The Singing Bone Read online

  For my mother, Mary Downing Hahn, and my husband, Allen Rose, because a dark road is best traveled with those who carry a light

  Sing with me if you want,

  or not, my ferryman’s song, my siren’s song.

  Sing for the dead lilacs.

  —Deborah Digges, “Lilacs” (1999)

  1

  HANS, AUGUST 1999

  The package lies on the kitchen table. Hans Loomis keeps his back to it, preferring instead to linger at the window, absorbing the final heavy days of summer—those long evenings when the nature of time shifts into something dreamlike, suspended. He thinks about taking a walk in the park before opening the package. It isn’t too hot for a walk, and he likes the smell of the cut grass on the Great Lawn. It’s his habit to walk around the reservoir each evening, weather permitting.

  Instead, he takes a wineglass from the cupboard and pours himself the cold Pinot Grigio a guest brought the night before. The dinner party was a kind of celebration. He was beginning a new project. The package was in his study then, and the whole night he thought of it there—sitting at the center of his desk beneath the spotlight of a gooseneck lamp—just as it is now sitting at the center of the kitchen table. If he goes for a walk, the package will haunt him. He will not enjoy the walk, just as he did not entirely enjoy the dinner party. He thought he would open the package after his guests left, but he didn’t.

  Hans turns away from the window and faces the package. It is wrapped with clear tape, wound over and over again, creating a thick plastic shield. There are drawings on the yellow envelope done in black marker. The drawings are of snakes, of birds, of skulls and flowers. They betray a tattooist’s skill in graphics. He takes a pair of scissors from a drawer and sits at the table, setting his sweating glass down on a square of linen napkin. He folds his hands and clears his throat as if about to speak. The package feels hostile, but maybe it’s because he knows who sent it and has a sense of what’s inside. He pulls the package towards him. In a space bracketed by curving snakes, he sees his name, the post office box number. New York, New York.

  Hans doesn’t want to rip the envelope’s drawings, so he cuts carefully across the top. He peers inside, opening the envelope with his thumb and forefinger. It’s a stack of papers. The pages are of different sizes and loosely held together with a black ribbon. He takes them out, trying to keep the loose cuttings and drawings from scattering, but he sees what is going to happen and goes to his study, finds an empty manuscript box and brings it back. He places the pages in the box. He puts the lid on and breathes. He feels as if there’s something alive in the box. A caught animal. A wild bird. He takes a sip of wine, sets the glass down, and then opens the box again.

  It’s really only ten pages, maybe twelve. It’s not enough to be called a book, but it’s more than a letter. There is a drawing of a tree, thick and knotted, done in the same kind of black marker as the drawings on the envelope, but the tree is drawn on Xeroxes of newspaper articles. He sees Alice Pearson’s face. She has her arm around someone, but a branch of the tree obscures the other half of the photo. Near the top branches of the tree, he sees Molly Malloy and Jason Stover. He can barely make their features out, but he knows it’s them. There are drawings of black birds surrounding the tree. Trina Malik is drawn with torn wings, and Allegra Ramos is stippled in a black dress, her black hair curling into the lines of the tree’s roots. The roots are a tangled mass, with a line above indicating the earth. The roots are linked to the arc of the black birds overhead. At the very base of the drawing, Hans reads Sweetheart, the dream is not ended. The dream is not ended. The line is familiar, but Hans can’t place it.

  Dear Mr. Loomis—the letter begins. May I call you Hans? We are both men of the world. You wrote to me wanting to know more about me, about what happened. These pages are manifestations and ideas. What happened is a long time ago, and my memory is not entirely dependable (though some people’s are worse). There are forces at work. You writing to me is one more sign that soon I will walk under the sky. I tried to write you a letter (only a letter the kind regular people write) but I kept going. I am not regular.

  He looks at the signature at the bottom of the drawing. Jack Wyck. A flourish of black ink. When Hans looks up again, it is almost dark outside. He remembers his walk. He returns to the pages, forgetting it again. At midnight, he puts the lid on the box and stands, stretching. He’s hungry. Francis left him something to eat in the refrigerator, but he thinks of the all-night deli on Broadway. He needs to be outside, to feel his legs move freely, to walk for a block or two past the park, where he can smell summer leaves, the damp of the ground.

