Mary Lynn
By
Two years after her daughter Mary Lynn died in the car crash that also killed her husband, Christina Blum stood outside a Circle K convenience store and called her son’s name as loud as she could. Heads turned lazily toward her, as though a screaming woman on the edge of this nowhere town were a regular sight. The gazes drifted away after a half-hearted look. No one said anything.
Her forest green Suburban was still parked at pump four, parallel to her. The passenger door was open. She had already checked the back, thinking maybe he’d crawled under the luggage. Too much luggage for two people. They were only spending two days inSt. Louis, for God’s sake. Why had she packed this many bags? He didn’t need that many toys. He didn’t even play with half of them.
“Have you seen Hunter?” she asked an overweight local passing her. The other woman, pinch-faced and sunburned, glared at her, pulled away. Bitch, Christina almost said, then turned to the woman’s husband, equally large and red, and said, “Please, have you seen Hunter?”
“I’m a hunter,” he said. His smile was quick and lifeless.
“My son,” she said. “Please, my son, he was right here.”
The man shrugged, moved to catch up to his wife, who hadn’t waited for him. “We just pulled in for a Diet Coke,” he said. “Sorry, ma’am.”
Two years ago, Christina had run a similar path around the crime scene. That’s what she called it, the crime scene, though her husband had been the only driver, and too much ice the only culprit. He had spun the wheel too sharply and the car went off the road into a pylon. They were supposed to keepChicagostreets clearer, or they were supposed to put up warnings, or they were supposed to make brakes and tires with winter in mind. Weren’t they? Christina had cried her daughter’s name, had shouted it, slipping on the ice, falling into the gathered cars, and no one had helped her. No one connected her or her words with the accident.
“Maybe he went to the restroom,” someone called out, and Christina had to stop and turn around and try to find the voice. A man standing next to his motorcycle, smoking a cigar, was watching her. He said again, “Maybe he went to the restroom.” When she stared at him, he added, “Your son?”
She nodded and ran back inside, but the clerk told her the restrooms had an outside entrance out back, and no one had asked for the key. He gave her one anyways, and she tried it out before realizing he’d given her the women’s key. She went back and he gave her the men’s key just to get her away from the customers. The men’s room was dimly lit and narrow. There was no one in there.
Out front, the biker was gone. A middle-aged man in a baseball t-shirt came out of the store and said, “Ma’am, what’s wrong?”
“I can’t find Hunter,” she said. “He’s not here.”
“Your dog?”
“He was in the car and I told him to wait there. I thought maybe he went to the restroom but he didn’t. I don’t know where he is.”
The man nodded. “Well.” Then: “Your son. Your son is missing.”
“Did you see him?”
The man was balding. Sweat dripped down his broad forehead. He wiped it out of his bushy eyebrows, down around his ears and along the back of his jaw line. The gesture was curiously effeminate.
“I don’t know,” the man said. “I’ve been here about ten minutes now, so maybe I did? What’s he look like?”
She described him. Eight years old, two years younger than his sister was when the accident happened. Blond hair, like hers, but cut short, like in the Army. She couldn’t remember the shirt he was wearing: was it his dinosaur shirt, the one with the long-necked thing whose name she couldn’t remember, or the Star Wars shirt with the cartoon characters? Or maybe it was his White Sox shirt, he didn’t like baseball but he wore the clothes because everyone at school did. Cargo shorts, beige. And he only had one pair of shoes, black and white Nikes with white socks, because she wouldn’t let him wear any other color.
The man thought. He didn’t look at her while he thought, but stared across the street. There was a Cracker Barrel there, the parking lot mostly empty this late in the afternoon. Seeing the restaurant made the McDonald’s Christina had eaten earlier surge upwards. She fought back the grease; her throat stung, but she kept the bile down.
“Well,” the man said, but he didn’t say anything else. His face was pinched. People walked around them; a car swerved wide to avoid them. The convenience store was busy for such a small town. Maybe because the Interstate was only a mile away. That brought more people, didn’t it?
She said, “Did you see him? Please, did you see him?”
“I think so,” the man said, and he wasn’t sure, he was doubting his words even as they were uttered. “I mean, well, maybe I did. I just glanced out the window, you know, and I saw a little boy getting into a pickup. A big black one. I remember thinking, ‘God, that truck is so big, or that boy is so small.’ He just climbed up in there, though, like he’d done it a million times before, so I didn’t think any more about it.” He met her eyes, looked away immediately. “He had blond hair. I remember, he looked like a little G.I. Joe.”
“A truck?” she said. “Why would he get in a truck?”
The man shrugged. He wished he hadn’t said anything. She could read him that easily. Some people, you just knew what they were thinking, and it was usually for the best that you didn’t.
“I could be wrong,” he said. “I sometimes am.” He turned as if to go, then said, apologetically, quietly, “It went that way.” He pointed away from the Interstate. The road went north until the town died away and only the pavement and countryside was left.
Christina turned from the man and went back to the Suburban. The passenger door was still open; she closed it gently, as though Hunter were still inside. She walked around the front of the vehicle calmly, opened the driver’s door and got in. The clerk came out and shouted at her. People turned and watched. When the clerk yells, you pay attention. A clerk is the authority at a convenience store, and you have to pay attention to authority figures. It wasn’t until she was out on the road and heading north that she remembered she hadn’t paid. It was just a memory, a notation. Your birthday is April twenty-second and you forgot to pay for your gas. She’d also left the jellybeans on the counter. She could picture them, spotted, looking mildewed and rotten. They tasted better than they looked, Hunter told her, but she had never tried one.
