Once she watched the birds spiral in the swelling dusk, swirling above the houses and the street, above the galloping dogs and young people standing in a sulk on the darkening street corners, and then the birds, all with one movement and one mind, flew down into a chimney and disappeared and for a moment, she was delighted.
When Mr. Shepherd was a young boy, he ran naked through the streets with his best friend. Young bones strained at young skin, trying to grow right then and there. They’d painted each other with old house paint and screamed, “We’re Indians. It’s our war paint. We’re at war.” It didn’t matter with what. They whooped and leapt. Cars careened to miss them as they darted along the blacktop. They swung sticks at dogs, sending the poor things spinning and howling.
Mr. Shepherd and his best friend ran home, cutting through backyards, painted bits bobbing, and when they got there, they found that water and soap did nothing to the now sick swirls of mustard brown that covered their thin chests and thin thighs. The housekeeper put them in a wash tub in the yard and poured gasoline over them. She scrubbed and scrubbed with something rough as the nude boys cried.
That evening, bouncing from twin bed to twin bed, Mr. Shepherd’s best friend leapt too far, hit the wall with his nose and fell to the floor. Mr. Shepherd clutched the best friend and began to wail. “Dead, dead, dead!”
The Shepherd house was a plain house on a plain street that was once lined with oak trees, their broad branches arching over the pavement. Only a few still stood, the rest having fallen in one of the hundreds of thunderstorms that rolled through the town, and the few that still stood would themselves one day fall, cut by the power company to avoid an outage or touched by a bolt of lightening or simply told to bow by the voice of the wind.
Porch lights filled with dry brown bodies of innumerable winged insects and slowly bury the light.
In spring, Mrs. Shepherd swept windblown petals. She kept what was hers in order even as disorder crept in on all sides. She wanted it to be neat should her children come home. She called her daughter, left a message, swept windblown petals and thought to ask her husband to clean out the porch light when he got home. The porch light filled. The porch filled with people. Neighbors waiting, bringing food in pans and dishes. Waiting, saying things into the screen. Praying, our prayers, thoughts, thinking, our thoughts, help, we’ll help, dear dear dear, prayer. Food to eat. The porch light dim on the dark porch. The light obscured by the fluttering.
He slipped into the house, having come from the apartment of one of the teachers he worked with, having told his wife that he just needed to go for a walk, having taken longer than he expected, having told the woman that they had to stop, because of his boy, that he needed to be home, that he couldn’t do this, and the woman turned her face from him, understanding, having known, despite what she hoped, that this was the only way it ever could have ended, even before the boy was gone, the man having seeded this brooding worry over his family, and the woman, having felt him pulling away even as he protested that he would find a way to make their relationship work — his word — felt ashamed at the time to doubt him, to feel like he was already trying to get away from what he’d done, and now, hearing him tell her that he couldn’t just leave his wife, she knew that she’d been right all along and suddenly felt how cheap her feelings had been, despite how unbearable they’d seemed at the time.
He left her apartment and slipped into his house and he let the door close, the faintest click and walked up the stairs as quietly as he could and longing to see his son asleep in his bed, to see the light from the hall fall across the boy’s face, and upon pushing the door open, just barely open, his daughter began to scream and scream, a scream ripping air and boiling blood out of nothing and the lights in the room were on and his wife was up out of the bedroom, scared and he held the girl and tried to get her to be quiet.
When he finally got her back to bed, he followed his wife to their bedroom, she crawled into bed in the unbearable closeness of the dark and she curled up on her side of the bed, her curved spine toward him, seeking nothing from him, and he suddenly found that he needed her to wail and scream too, to try to crawl into his chest, but she didn’t and he fell asleep on his back on his side of the bed and he drifted off, he at least felt happy that she was asleep. But she was wide awake, her eyes wide, her eyes wide open to the darkness and trembling and biting her lips in the gloom.
Leah Shepherd knew it was her fault that her brother was gone. At night she would lie in bed and pray to God for Jacob to come home. She prayed for her parents to never learn that it was her fault that he was gone. She was his big sister and she had failed to keep him safe. When in the bathroom she would take the hairbrush, a hard plastic thing that hurt when her mother drug it sharply through her hair, and she would slap her thighs with it until they glittered with pinpricks of pain, but it never seemed to cleanse her of the terrible feeling, the worm that hunted in her mind.
A week after Jacob disappeared, Leah went to her mother and said, “I saw a man looking at Jacob,” and then, “I think that is who took him.” Her mother began to cry and her father yelled at her for not telling earlier and she told them about the man in glasses she’d seen and her father called the police. Leah sat with the detective in the living room and looking down at her hands, tried to describe the man. He had glasses, she was sure. Maybe with wire frames. She didn’t remember. His hair was brown or light brown or blond. He was tall, but stooped and looked small. His face was plain. He didn’t have facial hair, but he hadn’t shaved and she would see the stubble along the lines of his face. He was balding. Light had glistened on the bald places. He was white. Pale. But his face was red. She’d seen him behind the school. At the grocery store. Walking down the street. He’d looked at Jacob. He’d motioned to them once, but they’d run away. She remembered that for sure. Mr. Shepherd kept interrupting to remind Leah of things she’d said the first time that were different and after a few minutes, the detective was noncommittal.
A few months later, the Shepherds went to church for the first time since Jacob’s disappearance. Mr. Shepherd was walking through the hallway after Sunday school and noticed the gentleman who taught one of the Sunday school classes, a balding man with thick glasses. Later, Mr. Shepherd couldn’t really remember much other than seeing the man. He began to scream at the older man, accusing him, despite the fact that the man was nearly eighty and had been teaching his Sunday school class at the time of Jacob’s disappearance, and when Mr. Shepherd hit the man in the face, the children who’d been standing in the classroom watching the argument began to scream and run through the church. “Murder, murder!” they screamed and the Shepherds had to attend a different church after that.
A suit was filed against Mr. Shepherd and Judge Whitehead, still then just Mr. Whitehead, represented him. He was able to, in light of the circumstances, get the charges against Mr. Shepherd dropped and the civil suit settled on terms that were pleasing to everyone. Judge Whitehead shook Mr. Shepherd’s hand, smiled and said, “Anything you all need, just let me know.” He didn’t bill the Shepherds and always made good on his word to them.
Nighttime. The sound of thawing snow trickling through gutters. A newly purchased parcel of land in Bellevue Cemetery, the white seeping, but it would remain empty. Years had passed and Mr. Shepherd finally convinced his wife that it was necessary. For closure. But it would remain empty.