by James King
After she finished with the dishes, she turned on the network news and sat in front of the television April always complained was too small. Midway through, not having seen or heard anything, Marcy turned it off. She threw another load in the washer and folded the clothes she’d left in the dryer the previous evening. She then went into the den to sort through the bills, then decided she’d pay them another time and went back into the kitchen. She sat at the table and snapped through a magazine. At around ten, she decided to go up. She stood outside April’s door, listening. Then she knocked.
“April, I’m going to bed.” She didn’t add the usual “I love you.”
Nothing.
“April?”
Another minute. Marcy knocked.
“At least say something, let me know you’re okay.”
Now she pounded on the door.
A moment later, she heard April call out, “What?” Marcy realized that April was probably lying on her bed, ears plugged with her iPod, staring at the ceiling and the poster.
“I’m going to bed. Good night.”
Marcy read in bed for a while, waiting for April to come in to apologize. After an hour, she turned out the light.
She was on phone duty the next morning at the realty office. She didn’t see April before she left for work. When she got home at about noon, she saw the note on the kitchen table.
I’m not the slut, it read.
Marcy knew—even before she ran upstairs clutching the note, calling her name—that April was gone. She hadn’t taken much. The piles of clothes on the shelves and on the floors were pretty much the same. The yellow duffel bag was gone from beneath the bed.
By the time April called from the old man’s house, Marcy had reread her daughter’s note so many times that she’d already run the gauntlet, several times, from indignation to guilt to disgust at April’s cruelty.
She and Hank had been so careful—too careful, Hank sometimes said. Before the day of The Slap, they were never even in Marcy’s house together unless April was there—and there before Hank walked in. Instead, they did it at Hank’s condo, during the day, after a joint call. Or they’d do it at night, but early, so that Marcy would be there when April got home after visiting a friend. They’d even, with much laughing and embarrassing grunts and groans as they struggled to position themselves accordingly, tried to do it in Hank’s car on a deserted stretch of road near the Woodlake Reservoir. They did it, yes, but given all the prerequisites Marcy’d insisted on, they didn’t do it all that often.
So where did April get off making such horrible, nasty insinuations? What right did she have to pass judgment? Even if she and Hank had been less discreet—hell, even if they had been doing it on the couch in front of the picture window with the lights on—what right did this teenage kid have to call her mother a slut?
“Put your grandfather on,” she’d said when April finally called that evening to tell her where she was. It was the smugness in his voice, the incredible nerve of him telling her that everyone just needed to cool down, that sent her over the edge. After everything she’d had to put up with from him and from her daughter, how dare they mock her now. “Keep her,” she’d said, and with that she’d hung up.
Marcy was certain that April would soon get so grossed out by her grandfather’s living conditions that she’d crawl home, promise to do anything, even clean the toilets from now on, if only her mother would forgive her and let her back in. Let them play their little game.
But the ridiculous letter that had arrived two days later had sent her running to Nick, who said that, yes, he’d gotten the same letter, except there was an additional message about some gate somewhere, the number 10, and the date June 17. Nick said he’d already left a message with Mike’s wife, and they’d just have to wait until their older brother got around to returning the call. “At least we know she’s safe, Marcy.”
“We do?” Marcy had said, voice rising. “Are you sure about that? Would you be so goddamned eager to wait for the next note if it was your daughter? And why the fuck did you call Mike instead of me? This is my goddamned daughter!”
Nick kept assuring her that everything was going to be all right, not to worry. But someone had to take the brunt of all this. Marcy felt she would break in two if she had to bear this entirely by herself—including the guilt she felt in any role she’d had in the old man’s decision to play this idiotic game.
Now, sitting on April’s unmade bed, staring up at the hideous poster on the ceiling, she pulled out her phone and called the only person she knew would be most likely to help lighten her load.
“This wouldn’t have happened if you’d listened to me,” Marcy said when Nick answered.
The pause. “Pardon me?”
“I told you we had to do something about him. I told you the old man was losing it, remember? But you didn’t want to do anything, remember?”
“Are you, in some way, blaming this on me, Marcy?”
Yes, she thought. I am blaming it on you. And I am blaming it on Mike. And the old man. And goddamned Patrick Shea.
“Marcy?”
She hung up on him.
But Nick, being Nick, called her back. He had news, he said. Mike had, in fact, heard from their father about their first chance to get April back. He said he had no idea what their father meant by his clue. But—surprise, surprise—he wanted to help.
“Mike’s on board, Marcy,” Nick said, and Marcy started crying.
Still keeping the phone to her ear, she slipped her shoes off and stood on the bed now. She reached up for the poster with her free hand and felt along the edges for some give, a spot where she could rip the goddamned thing down, burn it. She found it. She tugged but let go and smoothed the edge, and sat down on the bed. The sheets were warm from the sun streaming in the window, and it almost felt like they were warm from April’s body. She lifted the pillow to her face and smelled it, deeply.