  Hans thinks of his walk around the reservoir and wishes it weren’t too late to take it. He likes to think of the path of the water, the way it travels south from the watershed upstate. He imagines the water running in thick curving lines, like the drawings of the tree’s roots, cutting through stone and spilling over the earth. And then he reverses the flow of water, letting his imagination take over, and he sees the water racing north, uphill, towards the Catskills, weaving around towns, beneath bridges, rushing over stones and cutting through the trees, until it lands at the feet of Alice Pearson, who stands on the shore, looking out at the place where the water meets the sky.

  2

  ALICE, MARCH 1979

  “My mother said we shouldn’t hang out here,” Molly said. She took off her clogs and pressed her feet into the ground. The sky looked like snow, but the sun was there, a dim straw-colored reflection in the reservoir. Molly held on to Alice’s arm and steadied herself.

  “It’s too cold, Molls.” Alice still wore her heavy boots, the leather stiff and dry from the wet New York winter. She laughed. “Your toes are turning blue. Why did your mom say that?”

  “They’re not!” Molly examined her toes. She’d painted the nails a sparkling gold. “All right,” she said, “maybe,” and slipped her shoes back on. “Because of those girls . . . the ones who disappeared.”

  “That was far from here,” Alice said. She looked out at the water. “And we’re not hitchhiking.”

  Molly’s fingernails were painted with the same gold polish, and Alice thought of how Molly had tried to teach her to do the Hustle. They’d been hanging out in Molly’s basement. Stover sat on the low tan couch. Trina stood looking out of the sliding glass doors, her back to them. Molly pointed a slim finger as she kept count. “Forward, forward, forward, back, back, back. Like this—” Molly set the needle at the start of the record again. “Watch me,” she said. “It’s easy.” But it wasn’t.

  Molly called Trina away from the door and tried to teach her how to do the Hustle, too, but Trina got frustrated and went over to Stover. “You try it,” she said to him, holding her hands out. Molly stopped dancing and put on “More, More, More.” She counted—one, two, three, four—but she was looking at Stover. Alice stood where Trina had, with her back to the doors, watching.

  The graffiti had been on the fence of Stover’s house again—red, ugly, like a slap—sloping down on one side, climbing back up: Whites only. They had been on their way to Molly’s when they saw it. “Oh, come the fuck on,” Stover said, throwing his backpack on the ground. “We just painted over it.” Alice looked at the other houses and briefly hated everyone. She thought she knew who’d done it—the brothers who lived a few houses away, their faces distorted by some secret rage.

  “I don’t feel like dancing,” Stover said, looking up at Trina. He took her hand, opened the palm, and kissed it. Then he met her eyes. “It’s better to watch. Besides, this music sucks. Put on some Bowie or something.”

  At home, Alice tried dancing in front of her mirror, but she got lost after the grapevine and began turning as she’d seen women do in commercials. She sp
un like Mary Tyler Moore. She spun like Lynda Carter. She held her arms out and looked at the ceiling.

  • • •

  “It’s cold as shit out here.” Alice wrapped her windbreaker close. She didn’t like thinking about those girls. They’d been on their way to the store. Everyone hitched. It wasn’t a big deal. But she had a feeling—a feeling in the bottom of her feet—it was fear, wasn’t it? And then the drop in the stomach—like when they told stories at sleepovers. Trina always told the scariest ones, and Molly would make them turn on the lights. And she could hear this noise on the top of the car, Alice heard Trina saying. Going scrape, scrape, scrape.

  Molly squatted. She picked up a stick and poked at the ground. “Here,” she said. She pulled a pack of cigarettes from her jacket pocket and lit one. “Check it out.” Molly made a small o with her mouth. She exhaled ragged smoke rings and then laughed.

  “Give it up, girl,” Alice said, smiling.

  When they’d started coming to the spot by the reservoir five years ago, it was the four of them: Alice, Molly, Trina, and Stover. They ­huddled in a circle with a pack of damp matches, awkward with their cigarettes.

