lifted her head and met his gaze.
‘Mark.’
‘Are you okay, Mom?’
She swallowed and again lightly stroked her cheek.
‘I’m fine,’ she told him.
NOT FINE, SHE was emerging from the aftereffects of a profound shock. Just now, a girl of five or six in ripped, dirty coveralls had materialized in front of her, simply come into being, like an eerily solid hologram. The child was inconsolable, her weeping would never stop, so great, so crushing, were the injuries this child had endured. Frightened and dismayed, Nancy had thought to reach out and stroke her hair. But before she was able to raise her hand, the sobbing child turned her head and gave Nancy a glance of concentrated ill will that struck her like a blow. Pure vindictive animosity streamed from her, directed entirely at Nancy. This happened. Having happened, it spoke of a ferocious guilt, as ferocious as the child herself.
Yes I am here, yes I was real. You denied me.
Nancy found she was trembling violently and was incapable of speech. She had nothing to say anyhow. Back in the shabby little suburban house in Carrollton Gardens, she could have spoken, but then she had remained silent. Terror rooted her to the side of the tub. Why had she come in here in the first place?
Having communicated, the little girl vanished, leaving Nancy in shock. She had never seen that child before, but she knew who she was, yes she did. And she knew her name. Finally, Lily had come searching for her, after all.
‘ARE YOU SURE?’ Mark asked.
‘I’m just … you surprised me.’
‘Why are you sitting here?’
Nancy raised her left arm and looked at her bare wrist. ‘You’re late.’
‘Mom, you’re not wearing your watch.’
She lowered her arm. ‘What time is it?’
‘About eleven. I was with Jimbo. I guess we forgot about the time.’
‘What do you and Jimbo do at night hour after hour?’
‘Hang out,’ he said. ‘You know.’ He changed the subject. ‘What are you doing down here?’
‘Well,’ she said, collecting herself a bit more successfully. ‘I was worried because you hadn’t come home. So I went downstairs … I guess I dozed off.’
‘You looked funny,’ he said.
Nancy wiped her eyes with the heels of her hands, her mouth flickering between mirth and despair. ‘Get yourself to bed, young man. I won’t say anything to your father, but this is the last time, understand?’
Mark understood. He was not to say anything to his father, either.
MARK’S OBSESSION HAD begun quietly and unobtrusively, as simple curiosity, with no hint of the urgency it would so quickly acquire. He and Jimbo had been out with their skateboards, trying simultaneously to improve their skills, look at least faintly impressive, and irritate a few neighbors. Over and over they had seen it proved that the average adult cannot abide the sight of a teenage boy on a skateboard. Something about the combination of baggy jeans, bent knees, a backward baseball cap, and a fiberglass board rattling along on two sets of wheels made the average adult male hyperventilate. The longer the run, the angrier they got. If you fell down, they yelled, ‘Hurt yourself, kid?’
Unsurprisingly, the city of Millhaven offered no skateboarding venues with half-pipes, bowls, and purpose-built ramps. What it had instead were parking lots, the steps of municipal buildings, construction sites, and a few hills. The best parking lots tended to be dominated by older kids who had no patience with newbies like Mark and Jimbo and tended either to mock their equipment or to try to steal it from them. They did have amazingly good equipment. Mark had seen a Ledger classified ad placed by a dreadlocked twenty-year-old hippie named Jeffie Matusczak who was giving up the sport to pursue his spiritual life in India and was willing to sell his two boards for fifty dollars apiece. They went on the Internet and spent the last of their money on DC Manteca shoes. Their outfits looked great, but their skills were drastically under par. Because they wished to avoid ridicule and humiliation, they did some of their skateboarding in the playground at Quincy; some on the front steps of the county museum, far downtown; but most of it on the streets around their houses, especially Michigan Street, one block west.
On the day Mark’s obsession began, he had pushed himself past the entrance to the alley, rolled up to Michigan Street, and given the board a good kick so that he could do the corner in style, slightly bent over, his arms extended. Michigan Street had a much steeper pitch than Superior Street, and its blunt curves had donated a number of daredevil bruises to the forearms and calves of both boys. With Jimbo twenty or thirty feet behind him, Mark swung around the corner in exemplary style. Then it took place, the transforming event. Mark saw something he had never really, never quite taken in before, although it had undoubtedly been at its present location through all the years he had been living around the corner. It was a little house, nondescript in every way, except for the lifeless, almost hollowed-out look of a building that had long stood empty.
Knowing that he must have looked at that house a thousand times or more, Mark wondered why he had never truly noticed it. His eyes had passed over its surface without pausing to register it. Until now, the building had receded into the unremarkable background. He found this so extraordinary that he stepped backward off his board, pushed sharply down on its tail, and booted it up off the street. For once, this stunt worked exactly as it was supposed to, and the nose of the skateboard’s deck flew up into his waiting hand. Jimbo rumbled up beside him and braked to a halt by planting one foot on the ground.
‘Stellar,’ Jimbo said. ‘So why did you stop, yo?’
Mark said nothing.
‘What’re you looking at?’
‘That house up there.’ Mark pointed.
‘What about it?’
‘You ever seen that place before? I mean, really seen it?’
‘It hasn’t gone anywhere, dude,’ Jimbo said. He took a few steps forward, and Mark followed. ‘Yeah, I’ve seen it. So have you. We run past that stupid place every time we come down this street.’
‘I swear to you, I have never, ever seen that house before. In my whole life.’
‘Bullshit.’ Jimbo stalked about fifteen feet ahead, then turned around and feigned boredom and weariness.
Irritated, Mark flared out at him. ‘Why would I bullshit you about something like this? Fuck you, Jimbo.’
‘Fuck
