The Book of Air and Shadows

dust. Bingo, thought Crosetti, the name on the postcard, and examined the child with interest. He was a good-looking kid, if a little too thin, with wide-spaced intelligent-looking blue eyes, and a thin-lipped mouth whose genetic provenance Crosetti thought he knew. His hair was cropped so short that it was hard to tell what color it was.
    Crosetti said, “My name’s Al. Look, Emmett, would you like to help me out with something?”
    The boy hesitated, then nodded. Crosetti took an enhanced printout of Carolyn Rolly’s photograph from his back pocket, and unfolded it for the boy.
    “Do you know who these women are?”
    The boy studied the photograph, his eyes wide. “That’s my mom and my aunt Emily. She used to live with us but she died.”
    “
This
is your mother?” Crosetti asked with his finger on the younger Rolly.
    “Uh-huh. She run off. He locked her in the cellar but she got out. She got out at night and in the morning she wasn’t there. Where did she go, mister?”
    “I wish I knew, Emmett, I really do,” said Crosetti absently. His mind had been set whirling by the boy’s appearance and this confirmation of his guess, and his belly churned with tension. To his shame, what he was thinking of was the single night he had spent with Rolly and what she had done and what he imagined she had felt, and whether she had done the same for her husband, that brutal man, in the bedroom of this crummy little house. A powerful urge seized him, to get away from this place and also (although this would be more difficult) to vacate the place in his heart occupied by the person he knew as Carolyn Rolly. He was sorry for the children, stuck with this father, but there was nothing he could do about that. Another blot on Carolyn’s record.
    He started to walk away and the boy called out to him, “Did you know her? My mom?”
    “No,” said Crosetti, “not really.”
    He got into his car and drove off. The boy ran forward a few steps, with the photograph flapping in his hands, and then stopped and was lost in the dust of the road.
    Crosetti found a McDonald’s and had a Big Mac, fries, and a Coke. He finished the junk and was about to order more but checked at the counter. He ate when he was upset, he knew, and if he didn’t watch it he was going to look like Orson Welles, without that person’s early achievement to balance out the flab. He tried to calm himself, an effort hampered by the fact that he’d somehow lost his MapQuest driving directions and made a couple of wrong turns on the way back.
    When he was on the right interstate at last, he composed in his head the script of the film
Carolyn Rolly
; not a bad title, and he could probably use it without a release because Mrs. Olerud had probably fabricated her name too. Okay: brutal childhood, use that, the girl-in-the-cellar angle, although maybe the uncle’s serial rape business was a little too X-rated. Let’s make Uncle Lloyd a religious fanatic who wanted to keep his niece from the corruption of the world. He dies or she escapes and there she is at seventeen, say, knowing nothing, having had zero contact with mass culture, a little homage to Herzog’s
Kaspar Hauser
there. There’s some local celebrity around the weird case, and let’s say the cop who found her falls in love with Carolyn, he falls for her purity, her innocence, and marries her, which she goes along with because she’s all alone, she knows nothing about how the world works, and they set up house. He’s a control freak, a cop after all, Crosetti knew guys like that on the cops, but she submits, and that’s the first act.
    Then we show her life, she has the kids and then she starts taking them to the local library, where she meets the wise librarian and the librarian turns her on to art and culture and it lights her up, and then there’s a traveling exhibit of fine books that the librarian gets her to go to without her husband’s knowledge, maybe they go to Chicago (they would shoot it in Toronto, of course), and she realizes she wants to make books, she wants books all around her, but what can she do, she’s got two kids, she’s trapped, but she decides to apply for a bookbinding course by mail and her husband finds out and beats her up, and after that it gets worse and worse, and he locks her in the cellar just like her uncle did, and she escapes and that’s the second act. Then in the third act she goes to New York and…no, you couldn’t do that, the male lead has to