Lullaby

  “It’s really important,” Mona says. “I had it before that, and I left something between the pages.”

  Sorry, the guy says.

  “Can you tell us who has it?” Mona says.

  And the guy says, sorry. No can do.

  And I’m counting 1, counting 2, counting 3 . . .

  Sure, everybody wants to play God, but for me it’s a full-time job.

  I’m counting 4, counting 5 . . .

  A beat later, Helen Hoover Boyle’s standing at the checkout desk. She smiles until the librarian looks up from his computer, and she spreads her hands, her rings bright and crowded on each finger.

  She smiles and says, “Young man? My daughter left an old family photograph between the pages of a certain book.” She wiggles her fingers and says, “You can follow the rules, or you can do a good deed and take your pick.”

  The librarian watches her fingers, the prism colors and stars of broken light dancing across his face. He licks his lips. Then he shakes his head no and says it’s just not worth it. The person with the book will complain and he’ll get fired.

  “We promise,” Helen says, “we won’t lose you your job.”

  In the car, I waiting with Mona, counting 27, counting 28, counting 29 . . ., trying the only way I know not to kill everybody in the library and look up the address on the computer myself.

  Helen comes out to the car with a sheet of paper in her hand. She leans in the open driver’s-side window and says, “Good news and bad news.”

  Mona and Oyster are lying across the backseat, and they sit up. I’m on the shotgun side of the front seat, counting.

  And Mona says, “They have three copies, but they’re all checked out.”

  And Helen gets in behind the steering wheel and says, “I know a million ways to cold-call.”

  And Oyster shakes the hair off his eyes and says, “Good job, Mom.”

  The first house went easy enough. And the second.

  In the car between house calls, Helen picks through the gold tubes and shiny boxes, her lipstick and makeup, her cosmetic case open in her lap. She twists a pink lipstick up and squints at it, saying, “I’m never using any of this again. If I’m not mistaken, that last woman had ringworm.”

  Mona leans forward from the backseat, looking over Helen’s shoulder, and says, “You’re really good at this.”

  Screwing open little round boxes of eye shadow, looking and sniffing at their tan or pink or peach insides, Helen says, “I’ve had a lot of practice.”

  She looks at herself in the rearview mirror and pulls around a few strands of pink hair. She looks at her watch, pinching the face between a thumb and index finger, and she says, “I shouldn’t tell you this, but this was my first real job.”

  By now we’re parked outside a rusted trailer house sitting in a square of dead grass scattered with children’s plastic toys. Helen snaps her case shut. She looks at me sitting beside her and says, “You ready to try it again?”

  Inside the trailer, talking to the woman in the apron covered with little chickens, Helen’s saying, “There’s absolutely no cost or obligation on your part,” and she backs the woman into the sofa.

  Sitting across from the woman, the woman sitting so close their knees almost touch, Helen reaches toward her with a soft brush and says, “Suck in your cheeks, dear.”

  With one hand, she grabs a handful of the woman’s hair and pulls it straight up into the air. The woman’s hair is blond with an inch of brown at the roots. With her other hand, Helen runs a comb down the hair in fast strokes, holding the longer strands up, and crushing the shorter brown ones down against the scalp. She grabs another handful and rats, teases, back-combs until all but the longest hairs are crushed and tangled against the scalp. With the comb, she smooths the long blond strands over the ratted short hairs until the woman’s head is a huge fluffed bubble of blond hair.

  And I say, so that’s how you do that.

  It’s identical to Helen’s hairdo only blond.

  On the coffee table in front of the sofa is a big arrangement of roses and lilies, but wilted and brown, the flowers standing in a green-glass vase from a florist, with only a little black water in the bottom. On the dinette table in the kitchen are more big flower arrangements, just dead stalks in thick, stinking water. Lined up on the floor, against the back wall of the living room are more vases, each holding a block of green foam pincushioned with curled, wasted roses or black, spindly carnations growing gray mold. Stuck in with each bouquet is a little card saying: In Deepest Sympathy.

