Stony River (7 page)

Miranda tiptoes to Cian's cot and studies his sleeping face. Now that she's seen a picture of Doris's daughter Carolyn, she suspects something is amiss with the lad. James claimed Danú and Dagda brought forth nothing but geniuses. But wouldn't they give a genius a bigger head?

She returns to the bed and watches shadows skip along the ceiling. It's her first night here, yet she can almost believe this is the life she's always had. James would be proud she's forgotten to be afraid and allowed herself to trust. Tomorrow she will be the same and not the same as she is tonight. Tomorrow she will take Cian to a park and ask again about Nicholas.

As the longest day finally darkens, the Blessed Mother begins to glow.

THREE

JUNE 29, 1955
. Another scorcher. Waiting for Tereza in the small woods she'd dubbed The Island, Linda closed her eyes and pretended the pines were palms and their cones coconuts. Last year Aunt Libby airmailed a coconut from a real island and Daddy smashed it open with a hammer. Aunt Libby was a buyer for a department store in Elizabeth. She wore Tabu perfume and suits with pleated skirts. Linda could still taste the bittersweet crunchy insides that Aunt Libby claimed would make Linda's complexion soft and creamy like hers. Mother had said it must be nice to gallivant around the world.

Linda sat on the old hollowed-out log, the ridges scratchy against her bare legs under Bermuda shorts. The log stowed props she and Tereza had stashed for Swiss Family Robinson: a bent spoon, acorns, some string, the silver foil from gum wrappers. Tereza saw uses for things Linda considered trash, like cigarette butts. She stripped them and collected the loose tobacco in a Wonder Bread bag. She said they could sell it for food when they escaped from The Island.

Escape to where?

Eyes still closed, Linda was listening to the ebb and flow of cars and trucks on Route 1 four blocks away, pretending it was the sound of the shipwrecking sea, when Tereza snuck up on her like an Indian scout and stomped on her foot. She laughed when Linda yelped in fright. Tereza's hair was wild, as if she'd just gotten out of bed. She
wore red shorts tinier than Mother would have allowed and her arms were full of cattails.

“What are those for?” Linda didn't care how grouchy she sounded.

“If we let the punks dry out they'll be better smokes. When they turn to fluff we can make pillows. We can weave the leaves into sleeping mats.”

Linda sighed and rolled her eyes. “The rule is we live on whatever we find on The Island,” she said. “Punks don't grow here. Berries and acorns do.”

“It's our game, right? We make the rules.”

“It's my game. I played it a whole year before you came.”

“Yeah, and what have you got to show for it? You didn't make a tree house. You didn't make nothin' we could sell when we get off The Island.”

“What if I don't want to get off? What if I want to live here forever?”

“Why? Nothin' to do here, nobody to see. Might as well be Crazy Haggerty's kid, locked up in that house.” It had been a week since they'd watched the teenager and her baby leave.

“Maybe she liked it there.”

“Not a chance.” Tereza stuffed the cattails in the log and sat next to Linda. “Jimmy said her old man must've parked his car in her garage.”

“What's that supposed to mean?”

Tereza made a hand gesture Linda could tell was dirty. “I told Jimmy he tries that with me, I'll kick him in the balls. He backhanded me for that.”

Linda sucked in a breath. You weren't supposed to say balls; at least
she
wasn't. Her cousin's dog was always licking his. She didn't like to think of fathers having them.

“Maybe Jimmy's wrong,” Linda said hopefully. The way the girl walked out as though she wasn't in any hurry to leave had stuck in Linda's head. “Maybe Haggerty wasn't her father.”

“Nope,” Tereza said. “Ma found this.” She pulled a newspaper clipping out from under her waistband and began reading aloud as slowly as a third grader, shaping each word with her lips as though tasting it. It made Linda's jaw ache.

She held out her hand. “Here, let me.”

James Michael Haggerty, 48, of 2 Lexington Street, passed away June 21 of natural causes. Predeceased by his wife Eileen. Survived by his daughter Miranda. He will be buried in the potter's field section of Stony River Cemetery.

Seeing the girl's name in print gave Linda a thrill, as though she'd discovered the secret in Nancy Drew's old clock. “It doesn't say anything about the child,” she said.

“They don't want nobody knowing that crazy coot knocked her up. My mom got knocked up with me, you know.”

“Did it hurt?”

Tereza laughed so hard Linda wanted to punch her. She stood and said, “I'm leaving.”

“No, wait. Go with me to Crazy Haggerty's. You gotta see something.”

Linda didn't want Tereza to call her a chicken again and she itched to learn more about the girl who now had a name. “As long as you don't tell your folks so they can't tell mine.”

Not that Mother was likely to seek out the Dobras. At dinner one night she'd said, “Just because she's the only girl your age this side of the highway doesn't mean you have to play with her; we don't know anything about them.” Daddy suggested Mother walk over there and welcome them to the neighborhood, poke around in their garbage can. Mother didn't, of course.

Tereza pulled a rusty crowbar from the log. “How'd that get there?” Linda didn't like the idea of Tereza visiting The Island on her own and putting stuff in the log without her agreement.

“I found it back of my house, hiding in the grass.”

Tereza lived in an apartment building and what she called grass was more like weeds, but Linda didn't correct her.

They crept along the riverbank, approaching Crazy Haggerty's from the back, stepping around mounds of dog poop. “I never saw him walk that dog,” Linda said.