“We’ll find her, Marcy,” Nick said. “We’ll find them both.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Every now and then Bill’s head bumped up against the window as the tires hit a seam in the road, but for the most part the ride was smooth. The steady drone of the engine might have put him to sleep had he not been so terrified.
He knew that for some reason his granddaughter was nervous, too. She kept calling over to him to ask if they were going in the right direction. He’d nod, unable to find the energy to respond verbally. At one point he didn’t answer fast enough, apparently, for she poked him—to make sure, he supposed, that he was still breathing. Gradually, he felt himself become a little less agitated, and his panic slowly morphed to something more akin to curiosity. He wanted some time—and some peace and quiet, thank you—to work out everything that had just happened.
“I thought you were thirsty.”
Like a kid who’d finally realized the futility of arguing with his mother against eating his vegetables, Bill opened one of the bottles and took a sip.
“And here’s a news flash, Grandpa. Not everybody has change for a hundred.”
Bill wiped his lips with the back of his hand. “I gave you a hundred?”
“Yes, you gave me a hundred! And let me tell you—that . . . jerk . . . was not pleased.”
Okay, Bill thought, so maybe she got a little grief for not having something smaller. Was that what she was all worked up about?
“It was not a pretty scene,” she said.
Bill took another sip. Did she want to compare pretty scenes? How about one with an old man in a gas station bathroom who, feeling pretty good about things for no particular reason—euphoric, actually—looks into the mirror, starts sweating profusely, and feels his legs giving way as he realizes that he suddenly has no idea where he is or what he’s doing.
“Strange,” he said.
“What’s strange?”
Bill was surprised that he’d said that out loud. “Oh, nothing really,” he said. Maybe talking about it would make it less strange and m
ore logical. But Bill never did like talking about things unless he was pretty sure he knew where the conversation was headed—or, at least, where he wanted it to go. And there was simply no way to predict how his granddaughter would react if he told her that in those first few minutes after looking in the mirror, he felt the panic as if it were a living being hovering over his head, about to consume him. He’d taken a quick inventory to fight off the panic—something he’d learned to do but didn’t know where or when. He was Bill Warrington. He was in a dirty restroom somewhere. He was sweating. What else? Nothing joined together for him.
“You don’t want to talk, fine. I can live with that.”
Bill looked over. She talked just like Marcy. But, especially in profile, she looked like Clare. The thing he found most curious of all at this point—downright baffling, actually—was that he couldn’t remember her name.
He knew she was his granddaughter. He knew they were going somewhere together. But the name was playing games with him, staying just beyond his reach, teasing him.
That’s what was happening. He wasn’t losing his memory; he was letting his memories have full rein, and, as a result, they simply took over sometimes. Like at home, when he’d make up his mind to fix a squeaky door or clear off the kitchen table but something would remind him of one of the kids, and, next thing he knew, hours would have passed and he’d find himself sitting in front of the TV, staring at a show or at nothing at all. Or like a little while ago in the gas station bathroom, when he’d been leaning up against the door trying remember what was outside it, and he suddenly thought of Clare. The thought became a presence—so clear and so vivid that he was certain she was at that very moment waiting for him just outside. And everything seemed to return, even though it hadn’t. He was Bill Warrington. Clare Warrington was his wife. And Clare Warrington was standing just beyond that door and she would smile when she saw him and hold out her hand and he’d take it and slide his fingers between hers the way they always did it, the way they had done hundreds of times.
“No, thousands of times.”
Bill saw his granddaughter look over. He closed his eyes.
Memories could also turn on you, he thought, just as they had when he’d reached for that doorknob—he would have used a paper towel, but of course the bathroom didn’t have any—and he knew in that instant that Clare would not be outside, she would not be there for him, that she was gone and somehow, in some way, he was responsible.
He leaned his head against the window.
And there she was again, leaning against their new Oldsmobile Vista Cruiser. The kids loved that car. They sat transfixed, staring through the skylight over the second-row seat. They were about to go somewhere special, because Clare was wearing her flowered dress, the one that accented her slim waist. Bill loved being seen with the woman in the flowered dress. But, no, she wasn’t wearing the flowered dress. She was wearing tight black pants and no socks and a pair of sneakers and she was telling Nick to hurry up or they would miss warm-ups. And then Nick was in the backseat, wearing his baseball cap and his Woodlake Drugs T-shirt and reading a Hardy Boys mystery. We’re on our way to a baseball game, Bill called back to him. Think about the game. But Nick continued reading. Seemed it was all he did. Or write little stories that he liked to read to the family at dinner. He wasn’t like the other boys, or even his older brother. One day when Nick was younger, Bill had found him in their room, sitting at Clare’s vanity table, sitting next to his mom, putting on lipstick as his mother did. Clare had told him to relax after Nick ran out the door, crying as he always did. You’re going to turn him into a queer, doing stuff like that, he said, but Clare said Nick was just curious, a sensitive child, and Bill was going to make him neurotic. And now Bill was talking to a doctor and the doctor was saying nothing was wrong and Bill yelled that something was definitely wrong and Clare was in a hospital bed, her lips bright red, as if she had just applied lipstick, her face a jaundiced yellow. The doctor poked him in the arm and asked him if he was all right. But now Bill and Clare were running. They were running away from the hospital and Bill had brought the flowered dress and Clare was in it now, asking him if this was the right way, and her skin was yellow, her lips terribly chapped, and she sat in the stands at the baseball game alone, looking small. But then Bill was next to her and he was yelling at Nick, out there in left field, to stop daydreaming and pay attention to the batter. And Clare grabbed his hand and intertwined her fingers and told him to stop it, you’re going to embarrass him. Bill looked over and Clare smiled and her lips were still red but her skin was perfect now and he heard the crack of a bat and Nick had hit the ball over the head of the pitcher and it dribbled over second base and the short stop and second baseman were confused about who should field it but it was a clean hit, a base hit, no question about it, and after a moment’s hesitation, as if surprised he had actually hit the ball, the coach yelling at him to run, Nick scampered down to first base.
