Elizabeth McCracken - Thunderstruck & Other Stories

He was put in jail, and nothing could persuade the judge — also a patron, as it happened — to let him out on bail. Reports came down from the neighborhood and on the TV news. Mr. and Mrs. Mason let themselves be interviewed in their kitchen. They swore that it was impossible, that time would prove them right. Ask anyone in the neighborhood: Tom was the best kid. He wasn’t even interested in girls — why would he kill one? The Masons’ hands were woven together on the kitchen tabletop; their fingers were the same pink, their hands a solid knot. Mr. Mason was calm and reasonable. We wondered whether Tommy Mason was taking the fall for him. We remembered the screaming father, bright red with the idea we’d denied Tommy Mason anything; surely he turned that anger on his family.

The papers interviewed neighbors. Such a nice boy. There was something about him. He didn’t have a temper. You know, he was off — he didn’t have what you’d call emotions. He was shy. He was a loner. He was a daydreamer. Sometimes he stared through people’s windows .

Really, there was no prior proof other than vague gossip. He really was, or had been, a good kid, and who knew? The book Juliet had carried was discovered in her living room; it contained only sketches of her children. Maybe Tommy Mason’s parents — and some of the people on the street, who’d already lost one neighbor — were right. Maybe Tommy Mason was innocent and the two men he said he’d seen fleeing the scene were at large, dreaming of their perfect crime. A single perfect crime: the woman was not raped, the house was not robbed, the door had not been tampered with.

There were two bloody fingerprints, Tommy Mason’s, in the cellar. Bloody, but not his blood. The police said that, and we believed them.

Tommy Mason stayed in jail, and people stopped believing he hadn’t done it. Of course he’d done it. TV reporters were no longer interested in his parents’ version of the story. One day, at a community picnic in the park, a Little League coach began his remarks, “With all the troubles in our neighborhood in past months …” and one of Tommy Mason’s sisters was there. She went home to tell Mrs. Mason, who returned and stood at the edge of the baseball field. Mrs. Mason was a small woman to have had such a big son, and she looked smaller, cut into diamonds by the chain link of the backstop. “You’ll be sorry!” she screamed. She curled her fingers into the fence. “You’ll see, my Tommy never did it! You’ll see, you assholes!” Some people wondered whether they should go to her, say something comforting. But she scared them, rattling the backstop. Maybe she’d start climbing up it. People walked the other way. They waited for her to stop.

And perhaps she never will stop. What can you do? Your son, your only boy — whether he killed somebody or not, though he didn’t — is lost to you. He never could have killed anyone. He never even liked horror movies. He was always respectful. He believes in God. And if — though he didn’t! — if he did kill her, that’s one life gone already. Your child used to live in your house, and he has been taken from you, and all you can hope for is that eventually he will be returned. He will already be ruined. The best you can hope for is your ruined boy back in your house.

Tommy Mason — no matter what — has no doubt already been ruined. The newspapers refer to the Tommy Mason Case, not the Suzanne Cunningham Murder. In fifty years, neighborhood kids will choose kickball teams with rhymes about Tommy Mason, not knowing exactly who that was. Tommy Mason had a knife / Tommy Mason took a life / How. Many. Times. Did. He. Stab. YOU.

You better be good, or Tommy Mason will get you.

The children’s librarian was inconsolable. Her mind wandered; her story times made no sense; she forgot the words to “The Wheels on the Bus.” She also forgot to feed the rabbit, who died a week later. The cage had to be covered with cloth so the children wouldn’t peep in. The rabbit lay in state all morning, till someone from the DPW could come and haul it away.

“You know,” said the children’s librarian to the head of cataloging that day, “she told me, ‘I’ve had a good life. If I died tomorrow, I’d have no regrets.’ ” The head of cataloging stared, thinking, That rabbit said no such thing .

“Suzanne,” said the children’s librarian. “I don’t care about the rabbit. I’m talking about Suzanne.”

Which, when the news made its way around the library, struck us as stupid. She had children who grieved for her — isn’t that regret enough? How could sunny Suzanne, sunny Juliet, with her book and her dark hair and her three beloved and loving children, think that if she had to die tomorrow, she wouldn’t mind? We thought perhaps she had lost her life through carelessness and underappraisal. We wouldn’t be so free with our own lives. The difference is, no one has ever wanted ours.

Did he love her? We had encyclopedias of criminals, anthologies of love poems, textbooks on abnormal psychology. All useless. The newspaper articles said that he admitted nothing, including love. “He’s scared,” said his lawyer. We never heard him speak, and maybe we never would.

The bitter head of reference read newspaper articles, sick that he’d ever distrusted Juliet. At night, he had dreams of Suzanne Cunningham standing on the reading-room balcony. He saw himself presenting her things, back issues of magazines, rare tax forms, the best-reviewed books. Anything to win her back.

The bunny was dead. Perhaps the children’s librarian had killed it, but she claimed the rabbit was simply old, and she was the only one who knew anything about rabbits. That day with the bunny beneath its cloth, we thought we should have a funeral behind the library, out by the staff parking. We could turn it into something educational and useful, a children’s program on death. Didn’t parents always bury pets with a small lecture, a made-up eulogy, a somber taps played on a hand held to the mouth like a trumpet? Maybe—

“It’s a fucking rabbit,” said the children’s librarian, in full hearing of Preschool Arts and Crafts. “It doesn’t stand for anything.” Then she sighed. “I’ll miss Jessica,” she said.

Jessica? She must have meant Juliet.

“Jessica,” she said. “Jessica Rabbit.”

Tommy Mason had three sisters who looked like him, all of whom seemed to be about the same age, twins or Irish twins or a combination of both. They were tall and blond and had beautiful skin with rosy, radishy cheeks, red with white beneath. They started coming back to the library with the grandfather’s card. He still needed books.

For a while, they rotated duty. Then one started coming in week after week. She was a thin girl, the oldest Mason kid, someone said. Perhaps twenty years old. Pretty, like Juliet — like Suzanne — but pale, a mirror image. They could have been allegorical pictures in an old painting, or sisters on a soap opera, even though Suzanne Cunningham had been years older. Tommy Mason’s sister carried the grandfather’s library card and never spoke to anyone.

Somehow, we loved her. She seemed brave; she nodded when we nodded at her. We almost forgot who she was, the same way we almost forgot that Janice had ever been a nervous young man with a robot obsession and a faint, endearing mustache. She had become herself.

Ours had been a fine building until the mid-1970s, when it had the misfortune of being introduced to the wrong sort of architect. He knocked down the grand marble staircases that had led from the entrance to the reading room, and sealed off the first floor from the upstairs; he installed coarse brick walls and staircases that were only staircases, only transportation. It was possible for the people who worked in the first-floor departments — children’s, circulation — to go days without seeing their upstairs colleagues.