The lock turned and Dale entered, already sliding out of his “RHS Marching Tigers” windbreaker. He squinted at her, furrowing his brow at her glass of wine, then hung his jacket in the coat closet.
“And hello to you,” Susanna said lightly.
“Wild night at the Mitchell house.” He crossed the room and kissed the top of her head. “Does this mean I might get laid?” He squeezed—honked—her right breast. It was his way of trying to make fun of himself.
Susanna took another swallow. “Well heck, if you keep sweet-talking me like that, who knows.”
“I’m beat, baby,” he said. “Set the alarm, will you?”
“For five?”
“Yeah.”
She went to the bedroom to set the digital alarm clock while Dale looked in on Abby. She turned down the bedspread and top sheet, then removed the sham-covered pillows that she tried to keep nice, free of coarse hairs and drool stains. In a few moments she could hear him in the bathroom urinating—he always left the door wide open—and then he entered their bedroom stripped down to his boxers. He was a man of good but not exceptional height, and lean—a leanness that had seemed athletic nine years ago, when Dale was still the hotshot new teacher straight out of college, but now registered as . . . well, not as delicacy, exactly, but as cerebral and prematurely middle-aged, the figure of a man who could be coerced into no greater physical activity than the occasional brisk walk around the subdivision. But he had a good, thick head of dark brown hair, and his blue eyes, veiled by fashionable wire lenses, were wide-set and strikingly lashed. He was still attractive to Susanna. She registered this fact some days the way she always had, as a sensation of pleasure in her middle, but more often as an act of intellect—when she’d see a man, a man in worn jeans instead of pressed khakis, maybe, or a man who could sit in a restaurant and laugh loudly and openly, the way Dale never would, and she’d think, Perhaps it would have been him. And then, because she needed such touches with reality, she’d imagine the inevitable trajectory from excitement and thrill to predictability, the heartfelt whispers of love becoming empty, automatic recitations as they parted for work in the mornings, and she’d think, Dale looks as good as he does, and most days that sufficed.
They slid under the covers next to one another, and Susanna sidled into the space between Dale’s side and his arm, letting him pull her close. She could hear, from the right side of Dale’s chest, the distant echo of his heartbeat.
“Don’t guess you’d want to go with us tomorrow,” Dale said.
Susanna tried to make a face that suggested she was entertaining the notion. She’d gone to so many band competitions now that she could no longer distinguish the memory of one from another, and making the haul with Abby—rousing her at five A.M. and dressing her for the cold bus, trying to keep her entertained on the two-hour drive to Owensboro, appeasing her at the football field with nachos and hot dogs only to throw away most of the food uneaten, the endless ride back, the inopportune demands for bathroom breaks—would be a nightmare. Dale didn’t want to deal with that either, she knew, but he always felt obligated to make the offer. To remind her that she was wanted.
“Guess not,” she said. “I’m pretty wiped out.”
“Tell me about it.” He adjusted. “I got into it tonight with a parent. Corey Kirchner’s dad. Goddamn redneck. He started in about how he couldn’t arrange his whole life around picking his boy up and dropping him off at band practice, went on and on about how he has to work midnights at the plant and this and that. And you know me, Suze, I’m sympathetic. I really am. But nobody’s making Corey take band, and I told this guy as much.”
“You don’t want him pulling Corey out of band, though.”
“Well, no,” Dale said, his voice going up an octave the way it always did when he was defensive. “He’s a good drummer. He’s a good kid. But I can’t teach and chauffeur and fund-raise and do everything else these people want from me. The kids have got to practice. There isn’t any getting around that.”
He went on that way for another few minutes, and Susanna, listening, felt herself reliving her discussion with Nita Shelton, its insult and her own quiet fury, and she thought about sharing this incident with Dale, as a way of supporting him, but she found that she couldn’t bring herself to talk about it. Instead, she said, “I realized today that I haven’t heard from Ronnie in two weeks,” and she must have interrupted a point Dale was making, because he looked confused, then irritated.
“What?” he said. “You what?”
