When I ask this question I am a very serious eight-year-old. I think often of death. I have started to understand that my mother’s silence, my father’s fits—all of it means that there is something wrong, something about the blue duffel bag they still keep packed for my brother, something the way my sisters’ birth announcements hang framed on the wall and the one for me and my brother does not. At times I have the strange, sure feeling that someone is missing.
That can’t be right—there are four of us, there have always been four of us. But at times, the thought—death—takes my breath away.
So I ask. Are they used to it yet?
At my question, my grandmother will flinch and flutter her hands in front of her face, as though trying to shoo the thought out of me. But my grandfather meets my eyes, his gaze the same deep brown as my mother’s. “No,” he will say, calmly. “The fear never goes away.”
My grandmother will gasp. She will push her hands on my shoulders, as though by turning me away from him she can turn me away from the knowledge that what he says is true. But I will feel my chest go still, not in fright but in sharp, sudden gratitude to him. The gratitude for having been recognized for who I am, for how seriously I ask the question.
So before my grandfather gets any higher on the staircase, before he climbs his way to our bedrooms, know this: He was not all bad. He was a man who delighted in the power of stories, who when my mother and her brothers were young would take home a projector from his film-cutting job and thrill them by turning their living room into a theater. He knew how to make children laugh and he always had a candy sucker in his pockets or a tin windup dog from the dime store. He was the first artist I ever knew, a painter and a sculptor. He taught me to draw. He taught me what it was to look inward, to be quiet and thoughtful amid the world’s clamor. We were alike in this way, he and I. We were alone together in my family in this way. I loved him. In that family way of love, the way that is unquestioned.
*
As my grandmother lies in her half-empty bed in 1984, and my grandfather pauses on the stairs, there still remains a chance. Maybe tonight, unlike every night that has come before, my grandfather will turn around. He will climb back down the staircase and he will leave my grandmother to a story of her marriage—to a story of her life—that does not include hearing his climb. He will leave me to my childhood bed, and my sister in hers, where we each now lie silent, listening. We both know what we listen for, but we have never said the words out loud.
Or maybe tonight, unlike every other night that has come before, my grandmother will let go of her prayer card, open her eyes, and rise from the bed to walk toward the sound she cannot help but hear—
But no. The stair.
My grandmother in her bed, my sister in hers, me in mine, we listen.
Seven
Louisiana, 1992
Later, Lanelle Trahan, Pearl and Ricky’s supervisor at the Fuel Stop, will say that she’d known the night Jeremy disappeared that Ricky was the one who’d done it. She’d been working the register that night, ringing up the extra-large coffees and the scratch tickets and flipping on the diesel pumps for the truckers who climbed down from their cabs to pay in cash, walking a little bowlegged across the station pavement after so many hours on the road. A volunteer firefighter had come in, and as he handed her a crumpled five for a pack of cigarettes and a coffee said, “Got a long night ahead.”
“Yeah?” Lanelle said, being friendly.
And the man said yeah, a little boy was missing over on Watson Road in Iowa, and his fire department and another had been called in. Parents from all over the parish were turning up to help, having heard about it on the evening news. “Big search,” the man said. “Big. They’re bringing in dogs.”
Pearl’s son, Joey. That’s who Lanelle thought of first thing. Whom she assumed was missing. Joey was always playing out in the woods and sometimes Pearl would come in for her shift complaining that he’d gotten himself hurt or lost or worse. God, Lanelle thought, she must be so scared. When time came for her cigarette break Lanelle called up the owner of the Fuel Stop and asked him if she could take some Thermoses of coffee and a couple of sleeves of cups out to the searchers. “I s’pose that’d be all right,” he’d said. “Once your shift’s over.”
So it was ten o’clock, full dark, before Lanelle made it out to Pearl’s. A line of patrol cars, their headlights like a sentinel string, blocked the road, but she sidled up to one and rolled down her window—the February night air coming in an uneasy chill—and told the crew-cutted officer inside, barely out of boyhood himself, about the coffee. He let her by.
In the headlights, the paint of the house lit up ghostly white, the places where the paint was dingy and ragged giving it an ominous shape, as if the house were just a skin worn by a creature who lurked underneath. Its back disappeared into the dark woods.
The front door was unlocked, and Lanelle let herself in. Ricky was sweeping the kitchen. “Hi, Ricky,” she said, but he just kept up his swift, short strokes. The two of them never did get on. She could hear the television blaring from the living room as she set the Thermoses down on the kitchen table. In the living room, Pearl sat slumped on the worn brown couch, watching television. The white house was on the TV screen, all lit up. Looking at it unsettled Lanelle, as if she were up high looking down at herself on the ground. She sat down next to Pearl. “Pearl,” she said gently. “Have they found Joey yet?”
“Joey’s not missing,” Pearl said. “He’s upstairs. Ricky’s been looking after the kids. It’s a little boy from down the street. Joey’s friend.”
She went back to staring at the television. Lanelle waited a long moment, but it didn’t seem like she was going to say anything more.
If it had been Lanelle’s street all lit up with searchlights, you can bet Lanelle would’ve been out in the street with the others. But Pearl was acting like there was nothing much happening. Lanelle said, “I brought some coffee for the people searching. Boss said we could have it.”
“Thanks.”
“Well,” Lanelle said. “Well, why don’t I go take a look upstairs? Check in on Joey and June.” Maybe, she thought, the missing boy was just hiding up there. Maybe they were just having themselves a game. Kids that age, when they found a good hide-and-seek spot, sometimes you couldn’t get them out.
“That’s fine,” Pearl said.
So Lanelle got up and did it. The house was laid out kind of funny, Lanelle knew, and to get to the stairs you had to first walk through the bathroom off the kitchen.
TRIAL TRANSCRIPT, 2003
Q: What happened?
A: I went toward where the stairs were and Ricky made a b-line in front of me.
Q: Okay.