The Past Is Never Read online

  She was trussing the hen when she heard the robin sing. It was back, the songbird of death. It couldn’t be the same bird, and yet she knew it was. Clementine marched outside with her father’s rifle and shot the bird squarely through its fat, red chest. It fell to the ground with a thump. She picked it up and squeezed its still warm body in her fist. The bird’s blood oozed onto her hands and she wiped it across her chest. She marched inside, intending to wipe the blood on her mother. But her father knelt by her mother’s bedside, weeping, and she couldn’t bear to interrupt his grief. Her mother was dead.

  One month later, her father put the barrel of the rifle in his mouth and pulled the trigger. Ora came and helped Clementine scrub her father’s brains off the back door of the house. Ora helped her dig the grave. They buried him beside her mother, in a plot on the edge of their land. They lined the double plot with stones from the quarry. Clementine had found a pile of them in her father’s tool chest. There was no money for a grave marker. The quarry rocks would have to do.

  FOUR

  IN THE WEEK AFTER she disappeared, Pansy’s face was everywhere, on television and in the newspapers, plastered across store windows and utility poles. She squatted at the center of our collective mind and whispered look at me, look at me, look at me. We looked. We searched. We begged others to do the same. The police officers who’d come that first day were now regular visitors. The fat one brought me a stuffed bear wearing a deputy’s badge. Even though I was much too old for stuffed toys, I thanked him and hugged the bear tight to my chest.

  Mama was going to be on the evening news again. We settled in with a plate of pimento cheese and saltine crackers. Our refrigerator bulged with casserole dishes from well meaning neighbors, but we were sick of the food they brought. Everything tasted the same. Chicken spaghetti with a hard crust of salty cheddar, meatloaf surrounded by congealed fat, dumpling stew with too much baking powder, runny Jell-O salad with peaches, lemon pie with sweaty meringue. We couldn’t stand one more bite.

  Mama didn’t eat a thing. She smoked cigarettes and drank sweet tea. She shushed us and turned on the television. We held the cheese and crackers in our cheeks until it went soft enough to chew without making any noise.

  The blonde reporter came on the screen alongside a picture of Pansy. She looked like the sort of woman who would wear too much perfume. I swear I got a whiff of Chanel from the television.

  “This child, this precious innocent child, has been missing for five days. She has brown hair and green eyes. She stands about three feet tall. She weighs only forty-five pounds. Someone has seen her. Someone knows where she is. Her mother is frantic with worry. We talked with her earlier today.”

  And Mama came on the screen. She pleaded for Pansy, begged for information. Our mother looked especially tired and small next to the reporter with her crisp suit and aggressive shoulder pads. Mama seemed to fade into the walls against the reporter’s brassy hair and swinging gold earrings. “Please,” Mama said to the camera. “Please bring my baby home. Please don’t hurt her. She’s all I have in this world.” All? I looked at Willet, but he stared at the television and didn’t meet my eye. The fat policeman came on and gave a number to call with any information about Pansy.

  I looked at Mama. I wanted to know what she was thinking. Her hands clasped against her chest; her eyes never blinked. A cigarette smoldered in an ashtray beside her. After everyone was done talking, the whole screen filled with the image of Pansy’s face and a phone number for people to call with information. It was terrifying to see our sister’s face so large. Pansy’s image hung there for a very long time. The cheese and crackers hardened into a knot in my gut. Finally, when I thought we might spend the rest of our lives staring at a blown-up image of my sister, the blonde woman reappeared. She leaned toward the camera. It seemed like she was talking right to us, like she was making eye contact.

  “Someone out there is responsible for this little girl’s disappearance. Someone out there knows what happened. Do the right thing and come forward. Give this child’s mother some peace. Give this community some peace. And parents, hold your babies a little tighter tonight. Watch them and keep them close. Until we have answers, until we have an arrest, we must assume there is evil on the loose. No child is safe.”

