The Next Time You See Me

by Holly Goddard Jones

  A dark knowledge settles over her. She wishes her parents away, and they’re gone. She puts out her hand, and Christopher takes it. “You’re not mad at me?” she repeats, and Christopher says no, but now she doesn’t believe him. A tear slides down her cheek, and a soft cloth presses it away.

  “Don’t cry, kiddo. We’re here. Me and Daddy.”

  She opens her eyes. How could she be so easily fooled by dreams, by fantasies? Reality is coldly inarguable—it’s there in the dark pores on the end of her mother’s nose, which looks red from getting rubbed too many times with a tissue; in the smell of her father’s cheeks and neck, which she can tell with eerie certainty is tinged with the remnants of his Barbasol shaving cream and his usual splash of Old Spice. It’s there in their looks of desperation, how badly they need her to tell them she’s all right, and she resents them for needing this from her, for wanting reassurance more than the truth.

  “Go away,” she says, and her mother seems to crumple into the tissue she’s holding.

  “Now, don’t say that.” Her father has his arm firmly around her mother’s shoulder, and though the tone of his voice is firm, Emily can tell that he’s just as shaky; her parents are like pins she is knocking down, and she takes a small, bitter pleasure in watching them fall.

  “Go away,” she repeats, and she thinks of her brother, Billy, of how he acts when he is displeased, the way her parents scramble to satisfy him, to shut him up. She lifts her head off the pillow, drops it. Lifts, drops. It feels good. It feels right. Bop, bop, bop, she is being like her brother, and her parents exchange terrified glances, seem to say to one another without speaking aloud, Please, God, not her, too.

  “Stop that, Emily,” her mother says sharply.

  She gets her shoulders into the motion now. She is crazy, isn’t she? Seeing things that aren’t there? The guardrail starts to rattle, and the IV rack trembles. Her eyes are open, and so the square of silver light on the ceiling becomes a bright blur streaking across her vision, and her parents are dark, frantic smudges.

  “Press the call button,” her mother says, her voice choked with fear.

  “Where? I—”

  There is pressure across her middle, on her shoulders. She moves her head faster. She could stop, but what will happen then—what questions will she have to answer, what truths will she have to face? She is talking. She doesn’t even know what she’s saying. And then a new face leans over her, and the silver streak of light becomes a square again, and then it winks out.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  1.

  When Susanna got to the room, a man was standing in the hall. He was tall, gangly, with bulging, sorrowful eyes—Buster Keaton in blue jeans and an old flannel work shirt. He leaned against the wall, staring off into space.

  “Are you Mr. Houchens?” Susanna asked gently, not wanting to startle him.

  He drew up his shoulders, and his large eyes rolled tiredly her way. He nodded, attempted a smile. “Yes, ma’am. Morris.” He held out his hand. She shook it.

  “I’m Susanna Mitchell,” she said. “I’m one of Emily’s teachers at the middle school.”

  Some emotion passed across his features. She thought it might have been relief. “Oh. Oh, yeah, it’s good of you to come. It’s real good of you.” He pulled a blue paisley handkerchief from his back pocket and wiped his neck with it. “Go on in. My wife’s there. Emily’s probably still sleeping.”

  She nodded her thanks and went to the half-open door, rapping softly to announce her presence. Emily was in the bed, eyes closed. A woman, her mother, was seated beside her, face in her hands. She sniffed, lifted her head; her face was damp and blotchy, her eyes obscured by thick lenses.

  “Is this a bad time?” Susanna asked.

  The woman scrutinized her, confused. “Oh,” she said. “I know you.” To Susanna’s surprise she rose, stepped forward, and embraced her.

  “We talked on the phone last week,” Susanna said. She held the woman carefully. She could feel her tears soaking through the fabric of her blouse, an embarrassingly intimate sensation.

  “I remember. You were good to Emily.” She was shaking now.

  “Is she all right? I had heard she was doing well.”

  The woman pulled back, nodding, and sat down again. She motioned to an adjacent chair, which Susanna took. “Oh—yes. She’s OK. The doctor said that the main issue is dehydration, so they’ve got her on an IV. And she’s exhausted and—” She thought about it. “Upset. Hysterical. They had to give her a sedative.”

