“Leanna wouldn’t understand what this means,” Emily said. The Christopher of the woods could follow her thoughts, fill in the gaps.
“Of course she wouldn’t,” he said. “But I would.”
“Really?”
“I’m more like you than I let on at school. I would understand. I would respect you for waiting for the right moment to tell.”
“Who do I tell?”
“Who do you think?”
She looked at the disarray on the ground. “What if someone finds it before I can tell?”
“You know what to do about that, too,” Christopher said.
Emily dropped down to her knees and started scooping up handfuls of dirt and leaves, covering what she’d uncovered, doing a better job than the person who had originally buried it had. Boss pulled on his leash, whimpered, keeled back on his haunches. She ignored him. Her gloves were filthy and damp, and Emily couldn’t bear to wear them home. She peeled them off, dropped them onto the ground beside the body, and kicked some dirt over them with the toe of her tennis shoe. “Let’s go, Boss,” she said, untying his leash from the sapling. She left Christopher behind at the gully to keep watch over the dead.
3.
“Don’t you have that Mitchell teacher at the school?”
Emily, watching television, hadn’t been listening to her mother. Boss was stretched out on the carpet beside her—“He smells like he ain’t had a bath in ages,” her mother had groused when Emily’s father brought him home on Tuesday—and she let her hand rest on the warm swell of his stomach. She’d been feeling a surprising kinship with the dog. He was the only one who knew her secret, and he hadn’t spurned her for it; if anything, he’d adopted her as his favorite in the Houchens household, sleeping at night on the rug beside her bed and following her from room to room, even if she was just getting up to use the toilet.
“Emily.”
“Huh?”
“That Mitchell woman. Is she your teacher? The one who called the other day? The day—” Her mother waved a hand, hesitant. “The day you took the cab home,” she finished lamely.
“Uh—yeah,” Emily said. “English class.”
“It’s a sad thing,” her father said.
Emily roused a little, frowned. She had been watching an Andy Griffith rerun. “What’s a sad thing?”
Her mother huffed. “I wish y’all would turn the TV off every now and then. We’re raising a couple of space cadets.”
“Your teacher’s sister is missing,” her father said. “I saw the posters up around town today.”
Emily sat up so quickly that Boss, startled, ambled awkwardly to his feet. “What posters? What did they say?”
“That she was missing,” her dad said, throwing up his hands, feigning exasperation. He hadn’t showered yet since work, so he was on the couch next to Emily’s mother in his oil-stained khaki shirt and pants, sock feet slim and almost fragile looking. His boots, she knew, would be sitting on a rug in the utility room. “Said she went by the name Ronnie and that she’d been gone since weekend before last. There was a photo.”
“What did she look like?” Emily’s mother asked.
“I don’t know.” His brows drew. “She had short hair and a lot of makeup on. Kind of tan, sort of.”
Emily ventured hesitantly, “Pretty?”
“Heck, I don’t know,” her father repeated. “I guess so. In a funny way.” He smiled at Emily’s mother, teasing again. “Not my taste, of course.”
“Well it’s scary,” her mother said, not returning the smile. “There could be some crazy person out there. I don’t like you wandering off out of sight with that dog, Emily.”
“I don’t go out of sight,” she lied.
“My foot.” Her mother jabbed a finger toward the backyard. “I tell you, Morris, she’s gone from the time she gets home from school until right before you come through the door. I look out and there’s no sign of her. Where do you and that dog go off to?”
“God, Mom, not that far.” Emily felt her face burning. “Sometimes to Tasha’s.”
It was a mistake, she realized. Her mother, with her daffiness and her soap operas and her stories about the good old days, was easy to underestimate—but she’d seen through Emily’s lie, and they exchanged a glimpse of recognition.
Her mother cleared her throat a little. “Tasha’s.”
Emily nodded wordlessly. Her father’s gaze was back on the television.
“I think it’s time to give Tasha’s folks a rest,” she said. “She can come over here sometimes. If y’all are just so set on spending every minute together.”
Emily frowned down at her hands, which were knotted together on her lap.
“Or maybe you want me to call Tasha’s mom and tell her so.”
