Elizabeth McCracken - Thunderstruck & Other Stories

Every year he went to the Blackbird place and left a bouquet on the steps. He didn’t want to, he didn’t even know who he was leaving the flowers for, but stopping seemed worse.

On the tenth anniversary of the day he found the boy, the Hi-Lo manager stood on the front walk of the house and looked at it: the same asbestos tile, the tilting gap-toothed porch railing. How could it have been so abandoned for so long? The neighborhood had gentrified. Even beat up, the place was worth a mint.

Then the front door opened.

A man stepped out, late twenties, with a hooked nose, wide shoulders, a tentative smile. He needed a haircut. He brushed his dark curls out of his eyes. “Can I help you?”

“Oh,” said the Hi-Lo manager. He stuck the flowers behind his back, like a shy suitor, and noticed that the yard had been cleaned up, the broken window repaired. “I didn’t realize anyone lived here.”

The man nodded. “Since December. Fixing it up bit by bit. I know it doesn’t look it,” he said apologetically. “We’re focused on the inside. Got to do it before the baby comes. You live on the street?”

The Hi-Lo manager nodded. “It’s a good neighborhood for kids.” Neighborhood because he was about to say house and that wasn’t true: it was a catastrophic house for kids.

“I know,” said the man. “I grew up here.”

“In this neighborhood?”

“In this house.”

Unthinkingly, the Hi-Lo manager brought around the bouquet in its rattling cellophane, and handed it over. To Asher Blackbird. Of course. Everything about him was different but the nose. Asher Blackbird: a grown-up. Married, with a kid on the way. Of course he hadn’t touched the outside of the house. Like the Hi-Lo manager, he hadn’t given up hope. Karen might still come back. All that ruin said, You can always live here, if you want .

“Where have you been?” said the Hi-Lo manager, but Asher Blackbird was turning the flowers between his palms in a puzzled way. “Since, I mean.”

“Oh. Weymouth.”

“Weymouth.”

“Yeah,” said Asher Blackbird in an irritated voice. “I have family there.”

It was easy to be in love if you didn’t declare yourself. It was easy to be a coward. The Hi-Lo manager was lovesick, faint. It had been years since his bodily self had been so pummeled by emotions, knees, heart, joints, stomach. He’d forgotten it was possible. He thought he might go deaf. “Asher,” he said. “You don’t remember me.”

“Have we met?” That was familiar, too, a look on his face both damning and embarrassed.

The Hi-Lo manager said, “I’m the one who saved you.”

The embarrassment evanesced. Asher Blackbird crossed his arms around the bouquet. “Saved?”

“Found.”

“Leonard Aude found me.”

“No,” said the Hi-Lo manager.

“I talk to him all the time. I talked to him last night.”

“No — before him. I’m the one who brought you to him.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“At the Hi-Lo Market. I was the manager. I caught you shoplifting.”

At that Asher Blackbird took a step off the porch stairs. He looked into the face of the Hi-Lo manager, who waited, waited, waited. Of course anyone’s face changed over ten years. Any moment, he’d be recognized.

“I was starving ,” said Asher Blackbird at last.

“Yes, I know.”

“To death . To actual death . And what did you do? You had me arrested . Found? Saved? ” He lifted the bouquet like a weapon, then flung it across the yard and into the street. “Get the fuck away from me before I return the favor.”

Then he was inside, the door closed behind him. A new door, the Hi-Lo manager saw now, with an oval window in it. He stood there until he saw a pale blond woman come to the door and look out.

Asher Blackbird still lives in that house. The yard is tidy, the garbage long hauled away. The neighbors have heard he’s cleaned up the inside, too, painted the walls and sanded the floors and had a new kitchen put in. He’d have to, wouldn’t he? All those cupboards, the chains and locks he tried to pick. Maybe he took a sledgehammer to them.

The neighbors don’t know for sure. They’ve never been invited in, also being people who didn’t save Asher Blackbird.

He and his wife have two children. The little girl sleeps in Asher’s old room, and the little boy in Nathan’s. Which might sound gruesome, but these are old houses. Plenty of people have died in them.

The Hi-Lo manager thinks about knocking on the door again, explaining himself, but he’s waiting till he discovers the rest of the story. It’s all he has to give to Asher Blackbird. So far he’s leafed through descriptions of unidentified remains in thirty-seven states, files illustrated with postmortem photos, or pencil drawings that look inhuman. Extensive dental work. Thin gold ankle bracelet. Peach-colored brassiere, “Lovable” brand. Surgical scar. Blue T-shirt that reads , VIRGINIA IS FOR LOVERS. Tattoo on left buttock: ALMA FOREVER.

Thirteen states to go. He’s saving up money, having blown his budget on a psychic who told him that it was Karen who’d locked the cupboards: she’d left with her pockets full of tiny keys, scraps of paper scrawled with combinations. She’d planned to starve both of them to death. She moved to England; she has a daughter, to whom she is kind. She’s remorseless.

“No,” he told the psychic, “not Karen.” And then, because he didn’t want to hurt her feelings, “You must have looked at someone else’s future.”

Karen Blackbird was never seen in the neighborhood again. She was never seen anywhere again, except in California, where people see her all the time. A man grabs her arm and says, “Your family misses you, go home.” But it isn’t Karen Blackbird, just the actress who played her in the TV movie.

“Sorry, mister,” she says.

Karen Blackbird is a mystery. Karen Blackbird is everywhere. She is alive in South America, on a sofa, dreaming of the pleasures of her son, his thick hair, his emphatic nose, his sense of humor she didn’t always understand. She is dead by car crash, fire, murder, aneurysm, cancer, suicide, train wreck, drowning. She developed amnesia. She prayed for amnesia until she believed she had it. She is two mysteries at once — an open case in Massachusetts and an unidentified set of bones in a cemetery in Indiana, beneath a headstone marked JANE DOE. She is a flier that says, Have you seen me? and another that says, Do you know me? She ascended straight to heaven. She is the franking on every anonymous postcard sent anywhere.

· · ·

Once upon a time there was a mother who had an undersized son. Sometimes even she forgot how old he really was. One night — the last night — she came into his room in her nylon pajamas. She kissed his head through his thick black hair. He was reading a book. She asked him what it was about.

“A woman miser,” he said. “Her son had to get his leg amputated because she wouldn’t pay for a doctor.”

“That’s terrible,” said Karen Blackbird. She wound a lock of his hair around her finger. He swatted at her hand absentmindedly, as though it were an insect. “Well,” she said, “I guess I’ll go. Night, Asher B. Make sure and miss me.”

On her way out she switched off the light.

“Hey!” said Asher Blackbird.

“Whoops,” she said. “Force of habit.” She turned to go. The pajamas were too big for her. You couldn’t see the shape of her body underneath, just the tint of her skin beyond, the rolled nylon seams a shade darker, the way they hung off her. That was what he remembered later. What color were the pajamas? the police asked. What sort of mood was she in? He didn’t know. Her pajamas were too big. He wished she would buy new ones.