Circle of Three

by Patricia Gaffney

  I lay back down on the smelly couch and put Charmian on my chest. “I’m blowing this fleabag,” I told her. My stomach bumped the cat up and down when I laughed. “You’re the fleabag,” I said, rubbing her softly between the eyes. The phone rang.

  The machine picked up after the fourth ring. After Krystal’s message, Mom said, “Hello, it’s Carrie Van Allen. I’m just—I wanted to see, make sure—Krystal, if you’re there, pick up, will you?”

  I sat straight up. The cat made a hissing noise when she hit the floor. I froze—then remembered: Mom couldn’t hear anything on this end.

  Her voice sounded thin and high, really strung out. “Ruth’s not home yet,” she said fast, the words falling on top of each other, “and I can’t imagine where she is. I can’t find her. If she’s been there, if you’ve heard from her, please, please call me. Right away.” And she gave the number. Like Krystal didn’t already know it. “If you can’t reach me, if the line’s busy or—I don’t know, just—if you can’t get me, call my mother.” She gave that number. “Okay. Thanks. Call if you hear anything. ’Bye.”

  I lay back slowly, pressing all my fingers against my teeth. Yikes. Yikes. Sweat prickled in my armpits. It felt like all my nerve endings were electrical circuits shooting out sparks. Oh, yikes.

  I could get up and go home right now. “Driving around,” I could say when Mom asked where I’d been. She’d be mad, but so what? Eventually this would blow over, the fact that I stole the car, and nothing would come of it.

  That’s what decided me. Fuck it. I wanted consequences, I wanted trouble. The scarier the better—if it wasn’t scary as hell, I wouldn’t be doing it right.

  Krystal got home at 1:37, I saw by the glow-in-the-dark dial of my watch. I wasn’t asleep; I’d just turned the TV off, in fact, after watching a million videos on VH-1. I’d turned it off a couple of times before, but each time I got ready to go to sleep, I’d hear my mother’s voice, the way it sounded on the machine—it was like it was haunting me or something. Majorly annoying.

  I heard the back door slam shut, some bumping around downstairs, Kenny laughing, Krystal going, “Shh.” Would she bring him up? I hoped so, even though I was tired. It would be fun to sit around with them and talk about whatever they’d done this evening. Maybe they were drinking. Maybe they’d give me some.

  It got quiet, though. Except for the rain on the window, I couldn’t hear anything at all.

  I got up from the couch and crept over to the door. They’d better not be coming up now, or Kenny would see me in my underpants. I opened the door to the stairs a crack. Nothing. No—a rustling. Krystal’s husky voice saying just one word, but I couldn’t make out what it was. The stillness got heavier and heavier, fuller and fuller of meaning. I bet they are. I bet anything. I wanted to close the door and hear plain, uncomplicated silence again, but I also wanted to stay put until something definite floated up, a sound clue that proved it. Moaning or something. I hung in the doorway until my neck got sore and the wrist I was leaning on started to tingle and my right foot went to sleep. Now my biggest fear was that they’d hear me close the door and tiptoe back to the sofa, and know I’d been eavesdropping, but it was either that or stand there all night, so I shut the door as softly as I could and took slow, huge steps across the carpeted floor to the couch, and when I got to it I coughed really loudly as I sank down on the sighing pillows and pulled the covers over myself. I lay still, feeling stupid and childish.

  Everybody’s cool about sex but me. Jamie and Caitlin make jokes about it all the time, and underneath the kidding around there’s this feeling that they know everything about it and they aren’t even that interested in it except as something to snicker about and make fun of. But how can you make fun of something that’s a complete mystery? Were they just lying all the time? Was everybody? I myself am afraid to make sex jokes because I might get something wrong, say something that makes no sense and reveal my total and complete ignorance. Not about the act, I get that, but about the…the culture of it, the atmosphere. The history and politics, the do’s and don’t’s, the rules. Well, pretty much everything.