  “It’s only natural,” Susanna said. “She just needs some time.”

  “I hope so.” The mother lifted her glasses and backhanded away tears. “I’m sorry. It’s been a rough day.”

  “I can’t even imagine,” Susanna said, and she found that she meant it. Despite everything.

  The woman’s face crumpled, and her voice broke. “I don’t get it, I don’t understand it. I keep replaying things, trying to figure out what we did wrong. I thought we were good to her. We’ve got our hands full with Billy, and that puts a stress on all of us. I won’t say I never raise my voice. But I thought we were good to her.”

  “I’m sure you are,” Susanna said, touching her shoulder.

  “But she did run off,” the woman said.

  “You can do everything right by a person and still have things go wrong,” Susanna said. “Emily was having a hard time at school. She got singled out for a lot of cruelty, and none of that was her fault, or yours.”

  Emily’s mother snorted a laugh—a sharp, humorless sound. “I told her to try to be normal. That’s how I supported her.”

  “I don’t think that’s such bad advice,” Susanna said. “It’s realistic.”

  “She’s never been one to face reality.” The woman looked at Emily lovingly, and Susanna’s stomach clenched with pity. “It’s my fault, because I’ve never been good at facing it, either. I always told her stories. Played make-believe.” She stroked Emily’s hand, which rested on the top of the sheet. “And then we’ve got Billy. Make-believe’s just easier sometimes.”

  Susanna, feeling her own tears threaten, nodded briskly. “It sounds to me like you did your best.”

  “She told me she wished she was dead,” Emily’s mother said. “She started crying and banging her head like her brother does when he’s unhappy, and she said we should have left her in the woods. She didn’t stop until the nurse put something into her IV. They want her to talk to a psychiatrist.”

  “Teenagers say that kind of thing all the time,” Susanna said uneasily. But she thought of Emily that day in the bathroom, after the incident in the cafeteria—her humming, the mechanical way she went about wiping spaghetti sauce off her face—and wondered.

  “Kelly?” Morris was standing in the doorway, eyes even wider than before, handkerchief getting twisted between his two hands. “The counselor is here.”

  “I should leave you to it,” Susanna said. She shouldered her purse strap and stood.

  Emily’s mother—Kelly—looked back and forth between Susanna and Morris. “Does she want to meet in here? In front of Emily?”

  A young woman, as young as Susanna, slipped into view. She was dressed in a costume of seriousness: a flowery blouse with a bow at the neck, long skirt, tailored jacket. It reminded Susanna of her wardrobe in the first year she taught at RMS, when she had the audacity to consider her round, unlined face a liability. “Mrs. Houchens, there’s a conference space we can use just down the hall. I thought we could go there.”

  Kelly stood. She already appeared defeated; she had the confidence and posture of a person shuffling down the hall in a robe and slippers. Her hair was limp and uncombed, and Susanna noticed for the first time that she appeared to be wearing a long nightshirt over her jeans instead of a regular T. It was a thin, nubby polyester with a cracked screen print that read CAFFEINE, PLEASE!

  “I don’t think I should leave her,” Kelly said. She held on to the edge of the bed as if she might fall
.

  “Go on,” Susanna said softly. “She’s sleeping—she won’t miss you. I’ll stay with her until you get back.”

  “You don’t have any place you need to be?” Morris asked.

  Susanna said no.

  “Thank you,” Kelly said. She followed Morris out to the hallway, and Susanna tried not to listen to the soft, awkward murmur of introductions. At last the voices dwindled. She and Emily were alone.

  She felt, strangely, that there was no better place for her to be at this moment, no better person for her to spend time with. Home had not been right. Her mother’s house had not been right. Not with her husband or even her own daughter. This girl—this odd, haunted girl—was the one she needed. This child whose resting place had revealed her sister’s. Susanna watched Emily sleep. Her stomach moved gently under the sheet, and her lashes lay long, almost prettily, on her freckled cheeks. Her hair was coarse and limp, a light brown so joyless that it was practically green. The resting hands, Susanna noticed, looked as if they had been wiped with a cloth but not scrubbed; the fingernails had crescents of grime beneath them, and the knuckles were nicked and scraped, damp with some kind of clear ointment.

