Burntown Read online

  He reaches in so often that he wears holes in the right pockets of all his pants; Aunt Holly gives them patches, stitching silently and never scolding him. She understands loss. She understands longing.

  The elephant is with him when Aunt Holly takes Miles back to his house in Broom Hollow one last time to pack up his things. He goes straight for the garage, finds the gas can, and pulls out a Ziploc baggie with the rolled-up plans. Then, he goes into the house, pulls his mother’s copy of David Copperfield from the shelf (the one she used to hide her cigarettes behind), and stuffs that into his knapsack. He grabs his dad’s trumpet in its case.

  Back at his aunt and uncle’s, he follows the instructions in his spy book that teach you how to turn a book into a hiding place and tucks the plans inside David Copperfield. It goes onto his shelves, blending in with The Adventures of Robin Hood, Treasure Island, The Borrowers, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, A Wrinkle in Time, and a full set of Encyclopaedia Britannica. He shoves his dad’s trumpet under his bed. He gets down on his knees to peek at it each night before going to sleep, the way some kids pray.

  The little brass pachyderm is in his pocket on his first day at Ashford Middle School. Ashford’s an old mill town that’s now a dirty little city with a lot of people out of work, struggling to make ends meet. Even though it’s only twenty minutes away from Broom Hollow, it feels like another universe. He doesn’t mind, though. Aunt Holly and Uncle Howie have a nice little ranch house on the outskirts of town, and they painted their spare room blue for Miles, covered it with glow-in-the-dark stars. They watch over him as he begins to work on his inventions: little clockwork animals made from scraps of wood and metal that wind up, turn their heads, move their paws. He loves connecting the gears, making the inanimate come to life. Working with tools reminds him of his father, of all the hours he spent in his dad’s workshop handing him hoses and washers and screwdrivers.

  Sometimes, he opens up the book he’s hidden the Edison plans in, lays the papers out on the floor of his room. The schematics look almost alien to him, full of bulbs, wires, tubes, little words and numbers scrawled all over them. He wishes his father were here to explain it to him. His father could build this machine.

  He’s looking at the plans the day he hears Lily crash her bike on the street outside while trying to do some Evel Knievel jump. Miles takes in her old football helmet, the crazy red hair sticking out underneath, before running to get a first aid kit for her torn open knee. They talk while she cleans off the blood, then he helps her put Band-Aids on.

  “So why do you live with your aunt and uncle anyway?” she asks. And he tells her, which is weird. He hasn’t talked to anyone about it, but with Lily, the words just come. Lily says her own mother died, and her dad drinks and is rarely around. Her brother, Lloyd, is raising her. He drives a tow truck and can fix just about anything.

  “He’s gifted,” she tells him. “I’m gifted, too.” She digs around in the pocket of her cutoff shorts and pulls out a clear blue marble. “It’s my miniature crystal ball,” she tells him.

  “What do you do with it?” he asks.

  She holds it to her eye and looks through. “I see things with it. Things other people can’t.” She turns toward him, still looking through the marble.

  “What do you see?” he asks.

  “Sometimes good things, sometimes bad,” she says, tucking the marble back into her pocket and squinting at him in a funny way, like she knows something she isn’t saying.

  Miles pulls the elephant out of his pocket and shows it to her. “It was my mother’s,” he tells her. “She had it on the day she died.”

  He tells her the story of the elephant, the same story his mother told him just days before she died. He’d noticed her new bracelet and asked her about it. His mother had smiled and said there was a story that went with it.

  “Once upon a time,” he tells Lily, recalling each detail of his mother’s story, “in far-off India, lived a beautiful golden elephant. But see, the elephant wasn’t really an elephant: she was a princess who had been turned into an elephant by a sorcerer who had this big fight with the girl’s father, the king.”

  Lily’s eyes widen. “So what happened to the princess? Did she stay an elephant or did she find a way to break the spell?”

  “My mother said that she’s out there still. Waiting for someone to break the curse. And you know the worst part?” Miles asks. “The worst of it is that the princess is the only one who can break the spell. She carries the secret inside her but doesn’t know it.”