  With that, the reporter brought summer to an end for all the children in our town. There would be no more unsupervised trips to the snow-cone truck. There would be no more bike rides without a destination. There would be no more hide-and-seek in the woods, no more building bridges across Little Sand Creek, no more catching fireflies in mayonnaise jars and using them for lanterns. The only people under the age of eighteen who’d be allowed any freedom at all were Willet and me. Mama was too distraught or too distracted to keep tabs on the children in her home. She was too busy hunting for the child who wasn’t there. She blamed us for Pansy’s disappearance. Of course she did. If we’d kept an eye on her baby, if we hadn’t gone to the quarry, none of this mess would have happened.

  People called our home daily with reports of seeing Pansy at a convenience store in Shreveport or in a mall in Alabama. A man called to say he had Pansy and she was fine, not to worry about her. A child playing a cruel prank called and pretended to be Pansy, shouting through the phone line: “Mama, come and get me. I’m all alone out here!” Willet pulled the receiver from Mama’s hand and cussed into the phone until the child on the other end wailed and hung up.

  A woman who claimed to be psychic said Pansy was in the grips of an evil man. She said she could find her and release her from his grasp if Mama would send her three hundred and thirty-three dollars within thirty-three hours. Something about the number three was important, but I don’t remember the explanation. Mama wanted to send the money, but Willet stopped her. The police praised Willet.

  “It’s a scam,” the thin officer said. “Happens anytime we get a missing persons case.”

  It was during this time that a strange woman showed up at our house. Her hair was gray and thin, the skin of her face stretched too tight across her bones. She wore all black clothing even in the heat of August. Mama invited her in, offered her coffee and a cigarette. The woman had driven from Pittsburgh, a place I imagined as ugly and cold. She told us her son had disappeared ten years earlier, snatched from the street as he walked home from school. Mama nodded; she remembered the news reports. They sat in our living room, clutching stale cups of coffee, smoking, and talking about her son. Every few months, the woman said, someone reported seeing him. They saw him at a service station with an older man and another boy outside of New Jersey. They saw him smoking marijuana on the streets of San Francisco. Someone swore he stole food from a restaurant in Boulder, Colorado. A grainy film showed a boy who might have been him, who might have been anyone, doing unspeakable things to older men for money.

  “People will tell you these things,” the woman said to Mama. “You’ll believe every one of them, and it will break your heart, but you should never give up looking. I have never stopped searching. I will never lose hope for my child.”

  “Of course not,” Mama said. “How could you? How could I?”

  The woman told Mama how she continued to search for her son even as everyone around her gave up. She prayed. She put her trust in God. Her husband left her. Her friends and family grew distant. The police stopped returning her calls.

  The police, she said, would give up soon. “They won’t keep looking once the case goes cold. And the reporters will move on to other things. You are the only one who will keep the search for your daughter alive. You must be diligent. You should make a pest of yourself. It isn’t easy. I know you want to please everyone, to be pleasant. You cannot be pleasant or polite or quiet. You will have to scream and get angry. People will start to hate you, and you have to learn how to not care. Do you understand?”

  Mama nodded. “Thank you,” she said. “This is all very helpful.”

  I wasn’t so sure. Who did this woman think she was, coming in and telling us
to expect this nightmare to go on and on and on? Telling us it might get worse? Ten years she’d lived with the horror of her missing son, but Pansy had been gone for just over a week. It was too soon to start talking about cold cases. If any child could escape kidnappers, surely Pansy could. She wasn’t like other children her age. She didn’t act like a little kid; she didn’t talk like one. I knew Pansy could escape the grip of the creature from the woods. Pansy wasn’t like that woman’s son. She wasn’t some ordinary child lost on the streets. She was different. She was special.

  For one thing, Pansy never babbled nor spoke in the soft, slurred way most children do. For the first three years of her life, she didn’t say a word. No “mama” or “dada” or “mine” or anything an ordinary child might say. When she was almost four, she began speaking clearly and in complete sentences, with a vocabulary that stunned us all. The first thing she said was, “Mama, I’m hungry, and Bert won’t fix me a snack.” Just like that. As if I had been ignoring some request from her, as if we’d been having a discussion.

