act as the temporary employer of the disguised Arthur McCartney.
Ettore made a series of left and rights—no doubt memorized the map to their house with great precision—and brought us to the edge of a bland street, devoid of trees and sidewalks and, in general, love. This was a flat field that someone had decided would make a good place for five carbon-copy homes, lined up like soldiers, facing and backing a distinct nothingness, a six-year-old’s crayon depiction of rural life.
“That it?” I asked, nodding toward a gray rambler tucked at the bottom of a courtless dead end, to which I never received an answer. I’ve been told the look and life of a house is a reflection of its residents. If that’s true, this house reflected death and disinterest. What landscaping remained alive had overgrown the pieces that had long since perished. The paint on the shutters had chipped and begun to drop in hunks down onto the gnarled bushes below. On the two concrete steps leading to a broken screen door sat three planters holding the stiff skeletons of deceased flowers. This house said on behalf of its residents: What’s the point?
We waited from a secluded distance for an hour, not a word spoken, and the longer we waited the more at ease I became. Who was to say they were even home? I could feel the victory of failure upon us!
I jumped in my seat when the old wooden garage door of the rambler started to yawn, each framed section jerking as the opener tugged on it with all its might. Ettore sat up, leaned forward a little, and an icy smile came over his face that will never leave my memory, a look that suggested he’d visualized the series of moves leading us to checkmate.
A rush of adrenaline pumped through me as we watched their Subaru creep out from the shelter of the garage, obscuring them from view. I hadn’t seen these people since I stole glimpses of them on the New York sidewalk that day as a child. They existed in my mind the way they were then, ageless and blameless and healthy. But I could no longer allow my imagination to have that latitude; after all, here we were.
We followed them to the A&P. And the gray clouds opened.
I watched them from a sheltered point of view a baseball’s-throw distance away at the far end of the grocery store parking lot. It seemed I was always watching them exit automobiles, the closest thing to time travel I might ever experience. But this time, as they emerged from the Subaru, they looked weathered and worn. The father crawled out first and looked around like he was expecting the bullet already fated for his temple, trying to determine from which direction it would come. Rubbing his neck with one hand and coughing into the other, he walked to the passenger side and opened the door for his wife; she, too, looked around as if trying to locate a friend in a large crowd. They were both emaciated, the father having aged two decades in one’s time, the mother thin with clothes hanging off her frame like hand-me-downs from a larger sibling and wrinkles identifiable from our veiled location forty yards away. Arthur scoped the parking lot and through the rain it seemed he lingered on our car. Could he have identified the New York plates from that distance, things might have turned out differently.
Then Melody surfaced from the backseat—and I stopped breathing. Up to that moment, she’d remained a kindergartner in my mind, an everlasting image of all the innocence we’d so cruelly removed.
Unless you’ve got a buddy who serves as an expert at age progression photography at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, there is no way to anticipate the look a child will get when she transcends adolescence, and even if I’d had the skill, I could not have imagined how Melody matured. We were closer in age now—the four-year gap meaning less than it did long ago—and now I viewed her the way a college senior might view a freshman. She wore her chestnut hair short and tucked behind her ears, her skin an unhealthy white. Though she stood as tall as you would expect of a seventeen-year-old, I might’ve confused her for an older girl. And her size and shape suggested she could regularly raid her mother’s wardrobe. She pushed up the sleeves of a loose blue sweater, put her hands