Mislaid & The Wallcreeper: The Nell Zink Collection

Her father guffawed.

“Are you getting a divorce?” her mother asked.

“Not so far.”

“Do you have a lawyer?”

“I’m not getting a divorce, so why would I need a lawyer?”

“Lee’s out there right now, deceiving you with some two-bit hustler,” her mother said earnestly. “I don’t remember you signing any premarital agreement. He’s going to have to settle something on you. We’ll force him.”

“You and what army? I’m telling you, I cut out of there with no forwarding address. If I go to a judge, Lee will get custody of Mickey, too, not just Byrdie. I couldn’t make Byrdie come along. He didn’t want to, not with a choice between me and the Playboy of the Western World. Now name me a judge Lee’s not related to. I wouldn’t touch a court of law with a ten-foot pole. Screw me over, fuck you. Screw me twice—”

“Watch your language, young lady!” her father interrupted.

“Anyhow, he’s broke. He won’t have a cent until his mom buys the farm, and that’s going to take forty years. If she dies first, his dad marries some deb and we never see a cent.”

Peggy’s mother took Mickey by the hand and stood in the archway to the dining room, making as though to take her someplace else to play, but not wanting to miss anything. “Let’s play boats,” Mickey said.

“I don’t have boats. I guess you don’t have boats anymore either, now that you don’t live on Stillwater Lake.”

“Mommy made the lake fall down. Now we play boats in the yard.”

“Where are you living, honey?”

“We got a pyramid, and blue butterflies!”

“Where do you live?” Peggy’s father said, addressing himself to Peggy.

“Rented house,” Peggy said. “Nothing special.”

“Where?”

“I’d rather not say. I don’t want Lee serving me with papers.”

“I’m concerned about you, honey.”

“I can make my own decisions.”

Her father laughed. “I noticed! Do you have a phone, where we can call you?”

“Not in the house. There’s a party line at a bait shop.”

“You should get a phone for safety. Just list it under a fake name.”

Peggy stopped off at her dad’s churchyard to let Mickey play. The church was one of the oldest in the country, nearly square, with gated pews shining pale green and the Ten Commandments in loopy gold script on alabaster tablets at the front. Austere, creaky, ancient. She picked up a bench and let it fall. The echo ricocheted off the walls and made Mickey jump. They walked around the outside, stroking the soft salmon brickwork with its tracery of lime and the dark pottery of the glazed headers. In the graveyard a solitary angel kept watch over a boxwood. Broken columns—the oldest graves. The next era, bas-relief willows and skulls. Then cast-iron crosses. Then the newest graves, granite monoliths. The names were always the same. Except for one. The cemetery had apparently been integrated. A cluster of mauve plastic roses poked up from the foot of a tiny mound. At the head was a temporary marker, a cross made of unfinished pine, already weathered, reading karen brown 1970–73.

Peggy remembered the Browns. A nice black family who lived on the school property like her parents. Not neighbors exactly, but close by. And here they had lost a child like Mickey. A child who ought to be older than Mickey, but would always be younger. How sad. She looked at her daughter, and then she did something terrible. She drove to the courthouse, to the county registrar, whom she knew, and said, “Morning, Lester!”

“Miss Peggy! How do you do?”

“Fine, thanks. It’s beautiful out! My dad asked me to come down here. He’s doing Leon Brown’s back taxes and now the IRS says they need a birth certificate for their little daughter that died. Because of the deduction. He didn’t want to ask Leon for it.”

“Ain’t that a shame.”

“Her name was Karen.”

He fired up the Xerox machine and dug around for his notary stamp, then pulled out a hanging file tabbed with a B.

In the car on the way home, Peggy glanced at Mireille repeatedly and said, “Karen. Karen? Karen. Karen.”

“Who’s Karen?”

She poked her in the side. “You are Karen! You can’t go to school with a boy’s name like Mickey! You have to have a girl’s name, and your girl’s name is Karen. Karen Brown. My girl’s name is Meg. Meg Brown. Meg and Karen Brown.”

“We’re girls,” Mickey said.

“You bet your sweet rear end we’re girls!”