A small stack of firewood rested against a wall by the back door. “The door's locked,” Tereza said. “I tried it already. I could've busted in but I waited for you.” Padlocked shutters covered the windows on the outside. “I can smash 'em open, easy.”

“If you do, I'm not staying. I won't tell, but I won't stay.”

“Look up there,” Tereza said. She pointed to a small window close to the corner of the house too high to reach without a ladder; its shutter hanging by a hinge. “I broke that shutter because it‘s harder for the cops to spot. I jimmied the window and propped it open with a rock.”

“When?”

“Last week, at night. It was too dark to see inside.” She monkeyed up the drainpipe, leaned so far over Linda thought she'd fall and peered inside the window.

Linda's heart thumped at the fear of getting caught, but she was too curious to leave.

“The kitchen,” Tereza said when she got back down. “Nothing in it except a wood stove. No table, no chairs.”

“They must have eaten in the dining room.”

“Or not at all. They could be zombies from outer space.”

Linda sighed in exasperation. “Zombies are already dead. Crazy Haggerty wouldn't have died of natural causes if he was a zombie.” Then she noticed two small basement windows barred but not shuttered. Kneeling on a piece of wood so she wouldn't get her knees dirty, she peered into one. The light was dim but she could make out two white pillars with black drapes hanging between them.

“I see a robe on a hook,” Tereza called out from the other window.

Linda scooted over to look.

“The guys at the store say Crazy Haggerty worshiped the devil,” Tereza said. “They say he had snake fangs, rat tails and porcupine quills in his pockets when he died. I think the old man kept her as a slave, and sicced the dog on her if she didn't do everything he wanted. Too bad I didn't move here sooner. I would've sprung her.”

“How?”

“I would've figured a way.”

“Maybe Miranda was a lunatic that Haggerty saved from the horrors of an asylum,” Linda said. “They tie you up and turn hoses on you, you know, attach wires to your head and cook your brain.” She'd learned about asylums from a comic book passed around the school playground. She wanted to believe Haggerty had been protecting Miranda from that or something worse.

Tereza snorted. “The
horrors
? La-di-dah, Miss Dictionary.”

Linda stomped home alone.

At dinner, she asked, “Did Mr. Haggerty's daughter have a garage?”

“What an interesting question,” Daddy said.

Linda related what Tereza had said.

Mother looked at her plate.

Daddy said, “You and your mother need to have a chat.”

That night a huge black bug climbed onto Linda's back. It was so big and heavy she couldn't breathe. She must have screamed because Mother came into her room and rubbed her back. “Hush, angel,” she said. “It was only a dream.”

SIX WEEKS LATER
Mother disappeared into the hospital for what Daddy called a
female thing
. “Take care of your father,” she said. “He has no idea what to do with a stove.”

Linda rummaged in her brain for everything she knew about being a wife: keep your hands out of the wringer washer; start with
the collar of the shirt when you iron, then the yoke, then the sleeves; skim the cream off the top of the milk for his coffee; make sure all evidence of your housework is out of sight by the time he gets home.

Tereza was no help. She didn't want to help dust or vacuum or wash floors. “I'm never getting married,” she said. “If I have to clean somebody's house I'd better get paid for it.” When Linda was stuck at home cooking and cleaning, she suspected Tereza was with the greasy-haired boys who prowled the neighborhood in a pack.

Sometimes women from church dropped off a meatloaf, cabbage rolls or even a chocolate cake, but you couldn't count on it. Linda could scramble eggs and dissolve Jell-O. She could open cans of soup: Daddy's favorite was Manhattan clam chowder. She'd sit outside with him after dinner while he talked about his secretary, his boss and the vital role of the cost accountant at Bartz Chemicals. He'd help her with the dishes before their nightly hospital visits. While he was at work, she ate jars of expensive Queen Anne cherries Mother had hidden in the pantry behind a broken toaster. She sat at Mother's mahogany dressing table and smeared her face with Pond's—as cool and creamy as junket pudding. She licked two fingers as she'd seen Mother do and moistened the tiny brush before dipping it into the little red mascara box. She washed her hair by herself for the first time and needed every bobby pin in the house to set it. Without a mother, did Miranda know to brush her hair a hundred strokes a night?

Driving with Daddy to the hospital a week after Mother went in, Linda asked, “How come nobody knew Mr. Haggerty had a daughter?” She was in the front where Mother usually sat and got to watch Daddy shift gears. The seat cushion still held Mother's lemony scent.

“People were scared of him. Your mother went over there once to collect for the Red Cross and he greeted her on the porch with a shotgun.”

“Do you suppose his daughter went to school somewhere?”

“I doubt it.”

Poor Miranda. Linda liked almost everything about school: getting escorted across the highway by a police officer, waiting on the playground for the bell to ring, learning about the solar system, using the pencil sharpener. “Why wouldn't her father have let her go?”

“No idea.” He reached over and patted Linda's leg. “If only we'd known. Everybody just thought he was eccentric. We left him alone.”

“Where did he work?”

“He didn't as far as anybody knew. If you asked, he'd tell you he had a ‘condition' and ‘scraped by' on his ‘ma's meager charity.' I had an inkling he was smarter than he let on. During the war he did his bit patrolling the neighborhood. After that, he kept to himself.” Daddy slowly shook his head. “How long ago that was. To think of a little girl in there all that time.”