Hot Springs

by Geoffrey Becker

  “I guess that’s the idea,” said Tessa.

  The front door burst open and Landis jumped up just as Bernice stomped in.

  “What are you doing here?” asked Bernice, looking at him.

  “We didn’t call yet. She wouldn’t let me.”

  “You’ll get in trouble,” Tessa said, still holding the photo.

  “Did you pray?” asked Bernice.

  “I never stopped,” said Tessa.

  “Has anyone tried under the sink?” She led them into the kitchen. There was a good-sized space underneath, but it held only a couple of dried-up dish sponges and some mouse turds.

  “We’ve looked everywhere,” said Landis. “She’s not in the house.”

  “All right, then. We start walking the streets, looking in parked cars, on people’s porches, whatever it takes.”

  “I think this is beyond us now,” said Landis.

  The doorbell rang loudly. They all three ran to the front hall. Landis got there first and pulled open the door. On the porch was a thin, grinning, shirtless man, his chest dark with thick hair that seemed unlikely given the pallor of his complexion. His bony, shaved head shone with perspiration. He looked like a concentration camp survivor, but an unusually strong one—perhaps one who had made a deal for food. At the end of one of his long, tightly muscled arms, her hand linked with his, was Emily.

  “Does this little girl live here?” he asked.

  “Oh, my God,” said Tessa. She scooped up Emily and kissed her on the cheek. “Where have you been?”

  “No place,” said Emily.

  “That’s all right, I don’t need to come in,” the man said, peering past them, clearly trying to get a view into the house. “I just wanted to make sure she got back safe and sound.”

  “Where did you find her?” Landis asked.

  “Walking around by herself. I’m Charlie.” He held out a long-fingered hand. Landis thought it was like shaking hands with a batch of drill bits. Charlie jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “I live next door.”

  Landis recalled the flicker of blinds he’d seen the other day. “Walking around where?”

  “Out there. On the sidewalk. I was on my way out to practice my tai chi. I saw her just standing there, so I thought I’d bring her over. I think she was asleep on her feet, you know?”

  “She’s been gone nearly four hours,” said Landis.

  Charlie smiled at him again. “I don’t know about that. I just found her a few minutes ago. I’m sure that must have been scary for you all, though. I don’t have any kids myself. Wouldn’t mind, maybe, someday. Gotta find the right woman first. You probably ought to keep a better watch on her, you know what I’m saying?”

  “Thank you so much,” said Tessa. “Oh, we’ve been worried sick. We won’t let her out of our sight.”

  “Good thinking,” said Charlie, tapping the side of his head with a finger.

  Tessa and Bernice hustled Emily off to the kitchen, and Landis could hear them back there making happy sounds and telling her how much they loved her. “How’d you know to bring her here?” he asked Charlie.

  “I’ve seen her around, with that other one—the blonde. You, though—you’re new, aren’t you?”

  “Depends. I guess I’m new to you.”

  Charlie’s front teeth weren’t any bigger than the surrounding ones. “You’re the dad, then?”

  “Yeah, I’m the dad.”

  “And that’s your wife?”

  “That’s right.”

  He glanced around. “This place was empty for a long time. Then all of a sudden it’s like Penn Station.”

  “Charlie,” said Landis, “where have you been the past four hours?”

  “In my apartment,” said Charlie. “Taking a nap, most of it. Why?”

  “I just wondered where you were. I’m wondering about a guy who takes naps at night, then gets up to go practice tai chi.”

  “Hey, man, I just did you a big-assed favor, OK?” The smile was gone now, and Charlie seemed quite stressed, the tendons in his neck standing out in sharp relief. “You’re lucky I didn’t call 911, you know? Letting a little girl wander around the streets like that. That’s probably criminal behavior. All right?”

  “I said thank you.”

  “Thank you is right. Who knows what could have happened.” He scratched at the left side of his rib cage.

  “You are a Good Samaritan.”

  “Son of a bitch,” said Charlie. Then he turned and headed off toward the street.

