The Indians were threatening again.
“Come on, Pronk,” he said, as if he were urging on one of his own players, and clapped when the batter knocked in another run. They didn’t need it. The game was already out of reach.
As ordinary and relaxing as the evening was, she was afraid they were wasting what little time they had. Lindsay was curled on the far end of the couch with her book, Cooper dozing on the cool tiles of the fireplace—whole family in one room. They had to get up early so Ed could make the eight o’clock bus. Fran wanted to give in to the inertia, but even with him sitting right beside her, his hand on her knee, she felt like she was waiting, and was relieved when the game finally ended.
The TV clicking off brought Cooper to his feet. When she stood he bounded into the hall and spun around, wagging his tail and yipping as if she wasn’t going fast enough. Usually his frantic demands amused her—he knew he was going to go out and then get his treat and go to bed—but tonight she understood how routine could breed impatience. “Yes,” she said, “I hear you.”
Ed went around checking the windows and taking care of the lights. Since he’d been gone it was her job to batten down the house. She gladly ceded it to him. There was no way Lindsay would be up when he left, so they hugged good-bye at the bottom of the stairs. She took Cooper with her, closing her door, making Fran feel like she’d run her off.
They rarely prepared for bed together. She was used to having the bathroom to herself and some quiet time to read while he watched the news. Now she had to make the delicate decision of what to wear with him right there—not that she had much to choose from. Black was not an option, or red. She waited until he was brushing his teeth to get undressed, and settled on her white silk nightshirt, a conservative pick but a step up from her pajamas.
He was done with the bathroom, and by the time she moisturized her face and brushed her hair he was in bed. He lifted the covers for her. She’d changed the sheets, she said. She could feel the difference.
“After the Country Inn, this is paradise. Remind me to take my pillow tomorrow.”
“Did you want to try one of my pills?”
“No,” he said, “I think I’ll sleep tonight.”
In the hall, Lindsay’s door opened and the bathroom door closed.
“You’re not going to read?” he asked.
“No.”
He raised up to turn out the light, and as he lowered himself he leaned in, pressing against her shoulder. She twisted so he could kiss her.
“Sweet dreams,” he said, and lay back.
“Sweet dreams,” she said, letting her head fall.
All along she’d worried that it was too soon. Now, faced with proof, she thought she’d been foolish, and greedy, wanting him all for herself. She couldn’t expect him to set Kim aside, not after the drive. It was like her outburst at dinner, the base truth breaking through, overwhelming everything else. She understood if he needed time.
They lay side-by-side in the dark, listening to Lindsay finish and pad back to her room. Faintly, like the gnawing of termites, came the chatter of a keyboard, making Ed lift his head.
“Who’s she talking to?”
“Probably Dana.”
“How’s she been?”
“Better, I guess,” she said. “You know her, she doesn’t say a whole lot.”
“Yeah.”
“You’ve been pretty quiet tonight.”
“Me?” He shifted, throwing an arm over her stomach, the contact almost casual. “It’s probably living in that room with no one to talk to.”
“I wish you didn’t have to go back.”
“I wish I didn’t either.”
He stroked her side as if to soothe her. She stilled his hand, then rolled and reached for him, kissing him the way she wanted him to kiss her. He responded as if he’d been waiting for her.
“We have to be quiet,” she said.
“I can be quiet.”
He couldn’t entirely keep his promise, but by then Lindsay was far away, the world narrowed to a tentative edge. He was still hers, that had never been in question. She thought she shouldn’t have been surprised at how easily they surrendered their helplessness to each other. They always had before. Her mind was empty with the effort, at rest. It was only well afterward that the fear returned that this hunger—trivial now, having been slaked—was unnatural, but soon the Ambien took hold of her, mingling with the night’s wine, smoothing away any misgivings, a blurry softening like sinking into a hot bath, dissolving her thoughts, spiriting her into a dense, dreamless sleep.