  Like, why, really, is it all that great? People build their lives around it, and not just guys, either. What exactly is the deal? Sometimes I think the only reason I want to do it is because it’s not allowed. If I never did it, if I became a nun or something, would I miss it? How many times do you do it if you live to, say, eighty, and you’re so-called normal? And how in the world could you get tired of it—that is really a mystery—just because you’re married or middle-aged or whatever? It’s still sex, and you’re still naked, so how could that ever be boring? And how come everybody but me knows the answers to these questions?

  Mom having sex with Jess—I don’t have to try to not picture it, because I can’t picture it. Even if I wanted to. Which I don’t. I can’t picture Mom with Dad, either, although once I might’ve heard them—a long time ago, and I didn’t know what I was hearing, just funny noises late one night from behind their closed door. But I must’ve known more than I thought I knew, because instead of going on to the bathroom, I turned around and quietly went back to my room, without peeing.

  Mom and Jess. God. Why? They just couldn’t stand it? Like in a movie where the two people get so hot they start ripping each other’s clothes off? Gross—I almost pictured it, just for a second it flashed in my mind’s eye. I set the scene in Jess’s barn, the one where they’d made the ark animals, and I imagined naked Mom and naked Jess twisting around in a pile of sawdust.

  “Kitty kitty kitty.” I hung my arm down and snapped my fingers to call the cat, distract my mind, because I wasn’t going there, no way.

  Betrayed was how I felt. By my own mother, who turned out to be two-faced and a lying hypocrite. A cheater. Last summer, Mom rented Hope Floats and we watched it together, just the two of us because Dad wasn’t interested. Poor Sandra Bullock, we said, cheated on by her horrible, wormy husband. How low could you go? Mom sat there and pontificated on fidelity and faithfulness and the seriousness of the marriage vows, blah blah blah, and it was like we were two grown-up women discussing something really worldly, men’s wandering ways, and how women were superior because compared to men they hardly ever cheated. (So who are the men cheating with, is what I never get; if men do it all the time and women hardly ever, who are the men’s partners? The same handful of women over and over? Boy, what sluts they must be.) But—the hypocrisy of that conversation, that’s what got me. It showed that somebody you trusted could look you in the eye and lie their head off, and you’d never know it. If I thought about Jess teaching me how to fish, talking to me, listening to me talk about my dad…if I thought about that I’d explode, I’d hurt myself. It was like I had gas on my hands and Jess was a fire or a hot stove. If I touched it, I’d blow up and burn everybody around me to a crisp.

  So I didn’t think of it. When all of a sudden the cat jumped out of nowhere onto my stomach, I let it crawl under the covers, and I talked to it and listened to it purr, and told it a story about mice and cheese and a hole in the wall. And I fell asleep before Krystal came up, so I never knew how long she stayed downstairs making love with Kenny.

  22

  No Sin Goes Unpunished

  THE POLICE DIDN’T care. Unbelievable—I tried to sound calm, but panic was spreading under my skin like a virus. “Can’t you put out an APB or something? She’s a missing person. And she’s not like this, she’s not a runaway, this is not normal.”

  “Yes, ma’am, and you say she’s taken your car?” Courteous indifference, that’s all I could hear in Officer Springer’s voice. It made me clench the phone harder and try not to yell.

  “Yes. She’s gone, it’s gone, the keys are gone. It’s been more than five hours.”

  “Well, we’ve got the make and license and we’ll be keeping an eye out, but if I were you I wouldn’t worry. I know that’s—”

  “You don’t understand, you don’t understand, something’s happened. Something’s
wrong.”

  “But no note, you say, and you and your daughter had a fight?”

  “We had—words, yes. She was upset.”

  “Well, fifteen, they do this, Mrs. Van Allen, they take off.”

  “Not Ruth. No. She wouldn’t.”

  “First time for everything, you’d be surprised. My guess is she’ll turn up any minute, hoping you didn’t notice the car was gone. And when she does—”

  “Listen to me—are you saying you’re not going to do anything?”

