The Shadow Year (4 page)

I sat at the desk in my room, the open notebook in front of me, a pencil in my hand, and stared out the window, trying to recall all the details surrounding the prowler. There was the old ladder and the footprint, sitting, like a dirt layer cake, in a pink hatbox in the shed. I could have started with Mrs. Conrad and her ass, or just her scream.

But, in fact, I didn't know where to start. Although from the time I was six, I had always loved writing and reading, I didn't feel much like recording evidence. Then, through the open window, I heard the Farleys' back screen door groan open and slam shut. I stood and looked out to see what was going on. It was Mr. Farley, carrying a highball in one hand and a towel in the other. He was dressed in his swimming trunks, his body soft and yellow-white. His head seemed too heavy for the muscles of his neck, and it drooped forward, making him look as if he were searching for something he'd dropped in the grass.

The Farleys' pool was a child's aboveground model, larger than the kind you blow up but no bigger than three feet deep and no wider than eight across. Mr. Farley set his drink down on the picnic table, draped his towel over the thickest branch of the cherry tree, shuffled out of his sandals, and stepped gingerly over the side into the glassy water.

He trolled the surface, inspecting every inch for beetles and
bees that might have escaped the draw of the noisy little filter that ran constantly. He fetched up blackened cherry leaves from the bottom with his toes and tossed them into the yard. Only then did he sit, cautiously, the liquid rising to accommodate his paunch, his sagging chest and rounded shoulders, until his head bobbed on the surface. Gradually he dipped forward, bringing his legs underneath him. His arms stretched out at his sides, his legs straightened behind him, his back broke the surface, and his face slipped beneath the water, leaving one bright bubble behind in its place.

He floated there for a moment, his body stretched tautly across the center of the pool, and there came an instant when the rigid raft of his form gave way to death. His arms sank slowly, and his body curled like a piece of dough in a deep fryer. Mr. Farley really could do a mean dead man's float. I wondered if he left his eyes open, letting them burn with chlorine, or if he closed them in order to dream more deeply into himself.

I sat back down at my desk, and instead of writing about the investigation I wrote about Mr. Farley. After describing him getting into the pool and fake-drowning, I recorded two other incidents I remembered. The first had to do with his older son, Gregory, who had since moved away from home. When the boy was younger, Farley, an engineer who made tools for flights into outer space, tried to get his son interested in astronomy and science. Instead the kid wanted to be an artist. Mr. Farley didn't approve. Before Gregory left home for good, he made a giant egg out of plaster of paris and set it up in the middle of the garden in the backyard. It sat there through months of wind and rain and sun and eventually turned green. On the day after the astronauts walked on the moon, Mr. Farley sledgehammered the thing into oblivion.

The second incident happened one day when my father and I were raking leaves on the front lawn. Suddenly the Farleys' front door opened and there he stood, weaving slightly, high
ball in hand. My father and I both stopped raking. Mr. Farley started down the steps tentatively, and with each step his legs buckled a little more until he stumbled forward, his knees landing on the lawn. He remained kneeling for an instant and then tipped forward, falling face-first onto the ground. Throughout all this, and even when he lay flat, he held his drink up above his head like a man trying to keep a pistol dry while crossing a river. I noticed that not a drop was spilled, as did my father, who looked over at me and whispered, “Nice touch.”

I put the pencil down and closed the notebook with a feeling of accomplishment. Jim had Botch Town, Mary had her imaginary world, my mother had her wine, my father his jobs, Nan the cards, and Pop his mandolin. Instead of writing about the footprint or Mrs. Conrad's scream, I planned to fill the notebook with the lives of my neighbors, creating a Botch Town of my own between two covers.

When I went down into the cellar to tell Jim about my decision, I found him holding the plastic soldier up to the lightbulb. Big white circles had been painted over his eyes, and his hands, which had once held the machine gun and grenade, had been chopped off and replaced with straight pins that jutted dangerously, points out, from the stubs of his arms.

“Watch this: glow-in-the-dark paint,” said Jim, standing the figure upright on the board between our house and the Conrads'. He then leaned way out over Botch Town and pulled the lightbulb string. The cellar went dark.

“The eyes,” he said, and I looked down to see the twin circles on the soldier's face glowing in the shadows of the handmade town. The sight of him there, like something from a nightmare, gave me a chill.

Jim stood quietly, admiring his creation, and I told him what I had decided to do with the notebook. I thought he would be mad at me for not following his orders.

“Good work,” he said. “Everyone is a suspect.”

Saturday afternoon I sat with Mary back amid the forsythias and read to her the descriptions of the people I had written about in my notebook so far. That morning I'd gone out on my bike early, scouring the neighborhood for likely suspects to turn into words, and had caught sight of Mrs. Harrington, whom I had nicknamed “the Colossus” for her mesmerizing girth, and Mitchell Erikson, a kid who shared my birthday and who, for every school assembly and holiday party, played “Lady of Spain” on his accordion.

