This is the conclusion of a story that began last week. If you have not read part one, you’ll want to do that before continuing.
The sky outside was a grey veil of gritty mist with a scarlet ball flickering orange and yellow fingers from its center that dripped a nightmare version of daylight across the city of Pharison. The trees that had held the full peak of summer’s foliage now clung tenaciously to a few stubborn leaves. Dust drifted and spun in eddies across the streets the made-up Jon’s mile and a half route home.
It was hard to breathe in this heat. Rivulets of perspiration ran in trails of dusty mud down Jon’s face leaving grimy streaks that disappeared below his matted collar and congealed in dark splotches, staining patches at the breast of his formerly pristine shirt.
On Oak Avenue Mrs. McMurtry, who had once called him the most worthlessly lazy man to ever hold a law degree because the firm was unable to shield her from the damages she incurred when she cut the brake lines to her lover’s Jeep causing an accident that destroyed a shed full of tools and killed the dog that slept within, was nowhere to be found though the battered screen door to her house stood open. The trunk of her Bronco stood unlatched where a summer frock stretched, dancing in the scorching wind from the hinge on which it was caught.
When Jon rounded the corner onto Maple Street, he saw that Jack’s battered old Cobalt still sat rusting in the driveway. Approaching the house, he found nothing but the inkwell to Jack’s quill set tipped over, obliterating the words of the title to the piece Jack was working on. Notebook pages lay scattered across the wooden porch. Some of the pages were darkened, scorched around the edges and they crackled and crunched as he stepped to examine what appeared to be a fingerprint smudged in India ink on the handle to the front door.
Jon never could figure what Josey saw in that guy. An unpublished writer, Jack just seemed to hover around the town listening to everything and proffering nothing but furrowed brows over wasted paper in return. He’d never amount to anything, and Jon wondered how he even afforded to stay at the old place on Maple, much less take Josey to dinner . . . certainly not in the style that a lawyer could. Not in the way she deserved. Nevertheless, he hammered, panting on the doorframe.
“Jack! Hey! Jack! You in there?! You seein’ this outside?!”
There was no response but the crashing of the door against the coat tree as it swung too swiftly open making Jon jump back startled. The house was neatly organized and decorated with a distinctly minimalist flavor where everything was in order, but for a blue table lamp lying shattered on the hardwood floor next to the easy chair. No one was home. Terror crept into Jon’s heart, and he turned from the doorway, leapt from the porch, and started running in long desperate strides toward his house at the center of town.
His daughter was there with her nanny, in the house they had always lived at 1105 Main St. He and Margery had picked it out because the back yard faced Palentine Park on the border of the town square. They had thought that if they ever had children, it would be perfect because when the kids were old enough, they could play by themselves in the park while he or Marge looked on from the windows upstairs.
It had been almost three years since Marge had left. They had a fight. They had words and then she just left, just packed a bag and vanished. Jon had only taken a day off work; his case load was heavy, the office was short-staffed, and he was low man on the totem pole. He found Sarah, their nanny, the next day. Anna seemed to love her, and Sarah doted on the child with brilliant compassion. They got on with their lives with very little mention of her missing mother. The police never found any trace of Margery. No forwarding address was ever filed, no search ever showed her at another job or location. Everyone came to assume she just changed her name and moved on.
Heat, raw and dry as a blowtorch, swept over him as he threw open the door to the three-story red-brick Victorian. The house was dark. The curtains were drawn in the downstairs rooms with the cool grey wallpaper, but the heat was stifling. Sarah’s handbag lay open midway up the stairs, and Jon leapt over tubes of lipstick, eyeliner, blush, and gloss where they cascaded down the descending steps.
“Sarah! Anna!”
There was no response but heat and the ticking and cracking of the old house that it caused. Then he heard it, faint at first, clapping . . . a little girl’s giggles . . . the sound of Anna’s music box pirouetting its ballerina above a mirror and its chime-strings. His breath came out all at once, a gust of relief.
“Anna! Oh, thank God! Anna! You’re ok! Hang on, honey. Daddy’s coming. We’ve got to leave, honey! We’ve got to go right now!”
Jon ran to his bedroom and threw open the closet door. The lights didn’t work so he turned on his cell phone’s torch and scanned over the menagerie of clutter in the small storage cubby. Spare shoes, boxes from custom tie tacks, cedar shoe stretchers, broom, dustpan . . . there, the coral hard-shell suitcase that Marge had left behind. Jon scooped up the suitcase lifting it off of the broken brunette Barbie, whose legs and arms were twisted at odd angles, crushed beneath her collapsed doll-sized toolshed. He began flinging random shirts, shorts, and underthings for he and Anna into the body of the clamshell before piling toothpaste tubes and brushes on top and forcing it, with zippered leverage, closed. He rounded the corner from his bedroom, and at the threshold to his daughter’s playroom the world stopped.
Anna sat on her knees in the center of her playroom atop the four-by-eight hand drawn map of the city of Pharison that Jon had bought for her to play dolls on for her last birthday. The girl bounced giggling, crouched on her calves and ankles, her long hair matted and sticking in sweaty patches across her back and shoulders. Tiny doll shoes and clothes lay strewn in random scatterings across the map, the Barbie’s minute compacts, mirrors, and lipsticks sprinkled recklessly over the images of yards, streets, and buildings.
“Look Daddy! Look! Look what I made for you!”, squealed the little girl in delight.
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“I remembered Daddy! I remembered what you said about them! I remembered how they made you mad. You said you hated them. How Josey wouldn’t smile at you. How your bosses were mean and didn’t like you. How that man at work yelled at you all the time. I remembered how that old man with the notebooks wouldn’t keep to his place and let your girlfriend have you like she deserved. I remembered how they all made you sad, Daddy, so I made you something so you could be happy again!”
In the center of the room the little girl sat on the spot on the map that would have been their house. She had piled all of her dolls, boys and girls alike, in the space that would have been Palentine Park. They were wound with clear tape around a plastic Christmas tree, their hands and feet bound in barrettes and hair ties. In the little girl’s hand was a long wooden match, it’s end a ball of red-orange fire.
“Anna! No!”
The little girl dropped the flaming end of the match onto the top of the plastic tree, and Jon heard screams erupt from the park outside the second story window. Before he could make it to the window to see what was happening in the park Jon heard Anna say, through thick little girl sobs.
“I remember how they made you cry, Daddy . . . just like mommy did.”