In the morning she made him French toast and drove him to the diner downtown and sat in the car with him until the bus rolled up. She kissed him hard in the bright sunlight as if she might never see him again.
“I’ll be back Sunday.”
“You don’t have to,” she said.
On the way home she imagined him riding west along Lake Road, passing the neat summer camps along the bluffs, and caught herself biting her cheek.
“Shit,” she said, and thumped the wheel. She’d forgotten his pillow.
It was Friday and the street was quiet, motionless except for a crew resealing the Naismiths’ driveway. The house was clean, Lindsay was still asleep. The day spread before her like a desert. She had a list of possible sponsors to call, and details to nail down with Sal for the reward, but messed around on the internet instead, visiting Cedar Point’s website before checking the guestbook. You are about to receive a blessing from the Lord, a woman from Joplin, Missouri, assured her.
Good, she thought. I’m ready for one.
Instead she received their Cingular bill listing all of Kim’s calls from last month. They stopped on the fourteenth. The last was to Nina, at ten to three. Fran went over the list, trying to identify the other numbers—Elise, J.P.—upset that she knew so few. KINGSV OH, most of them said, but several showed just their area code and FOLLOW ME. She checked the rate key. DFMR meant call delivery service, some sort of automatic forwarding, she guessed. There were three of them on the fourteenth, including the next to last one, two minutes before she called Nina.
The police had to know this, yet she’d never heard a word about it.
She went through the list backwards, calling every number she didn’t recognize. “This is Kim Larsen’s mom,” she said. “Who’s this?”
Marnie, Hinch, Covered Bridge Pizza. She used the fun run as an excuse, as if she were fishing for volunteers. She’d become an expert at asking for things, and at expecting nothing.
Only one person hung up on her, a young guy. She underlined the number. When she was done she called the detective, getting his voicemail.
That first day she’d called Kim until her voicemail was full. Panicked, she clung to the least painful solution, hoping she’d just lost her phone. She wondered where it was now.
It took him twenty minutes to get back to her, and then he sounded impatient, as if she’d interrupted something important. He couldn’t tell her what FOLLOW ME meant, but they’d run the numbers weeks ago. The hang-up was Dennis Wozniak. He warned her not to call Wozniak again. “Just give us a chance to do our job, okay?”
There was no point arguing. She spoke with the detective every day, and each time she came away disheartened. Today it only seemed worse because Ed had left, and because she thought she’d actually discovered something. Why did she think there had to be a clue, one improbable piece of evidence that would break the case?
She had a thousand things to do, but wandered the downstairs, gazing out the windows at the leafy street and the Hedricks’ yard. Robins hopped in the grass, bees zigzagged—another perfect day. All afternoon she’d have to endure the Finnegans splashing and laughing.
In the back hall the spare keys shared a hook with his coach’s whistle, hanging by a lanyard Lindsay had made at camp. She passed them twice before giving in. Outside, crossing the yard, she felt watched, and glanced up at Lindsay’s window—filled with her curtains.
&n
bsp; She slipped inside the garage, closing the door behind her like a thief, though she wasn’t even sure what she was there to steal. After her mother had died she spent a week clearing out her house, saving the fraying afghans and the Time-Life books of the states and the hokey salt-and-pepper shakers she collected, but what meant the most to her was sitting in her mother’s ladder-back chair in the kitchen where she’d sat every morning, sipping her coffee properly with a cup and saucer, listening to the radio. When Fran grew tired of bagging her clothes for Goodwill, she retreated to the kitchen and sat in her mother’s chair (the radio was still there, faithfully tuned to the same station, the white plastic cabinet yellowed like old ivory from her cigarette smoke) and the past would settle around her, comforting.
Here there was no chance of that, and yet she didn’t hesitate, approaching the car head-on, the key ready. Somehow a wasp had gotten inside, bumping against the windshield, its wings beating. Ordinarily she was terrified of wasps, but today it only provoked her. Inevitably, she was going to be in the car. She would not be run off by some insect.