“Did you see that? Did you see him hit that ball?” Bill yelled. But now they were back in the car. He didn’t recognize the road. “Maybe he’s not a fruit, after all.” He sat back and stared ahead. He was afraid to look to his left. He was afraid he wouldn’t see anything familiar, anything at all. “Wasn’t that great, Clare?” he asked, but he knew it was not Clare sitting next to him.
He closed his eyes again. It was April. April! How could he have forgotten a screwy name like that? And with what felt like a breeze across the top of his head, everything came back to him: their trip to East Lansing; his children’s no-show; the doctor.
He heard April turn on the radio and then turn down the volume. A good kid. Considerate, the way her mother used to be. Still was, most times. April hummed along with the song. After a while, she started singing softly.
“Louder,” he said, opening his eyes.
April glanced over. “Did I wake you? Sorry.”
“Sing louder, April,” he said.
April shook her head. She pushed some of her hair behind her ear. Bill saw from her profile that she was smiling.
“Why not?”
“Feels weird, singing to just one person.”
“You want to be a whatchamacallit and you’re shy?”
“Singer-songwriter.”
“Huh?”
“I want to be a singer-songwriter.”
“Well, I know you write,” Bill said, nearly ecstatic over remembering how she loved to doodle in that little notepad she kept in her pocket. “So sing.”
April exhaled noisily, as if she’d been asked to weed the garden. She turned up the volume. “It has to be loud,” she explained.
Suddenly, a sound so loud and so ghoulish filled the car that he wondered if they’d crashed into the back of a semi and he was already dead and on his way to hell, the voices below reaching up for him.
“Meet the new boss,” April yelled, shaking her head violently as she drove. The scream, Bill realized, had been his granddaughter’s. “Same as the old boss.” A few noisy codas later, the song ended. April turned the volume down.
“Well?”
Bill worried about his eardrums. “I like Sinatra, Bennett, Peggy Lee . . . those guys,” he said. “What do I know?”
“C’mon, Grandpa. Tell me the truth. Remember our deal.”
Bill nodded. Yes, he remembered the deal. And he was very grateful that he remembered the deal. Things weren’t nearly as bad as they’d seemed just a few minutes earlier. In fact, the more he talked with April, the more he seemed to remember.
“Grandpa? You’re not falling asleep are you?”
“Are you kidding? After what I just heard, I may not be able to sleep for a week!”
April glanced over at him. Bill got ready to apologize.
“Now I know what my mom means when she says that you’re about as subtle as a kick in the crotch,” April said. “I sounded that bad?”
“Like a tomcat with his testicles caught in a fence.”
“Grandpa! Gross.”
/> “A grizzly in heat.”
“All right,” April said. She was laughing now.
“A dachshund in a foot of snow.”
April looked over at him.
“A male dachshund,” Bill said. “Think about it.”
“I get it,” April said. “My singing sucks.”
“I didn’t say that,” Bill replied. “I just told you how it sounded to me. And isn’t that how it’s supposed to sound to someone my age? Wouldn’t you be more worried if I actually liked it?”
April didn’t say anything for a half mile or so. “I guess you’re right.”
“I know I’m right. Listen—your mother came home one day. She was about your age, maybe a couple of years younger. She ran upstairs and started playing this record full blast. She showed me the album cover and asked me, just like you did, how it sounded. I said they needed a haircut and they’d never convince a producer to make another of those records. Guess who.”
“The Beatles.”
“How’d you know? Aren’t they before your time?”
“My dad. Whenever one of their songs came on the radio, he’d get all serious and tell me the Beatles changed the world.”
“He blamed them, eh? Well, you get my point. Doesn’t matter what I think. You get up on that stage, sing your heart out, or your head off, or whatever.”
April drove a few more miles before saying, “I’m starting to think that all this is, you know, a mistake?” She waved her arm in front of her to include him, the car, the road.
He waited a while before he answered.
“Well, I guess this is where I tell you that chasing a dream is never a mistake, right?” he said. “That everything’s going to be all right. That you’ve got what it takes to be a huge—”