  “Look at Alice.” Stover exhaled and tilted his chin at Alice. “She’s a newbie.”

  “Better than in juvie,” Alice said. They all laughed. Alice coughed and held the cigarette away from her. “Why does anyone do this?” Stover swung his backpack at Alice, who spun away.

  “I’ve been waiting for a cigarette all day.” Trina smoothed her dark hair back and lifted her face towards the sky. “Freedom!” she yelled into the trees. Freedom was Trina’s favorite word. She wrote it on the knee of her jeans, on her book covers—that and Love.

  • • •

  Alice tried to do the thing that Molly had done with the smoke. “How do you do it?”

  “Snap your jaw,” Molly said. “Like this.”

  But Alice couldn’t see. She moved her jaw around, experimenting. She gave up. “Where’s Stover?”

  “Band practice.”

  The wind in the woods behind them made it sound like someone was coming. Alice imagined a man limping through the trees, dragging a stick behind him. She quickly turned her head, just to make sure.

  “Who’s that guy Trina’s been seeing?” Molly stood up and moved around. She looked at Alice’s feet. “I’m so jealous of your boots right now.”

  “What guy?”

  “It’s weird, right? She hasn’t said anything about it. I saw her in town—in the parking lot by the train. She was hanging all over this guy.”

  “It wasn’t Stover?”

  “No way was it Stover. Stover’s, like, olden times.”

  “She’s vanished lately.” At school, Alice had tracked Trina to the smoking section outside after lunch. She was sitting on a picnic table. There were other kids sitting around her, but Trina wasn’t talking to them.

  “What are you doing, T.?” Alice asked.

  Trina stared at the sky and kicked the table with the pointed toe of her boot. She kept her hands in the pockets of her coat. “Thinking.” She didn’t look at Alice. “Do you ever think,” Trina said, “about your destiny?”

  “You mean, like where I’ll go to college?”

  “No.”

  “Then what?” But Trina hadn’t explained. She sat there, staring, until Alice got bored and went back inside.

  • • •

  Alice told Molly about seeing Trina.

  “That doesn’t sound right,” Molly said.

  “You’d think she’d tell us if something was going on.”

  “I hope she’s all right.”

  “She’s all right.” Alice stood and dropped the cigarette to the ground, crushing it with the toe of her boot. She folded her arms. She liked the way the reservoir looked when the sun got low. The shadows vanished. The water and the sky were the same color, the trees and the rocks on the other side that divided them a crooked black line.

  “No, it was totally weird when I saw her in the parking lot with that guy. I started to go over to say hi and she looked right at me and then turned her back on me.”

  “That’s just Trina.” Alice rolled her eyes. It was a phrase they were used to. That’s just Trina. When they were kids, Alice, Trina, Molly, and Stover always had a game—it could be hide-and-seek or Monopoly—­anything—but Trina always found some reason to get mad, to throw the cards into the air or the Monopoly board against the wall. Or she’d just announce that she was going home, her chin high, and Stover trailed after her, saying, “Come on, T., what’s wrong? It’s no big deal. Come back,” and Molly and Alice, looking at each other across the ruined game, shook their heads. Why?

  • • •

  “That’s just Trina,” Molly echoed. She smiled and lit another cigarette.

  “What did he look like?” Alice wanted to know. “The guy?” She squatted again, like Molly had, and looked over at her.

  “Like, Italian? Dark. Cute. Oh my god. So cute.” Molly took a piece of pink bubblegum out of her purse and passed another piece to Alice. “Older? Yeah, I think he’s older. He’s not in school.”

  “Older like by how much?” Alice asked.

  “I didn’t go up to them because she just, you know, turned her back on me. So weird.” Molly shook her head. “Do you think I should dye my hair blond?” She was examining a strand in the weak light. “For summer?”

  “Maybe they were tripping.” Alice said. “Look at me.” Alice looked at her friend’s pale round face, the small chin, the big blue eyes, the brown ringlets that used to be blond. She was like something from one of the Christmas cards her grandmother collected. “Yeah, blond,” she said. “Definitely. Like when you were little. Frost it.”