  And Helen says, “Now put your hands over your face,” and she starts shaking a can of hair spray. She fogs the woman with hair spray.

  The woman cowers blind, bent forward a little, with both hands pressed over her face.

  And Helen jerks her head toward the rooms at the other end of the trailer.

  And I go.

  Pumping a mascara brush in its tube, she says, “You don’t mind if my husband uses your bathroom, do you?” Helen says, “Now, look up at the ceiling, dear.”

  In the bathroom, there are dirty clothes separated into different-colored piles on the floor. Whites. Darks. Somebody’s jeans and shirts stained with oil. There’s towels and sheets and bras. There’s a red-checked tablecloth. I flush the toilet for the sound effect.

  There’s no diapers or children’s clothes.

  In the living room, the chicken woman is still looking at the ceiling, only now she’s shaking with long, jerking breaths. Her chest, under the apron, shaking. Helen is touching the corner of a folded tissue to the watery makeup. The tissue is soaked and black with mascara, and Helen’s saying, “It will be better someday, Rhonda. You can’t see that, but it will.” Folding another tissue and daubing, she says, “What you have to do is make yourself hard. Think of yourself as something hard and sharp.”

  She says, “You’re still a young woman, Rhonda. You need to go back to school and turn this hurt into money.”

  The chicken woman, Rhonda, is still crying with her head tilted back, staring at the ceiling.

  Behind the bathroom, there’s two bedrooms. One has a water bed. In the other bedroom is a crib and a hanging mobile of plastic daisies. There’s a chest of drawers painted white. The crib is empty. The little plastic mattress is tied in a roll at one end. Near the crib is a stack of books on a stool. Poems and Rhymes is on top.

  When I put the book on the dresser, it falls.

  I run the point of a baby pin down the inside edge of the page, tight in next to the binding, and the page pulls out. With the page folded in my pocket, I put the book back on the stack.

  In the living room, the cosmetics are dumped in a heap on the floor.

  Helen’s pulled a false bottom out of the inside of her cosmetic case. Inside are layered necklaces and bracelets, heavy brooches and pairs of earrings clipped together, all of them crusted and dazzling with shattered red and green, yellow and blue lights. Jewels. Draped between Helen’s hands is a long necklace of yellow and red stones larger than her polished, pink fingernails.

  “In brilliant-cut diamonds,” she says, “look for no light leakage through the facets below the girdle of the stone.” She lays the necklace in the woman’s hands, saying, “In rubies—aluminum oxide—foreign bits inside, called rutile inclusions, can give the stone a soft pinkish look unless the jeweler bakes the stone under high heat.”

  The trick to forgetting the big picture is to look at everything close-up.

  The two women sit so close, their knees dovetail together. Their heads almost touch. The chicken woman isn’t crying.

  The chicken woman is wearing a jeweler’s loupe in one eye.

  The dead flowers are shoved aside, and scattered on the coffee table are clusters of sparkling pink and smooth gold, cool white pearls and carved blue lapis lazuli. Other clusters glow orange and yellow. Other piles shine silver and white.

  And Helen cups a blazing green egg in her hand, so bright both women look green in the reflected light,
and she says, “Do you see the kind of uniform veil-like inclusions in a synthetic emerald?”

  Her eye clenched around the loupe, the woman nods.

  And Helen says, “Remember this. I don’t want you to get burned the way I was.” She reaches into the cosmetic case and lifts out a bright handful of yellow, saying, “This yellow sapphire brooch was owned by the movie star Natasha Wren.” With both hands, she takes out a sparkling pink heart, trailing a long chain of smaller diamonds, saying, “This seven-hundred-carat beryl pendant was once owned by Queen Marie of Romania.”

  In this heap of jewels, Helen Hoover Boyle would say, are the ghosts of everyone who has ever owned them. Everyone rich and successful enough to prove it. All of their talent and intelligence and beauty, outlived by decorative junk. All the success and accomplishment this jewelry was supposed to represent, it’s all vanished.

