A Map of the World - Jane Hamilton [164]
I imagined Carol feeding Norman and Robbie, Anthony and Tommy, hot dogs with Day-Glo orange cheese spread from a can in zigzags over the wiener. She might think that she was a good mother, to be able to reproduce, exactly, down to the last zig, the picture on the can. Although she could well have had a bright kitchen with an island, sparkling copper pans, framed prints of fruit, I pictured her in a poorly lit room with dark cabinets and a red sheen, nearly a glow, coming from a fake brick wall. “What do you boys think of the school nurse, that Mrs. Goodwin?” she might have idly asked as she poured them Hawaiian punch on an afternoon only days after Lizzy’s funeral.
“She’s mean!” Norman would say. “She pulled my tooth out.”
“She pulled your tooth out? She went in and yanked out your tooth?”
“She held me hard around the stomach, I couldn’t get away, and then she reached in and dug my tooth out. It wasn’t even loose, she probably would have taken all my teeth if I didn’t scream and run away. She has a pair of pliers, a gigantic pair of pliers in her desk drawer.”
“I always kick her,” Robbie might have offered.
“Does Mrs. Goodwin do the same awful things to you that she does to Robbie?”
“She rips my pants off of me,” Robbie would have shouted, giving them a quick demonstration. “My mom says we’re going to get a pile of money from her because she did that. She killed a girl, too!”
“Put that thing back in where it belongs!” Mrs. Mackessy might have said, in anger, before she realized that the school nurse had made a little exhibitionist out of him. “Come here, Pumpkin,” she said, going to him, putting her arms around him as he stiffened.
“She did that to me once,” Anthony Jenkins cried, remembering the time his sweat pants were torn clean through and I had him take them off so I could clean the wound.
“More chips, boys? Soda? Anyone ready for a Twinkie?”
Robbie, still within the circle of his mother’s embrace, said, “We’re going to be so rich, my mom says we’ll get a sports car, the kind with a roof.”
“What did she do to you, Anthony? I can’t believe this—She’s hurt other boys too—”
Robbie burst from her arms, charging at the back door, shouting, “Them cars go ninety miles, varoom—”
“Slow down, tiger—”
From the porch, through a small window, he called into the kitchen, “She licked my pee-pee!”
“Did she do that to you boys?” Mrs. Mackessy asked. “You don’t need to be afraid to tell. When someone touches you, and hurts you, like Mrs. Goodwin has, it is so important to tell someone. We know it’s happened. We know what she is. You only have to say one little word and we’ll know the rest. There were days”—she was getting upset now, having to blink away the tears—“when she wouldn’t let me take Robbie home. We all know what she is! Only you can help do the important job of making sure Mrs. Goodwin never sees another boy, never hurts another one of you. It’s your job to help us get her. This town will be so thankful to you four boys because you saved us from a person who is disturbed, twisted.”
“It’s starting to make sense,” I said to Rafferty, knowing that as far as proof went, Mrs. Mackessy in her kitchen was as solid as a hallucination.
“Do you think Lizzy’s death tied into the charge?” Rafferty asked. He always waited for my answer with his chin resting on his folded hands. I never thought, until afterward, that he was getting paid for his time, that my reveries were costly. Still, his questions, his watchful eye, forced my memory.
“Was it something specific that triggered the charge?” he probed.
It was as if he had the power of the hypnotist, that he need only snap his fingers to make me sleep or wake. I could see into the hospital lounge right after Lizzy had been brought to the emergency room; I could see Mrs. Mackessy in her chair leafing through a magazine. I had forgotten that she’d been there. She had been with me, like a shadow, while I waited to hear. I had been dripping wet, and I had sat on the edge of the sofa, doubled