Thunderstruck & Other Stories Read Free Page A

mother is calling his name on the next block. Soon she’ll phone the police.)
    “What’s your name?” Joyce asks.
    He says, “I don’t know.”
    “You don’t know your name?”
    He shrugs. He looks at his foam-filled hands. Then he says, “Johnny.”
    “What’s your last name?”
    “Lion,” he says. He drops his face in the bubbly bath water, plunges his head down, and blubs.
    When he comes up she says, smiling, “Your clothes are filthy. You’re going to need clean ones. Where were you?”
    “Trunk.”
    “Of a
car
?”
    “Trunk like a suitcase,” he answers. He pounds the sliding glass shower door, bored with questioning.
    It’s after school. Mrs. Mackers, the owlish pincher, is back on Winter Terrace, asking the neighborhood kids if they’ve seen Johnny, the little boy, the little boy on the trike. She doesn’t know where Santos is, either, but Santos is old enough to take care of himself (though she’s wrong in thinking this—Santos even now is in terrible trouble, Santos, miles away, is calling for her). The last teenage boy she asks is so freckled she feels sorry for him, a pause in her panic.
    No, Gerry Goodby hasn’t seen a little kid.
    He’s looking up at Missy’s window; he always looks at it when he comes home, shouldering his lacrosse stick like a rifle. He didn’t remember to pull down the blinds all the way before closing the room up and it always bothers him. You can see the edge of the dresser that overlaps the window frame, a darkened rainbow sticker, and just the snout-end of an enormous rocking horse named Blaze who usedto say six different sentences when you pulled a cord in his neck. Blaze had been Gerry’s horse first. It seemed unfair he had to disappear like that. Someday, Gerry knows, they’ll have to sell the house, and the new owners will find the tomb of a six-year-old girl pharaoh. It’s as though they’ve walled in Missy instead of burying her in the cemetery, as though (as in a ghost story) he will someday see her face looking back out at him, mouthing,
Why?
Gerry, in his head, always answers,
It’s not your fault, you didn’t know how dangerous you were
.
    But this time he sees something appearing, then disappearing, then appearing again: the rocking horse showing its profile, one dark carved eye over and over.
    Not only that: the front door is open.
    The barrier cloth has been slit from top to bottom. Beyond it is the old door with the brassy doorknob still bright from all its years in the dark. Beyond the door is Missy’s room.
    “Hello,” says his mother. She’s sitting on the bed, smoothing a pair of light yellow overalls on her lap. There’s a whole outfit set out next to her: the Lollipop brand underpants Missy had once written a song about, a navy turtleneck, an undershirt with a tiny rosebud at the sternum. The dust is everywhere in the room. It’s a strange sort of dust, soot and old house, nothing human. Even so, compared to the rest of the house, this room is Oz. The comforter is pink gingham. The walls are pink with darker pink trim. Dolls of all nations lie along one wall, as though rubble from an earthquake has just been lifted from them. The50-50 bedclothes are abrasive just to look at. He inhales. Nothing of Missy’s fruit-flavored scent is left.
    But his mother doesn’t seem to notice. She has—he’s heard this expression but never seen it—roses in her cheeks. “Look,” she says, and points.
    A boy. He’s fallen through the chimney or he’s a forgotten toy of Missy’s come to life. What else can explain him here, brown and naked next to the rocking horse he’s just dismounted, a gray towel turbaned around his head. He’s pulling two-handed at the cord that works Blaze’s voice box, but Blaze has had a stroke and can’t speak, he just groans apologetically before the boy interrupts him with another tug. Through the half-drawn shades the police lights color Winter Terrace: blue, less blue, blue again.
    Outside, the neighborhood