  With the same hairdo, the same makeup, leaning together so close, they could be sisters. They could be mother and daughter. Before and after. Past and future.

  There’s more, but that’s when I go out to the car.

  Sitting in the backseat, Mona says, “You find it?”

  And I say yeah. Not that it does this woman any good.

  The only thing we’ve given her is big hair and probably ringworm.

  Oyster says, “Show us the song. Let’s see what this trip is all about.”

  And I tell him, no fucking way. I tuck the folded page in my mouth and chew and chew. My foot aches, and I take off my shoe. I chew and chew. Mona falls asleep. I chew and chew. Oyster looks out the window at some weeds in a ditch.

  I swallow the page, and I fall asleep.

  Later, sitting in the car, driving to the next town, the next library, maybe the next makeover, I wake up and Helen has been driving for almost three hundred miles.

  It’s almost dark, and just looking out the windshield, she says, “I’m keeping track of expenses.”

  Mona sits up, scratching her scalp through her hair. She presses the finger next to her pinkie finger, she presses the pad of that finger into the inside corner of her eye and pulls it away, fast, with an eye goober stuck on it. She wipes the goober on her jeans and says, “Where are we going to eat?”

  I tell Mona to buckle her seat belt.

  Helen turns on the headlights. She opens one hand, wide, against the steering wheel and looks at the back of it, her rings, and says, “After we find the Book of Shadows, when we’re the all-powerful leaders of the entire world, after we’re immortal and we own everything on the planet and everyone loves us,” she says, “you’ll still owe me for two hundred dollars’ worth of cosmetics.”

  She looks odd. Her hair looks wrong. It’s her earrings, the heavy clumps of pink and red, pink sapphires and rubies. They’re gone.

  Chapter 21

  This wasn’t just one night. It just feels that way. This was every night, through Texas and Arizona, on into Nevada, cutting through California and up through Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Montana. Every night, driving in a car is the same. Wherever.

  Every place is the same place in the dark.

  “My son, Patrick, isn’t dead,” Helen Hoover Boyle says.

  He’s dead in the county medical records, but I don’t say anything.

  With Helen driving, Mona and Oyster are asleep in the backseat. Asleep or listening. I sit in the passenger side of the front seat. Leaning against my door, I’m as far from Helen as I can get. With my head pillowed on my arm, I’m where I can listen without looking at her.

  And Helen talks to me without looking back. This is both of us looking straight ahead at the road in the headlights rushing under the hood of the car.

  “Patrick’s at the New Continuum Medical Center,” she says. “And I fully believe that someday he’ll make a complete recovery.”

  Her daily planner book, bound in red leather, is on the front seat between us.

  Driving through North Dakota and Minnesota, I ask, how did she find the culling spell?

  And with one pink fingernail, she pushes a button somewhere in the dark and puts the car in cruise control. With something else in the dark, she turns on the high-beam headlights.

  “I used to be a client representative for Skin Tone Cosmetics,” she says. “The trailer we lived in wasn’t very nice.” She says, “My husband and I.”

  His name is John Boyle in the county medical records.

  “You know how it is with your first,” she says. “People give you so many toys and books. I don’t even know who actually brought the book. It was just a book in a pile of books.”

  According to the county, this must’ve been twenty years ago.

  “You don’t need me to tell you what happened,” she says. “But John always thought it was my fault.”

  According to police records, there were six domestic disturbance calls to the Boyle home, lot 175 at the Buena Noche Mobile Home Park, in the weeks following the death of Patrick Raymond Boyle, aged six months.

  Driving through Wisconsin and Nebraska, Helen says, “I was going door-to-door, cold-calling for Skin Tone.” She says, “I didn’t go back to work right away. It must’ve been, God, a year and a half after Patrick’s . . . after the morning we found Patrick.”

  She was walking around the trailer development where they lived, Helen tells me, and she met a young woman just like the woman wearing the apron patterned with little chickens. The same dead funeral flowers brought home from the mortuary. The same empty crib.