  Lily smiles. “That part doesn’t seem sad to me. It’s like…like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, you know? She had the power to go back home the whole time, but then she wouldn’t have gone on the journey; she wasn’t ready to go home, right? The princess, she’ll figure out how to break the spell when the time is right. And then, think of it, what an amazing story she’ll have to tell people. All about being an elephant.”

  She asks him if they caught the man who killed his mother, and he says no, but he’s going to find the killer himself one day.

  Lily pulls out her marble again, looks through it. “You will,” she says, “I can see it.”

  “What else do you see?” he asks, and she only smiles, puts her little crystal ball away.

  He has his first kiss with Lily, two years later, and when he starts going over to her house every day after school. Lily’s brother, Lloyd, turns out to be about the coolest person Miles has ever met, and the three of them eat dinner together all the time. Lily cooks—Kraft macaroni and cheese, tuna casserole, hot dogs and beans.

  “Lil told me about what happened to your parents,” Lloyd says one night. “I’m real sorry.” Miles isn’t sure what to say, so he only nods, looks down at his empty plate, at the ketchup smeared across it like blood.

  Lloyd shows Miles how to solder and build an AM radio receiver; how to take an engine apart and to ride a motorbike. Also, it’s Lloyd who gives Miles his first beer, a Narragansett, and shows him how to crush the can when he’s done, like Quint did in Jaws. Lloyd teaches him to drive a stick shift out on the old roads by the river.

  The day Miles gets down on his knee and asks Lily to marry him, he pulls out the ring from his pocket, where it’s been riding around next to the elephant for days. They’re out at dinner at an Italian place Miles can barely afford. He’s just finished grad school. They’ve been living together in a tiny hole-in-the-wall apartment near the paper mill. When Lily says yes, he kisses her, puts the ring on her finger, then touches the elephant to say thank you.

  It’s there, in the pocket of his good khakis the day he’s teaching his Sociology 101 class at the college and Lily calls to say she’s in labor—“The baby’s coming!” His car is out of commission—needs a new alternator that they just can’t afford—but Lloyd picks him up in the tow truck from the garage he now owns. They run all the lights on the way to Mercy Hospital. Miles gets there just in time to welcome his firstborn into the world.

  The elephant is there, listening, as Miles and Lloyd stand on the slushy sidewalk outside the hospital smoking cigars that are a little crushed from riding around in Lloyd’s pocket. Miles thinks of the exploding cigarettes he once made, how back then, he’d thought smoking was the most evil thing in the world. He knows better now, as he stands, happily puffing his cigar; knows there are far worse things. Miles has pulled the elephant out, and is holding it in his hand, giving it a thank-you rub.

  “What’s that?” Lloyd asks, exhaling a puff of smoke.

  “My good luck charm,” Miles says.

  Lloyd stares at it for a minute, then says, “Do you have any idea how lucky you actually are, Miles?”

  And Miles says, “Yes.”

  Yes, yes, yes.

  And all along, each day, from the time he is ten until he is a grown man, a husband and a father—in spite of how lucky he feels; how he knows in his logical mind that he has everything he’s ever dreamed of—Miles wishes the elephant could speak. Could tell h
im where it came from. Who had given it to his mother. And what the killer had said that last day that had made her smile.

  He knows he should let it go, but he can’t. And sometimes, after his wife and newborn baby are fast asleep, he slips into his office, pulls the book down from the shelf, takes out the Edison plans, and thinks, What if he built the machine and it actually worked? What if the dead could speak? What if he could finally have the answers he’s been looking for all these years?

  Miles

  OCTOBER 31, 2000

  Halloween. A day for spooks and the spooky. And the day, he’s heard Lily say, when the veil between the worlds is thin. “Ghosts walk on Halloween,” his wife told him once with such surety that of course he believed. Which makes today the perfect day for turning on the invention.

  Lily made little Eva a ladybug costume: a red fleece suit with wings and black felt dots sewn on. She’s taken her to the children’s Halloween parade downtown. Afterward, there’s a party at the library with games, a magician, apple bobbing.

