LYNDEE ANTHONY is a liar. I am standing behind her, chewing on a piece of my hair as she pays for her Virginia Slims at the Quickie Mart. Knick Knack is hitting on her in that pothead sort of way, where he laughs at everything she says and punctuates his sentences with ‘damn.’ He sees the SpongeBob fob on her keychain and asks if she has any kids.
Oh my God, Knick Knack, I want to say. Don’t you watch the damn news? I wait for her to break down; I even hold my breath as I imagine her tear ducts opening, releasing the full force of her pain. Instead she laughs and coyly shakes her head no. No? I am still in shock and trying to work out her angle when she leans over the counter to grab her change from his hand. Maybe she doesn’t want anyone to know she’s Nevaeh Anthony’s mother. Maybe she’s tired of the looks, and words, and the pity. Knick Knack holds her change just out of reach so that she has to jump for it. He’s watching her chest with the rapt attention of a man watching his dinner approach. She seems to be enjoying the play—doe-eyed Lyndee Anthony, who can make Bambi look like a stone cold killer. Playing and flirting like her little girl isn’t dead.
That’s the moment I decide she’s a liar. And if she can lie about not having a kid, a kid who’s goddamn dead, what else is she lying about? Maybe I’m being too hard on her. I entertain the thought that she’s pretending to be someone else to escape. When Knick Knack has his fill of her bouncy breasts, he hands her the change, and she giggles all the way out the door.
“That’s Nevaeh Anthony’s mother, you shit,” I tell him.
He plucks a box of healthy cigarettes off the shelf and scans them under the gun.
“I know,” he says.
I balk at him. “Well, she lied about having a kid,” I say, handing over my money.
“I know.”
“So the flirting and the questions?”
Knick Knack shrugs. “Why not?” He hands me the pack. “You want to know my professional opinion?” he asks, lowering his voice and leaning his elbows on the counter so that he’s close to my face.
“She got rid of her kid. Wasn’t no stranger that took her.”
The pothead gas attendant is the first one to voice my thoughts. I glance over my shoulder to see if anyone else is in the store.
“Why do you think that?” I hiss, tucking the cigarettes into my back pocket.
“My cousin works with her at the car wash,” he says. “My cousin has a little girl, you know. About the same age as Lyndee’s kid. My cousin was saying that she couldn’t go to this party her friend was having because she didn’t have anyone to watch her daughter. Lyndee told her to slip the kid half a sleeping pill. Said it’s what she did when she wanted to go out.”
I stare at Knick Knack, sour dread curling in my stomach.
“I gotta go,” I say. I am halfway to the door when he calls out to me. “Hey, Maggie!”
“Margo,” I say.
“You look good, girl! I’d hit that.”
I roll my eyes, but there is something so deeply satisfying about that, You look good girl, I have to smile.
I am walking down Wessex when I realize I bought cigarettes, and my mother is in a jar in the corner of her old bedroom.
The Bone has one grocery store, two gas stations, and a peppering of small businesses like Fat Joe’s Burgers and the FUN! FUN! ARCADE. You’re bound to run into the same face more than once a week; at least, that’s what I tell myself as I follow Lyndee up and down the streets of Bone Harbor.
It’s not until I follow her from the bus stop to Wal-Mart one night that I realize the extent of my obsession. I trail her through the brightly lit aisles with a blue basket looped on my arm, as she piles things into her cart in a hurry: a package of bologna, two liter bottles of Pepsi, a giant jar of pickles, and a bag of green apples.
Every day she eats her apple as she sits at the bus stop, thin slices in a plastic baggie that she pulls out of her purse. I walk past her on my way home from the Rag, studying the bag of apples beside her on the bench. Watching as she sits hunched over her cell phone, her thumbs darting across the screen.
Lyndee was with her boyfriend, Steve, the night Nevaeh went missing. They made dinner and stayed home to watch a DVD: macaroni and cheese—the Kraft kind—and Transformers.
The more I see Lyndee Anthony, the stranger I feel. I see her on her porch some nights when I walk home, drinking Mike’s Hard Lemonade with Steve, music pounding from the overly juiced stereo inside. I watch carefully for her grief, but it never comes. At least not for my eyes. But I can’t tell anyone, not even Judah. My mother had the same look about her—the deer in the headlights vulnerability. I buy a box of Gushers, like the ones Nevaeh used to eat on the bus, and take them to Judah’s house. We eat them on his porch as we watch the rain.
“I’ve never seen her cry,” I say about Lyndee.
“Everybody deals with their pain differently,” Judah says.
I suppose he’s right.
“But shouldn’t you cry? Just a little. Or at least look sad?”
He sucks the candy off his teeth and looks at me seriously.
“They found my tumor when I was five. I had to have surgery to remove it. The doctor did a shitty ass job and there was nerve damage.”
He runs his hand over his face, and suddenly the cocky joker is gone, and I can see all of his shadows. “God, the therapy … no little kid should ever have to be that sick. My mom was there all the time. Every day. They had to make her leave to sleep and shower. But, not once did I ever see her cry. That didn’t mean she wasn’t suffering.”
That’s the most Judah’s ever said about what put him in the wheelchair. It wasn’t a car accident like the kids at school had guessed. I remember him as a little boy. He used to run around the front yard naked, shrieking until Delaney would catch him from behind, and tickle him into a fit of laughter. Sometimes I used to see him working in the dirt with her, planting things.