  “Why were you there?” Susanna said softly. “How did you know?”

  Emily’s eyeballs twitched behind their lids. Her forehead creased, and she made a sound, faint, kittenish—something between a grunt and a wince.

  “What did you see?” Susanna whispered.

  A sound from behind her: a clearing throat. Susanna sat up with a start, turned.

  “Tony,” she said, standing.

  “Hey there,” he said.

  She gave no thought to what he wanted, what he would be comfortable with. She gave no thought to appearances. She went forward, arms opened, and made him envelop her—bold because she knew now she could be, that it didn’t matter any longer. Or didn’t matter in the way she had once thought it might.

  His bright-smelling cologne was a distant note, an afterthought. The spice of his skin was stronger, ripe, and she knew without asking how tired he was, how hard he had pushed himself today. It was on his face when he pulled back: the red threads running through the whites of his eyes, the gray cast to his skin. The planes of his cheeks above the neat line of his goatee were grizzled faintly with hairs.

  “I already know about Ronnie,” she said. “I already know, Tony.”

  He touched her cheek; she could feel the rough callus on his thumb. “I went to your house,” he said. “Your husband was there. He told me you’d heard.” She blinked, and a tear spilled toward his hand. “It shouldn’t have gotten to you that way.”

  “There was no good way.”

  “Nothing is certain yet,” Tony said. “We won’t know until they finish the lab work.”

  “Did you see it? The body?”

  His eyes darted to the side. “I didn’t see much. Enough to know what it was.”

  Her breath hitched, and she pressed her palm to her chest. “And it looked like it could be her?”

  He was still staring at some point to the left of her. “You have to believe me when I say I can’t answer that.”

  “You mean you won’t. You’re not supposed to.”

  “I mean I’m not able to,” Tony said. There was something in his face. Fear. Weakness. She wondered for the first time if she could trust him.

  “It’s her,” she said. “I feel it. I know it.”

  He didn’t reply.

  “And you know it, too,” Susanna said, at last believing. She had wanted to elicit in Tony some reaction of surprise or refutation. Something to make her hope. But there was no hope on his face.

  “I think it is, yes,” he said. “I’m so sorry. But I think it’s your sister. There aren’t any other missing persons reported in the area.”

  “And somebody put her there,” Susanna said.

  “Yes,” Tony said.

  “Somebody put her there,” she murmured to herself. “Tony, you’ve got to find out who. You’ve got to find him.”

  Tony stepped abruptly around her and looked down at Emily. “How is she? I was here—and I had some time. I thought I’d check in.”

  “As well as can be expected, I guess,” Susanna said. “Medically, she’s OK. Her mother told me she woke up pretty upset.”

  “It’s no wonder,” Tony said.

  “Was she with the body?”

  His hands were in his pockets, his shoulders slumped. “Nearby. Ten or fifteen feet from it.”

  “You think she found it?”

  He shrugged. “She was within sight of it. But I’m not sure. Maybe it was a coincidence.”

  “I wish she would wake up,” Susanna said.

  But the child slept on, her breaths long and steady, her features smooth. If she had been dreaming before, she didn’t seem to be now. The monitor at her bedside beat out a steady time. Somewhere down the hall, a television blasted the laugh track to a sitcom. Susanna sat again in the chair Kelly had vacated, thinking that she could almost be jealous of Emily right now, despite all of the hard truths she was about to awaken to. In this moment, the girl had found a hiding place. She was still young enough that the world would allow her that.

  “You’ll go home?” Tony asked. “Your husband seemed worried about you. Genuinely.”

  She smiled a tiny, rueful smile. She understood what he was really saying.

  “What I mean to say is that he seems to love you.”

  But you don’t, Susanna thought. She was gripping the edge of the rough-woven thermal blanket on Emily’s bed, and she unwound it from her fingers.

  “And your daughter,” Tony said. “I saw her. He seems like a good father to her.”