  The women had decided, even though it was late, to give Emily a bath. Landis stood just outside the door, listening to the sound of their voices echoing off the tile and around the big clawfoot tub. He heard the water sloshing around, heard the music of their conversation, the tentative sound of Bernice’s voice as she asked Emily about the water temperature—too hot? just right?—the flatter, rounder, practiced cadences of Tessa’s as she directed the child to move her head a little this way, to sit still and stop squirming, was she a little girl or a wriggle worm? If something were wrong, surely they’d know, these two mothers. If something had been done to her. The child had seemed merely sleepy, not strange—not stranger than usual, anyway—and he took a deep breath and leaned against the wall and tried to simply relax and enjoy the relief of knowing that he hadn’t lost her, he hadn’t lost either of them.

  They brought her out wrapped in a big orange towel, Tessa holding her, Bernice with water all over her pants and shirt.

  “Are you sure she’s OK?” he asked them.

  “She’s fine,” said Tessa.

  “Emily?”

  Her eyes were drooping shut, and he was transported by the same feeling himself, the feeling that the adult world was a kind of dreamscape he had wandered into, and all he wanted was to retreat into his own head and sleep.

  “We’re going to put her to bed,” said Bernice.

  “I’ll just sit here.”

  There was a chair in the hall outside the bathroom, an old-fashioned one with a high back and almost no cushioning. He sat in the dim light and looked at what he took to be one of Bernice’s father’s paintings on the wall, a large, two-toned canvas that might have been sky and ocean meeting, viewed at night, or might simply have been some abstraction he wasn’t meant to understand. Finally, he heard footsteps, and then Tessa was in front of him.

  “You want a ride back to the hotel?” he asked.

  “I can get a cab.”

  “I’m surprised you’d leave us alone with her again.”

  “I’m trying—I’m trying to do the right thing here. Anyway, you’re not to blame. Not for tonight. It wasn’t your fault.”

  “Sure, it was. I could have kept a better eye on her. You don’t understand. I was hunting around for a TV to watch.”

  “I know you think that, but you’re wrong.”

  “Four hours.”

  “She was sleepwalking. That’s all. Bernice is with her now.”

  “Forget the cab. I’ll take you.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Let me just go up and let Bernice know.”

  He climbed the stairs. She was sitting in a chair, watching Emily intently, as if her attention were the main thing keeping the child from growing transparent and fading away.

  He pantomimed driving, pointed downstairs. Bernice looked at him and nodded, then returned to Emily. Her lips were moving silently—she was having some sort of conversation with herself. Outside, he could hear that the rain had started to come down again. It pattered against the glass of the small skylight in the hall. He left the two of them in the room and moved as quietly as he could back toward the stairs and down to the first floor. It occurred to him that Bernice was probably planning to sit there all night.

  They didn’t talk for most of the drive. At one point, Landis wondered if Tessa had fallen asleep, but when he looked over at her, he saw that she had her forehead pressed against the smudged glass of the passenger-side window and seemed to be studying the pas
sing cityscape.

  “Your husband’s in a band?” Landis said. “I work with bands.”

  “You probably wouldn’t know his.”

  “Try me.”

  “They were called Pale Rider, but now they’re going by Forty Days.”

  He nodded, trying to pretend he might have heard of them at some point, though he was certain he hadn’t. “In the desert or something, right?”

  “It’s how long Jesus was in the desert. It’s also how long it rained in Genesis. Forty comes up a lot, although I don’t think the number really means much. It’s more about the wandering—about feeling disconnected from God, at least temporarily.”

  “You think your praying brought her back tonight?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t think it’s possible to say, really.”

  “I guess that’s right.” He adjusted one of the air vents on the dash. “That guy looked a little like Jesus, huh? Charlie?”

  “I don’t think it was him.”

  “But it could be, right? He could come like a thief in the night.”

  “That’s right.”

  “You think maybe he told her he was Jesus?”

  “No.”

