Having failed once more to get Miranda to let him in, Byron stood in front of Crolley’s house. Crolley sat on his porch, watching The Tyra Banks Show. Byron reached down and picked up a handful of gravel from the side of the street. He flung the gravel at Crolley, pebble by pebble. Crolley ducked down behind his TV, covering his head and neck with his arms.
Bree rushed from her house and slapped the rocks from her brother’s hands. “Grow the fuck up,” she said to him. Brother and sister looked at one another a long time, their chests heaving, and when they looked back at Crolley’s porch, he’d disappeared inside, but they knew he was watching them from the window. Bree squeezed Byron’s wrist, and he put an arm around her shoulder and they walked back to their house.
In the days that followed, as the leads in the case began to dry up like parched creeks, Byron didn’t return his buddies’ phone calls and went to work only to do paperwork—orders, inventory. Before the disappearances, he preferred to be out front, joking with his employees, flirting with customers, but now he chose to do the lonely administrative work and then ride his Vespa home. He always stopped by Miranda’s twice a day. Sometimes he didn’t even say anything; sometimes he only stood outside her open bedroom window and listened for a few minutes to her tossing and turning in her bed. As he rode through downtown Harrisonburg to and from work, every towheaded white kid made him look twice, made him slow his scooter, the names of the vanished boys ready on his tongue.
During the summer, Miranda had taken Josh and Dusty to work with her, and while she managed the doll store, the boys spent hours wandering the mall or playing video games at the arcade for free because the employees knew them. But when she and Byron started dating, she’d asked him to watch the boys when he didn’t have to work. The boys reminded Byron of his late mother’s blue-eyed white porcelain cherubs, which Bree carefully removed from the living room curio cabinet and dusted every month. Byron liked Josh and Dusty, their silence, the ease with which they seemed to accept him, to accept everything.
“You got tattoos?” Dusty asked him once, as they walked to Kline’s for ice cream. When they returned to the house, Byron showed him the barbed wire around his bicep and the word VIDA written in gothic letters on his back. The boy had nodded as if he had suspected as much. When Byron took them to Purcell Park or to see a movie, they didn’t jump with excitement, but followed him with an ancient patience, as if they had done and seen everything, but were willing to try it again. Because they were so good, Byron regarded them with a kind of reverence. He thought he deserved more trouble, deserved rebellious children resenting that this black man might replace their father. The boys were so good that he could only think of them as little cherubs. They made him feel as if he were doing something very right, that he himself was good. It was the same way with Miranda. For a long time, he had felt like Bree’s burdensome brother, but with Miranda, he was responsible for things, and he made plans and carried them out.
He realized he could leave the boys, run an errand, and return to the house to find them in the same spot where he’d left them, absorbed in whatever activity they busied themselves with, as if they didn’t notice or care about his absence at all. So when Miranda suggested Crolley could keep watch from his front porch, Byron had agreed.
There would come a day, sooner than he might expect, when Byron would forget to cross to the pink house, knock on the door or stand in the shrubs, and whisper Miranda’s name. That day, the rain would fall on the yellowed leaves outside his cracked window, and the smell of it—the cold rain and the dying leaves—would wake him, and he’d shiver a little, roll over, and slap his radio alarm, even though it hadn’t gone off. Music would fill the room—Curtis Mayfield’s “The Makings of You”—and Byron would remember a distant morning, his mother humming the song in her yellow kitchen, stirring pancake batter. He’d get up then and teach himself how to make pancakes. He’d be surprised at how easy it was.