked my wiper on, and that single eyeball, stalk and all, it smeared across, like climbing the glass up to where it could see me better.
I dove from the car, crawled backwards away from this . . . this whatever the hell it was.
At which point something fell onto the fingers of my hand.
It was a small, pale finger. Smaller than my own. Pale from not having any blood under the skin.
And then a pair of small, smug wings flapped up there, left me alone to deal with this.
When I could breathe again, and think, I flicked the eyeball from my car and stepped on it until it was gone. I tried to do the same with the finger but it kept pointing at me, even when it was just bone.
I opened my hood just like my dad had taught me, and dropped that finger into the spinning fan.
Black rotted blood sprayed back up. Onto my face. Onto the underside of the hood.
I blew it all off at the car wash, and washed my face in the stinging mist, and left my left shoe in the trash there, after spraying it clean as well.
Only when my mom asked was she okay did I remember Kara. She was the reason I’d checked in on the way out.
“She has to work through it,” I said in the most sulky way I could, and limped upstairs, hid my head under the pillow.
Now who I hated, it was the cops.
How could they not have found a rotting body barely even hidden in the culvert? Isn’t the closest trash pile the first place you look when somebody goes missing? Haven’t they ever watched a police show?
If they’d found him like it was their job to do, then Tad and Kim Rogers could have had a coffin that weighed almost what it should, right? They could have had a service to move on from. And Kara would have known, at least.
And—more important—there wouldn’t be a little body out there in the weeds and the sumac, a decaying, putrid corpse a bird could find, settle down on. Pull parts from to bomb me with, give me away for anybody with eyes to see.
I fucking hate that bird.
Every sound I heard on the roof afterward, I knew it was more body parts. That our gutters were going to be clogged with Ben Rogers.
Finally, my parents sleeping off their pitchers of beer from bowling night, I did what I knew I shouldn’t: unlimbered the long aluminum extension ladder from the garage, walked it out the side door because the actual big garage door would wake everyone. I tipped the ladder up against the roof as gently as I’ve ever done anything.
I was going to throw Ben Rogers back into the sky.
Up on the shingles, though, it felt like I was about to fall up into that blackness myself. It felt enough like that that I hunched down.
It was just the usual tree-trash I’d been hearing, too. Like I should have known. Leaves, twigs, something like an acorn that wasn’t going to ripen, I don’t know, I’m no tree-nerd.
I didn’t know if I should be happy or pissed about this.
I sat down, hugged my knees, and tried to cry.
The rest of the town had no problem bringing forth the tears. They did it every time they even thought about Tad and Kim Rogers, and Ben.
Not me. Because I was carrying the burden for all of them. Because I knew what had happened.
I don’t want to claim I’m the victim, but I don’t want to make being me easy, either. The old me, she would never have thought that the ladder creaking behind her was because of the weight of a small body, settling onto it. The old me wouldn’t have backed away, all the way to the edge, forty feet opening up behind me. The old me would have known to breathe, would have known not to watch that open space at the top of the ladder.
This was the now-me, though. The one already planning things out: how she was going to guide Kara out to the trash pile in the culvert—trash delta, more like, thank you, tenth-grade geography—how she was going to guide Kara out there, so either Ben Rogers could finally be found, or, when he pulled himself back together with the good and hopeful but terribly misguided wishes of the whole church, he could claw his way into her stomach, not mine.
I’m not the one who lost him, after all. But now I am the one who will be seeing more and more pieces of him raining down on me in my car. Some of them mixing with a secret leftover piece of Curtis Grant’s yellow lab, so that, when this reconstituted little boy claws up onto my hood, he’ll have a canine muzzle, and long downy blond hairs coating what’s left of his decaying skin.
Is this how it always is when you accidentally kill someone?
“No,” I say out loud, like to make it real up here alone on top of the house.
The old me wouldn’t have been scared to walk right over to the top of the ladder and turn around, climb back down it.
I’m not either.
And it all goes fine, hand over hand, feet feeling down for each careful, certain rung. It all goes fine until I look up.
The pigeon, that stupid goddamn pigeon, it’s up there on the right post of the ladder. I expect the evil eye from it, but it’s too dark for that. It’s just a shape up there—if it’s even that.
What if I’m making it up, right? What if I’m dreaming it into place?
To prove I’m not, I shake the ladder once, risking the sound of aluminum rattling.
Instead of lifting off to become part of the sky again, like, you know, a bird, this pigeon, it falls straight down like the stupid dead weight it is, right through the rungs, not even dinging into one of them.
“Dead weight” is right, too. If there’s a way to add “for weeks” in there.
I didn’t just heart-attack this pigeon with my ladder-shake. It’s been dead for weeks, it looks like. It’s been dead long enough that it bursts a little bit when it lands, onto the side of one of my shoes that I’m still calling new, just because I haven’t worn them to school yet.
I shriek on accident then clap my hand over my mouth, fall back into the sharp bushes my dad says are better than a fence.
The pigeon doesn’t clump up onto its stick legs. It doesn’t do anything. It’s just and simply dead. Without Ben Rogers to whisper life in through its little beak, it’s nothing but gross meat, dirty feathers.
When I can breathe normal again, I stand, drag the side of my shoe on the wet grass even though I know I’m never wearing it again.
I guess I’m crying now, finally. Snot on my lips, the whole package.
“I’m sorry!” I scream across to the pigeon, to the neighborhood, to the town. To Tad and Kim Rogers.
No lights go on in my house. None next door either.
This makes me think that maybe when I came down the ladder, it was into another place.
My heart slaps inside my chest but I shake my head no, you’re being stupid, girl.
Because my dad will figure this all out if I leave the ladder up—he’s got what he calls a devious mind—I edge close enough to lean it back my way, then I hand-over-hand it back to its half-size, lug it back into the garage, place it gently on its two red hooks.
Same garage, I tell myself. Same house. Same everything.
What I force myself to picture instead of the dead pigeon, probably crawling with who knows what out there, it’s Tad and Kim Rogers in their lonely backyard. There’s the silhouette of the swing set. There’s the doghouse they got because it was a deal, and they were going to need it before too long, wink-wink.
Where they’re looking mostly, it’s straight up.