Elizabeth McCracken - Thunderstruck & Other Stories

Inside the house, Aude’s boat-size heart sunk: he could feel it take on weight and drop. That’s what happened when you got smacked in the face with how people lived. No one was taking care of the boy. He’d be going into Social Services and the mother arrested when she showed back up. The house smelled of garbage and cats, though only one cat was visible, asleep on a ladder-back chair. It lifted its head. A line of drool trailed down from its mouth. Aude hadn’t known cats could drool. It needed a good home, too.

“Hello?” he called.

The whole living-room ceiling looked ready to collapse from damp. Five different wallpaper patterns were peeling off the wall. Scattered around the main room were half-filled cardboard boxes that looked slept on — coming in? going out? — and a sunroom beyond seemed an asylum for insane and injured furniture. In the cave-like kitchen, Aude noticed that every single cabinet was secured with bicycle locks. Some of the chains were thick; others narrow, candy-colored, plastic-wrapped. That, he was certain, was the work of Nathan Blackbird.

Aude climbed the stairs. Later he’d be furious, but for the moment he felt only the deep sorrow that visited him whenever he got someplace later than he should have, when he saw how helpless the world was, eventually, to protect its children. The carpet runner under his feet was as filthy as a garage floor. At the top he turned and walked down the hall. A voice muttered behind a door.

“Hello? Mr. Blackbird,” said Aude.

The voice muttered on.

Aude opened the door and peered in. Compared to the rest of the house, the room was oddly tidy. A window air conditioner chugged away. The dresser beneath was glazed with dust. The head end of the old iron sleigh bed had been raised on books: under one side, the Boston yellow pages and A — Ak of The Book of Knowledge , a premium from the Purity Supreme. Under the other, the white pages and XYZ .

Ordinarily, Nathan Blackbird would have confessed to everything. He was a confessor. That’s why he was known to the police. Before he’d come to live with Karen and Asher, he’d been in a boardinghouse with other old men. Twice a year he’d show up at the station, offering up his wrists and claiming he’d murdered someone. He never had. He wanted incarceration, blame, absolution — what anybody ever wanted — but he was too chickenshit to do anything to earn them. At last , he would have said to Leonard Aude, had he noticed him there, finally you believe me. I’m the Boston Strangler. I’m the San Andreas Fault .

The head of the bed had been raised to improve Nathan Blackbird’s circulation, though his circulation had stopped two days before, when he’d had a heart attack in his sleep. His arms were outside of the bedclothes; his wrists touched at the pulse points as if he were again, as always, ready for handcuffs.

“Aw, shit, Nathan,” said Aude to the corpse. “Mr. Blackbird, dammit.”

The back of the body would be black with pooled blood, a half-swamped boat, but what was visible was pale and so far intact, thanks to the chill of the room. The muttering voice came from a police scanner on the bedside table: Nathan Blackbird liked to listen to reports of all the crimes he didn’t commit. Aude turned it off so he wouldn’t have to hear himself radio in. Then he went to talk to the kid.

Once upon a time a woman disappeared from a dead-end street. Nobody saw her go. She must have stepped out the door of the Victorian she shared with her father and son. She must have walked down the front steps. She was accompanied or unaccompanied, willing or unwilling. She left behind her head-dented pillow like a book on a lectern, on the right page one long hair marking her place for the next time. She left behind the socks that eventually forgot the particular shape of her feet and the shoes that didn’t, the brown leather belt that once described her boyish waist, dozens of silver earrings, the pajamas she’d been wearing when last seen. She left behind her mattress printed with unfollowed instructions for seasonal turning. She left behind her car. She left behind the paperback mystery she’d been reading.

She’d been fired from her job as a lunch lady at the local grade school for allowing the children to give her back rubs. She’d had a boyfriend but they’d broken up. She’d been talking religion again; there was a girl in Hamilton, Ontario, who’d suffered a head injury and was supposedly performing miracles, and Karen Blackbird had been thinking of going. All her life she’d been looking for God. She went to church services, temple, the free brunch at the International Society for Krishna Consciousness. Then she’d come home to sleep on her own doubt-scented sheets. Maybe this time she’d elected to stay among the faithful.

She left behind a basement filled with old photographs, smashed hats, a sprung wicker love seat that resembled the Brooklyn Bridge, a trunk full of bank statements, a canvas bag of orphaned keys, an asthmatic furnace, a noncommittal hot-water heater.

In the upstairs bathroom she left a disheveled toothbrush with a fleshy red rubber point at one end to massage her gums, the round lavender disposable razor that she used on her legs but not under her arms, a black rubber comb bought from a truck-stop vending machine, a blond boar bristle brush darkened with her hair.

She left behind her elderly father and her son. She never should have done that. Her father had a temper and a criminal record. The son was defenseless. He was little for his age, and then he turned sullen, and skinnier, and his skin got ashy, and he seemed barely awake in class, and everyone thought, At last, the poor kid’s going through puberty .

But the truth was only that his grandfather was starving him to death.

A picture of Karen Blackbird appeared on the evening news. It made her inaccurately beautiful. Her hair had been pulled back and tamed along the territory of her skull. She wore dark lipstick. The flash obscured the oddness of her nose. Her paisley dress had smocking across the chest and cutouts over the shoulders. On the nearest shoulder, you could see a few freckles, the kissing kind. Maybe the coincidences of light and angle made her beautiful; maybe it was the affection of the photographer. If you went looking for the woman in the picture, you might never find the real Karen Blackbird. It was Asher Blackbird’s favorite picture of his mother. He had given it to the police. They questioned him for a while, but he knew her only the way you know your mother — the smell of her, the dogleg corridors of her faith, the sloppy scrape of her left foot as she walked. Not scars, not most of her secrets.

In a house like that, how could you tell whether someone had packed for a trip, and for how long?

Had Asher known his grandfather was dead? He slept a lot , said the boy, he got mad when I bothered him . When did the chains go up? After my mother left . But why? Because I was a vegetarian . What does that have to do with anything? My grandfather didn’t believe in vegetarians: he said if I got hungry enough I’d eat what I was given .

Why didn’t you leave?

At that the boy looked confused. “I live there,” he said at last.

Not anymore, you don’t , said the police. Don’t worry, we’ll find you somewhere good. Someplace that’ll feed you .

In the meantime the kid stayed with Leonard Aude and his wife. He gained ten pounds the first two weeks.

On every tree and telephone pole in the neighborhood:

HAVE YOU SEEN KAREN?

NAME: KAREN BLACKBIRD

AGE WHEN LAST SEEN: 42

HEIGHT: 5′2″ (ABOUT)

WEIGHT: 100 LBS (ABOUT)

That was all. It was all the manager of the Hi-Lo Market knew. He’d Xeroxed the photo from the local paper. The library’s photocopier was feeble, and Karen Blackbird looked frozen in a block of ice. He replaced the fliers every week, whether they’d been rained on or not, but forgot to include a number to call. They were like the refrain of some pop song as you passed them on the street, all question and no way to answer.