Elizabeth McCracken - Thunderstruck & Other Stories

On the fifth day, he woke up in his cell. His heart was calm. The walls were steady. He was astounded to hear that he’d been arrested for murder.

“Well, maybe I did it,” he said to his lawyer. “I don’t remember much of anything about anything.”

“You didn’t,” said his lawyer, an awkward young woman named Slawson. She was a friend of his sister’s, and she was relieved to believe he was innocent, because he terrified her.

The police had followed every single harebrained lead that Manny Coveno had given them. They’d even checked the former Hollis Hotel, much to the consternation of the new owner. It had all been nonsense. He’d hallucinated every detail.

Manny began to cry. “Jesus,” he said. “Who did I kill?”

“Manny,” said Slawson desperately. She felt her pockets for a handkerchief. “You didn’t kill anyone.”

“Then why am I here? Oh, Jesus, I don’t want to kill anyone!”

“They thought you killed Karen Blackbird, but you didn’t.”

“Blackbird? She Nathan’s wife?”

“Daughter.”

“Nathan Blackbird,” Manny said through his tears. “I always looked up to that guy. How’s he doing?”

On the first anniversary of Karen Blackbird’s disappearance — that is, the anniversary of the day he’d found Asher Blackbird — the Hi-Lo manager attended a support group for families of missing people. It was held at a junior college, in a basement classroom full of atmospheric chalk dust. Twelve people were there, sitting in chairs with paddle desks attached, and they seemed thrilled to see him.

“Who have you lost?” a kindly woman in a Red Sox cap asked.

“My wife,” he answered. True enough, his ex-wife had moved the month before to Indiana, and cut off contact, though that wasn’t who he was thinking of when he looked for a missing-persons support group.

The kindly woman was royalty, the mother of Deanna Manly, the teenager who in the summer of 1959 left for her job as a lifeguard at an MDC pool and vanished entirely. Despite the fact that Deanna had been missing more than twenty years, longer than she hadn’t been missing, her mother wore a T-shirt bearing her daughter’s face, black and white with shining hair, looking like the famous person she became that summer. BRING DEANNA HOME, the shirt said. It was well washed and worn, and the Hi-Lo manager couldn’t tell what level of hope it represented.

Another woman was missing her ex-husband. She was tall and bony, with a nasal, insinuating voice and gnawed fingers. She couldn’t find her ex-in-laws, either, or the ex-friends she and her ex-husband had shared, who might have died of overdoses, or probably had. They weren’t in any phone book. She talked for ten minutes about how bad the marriage had been, how it had damaged her, how every day she couldn’t find him was a new injury.

“It’s the not-knowing that’s terrible,” she said.

“Excuse me,” said the Hi-Lo manager.

She looked at him and stuck the side of her index finger in her mouth.

“Do you even belong here?” he asked her.

She began to nibble that finger.

“Now—” said a middle-aged man in a plaid shirt.

“Hey,” said a woman next to him.

“Oh,” said Deanna Manly’s mother, laying her hand on the Hi-Lo manager’s arm. She looked like her daughter and, despite everything that had happened, decades younger than her age; she looked, in fact, like a police artist’s sketch of what Deanna would look like now, if she were alive, and for a moment the Hi-Lo manager wanted to say: It’s you, Deanna, isn’t it? You’re here, and your mother’s missing . “You can’t question someone else’s pain,” she told him. “Listen. It’s all valid. You can’t — you can’t compare one person’s grief to another’s.”

Of course you could. Losing a fifteen-year-old daughter was worse than losing a deadbeat, drug-addicted ex-husband. He looked at the twelve people in the room: he wanted to interrogate and rank them — the married couple, the older woman with the shapes of curlers in her hair, the guy who looked like a pedophile. The finger-biter’s feelings for her ex-husband were a bonsai tree — they may have started in something real, but she’d tended them so closely and for so long they were now purely decorative. Of course you could compare one person’s grief to another’s! All he wanted was for one single person to compare, to say to him, yes, your sadness is worse than anyone else’s. Your sadness is inestimable.

“Do you want to tell us your story?” asked Deanna Manly’s mother.

Then he remembered: he was a liar, worse than anyone.

So he told a nonsensical story stitched together from the life of Karen Blackbird, according to newspapers and magazines, and the days of his marriage. As he spoke, he believed even more strongly that there was a reason for his longing that had nothing to do with him: it was fate that had kept him from the people he loved. “She made a kind of chocolate cake with no flour,” he said at last, overcome.

“Oh, yeah,” said the woman with the missing ex-husband. “I make that.”

“What does this have to do with you?” said the Hi-Lo manager.

Deanna Manly’s mother put her hand on his arm again. “Those are wonderful, those flourless cakes. You must miss that.”

He was heartbroken to hear that one of the small miracles of his marriage was a perfectly common thing.

It wasn’t fair that only Karen Blackbird got a poster. Everyone wanted one.

MISSING: ONE WORLD WAR II VET, PLAYED SKY MASTERSON IN GUYS AND DOLLS , CAPABLE OF BENCH-PRESSING 220 POUNDS, AFFECTIONATE BUT HOTHEADED. PLEASE CALL IF SEEN.

MISSING: FAVORITE CHILD, SIX FEET TALL, MAY BE TALLER BY NOW.

MISSING, ENDANGERED: FIVE-YEAR-OLD GIRL, ONE LAZY EYE, FASCINATED BY TYPEWRITERS, SMELLS OF CHAPSTICK, LAST SEEN WEARING A HOSPITAL GOWN.

The neighbors wanted stacks of MISSING posters for every person they lost, even themselves. Missing: former self. Distinguishing marks: expectations of fame, ability to demand love. Last seen wearing: hopeful expression, uncomfortable shoes .

“The case is still open,” the police chief would say of Karen Blackbird whenever anyone asked, in a voice that suggested the case was a hole in the ground and the best they could hope for was that someone might fall in. But mostly people didn’t ask. Even her son said she was a woman who could have wandered off. Not on purpose: she would have gone to the corner, leaned against a tree in the late-summer swelter. Then to the next corner, to the bus stop. She might have met someone on the bus who belonged to a church, and followed him. She might have gone all the way to Canada. So what if she’d never done it before: she was the sort of person who thought that disappointing someone was to sin against him, which was how she’d ended up pregnant, why she’d taken in her angry father. She might have acquiesced to any number of people until she was far away from home.

Let her stay lost.

For ten years, the Hi-Lo manager wondered what he would say if he saw Asher Blackbird again. I’m glad you made it. I hope you’re all right. Hey, son, hey, buddy: how’s your life? They might bump into each other walking across the commons, or in a movie theater downtown. Not in the neighborhood, which had been razed and redeveloped, not a single old business left but the liquor store. In place of the Hi-Lo, an upscale pizza place that specialized in thin crusts; in place of the five-and-dime, one that featured deep dish. Everything gone, Mac’s Smoke Shop, the Boston Fish House, the Paramount Movie Theater, George’s Tavern. You couldn’t even call it a neighborhood anymore. It was just office space. The Hi-Lo manager wasn’t the Hi-Lo manager. He had a new job two towns over at a hardware store. He cut keys and sorted washers and was glad for the conversation: people talked in hardware stores, he found out.