When she turned the key, the clonk of the lock echoed in the rafters. She opened the door and the wasp bounced away from her, nosing the glass. For a few seconds she waited for it to fly out on its own, then went around and opened the other door. It serpentined between the headrests and into the empty hatchback, exploring a corner of the rear window.
“For God’s sake,” she said, and popped the hatch, waving a backhand at the wasp until it took off.
Quickly, as if she was in a hurry to leave, she slammed the hatch and the passenger door and curled around the hood. As she did she saw herself as if from above and realized that maybe this was a bad idea.
It was too late. She was already lowering herself into the bucket seat. The vinyl was cool through her shirt, as if the whole car had been refrigerated.
She closed the door, sealing herself in, facing the knotty back wall of the garage. The interior smelled of cigarettes and the chemical perfume of the blue dolphin that hung from the mirror. She resisted the urge to tap it and send it swinging. The wheel seemed far away. Ed had adjusted the seat to fit his big frame, and she ducked down to lift the lever, then bucked forward until she could reach the pedals.
Could she have made the drive by herself? The motel was something else, but she thought she could handle I-90 in the daylight. To test the idea she wrapped her hands around the wheel, gripping it at ten and two. There was no shock, no flood of visions. Maybe after a few hours on the highway her mind would fix on Kim. Still, she wished Ed had let her help.
She bent her head to one side of the steering column and slid the key into the ignition. She twisted the key partway and the red dash lights blinked on. Ed must have changed the station, because it was on some talk show. She switched to FM and spun the old-fashioned chrome knob until she found WERG, Kim’s favorite.
She’d called them dozens of times, requesting her song, explaining the dedication, and while it wasn’t a rock song they’d made an exception. It was only by luck that it wasn’t playing now. What was was boring noise, a whiny British guy singing about a distant, untouchable love. She didn’t know the bands anymore, and it made her feel old.
The Killers, they were called—a stupid name.
Three hours was a long time, but some days now she never left the house. She imagined driving, the wide-open road, traffic blasting the other way. Billboards and truckstops, hawks and bikers. She thought just being in the car would spark a connection with Kim, a fleeting memory that might sustain her for this next hard stretch, the way it had with her mother, but as the DJ introduced the next song and then the next, nothing came. She blamed herself for letting the wasp distract her. She told herself she’d stay until they played a group she knew—Pearl Jam or U2, Nirvana. The mood was ruined, but maybe if she was patient it would change. She wanted to believe that, and for a long time she sat there in the dimness with both hands on the wheel, as if she was actually going somewhere.
The Last Time
He went back to work for the routine as much as the money. The search had moved out of town and he had nothing to do. The baking streets, the DQ, the beach—no place was safe. The Larsens refused to talk to him, all but Lindsay, who e-mailed him five, six times a day, a complication he hadn’t foreseen. Nina said he was being dense. She’d known all along.
“You never had a crush on anyone?”
“No one ever had a crush on me.”
“Honestly,” she said.
“Not that I know of.”
“It sucks. You kind of feel sorry for them but you don’t because they’re stalking you. Everywhere you go they just happen to be there.”
“That hasn’t happened.”
“That’s because you don’t go anywhere,” she said.
His room was dark except for the phone. He wanted to go to sleep, but he liked her voice and the way she jabbed him back to life. During the day he hardly talked with anyone.
“How do you stop it?” he asked.
“You have to squash them. It’s no fun.”
“You’ve got a lot of practice at this.”
“That’s the danger of having boobs in the sixth grade. You’re a target for every twelve-year-old boy.”
“Like you’re not anymore.”
“I wish I could just cut them off.”
“You don’t mean that.”
“Seriously, you don’t want to know what a pain they are.”
“You’re right, I probably don’t.”
“So are you coming out with us tomorrow or what?”