“Ronnie,” she said. “I haven’t heard from her in two weeks. I tried calling her tonight and she wasn’t there.”
He adjusted again, this time pulling his arm out from under Susanna’s neck so that she had to lean back on her own pillow. He made an exaggerated display of flexing his bicep, as if in explanation. “Well, don’t take this the wrong way,” he said. “But that doesn’t seem all that unusual to me.”
“It is, though,” Susanna said. “She usually checks in at least once or twice a week. I’ve just been so busy lately that I hadn’t noticed.”
Dale rolled to his side, placing his back to her, and pulled the bedspread up around his shoulders. He yawned. “I’m sure she’s fine,” he said. “Probably off shacking up with some loser. She’ll be back in no time, asking for money.”
“She’s never asked me for money.”
“She’ll show,” he said.
Susanna turned off her lamp and rolled over, too, wanting to place the cold bottoms of her feet against Dale’s calves but reluctant to favor him with the intimacy. She both hoped Dale was right and resented him for being flippant; she thought, drifting toward an uneasy sleep and bracing herself for the ring of the phone, that she’d suffer a thousand embarrassments at the hands of Nita Shelton if Ronnie would show up at her door tomorrow morning, hungover and hoping for a free meal. She slept through Dale’s alarm and his departure. The phone never rang.
Chapter Three
1.
The next morning, as Abby lay on her belly in front of the TV watching Garfield and Susanna blew the steam off of her second cup of coffee, Susanna decided: she would go by Ronnie’s today, take a look around. She’d have to bring Abby, and Dale wouldn’t like that, but Dale be damned. Ronnie was her sister. Susanna didn’t need her husband’s permission to do right by her.
Ronnie lived across town, in a rental house near the sewing factory where she worked. It was, like so many neighborhoods in Roma, neither a bad place nor a nice place. On a street filled with working-class families and retirees, Ronnie herself was probably the most unsavory element. This was a street where the old women spent their springs coaxing lilies and rosebushes, hydrangeas and peonies, into short bursts of colorful glory. With the maples fully green and the dogwoods raining petals into a satin snow on the trimmed grass, a passerby might be charmed, even delighted. By October, though, the street had taken on a shabbier, more somber look. Hanging baskets of ferns no longer distracted from the faded wood siding on the old widows’ houses. Bird feeders dangled empty, the hydrangeas shriveled back into skeletal gray spikes, and the little iron benches and chairs that had seemed so charming flocked with greenery sat useless on the small lawns, artifacts from a more abundant time.
Ronnie’s house was a 1940s shotgun, its siding not merely faded but almost stripped, the gravel driveway so worn down that weeds were springing up in the hollow spot between tire tracks. The car—a maroon ’89 Camaro, Ronnie’s baby—was parked in the drive, and Susanna’s stomach flip-flopped instantly with relief and annoyance. Ronnie must have pulled an all-nighter, or something close to one. And Susanna would bet good money that she was still asleep inside, probably sprawled atop her bedclothes in the blouse and jeans she’d worn to the bars, snoring and mumbling and drooling on her pillow. Or perhaps there was a man beside her. In any case, it wouldn’t be a scene Susanna could expose her daughter to in good conscience.
Yet she pulled her car, which she’d let idle on the street in
front of the house, into the drive behind the Camaro and shut off the engine.
“We’re going to see Aunt Ronnie?” Abby said in that strange little voice she got sometimes, the one of almost adult formality.
“I don’t know,” Susanna said. “What do you think?”
Abby shrugged, again with a kind of ironic exasperation that seemed much older than she was. “We’re here, aren’t we?” she said, and Susanna laughed out loud, running a thumb along her daughter’s satin cheek.
“You’re right.” She pulled the keys from the ignition and stuffed them in her purse. “You sit here, though. I need to make sure Aunt Ronnie’s up for company.”
“Okay.”
“You’ll hold tight?”
Abby nodded.