“No, Mom, God,” Emily said. “I’ll stay closer to home. It’s not a big deal.”
“We’re going to have to set some ground rules around here,” her mother said.
Emily’s father stretched his arm across the back of the couch and kneaded her mother’s neck, conciliatory. He had been putting out fires between them for thirteen years. “That sounds good to me, honey. And Em oughta be doing homework after school anyhow.”
“I agree,” her mother said.
“We’ll be taking the dog back to Wyatt’s soon enough.” He rose, put his hands on his lower back, and leaned against them, wincing. “He’ll want the company. And it’s getting too cold to be outside all the time.”
“I need the exercise, Dad,” Emily said. She felt her flush deepening. “I’m trying to lose weight.”
“Lay off the Debbie cakes if you want to lose weight,” he said.
“Morris,” her mother hissed.
“What?” He started toward the bathroom, paused to ruffle Emily’s hair along the way. “She’s the one talking about losing weight.”
“Just leave her be,” Emily’s mother said.
He shrugged a little and left the room. The bathroom door closed, and the faucet on the bathtub creaked, the echo rattling through the plumbing all over the house. Seeming to sense that some tension had exited the room along with Emily’s father, Boss backed slowly down and flopped onto his side with a sigh.
Emily, pretending to watch television again, felt the soft press of her mother’s hands on her shoulders. “I worry about you,” she said tenderly. Emily waited for the follow-up, the offers of fun: Why don’t you have a sleepover? We could order a pizza, or Do you think one of your friends would want to go to the mall with us on Saturday? Perhaps she would start touching Emily’s limp hair, combing her fingers gently through it and lightly scratching the scalp (a move that had, in Emily’s earlier childhood, always provoked in her a sleepy bliss), offering to use the curling iron or pull it into a French braid. “You always hide your beautiful eyes,” was her refrain. “Just once I’d like to see you keep your hair out of your eyes.”
But she did none of these things, made no offers.
“I wish I could tell you to just be yourself. I like you, Daddy likes you, and that ought to be the end of it. If you’re happy.” She hunched down, trying awkwardly to cradle Emily, and Emily could smell her sour coffee breath. “But you don’t seem happy. You don’t even seem yourself to me.”
Emily stiffened against her mother’s touch, felt both relieved and guilty when the hands pulled away and her mom rose.
“It’s becoming a teenager, I guess,” her mother said. On TV, Barney Fife was gesturing theatrically, eyes bulging. His gun fired by accident. “You’re getting farther and farther away from me. I don’t know how to help you.”
“I don’t want help,” Emily said. “I just want you to leave me alone.”
There was a pregnant silence, long enough that Emily, still facing the television, thought that her mother had perhaps left the room. She cast a quick glance over her shoulder and saw that her mother was standing and crying a little, clamping her hand over her nose and mouth as if she could hold it in that way.
“
Do you want to have friends, Emily?” Her voice was hoarse, high-pitched.
Emily shrugged.
“I think you do,” her mother said. “I think you do and don’t know how. Maybe it’s my fault. Maybe I—I don’t know. Playacted with you too much.”
“Oh, Mom,” she said miserably.
“What I’m saying is that if you want people to care about you, you have to meet them halfway. I wish that being yourself was the answer, but, honey, it’s not. I’m sorry. It’s the truth. You have to act interested in other people, and you have to ask them questions about themselves, and”—she was weeping openly now—“you’ve got to be normal sometimes.”
“I’m not normal,” Emily said. She looked up finally, taking in her mother’s damp, magnified eyes and sun-spotted neck. Her skin, Emily noticed for the first time, was loose and slightly crinkled. Overripe.
“Baby, normal’s not who you are or how you’re born.” Her mother was smiling a little, calm again, as if Emily had made the only statement that she could have formulated a response to. “It’s how you act. It’s something you do on purpose.”
Chapter Fourteen
1.