Then one day he just stopped being in the yard. I never thought much about it until school started. He would have been in the same kindergarten class as me, except he never showed up on the first day of school, or the second, or the third. Then a few months later, when I was walking home from school, I saw the chair. It was on the porch, empty, but spoke volumes. Something had happened. Something. But what?
When I asked my mother, she said that he’d been sick. He had to go away for a while, and now he was crippled. I didn’t know what cripple was until I went to school the next day and asked my teacher, Mrs. Garret. Then the wheelchair made sense. Judah couldn’t use his legs anymore. I tried to imagine what it would be like. His house didn’t have stairs like mine, but how did he get in the bath? Get out? Who put his pants on in the morning if he couldn’t stand up to do it himself?
I imagine his mother does it for him, my mom said when I asked. I watched him really carefully from then on, not because I thought he was a freak like the other kids. Because I didn’t know how he could be so different and still always be smiling.
I finish my bag of Gushers and crumple the wrapper in my fist. How did I even end up here, on Judah’s porch? We’d never spoken a word to each other, and now, here I was every day.
“Hey,” he says.
“What?”
“You look different lately.”
I laugh a little. “Lately? As in the two months you’ve known me?”
“Awe, come on. We’ve lived on the same block since we were little. We might not have known each other’s names, but…”
“Different how?” I ask. My palms are sweating. I look like a murderer, that’s what. But what does he see? Can he see the blood on my hands?
“Like you don’t give a shit anymore,” he says.
I don’t.
“I remember watching you walk to school. Every day. First grade through twelfth. You reminded me of a rat.”
“Whaa?” I spin around, and he pretends to flinch like he’s afraid of me. He’s laughing when he says, “You scurried around like you were afraid of everything. Hiding behind the hood of your raincoat, sneaking looks at the world like you expected it to take your cheese.”
“It did take my cheese, fool.” I laugh.
“Well, you don’t do that anymore. You’re gangsta now, with your Groceries & Shit bag, and your blue Docs, and your defiant walk.”
“You’re dumb,” I say, though inwardly I wonder how right he is, and when exactly I stopped being a rat?
“I like this new look on you, Margo the lion,” he says.
What Judah doesn’t say is how much weight I’ve lost since I broke up with Little Debbie and her crew. Fat rat lost a few pounds. And I stopped chopping my hair off every time it grew past my chin. So, now it’s shoulder length, and it reminds me of dying grass—pokey and yellow.
I wonder if he saw those changes, and not just the ones that happened on the inside. The fact that my lips aren’t buried in the dough of my cheeks, or that I actually have long legs once the cottage cheese deposits melt away. Or maybe he’s one of those saintly people who only looks to the inside of others and doesn’t see their doughy arms and freckled double chins. He’s just a cripple kid, I think. Who cares what the poor, cripple kid thinks of you? But I do. Because pot-smoking, Judah Grant is the best human I’ve ever known, and I can’t even pinpoint why. I listen to Alanis Morissette on my headphones all night and pretend I don’t have a crush on that smiling fool.
“You listen to white girl music,” Sandy tells me the next day. I’m singing “Uninvited” as I empty garbage bags in the stock room. “And on top of it, old white girl music,” she says.
“I am a white girl,” I say, putting an ugly ass shirt into the ugly ass shirt pile.
“Yeah, but you have to stay current and shit. Listen to some Miley Cyrus or somethin’. That bitch is a ‘Wrecking Ball’!” Sandy cracks up, and I frown. I don’t have a radio, car, or television. I use my mother’s old CD player and listen to my mother’s old CDs.
“And why you singing anyway? You in love or something?”
“Ugh, Sandy! Go away and manage something.”
“I’m managing you, girl,” she laughs. “You’re different lately. I like that.”
I stare at the wall after she walks away. Why does everyone keep saying that? And yet no one … NO ONE has said anything about the fact that I’m not a walking Honey Bun anymore.
I make it two more weeks, covering Lyndee Anthony’s shortcomings with Judah’s words. Everyone grieves differently.
But it’s her laughter that changes everything for me.
I no longer see her as Nevaeh’s mother, because, after all, Vola Fields was Mo’s mother, and that didn’t give her a minute of pause when she beat him. I see her instead as a possibility. Is there a possibility that she is tied to Nevaeh’s death? Her boyfriend? Her negligence? Her hands?
Nevaeh looked at me with years in her eyes. She had the young, fresh face of a child, the kind that should always be suntanned, and dimpled, and kissed, but instead her eyes held all the years of a seriously damaged adult. I hated the world for her. I wished someone had seen the years in my eyes when I was her age, and loved me for them. I hate that her father didn’t claim her, not even when she went missing, and then only when he could get something out of it. I hate that nothing can be done about the suffering of children, and that most of the world blocks out their suffering to cope with their own inability to help. The few who carry the burden, like social workers and teachers, become weary, burning out after only a few short years, forced to carry the weight that should be shared by a society. Children are vastly overlooked. Their importance underestimated by their size.
In my eighteen years I’ve heard the phrase children are resilient in passing, half a dozen times. But in books they tell you that a child’s personality is set by the time he is four years old. That gives parents a four-year window to mold and love accordingly. And thank God that my mother still loved me when I was four, that she only kept her distance later in my life, with the sum of who I was already set like a wobbly Jell-O mold. I can be shaken; I can have a mother reject me over and over, and still I remain someone who is accustomed to love, enough to still seek it out. I desire a deep connection because I have had a deep connection. Reject me, and I’ll look elsewhere. I’ll just cast less and less of my pearls before swine each time.