One of the houses on the road that Leah drove each morning to work had a small dogwood tree out front. From the branches of the tree hung blue glass bottles. They were tied with graying string and spun slightly in the breeze. An elderly woman sitting outside with a black dog by her side. She had a green kerchief on her head and she waved at the cars as they passed. One day, she was gone but the bottles remained.
One evening, the sky was purple and the clouds were orange. They took on strange shapes. Dead grass grew. Paved lots were full of cracks with yellow stems pushing through. There was a taste to the water — dense and green. That woman walking along a country road, her boots along the gravel shoulder. In a pair of pants that were once nice, but were now soiled in the seat and the knees. A nice pair of pants that she must have been given by the Salvation Army. What was in the backpack that she carried on her bent back? Leah passed and tried to look into her rearview mirror to see the woman’s face, but there was a bend in the road and all Leah could see were trees dressed in the purple shadows of early evening.
A dead dog was found in the road that no one recognized. Everyone at the office was talking about it. There was one shoe on the side of the road. There were strange messages in the personals. The telephone rang, but there was no one there. The telephone rang and there was just clicking. The television flickered and clouds rolled in from the wrong direction. Grandchildren called their grandmothers without having to be told. A strange man helped a woman who’d dropped her things. He did not give his name. A young woman living alone moved back home and claimed the baby had no daddy.
In the waiting area someone laughs and spills sweet tea on the monthly financial reports. Her granddaughter has called and is getting married.
Clients, in their best clothes and with children, smile politely and chomp Starlight mints. Joy is no cause for the cessation of work.
The boy wouldn’t hold still. His mother begged him, “Jesse, Jesse, honey, please hold still, I need to talk to this woman, please, Jesse.”
Leah turned to the boy, smiling, and asked him, “Would you like a book to read? We have some books.” The boy shook his head and wriggled. His mother said, “You like to read don’t you? Jesse?” The boy stopped moving and looked at Leah. She asked, “Where do you go to school?” He looked at his mother and she said, “Tell the nice lady where you go.” The boy didn’t say anything. He was slumped down in the chair so far that his back and head were on the seat. The woman sighed and said, “He goes to Toliver.” Edna L. Toliver Elementary School was Crow Station’s oldest school. “That’s where I went to school when I was your age,” Leah said to the boy, leaning toward him, smiling. He was a cute boy, she thought. A round head and plump face and quick grin. “Do you want the woman to get you a book to read?” his mother asked again and the boy said, “No, I don’t want to read.” Leah gave him an exaggerated look of mock shock and said, “You don’t like to read? But reading is so much fun and Toliver has such a great library full of cool books about mythology and detectives and castles.” The boy stopped moving and said, “I don’t like it.” His mother took his arm gently and said, “Honey, please, the nice woman—” and Leah said, “Why don’t you like it?” She remembered the orange carpet and the high windows that ran along most of the front wall that looked out on the town. “I don’t like it because there’s a ghost up there.” Leah looked at him and didn’t say anything and the woman said, “Jesse, honey, what did I tell you about that. Jesse, honey, please,” and Leah asked, “A ghost?” and the boy said, “There’s a ghost of a boy and everyone said they seen him. I haven’t but I am scared to. This one girl said that when she goes up there he looks at her from the hallway and another girl said he tried to touch her hand.” The woman said, “Jesse, that’s it, how many times do I have to tell you—”
Fragments of light cast across the cosmos reached the blue hood of her blue car. When she was in high school, she rode with her parents to the cemetery to see the stone. The stone signaled that they’d given up, finally.
One night, she snuck into the cemetery with a friend and as they walked, they passed the stone and Leah said, “That grave is empty.”
The night cracked. Beyond the trees, a train groaned, its mouth open, slithering between the bent branches.
Leah Shepherd stayed late looking at things on the Internet she shouldn’t. She couldn’t afford the Internet at her apartment, so she would stay late at work sometimes and if she found something she liked, she would carefully make sure that no one was in the building, no matter how late it was and she took care of herself.
And the boy sunk to the bottom of the sea and the slow churn of the ancient ocean turned his bones to dust and turned the dust to stone and over the silent turning of the bottom of the ocean, no light fell and his name was lost among the shards of bone and shell.
The neighborhood boys were sitting on the curb in the bend in the street, setting off Black Cats and throwing rocks at one another. They wrestled on the pavement, howling and laughing, scraping and bruising each other, skin peeling in leaves of pale pink and lakes of red. Blistered fingers and bruises welling. “Fat fuck.” “Fat fuck face. Fag.” Picking teeth, the boys howling.
“Hey,” Leah said, sidling up, “I heard your yard was haunted.” The neighborhood boys craned their lumpy necks at her and lolled their red eyes. Their faces erupted. “Listen, listen, listen.” This little girl drove them crazy. What was she? Like ten or something. And that little baby brother, always crying. But this they listened to because they were very bored. They’d broken already that summer everything that they could get their hands on. And so, summer being what it was, they listened.
“How do you know?”
“I can’t tell you. This girl said.”
“Girl? I thought you liked boys.”
“Fag.”
“Fag’s for a guy that sucks dicks. She’s not a fag. She’s a lezzie.”
“Listen,” undisturbed and eager, unsure what they meant, but not wanting to betray ignorance, she insisted and they began to sway and circle. So they listened. The boys. Howling and howling. And crackling cracks in the curbs. “That there was a girl who lived in your house and she died because this guy she loved died in the war and she killed herself and her parents buried her in the side-yard and put that pond in.” A hole and a hole and a hole. “No, listen, listen, it really happened. The girl told me it was the truth and then swore on her mother’s grave and showed me a bone.” They bellowed cackles at holes.
“Okay, so what? Okay, so show us.”
And Leah led the boys in the gate of the walled garden where it was quiet. A slight breeze slithered. Though summer, bare legs and arms goose-fleshed. Impatient, the boys akimbo and contrapposto. Lulled by the silence there in the garden behind the wall. In that moment, the possibility of a secret seemed real. They listened to her. Flemish bond, ten feet high, discolored by lichens and moss. Brick paths around the green pool of water. In the corners, planters with dry and dying plants. Brown leaves. Fallen petals. Broken stalks. And the pool’s glaucous eye, lidless, idle. What odd portents had it been quietly privy to? The bending branches of old oak and elm trees outside the garden bent curiously over the walls, cut the sunlight into suggestion of light and with dry voice, spoke.