The lowest rungs already have a coat of shellac, and as I lie up top, their vinegar-sharp smell wafts up to me. The sun burns my legs below my shorts. I scratch at a mosquito bite on my thigh and turn the page. Below me, the yard swells, then dips. It looks nearly flat from up here, but in the distance the gray house rises upward on the hill, its paint still shiny and new. We have the longest yard in the neighborhood. Behind the swing set is an undeveloped patch, sixty feet square, with crab apple trees and a mountain of rotting grass clippings that sweetly stink. Sometimes I dive on top of it and feel my face hit the dead grass and the earth give way beneath me like a cloud. We call the area “the woods,” and all our childhoods, we will conspire to build forts there and hideaways, though we never will. When my parents get low on cash, they’ll sit around the kitchen table and scheme how they can sell the woods, but a buyer will never materialize.
As I read, trying to keep the words in focus on the page—I need glasses, but no one knows this yet—my father mows the lawn with a red riding mower we call his tractor. He loves the yard almost as much as he loves the house, and since we moved here he’s started wearing Wrangler jeans that flare out at the bottoms with boots and a wide-brimmed suede cowboy hat that shields him from the sun as he cuts neat rows in the grass. A New Jersey cowboy, at least for now. All my childhood he’ll reinvent himself, wriggling out of a new identity every few years: the opera years, the plaid golf years, the years when Cole Porter’s voice swings through the house and a white dinner jacket appears. For now, a boom box on the lawn blares twanging guitars. My brother, Andy, climbs onto the tire that hangs by a rope from the big oak tree. Though we’re twins, he’s a head shorter than me and twenty pounds lighter, so skinny that strangers gape at him in the supermarket. Now he flings himself through the center of the swing into a belly flop.
My mother comes running from the house, wailing.
She must have looked out the picture window in her bedroom just at the moment my brother hit the tire and watched his limbs drop. She tears across the lawn, barefoot and hysterical, the ties of her pink bathrobe trailing behind her. She runs for my brother, who’s started to sit up now, not knowing what the problem is yet understanding he must move his body, but my father catches her first. He grabs her, stopping her body’s tumult, and pins her arms to her sides. His lips are moving, he’s wiping her tears, but I’m too far away to hear.
I just stare.
I put down my book and sit upright on the swing set. My brother pulls his body out of the tire, stands stock-still beneath the tree, and stares, too.
The scene is wrong. We have never seen my mother cry. My father is the one who sometimes calls us into the bedroom, where we find him lying belly down on my parents’ vast bed. He is the one who tells us then that we don’t love him, that we want him gone. That we’d be better off if he were dead.
She holds him then, and holds us together. But now she’s sobbing.
Eventually she looks up and notices us there, staring. She wipes her eyes. “I’m fine,” she calls to us. “I just thought—”
My father cuts her off. “She’s fine.”
His arm around her shoulder, hers around his waist, they walk back to the house, together.
Five
Louisiana, 1992
As February 8 dawns in Louisiana, a single patrol car sits parked in front of the weathered white house in the town of Iowa. The car belongs to Officer Calton Pitre. A fifteen-year veteran of the Calcasieu Parish Sheriff’s Office who’ll stay on ten years more, all told serving a quarter of a century as a deputy sheriff in the same clot of southwestern towns where he grew up, Pitre had been sitting in his office in Lake Charles when the call came about the missing boy. Even ten years from now he won’t be able to say why the call scared him so much. But he has a little boy himself, Jeremy’s age. And those ten years later, when his boy is a teenager, and the lawyers call him up to ask him to testify again, he’ll remember Jeremy’s name without any prompting. When they found the child he was wearing a little white Fruit of the Loom T-shirt, he’ll tell the lawyers. They cut rings out of that shirt to test for semen stains.
His son wore Fruit of the Loom T-shirts, too.
Though his shift was just about to end when the call came, he took it anyway, arriving in Iowa just as the sun set. There were dozens of people in the street. Local parents, but also the fire department from neighboring LeBleu. Fifty or sixty people, and Pitre could see no one was in charge. They didn’t have much time. Whatever search they got under way would have to be called off when the sky was fully dark.
The fire department men went into the woods. Pitre went to the white house where the 911 calls had come from—there had been two: the boy’s mother, crying, and then, minutes later, a young man who identified himself as a lodger in the house calling back to make sure the dispatcher knew how to find the right street—and asked if he could use the phone.
A woman let him in. It was her house, she said. She showed him where the telephone was and went right back to watching television, half a dozen children sitting cross-legged on the floor in the living room, and in the armchair a young man with brown hair and glasses who turned his head and nodded at him once. They were watching some kind of crime show; Pitre couldn’t make it out. He told his supervisor that the search required a command center, a phone line; someone was going to have to take charge. They needed more men. But the supervisor wouldn’t commit to anything—wasn’t it LeBleu’s responsibility out that way? Or Iowa’s? Frustrated, Pitre went back out to the street.
Soon he returned and called a second time. The woods were hard terrain. Along the north side of the house was a ravine and what looked like a canal. They needed four-wheelers. Maybe a boat.
The third time Calton Pitre went back to the white house to call his supervisor, he saw the brown-haired man sitting in a recliner, still watching television, and had an idea. “You know the area?” he asked.
“Sure do,” the man said.
“Draw me a map?”
The man took the three-by-five spiral pad Pitre offered and carefully penned in the areas around the white house, laying out hash marks for the woods. He made a web of the small backstreets. Drew the route out to Highway 90. “Let me know if you have any trouble with it,” the man said.
“Thanks,” said Pitre.
TRIAL TRANSCRIPT, 2003
Q: And how did the young man seem to you?
A: He was very calm, he was real calm.
Q: Do you see him in the courtroom?
A: Yes, I do.
Q: Would you point him out and describe what he’s wearing?
A: Wearing a pair of glasses, light blue shirt with a necktie.
Q: Your Honor, let the record indicate that the witness has identified the defendant.