I doled them out to Mary, starting with Mr. Farley, reading in the same rapid whisper I used when relaying a chapter of a Perno Shell adventure. Mary was a good audience. She sat still, only nodding occasionally as she did when she sat with Pop while he figured the horses. Each nod told me that she had taken in and understood the information up to that point. She was not obviously saddened when Mrs. Harrington's diminutive potato-head husband died, nor did she laugh at my description of Mitchell's smile when bowing to scanty applause. Her nod told me she was tabulating the results of my effort, though, and that was all I needed.

When I was done and had closed the notebook, she sat for a moment in silence. Finally she looked at me and said, “I'll take Mrs. Harrington to place.”

Our mother called us in then. Since it was the weekend, my father had just gotten home from work, and it was time for us to visit our aunt Laura. We piled into the white Biscayne, Jim and me in the back with Mary between us. My father drove with the window open, his elbow leaning out in the sun, a cigarette going between his fingers. I hadn't seen him all week, and he looked tired. Adjusting the rearview mirror, he peered back at us and smiled. “All aboard,” he said.

St. Anselm's was somewhere on the North Shore of Long Island, nearly an hour's drive from our house. The ride was usually solemn, but my father sometimes played the radio for us, or if he was in a good mood, he'd tell us a story about when he was a boy. Our favorites were about the ancient, swaybacked plow horse, Pegasus, dirty white and ploddingly dangerous, that he and his brother kept as kids in Amityville.

This hospital was not a single modern building, smelling vaguely of Lysol and piss. St. Anselm's was like a small town of stone castles set amid the woods, a fairy-tale place of giant granite steps, oaken doors, stained glass, and dim, winding corridors that echoed in their emptiness. There was a spot set amid a thicket of poplars where a curved concrete bench lay before a fountain whose statuary was a pelican piercing its own chest with its beak. Water geysered forth from the wound. And the oddest thing of all was that everyone there, save the patients and old, bent Dr. Hasbith of the bushy white sideburns, was a nun.

I'd never seen so many nuns before, all of them dressed in their flowing black robes and tight headgear. If one of them came toward you from out of the cool shadows and your eyes weren't yet adjusted to the dark interior, it was like a disembodied face floating in midair. They moved about in utter silence, and only rarely would one smile in passing. The place was haunted by God. I couldn't help thinking that our aunt was being held prisoner there, enchanted like Sleeping Beauty, and that on some lucky Saturday we would rescue her.

As usual, we were not allowed to accompany our parents to the place where Aunt Laura was kept. Jim was left in charge, and we were each given a quarter to buy a soda. We knew that if we went down a set of winding steps that led into what I thought of as a dungeon, we would find a small room with a soda machine and two tables with chairs. Our typical routine was to descend, have a drink, and then go and sit on the bench by the fountain to watch the pelican bleed water for two hours. But that day, after we'd finished our sodas, Jim pointed into the shadow at the back wall of the small canteen to a door I'd never noticed before.

“What do you think is in there?” he asked as he walked over to it.

“Hell,” said Mary.

Jim turned the knob, flung the door open, and jumped back. Mary and I left our seats and stood behind him. We could see a set of stone steps leading downward, walls close on either side like a brick gullet. There was no light in the stairway itself, but a vague glow shone up from the bottom of the steps. Jim turned to look at us briefly. “I order you to follow me.”

At the bottom of the long flight of steps, we found a room with a low ceiling, a concrete floor, and a row of pews that disappeared into darkness toward the back. Up front, near the entrance to the stairway, was a small altar and above it a huge painting in a golden frame. The dim light we had seen from above was a single bulb positioned to illuminate the picture, which showed a scene of Jesus and Mary sitting next to a pool in the middle of a forest. The aquamarine of Mary's gown was radiant, and both her and Christ's eyes literally shone. The figures were smiling, and their hair, along with the leaves in the background, appeared to be moving.

“Let's go back,” I said.

Mary inched away toward the stairs, and I started to follow her.

“One second,” said Jim. “Look at this, the holy fishing trip.”

We heard a rustle of material and something clunk against the heavy wood of one of the pews behind us. I jumped, and even Jim spun around with a look of fright on his face.

“It's a lovely scene, isn't it?” said a soft female voice. From out of the dark came a nun, whose face, pushing through the black mantle of her vestments, was so young and beautiful it confused me. She, too, was smiling, and her hands were pale and delicate. She lifted one as she passed by us and climbed onto the altar. “But you mustn't miss the message of the painting,” she said, pointing.

“Do you see here?” she asked, and turned to look at us.

We nodded and followed her direction to gaze into the woods behind Mary and Jesus.

