Mrs. P
Mrs. P
T his beautiful girl.
Ebby hugs Mrs. P the way she always does. Her face in the curve of Mrs. P’s neck, as if she were still a little girl and not a woman a head taller than Mrs. P. Same height as her granddaughter Ashleigh. Same age. She’s glad that Ebby still keeps in touch with Ashleigh. When Ebby hugs her like this, she thinks of her granddaughter, too. Mrs. P looks over at Ed. She can tell from the look in his eyes that they’ve been thinking too much about the past.
Mrs. P knows all about that. Thinking about the past. Wanting to undo what they can’t.
When your neighbors gave you the keys to their back door, this was not what any of you had in mind. You didn’t know that being a good neighbor, being a friend, would lead to what it did that day in 2000. What you had in mind was letting the kids inside if they’d locked themselves out. Or checking on the house as a favor while the Freemans were away. You did not imagine seeing a van speeding away from their home. You could not, in a million years, imagine what would come after.
You hadn’t seen the van in the driveway beforehand. From your garden, you could see only the Freemans’ backyard and part of the street that led away from the house. You remember noting the ripening corn and squash in their vegetable patch, and a late-summer brood of wild turkeys hobbling after their mother as she picked at crab apples.
You’d been gathering seeds with your husband and taking note of the number of turkey poults for the government’s wildlife survey. Wild turkey populations had been way down in the 1970s. Non-existent, really. But they’d been improving ever since. And just as you were thinking, Now there’s a hen with six poults, the entire lot of birds jumped and scattered, chirp-chirp-chirp-chirp-chirp . That was the first sign that something was wrong.
When you hurried next door and found the front door open, you ran straight into the cool, cedar-scented hallway that led toward the stairway. You knew this house almost as well as you knew your own home. The sun-filled living room was to the left, and farther down, the tiled kitchen and a guest bathroom. But you stopped, now, at the study, to the right. This was the long, book-lined room where Ed Freeman worked. This was where you found the children.
Little Ebby was kneeling on the floor and pushing, pushing, pushing at Baz’s blood-soaked arm, as if to rouse him from a deep slumber. A cordless telephone receiver lay on the ground, and you could hear a voice squawking from it. You picked it up. On the other end was an emergency dispatcher.
“Yes,” you said. “My name is Adelaide Pitts. I’m a neighbor.” You felt your chest constricting. “A friend of the family.”
Only later, as you put your arm around Ebby and followed the police officers out of the room, did you notice the broken pottery on the floor. It was that olive-colored, open-mouthed thing that the Freemans loved so much. A real piece of Americana. In all these years, in its journey from south to north, in its sojourn in this room within frequent reach of young children, the jar had never been damaged, but there it was now, its belly split open on the floor.
By the time your neighbors gave you the keys to their back door, you were already a grandmother. You had given birth to your first child the week Martin Luther King, Jr., was killed, which also happened to be the year the U.S. registered its highest death toll ever in the Vietnam War. You’d had your second child the year Nixon resigned, having suffered a miscarriage once before that. And your granddaughter was born the year the Hubble Space Telescope was launched, the World Wide Web was formally proposed, and a paleontologist found the fossilized skeleton of a Tyrannosaurus rex, which later bore the scientist’s first name, Sue.
By the time you first hung the Freemans’ house keys on the hook near your kitchen door, you thought you’d seen it all. The Freemans were the first black family that had ever lived in your section of town. They turned out to be a lovely pair. And you couldn’t help but grow attached to their children. Their second-born had been the cutest baby. Sure, you thought you’d seen it all, but you hadn’t. What happened to the Freemans changed everything. After that day, you and your husband sold the old house and moved away.