  “Because this kid is waiting for Jesus to come back. Who knows what kind of ideas she’s got, right? Don’t take this the wrong way—I’m not blaming you. I’m not even sure I know what I’m talking about. I mean, I don’t. But I do know that little kids can’t keep a story straight, and they make stuff up.”

  She didn’t answer, and he thought maybe he’d gone a little far and somehow insulted her, so he just drove in silence.

  “Here we are,” he said, pulling over in front of the hotel. “Home sweet home.”

  “I’m not leaving without her,” said Tessa, her head jerking slightly, as if she were just returning from a daydream. “That part is nonnegotiable.”

  “I never figured it was anything else.” He watched her push through the glass doors into the lobby, waited until she was on the elevator before he pulled back out.

  The door was down a couple of cement steps from ground level, with some dusty plastic flowers affixed to the outside. Landis knocked a couple times. Finally, it opened. Charlie was still shirtless, his shorts a strangely baggy affair that might have looked right on a British officer assigned to India. “Can I come in?” asked Landis.

  “Nope,” Charlie said.

  Landis pushed the door open anyway and stepped inside. A distinctly wet-basement smell. A brown sofa was parked up against the long wall of the living room, and on the other wall there was a small television on a metal cart. On the coffee table, six or seven mugs sat out, along with a few scattered pieces of notebook paper.

  “You live here alone?” Landis asked.

  “That’s right.”

  “You like girls? You like little girls?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Sure you do. Come on, let’s talk about it.”

  “Maybe I should be asking you that same question. You’re not that kid’s father—you don’t look anything like her.”

  Landis stepped forward so he was fully in the man’s face. He sniffed something ugly in his breath. He stepped even closer, to the point where he could feel Charlie’s uncertainty—should he back away? Stand his ground? It had been a while since Landis had put himself in such a situation, and he wondered if he could still fight. “I want you to understand something, all right? You will never get within fifteen feet of that little girl ever again. If you see us coming out onto the porch, you will walk the other way, back toward the alley. If you’re out front, you will move along down the breezeway until you’re by your own front door. You won’t talk to her, you won’t wave to her, you won’t smile at her. And she will never, ever come into this apartment. Got all that?”

  “She’s never been in this apartment.”

  “I want to believe that. And until she tells me something different, I’ll try.”

  “I know who you are,” Charlie said, his small, rodent eyes unblinking. “And I seen where you’re living. Don’t act like you’re better than me. You’re working some scam. Colorado plates. Coming into my house and threatening me. You’re worse than the niggers up the block—at least they don’t pretend to be what they’re not.”

  “You think I’m pretending?”

  “I know it.”

  Landis noticed that one of the pieces of paper on the coffee table had ballpoint-pen drawings on it. He grabbed Charlie’s left arm and maneuvered it quickly up and behind his back, in the process spinning the man around and doubling him over.

  “Ouch,” said Charlie. “What?”

  “What is that?”Landis pushed him over to the coffee table. “You draw that?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Then tell me who it is.”

  “What do you mean, who? It’s just a picture.”

  “No, it’s not. It’s a specific person.”

  “You’re fucking nuts. Let me go.”

  “Thelonius Monk.” It was just a child’s drawing, and it looked more like a man driving a truck, but Landis knew the truck was supposed to be a piano. “It’s Thelonius Monk, from the Underground album.” Landis yanked harder on Charlie’s arm, felt some section of tendon stretch with a small pop. He was inches from breaking his arm. “What did you do?”

  “Nothing.”

  “And my little girl was never in your apartment?” He increased the pressure even more.

  “I wanted to teach you a lesson,” he gasped. “That’s all. I didn’t do anything to her. She was standing on the sidewalk. I gave her some chocolate milk. What do you think I am?”

  “A lesson?” Landis pushed him to the floor and kicked him in the ribs. Not too hard, but hard enough. It would hurt for a week or two, definitely, probably make it painful to sleep. “Everything I just told you,” Landis said, quietly, and with menace

  Charlie sat up, rubbing his arm, a sullen expression on his face. “You got lucky, man.”

