I noticed first was the loose board on the front steps. It surprised me. Then I saw that the paint on the porch was peeling, that the roses, blooms long gone, had not been tended to. The bushes were skeletal, snarled.
Mrs. Parker answered the door wearing her slip, and I felt myself blushing. She looked exactly like Elizabeth Taylor now—in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (which Brooder and I had snuck into the theater to see). Her hair was messy, and she was barefoot. She stepped out onto the porch and looked past me down the street.
“Is Betsy home?” I asked.
She stood shivering on the porch for what seemed like forever.
“Mrs. Parker,” I said. “We should go inside. You’ll catch a cold.”
She came back to me then and nodded.
Inside, the house was unfamiliar. There were stacks of old newspapers all over the floor. The sink was full of dirty dishes. Mrs. Parker had to rummage through them to find a pot, which she rinsed and then filled with milk to warm for hot chocolate. Betsy came out of her room, and while she and I sat silently at the table dunking marshmallows in our mugs of cocoa, Mrs. Parker disappeared. When she came back, she was carrying a child’s sand bucket filled with snow. She set it down on the kitchen floor and smiled. “Let’s build ourselves a snowman,” she said. Betsy sank lower into her seat.
I sat quietly and watched. Mrs. Parker opened the back door when the bucket was empty and stepped out into the snow, still without any shoes on. She brought in more and more snow, until there was a huge pile of it on the linoleum. The kitchen was warm; the snow was melting all over the floor.
Betsy’s eyes were wide and wet.
“Here,” I said. “I’ll help.” I ran outside to the backyard and made a snowball. I set it down in a good patch of snow and rolled it back and forth across the lawn until it was the size of a large medicine ball. I went back into the kitchen to get them, to show them what I’d made, but by the time I got there Mrs. Parker had disappeared and Betsy was sitting on the floor next to the puddle.
She reached for my hand, pulling me down next to her. She looked at me as if she were trying to figure something out. Then she framed my face with her hands and kissed me so hard on the mouth that my front tooth bit into my bottom lip. I was a little puzzled but mostly excited. I started to kiss her back, but she pulled away. She looked hard into my eyes and said quietly, “I’ll never marry you, Harper Montgomery. It’s best that you know that now.”
I felt heat rising into my face, despite the chill I’d carried in from outside. “I don’t want to marry you,” I offered, like some god-awful gift. “Why would I want to marry you anyway?”
She softened then, and looked at me with something close to sympathy.
“What?” I asked, still offended. I could taste my own blood.
Betsy’s shoulders slumped. “My daddy’s sending her away. To the state mental hospital in Waterbury. She’s crazy, you know.”
By Christmas, Mrs. Parker was gone and the Parkers’ house was no different from the other crumbling monstrosities on our street. Even the Christmas lights strung around the porch railings seemed haphazard and half-hearted. By the following summer their yard had grown into a sort of jungle. And even though Betsy had sworn she’d never marry me, I was pretty certain there was still a chance she might one day love me.
News
“W here the hell you been, Montgomery?” Lenny asked. He was standing outside the train station, smoking a cigarette. “I told you. I was at the wreck. I went home to dry off. Change my clothes,” I said.
“Well, get in here,” he said, snubbing out his cigarette under his boot and blowing three perfect smoke rings into the air. He held his finger up and put it through one of the rings, letting it circle his finger, smiling stupidly like he’d exhibited a new and remarkable talent.
The station was eerily empty. All trains coming through Two Rivers had been delayed or diverted. Normally, there was a bustle of activity at the station at any given time of the day. Today there was no motion but the whirring of the ceiling fans. I shut the door to the freight office and tried to concentrate on the pile of paperwork that had accumulated in my inbox. As luck would have it, the ceiling fan in my office was broken. It was hot, especially with the door closed, but I didn’t want to be bothered. Within minutes Lenny was knocking.
Lenny had been a thorn in my side since he transferred up from Brattleboro five years before. He was the station agent, in charge of overseeing all of the operations at the station. His interpretation of this job description was poking his nose into my office, and generally impeding all operations at the station with his incessant drivel.
“The news wants to interview me,” he said. “Burlington. NBC.” He was examining his cuticles, trying to be blasé about it, I suppose.
“What for?” I asked.
“Duh,” he offered by way of explanation, opening his buggy eyes wider. “ Earth to Montgomery. A train wrecked in the river today.”
“I mean, why do they want to interview you? You haven’t even been down there yet, have you?”
“I’ve been waiting for you to show up all morning. I couldn’t exactly leave, could I?”
“Why don’t you go down there now?” I asked, hopeful.
“Maybe I will .”
“Great. Can you close the door on the way out?”
Since Lenny’s arrival in Two Rivers I had found myself in more than a hundred such inane conversations. Every single exchange we had had a certain prepubescent quality to it. I worried sometimes that I might actually wind up in a school yard brawl with him one afternoon. I didn’t know how much longer I could stand this job.
After Lenny was gone, I trudged through some bills of lading. I wanted to get through the mountain of paperwork so that I could get back to the apartment, to Marguerite, before Shelly got home from school. I was working on deciphering handwriting on an order when the phone on my desk rang, startling me so badly I felt like I’d been sucker-punched.
“My daughter!” the voice cried. “Please tell where my daughter is!”
Sweat broke out onto my forehead in cold drops. I thought about Marguerite at the river’s edge, the sunlight behind her. My mama’s dead.
“Excuse me?” I managed.
“Oh God, is she dead?” Her accent was thick. Southern.
I closed my eyes, thought of Marguerite reaching for my hand.
“Ma’am, please slow down. The connection’s not so good. How can I help you?” Sweat ran down my sides; I could smell myself, the dank scent of the river and my own wet fear.
“My daughter was on the train. At least I think she was on that train. Dammit, we haven’t heard nothin’ from nobody. Who’s in charge up there?”
“I’m sorry, ma’am. I understand you’re upset. Please, let me see what I can do to help.” I wiped my wrist across my forehead, blinked hard to squeeze the sweat out of my eyes.
“Her name’s Sara. Sara Phillips. She got on in Virginia, headed to Montreal. Was she on this train? Where is my daughter?”
“Sara,” I said, my skin tingling with sudden relief. Release. But my body felt like it had just woken from a nightmare; everything was still buzzing. I breathed deeply. “This is the freight office. Let me give you the number for the railroad. They should have a passenger list.”
The woman was sobbing on the other end of the line.
“Ma’am?” I said, softly.
“Yes?”
“A lot of people made it out of the wreck just fine. I was there. I saw a lot of people who walked