while it was still daylight.
She leaned into Stevie's room. He was lying on his bed, facing away from the door. "Stevie, honey, we're going to take a walk. Want to come?"
He mumbled no.
"I'm going to lock the doors. I'll only be gone a few minutes, OK? But if there's a problem, we'll be out in front somewhere, we won't go out of sight, OK?"
He nodded.
Out on the street, she realized for the first time that there weren't any sidewalks. They couldn't even walk on the grass-people planted hedges right down to the street. How completely stupid, how unsafe! Where do children rollerskate? Where do you teach children to walk so they'll be safe? Maybe people in Steuben haven't noticed yet that cars sometimes run over children in the road.
It made her feel trapped again, as if she had found out that they would have to live in a house with no hot water or no indoor toilets. I had no business bringing my children to this uncivilized place. In Utah I could have kept them on the sidewalk and they would have been fine.
In Utah.
Is that what I am? One of those Mormons who think that anything that is different from Utah is wrong? She mentally shook herself and began giving the kids a revised version of the sidewalk lecture. "Stay close to the curb and walk on the lawns wherever you can."
Robbie was bouncing his red ball in the gutter as they walked. It was one of those hollow rubber ones about four inches across, small enough for a small child to handle it but big enough that it wasn't always getting lost.
"I wish you hadn't brought that, Robbie," said DeAnne.
"You told me it was an outside toy, and we're outside."
"Well, if it bounces into the street, you can't chase it, you have to wait for it to roll to one side or the other, all right?"
Robbie nodded hugely-and then kept on nodding, not so much to annoy his mother as because nodding with such exaggerated movement was fun. "Look, Mom, the whole world is going up and down!"
Of course, he had not stopped bouncing the ball, and at this point the inevitable happened- it bounced off his toe and careened down the gutter away from them, rolling into the road and then drifting back to the curb, where it disappeared.
"My ball!" cried Robbie. "It went down that hole!"
Sure enough, the ball had, with unerring aim, found a storm drain and rolled right in. This was the first time DeAnne had really noticed what the drains were like, and again she was appalled. They were huge gaps in the curb, and the gutter sloped sharply down to guide the flow of water into them. The effect was that any object that came anywhere near them would inevitably be sucked inside. And the gap was large enough that a small child could easily fit into the drain. Naturally the people who designed roads without sidewalks would think nothing of creating storm drains that children could fit into.
"Mom, get it out!"
DeAnne sighed and set Elizabeth down on the neighbor's lawn. "Stay right by your sister and don't let her go anywhere, Robbie."
Of course, this meant that Robbie grabbed hold of Elizabeth's arm and Elizabeth began to scream. "I didn't mean tackle her and pin her to the grass, Robbie."
"She was going to go into the street," said Robbie. "She's really stupid, Mom."
"She isn't stupid, Robbie, she's two."
"Did I go in the street when I was two?"
Elizabeth had stopped screaming and was tearing grass out of the neighbor's lawn.
"No, Robbie. You were too scared that a motorcycle might come by. You had this thing about motorcycles.
You used to dream that they were coming to get you and eat you. So you never went into the street because that's where the Motorman was."
In the meantime, DeAnne was down on her hands and knees, trying to see anything at all in the storm drain.
It was too dark.
"I can't see anything," DeAnne said. "I'm sorry, Robbie. I wish you hadn't brought the ball on this walk."
"You mean you aren't going to reach in and hunt for it?"
"Robbie, no, I'm not," said DeAnne. "I can't see in there. Anything could be down in that hole."
Suddenly he looked terrified. "Like what?"
"I meant that I just don't know what's in there and I'm not going to go reaching around for it. For all we know it's eight feet down, or the ball might have already rolled halfway to Hickey's Chapel Road." She gathered up Elizabeth and took Robbie's hand and they walked on toward the street where the Cowpers lived.
"Stevie said this was a bad place."
"Stevie said what?"
"A bad place," said Robbie, enunciating clearly, as if his mother were deaf.
What could Stevie have meant by saying such a thing to Robbie? Did he mean the house? The neighborhood? School? Steuben?
Robbie looked over his shoulder again toward the drain. "Do you think that someday they'll find my ball down there?"
"Since the ball isn't biodegradable, it will probably still be there for the Second Coming."
Robbie was still trying to extract meaning from that last statement when they got to the second corner.
DeAnne stopped there and counted down five houses on the right. The Cowpers' was a one-story brick house with a station wagon in the driveway, with two kids climbing all over the top of it. DeAnne would never let her kids climb on the car. They could fall off. They could damage something. The hood of the wagon was up, and as she watched, she saw Jenny emerge from the hood, where apparently she had been fixing something in the car. Jenny stretched her back, looked around, and saw DeAnne. She waved the grey doughnut-shaped thing she was holding. DeAnne waved back.
Jenny yelled something, but DeAnne couldn't hear her, and it embarrassed her to have somebody yelling to her on the street. So she waved aga in, as if to say yes to whatever Jenny said-which was probably something like, See you at six, or, Nice weather we're having-and then turned and herded her little flock back toward home.
"Kitty!" shouted Elizabeth right in DeAnne's ear. "Kitty! Kitty!"
A jet-black kitten scurried across the road just as a car came speeding by. The cat dodged out of the way; the car made no effort to slow down or stop. DeAnne's fears about the dangers of the street in front of their house were all confirmed.
"Wow," said Robbie. "We almost had a kitty pizza."
Another Step- ism.
The cat headed straight for the storm drain and disappeared.
"Mom!" screamed Robbie. "The yucky hole got him!"
Robbie ran a few dozen steps toward the hole. Then he realized that he was not in the protection of his mother and started to run back. But he could not bring himself to leave the kitty, and so he stood there beating his fists against his hips, demanding that his mother hurry, hurry!
"Honey, the kitty probably goes down into that hole all the time and plays there."
But Robbie wasn't hearing anything she had to say. "The snake got him, Mom! You got to save him, you got to!"
Of course Robbie would imagine a snake down there. Step had taken them to a science museum and they had watched a snake eating a mouse. Robbie couldn't let go of the memory. Snakes had replaced the Motorman.
She knelt by him and put her arm around him to calm him. "Robbie, I promise you, there is no snake down there. Whenever it rains here, the water all rushes down into that drain, and if there were any snakes living down there they would have been washed out to the ocean years ago."
"The yucky hole hooks up to the ocean?" asked Robbie.
"Everything does," said DeAnne.
"Wow, cool."
Robbie took a wide berth around the drain, and as DeAnne stood at the front door, fumbling in her purse to find her keys, he stayed at the curb, looking back toward the yucky hole.