Sarah Sparrow - A Guide for Murdered Children

“Since—?”

“ You know.”

“By my own hand? A few hours ago.”

“You are such a slut.”

“Actually, I meant a few minutes ago. In the guest bathroom.”

In paroxysms again.

At this same moment, Ronnie Rummer stands by the grill in a spattered GOTTA PROBLEM WITH THIS? cook’s apron, tiny American flags tucked over both ears. Next to him is the action-figure history teacher Roy Eakins, oblivious to the tipsy, prying eyes apprising him from the kitchen window. Ronnie goads the meat until it sizzles, then gyrates triumphantly, embarrassing his son, Troy, but delighting daughter Maya, provoking her to buffoon-salacious imitation. The nine-year-old is a freckle-faced Alfred E. Neuman doppelgänger; his younger sister’s hair a fiery red torch, a geyser, a local attraction that Elaine maintains with religious devotion.

Through it all, Roy’s son stands apart, examining his own man-sized hands—deep in the solving of their mysteries.

As if called by a sovereign voice, Troy rushes off and Maya follows like one attached by rope. Grundy looks up and moves toward them before Roy commands, “ Stay. You stay with us.”

Penny and Elaine exit the house bearing full glasses of wine. Enter Detective Willow Wylde, in from New York to surprise his daughter with a puppy on her Sweet Sixteenth. (Word is, she knows he’s at the barbecue and is dodging him. She’s been dodging the world for a few years.) Willow has a rep as a rake and a bad boy and likes that the girls have had a little too much. He’s already been working Penny, who he always thought had a thing for him back in the day when he was a policeman in the Falls; his upgrade to the Manhattan big leagues can only have helped his case. Willow’s research in the field had proven that certain women, particularly divorcées, couldn’t resist the glamour of a big-city cop, particularly the glamour of a New York City narcotics cop. He and his NYPD drinking buddies liked to call it the job description that launched a thousand blow jobs. When they said their prayers, they thanked the TV procedurals for that.

The Rummers had invited Owen Caplan, but he politely declined to attend. Willow and Owen once were patrol-car partners, the local Starsky and Hutch, before the shit blew up between them in so many ways, and in the years since he’d left for the Big Apple, Owen had been appointed by the city to be chief of the five-man Andy of Mayberry department. (He’d always been ambitious, and Willow thought, Good on the little fella .) Adelaide, Willow’s ex, had also been invited but politely declined. Hmmmm. Pace, Willow’s child with Adelaide, was invited too, but MIA — to be fair, his daughter hadn’t actually RSVP’d (not being a student of Emily Post) and Willow still hoped she’d turn up. If Pace didn’t care to see him (it seemed like half the world didn’t care to see him), she might just give a shit about seeing the $650 puppy he brought. If Dad had been unreliable in everything else, he’d at least been consistent with guilt-induced, over-expensive birthday presents.

Like most of the neighborhood men, Ronnie Rummer had done a lot of thinking about Penny and what it’d be like to have her. She had a wild streak that she didn’t try too hard to conceal, and they’d always had one of those easy, flirty things going on, or at least he thought they did. He’d have to watch himself a little because the low stone fence of Penny’s marriage was now gone. His own fence was tall and strong, but like any suburban Superman he could see himself leaping over it in a single bound.

The fire in the grill goes out.

Ronnie squirts the can — no lighter fluid.

He turns his burger-flipping chores over to Dubya and goes to find the kids.

Troy’s in the meadow behind the house with a sparkler. On the front of his T-shirt it says BE EXCELLENT TO EACH OTHER. On the back, AND PARTY ON, DUDES.

“Hey! What’d I tell you about sparklers, Troy? You wait until tonight .” Troy casts his eyes to the ground while his little sister cavorts to unheard songs. “I need you to go to Ebenezer’s for lighter fluid.”

“Can I take Maya?”

“Okay. Ride on over but don’t be long.”

The smile returns to his son’s face. Reinvigorated by a mature, useful task, he looks at the sparkler and then looks at his dad—what to do? “Put it in the ground ,” says Ronnie. He buries it and, with that task done, is ignited anew. (Nine-year-old boys are all about ignition.)

The siblings run off, the invisible rope between them taut.

What was it that caused Willow to shiver when Ronnie left the dormant grill? No — more than that, more a sickening familiar vortex than a shiver — a fluish, dizzying, feverish gust that raced his pulse and seemed to make gooseflesh of his very soul, nearly knocking him off his feet.

Standing at the barbecue, a sense-memory déjà vu turned his stomach… and with it came that blueness again, age-old, without origin, without earthliness. (In his mind, he always called it the Blue Death.) Nana used to nurse him through what she called “the fits,” but Willow’s mother didn’t like the term, hated it, countering that it was merely “the ague” — that odd, antiquated word — no, Mom didn’t like the spooky way Nana fussed over her boy’s ague at all. His grandmother would then submit to her daughter before faking her out in order to comfort him, sneaking into his room and whispering in his hot pink ear through the blue delirium. He never understood or recalled what she was saying, so dreamlike, yet still it soothed, but the nature of the elixir remained forever tongue-tied and unknown. Nana — how he loved his Nana! — was for sure some kind of Old World witch. One time when “the fits” happened, Willow heard barking in his head; Palomar, their runaway German shepherd, was in the midst of dying crosstown, impaled on a fence by three neighborhood sado-punks. The Blue Death… The Wyldes hadn’t even known the dog had escaped the house.

Guests begin arriving with Tupperwares of egg salad and coleslaw, medleys of macaroni and fruit salad, potpourris of this and that from family recipes. And desserts: brownies and apple pie, peach cobbler and s’mores, banana pudding and Oreo creations, the whole Great American Sugar Songbook.

Maya pedals furiously, that rope between she and her brother too tight then too loose, the wild garden of hair on her head burnt-orange in the midday sun. Troy exults in his superior strength and locomotion, leaving her in the dust. (Nine-year-old boys are all about lording it over little sisters.) Her unicorn is in the flowery bicycle basket—she made a daybed for it with a silk pillow Mom had given her. When she isn’t looking toward Troy, she glances at the sleeping creature with the devotion of a rehearsing mother.

Troy races to Ebenezer’s amid the distant ambient sounds, some near but mostly far away, of Roman candles and firework rat-a-tats. Apparently not everyone got Dad’s memo to wait until dark. The pulse of his heart accelerates at the hijinks of the taboo breakers but he isn’t envious, only becoming more excited about tonight’s celebrations.

A block from Ebenezer’s, he turns to look back — sister gone.

She isn’t dead, not yet, but will never speak again or have recordable conscious thought. Maya’s body has a week left of breathing and making all manner of unrecognizable sounds, an animal’s involuntary reaction to the work being done. Troy will soon be in water, reunited (in a sense) with his sister-princess, looking on with supportive, sightless eyes like a figurine propped on the balcony of a decayed castle in a forgotten aquarium.