‘What are you supposed to be?’ I said to Kelly, because suddenly I was uncomfortable looking at Jenny.
Kelly flung her arm out to point and did a quick, ridiculous shoulder-wriggle. It was nothing like her typical movements; I’d seen her dance. ‘Vanilla Ice,’ she said, and spun around.
‘Let’s go,’ Peter said, stepping past me and his father and tossing my mac on the floor so he could get to his slicker.
‘You want candy, Andy?’ Jenny teased, her voice sing-songy.
‘Ho-ho?’ I asked. I was talking, I suppose, to Mr Andersz, who was still staring at his hand on the mirror. I didn’t want him to be in the way. It made me nervous for him.
The word ‘ho-ho’ seemed to rouse him, though. He shoved himself free of the wall, shook his head as if awakening, and said, ‘Just a minute,’ very quietly.
Peter opened the front door, letting in the wind, and Mr Andersz pushed it closed, not hard. But he leaned against it, and the Mack sisters stopped with their coats half on. Peter just stood beside him, his black hair sharp and pointy on his forehead like the tips of a spiked fence. But he looked more curious than angry.
Mr Andersz lifted a hand to his eyes, squeezed them shut, opened them. Then he said, ‘Turn out your pockets.’
Still, Peter’s face registered nothing. He didn’t respond to his father or glance at us. Neither Kelly nor I moved, either. Beside me, Jenny took a long, slow breath, as though she was clipping a wire on a bomb, and then she said, ‘Here, Mr A,’ and she pulled the pockets of her grey coat inside out, revealing two sticks of Dentyne, two cigarettes, a ring of keys with a Seahawks whistle dangling amongst them, and a ticket stub. I couldn’t see what from.
‘Thank you, Jenny,’ Mr Andersz said, but he didn’t take the cigarettes, hardly even looked at her. He watched his son.
Very slowly, after a long time, Peter smiled. ‘Look at you,’ he said. ‘Being daddy.’ He pulled out the liner of his coat pockets. There was nothing in them at all.
‘Pants,’ said Mr Andersz.
‘What do you think you’re looking for, Big Bad Daddy?’ Peter asked. ‘What do you think you’re going to find?’
‘Pants,’ Mr Andersz said.
‘And what will you do, do you think, if you find it?’ But he turned out his pants pockets. There was nothing in those, either, not even keys or money.
For the first time since Peter had come upstairs, Mr Andersz looked at the rest of us, and I shuddered. His face looked the same way my mother’s had when I’d left the house: a little scared, but mostly sad. Permanently, stupidly sad.
‘I want to tell you something,’ he said. If he spoke like this in the classroom, I thought, no one would wedge unbent paperclips in his chalkboard erasers anymore. ‘I won’t have it. There will be no windows broken. There will be no little children terrorized—’
‘That wasn’t our fault,’ said Jenny, and she was right, in a way. We hadn’t known anyone was hiding in those bushes when we toilet-papered them, and Peter had meant to light his cigarette, not the roll of toilet paper.
‘Nothing lit on fire. No one bullied or hurt. I won’t have it, because it’s beneath you, do you understand? You’re the smartest children I know.’ Abruptly, Mr Andersz’s hands flashed out and grabbed his son’s shoulders. ‘Do you hear me? You’re the smartest child I’ve ever seen.’
For a second, they just stood there, Mr Andersz clutching Peter’s shoulders as though trying to steer a runaway truck, Peter completely blank.
Then, very slowly, Peter smiled. ‘Thanks, Dad,’ he said.
‘Please,’ Mr Andersz said, and Peter opened his mouth, and we all cringed.
But what he said was, ‘Okay,’ and he slipped past his father and out the door. I looked at the Mack sisters. Together, we watched Mr Andersz in the doorway with his head tilted forward on his neck and his hands tight at his sides, like a diver at the Olympics getting ready for a backflip. He never moved, though, and eventually, we followed Peter out. I was last, and I thought I felt Mr Andersz’s hand on my back as I went by, but I wasn’t sure, and when I glanced around, he was still just standing there, and the door swung shut.
I’d been inside the Andersz’s house fifteen minutes, maybe less, but the wind had whipped the late afternoon light over the horizon, and the Mountain had faded from red to grey-black, motionless now on the surface of the water like an oil tanker, one of those massive, passing ships on which no people were visible, ever. I never liked my neighborhood, but I hated it after sundown, the city gone, the Sound indistinguishable from the black, starless sky, no one walking. It was like we were someone’s toy set that had been closed up in its box and snapped shut for the night.
‘Where are we going?’ Kelly Mack said, her voice sharp, fed up. She’d been sick of us, lately. Sick of Peter.
‘Yeah,’ I said, rousing myself. I didn’t want to soap car windows or throw rocks at street signs or put on rubber masks and scare trick-or-treaters, exactly, but those were the things we did. And we had no supplies.
Peter closed his eyes, leaned his head back, took a deep breath of the rushing air and held it. He looked almost peaceful. I couldn’t remember seeing him that way. It was startling. Then he stuck one trembling arm out in front of him, pointed at me, and his eyes sprung open.
‘Do you know. ’ he said, his voice deep, accented, a perfect imitation, ‘what that bell does?’
I clapped my hands. ‘That bell. ’ 1 said, in the closest I could get to the same voice, and the Mack sisters stared at us, baffled, which made me grin even harder, ‘raises the dead.’
‘What are you babbling about?’ said Kelly to Peter, but Jenny was looking at me, seawater eyes curious and strange.
‘You know Mr Paars?’ I asked her.
But of course she didn’t. The Macks had moved here less than a year and a half ago, and I hadn’t seen Mr Paars, I realized, in considerably longer. Not since the night of the bell, in fact. I looked at Peter. His grin was as wide as mine felt. He nodded at me. We’d been friends a long time, I realized. Almost half my life.
Of course, I didn’t say that. ‘A long time ago,’ I told the Macks, feeling like a longshoreman, a lighthouse keeper, someone with stories who lived by the sea, ‘there was this man. An old, white-haired-man. He ate lutefisk — it’s fish, it smells awful, I don’t really know what it is — and stalked around the neighborhood, scaring everybody.’
‘He had this cane,’ Peter said, and I waited for him to go on, join me in the telling, but he didn’t.
‘All black,’ I said. ‘Kind of scaly. Ribbed, or something. It didn’t look like a cane. And it had this silver dog’s head on it, with fangs. A doberman—’
‘Anyway. ’ said Kelly Mack, though Jenny seemed to be enjoying listening.
‘He used to bop people with it. Kids. Homeless people. Whoever got in his way. He stomped around 15th Street, terrorizing everyone. Two years ago, on the first Halloween we were allowed out alone, right about this time of night, Peter and I spotted him coming out of the hardware store. It’s not there anymore, it’s that empty space next to the place where the movie theater used to be. Anyway, we saw him there, and we followed him home.’
Peter waved us out of his yard, toward the locks. Again, I waited, but when he glanced at me, the grin was gone. His face was normal, neutral, maybe, and he didn’t say anything.