The alarm sounded at four thirty A.M., and Dale, as he always did, snapped his bedside lamp on. Susanna stiffened, heart racing, and remembered her anger at him. Remembering was satisfying. The worst mornings were the ones when she softened, allowed him to kiss her, and then realized that they had fallen asleep arguing, nothing resolved, her acceptance of his kiss an absolution that she hadn’t intended to offer. On this morning she rolled away from the light and folded the end of the pillow over her eyes. She heard, muffled, the closet door rattle and slide on its track, the opening and closing of a dresser drawer. He left the light on when he went down the hall to the bathroom, and Susanna, muttering, rolled back over and fumbled, eyes pinched shut, to find the knob to turn it off.
She was wide-awake now, bladder tight, back cramped. She wouldn’t relieve herself until Dale finished his shower and went to the kitchen in his robe and slippers to pour a cup of coffee. There would be a minute or two, while he poured and stirred in half-and-half, when she could slip into the bathroom and out unseen, then crawl back under the covers as if she’d never awakened. Then Dale would return with his mug to the bathroom, wipe steam from the mirror, shave. He would dress in his best band director’s attire—the dark gray wool suit, the white shirt, the black-and-gold silk tie that the students had presented him at the band banquet two years ago. He would move his coffee mug well out of the way before dousing himself with the strong cologne he favored on field days, the kind that smelled to Susanna like grass clippings and lemon. He would gel his short, dark hair so that the bangs lifted a little and a stiff part coursed left of center.
Their arguments had never been like this. They had, since Wednesday evening, been for the most part mutually silent—easy enough to maintain since Dale kept the band practicing late again both Thursday and Friday, coming in at night in time to kiss Abby while she slept, change into his pajamas, and fall immediately into a snoring deep sleep. They hadn’t shared a meal, a conversation. Abby had told Susanna with exaggerated, confused delight about the other evening with Daddy, how he’d let her come to the top of the band tower and watch the performance, how she said “Good job, team!” into his microphone and the big kids cheered, how he took her to McDonald’s for a Happy Meal on the way home. She kept playing with the prize from the Happy Meal, a wind-up character from a Saturday-morning cartoon that she wasn’t old enough to enjoy. “I didn’t like the rain,” she said a few times, as though her conscience were tugging at her for painting too rosy a picture. “I didn’t like the rain, but Daddy said that I wouldn’t melt.”
“And you didn’t,” Susanna told her.
“Little girls can’t melt,” Abby said.
Now he was standing in the doorway. Susanna, back in bed with her eyes still closed, felt him rather than saw him. His cologne tickled her sinuses.
“I’m leaving,” he said.
She groaned a little and propped herself up on her elbows, blinking in a sleepy way. She could tell by how he was looking at her that he knew she was putting on, and it embarrassed her. “Okay,” she said. “Be careful.” Then, an afterthought: “Good luck.”
He nodded. “We won’t be back tonight. We’re going to stay to watch the finals no matter what. I went ahead and booked a block of rooms on Thursday.”
“Better not to be on the road late,” Susanna said. “It makes sense.”
He rubbed his mouth suddenly, a quick, brisk side-to-side, and Susanna noticed for the first time how tired he looked. “You could come with us. You don’t have to bring Abby. I called your mom last night, and she said she’d take her. I mean, it’s not a real trip away, I know, but we’d have some time alone, at least. I’m following the buses in the Blazer.”
“Dale—”
“Hear me out,” he said. He had a hand up, as if he were stopping traffic. “I know that you don’t love sitting in the bleachers all day. I know you’ve got work to do. But we could get lunch in Louisville tomorrow, go to that bookstore you like, go to a museum. We could go to that movie you were wanting to see—The Piano? Was that it? They’ll have it in Louisville.”
Susanna sat up in the bed. Her chest felt constricted with something, a guilty, tender ache. He was right about the movie she’d mentioned, had remembered her muttering over the preview when it had shown on TV, her remark that the Blockbuster in town would probably not ever even get it on video. He was wrong about the bleachers, because there had been a time, before Abby, when she had loved hanging out in the bleachers all day—when, almost as much a kid as her husband’s students, she had sat wrapped in a blanket, blowing into a paper cup of hot chocolate, and felt goose bumps at the sight of her husband on the sidelines in his sharp dark suit. She had known the shows then almost as well as Dale did, remembered the melodies, the formations, each toss of a flag, how the drum line did that little spin of their sticks between numbers, always to a round of game applause from the audience. Even now, she could imagine the pleasure of a late-autumn marching band competition, the awe of watching a 4A band take to the field in hundreds, the theater of richer schools who had smoke machines and set pieces and elaborate costuming. She’d not grown immune to all of those charms—just too tired, now, to appreciate them.
