The aunts never married. They still lived in the house where they raised their niece. Occasionally they sent her photographs, recipes, information on the NRA, or obituaries of people she had known clipped from the local newspaper. When a reporter called Mrs. Mitchell asking questions about Pat and Clyde, she thought back to all the notices her aunts had sent over the years, and said: They were good neighbors and wonderful people. I don’t know who would have done something like this. They will be greatly missed. The truth was that she felt very little at their loss. It was hard to forgive herself for this, so she didn’t try.
She waited patiently through the following day and night for someone to come for her. On Monday morning she woke up and let the dog out. She made a sandwich for Miguel and fit it in his lunchbox beside a thermos of milk. She poured juice into a glass and cereal into a bowl. Then she locked herself in the bathroom and watched her hands shake. She remembered that she had wanted to cover Clyde with something. Falling out of the box, the cereal had sounded crisp and new like water on rocks, but it quickly turned into a soggy mess that stayed with her as she left him, stepped over Pat, and picked up the welcome mat with her gloves. She could still see her husband moving back and forth on top of it. She wanted to make Home Sweet Home disappear, but the longest she could bring herself to touch it was the end of the driveway, and she left it in a garbage can on the street.
She found that she could not say good-bye. Not when her husband pounded on the door to take a shower and not when Miguel asked if he could brush his teeth. She sat on the toilet and listened to them move about the house and leave. Later, she watched a policeman wrap her neighbor’s house in yellow tape. To double it around a tree in the yard he circled the trunk with his arms. It was a brief embrace and she thought, That tree felt nothing.
In the afternoon, when the sun began to slant through the western windows, Lieutenant Sales crossed the Mitchells’ front yard. He was carrying a chewed-up slipper in a bag, jostling the dandelions and sending seeds of white fluff adrift. Mrs. Mitchell saw him coming. She turned the key in the lock, and once she was beyond the bathroom she ran her fingers through her hair, smoothing down the rough spots. The bell rang. The dog barked. She opened the door, and offered him coffee.
Miguel turned nine years old that summer. In the past two years he’d spent with the Mitchells the boy had grown no more than an inch, but with the warm weather that June he’d suddenly sprouted — his legs stretching like brown sugar taffy tight over his new knobby bones, as if the genes of his American father had been lying dormant, biding their time until the right combination of spring breezes and processed food kissed them awake. He began to trip over himself. On his way home from baseball practice that Monday, he caught one of his newly distended feet on a trash can, just outside the line of yellow police tape that closed in Pat and Clyde’s yard. Miguel fell to the sidewalk, smacking his hands against the concrete. The barrel toppled over beside him and out came a welcome mat. Home Sweet Home.
Miguel was not the best student, but he had made friends easily once he hit several home runs in gym class. Norman and Greg Kessler, the most popular kids in school, chose him for their team and for their friend, replacing Little Mike Findleman, who had never been that good in the first place. Norman and Greg helped him with English, defended him against would-be attackers, and told him they had seen his father naked.
The boys claimed they had looked down from the window of their mother’s minivan and seen Mr. Mitchell drive past, stripped bare from the waist down. There was a woman in the car with him and she was leaning over the gearshift. It’s true, said the twins. Miguel made them swear on the Bible, on a stack of Red Sox cards, and finally on their grandfather’s grave, which they did, bikes thrown aside in the grass and sweaty hands pressed on the polished marble of his years. At dinner that night the boy watched his father eating. The angle of his jaw clenched and turned.
Miguel felt a memory push past hot dogs, past English, past Hostess cupcakes and his collection of Spiderman comic books. He was five years old and asked his mother where his father was. She was making coffee — squeezing the grounds through a sieve made out of cloth and wire. He’d collected eggs from their chickens for breakfast. He was holding them in his hands and they were still warm. His mother took one from him. This is the world and we are here, she said, and pointed to the bottom half of the egg. Your father is there. She ran her finger up along the edge and tapped the point with a dark red nail. Then she cracked the yolk in a pan and threw the rest of the egg in the garbage. He retrieved it later and pushed his fingertips back and forth across the slippery inner membrane until the shell came apart into pieces.
Miguel picked up the doormat and shook it to get the dust off. It seemed like something Mrs. Mitchell might be fond of. That morning he had kept watch through the bathroom keyhole. She was out of sight, but he caught the scent of her worry. He knew she needed something.
In Caracas he had gone through the trash regularly, looking for things to play with and at times for something to eat. Ever since he heard about his father being naked on the highway, he had been remembering more about his life there, and even reverting to some of his old habits; as if the non sequitur of his father’s nudity had tenderly shaken him awake. He lay in bed at night and looked into the eyes of the papier-mâché head for guidance. He had two lives now, two countries, and two mothers. Soon he would find another life without his father, and another, when he went away to college, and another life, and another, and another, and another; each of them thin, fragile casings echoing the hum of what had gone before.
The boy walked into the kitchen and found his American mother sitting with a strange man. They both held steaming mugs of coffee. Buster was under the table, waking from his afternoon nap. He saw Miguel and thumped his tail halfheartedly against the floor. The adults turned. Now what have you got there?
Lieutenant Sales took Home Sweet Home in his hands. He felt it was what he had been looking for. The twisted pink skin where the shark had bitten him began to itch. It had been tingling all afternoon. He hadn’t had sensation there for years — the buildup of scar tissue had left him numb — but there was something in the look of the boy and the feel of the rope that held possibility, and excitement rose like fear within him, alongside the memory of closing teeth. Later, in the lab, the welcome mat would reveal tiny spots of Pat’s blood, dog saliva, gunpowder, dead ants, mud, fertilizer, and footprints — but not the impression of Mr. Mitchell’s knees, or the hesitation of his lonely wife on the doorstep, or the hunger of his son in the garbage. All of this had been shaken off.
Lieutenant Sales would leave the Mitchells’ house that afternoon with the same thrill he’d had when the shark passed and he realized his leg was still there. He was exhilarated and then exhausted, as though his life had been drained, and he knew then that he had gone as far as he could go. Home Sweet Home would lead him back to the beginning of a murder he could not solve. There would be no scar, just the sense that he missed something, and the familiar taste of things not done. For now, he reached out with a kind of hope and accepted the welcome mat as a gift.
Mrs. Mitchell put her arm around Miguel’s shoulders and waited for Lieutenant Sales to arrest her. She would continue to wait in the weeks ahead, as suspects were raised and then dismissed and headlines changed and funerals were planned. The possibilities of these moments passed over her like shadows. When they were gone she was left standing chilled.