  “Ma’am, have you got someone you can call?”

  “I’ve been on the phone calling people for five hours. What do you—”

  “I meant a family friend, a relative, somebody to sit with you while you wait. I know it’s stressful.”

  “Yes, it’s stressful. Anything could’ve happened. I think she’s alone—I’ve called everybody, no one’s seen her—”Officer Springer, who sounded very young, waited through a polite, embarrassed silence while I pulled myself together. “All right,” I said when I could. “You’re going to call me when you hear anything.”

  “Yes, ma’am, we certainly will.”

  “And I’m going to call you. I’ll be calling back.”

  “That’s perfectly okay. If it’s any help, we get calls like this every day, every single day, and nine times out of ten the kid turns up fine.”

  “Okay.”

  “Just remember to give us a call when she comes home, will you?”

  “Yes, I will. Thanks.”

  My left ear ached from pressing the phone to it. I stood in the doorway, listening to the hum of the refrigerator, the tick of the clock over the stove. Ruth wanted a dog clock; every hour a different breed of dog barked. I told her no, it cost money we needed for a hundred other things. Every day, a dozen times, we butted against each other over something that inconsequential. I want this, you can’t have it. Yes, no. Inmate, warden. My purpose on earth was to puncture my daughter’s dreams. I probably did it out of habit half the time. The parent-child system worked until adolescence, then it broke down. It was fundamentally flawed from the age of thirteen, when it changed from adults guiding children to people bossing around other people. Everyone hated it, both sides, but nobody had a better idea.

  I hated the sound of the clock ticking. The smell of fish was vaguely nauseating—Modean had brought over a plate of tuna casserole for my dinner, but I hadn’t been able to touch it. Ruth could have it if she came home hungry. No—she could go to bed starving for all I cared. If nothing was wrong, she hadn’t been kidnapped or beaten or molested, if she was all right, if she was safe—I’d grab her by her skinny shoulders and shake her till her teeth rattled. Interesting: the only way she was going to get a warm welcome here was if she could produce evidence of abuse.

  I could still think like that, dry, sardonic thoughts, because as frightened as I was, I could not make myself believe anything truly horrible had happened. I had to trust that feeling, I had to think of it as higher intuition, not cowardice or denial. My mind swerved between images of catastrophe and images of safety, innocent, prosaic explanations for Ruth absconding with the car. The catastrophe scenarios made my heart race and my skin flush, but deeper down, I knew Officer Springer was right. Any minute she was going to waltz in with a sullen face and a surly explanation, and I was going to kill her.

  The phone rang.

  “Carrie?”

  I sank down on the sofa. “Oh, Jess.”

  “Bonnie just told me.”

  “I called her. To see if Ruth was with Becky, but she’s not.”

  “Why didn’t you call me? Bonnie said she’s been gone since this afternoon.”

  “I kept thinking she’d come home. I was sure she’d be here by now. I should’ve called you, I’m sorry, I wish I had.”

  “It’s all right.”

  “It’s dark out now, and she’s not used to driving at night.”

  “Have you called the police?

  “Yes, but they’re not worried. They just say to wait.”

  “What happened after I left?”

  “I ruined it. I still don’t know what I should’ve said. She was so angry, and I couldn’t comfort her, I couldn’t do anything but make it worse.”

  “I’m sure she’s okay.”

  “Why?” I could tell myself that, but I couldn’t stand anyone else humoring me. “It’s Saturday night, it’s almost ten o’clock. She’s got the car, she’s out, she’s gone, she’s driving around somewhere—how can you think she’s okay?”

  “Because she’s smart, she wouldn’t do anything stupid.” He didn’t sound calm, though. That scared me more than anything—Jess always sounded calm.