Three (#u1d1a47f1-b656-51b0-9961-20ecc5449042)

Where the yard ended, the pines started. Among them were old ruined houses, just humps left of their two brick chimneys, and little burial grounds. They were popular destinations. Along with thin slabs of marble, some still standing, they had beer bottles, mattresses, and old car seats. The nearby ponds had their banks trampled down from fishing.

Every time they came back from a voyage of discovery, Peggy would examine her house carefully from the deep cover of the underbrush on the edge of the yard. But there was never any sign that anyone had dropped by. No tire tracks in the mud.

Peggy had not forgotten the intellectual and social ambitions she had started life with only a decade before. Years so weary and routine laden, they seemed like a single year that had repeated itself. She wanted to be creative and self-reliant. Her plan was to be a successful playwright. With her earnings from royalties she would one day have a comfortable home again, worthy of Mickey and Byrdie. Though she had her doubts about whether Byrdie would visit, or even want to talk to her, and how all that would make her feel.

First she had other things to attend to. She had saved housekeeping money for years in a sock and had enough to spare to buy provisions. They were not big eaters. They would need a kerosene heater and lamps, but not until the fall. First renovations were in order. She nailed down linoleum to keep from falling through rotten places in the floor. There was a fair-sized gap in a corner of the kitchen, under a dead boiler that sat flaking rust. She discovered the hole when a possum crawled out and startled bumbling around like a fool. Luckily she had a broom and could herd it back down into the crawl space.

The lawn never needed mowing because of the standing water. The bug situation was correspondingly dire, but no worse than the Mekong Delta, as some poets called Stillwater Lake. Still, she fixed the screen doors before she covered the cesspool. That was the obvious order of priority. She acquired a camp stove to heat water. It was easy to sell Mickey on the virtues of simple foods that require no cooking or dishwashing, such as potato chips and cocktail wieners.

She set up her portable typewriter on the table. She would write under a pseudonym as did the Brontës. Anne, Emily, Charlotte, and Branwell. Also known as Acton Bell, Ellis, Currer, and—did the boy Brontë even write? Or just drink himself to death?

She couldn’t remember. She had no place to look it up. She had snagged some books of plays on her way out the door: Shaw, Hart, Synge. She hadn’t thought to take the one-volume Columbia Encyclopedia.

It didn’t matter to her plan. She could still copy the basic principle. Publish under a fake name while dwelling in the lonely fastnesses of the moors. She wasn’t clear on what moors were, but the Brontës made them sound every bit as damp as Tidewater. As well as freezing and tubercular, but that wasn’t her problem. She would be the Brontë of warm, malarial moors, the dramatist of the Great Dismal Swamp.

After the big money started coming in, she would move to New York. From her picture window above Astor Place, Mickey and Byrdie at her side, she would laugh at Lee’s creaky house, his stagnant lake, his noblesse oblige pseudo-income.

Lee had distractions, what with his work at the college and keeping track of where Byrdie was at any given time (students were lined up to babysit and passed him like a baton), but he got a judge to issue a warrant. The charges: kidnapping, reckless endangerment, vandalism, and something about the welfare of a child.

The judiciary was happy to help. The police were not so responsive. Lee called them several times a day, wondering where they were. He wanted them to take copies of Peggy’s fingerprints. She hadn’t stolen any money when she left. Ergo, he surmised, she would soon embark on a life of crime, endangering Mireille’s safety in a criminally insane manner.

But the sheriff and all his deputies seemed to regard Peggy as a grown woman with a right to run away. And who would have expected her to abandon a little daughter? It troubled them more that she hadn’t taken the son.

As they fantasized (a primary investigative tool of law enforcement) freely and at length about her motives, alone or over drinks with friends, the sheriff and his deputies consistently came to feel that getting her son away from Lee ought to have been her first priority.

After they finally came and went, Lee dragged himself around the house to eradicate all traces of her. Clothes she hadn’t worn in ten years. Light reading for ladies such as the Foxfire books and Virginia Ghosts. Her Mirro omelet pan, open admission of her inability to make an omelet. Cher records. They all went into the trunk of a beat-up Volvo and from there into a Dumpster at a wayside. Except the Cher records, which he abandoned on the shoulder of a deeply shaded back road, to make sure no one would suspect he had anything to do with them.