The Blue Girl (18 page)

For any of it
, she says.
It's not your fault that you went
.

The cop starts up with the questions while I lean against the counter.

All the questions. There have always been so many questions about Ethan.
Why does he talk that way? Why are his ears flat? He's retarded, right? What does it feel like, having a brother who bangs his head and can't do much of anything for himself?
But the questions I have are about the girl. The girl out trying to drown herself in the lake.
Why doesn't he ask about her?
I wonder. Then I realize that he doesn't know.

I tell the cop I did not let my brother out. That is the truth.
Other nights, yes
, I say,
there are times when I've let him out of the room because the banging gets to be too much and because I have to sleep, I have school
. Didn't this guy ever go to school?
But when I've let him out of his room, I've kept him in my room with me, where he buries his head in my beanbag chair and falls asleep face down
. The cop says he never had a brother like mine, but he imagines it would be hard. He's seen my brother in the car with my mother or sometimes at the store with us. He imagines there's a lot of strain, he says.

Ethan has problems
, I say.
A disability. He has something called fragile
X
. Do you know what fragile
X
is, officer?
I say, because I feel that burning in my stomach that I get when people talk about my brother like this.

There are lots of kids like Ethan
, I say.
They live everywhere, not just in this stupid lake town. He's not the only one
.

And then I almost say,
And how would you feel if someday you and your bitch wife
—and I don't know why I even think this guy's wife is a bitch when I've never seen the guy before, and why would I care about his wife, and maybe his wife is soulful and kind, the way my mother used to be, but still I want to call her a bitch for some reason—
had a kid like Ethan? How would you feel then having a kid who couldn't understand you or write his own name or be left alone at all at eighteen?

Or worse
, I want to say, as he stands there with his pad and pencil while Magda and Irene and Audrey and Caroline are all out there calling for him.
How would you feel if you had a kid that was blue? A kid like her?

I'm about to say this when all of a sudden I hear Audrey yell from the back door,
Mom, Jesus, Mom, where's Buck?

Now Buck is gone, too. Buck is not in the yard or in the car or hiding under the cabinets where my mother is still pulling pots. Buck is not there, Buck is somewhere else, and though I can't think about it now, I know I'm going to be wondering for a long time just what happened last night after I let Greg push himself into me on the couch, and just what our mothers were doing last night with their moon pies. They were gone for a very long time, longer than they'd ever been gone before, and I'm going to be wondering how two of those mothers let their sons go missing without even noticing they were gone.

But I can't think about that now. There's no time now. Now I have to get Audrey alone.

Before the cop can get to Irene and the screaming Audrey, who's shaking her mother by the arms at the back door while Magda tries to pull her off, he asks me where I was last night, if I can prove where I was, because they have to think that maybe, just as a possibility, Ethan was taken.

I turn to him, and I want to say,
I was with my boyfriend. His mother caught us. She opened the door and saw. I know she did. Go ahead and ask them all
, but I don't. I stand there looking at the cop and at Greg, who says nothing, not even fuck.

I move away from the cop, whose attention is on Irene now anyway, and I push Greg away as he tries to grab me around the waist and hold me.
It's not that the holding isn't nice
, I want to say,
but not now, Jesus, not now
, but what comes out is me telling him,
Get the fuck off me, Greg, and tell the officer the fucking truth
.

I was with Rebecca
, he says. No fucks. I struggle to get across the room to Audrey, who's squeezing her mother's arms, her face whiter than I've ever seen it. She's whiter than anything naturally white, whiter than the kitchen with the white walls and the white counter and all the white things that help Ethan feel safe. But this is one shade of white I've never seen.

What if she did it?
I say to Audrey, as I pull her over to the space between the kitchen and the upstairs landing.
What if she took him?

Who?
Caroline asks. I didn't see her coming up, and for a minute I think of staying quiet, but then I see a look pass between Caroline and Audrey, and I know they've been out there. The two of them. Without me.

Her
, I say, and then under my breath,
Why didn't you ask me to go?

Audrey moves between us and says,
O.K
.,
O.K
., not now. You're right,
O.K
.? There was no time. It was Caroline's idea, and we made my dad drive. We shouldn't have. We shouldn't have left you out
.

Our mothers are calling their names, Buck, Ethan, over and over. They draw out the sounds with their hands cupped over their mouths. The cop is trying to keep them quiet, but they just keep calling and calling and calling. Calling for the boys, all except Greg, who stands in the corner with his hands in his pockets with no one to touch.

We never should have taken Buck, either
, Audrey says.
But he begged. Him and those dreams
. She looks down at her sneakers and adds,
I thought I could make them stop
.

Her blond hair hangs over her face, and I know she's crying. I can see it in everything, her shoulders, her hands. When Ethan cries, he rolls his hands. I look down at Audrey's freckled hands and think of my brother's turning
and turning, and how he hates hands, hands that touch, hands that squeeze, hands in front of his face, hands too big, hands too small. As I think about my brother and how he hates hands, for some reason I realize what's happened. They've gone out there, they've gone to see her.

You don't think . . .
Caroline says.

It's the first time Caroline and I have looked at each other in a long time, maybe since that day out at the lake when we saw her drowning and Audrey saved her. Before we thought of stealing cars and our moms went crazy making all those moon pies.

Oh, yeah
, I say.
I do think
.

We have to get the cop to go
, I whisper to Audrey, and she nods and wipes her nose with the back of her hand. She knows that if they're out there with the blue girl, we can't let the cop see her, or Buck and Ethan. Who knows what a cop would do to them?

