Elizabeth McCracken - Thunderstruck & Other Stories

He rings the doorbell once, twice. Last year in their old neighborhood he helped Santos sell mints for the Y; you were supposed to ring, count to ten slowly, and ring only once more. He counts to ten but quickly and over and over. To keep himself from ringing too many times, he runs a finger over the engraved sign by the bell. He doesn’t know what a solicitor is or that he’s one. The air of the sun porch is stale. He gulps at it. The front door opens.

“Lady,” he says, “do you wanna buy a rock?”

The rocks in Johnny Mackers’s hand have been lightly rubbed with crayon. He found them a week ago at Revere Beach with his father: at the beach they were washed by the water and looked valuable and ancient. Dry, they turned gray and merely old. The woman who has answered the door is the witch, of course, the dead girl’s mother. He’s come to her first of all the neighbors because she may be able to grant wishes, and Johnny has one. When it’s the right time, he’ll ask: he wishes his brother dead. She’s the cleanest person he’s ever seen and yet not entirely white. Everything about her is blurred, like dirt beneath the surface of a hockey rink.

He would do anything for her. He knows that right away, too. You have to, to get your wish granted.

He has cobwebs in his hair but she doesn’t smell them. She doesn’t smell the cigarette smoke or the fibers off the wall-to-wall carpet or the must that clings to him from the trunk, the usual immigrant disappointments, the rusty cut on his ankle that needs medical attention. What she smells is little-kid sweat touched with sweet bland tomato sauce. Ketchup, canned spaghetti, maybe.

“Come in,” she says. “I’ll find my purse.”

Once he’s inside she doesn’t know what to do. She sits him at the kitchen table and offers him a plate of pebbly brown cookies. He eats one. He would rather something chocolate and store-bought, but his mother likes cookies like this, studded with sesame seeds, and he knows that eating them is a good deed. She hooks a cobweb out of his hair with one finger. He picks up another cookie and rubs the side of his cheek with the back of one wrist.

“You need a bath,” she says.

“OK,” he answers.

Now, Joyce. You can’t just bathe someone else’s child. You can’t invite a strange boy into your house and bring him upstairs and say, “Chop chop. Off with your clothes. Into your bath.”

The bathroom is yellow and pink. Johnny Mackers understands his new obedience as a kind of sanitary bewitching. He is never naked in front of his mother like this: his mother likes to pinch. “Just a little!” she’ll say, and she’ll pinch him on his knee and stomach and everywhere. Santos is right, their mother loves Johnny best. His hatred of kisses and hugs has turned her into a pinching tickler, a sneak thief. “Just a little little!” she’ll say, when she sees any pinch-able part of him.

“Bubbles?” Joyce asks, and he nods. But there’s no bubble bath. Instead she pours the entire bottle of shampoo into the tub.

So it’s true, what the neighborhood kids say. She does kidnap children.

He’s not circumcised. He looks like an Italian sculpture from a dream, a polychrome putto from the corner of a church. The tub is rotten, pink, with a sliding glass door that looks composed of a million thumbprints. Soon the bubbles rise up like shrugging, foamy shoulders, cleft where the water from the faucet pours in.

The almond soap is as cracked as an old tooth. The boy steps over the tub edge. “Careful,” Joyce says, as he puts his hand on the shower door runners. When Missy was born, Joyce was relieved: she loved her husband and son but there was, she thought, something different about a girl. Maybe it was scientific, those as-yet unused girl organs speaking to their authorial organs, transmitting information as though by radio. A strange little boy is easier to love than a strange little girl. The water slicking down his dirty hair reveals the angle and size of his ears. She soaps them and thinks of Missy in the tub, the fine long hair knotted at the nape, the big ears, the crescent shape where they attached to her head. The arch at the base of her skull.

“Your ears are very small,” she says.

“I know,” he answers.

She soaps the shoulder blades that slide beneath the boy’s dark skin and is amazed to see that he’s basically intact, well-fed, maybe even well-loved.

(Of course he is. Even now his mother is calling his name on the next block. Soon she’ll phone the police.)

“What’s your name?” Joyce asks.

He says, “I don’t know.”

“You don’t know your name?”

He shrugs. He looks at his foam-filled hands. Then he says, “Johnny.”

“What’s your last name?”

“Lion,” he says. He drops his face in the bubbly bath water, plunges his head down, and blubs.

When he comes up she says, smiling, “Your clothes are filthy. You’re going to need clean ones. Where were you?”

“Trunk.”

“Of a car ?”

“Trunk like a suitcase,” he answers. He pounds the sliding glass shower door, bored with questioning.

It’s after school. Mrs. Mackers, the owlish pincher, is back on Winter Terrace, asking the neighborhood kids if they’ve seen Johnny, the little boy, the little boy on the trike. She doesn’t know where Santos is, either, but Santos is old enough to take care of himself (though she’s wrong in thinking this — Santos even now is in terrible trouble, Santos, miles away, is calling for her). The last teenage boy she asks is so freckled she feels sorry for him, a pause in her panic.

No, Gerry Goodby hasn’t seen a little kid.

He’s looking up at Missy’s window; he always looks at it when he comes home, shouldering his lacrosse stick like a rifle. He didn’t remember to pull down the blinds all the way before closing the room up and it always bothers him. You can see the edge of the dresser that overlaps the window frame, a darkened rainbow sticker, and just the snout-end of an enormous rocking horse named Blaze who used to say six different sentences when you pulled a cord in his neck. Blaze had been Gerry’s horse first. It seemed unfair he had to disappear like that. Someday, Gerry knows, they’ll have to sell the house, and the new owners will find the tomb of a six-year-old girl pharaoh. It’s as though they’ve walled in Missy instead of burying her in the cemetery, as though (as in a ghost story) he will someday see her face looking back out at him, mouthing, Why? Gerry, in his head, always answers, It’s not your fault, you didn’t know how dangerous you were .

But this time he sees something appearing, then disappearing, then appearing again: the rocking horse showing its profile, one dark carved eye over and over.

Not only that: the front door is open.

The barrier cloth has been slit from top to bottom. Beyond it is the old door with the brassy doorknob still bright from all its years in the dark. Beyond the door is Missy’s room.

“Hello,” says his mother. She’s sitting on the bed, smoothing a pair of light yellow overalls on her lap. There’s a whole outfit set out next to her: the Lollipop brand underpants Missy had once written a song about, a navy turtleneck, an undershirt with a tiny rosebud at the sternum. The dust is everywhere in the room. It’s a strange sort of dust, soot and old house, nothing human. Even so, compared to the rest of the house, this room is Oz. The comforter is pink gingham. The walls are pink with darker pink trim. Dolls of all nations lie along one wall, as though rubble from an earthquake has just been lifted from them. The 50–50 bedclothes are abrasive just to look at. He inhales. Nothing of Missy’s fruit-flavored scent is left.

But his mother doesn’t seem to notice. She has — he’s heard this expression but never seen it — roses in her cheeks. “Look,” she says, and points.