“Who are you?”
“I’m Ned Halverson.” He paused, apparently expecting some reaction, then exhaled and lowered his hands. “Hilary’s uncle.”
Anne frowned. Hilary’s last name was Benson; she’d never mentioned an uncle. “Where is she?”
The man sighed. “Do you mind if I sit down for a second?” he said. “Those stairs just about kill me, in this heat.”
He moved to the couch, where she noticed a small brown suitcase on the floor and a folded set of sheets on the cushions. He sat with his hands on his knees, back perfectly straight, a military pose. Then, reaching into his rear pocket, he pulled out a handkerchief and wiped off his forehead.
“Hilary told me about everything you’ve done for her,” he said. “I mean to say, she didn’t. She always makes out like she did it all herself, but it’s clear to me that you’ve done a lot. Letting her stay here. And then Alan.” From the way he said his name, it was obvious there was no love lost between them.
“Where are they?” Anne said.
Halverson raised an eyebrow. “She was supposed to leave you a note,” he said, “but she didn’t, did she? That girl was never any too good at following instructions.”
Anne glanced around. “I just got here,” she said.
Halverson seemed perfectly at ease on the couch and uninterested in clearing up her confusion. She walked over to the kitchen counter, then glanced into the bedroom, which was unusually tidy and free of clutter. The bed was made. Somehow this seemed more ominous than anything else.
Back in the living room, she said, “No note. Why don’t you tell me what’s going on? Did you make Hilary go home?”
“Well, now, of course I did,” he said. “My wife took them straight away, and I’m here for the rest of their things. I’m sure you understand. We been worried sick to death. She’s just a kid herself, you know. We can take care of her, and once the baby comes …” He spread his hands out wide. With his ramrod posture and slow, deliberate delivery, the gesture reminded her of the old men who practiced tai chi in Tompkins Square Park. Anne couldn’t quite grasp what he was saying but felt irritated, then enraged, that circumstances had changed without her consent. There must have been plenty of drama — Hilary never would have left willingly — and she had missed all of it. If she had been here, would things have been different? Would they have fought harder to stay?
“You know my son means well,” he said. “I mean, I think he does, anyway, but it’s hard to say what’s going on in that pinhead of his. Sometimes I just lose patience. It’s like he’s got no common sense at all. And the worst part is that he can’t see around his own ideas, he’s built them up so big. He’s bullheaded. My wife says I am too and that’s why we don’t get along. I tell her, that’s just what you say so we can keep loving him when he acts like an idiot.”
He seemed prepared to ramble on like this indefinitely. Anne sat down on the chest in front of the couch. “What are you talking about?”
Halverson rested his palms on his knees again. “My son Alan, of course.”
It turned out, as she should have guessed, that everything Hilary had said about her family was a lie. Halverson told her the whole story without ever relaxing his military bearing, and she believed him not because he seemed more credible but because she knew Hilary and had once been just like her, and therefore understood how fluidly lies come, how easily they spill from you once you get into the habit of telling them.
There was no abuse at home, according to Halverson, and Hilary, his sister’s daughter, had been a good kid. Her parents ran a small farm, and she grew up tending to the cows and the chickens, more at ease with them, it seemed, than she was with people. But both her parents were killed in a car accident when she was ten, and she moved in with Halverson and his family.
“It was weird how it didn’t seem to affect her,” he said. “She didn’t cry, or even talk about them much. We had a counselor over in Hawkington that we were taking her to for a while, but she seemed to be okay. There’s something about her that’s just … steely, you know what I mean?”
Anne nodded. Unconsciously she had mirrored Halverson’s pose, sitting across from him on the chest with her hands on her knees. Noticing this, she shifted her weight and crossed her legs.
Halverson didn’t need much encouragement to keep talking. He seemed to think it was his duty; in exchange for having housed Hilary, Anne would get this story from him. “She lived with us till she was around fourteen, then things went all haywire. I guess it’s the hormones that set in around that age. I don’t know. The kids in our town are like wildcats. One minute they’re normal and the next thing you know, you can’t contain them. Out of control.”
He sighed. This, she could tell, was the hard part of the story. “What happened?” she said.
“Oh.” Halverson made another slow, vague wave, as if she could surmise from this what he was going to tell her. When Anne said nothing, he sighed again. Still she said nothing. She could wait him out, she knew, because most men — most people — can’t stand silence. Less than a minute passed before he broke down, speaking faster than he had before.
“Comes to pass that my wife gets home one day and finds Alan and Hilary together in her little pink bedroom. The stuffed animals flung around. Bunnies on the floor. It horrified her. She was so upset by it that she threw them all away. I think she just couldn’t stand the idea, you know, of those little-girl things being in the room with Hilary and Alan. You understand it wasn’t just that they were cousins, or so young. It was both things together. And somehow — sure, they were still children — there was something about it that wasn’t innocent. You know?”
Anne nodded, knowing exactly what he meant. Hilary and Alan, in her experience, were clueless and vague and not quite with it, but she would never have described them as innocent. They were too carnal. Too tough.
“I wanted to take the kids over to Hawkington, back to that counselor, to sort things out. They sure didn’t want to, and my wife was so upset she couldn’t even talk about it. The stuffed-animals thing made Hilary so mad she ran away. And she’s kept running away, off and on, ever since.” He kept looking over at the kitchen counter, avoiding her eyes, which she took to be a show of emotion until he cleared his throat and said, “I wouldn’t mind some water.”
She guessed this was where Hilary had learned her manners. But as she got him a glass, she thought of a question she wanted to ask. It wasn’t about Alan; she could picture his side of things pretty clearly, and anyway he’d never interested her that much. She looked at Halverson and said, “What can you tell me about Joshua?”
The silence following this question grew so long that it was as if he might not have heard it. He just sat there staring into space, the glass, now empty, balanced on his right knee. He had Hilary’s same intransigence, or she had his.
“Joshua,” he finally said.
Anne was getting annoyed. “She writes to him,” she prompted. “Postcards. She gives them to women at train stations and asks them to mail them.”
Again he was mute. To stop herself from drumming her fingers, she looked down and clasped her hands together. Glancing back up, she saw tears shimmering in his eyes. “What?” she said.
Halverson swallowed, his jaw clenched. “He was in the car too. Six he was, at the time. I guess he’d be around twelve now. I didn’t know that, about the postcards. Is that true? It breaks my heart.”
She believed him.
After a while, he composed himself and went into the bedroom to pack up Hilary’s and Alan’s belongings. Anne sat in the living room, not sure what to do.