Mrs. Shepherd tried to lighten Jacob’s hair and bleached it bone white. This is how Leah remembered him as well.
Each morning, Mrs. Shepherd woke her children by turning on the light in the bedroom and singing a hymn. One Christmas, Leah gave her brother a cheap plastic car. She told her mother that she’d saved her allowance for months and had purchased the blue car from the small rack of cheap toys in the back corner of the Convenient across the street from the elementary school one afternoon before walking home. So proud her mother was of such generosity. Those last seven months, Jacob slept with the car every night.
The first Leah could remember: They held her out over the slumping slave wall and she pointed at the cows drinking clouds out of a barrel. Her mother’s legs were made of grass and her stomach out of the dirt and her breasts out of the sun and her hair out of the night. The cows licked the sky from their noses and swayed.
Leah mentioned the memory to her mother who pulled out the picture from the old photo album showing Mrs. Shepherd in green and yellow holding Jacob out to a cow in a field. Her mother smirked and put the picture back.
A gnarl of green branches and crackling leaves. Under it, the ground is bare of grass blades and always damp with mud. Bits of rock and glass found in the gutter by the storm drain. When a thunderstorm washes the crushed, colorful glass and dead leaves through the cement furrows, they flow here.
“Leah, honey, please get your hands out of that mess. You are going to prick your finger and get a blood disease or tetanus. Your jaw will lock up and you will never be able to eat again. The doctor will have to cut a hole in your throat, like one that man has who lives next to your aunt, the one with the robot voice. You will have a hole like that and you will have to eat baby food through it for the rest of your life. We will have to hire a nurse to sponge off the mucus that will grow around the hole and you will have a decaying smell about you for the rest of your life and no one will ever marry you.” No one ever did marry Leah Shepherd, though she was engaged for a time during graduate school to a man named Derrick Green. The failure of their relationship had nothing to do with a blood disease or tetanus. He told a joke at a party, his lips covered in spittle as he gave the punchline and his friends roared in laughter and told him he was terrible and Leah recoiled and he saw the look of disgust on her face and he gave her a look that said, What? and Oh, come on, it’s just a joke. Later, as they drove home from the party, he picked at her about her disapproval of the joke, even though she’d not said anything about it, but he’d been with her for a year and he knew that it hurt her, but he knew she would just let it fester and he wanted to get it out, to go ahead and fight so that they could move beyond it, but she wouldn’t talk to him at all. “You are overreacting,” he said. She didn’t break off the engagement, but he could tell it was over and they eventually just ceased being a couple and it had nothing to do with broken glass.
The sizzle of its electric-lit windows and the soft, hazy waver of the horizon of glass towers and neon signs—
It was always the same: Jacob was scared and wanted to get into bed with his big sister, but he wouldn’t let her sleep, wanting instead to talk all night, clutching his toy car and talking and flailing about, so Leah would tell him that if he didn’t lie quiet, a monster would come for him, and then he would start to whimper and she would feel sad for having scared her little brother and then she would put a long freckled arm over Jacob and tell him that there were no monsters. No ghost or witch or vampire. No creatures clawing or baying. No secret codes or forgotten tales, whistling languages and alien photography. No God in the sky making your skin sick for saying something bad. Nothing. No monsters, no ghosts, but the man she’d seen, how could she tell her brother to be careful of him? Their father had had a talk with them about not going with strangers. She’d gone into her parents’ bedroom one night and told them, “Jacob said there is a man in the backyard,” but Mr. Shepherd, after looking at the glowing green arms of the clock next to the bed, said, “There is no one in the yard. You two need to go to sleep,” and he rolled over on his other side. So Leah took it upon herself to fill her brother’s head with a fear of anything she could, but she always felt guilty when he cried, so she backpedalled. Jacob, for his part, loved his sister, there in the burrow of dark, and he listened to her comforting words, but he didn’t believe her. He’d heard someone knocking on the door in the middle of the night once. He knew better.
“Isn’t it nice, Jacob. Your big sister got it for you. A little car. Say thank you, Jacob. Say thank you.” Leah told her mother that she’d saved her allowance and bought the car at the Convenient across the street from the school, but Leah had actually spent her allowance on candy for herself and then stolen the small blue car, walking out of the store with it hidden in her pocket on the last day of school before Christmas break and even though the middle-aged woman behind the counter hadn’t noticed Leah take the car, Leah was certain that she would be caught, that the woman would notice the car was gone and would know that she had taken it and all Christmas break Leah worried that she would get caught. Every time the telephone rang, Leah’s heart leapt, sure that this was the middle-aged woman calling to tell the Shepherds that their daughter was a thief, which never happened because the woman didn’t notice Leah taking the toy car, and even if she had, it was unlikely that she would have cared — they didn’t pay her enough to care — yet Leah never went back to the Convenient, too full of shame and fear, and even now, three decades later, she avoided the store, the name of which was changed to Chill’s Quik Stop.
They coursed through the house, up the front stairs and down the back, out the front door and around the side of the house, hands reaching out to beat at the holly bushes, the holly leaves scratching their tender palms, feet stomping earth and they bellowed and mewed at each other, howled and howled, ran past the back of the house where the porch was half-enclosed, the solarium half-formed, and sprinted across the endless stretch of green yard toward the bushes and trees in the back, seeking the cool of overhanging branches, slapped the trunk of the dogwood, screaming Safe and then legs folded and bend on the impossibly rough edges of the blades of grass. Their mother was out of town visiting one of her sisters, hoping to get the sister to call, or maybe even visit, their father who was much changed since he started going to church and stopped drinking, had given them five dollars to go to the Convenient, but Leah wouldn’t go, promising to give Jacob her half if he would pretend that they’d gone there and bought candy, so they larked in the yard.
Jacob said he didn’t like going to school, because the other children didn’t like him and the teacher didn’t like him and he didn’t like going to church because the Sunday school teacher didn’t like him and the stories scared him and he was scared he was going to be bad and the Creature was going to get him like it got Jonah. An ant crawled across his leg, the barest tiny thing, so small Jacob couldn’t even feel its six legs on his one leg, and Leah looking down and seeing the ant told Jacob that he didn’t have to be afraid, that nothing bad would happen to him at school and nothing bad would happen to him at church and all he had to do was do everything she said and listen to her and then she was up and her young legs were leaping from the shadow to light across the yard, and Jacob jumped up and ran, the ant gone from his leg in a cataclysm too profound for it to comprehend, and Leah was an unstoppable bolt, nearly to the house before Jacob had risen, before his own legs were moving and exploded through the door and through the kitchen and down the hall, Leah disappeared ahead of him, into the house, the rooms and rooms, the shaded windows, the ticking of the old clock in the hall, the small toy car that he loved and never let go of, a small blue Bug, still in his hand, and Jacob called for her as he stood in the hall and listened to the house as it creaked and moaned softly and he began to softly speak Leah’s name again when the door to the basement just behind him slowly opened and a hand reached out from the darkness and took hold of his shoulder and pulled him into the void. As he began to scream, another hand covered his mouth and at his ear she said, “Shhh.” Leah held him there in the doorframe, at the top of the steps that lead down to the dark basement. They heard something and both fell silent. “Listen.”