  “Well, then, I guess I’ve got all a girl could hope for.”

  He shuffled uncomfortably.

  “I know that’s not what you meant,” Susanna said hoarsely.

  Tony went to the door, halted. “I’ll call you tomorrow, when we hear from the lab. It’s possible that we’ll need you to come in and identify some clothing items.”

  “Perhaps you could have that Pendleton guy take care of it,” Susanna said. She turned and looked over her shoulder at him. “Just for now. For this part of things.”

  “Are you sure that’s what you want?”

  She nodded, lips pressed tightly together.

  He was propped against the doorpost stiffly, as if he needed holding up, and she wondered if his back was paining him. His temples and forehead were damp.

  “Try to get some rest tonight, Suzy.”

  She lifted her fingers in a little wave. It was all she could manage.

  2.

  She looks down at Emily Houchens, not seeing her. She is thinking about what comes next. She will go home and pack a bag. She will pack a bag for her daughter. She will take Abby to her mother’s, and she will try to explain to the both of them about Ronnie, and then they will face the rest of it together. She knows now what she is getting, which isn’t much—and what is left, which is enough. Just enough to keep her going. She suspects that this is a decision she will have to make not just now but every day of her life, each time she passes her daughter off to Dale for a visitation, each time Abby asks her the difficult questions, each time her mother draws her lips in disappointment. Am I right? Is it worth it?

  Ronnie, she thinks, is the only one who would have understood. Who would have told her, each time she needed to hear it, yes.

  Thanksgiving

  Ronnie had come with a bottle of white wine, because Susanna liked it, though Ronnie had known she was baiting Dale—that he would spend the rest of the day silently angry about it. And she was right, of course; he scowled when Susanna dug out a corkscrew before serving dinner, scowled when she poured equal portions into two of her crystal water goblets, the only glasses she owned with stems. His disapproval was only matched by their mother’s. “I don’t see how the two of you can tempt fate that way after what your father put us through,” she said. “They say it runs in the family.�
��

  “What?” Ronnie said. “Crazy? We got that from your side.”

  Susanna laughed.

  “Oh, hush,” their mother said. “You know what I’m talking about.” But she wouldn’t say the word. She never said the word.

  When they’d finished eating, Dale stood and tucked his cloth napkin under the lip of his plate. “It was good,” he told Susanna. “I’m going to watch the game in the bedroom, if that’s all right with you.”

  “We were about to play hearts,” Susanna said. “You don’t want to? We need a fourth.”

  “Just deal out an extra hand and don’t do pairs. It’s not a big deal.”

  Susanna snatched his plate from across the table and started scraping it roughly into hers. “Fine,” she said, and Ronnie couldn’t help but wince a little. Dale was an asshole, behaving in characteristically asshole fashion, but she hated seeing her sister this way, so prissy and petty.

  “Calm down, Sister,” Ronnie said. “I’ll help you with the dishes. Let Dale take off.” She threw him an exaggerated smile. “We’ll just finish this bottle of wine and yak.”

  He left the room without speaking again, and it was better, really. Even their mother seemed to feel the difference, and she didn’t object when Ronnie poured a small amount of wine into her empty water goblet, or when she poured her own and Susanna’s back to full.

  “Well,” their mother said, taking a tentative sip, “it is Thanksgiving.”

  They all went to the living room. Abby hunched down at the coffee table to play with Matchbox cars, and Susanna set the television on a cartoon, something the grown-ups could ignore. It was so rarely like this: the three of them together, enjoying each other, talking about something besides old grievances. How many holidays had they spent rehashing their father’s sins against them and their sins against one another? The most terrible days of Ronnie’s and Susanna’s youth had taken on a kind of legendary status among them, and they each had their pet stories: Ronnie’s was the time that Dad had slapped her so hard her ear bled, and how Mama’s reaction was to flee the room weeping instead of tending to her. Susanna’s was when she came in from school to find their father passed out naked on the couch, and though Ronnie never said so, she thought that Susanna was being a bit dramatic about the whole thing. Ever been socked in the ear? she wanted to say. I’d have rather gotten a look at the old man’s pecker any day.