The neighborhood association explicitly warned every new family to avoid Mr. Henderson. The bitter, 78-year-old widower kept his yard surrounded by a chain-link fence, yelled at children who rode their bikes too close, and always kept his heavy curtains drawn. When a sudden, violent tornado siren sounded on a Tuesday afternoon, five-year-old Emma was separated from her mother in the chaos. Terrified and soaked by the driving rain, Emma pounded on the nearest door. Mr. Henderson opened it. The imposing man looked down at the crying child, quickly pulled her inside, and locked the deadbolt. When Emma’s frantic mother finally tracked her down an hour later, she expected the worst. She pounded on the door, prepared to fight for her daughter. Mr. Henderson opened it calmly. As the mother rushed in, she froze in the hallway, staring at the walls of the widower’s brightly lit living room, which were completely covered in something nobody on the street could have ever imagined.
The Room With No Bare Wall
Children.
Hundreds of them. Maybe more.
Lindsay Pruitt stood on a rubber doormat that said WIPE YOUR FEET in letters worn almost blank, rain running off her hair and into her collar, and she couldn’t make her legs go any farther.
Every wall of the living room was covered in small paintings. Watercolors, each one about the size of an index card, pinned edge to edge from the baseboards to the crown molding. No frames. Just pushpins, the cheap colored kind, red and yellow and green.
And every painting was a kid on a bike.
A boy on a red Schwinn with a banana seat. A girl with pigtails and streamers on her handlebars. A kid in a Chicago Bears jacket standing on his pedals. Two brothers on one bike, the little one on the pegs, his arms around the big one’s neck. Some of the paint had gone yellow. Some looked like it was still drying.
Under each one, in small, careful pencil, there was a name and a date.
Kevin M. – June 4, 1981.
Tracy Doyle – Aug 19, 1994.
the twins (Brett & Bryce?) – Sept 2, 2003.
“Mommy.”
Emma was sitting on the carpet in the middle of the room in a man’s gray sweatshirt that went past her knees, the sleeves rolled up six or seven times. She had a Dixie cup of apple juice in one hand and a purple crayon in the other. In front of her was a stack of printer paper and a coffee can full of broken crayons.
“Mommy, he has a closet with a flashlight in it.”
Lindsay crossed the room in maybe two steps and grabbed her. The juice went everywhere. Emma said “Hey” in the offended way she said it when you turned off a cartoon.
Behind them, Mr. Henderson shut the front door and threw the deadbolt again.
Lindsay turned around with Emma clamped against her chest.
“The wind,” he said. He pointed at the door with two fingers. “It’ll pull it right open. Latch on that one’s been bad since the eighties.”
He was bigger up close than he looked from across the street. Wide through the shoulders, a little stooped. White hair cut so short you could see his scalp. He was wearing a flannel shirt buttoned all the way to the top and he had a dish towel over one shoulder like he’d been doing dishes when the world started ending.
“She was in the hall closet the whole time,” he said. “Interior wall. No windows. I sat outside the door so she wouldn’t think she was locked in.” He looked at the wet spot on his carpet. “I’ll get that.”
He didn’t move to get it.
Lindsay’s heart was going so hard she could feel it in her teeth.
What Pam Sloan Said at the Welcome Basket
They’d moved onto Larkspur Court in March.
Lindsay, Emma, and Lindsay’s husband Greg, who drove a regional route for a beverage distributor and was in Terre Haute that Tuesday, which Lindsay would bring up in arguments for months afterward.
Pam Sloan from the neighborhood association had come by the second day with a wicker basket. Banana bread, a magnet with the trash schedule, a list of approved mailbox colors. Pam was in her late fifties, sunglasses on top of her head at all times, and she talked the way some people drive, with one hand on the wheel and no blinker.
“Okay, and then 114,” she’d said, nodding across the street at the little brick ranch with the chain-link fence. “Don Henderson. You just. Don’t.”
“Don’t what?”
“Engage.” Pam made a face like she’d bitten foil. “He screamed at my nephew last summer. Screamed. For riding on the sidewalk. On the public sidewalk, in front of his house. The kid was eleven.”
Lindsay had laughed a little, the polite laugh. Every street has one.
“I’m serious,” Pam said. “Keep your girl off that side. He’s been like that since before I was born.”
And for three months, it had been easy to obey. You barely saw him. The curtains on 114 never opened, not once, not even on the nice days in May when everybody else had their windows up. The lawn was cut short and square. He got his mail at 11:15 every morning in the same flannel and went back inside.
Then, three weeks before the siren, Emma had gotten a pink bike with training wheels for her birthday.
Lindsay had been on the porch with her phone. Emma had been wobbling up and down the sidewalk, and she’d gotten going pretty good on the slope by the Hendersons’ mailbox, and the front wheel had drifted toward the curb, toward the street, and the door of 114 had banged open.