  So Lily and little three-year-old Ladybug Eva are off to see the world of parades full of Barneys, princesses, and pirates. They’ll bob for apples with vampires and ghosts. And it gives Miles the whole afternoon and evening to test the machine.

  About six months ago, Miles and Lily bought an old farmhouse out at the end of Birchwood Lane, a winding, dead-end dirt road that runs along the east side of the river. It’s a thirty-five-minute commute to the college, but Lily could no longer stand to stay in downtown Ashford, where you could smell the sulfur smoke from the paper mill and see the poisoned film on the two rivers, which people said you shouldn’t swim in either unless you wanted to grow extra fingers. They’re full of toxic sludge, ruined from the decades of chemicals and dyes and dioxins that have been dumped by the mills. The Jensen Mill, machine shop, and foundry have been closed forever—Two Rivers College, where Miles has studied and now teaches, is housed in the old foundry building—but there’s a paper company that still runs, still stinks. The EPA has cracked down, so they’re not dumping as many chemicals into the river these days. They’re putting their waste in barrels that are carted away and become some other town’s problem. Lily said she didn’t care—Ashford was filthy and full of poisons. She wanted to be out in the country in a house with a yard and gardens and space for little Eva to play. Miles built Eva a sandbox. Put up a swing set. His little girl could spend hours swinging.

  Miles is in his workshop now, a little aluminum-walled garden shed in the backyard, puffing on his pipe (a joke gift from Lily in honor of his first teaching position). He looks at the brass elephant, which he’s given a new home by a favorite photo of his mother. In it, she’s on the couch holding a book, and the photographer (his father) has caught her by surprise. She’s smiling, but slightly startled, her mouth open.

  Miles is writing his PhD dissertation about the little brass elephant; not the elephant exactly, but the ideas inspired by the elephant and the story his mother once told him. The Princess and the Elephant: A Sociological Study of How Personal and Cultural Stories and Myths Shape Individuals and Society.

  Miles lets himself believe, at times, that some piece of his mother is trapped inside the charm, as with the princess trapped inside the body of the elephant in the story. He strokes its tiny brass back, the curve of its trunk, remembering how many times he’d stared at it wishing that it would tell him what he wanted to hear.

  But now maybe, just maybe, he’s found something that might. It’s Halloween, after all. What better day for a conversation with the dead?

  He looks down at the machine laid out on his table: tubes and wires, coils and capacitors, pieces scavenged from old radios or bought from eBay. He has spent the past four months building Thomas Edison’s secret machine. He has worked in his shed with the door locked and the plans spread out before him, telling no one what he was doing. When Lily asks, he tells her he’s just tinkering: building more mechanical animals like the windup metal raccoon she loves so much. He’s thought of telling Lloyd, of showing him the plans and asking for help, but this is something he needs to do on his own.

  He knows what his friends and colleagues at the college would think if they could see him now. He’d be out of a job, probably. “You can’t be serious, Miles,” they would say. “You can’t possibly think such a thing would work.”

  But he would argue. Say, “If you had plans believed to truly be from a secret machine of Thomas Edison’s, wouldn’t you build them? Wouldn’t you want to see for yourself?”

  Now, he’s just making adjustments, fine-tuning things. But really, there’s nothing left to fine-tune. The machine is a near-perfect replication of the one drawn in the plans. It has taken months of trial and error to get to this point, but now, at last, everything looks perfect. So what he’s really doing as he tightens tubes, rechecks connections, is stalling. He’s not sure what he’s more afraid of—that it won’t work (which is, his rational mind tells him, the most probable result)? Or that it will?

  And what if it does work and actually gets through to her?

  He’s gone over it a million times in his mind. How he’ll finally say what he’s waited all these years to tell her:

  I’m sorry.

  I’m so sorry I couldn’t save you.

  He closes his eyes and he’s a ten-year-old boy again, dressed up as Robin Hood, feeling the arrow leave the bow, the red feathers brushing against his right cheek, watching it go right into the back of the Chicken Man.

