NOS4A2 A Novel

Various Locales


IN A FEW MONTHS, THE INCIDENT OF THE LOST BRACELET WAS LARGELY forgotten, and when Vic did remember it, she remembered finding the thing in the car. She did not think about the Shorter Way if she could help it. The memory of her trip across the bridge was fragmented and had a quality of hallucination about it, was inseparable from the dream she’d had of dark trees and dead dogs. It did her no good to recollect it, and so she tucked the memory away in a safe-deposit box of the mind, locked it out of sight, and forgot about it.

And she did the same with all the other times.

Because there were other times, other trips on her Raleigh across a bridge that wasn’t there, to find something that had been lost.

There was the time her friend Willa Lords lost Mr. Pentack, her good-luck corduroy penguin. Willa’s parents cleaned out her room one day while Willa was sleeping over at Vic’s house, and Willa believed that Mr. Pentack had been chucked into the garbage along with her Tinker Bell mobile and the Lite-Brite board that didn’t work anymore. Willa was inconsolable, so torn up she couldn’t go to school the next day—or the day after.

But Vic made it better. It turned out that Willa had brought Mr. Pentack along for the sleepover. Vic found it under her bed, among the dust bunnies and forgotten socks. Tragedy averted.

Vic certainly didn’t believe she found Mr. Pentack by climbing on her Raleigh and riding through the Pittman Street Woods to the place where the Shorter Way Bridge had once stood. She did not believe the bridge was waiting there or that she had seen writing on the wall, in green spray paint: FENWAY BOWLING →. She did not believe the bridge had been filled with a roar of static and that mystery lights flashed and raced beyond its pine walls.

She had an image in her mind of riding out of the Shorter Way and into a darkened bowling alley, empty at seven in the morning. The covered bridge was, absurdly, sticking right through the wall and opened into the lanes themselves. Vic knew the place. She had gone to a birthday party there two weeks before; Willa had been there, too. The pine flooring was shiny, greased with something, and Vic’s bike squirted across it like butter in a hot pan. She went down and banged her elbow. Mr. Pentack was in a lost-and-found basket behind the counter, under the shelves of bowling shoes.

This was all just a story she told herself the night after she discovered Mr. Pentack under her bed. She was sick that night, hot and clammy, with the dry heaves, and her dreams were vivid and unnatural.

The scrape on her elbow healed in a couple days.

When she was ten, she found her father’s wallet between the cushions in the couch, not on a construction site in Attleboro. Her left eye throbbed for days after she found the wallet, as if someone had punched her.

When she was eleven, the de Zoets, who lived across the street, lost their cat. The cat, Taylor, was a scrawny old thing, white with black patches. He had gone out just before a summer cloudburst and not returned. Mrs. de Zoet walked up and down the street the next morning, chirping like a bird, mewling Taylor’s name. Mr. de Zoet, a scarecrow of a man who wore bow ties and suspenders, stood in the yard with his rake, not raking anything, a kind of hopelessness in his pale eyes.

Vic particularly liked Mr. de Zoet, a man with a funny accent like Arnold Schwarzenegger’s, who had a miniature battlefield in his office. Mr. de Zoet smelled like fresh-brewed coffee and pipesmoke and let Vic paint his little plastic infantrymen. Vic liked Taylor the cat, too. When he purred, he made a rusty clackety-clack in his chest, like a machine with old gears, trundling to noisy life.

No one ever saw Taylor again . . . although Vic told herself a story about riding across the Shorter Way Bridge and finding the poor old thing matted with blood and swarming with flies, in the wet weeds, by the side of the highway. It had dragged itself out of the street after a car ran over its back. The Brat could still see the bloodstains on the blacktop.

Vic began to hate the sound of static.