Susanna crossed the yard to the front porch—there wasn’t a sidewalk—and adjusted her purse strap on her shoulder. At the door she stopped, swallowed, and rapped as loudly as she could, using the side of her hand instead of her knuckles and bracing herself for the reappearance of Old Ronnie, the Ronnie who’d tried to coax twelve-year-old Susanna into a van with a bunch of older guys, the sister who sometimes emerged when Ronnie was hungover or working overtime at the factory or having money troubles. Stop the goddamn knocking! that Ronnie would say. Can’t a woman get some fucking sleep?
Susanna waited. It was a chilly morning, the first that really smelled like the promise of winter. Wearing only her belted cardigan, she shivered and pounded on the door again. “Ronnie!” she said. “Open up. I’ve got Abby out here. We want to see you.”
A full minute passed—Susanna counted it on her wristwatch—and nothing. She looked back at her car and waved at Abby, who was watching all of this banging and shouting with interest. Abby waved back.
There was a window on the front porch to the right of the door, and Susanna cupped her hands and peered inside. Through the thin cotton sheers she could make out only shapes and shadows: the round hump of the sofa, the triangle of a lampshade, the furnishings of a home all simplified to their basic forms. There was a light on in the kitchen—the bedroom lay beyond it—but no movement. The light bothered her. The house seemed dormant, disused, and the light in the kitchen reinforced Susanna’s vague but growing unease instead of lessening it.
She knew that Ronnie kept a spare key hidden under a rock beside the porch, so she retrieved it and unlocked the door but stopped shy of turning the knob. She was afraid, she realized. And the fear was irrational, of course, but it was real, just as it had been all of the times when she had to check on her sleeping daughter to make sure she was breathing or when Dale was late getting home and her mind went to car accident before any of the logical explanations took hold. But fears weren’t always groundless, and Susanna knew that, too. She had dreamed about her father’s death the night before her mother called to confirm it—but they hadn’t been speaking then, she and her father, and so she’d dismissed the dream as rubbish. “He’s dead to me anyway,” she’d told Dale flippantly. She had been twenty-three years old.
Now she turned the knob and rushed inside all at once. “Ronnie!” she yelled again, getting ready to stride over to the bedroom door and fling it open, as though by being loud, by barreling pell-mell into her sister’s silent house, she could will Ronnie into getting up and yelling back at her. Because Susanna was already half of the way to certain that she was going to find Ronnie dead or comatose. Maybe it was alcohol poisoning again. Maybe she’d OD’d. Susanna was willfully ignorant about her sister’s drug use, thought that Ronnie just smoked pot occasionally but couldn’t be sure.
She and Ronnie got by as much through what they suppressed as what they shared. Ronnie resented Susanna when she spoke like a schoolteacher, when she brought up politics or mentioned a book. Ronnie would get stubborn and obtuse; she’d pretend to understand less than Susanna suspected she did. In turn, Susanna knew that the Ronnie she saw these days was simplified and sanitized, her recklessness and darkness—the mean streak, the bouts of depression—tamped down. Maybe Ronnie only did smoke pot. Or maybe she did coke or pills as she had in the old days. Susanna didn’t want to know, and Ronnie accommodated her by staying mum about it.
“Ronnie,” Susanna said now, the word more a sigh than a call. Her voice fell flat, her greeting answered not by a sister but by a smell: powerful, nauseating, enough of a contrast to the cold, slightly smoky air outside that Susanna instantly felt ill. The house seemed shuttered and abandoned. The blinds were drawn, all the lights off except the one in the kitchen. The smell was a combination of mustiness and sweet rot, and before Susanna could make the leap from worry to panic she saw on the kitchen table the remains of a meal. She got closer, grimacing, and leaned over for a better look. There were white plastic bags, plastic forks and napkins wrapped in cellophane, red plaid paper baskets with grease dotting the sides. It looked—she turned away, gagged a little, then turned back—like chicken livers and gizzards, some remnant potato wedges, two Styrofoam cups half-full of coleslaw. The table was also strewn with an ashtray, a few cigarettes ground into corkscrews, and empty Miller High Life bottles, half a dozen of them. Ronnie’s favorite denim jacket, the one with the tacky pattern of brass studs on the back, was draped over the back of one of the chairs.