“I’m meeting the detective about Ronnie again today,” she said. “I was going to get Mom or Denise to take Abby. We’re going back to the gas station to talk to the person who was working the night Ronnie would’ve come. She’s been out of town the last few days.”
“All right,” Dale said evenly.
“It would go a long way toward”—Susanna waved her hands between them—“this. Making this better. If you were to support me a little.” She picked at a thread on the quilt. “I appreciate your invitation. But I need your support more.”
He walked over to the bed and sat, and she moved out of the way, trying not to jerk, to seem as if she were avoiding his touch. His hip was next to her calf and he propped his arm on the other side of her legs, leaning forward a little, trying for intimacy, she knew, but instead making her suddenly claustrophobic, her feet pinned beneath the covers, her body forced to dip toward his.
“I don’t want you to be stuck with me,” he said. “I love you. I want you here. But I don’t want you stuck here.”
She looked at his earlobe and cleared her throat. “I’m not stuck,” she said quietly, and she couldn’t tell if it was a lie or not.
“It isn’t always easy for me, either,” he said. “There are nights when I think that we could have had more than this.”
“More than this house and these jobs and our child.”
“Yes,” he said again, forcefully, as if he expected an argument.
Susanna swallowed against a sharp pain. “I wonder what it would have been like,” she said.
“So do I.” He turned and looked at the alarm clock on his bedside table. “I’v
e got to go. I’ll be late.” He rose and let his fingertips graze the bedspread over her thigh. She could see him wanting to say that he loved her again but worrying that she wouldn’t say it back to him.
“Be careful,” she said firmly and, she hoped, with finality.
“Yes,” he said. He adjusted his trousers and tucked his dress shirt back into place. “Thanks. I will.”
He brought Abby to her before leaving, an old, indulgent ritual they had lately abandoned. He tucked her, still sleeping, into Susanna’s open arms, so that Susanna could rest her chin on Abby’s head and Abby’s feet could rest on the tops of Susanna’s thighs. She reached down and held the little feet in her hands, delighting, as she always did, in their plump smoothness. They were the part of her daughter that still felt and looked more a baby’s than a child’s, the bones hidden in layers of flesh, the soles unblemished. Abby’s hands were already slimmer. Susanna had looked one day and realized that where the knuckles had once been dimples in the flesh—concavities—there was now the slightest angle of bone. The visible skeleton, memento mori.
Dale kissed their cheeks. “Bye, girls,” he said. The floor creaked, the outer door closed. Outside, the Blazer roared to life.
Abby shifted around and scrambled up Susanna, papery toenails catching purchase. She put her arms around Susanna’s neck, tangling her fingers in her long hair, and she drew her legs up so that her knees pressed into Susanna’s stomach. Abby was warm; she always felt hot to Susanna, even when her temperature—she so often checked—was normal. Pink-faced and sweaty, breath moist and sour with last night’s glass of milk. What was this creature they’d created? This living, growing thing, more animal at times like this than human? What if they had dared to have a life without her?
These thoughts inevitably led her to Tony Joyce, and just letting her mind slide along the syllables of his name sent—she could not help it—a thrill of excitement through her. Today she would see him again. Today, they would continue their search. Her heart, which Abby’s forehead was pressed against, thumped harder for a few beats as she imagined it: dropping Abby at her mother’s, meeting Tony at the station, accompanying him back to the Fill-Up. They would learn something, she just knew it. Maybe they would even track Ronnie down. At that last thought her stomach knotted with vague dread, a sensation that Susanna made an effort not to settle upon. She thought instead about how it had felt to be near Tony, at the computer and in his police cruiser, and how she would get to repeat that pleasure today. And, for the first time, she thought about the fact that her husband would be gone overnight, hundreds of miles away.
The Next Time You See Me Page 17