  “I could make a lot of money just selling heavy foundation and cover-up,” Helen says, smiling, “especially toward the end of the month, when money was tight.”

  Twenty years ago, this other woman was the same age as Helen, and while they talked, she showed Helen the nursery, the baby pictures. The woman’s name was Cynthia Moore. She had a black eye.

  “And I saw they had a copy of our same book,” Helen says. “Poems and Rhymes from Around the World.”

  These other people kept it open to the same page it was the night their child died. The book, the bedding in the crib, they were trying to keep everything the same.

  “Of course it was the same page as our book,” Helen says.

  At home John Boyle was drinking a lot of beer every night. He said he didn’t want to have another child because he didn’t trust her. If she didn’t know what she’d done wrong, it was too much of a risk.

  With my hand on her heated leather seats, it feels as if I’m touching another person.

  Driving through Colorado, Kansas, and Missouri, she says, “The other mother in the trailer park, one day there was a yard sale at their place. All their baby things, all folded in piles on the lawn, marked a quarter apiece. There was the book, and I bought it.” Helen says, “I asked the man inside why Cindy was selling everything, and he just shrugged.”

  According to county medical records, Cynthia Moore drank liquid drain cleaner and died of esophageal hemorrhaging and asphyxiation three months after her child had died of no apparent cause.

  “John was worried about germs so he’d burned all of Patrick’s things,” she says. “I bought the book of poems for ten cents. I remember it was a beautiful day outside.”

  Police records show three more domestic disturbance calls to lot 175 at the Buena Noche Mobile Home Park. A week after Cynthia Moore’s suicide, John Boyle was found dead of no apparent cause. According to the county his high blood alcohol concentration might’ve caused sleep apnea. Another likely cause was positional asphyxiation. He may have been so drunk that he fell unconscious in a position that kept him from breathing. Either way there were no marks on the body. There was no apparent cause of death on the death certificate.

  Driving through Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio, Helen says, “Killing John wasn’t anything I did on purpose.” She says, “I was just curious.”

  The same as me and Duncan.

  “I was just testing a theory,” she says. “John kept saying that Patrick’s ghost was with us. And I kept telling him that Patrick wa
s still alive in the hospital.”

  Twenty years later, baby Patrick’s still in the hospital, she says.

  Crazy as this sounds, I don’t say anything. How a baby must look after twenty years in a coma or on life support or whatever, I can’t imagine.

  Picture Oyster on a feeding tube and a catheter for most of his life.

  There are worse things you can do to the people you love than kill them.

  In the backseat, Mona sits up and stretches her arms. She says, “In ancient Greece, people wrote their strongest curses with the nails from shipwrecks.” She says, “Sailors who died at sea weren’t given a proper funeral. The Greeks knew that dead people who aren’t buried are the most restless and destructive spirits.”

  And Helen says, “Shut up.”

  Driving through West Virginia, Pennsylvania, and New York, Helen says, “I hate people who claim they can see ghosts.” She says, “There are no ghosts. When you die, you’re dead. There’s no afterlife. People who claim they can see ghosts are just looking for attention. People who believe in reincarnation are just postponing their lives.”

  She smiles. “Fortunately for me,” she says, “I’ve found a way to punish those people and make a great deal of money.”

  Her cell phone rings.

  She says, “If you don’t believe me about Patrick, I can show you this month’s hospital bill.”

  Her phone rings again.

  We’re driving across Vermont when she says this. She says part of it while we’re crossing Louisiana in the dark, then Arkansas and Mississippi. All those little eastern states, some nights, we’d cross two or three.

  Flipping her phone open, she says, “This is Helen.” She rolls her eyes at me and says, “An invisible baby sealed inside your bedroom wall? And it cries all night? Really?”

  Other parts of this story, I didn’t know until we got home and I did some research.

  Pressing the phone against her chest, Helen tells me, “Everything I’m telling you is strictly off the record.” She says, “Until we find the Book of Shadows, we can’t change what’s happened. Using a spell from that book, I’ll make sure Patrick makes a full recovery.”