  “Taking off was stupid,” I told him. “Anyway, it’s not her stupidity I’m worried about, it’s stupid other people. Oh God,” I breathed, covering my face with my hand. “No, I know, you’re right, she’s probably fine, nothing’s happened. But she could be with somebody, and I don’t know who.”

  “You’ve called all her friends?”

  “Everyone I can think of. There’s a boy—I even made his mother call his father—they’re divorced—to make sure he was there and not with Ruth, that he was in Richmond where he’s supposed to be, and he is. And all her friends, nobody knows anything—”

  “What about Krystal?”

  “No, nothing, Ruth left work early because she didn’t feel well, and that’s all Krystal knows. The police don’t care, they say it happens all the time, not to worry—”I laughed, a garbled sound. “I don’t think they’re doing anything. They say it’s nothing, she’ll turn up.”

  “Are you by yourself?”

  “Modean was here before.”

  “Do you want me to come over?”

  “No. Yes, but it wouldn’t help, there’s nothing you can do.”

  “Why don’t I drive around and look for her, look for the car.”

  “Jess, would you?”

  “I’ll leave right now. I’ll call you in a little while.”

  “Thanks. Thanks.”

  “Try not to worry. I know,” he said when I tried to laugh. “Just keep thinking about how smart she is.”

  “I’ll make her smart when she gets home.” Some joke.

  I hung up quickly—we’d talked too long, tied up the line, what if Ruth was trying to call? And about thirty seconds later, the phone rang.

  “Any word?” my mother’s voice boomed in my ear.

  “No.” I’d called her earlier, on the slim hope that Ruth had gone over to her house.

  “Oh, honey.”

  I told her about the police, that they didn’t care.

  “I’m coming over.”

  “No, Mama.”

  “Your father’s home if she calls or comes over here. I’ll come and stay with you.”

  “No, don’t, honestly, there’s nothing for you to do.” We argued a little longer, while I tried to figure out what I really wanted. I’d said no to her without thinking, but would it be better to have someone to wait with? Mama would take over everything, no question about it. Would that be bad or good?

  “All right, but call me the minute you hear anything, you hear?”

  “I will, I promise.”

  “Doesn’t matter what time it is, I won’t be asleep anyway.”

  “Well, you might as well go to bed, there’s no point in both of us staying up.”

  That started it all over again. “Then why don’t I just come over and we can stay awake together?”

  “Because it’s too—I’d just rather not, I’d rather—I just want to—”

  “All right, never mind,” she said stiffly. Wounded.

  Shit. “Mama, I’m no good. You don’t want to be around me.” She clucked her tongue in disgust. “Anyway, she’ll probably drag in here any minute. I’m honestly not that worried. Listen, we should get off the phone in case, you know, she’s trying to call. Or the police or something.”

  “All right, Carrie.” Still hurt, but bearing up. “Yo
u’ll call when you hear?”

  “I said I would. ’Night, Mama. Thanks. It really—”

  But she’d already hung up. It really helps that you’re there, I’d been going to say. Not to mollify her, either. It was true.

  I couldn’t sit still. I called Krystal again, got the machine. I hung up after leaving a message, aware of irrational anger. How could she be out when Ruth was missing? Irresponsible airhead. No, that wasn’t fair; Ruth was crazy about Krystal, whose only flaw was flakiness. Plenty of worse qualities she could pass on to an impressionable fifteen-year-old. Still, what if Ruth had gone there, gone to the store looking for guidance or help or friendship? And nobody there, just the empty building. I shivered; a hole opened in the pit of my stomach when I pictured her in the car, driving in the dark, hurt and confused, furious over the injustice I’d done to her.

  Upstairs in her room, the familiar locker room smell greeted me, and the exasperating rubble and chaos I hated and loved. Although I tried all the time, I couldn’t quite remember myself at fifteen, not with any helpful clarity, not to any purpose. Confused and impatient—I remembered being that, but the details were hazy. My strongest memories were of Jess and my mother. What would Ruth’s be? Losing Stephen. Finding me with Jess.