Darlene’s awed. She’s seen the trunk her mother gestures toward, but only by peeking through her mother’s hung-up dresses while Bessie gets ready in the mornings. It’s always been a shadow in the dark recesses of the closet. She kneels down in front of the trunk and tugs and tugs but can’t move it. Judy kneels beside her and together the sisters wedge and wheedle the trunk forward as Bessie watches. When they have it almost to the door of the closet, Bessie says, “Well, that’s all right then,” and the children let go the metal brackets and step back, watching.
Bessie settles herself to the floor. It’s a complicated procedure but a familiar one. First Darlene takes the crutch from Bessie, holding it in front of her as if a guardsman with a rifle, her face turned away and nose wrinkled up, trying to avoid the smell of the washcloth that’s been rolled and rubber-banded to the top to cushion Bessie’s armpit. Francis stands on the other side of Bessie, and as Bessie starts to bend her knees Francis positions herself so her mother can balance herself on Judy’s shoulder. Then it’s a turn and a catch from Francis, with Judy helping, and Bessie is lowered to the floor. The girls settle beside her. Ricky, always a little shy, sinks to the carpet a ways back.
The catch on the trunk is rusted but lifts easily in Bessie’s palm. The children watch, transfixed. They know their mama goes into the trunk. They know it the way children know what goes on behind closed doors. But they’ve never been permitted to watch.
Inside the trunk is a jam of paper. Photographs, dozens of them, black and white and sienna and even a few of the new Polaroids. Some in cellophane envelopes. Who are these strange faces, the children must wonder, these faces in black and white and with the funny dark clothes?
Darlene pops her thumb in her mouth and sucks, an old habit. Francis is sitting on one of her knees, the other leg splayed in front of her, and she shifts now, trying to get a clearer view. No one speaks. There is something about Bessie’s quiet right now, her methodical movements, that sparks an undercurrent in the children. They are waiting, even if they don’t know what for.
Bessie’s hands know where to go. She slides her right hand along the far edge of the trunk, toward the back corner by the hinge, and withdraws two photographs. Then she settles back and lays them right-side up on her lap.
The children cluster closer. One photograph is of a baby in a white christening bonnet on a layette. The photograph is in black and white, but the baby’s cheeks and lips have been tinted pink. It looks like a doll.
“That’s your sister, Vicky.”
The other photograph is of a little boy with a brown bowl cut grinning at the camera, his front tooth missing.
Ricky recognizes him immediately. “That’s me!” he says, delighted, and pops off the floor to pluck the photograph from Bessie’s hand.
She doesn’t give it. “No, baby,” she says. “That’s your brother Oscar Lee.”
Brother. The word must bloom dizzyingly around Ricky, this lonely boy, this boy whose only brother is a baby too young to play with and who spends day after day with Bessie and the girls. This boy who will always be hungry. Brother. “Where is he?” Ricky asks, but as soon as he says those words, he knows. He recognizes him. The brown hair, the eyes, the smile. He’s the boy in the dream.
“He died, baby. He and Vicky both did. Before you were born.”
There must be a flicker in Francis’s mind, in Darlene’s and in Judy’s. They were four, three, and two that day in the car. The tires’ screech as Alcide awoke into the moment, the sun’s slant through the windows, then the bright hot slam. Pain. No one has spoken of Oscar since he died. Or the baby. But the memory must be there, living inside Darlene: her hands under the baby’s armpits, holding her upright, the baby’s ribcage as tiny as a fledging bird’s. Darlene’s knees pressed against Francis’s as they bounced Vicky between them, coaxing her to laugh. Then the car flew forward. The jolt. She let go.
Three decades from now, when Darlene’s an adult on the witness stand at Ricky’s trial, she’ll tell about the afternoon with the trunk simply this way: “That’s when Mama told us about the crash.”
*
Ricky returns to the trunk again and again to study the photo of the little boy. At five Ricky is still small for his age, bucktoothed and scrawny. He stutters and he wets his pants when he gets nervous. He has no friends. Oscar becomes his friend. One day Ricky steals the photo, and from then on it’s his. When he plays in the woods, he props it up against the roots of a tree and has long conversations with it. He carries it in his pocket to school, patting it with jelly-crusted fingers when there is no one else to eat lunch with. Sometimes one of his sisters hears him talking in a room that otherwise looks empty, and when they ask him whom he’s talking to he answers, “Oscar.” Sometimes Darlene asks him to close the window next to his bed—she’s cold—and he says he can’t. Doesn’t she see Oscar sitting there in the trees? He doesn’t want Oscar to be lonely. The family decides Oscar is harmless, an imaginary friend for the boy who doesn’t have any friends.
Then the crying starts. Bessie finds Ricky sitting on the carpet in front of the television set. They keep a framed picture of praying hands on top of the set, but he’s knocked it facedown, as though to keep the image away. Ricky’s rocking on his knees, clawing at his head. “Make him stop!” he says. “Make Oscar not see me!” When she tells him there’s nobody there, he only cries harder.
STATEMENTS BY REPORTERS AND LAW ENFORCEMENT OFFICERS, 2003
Ricky said he had been visited in a dream by a ghost who took him to the scene of the car accident. After this dream, he began asking questions and found out about the car accident and his brother. He claimed that his brother was his “tormentor/best friend.” He said the brother would torment Ricky about taking his place in the family.
The brother died in a car crash before Ricky was born. He said his brother was a thorn in his side and Ricky wanted to get rid of him.
He said he had to get Oscar Lee out of his life.