He’d been staying in nights, using his mom as an excuse, when really it was Kim. It didn’t seem right to go to the beach without her. He even felt guilty for being at work. He’d confessed everything to the police, expecting them to arrest him. They let him go, leaving him to devise his own punishment. Wooze had been working on it: Someone keyed his car right in his driveway, pouring acid on the scratched hood, burning big patches down to the bare metal. His mom was shocked, threatening to call the cops. J.P. was surprised it had taken so long, and knew the cops wouldn’t do anything. This was about paying your debts. He kept expecting to punch out and find three or four guys waiting for him in the lot.
“I don’t know,” he said.
“It’s Elise’s last night,” she said. “I’ll be pissed if you don’t.”
The trouble with talking to her so late was that when they hung up he couldn’t get back to sleep. He went over their conversation like an actor studying a role, combing it for hidden meanings.
The terrible thing was that he would have said yes if he knew Hinch wasn’t going to be there. It wasn’t sudden. Nina had always confused him, broadcasting her flirty mix of signals. He still remembered their kiss as if it was more than an accident. The memory, like any deep desire, had the ability to thrill and shame him at the same time. Already overloaded, he wanted to think it was temporary, a perverse side-effect of losing Kim and then learning she’d been with someone else. In three days he’d be gone and wouldn’t have to worry about it anymore.
The fact that he was leaving should have been a relief. He’d already registered for classes and drawn a roommate in the housing lottery, a communications major from Indonesia named Talman, except he couldn’t see himself on campus, living day to day surrounded by thousands of strangers. He was having a hard enough time here.
In the morning his mom let him sleep in, weighting a note on the kitchen table with cash for him to replace his lost winter jacket—an argument they’d been having since he’d been accepted, as if Columbus was part of the Arctic. He pocketed the money not to please her but because he was tired of fighting. It was ninety outside. No one was selling winter stuff yet.
Lindsay had sent him two e-mails late last night that he hadn’t answered. He knew he shouldn’t now, but she was his only way of keeping up with the investigation. He was brief and impersonal, ignoring her questions about Nina and college, asking why her dad was sti
ll in Sandusky.
They’d gotten the car back weeks ago. It was sitting in their garage, and though he wouldn’t be able to see it, and their place wasn’t on the way, he’d made it a ritual to cruise by before work. He was so used to the route now, when six months ago he had no idea where she lived. Her porch was empty, and he imagined walking up the stairs, ringing the bell and apologizing in person, this time finding the right words to soothe her mom, whose Subaru sat blocking the driveway. He slowed, looking beyond it to the garage as if he might feel her presence. He didn’t, and by the time he reflected that he was a fool for expecting anything, he was past the house and moving away.
He could turn left at the next street, but went to the end of Lakewood and swung around in the cul de sac. On his way back he thought he saw her mom in the front window, still and forbidding as a ghost, and kept going.
At work he concentrated on the smallest tasks, stocking the shelves as if he was being graded, and still she came to him. They all did—her mom and dad, Lindsay, Nina, the volunteers and the long days they spent searching the gorge. Kneeling in the aisles, he replayed those lost weeks as if he could go back and change the past. That last day, if only he’d convinced her to stay and blow off work. He’d even said it, but not strong enough, just a joke—except she never called in sick. She was like him that way, it was one of the things he liked about her. She was dependable, which only made the Wooze thing stranger. Obviously he thought he knew her better than he actually did. So he could sympathize with the Larsens. He knew how it felt to be lied to.
Since she’d been gone he’d probably thought about her more—and sometimes thought he loved her more—than when they were together. He wasn’t angry about Wooze. All he wanted was to talk to her and clear things up, even if that meant just saying good-bye.
In the same spirit he’d go to the beach tonight and say good-bye to Elise, another friend he should have appreciated more. If Hinch was there he’d clink beers with him and do his best not to think of Nina—which was crazy anyway. When he got home he’d e-mail Lindsay and tell her they had to stop. None of these resolutions seemed impossible, and after they closed the doors and pulled the canvas covers down over the coolers, he left work with a sense of purpose, even thinking he could look for a coat tomorrow.
Songs for the Missing Page 15