Two cups of coleslaw, two baskets, two pouches for potato wedges. Six beers. Susanna looked up at the bedroom door. Her stomach did a lazy somersault.
She was sweating, despite the chill. And that, how about that: Why was it so cold in here? Why wouldn’t the heat be on? She went to the bedroom door, thought about knocking again, knew that doing so would be futile. So she grasped the knob and pushed into her sister’s bedroom, and she was so convinced of what she’d find that the heap of pillows and blankets on the bed at first looked to her like a body, and she nearly screamed. But the illusion lasted only a second. The room was empty, the bed unmade but also unoccupied. Again, Susanna was struck by the sense of abandonment, of dormancy, but she’d have taken any of those oddities, those unknowns, over the sight of her sister lying glassy-eyed in a pool of vomit. That was, she admitted to herself, what she’d expected.
So it wasn’t the worst thing. But what was it?
She looked around the bedroom, rolling her feet so that they wouldn’t sound on the hardwood floor, hating the empty echo. Unmade bed, sheets in need of a wash. No surprise there. Drawer on the dresser half-open, peach-colored T-shirt hanging down like a flap of skin. Shades drawn. Lights off. She snapped on the bedside lamp and looked at the items on Ronnie’s nightstand: face cream, alarm clock, a pot of lip balm. A book.
A book? She picked it up and felt her sinuses ache with the sudden press of tears. It was A Separate Peace. A Wal-Mart receipt was tucked in between chapters 11 and 12. Ronnie had almost finished it.
There was one more item on the table: Ronnie’s birth control pills. Susanna opened the compact and looked at the rows of depressed bubbles. The first two weeks were emptied, Sunday through Saturday. Saturday was the last day. Today was Saturday. Ronnie must have been home today to take her pill. Right?
Or else she’d taken it a week ago. Or two.
Susanna returned to the kitchen, checked the fridge: condiments; a paper Chinese food container, the rice inside shriveled to a hard, gray crust; a half-empty two-liter of Coke that didn’t make so much as a sigh when Susanna unscrewed the cap; the rest of the case of Miller High Life; and a carton of eggs, three missing. In the freezer was a bottle of Gordon’s Vodka, the big size.
She went to the table, to the litter of food and wrappers and bottles on its surface. A large paper sack was serving as a coaster for a few of the bottles; Susanna moved the bottles to the side carefully, retrieved the bag, spread it smooth. THE FILL-UP, the logo read. A local gas station chain. There was a receipt in the bottom of the bag:
October 23. She counted back. That was last Saturday. Ronnie had bought this meal a week ago and left it unfinished on her kitchen table. She’d taken her last birth control pill on a Saturday. And her car was sitt
ing in the driveway. Susanna looked at all of those times-twos on the receipt, at the emptied beer bottles standing like chess pieces on the table. Someone else had been here. Someone had been here, and now Ronnie was gone.
“Mama?”
Susanna jumped, put her hand to her chest. “Jesus, baby,” she said. “You scared me.”
Abby ran to her and grabbed her leg playfully. She was overdressed, as usual, in the red jumper, white tights, and patent leather Mary Janes that she insisted upon, no matter Susanna’s protests. Ronnie had bought the shoes, Susanna remembered. Ronnie had called it a “no particular reason” present.
“Where’s Aunt Ronnie?” Abby said, now hooking her legs around Susanna’s leg, dropping her bottom on top of Susanna’s foot.
“Don’t know, baby,” she said, lifting her leg and swinging it a little, bracing herself on the kitchen counter for balance. Abby giggled, the cheerfulness of that sound and that bright red dress ill fitted to this stinking home. Susanna trudged toward the door, dragging Abby like a ball and chain, trying to make a plan. Should she call her mother first? No, foolish to worry her before she had solid information. She’d try Ronnie’s supervisor at the plant, find out if she’d shown up for work this week. Then Mother. Then the police.
The Next Time You See Me Page 4