“What do you see?”

Jim stepped closer and a few seconds later said, “Eyes and a smile.”

“Someone is there in the woods,” I said as the figure became evident to me.

“A dark figure, spying from the woods,” said the nun. “Who is it?”

“The devil,” said Mary.

“You're a smart girl,” said the nun. “Satan. Do you see how much this looks like a scene from the Garden of Eden? Well, the painter is showing us that just as Adam and Eve were subject to temptation, to death, so were the Savior and His mother. So are we all.”

“Why is he hiding?” asked Jim.

“He's waiting and watching for the right moment to strike. He's clever.”

“But the devil isn't real,” said Jim. “My father told me.”

She smiled sweetly at us. “Oh, the devil is real, child. I've seen him. If you don't pay attention, he'll take you.”

“Good-bye now,” whispered Mary, who took my hand and pulled me toward the steps.

“What does he look like?” asked Jim.

I didn't want to be there, but I couldn't move. I thought the nun would get angry, but instead her smile intensified, and her face went from pleasant to scary.

Mary pulled my arm, and we took off up the stairs. Not bothering to stop in the canteen, we kept going up the next set of steps to the outside and only rested when we made it to the bench by the fountain. We waited there for some time, hypnotized by the cascading water, before Jim finally showed up.

“You chickens should be hung for mutiny,” he said as he approached.

“Mary was afraid,” I said. “I had to get her out of there.”

“Check your own shorts,” he said, shaking his head. “But she told me a secret.”

“What?” I asked.

“How to spot the devil when he walks the earth. That's what Sister Joe said, ‘when he walks the earth,'” said Jim, and he started laughing.

“She was the devil,” said Mary, staring into the water.

That night, back at home, the wine flowed, and my parents danced in the living room to the Ink Spots on the Victrola. Something dire was up, I could tell, because they didn't talk and there was a joyless gravity to their spins and dips.

Before we turned in, Nan came over from next door and told us that while we were out she had heard from Mavis across the street that the prowler had struck again. When Mavis's husband, Dan, had taken out the trash, he heard something moving in their grape arbor. He called out, “Who's there?” Of course there was no answer, but he saw a shadow and a pair of eyes. Dan was an airline pilot who flew all over the world, and one of his hobbies was collecting old weapons. He ran inside and fetched a long knife from Turkey that had a wriggled blade
like a flat, frozen snake. Mavis had told Nan that he charged out the back door toward the arbor, but halfway there tripped on a divot in the lawn, fell, and stabbed his own thigh. By the time he was able to hobble back beneath the hanging grapes, the prowler had vanished.

While my mother sat in her rocker, eyes closed, rocking to the music, Jim and I arm-wrestled my father a few times, and then Mary danced with him, her bare feet on his shoes. “Bed,” my mother finally said, her eyes still closed.

At the top of the stairs before Jim and I went into our separate rooms, he said to me, “He walks the earth.” I laughed, but he didn't. George followed me to bed and lay by my feet, falling asleep instantly. He kicked his back leg three times and growled in his dreams. I stayed awake for a while, listening to my parents' hushed conversation down in the living room, but I couldn't make anything out.

I wasn't the least bit tired, so I got up and went over to my desk. Nan's talking about Mavis and Dan gave me the idea to capture them in my notebook before I forgot. All I found interesting about Dan were the things that he owned: the leopard-skin rug, the shrunken head, the axes and knives and ancient pistols. Otherwise he was a pretty blank person, save for his toupee, which sat on his head like a doily. Mavis, on the other hand, had been born in Ireland, in the town of Cork, and had the most beautiful way of talking. She had grown up with the actor Richard Harris, who sang the song about the cake in the rain.

By the time I was done, it was quiet downstairs, and I knew that my parents had finally gone to bed. Still, I wasn't tired, and on top of that I was a little spooked by the day's events. Any thought of death was capable of conjuring the angry spirit of Teddy Dunden. To dispel his gathering presence, I got out of bed and tiptoed quietly down the stairs. In the kitchen I stole a cookie, and that's when I decided to visit Botch Town.

Every old wooden step on the way to the cellar groaned miserably, but my father's snoring, rolling forth from the bedroom at the back of the house, covered my own prowling. Once below, I inched blindly forward, and when my hip touched the edge of the plywood world, I leaned way over and grabbed the pull string. The sun came out in the middle of the night in Botch Town. I half expected the figures to scurry, but no, they must have heard me coming and froze on cue. Peering down on the minute lives made me think for an instant about my own smallness.

Scanning the board, I found the prowler, with his straight-pin hands, on the prowl, hiding in the toothpick grape arbor netted with vines of green thread behind Mavis and Dan's house across the street from ours, his clever, glowing eyes like beacons searching the dark.