The picture of the boy who looked like Drew had stood on the windowsill, above the sink, tucked behind three or four others. There was the frame on top of the microwave, clean silver with a beveled edge, but it held an Asian girl aged about twelve, in a plaid Christmas dress with violin at port arms.
“Where is he?” She shook the frame at Harry. “Where is he, who is he?”
Harry took the frame. He turned her to face the opposite wall of the kitchen and guided her to the middle, and there he was, the serious blond boy beside the gleaming piano. Drew. Not Drew. So much alike. “I told you last time. That’s my son, Ted, when he was seven.”
“It looks just like Drew.” Not quite. Drew’s eyebrows were straight, as if drawn with a ruler, but this boy’s eyebrows lifted in a curve of slight surprise, giving him a look of mild and pleasant eagerness, as if someone had unexpectedly given him candy.
“Everybody says so,” Harry said. “Everybody who’s seen him. I never saw him. I used to go over there, in between tenants, and call him and call him, and he never came.”
“Then why don’t you live in the house yourself?”
“When we lived there, my wife saw him. Teddy was six. She got scared. She went back to her family in Australia. Whenever I’m in the house, Drew goes after Ted.”
“In Australia?” And she’d thought she could escape by driving to the beach.
“He’s got kids. My grandchildren. I can’t live in that house.”
“Burn it. Tear it down.”
“You think that’ll stop him?”
“Maybe.” But if Drew didn’t have a home of his own to return to, maybe he’d go to Australia, a cuckoo in Ted Rakoczy’s nest. “I don’t know.”
Harry put an arm around Lacey’s shoulders and urged her back to the table. As she drank her cocoa, her right hand worked the tissue, her thumb rubbing and rubbing along the oily dent in the felted paper. “So he’s still calling himself Drew?” he said. “You know he’s lying, because Junior survived?”
“Eric found out. I wondered if he was the father. Andrew Senior.”
“He was an artist. Andy Halliday. He was my best friend in high school. He drew that picture, Dora with her violin. She was fifteen . . . oh God, fifteen. I have students older than that. Sixteen when they got married. They had to. You had to, back then, if you got a girl in trouble. Not in some places, but in Greeneburg you still had to.”
“What did they do?”
“He enlisted right out of school and broke both his ankles on an obstacle course in basic. Dora was seventeen and Junior was a baby then.”
Injured in basic training and discharged, still wearing his crew cut nine years later. Lacey felt a remote pity, like an archaeologist finding a mummified murder victim. A tragedy, so long ago. “What did they do?”
“He went to college, got a teaching degree. She waitressed all those years, put him through school. Twelve hours a day on her feet and a baby every year.”
Greeley Honeywick broke both her ankles and lost her feet. Lacey put Eric through school. The house knitted them together, all their lives in the same pattern. The same life, repeating itself in fragments. Mosaic, pastiche, collage.
“He never forgave her,” Harry said.
“He never forgave her? She did everything for him!”
“And he couldn’t get over it. Those years when she was earning and he was in school. I sent them money, but they wouldn’t take it. So young and so proud. Andy was a hard man and he got harder. His students hated him.”
Lacey wasn’t surprised. Her students were too young to hate their teachers, but she knew of people who’d left the classroom forever, driven out by the mob revulsion of middle-school and high school students. The stories, repeated by older faculty to student teachers as cautionary tales, always ended with the failed teacher entering some more lucrative field. And he got another degree and became an accountant, but he never taught again. She checked her watch. If the contractions kept coming every half hour, she was due for another in four minutes or so. “What did he do?”
“Beat up a kid. So he was fired, just after Dorothy was born. Dora went back to work. I sent them two thousand dollars, all the money I had on hand. They never cashed the check. Next thing I knew, they were all dead except Junior. Margaret and I moved down here with Teddy. And then, well . . .” Harry opened his long fingers. “You know the rest.”
Lacey sat back, thinking. “My mom’s friend Jack,” she said, “the guy they took away in the ambulance. He was trying to help. Greeley says it’s been tried before.”