Invisible Boy (10 page)

I cleared my throat. “‘
HURRY UP PLEASE IT’S TIME
—’”

“Eliot!” she crowed, triumphant.

“Title?”

Looking back over her shoulder, she threw me a smirk. “‘Teenage Wasteland’?”

“
Exactemente
, you goddamn genius.”

“We’re going to rule the world, you and I.”

“Of course,” I said. “No question.”

“Say that like you
mean
it.”

I picked at my jacket’s duct tape. “Sure.”

At fifteen I’d discovered this small slice of world in which my natural impulses suddenly marked me not outcast, but leader.
I’d seen my life come shining, from the west down to the east.

I was now three years older, and reluctant as hell to leave this safe haven.

I looked up at her. “I must admit to an increasing sense of panic that I’m doomed to become one of those awful little people
who peaked in high school.”

“Goddamn it, Madeline, we are the
balls
,” said Astrid, kicking me in the thigh. “Now and forever.”

“Look,” I said, “in this place, you and I own any goddamn room we walk into. We can get up onstage and play the entire school
like a fucking violin, conjuring forth any nuance of emotion we want—teachers, classmates, administration—off the cuff, pitch-perfect
every time. Either one of us could snap our fingers and start a riot, or stop one dead in its tracks.”

She nodded. “Absolute power.”

It’s why we were friends. I mean, who the hell else could we have admitted this to?

“Absolutely,” I said, then pointed at the window. “Out there, however, it’s a goddamn crap shoot. Entropy… chaos.”

She crossed her arms, impatient. “Don’t be such a pussy.”

“I’m not a pussy, I’m a realist. Our main ingredient is just charisma, Astrid, the very quintessence of ephemerality. ‘One
shade the more, one ray the less…’ and
hey presto
, it’s gone.”

“Bullshit,” she said. “The only thing that can take it away is allowing yourself to doubt it.”

“Well, there you go, then. I’m dead meat.”

Astrid blew a stream of smoke out the window, then turned back to me. “Take off your jacket.”

“Why?”

“So you can give it to me.”

“I don’t want to fucking give you my jacket. The window’s open and it’s goddamn freezing in here. Besides which you’re already
wearing
a coat.”

“Yeah, but we’re trading.” She stuck the Dunhill in the corner of her mouth and shook off her mother’s sable, holding it out
toward me.

“Fuck off. I like mine better.”

“The hell you do,” she said. “It’s an ugly piece of shit with duct tape all over it.”

“I happen to
enjoy
duct tape.”

“Cocky bitch.”

“Damn right,” I said.

She took another drag and put her coat back on. “You know how many people would’ve traded?”

I shrugged.

“All of them,” she said. “Everyone but you, Madissima. So
fuck
doubt. The only thing you need to do is
arise, go forth, and conquer.
”

“Tennyson. ‘The Passing of Arthur.’ ”

“We are the best fucking minds of our
generation
,” said Astrid. “And I will
never
let you forget it.”

She leaned out the window, blowing a plume of smoke into the frosty air before extending her sable-draped arms in a gesture
of sublime grace, a benediction over those still asleep in the waning darkness.

“Hear this,” she said into the night, “from Astrid and Madeline: We. Are. The.
Balls
.”

She declaimed Eliot’s second-stanza blessing, then—softly—across all the campus below:

“
Good night, ladies, good night, sweet ladies, good night, good night
.”

Then the sun came up, and, four hours later, the pair of us aced Hindley’s bullshit poetry test: ninety-eight apiece.

It was hard, now, to remember the two of us—me and Astrid, as children—but harder still to recall the people she’d believed
we would become.

I
got from Jamaica Station to Prospect faster this time around. Not just because I knew my way, but also because the air felt
a little crisper—there was a nice snap to it, heralding fall. Not enough to make me wish I’d brought a sweater, just adequate
to walk at a brisker pace, freed from summer’s soggy oppression.

Cate was just unloading her car when I turned into the little dead-end lane.

She looked up and smiled. “You’re the first one here.”

The other volunteers arrived moments later—half a dozen mellow-looking older folk wearing sturdy shoes and floppy hats. They
might’ve just returned from an Elderhostel rafting trip down the Colorado: no-nonsense, ready for anything.

Cate jumped right into describing the parameters of today’s

mission.

“All we know so far is that the child was three years old,” she said. “So we’re looking for anything that might help to identify
him or her… clothing especially. Let’s work in pairs this week, and go slowly.”

The Quakers nodded.

“If you uncover
anything
other than plant matter,” she continued, “even if it looks like run-of-the-mill garbage, bring it out to the edges of the
cleared trail and leave it next to the little railings, here.” She pointed to the granite corner-marker of a family plot.

“Didn’t Skwarecki say we shouldn’t touch anything we found?” I asked her, once the Quakers had paired off and moved away.

“Her crew’s spent some time here since,” said Cate, “and she thinks if we do turn anything up, the stuff will most likely
have been moved by animals. She’s coming by later to look over whatever we do find.”

I tied a newly laundered bandanna around my forehead.

“Nice,” she said, handing me a machete, gloves, and a garbage bag. “Makes you look like a pirate.”

“Damn, and here I was going for Hendrix.”

Cate laughed, picking up a set of clippers, and the pair of us headed off into the bushes.

Ninety minutes on, we’d filled ten bags and lined up a five-foot, single-file parade of worthless-looking objets-du-garbage
alongside the central trail.

