They met at their curbs when hauling garbage, or on one another’s front porches. In the shadow of that ominous and active hole, their chitchat degenerated. The things they’d been worried about, the deep-down disquiets about their parents’ health and their children’s futures and their jobs and this falling-apart world, began to erupt.
Margie Walsh carped to Cat Hestia and Nikita Kaur about the state of things. About women’s rights and that poor girl in Buffalo who’d been beaten to death by fraternity brothers. She scratched invisible itches along her fingers when she spoke, her querulous voice uplifted. “Don’t you even care?” Margie asked a surprised Cat Hestia, then narrowed her gaze to Nikita Kaur. “I suppose you’d have us all in those ridiculous burkas if you could.”
Nikita, whose mom had taught astrophysics at the Indian Institute of Space Science and Technology at Trivandrum, India, was at a loss for words. Cat Hestia changed the conversation, fast, but Nikita stayed stuck on it, her body rooted, her face flushed. “Sikhs don’t wear burkas,” she said, even as Margie kept talking, tears in her eyes, about how unfair it is for girls in college. They go out into the world expecting adventure, and the patriarchy eats them.
Linda Ottomanelli fretted over her boys, following them from room to room as if, without her, they’d disappear. Jane Harrison wondered if she ought to educate the students at her preschool about sinkhole preparedness. Fred Atlas continued his morning jogs despite the heat. He had so much to run from. Sick Bethany watched from her shut window, looking out. To her, the hole was an especially terrifying thing.
More than anything, the Ponti men feared impotence. And so, they had a frank discussion. They felt it was their obligation to say out loud what no one else would admit: the child was dead. There was nothing to do but help those who’d loved her most. Fritz Sr. seemed ill-equipped for the task, so they inducted Dominick Ottomanelli and Sai Singh into their club. Like heroes, these men devised all variety of scenario in which to protect the Schroeder women from having to see Shelly’s body, once it was finally raised.
A week passed. Rescue crews descended with less urgency. Engineers inserted hydraulic pistons and shields to prevent the hole from collapsing, and their ropes stretched deeper and farther as they dove into surprisingly cold water. When they climbed back out in black wet suits like spacemen, their hands were always empty.
Ten days missing. The heat wave continued, straining the power company past its limits. Brownouts turned to blackouts, making the people of Maple Street glisten. Trapped on that crescent, their thoughts circled and distilled into the simplest expression of worry.
Shelly Schroeder, Shelly Schroeder. Where are you?
They thought her name in a constant loop and it didn’t just mean Shelly. It meant hope and life and death and community. It meant the future and the steady ground beneath their feet. It meant their validation and their justification. It meant their fear and their joy. It meant everything.
The girl became mythic and tragic, and they thought they’d found her on a Wednesday evening, drifted a quarter mile along an underwater stream. They felt the kinetic energy, heard the sirens, the calls through bullhorns. They stumbled out through front and back doors, even Peter Benchley in his wheelchair. They circled the hole’s lip just as darkness set, and they bore witness as people in a community are supposed to do.
Shelly Schroeder, Shelly Schroeder.
First emerged three men in wet suits. They rolled out, apparatus weighing their hinds, flashlights bleaching the dark. These handed their ropes to another set of men, who attached them to a winding crank where more men turned the wheel. The rescue crew peeled off their second skins with solemnity. The crank got stuck. The men crawled to the hole and leaned on flattened bellies. They freed a black zipped bag and hoisted it to the bitumen-rich surface.
“Back away. It’s not her,” the lead crewman shouted. But they knew this couldn’t be true. It had to be her. The bag was too big to be anything else. They gathered, the news crews among them. Dominick Ottomanelli, Sai Singh, and the Ponti men pushed to the front. Using their bodies as barricades, they protected the Schroeders from the sight.
Pushed to the back, the Schroeders’ only son, FJ, found Larry Wilde alone. In his nervousness, Larry had tucked Robot Boy inside his green shorts. FJ approached with such slow, heavy steps that it seemed his body was a weeping sponge.
“Freak. Should have been you.”
While the Ottomanelli children and the entire Harrison family heard this cruelty, none corrected. They would later bristle at the memory, thinking they should have.