  Mama had stared at her, shocked, and then she’d laughed. “Roberta Lynn,” she said. “Go fix your sister a sandwich. She’s hungry.” I’d protested. Why did I have to get her a snack? I wasn’t her servant. I wasn’t her mother. But Mama fixed me with a dark look. “We honor a person’s first request,” Mama said. “And a person’s last request. We can negotiate the rest.” I fixed the sandwich, tearing the bread as I smeared peanut butter across it in short, angry strokes. If this was what it meant to have Pansy speaking, I would have preferred her mute.

  Shortly thereafter, Pansy introduced us to Ivy. Ivy, she insisted, was her sister, her favorite sister, and we were all instructed to be kind to her. That we couldn’t see her didn’t make her any less of an intrusion in our lives. Ivy spent her days lolling on the couch. She wore long, diaphanous dresses. “Here comes Ivy,” Pansy would say. “Can you hear her dress swishing against the floor?” Sometimes I swore I could.

  Ivy loved sweet things. She was mad for Mama’s coconut cake. She couldn’t get her fill of biscuits with jam or honey. Pansy reported this to us, and food did seem to disappear.

  Mama made biscuits most mornings and we ate them throughout the day, flaky biscuits with butter, with blueberry jam, with honey and sour cream, or plain and soaked in buttermilk. I liked to hold one biscuit back for the next day, when I would split the stale disk in half, slather both sides with butter and run it under the broiler on a piece of tinfoil. I loved the brown, crispy edges of the toasted biscuit, and the way my teeth snapped through the salty outer crust. I kept my biscuit in a corner of the kitchen counter, wrapped in a square of paper towel. Everyone knew it was mine. During an unseasonably cool week one fall my biscuit began to disappear. I didn’t say anything the first day, but when it disappeared three days in a row, I was furious.

  “Who is taking my biscuit?”

  I’d assembled Mama and Willet and Pansy together in the living room for my interrogation. Daddy was off on one of his trips, so he couldn’t be responsible. I’d accused each of them in turn over the past days, and they’d denied stealing from me. I guess I believed by bringing them all together, someone would have to confess. No one did. Willet laughed at me and told me to relax. Mama said I was being ridiculous. Pansy swore it wasn’t her, but then she paused and grinned. “I bet it’s Ivy!”

  I hated Ivy. Pansy and I shared a room, and I was forced to listen to her babbling away with Ivy every morning. Now Pansy said Ivy was stealing my biscuit; it was too much. I lashed out at her. “She’s not real! She’s not a real person!”

  Pansy smiled. “Just because you can’t see her doesn’t mean she isn’t real.”

  Thankfully, Mama spoke up or I might have throttled Pansy. “I know you like to pretend to have a friend your own age, but Ivy is someone you made up. Ivy isn’t real, sweetie.”

  “She’s real,” Pansy said. “She’s my sister, and you can’t make her go away.”

  Mama gave Pansy a long look. “Now, Pansy, it’s nice to imagine things, but we’ve talked about what a bad thing it is to lie.”

  “I’m not lying,” Pansy said. “And you know it.”

  Mama stood. She brushed her hands together. “I have work to do. This house is a wreck.”

  There was nothing wrong with the house. It was no more or less a wreck than it ever was. I stamped my foot like a spoiled child. I was about twelve years old at the time.

  “Roberta Lynn, I am sorry you’re upset about your biscuit, but you know there are children starving in the world. There are children in Africa who’ve never so much as tasted a biscuit.”

  That kind of reasoning drove me nuts. Of course I knew there were children who didn’t have enough to eat, who didn’t have any clean water. If I could give my biscuit to one of those children, I would gladly do so. I would give up eating biscuits altogether if it meant those poor African children could fill their bellies, but that wasn’t an option and Mama knew it.

  “That has nothing to do with this,” I said. “Those starving children aren’t stealing my biscuit! Someone in this house is stealing my biscuit!”

  “Ivy loves biscuits with honey,” Pansy said.

  Willet rolled his eyes. “That child is touched in the head. She’s a goddamned loon.”

  “Watch your mouth,” Mama said. “The inquisition is over, Roberta Lynn. You’ll just have to find a better place to keep your biscuit, somewhere it won’t get accidentally eaten.”