  Molly pulled another ringlet straight and twisted it. “I don’t know. Maybe they were tripping. But I’ve only known her since I was five. You’d think she’d still recognize me. I mean, she’s at my house all the time.”

  “True.”

  Alice thought of Molly’s house, how clean it was and the way her parents left the door unlocked for their daughter no matter what the time. She thought of Trina’s house—the unfamiliar cooking smells, the round of rose-shaped pink soap on a white dish in the guest bathroom, the blue carpet and plastic-covered white couches—and of Stover’s house—the modern furniture, the deck his father built, the swimming pool with yellow walls. Then Alice thought of her own house, and her mother’s “collections”—that’s what Mrs. Pearson called whatever she hauled home from garage sales or out of the trash—that made each room smaller, the shades pulled, the curtains unwashed. Alice saw her own room: her bed with the green and yellow daisy-chain blanket, the white desk with gold trim, the red plastic record player with the white needle arm. Everything in its place.

  • • •

  The four friends could see one another’s houses from various windows of their own. Their parents were friends, too—or had been when the kids were young enough to race their bikes in the summer or trick-or-treat in the fall—everyone but Trina’s parents, who kept to themselves. Whenever Alice thought about Trina’s parents, she saw them perched, blank-faced, on their plastic-covered sofa, as still and quiet as two perfectly painted china figurines. In elementary school, Alice walked to the school bus with Molly, and Molly’s mother always asked Alice to hold her daughter’s hand as they walked. “She’s so small for her age,” Mrs. Malloy said, touching Molly’s blond head and putting her hand into Alice’s. “Make sure she’s safe.”

  • • •

  The trees in the distance were losing their outline to the night. “We should go,” Alice said. Molly put her cigarette out. They climbed through the woods without talking. They arrived on a street lined with neat ranch houses. “Lip gloss?” Alice offered the tube to Molly. The flavor covered the smoke smell, just in case. This one was sticky sweet and smelled of root beer. Alice took the gloss back. Molly blew a bubble. “Pizza?” she asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “I’ll go ask my da
d for the car.”

  “I’ll stay out here,” Alice said.

  Alice made small circles in the street to keep warm while she waited. She tried the hustle: One, two, three, four. She hopped. She stood still and looked up at the stars. Inside, Molly’s mother was making dinner. The blue light of the television illuminated the den where Molly’s father stood with his back to the window. Her little brother came to the front door and opened it, leaning out. “Hi, Alice-Alice,” he called. Alice looked up. Stuart was almost as tall as Molly now.

  “Hi, Stuart-Stuart,” she answered. When Stuart was four or five, Alice had started to call him Stuart-Stuart. It made him laugh like crazy. “Stuart-Stuart,” she’d say, and Stuart begged: “Say it again, Alice. Say it more than twice. Say it twice twenty times,” and she’d tickled him, saying: Stuart-Stuart-Stuart-Stuart—on and on, faster and faster, until the name became garbled in her mouth and neither of them could stop laughing.

  “Mom says Molly can’t have the car. She made dinner. She says for you to come inside.” Stuart pushed the screen door back and forth, waiting.

  Alice liked “Alice-Alice” better than “head” or “freak”—which is what kids at school called her. She pretended not to care. She’d stopped talking to them ages ago. And her grades were high; people thought of her as “smart”—or that’s what she heard from Molly and Trina. The smart one. Really? Alice didn’t think she was so smart.

  She pulled her straight brown hair back and into a ponytail, put lip gloss on her thin lips and mascara on her deep-set eyes. She applied blush, even, because Alice was under the impression that she was too pale. Hey, ghost, the mean boys in the neighborhood called after her. Boo! they cried, jumping out at her. Hey, ghost. Hey, phantom. Dan Crew never said it. When he looked at Alice, he smiled. She’d had a crush on him since third grade. “Hey, Alice,” he liked to say. Alice, like it was the only name ever. It made her feel like there was a light shining on her. Molly said if Alice would just talk to him, he’d go with her. “Don’t be so shy, Alice,” Molly said. “You’re so nice to talk to. I’d know.” Easy for Molly to say, Alice thought, with her curls.