S
he tried to do it while we were out there
, Audrey says,
right before we left. She does it all the time. I heard the old lady say it. Every day she runs for the lake and throws herself in. Then everything is wet, the old lady said, the bed, the covers, everything
.

It was really hard to get her out
, Audrey says, almost to herself.
I almost didn't make it
.

Greg, do something already, don't just stand there
, Caroline says.
Go get rid of the cop
.

We move over to the door and watch as Greg starts talking to the cop with his hands moving all the time. He points down the road toward the school where Ethan goes in his yellow bus. I watch the cop talking into his radio as he drives away and our mothers stand there. Magda has her arms around the two of them, my mother and Irene, and when I look over at Greg, I think maybe it wasn't so bad out on the porch. Maybe I can feel something for him, I think, if we can get them back, Ethan and Buck, and her, the girl who tries over and over to drown herself.

We take my mother's van. It's so much easier than I thought, getting our mothers to listen to us once Audrey tells them that we think Buck and Ethan went out there, that the girl ate the moon pies that they brought, her and Caroline.
Stole
, Audrey says, but she doesn't say she's sorry. She tells our mothers that the girl ran into the lake again and that she pulled her out. Again.

I took Buck with me, Ma
, she says,
because he begged
.

Irene doesn't answer.

I sit in the back between Audrey and Caroline. We keep the windows open so we can see the sides of the road. We made Greg stay behind in case they come back while we're gone. By the time we left, Greg's father had shown up and stood in the yard with Greg. I could see he was
confused. His father doesn't say or do much, either, but at least he shows up. Greg kissed me in front of his father, but I wasn't embarrassed. I told Greg to keep trying my own father until he picked up the phone.

Forget about your dad
, Greg's dad said to me, leaning in to say it low as I got into the car.
Don't worry about your dad
, he said.
Just find your brother and that blue whatever-she-is
.

I didn't think any of them knew, any of the dads, but now I see I was wrong. We were stealing cars, our mothers were making moon pies, we all thought nobody else knew, but maybe the dads knew all along. There's no time to worry about what they know. There's only Ethan, Ethan afraid of hands and things not white, and little Buck, who has somehow managed to walk all the way out to the lake to find the blue girl.

It's where he has to be. I know it before we can even get there.

As we drive I feel Audrey's hair whip against me. I close my mouth against the wind and let her hair and mine sting my cheeks and lips. When we get close, Audrey and Caroline lean back and tell me about the night they went out there without me, how they convinced Audrey's father to drive.

Buck and I stayed under the blanket
, Caroline says,
until we heard the old lady at the door, and she started saying such terrible things
about our mothers. She said they were fools, unkind, and that they wanted the girl to starve
.

I fed her
, Audrey says, as we pull down the gravel road to the grove of trees that leads to the lake.
She ate all the moon pies we had
.

Gravel sprays up through the windows and hits me in the face. I see the outline of the lake beyond the trees as Audrey keeps talking.

Then, as soon as she was done, she ran for the water and jumped in. I was almost too tired to pull her out
.

Audrey turns to look at me and pulls her hair away from her face. She looks so tired.

She looked so sad
, Audrey says,
like she couldn't believe I'd pulled her out again. Just so, so sad
.

We pull in closer to the lake, and there is Ethan, standing waist-deep in the water. My mother screams. I don't know who tramples over me, Audrey or Caroline, but the next thing I know I am down on the ground with my knees in the gravel. Somebody pulls me up—Magda, I think—and I feel the cuts burning as I run to the water's edge.

I try to look for my mother, but everyone is in front of me, all of their bodies keeping me from seeing past them, from seeing where Ethan is. I brush off my legs and think about how I left him last night when he was still banging, that I got up and went to bed without letting him
follow me the way I usually do when he won't settle down. I think about how I lay in bed waiting for my mother to get home, how I must have fallen asleep to his sounds.

Only when I get close enough can I see that Ethan is holding the blue girl in his arms. The water comes up to his waist. He has one arm under her neck and one under her legs. Her head hangs back like a doll's, the neck and face and hands, all of it blue. Even from here I can see she's not breathing.

Buck stands by the far side of the lake. Irene shrieks his name. He runs toward Audrey and hugs her hard around the waist, so hard she stumbles.

Ethan!
I call.
Ethan's
O.K
. now. Ethan's going to be
O.K
.

He starts to rock back and forth in the water, the girl's blue arms sinking deeper as he sways. I watch as Audrey peels Buck's arms from around her waist and wades into the water in her jeans and sneakers. Caroline grabs for Audrey, but Audrey shrugs her off and moves forward until the water reaches her knees. She raises both arms above her head, about to dive in, when Buck splashes into the water and pulls her back.

No, Audrey
, he says.
The old lady said no, remember?

He points toward the gravel road where the old lady stands with her hands on her hips and shakes her head at us.

See?
Buck says.

Audrey stops. I find my mother and take her hand, and Caroline takes Magda's, and Audrey and Buck take each of Irene's. Together we move a bit farther into the water, so cold it makes my breath stop. I look back at the old lady, shaking her head no, and then I look out at Ethan there in the lake. From where I stand, with the light hitting him just this way, he looks the way he was meant to look, I think, without his fragile
X
. His face looks shorter and less pointed, his ears not so flat.

Becca?
he says.
Ethan's
O.K
. now. Ethan's
O.K
. You see, Becca? Here's Ethan, here he is. Ethan's
O.K
.