  “How can someone accidentally eat something?” I shouted at Mama.

  “I want your rooms cleaned,” Mama said. “Top to bottom. Wipe down the baseboards. Pull the books off the shelf and dust every one.”

  I felt like crying, but I knew it would only prompt Mama to add something else to the chore list. Willet didn’t care. He kept his room spotless; there was nothing in it to get dusty. Pansy never pitched in to help in our bedroom. I was being punished and I couldn’t understand why. The way I saw it, I was the only one who hadn’t done anything wrong.

  Now I realize Mama didn’t see it that way. I was the one who started an argument over something as trivial as a biscuit. It seemed a silly thing to make such a scene over, but it wasn’t silly to me. I shared everything with Pansy and she always managed to get more of everything—more dessert, more attention, more of our mother’s love. Even when Mama was upset with Pansy about her imaginary sister, she punished me. The unfairness of it festered and ate at me like a disease.

  Some years later, I asked Mama about it. I asked her why she treated Pansy so special. She denied ever doing any such thing, told me I was being stupid, told me she treated all her children exactly the same. She denied ever bringing Pansy chocolate milk in bed or making her special meals. “No,” she said. “I would not have done such a thing. Although, with everything that’s happened, I wish I had.” I didn’t press her. After all, memory is a slippery thing, and who’s to say mine was any better than hers.

  Maybe the woman from Pittsburgh would never find her son, but I believed we’d find Pansy. How could anyone take such a child and not return her? Who would put up with her wild imagination? I’d resigned myself to living with the guilt of losing Pansy, but only when the woman from Pittsburgh showed up did I understand how completely our lives had changed. We were not just that family now. We might be that family forever. And being that family meant people could intrude without invitation. Were we required to let them in? Mama seemed to think so.

  Mama and the woman talked for hours. It was midafternoon, the hottest part of the day. The sky was cloudless and bright. Our air conditioning hummed and the box fan whirred, but it was no match for the sun and the thick humid air. My body was covered in a sticky sheen of sweat. Willet paced through the house, as if searching for something he’d lost. A sour scent wafted from the kitchen. We hadn’t taken the trash out in days.

  My thoughts grew dark. I kept picturing Pansy floating in the quarry, how peaceful she seemed, how content she was to let the water carry h
er. Her disappearance made no sense. Somehow she’d been swallowed up by the creature from the woods. If I found him, maybe he would spit her out again. I left Mama and the woman without excusing myself. I walked alone down the hot dusty road, the same one we’d traveled before. The heat rose up to meet me. It pushed against me, warning me to turn back, but I kept going. It wasn’t the quarry I wanted to see, but the clearing in the woods. If the loathsome creature were there, I would confront him. If evil presented itself to me, I was ready. I’d had enough of waiting for Mama and Willet and the police to find Pansy. I’d had enough of waiting for Daddy to come home.

  I’d failed my sister by hiding like a frightened child in the woods on the day she disappeared. I’d failed Mama and Willet, but I thought I could make it right. The creature lived among the shadows and he’d taken Pansy to live there as well. Most people couldn’t see into the shadows, but I could. I had. All I needed to do was find the same spot in the clearing, find the shadows, and find the creature. Then, surely, I would find my sister. I could not live for the next decade with the terrible gnawing guilt. The woman from Pittsburgh might be content to get angry and pray, but it was not enough for me.

  I thought about a story from the book of fairy tales I read to Pansy most nights. It was an old heavy book, full of dark tales about monsters and bad parents. There was a story about a girl who disguised herself as an animal to hide from the king, her own father, who’d declared his intention to marry her after the death of her mother. She knew it was a godless plan. To escape she became “all fur,” wrapping herself in animal pelts and using soot to blacken her face. In this disguise she worked in the royal kitchen. Her father threw boots at her head when she brought him his soup. It was a miserable, dark story, but Pansy liked it. She liked the dark stories best. I liked them, too. Perhaps Pansy was hiding in the woods now, wearing a cloak of pelts, biding her time and waiting for someone to come and find her. Perhaps Ivy was with her. I tell you it seemed as likely as anything.