  “Tai chi, huh?”

  “Don’t underestimate me.”

  “You don’t even look at her.”

  “You should be thanking me,” said Charlie. “She could have wandered out in traffic, gotten hit by a bus.”

  “And every time you see me,” said Landis, “I want you to think about that arm. Because if I have to talk to you about this again, I’m going to break it.”

  Landis walked around to the front and sat on the steps of Donald Click’s house, watching as a few cars slipped past in the humid dark before the street fell empty again. He didn’t feel particularly good about what he’d just done, and his back hurt now. Chocolate milk. Perhaps the guy was simply lonely. Maybe he was jealous. He was obviously a person with problems, but that didn’t make him evil, necessarily. He just stared at the world from his basement window and lived in his head and let his anger get the better of him.

  After a while, he got up and let himself in the front door with the key Bernice had given him earlier in the evening and stretched out on the couch in the darkened parlor. He could hear the rain starting to come down hard outside. The key had significance, he knew. He remembered a rainy afternoon he and Pam had spent together a month or so before her accident; she was the only woman he’d ever shared an address with. They’d spent that afternoon in an arcade at Seaside Heights where someone had gathered together orphan games from other arcades into a kind of old-age home for such amusements, moving from machine to machine. Many were so ancient, they operated for a dime. One, which looked to be a hundred years old, with cast-metal soccer players, only wanted a penny. They shot Old West rifles at tin bad guys, fed coins into pinball machines with numbers that clanked around on oversized odometers. Hugh Hefner and 007, Archie and the Green Lantern, the rain falling in dismal buckets.

  “I can get rid of it,” she’d told him. She was pretty, young, Greek on her father’s side, Irish on her mother’s, a collector of stuffed animals who sewed her own dresses, talked about someday star
ting a clothing business. “I can make an appointment tomorrow.”

  “No,” he’d told her. “Don’t do that.”

  “Because of it, or because of me?”

  He hadn’t answered. He hadn’t known. Instead, he’d put more coins into a machine. He’d thought he understood what the rest of his life was going to be like from that moment on. It turned out he hadn’t understood a thing.

  Outside, an ambulance passed by on its way to the hospital a few blocks north. He stared up at the parlor chandelier, which was dimly visible above him, a cracked rosette inhabiting the shadows above it. Exhaustion overtook him and he closed his eyes.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Tessa watched television in the dark from her bed, hoping the infomercials would somehow drown out the noise in her head and let her go to sleep. She understood Landis’s suspicion about the neighbor. But the girl was unmarked, and when they’d bathed her, she hadn’t acted traumatized or scared, or even embarrassed. Just sleepy. You’re OK, right? Bernice had asked her over and over. Yes, Emily had replied, without elaboration. Yes.

  On one channel, an Englishman was selling cookware to an enthusiastic airhead of an American woman. On another, a man with teeth that made her think of white tombstones wanted to explain the secrets of buying real estate with no money down. She was missing out, he told her. She didn’t know what everyone else knew. The train was leaving the station, and she was not going to be on it without her cookware, without her real estate DVDs. But it was not too late, not if she acted now.

  They’d entered a strange isolation, she and David. Their cars, their house, their mortgage, all of them zipped up in a neat little Christian carryall. She’d never questioned this, never wondered if it might be dangerous. They would be good people and God would reward them for it with wealth, and children, and happiness. That was what she’d believed.

  The last year of their trying, before it had become clear that she would never conceive, she’d gone with David to a conference of Christian business owners in Boise, where they’d stayed at a resort hotel. In the mornings, he went to sessions while she explored the town and lounged by the hotel pool. Then, at five, he’d return, looking handsome and rugged in his jacket and tie, and she’d meet him wearing nothing but the fluffy terrycloth robe the hotel provided. She’d felt like a kept woman. The sex they’d had on those sunny afternoons had felt dirty and wonderful, and as close to knowing God as she imagined possible.