“HEY. HEY. YOU GET BACK UP ON THAT GRASS.”
Emma had dropped the bike right there and run home crying.
Lindsay had stood at the bottom of her own driveway and yelled something back. She didn’t remember exactly. Something like Don’t you ever talk to my kid. Something about calling somebody. She remembered her hands were shaking so bad she couldn’t get the bike’s kickstand down after.
He’d just looked at her. Then he went back in and shut the door.
So when the siren started at 3:40 on a Tuesday afternoon, and the sky over the Kroger parking lot went the color of a bruise, and Emma, who’d been playing in the yard while Lindsay ran the trash cans back up the driveway, panicked at the noise and bolted, Lindsay ran the wrong way. She ran around the back of the house because Emma always hid by the air conditioner unit.
Emma was not by the air conditioner.
An Hour Is a Very Long Time
Lindsay would never be able to explain the next hour to anyone in a way that made sense.
She checked under the deck. She checked the Kowalskis’ garage, which was open. She screamed Emma’s name into rain that was coming sideways and hit her face like gravel. A branch the size of a canoe came off the maple in the Doyles’ yard and landed on their minivan. She found one of Emma’s sandals in the gutter at the end of the cul-de-sac and sat down in the water and could not, for a minute, stand back up.
A police cruiser came through with its lights going and an officer leaned out and told her to get inside, ma’am, get inside right now. She told him her daughter was missing. He got out of the car.
They knocked on doors together once the siren cut off. The Kowalskis. The Burkes. Pam Sloan, who answered in a bike helmet for some reason and said “Oh my God, oh my God” about nine times and was no help at all.
It was the officer who looked across the street and said, “What about that one?”
And something in Lindsay’s stomach turned over and went hard.
She didn’t wait for him. She ran. She pounded on that door with the flat of her fist and then with the side of it, and she was already composing what she would do, how she would get past him, whether she could, and then it opened and he was standing there, calm, dish towel on his shoulder.
And now here she was, dripping on the carpet, holding her kid, surrounded by four decades of children on bicycles.
The officer had come up the walk behind her. He leaned in the door, saw Emma, saw the walls, and said, “Huh.” Then, after a second, “Everybody good here?”
“We’re good,” Mr. Henderson said.
The officer looked at Lindsay. She nodded. She didn’t trust her mouth yet.
“Okay.” He tapped the doorframe twice and went back out into the rain.
Pin Number Something
Lindsay sat down on the couch because her knees decided for her.
It was a green plaid couch with a crocheted blanket over the back, the kind of thing her grandmother had. Emma climbed off her lap immediately and went back to the crayons, because she was five, and the crisis was over as far as she was concerned.
Mr. Henderson finally got a roll of paper towels from the kitchen and got down on one knee, slowly, one hand on the arm of a recliner, and started blotting the apple juice.
“You didn’t have to do that,” Lindsay said. “Take her in. I mean, thank you. I mean.” She stopped. “I yelled at you.”
“You did.”
“I’m sorry.”
He kept blotting. “You were right to.”
That was not what she expected him to say, so she didn’t say anything. She looked at the wall nearest her instead. Up close, the paintings weren’t sloppy. They were good. Not art-museum good, but whoever did them could draw. Each kid had a face. A real face. The girl with streamers had a chipped front tooth.
Pamela S. – July 11, 1977.
Lindsay leaned closer.
A skinny girl with a home perm and enormous glasses, riding a yellow bike with a basket. Her mouth was open in the painting like she was yelling something back at whoever was looking.
“Is that Pam Sloan?”
Mr. Henderson glanced up. “She called me a fat old turd,” he said. “She was nine.”
Lindsay laughed. It came out ugly, half a sob, and she covered her mouth.
“She doesn’t remember,” he said. “That’s fine. Most of them don’t.”
The Second Date
He got himself up off the floor by stages. He threw the wet paper towels in a trash can by the recliner. Then he went over to the wall by the hallway, the one with the most recent paintings, the paint still bright, and he stood in front of it with his hands in his back pockets like he was looking at a menu.
“Dee started it,” he said. “My wife. She was the painter. I can’t draw a stick.”
Lindsay waited.
“Our boy was Danny.” He didn’t turn around. “Nine years old. August of 1975. He had a green Sting-Ray, he loved that thing, he’d ride it down to the end of the court and back about four thousand times a day. And there was no stop sign on Maple back then. Kids used to cut out off the sidewalk right through to the main road.”
Emma was humming something. Lindsay didn’t stop her.
“Guy wasn’t even speeding. Wasn’t drunk. That’s the part. Nobody did anything wrong.” He shrugged one shoulder. “Danny just came off the curb at the wrong second.”