Cate topped up one more load, then spun the bag closed and retrieved a toothed plastic closure from her shorts pocket. I reached
over to keep the bag’s neck shut with my fist so she didn’t have to cinch it one handed.

She hoisted the load over her shoulder, Santa-style. “Ready for a break?”

“Thought you’d never ask.”

I gathered up our tools, slowly scoping out the hacked weeds underfoot as I walked back toward the trail edge. All I turned
up was a root-beer bottle and a wad of disintegrating newsprint.

There was nothing obviously connected to a child—no little toys, no tiny sweaters with name tags sewn in, no laminated photo-ID
cards reading,
MY NAME IS————, AND SKWARECKI SHOULD ARREST————.

We hadn’t found a thing that required a second thought: bent cans and grimy bottles, the rusty blade of a garden trowel, a
tangle of kite-string with silver Christmas tinsel inexplicably wound in—pointless, all of it.

I placed my latest finds at the back of the sad little line of crap and sighed, shaking my head.

Maybe the Quakers were having better luck, or maybe there hadn’t been anything to find in the first place.

I wiped my hands on the back of my shorts and started trudging up toward the chapel, only slightly cheered by the promise
of ice water.

When I stepped inside the chapel I found Cate deep in discussion with Detective Skwarecki.

Cate was looking at the floor and nodding, cup of water in hand, while Skwarecki gesticulated with what looked like the remaining
half of a Chips Ahoy.

I grabbed some water myself before walking over to join them.

Cate looked up at me. “We may have a bit of good news.”

“The Quakers got lucky?”

“We’ve turned up a missing-persons report that could be relevant,” said Skwarecki. “It was filed last April here in Queens,
by the mother of a three-year-old boy.”

“So, right age,” I said.

“The pathologist thinks the child we found was African American,” added Cate. “Which fits.”

I looked at Skwarecki. “You can tell someone’s ethnicity from their bones?”

“Broadly speaking,” she said. “You get different features distinguishing Caucasoid, Mongoloid, and Africanoid skulls, even
in children.”

“Like what?” I asked.

“The shape of the nose holes, proportions of any nasal bones, whether the zygomatic bones—cheekbones—are curved or square.
Even the chin’s angle means something. Our guy’s pretty confident that this child’s ancestry is African.”

“Is there any way to tell for
sure
whether the woman who filed the report is the mother?” I asked. “Some kind of test?”

Skwarecki shook her head. “Not with skeletal remains. With a blood sample we can at least establish the likelihood of two
individuals being closely related.”

“Sure,” I said. “Blood typing.”

“Serology, or HLA,” she said, “but again, with these remains…”

“What about DNA?” I asked.

I’d read about it in the
Times
, but it was still pretty new.

Skwarecki shook her head. “That takes a
big
sample of blood or saliva or semen from both individuals. And there’s a lot of argument on whether the results really even
stack up forensically.”

“I thought it was foolproof,” I said.

She shrugged. “This guy Castro almost got off last year, killed a pregnant woman and her daughter. They thought they had him
on DNA—blood on his watch—but his lawyer convinced the judge it was a lab screwup, not a match. That’s got everybody’s panties
in a knot over guidelines, chain of evidence.”

I slugged back the last of my water, discouraged.

Cate asked, “So, in a case like this, how
do
you establish someone’s identity? You said there probably wouldn’t be dental records.”

“It’s tough,” said Skwarecki. “Skeletal structure can’t even confirm gender, before puberty.”

I peered into my now-empty water cup for a moment, like I’d find some useful advice printed at the bottom.

Nope
.

I raised my eyes to meet Skwarecki’s. “Did the missing boy have any dental records?”

“No,” she said. “I asked his mother this morning.”

I thought about “our” child’s smashed rib cage and all the other fractures the ME said had never been set so they could heal
properly. If he was the missing boy, it didn’t sound like he’d ever been taken to a doctor, either. Skwarecki had to be thinking
about all of that too.

“So how did this lady manage to lose her son?” I asked. “Were they, like, at the beach? In a department store?”

I wanted to give this woman I’d never seen the benefit of the doubt. Maybe she had no connection to the battered bones we’d
found. Maybe she was honestly grieving the most horrifying kind of loss life could throw at any parent. For a minute I sure
as shit hoped so, even if it meant we’d never know whom the Prospect child belonged to.

But then I thought it would be better to know, better to make sure Skwarecki got who did it.

“She said she was out looking for work,” said Skwarecki.

“Please tell us that this woman didn’t leave her three-year-old home alone,” said Cate.

“She didn’t,” said Skwarecki, shutting her eyes for just a moment and looking very, very tired when she opened them again.
“She told me she’d left him with someone she trusts, absolutely.”

I felt cold, suddenly, like the ice water in my stomach had suddenly leaked out into the veins snaking up through my rib cage,
coursing onward into my lungs and heart.

I looked at Skwarecki. “Boyfriend or stepfather?”

She closed her eyes again, for longer this time. “Boyfriend. A guy named Albert Williams.”

A
nd this Albert Williams boyfriend says what?” I asked. “A toddler ran to the corner deli for cigarettes?”

Cate put her hand on my forearm. “Madeline, we don’t
know
these people are to blame.”

I looked down at my sneakers.

Cate removed her hand. “Detective Skwarecki, what did the man say had happened?”