  He touches the elephant one more time for luck, flips the on switch, watches the machine glow. He adjusts knobs, turns the volume all the way up. He hears the dull crackle of static, the way you do when you’re between radio stations. Then, he takes the handheld receiver and speaks into it.

  “Hello,” he says tentatively.

  The crackling changes, he thinks he hears something behind it: voices, people talking, calling, laughing from far away, as if at a distant party.

  “Hello,” he says, louder this time. “Anybody there? Can you hear me?”

  It feels idiotic, pathetic, even: a grown man talking into a cobbled-together radio, hoping for a response.

  “Elizabeth Sandeski?” he says, voice tentative. “Are you there?”

  All he hears is his own heartbeat. Then, a crackling from the speaker.

  She’s here, a male voice says, clearly. We’re all here.

  Miles flinches back, nearly drops the receiver. Then, from the machine, he hears someone saying his name.

  “Mother?” he says, fearful. “Are you there?”

  Yes, a voice comes back, louder and female, swimming through waves of electrical interference. It’s a voice he recognizes. A voice he’s heard in his dreams.

  His heart jolts, and what he says next isn’t what he’s planned for and rehearsed, but it’s what he most needs to know.

  “Who is he, Mother?” Miles says into the machine. “Who murdered you?”

  A dull roar of static.

  “Please,” he says.

  And then, in a crackling whisper, she tells him.

  “No,” he says, voice trembling, stomach churning. “That’s not possible.”

  She repeats the name, and then, she’s gone. He fiddles with the knobs, calls for her again and again, but there’s only static.

  And he knows what he must do.

  He turns off the machine, covers it up with a tarp, and, hands and legs shaking, goes to find the man who killed his mother.

  Miles

  APRIL 12, 2011

  “Miles, I’m worried about the rain. The radio says the worst is yet to come. Flood warnings for the whole county. And if the dam goes…we’ll be underwater in minutes. There won’t be any warning.”

  Lily’s wrapped in one of her chunky, hand-knit sweaters, and her hair is held back in an untidy ponytail. She still looks lovely, but there’s a certain light in her green eyes that comes on only when trouble is brewing. There are dark circles under them now; she hasn’t been sleepi
ng well these last few days, not since the rain began.

  He takes her hand, kisses her knuckles, which smell of turpentine. She’s been working in her studio, doing a new series of paintings of the moon on huge canvases. She’s showing the moon in all its phases in a series she’s calling Birth, Marriage, Death, Rebirth. She’s taken to referring to the moon in her painting as She. Miles got her a telescope for Christmas and Lily spends hours looking through it, studying the moon and all her craters and shadows, trying to bring the far-off stars into focus. Miles has suggested that she take an astronomy class at the college, but Lily prefers exploring on her own, giving her own names to things.

  “The dam will hold,” he promises her now. “That dam has seen far worse storms than this.”

  Their house is miles and miles downstream, on the east side of the river. Right in the floodplain—as the mortgage company was quick to point out whenever they demanded proof of his flood insurance. But it’s never flooded. The dam, originally built by William Jensen to harness the power of the water for his mill back in 1836, has always held. The river has never crested more than a few feet above the banks, even in the years they’ve had heavy spring melts and ice dams.

  He sops up the last of his soup with a hunk of Lily’s homemade bread. The kids are in the living room with the TV on, some police drama turned up loud, the whole house echoing with sirens and gunshots. Errol and Eva are on the floor below it playing cribbage on the oval rag rug. Eva is ahead and is teasing Errol mercilessly about it.

  “You’re going to get skunked,” she says.

  “Am not,” he says.

  “Smell that, Er? That’s the smell of a big old skunk coming your way.”

  He gives her a playful shove. “It ain’t over till it’s over, Little E,” he says.

  She pretends that she hates the juvenile nickname, but Miles knows she secretly likes it. He’s always amazed at the bond these two have, at how unconditionally they love each other. At how much Eva worships her older brother. At how she never seems to remember a time when he wasn’t there, when he wasn’t one of the centers of her universe.