The rain had gone soft against the windows behind the curtains. Lindsay could hear the refrigerator in the kitchen, and a clock somewhere, and that was all.
“Dee couldn’t look out the front after,” he said. “So the curtains. That’s all the curtains ever were. And I put the fence up because I couldn’t stand the thought of some kid cutting across our yard to the road. And then I got to be the guy who yelled.”
He pulled a pushpin out of the wall, looked at it, pushed it back in.
“After the first time I yelled at one of them, Dee says, Don, what was his name? I didn’t know. She says, Well, find out, and tell me what he looked like. And she painted him. And she said, Now you watch for him to go by. You watch till he’s grown and gone and safe somewhere. Then you write it down.”
He touched the bottom edge of a card. Lindsay got up, finally, and came over.
There were two lines of pencil under each painting. She hadn’t noticed before. The name and the date on top. And under that, in different pencil, different years:
Kevin M. – June 4, 1981.
Home. Graduated Lincoln H.S. May ’89.
Tracy Doyle – Aug 19, 1994.
Home. Moved to Columbus w/ husband. 2011.
Pamela S. – July 11, 1977.
Home. Still here, unfortunately.
Lindsay laughed again, wet, and didn’t bother covering it this time.
“Dee did the first three hundred-some,” Mr. Henderson said. “She passed in 2009. I didn’t touch it for a couple years. Then the Burke kid nearly went under a FedEx truck and I yelled at him, and I came in, and I just sat here.” He nodded at the couch. “And I thought, well, somebody’s got to keep watching. So I took a class at the library. Tuesday nights. Retired ladies and me.” He made a face. “I’m still bad at hands.”
He was. The newer kids all had their hands kind of hidden, tucked behind handlebars or in mittens. Lindsay noticed it and then couldn’t stop noticing it.
Number Six Hundred and Twelve
“Mommy, look.”
Emma was standing at the end of the hallway, the sweatshirt dragging on the floor, pointing at a spot near the bottom of the newest wall.
Lindsay already knew. She knew before she bent down.
A little girl in a striped T-shirt on a pink bike with training wheels. Brown hair pulled up in a crooked ponytail. One sneaker untied; he’d gotten that. The face was a little wrong around the mouth, but it was Emma. It was absolutely Emma.
Emma – May 23.
And under it, nothing. A clean space where the second line should go.
“I did that one the night I hollered at her,” he said behind them. “Took me three tries. That ponytail.”
Lindsay crouched down next to her daughter. Her face got hot and her nose started running and she wiped it on her own wet sleeve, which only made it worse.
“Why does it say Emma?” Emma asked.
“Because that’s you, baby.”
“Why is it on his wall?”
Lindsay didn’t have an answer that would fit in a five-year-old, so she just held onto the back of the giant sweatshirt.
Mr. Henderson went into the kitchen. She heard a drawer open, something rattle around in it, the drawer shut. He came back with a pencil, the yellow kind, sharpened with a knife instead of a sharpener so the wood was all chopped.
He held it out to Lindsay.
She stared at it.
“I don’t write that till they’re grown,” he said. “That’s the rule. Dee’s rule.” He turned the pencil over in his fingers. “But I figure we can bend it. She came to my door. She made it home. That counts for today.”
There was one painting Lindsay hadn’t seen yet. It was up by the ceiling, in the corner over the hallway, by itself, with a little space cleared around it like nobody wanted to crowd it. A boy on a green Sting-Ray, freckles, his tongue sticking out of the side of his mouth in concentration. The paint was the oldest in the room. The colors had gone thin and brown, like tea.
Danny – 1966 – 1975.
And under it, the second line. In pencil, faint, written and erased so many times the paper had gone fuzzy and worn through in one spot, a tiny hole you could see the wall through.
Lindsay took the pencil.
Her hand was shaking but she wrote it anyway, under Emma’s name, as neat as she could manage, which was not very.
Home. June 13.
Mr. Henderson looked at it for a long time. Then he reached past her and pressed the pushpin in a little harder with his thumb, like it might fall.
“Your mailbox,” he said, “is not an approved color, by the way.”
“I know,” Lindsay said. “Pam told me.”
“Good,” he said. “Don’t change it.”
Outside, the all-clear siren started up, one long steady tone, and Emma put her hands over her ears and laughed.
—
Is there a Mr. Henderson on your street? Tell me about them.
Some neighbors have more to their story than meets the eye – like the woman in “The Woman Who Took Her Husband Left an Envelope Instead of a Tip” and the quiet mystery behind letters addressed to someone’s boss. And for another unexpected act of kindness, meet the boy Clara fed – and the surprise waiting the next morning.