Mary Lynn had also liked jellybeans, but she preferred the regular kind, where the red tasted like strawberry and the purple tasted like grape. The bigger ones, juicer. Christina could eat those. She and Mary Lynn used to eat them all the time. Her daughter had had some with her that night, a small bag wedged into the pocket of her winter jacket. The candy had survived the crash.
The jellybeans in the convenience store had been for Hunter, who would never climb into a stranger’s truck, he knew better, he was ten. By that age you know not to trust strangers. Hunter knew. She’d made sure he knew and it just wasn’t like him to do this. Maybe that man was wrong. Of course that man was wrong. But she kept driving.
Christina had never liked driving. Her husband had always driven, and then he died and she’d had no choice. After two years she still wasn’t confident, even less so here. She was used to the packed city roads; this empty two-lane highway was foreign, disturbing. Where was the other traffic? Christina gauged how she was driving by the cars around her. She went the speed they went. She stayed in the lanes they did. She belonged on the interstate, one of countless motorists relying on reach other for navigation and protection. It was like driving in the city, except faster and without the buildings. Christina didn’t like it, but it was better than this, corn on either side of the road, giving way to smaller plants—soybeans?—and then corn again. How was she supposed to tell where she was?
She was driving fast, interstate speeds. The truck had a head start. Surely it was going fast, too. You don’t pick up a child who isn’t yours and then meander away. Maybe that was why she couldn’t see it. There were no cars ahead. She could see far, the road was straight and narrow, and she saw nothing.
She’d seen nothing that winter night two years before, either. Her vision had been blurry, and not just from the tears. She’d gotten the call, someone had called, they knew who owned the vehicle and they’d called her but they didn’t know what she looked like, and when she’d pulled up and seen thePontiaccrumpled like that, everything disappeared. She remembered words, noises. Her own voice, other voices, none speaking to her, shouting at each other. Over here. Over there. Stretcher. Ambulance. Jesus. Questions, a lot of questions, hers among them.
Why had he gotten into that truck? Sunlight reflected off the Suburban’s hood, into her eyes. She blinked and swerved, tires churning gravel. For a moment, everything stopped. Her heart, her lungs, her body ceased to move. One moment. And then she was back on the road, and the truck still wasn’t ahead. Where was the truck? If she could just find it, if she could just know—
Something beside the road. Something curled up. She knew. She was several yards away, approaching too fast to see clearly—but she knew. She hit the brakes, swerved wide into the other lane. The Suburban skidded past, but she didn’t take her eyes off that spot. White and beige. Black and white shoes. Blond hair. “Hunter,” she said, and the Suburban whipped around, perpendicular to the road, and came to a halt.
She hadn’t put on her seatbelt. She opened the door and jumped out, and even as she ran to her son, she went numb, because she hadn’t put on her seatbelt. That was why she hated her husband. She had loved him but now she hated him, wouldn’t even speak his name, wouldn’t even think it if she could avoid it. He hadn’t been wearing his seatbelt because he never did, and he hadn’t bothered to check if Mary Lynn had put hers on, either.
She’d gone flying out the windshield. They told Christina this afterwards: Mary Lynn had been flung out the windshield, like a bullet, straight through the glass that wasn’t supposed to break like that. They didn’t know what had killed her: the windshield as her head struck it, glass slicing he face and throat and body, or her skull crushing against the pylon. One of the three, they said, and they shrugged because it didn’t matter which. One of the three, and a seatbelt would’ve prevented all of them.
Her husband’s neck had been snapped by the airbag. That also wasn’t supposed to happen, they told her. This was afterwards, after someone identified her slumped against the back of thePontiac, unconscious. They found her ID and realized who she was and took her to the hospital. Her, not her husband or Mary Lynn. She’d woken up and her parents had been there, and also a policeman, and he’d explained it to her. Everything. And then a doctor, and then a different policeman, and then an insurance man, a whole parade of them, everyone telling her what’d happened. Just to make sure she knew. They didn’t want any doubts.
Mary Lynn had been found on the hood of thePontiac. Curled up, they told her. Fetal position. Like a baby, her baby. Hunter was curled up at the side of the road. He was looking at her as she approached, his eyes were open, brilliant blue, but he didn’t get up, and when she knelt beside him and pulled him against her he yelped and tried to squirm away. She dug her fingers into his t-shirt, into his back, just to make sure he was there.
“Why,” she said, and somehow it came out as an actual word. “Why,” she said again, and then again.
“I jumped out,” Hunter said. He was crying now, she felt his tears on her neck.
“Why.” She stroked his hair, too short. He needed longer hair so she could stroke it properly.
“He looked like daddy. I thought…I thought…I jumped out.”
She pushed him away from her, looked at him. His face was cut from where he’d landed. His left ankle looked strange. She held him away from her for a moment, one hand on each shoulder. Then she pulled back her right hand and slapped him. Once. Hard. Then she pulled him back against her.
“Oh,” she said. She rocked him and thought of Mary Lynn’s body, the way they’d described it to her, so she’d know. She cried too, except this time when she opened her eyes she could see everything clearly, every stalk of corn and speck of gravel and dot of blood. She looked back the way she’d come, at the emptiness she’d driven through. The road stretched on for miles, and Christina could see all of it. She wished she couldn’t.
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