The Edge of Sleep

by Wiltse, David

  Jack turned back to the counselor, nodded, breathed again, then launched himself for the final lap. It was meant to be swum with the sidestroke, but it was obvious that Jack had no idea how to perform the maneuver. After sinking once, he came up again on his belly and reverted to the dog paddle that had served him on the first pass. He inched across the area between docks as if tethered to the far shore, fighting for every advance, paying for it with a loss of vitality and buoyancy, sinking, then rising again with less and less strength each time. It seemed to Becker like an ordeal that would never end. He marveled at his sudden vulnerability when it came to the boy, he was amazed at Karen’s coolness. If this was what it was like to be a parent, he didn’t know how anyone survived it.

  When Jack gained the dock at last, he hung in the water for a full minute before accepting the counselor’s offer of assistance in getting out. After a hug and pat on the back from the counselor, who turned immediately to his next victim. Jack came toward Becker and Karen on wobbly legs, his face white, his nostrils pinched with fatigue. He was too tired to smile, but as his mother put her hand lightly on his shoulder and kissed his head, he looked into her face for confirmation of how he had done.

  “Great job,” Becker said, taking his lead from Karen and restraining his enthusiasm. He wanted to lift the boy to his shoulders and parade him in triumph. “Well done.”

  Jack continued to look to his mother for approval and Becker sensed a jab of jealousy.

  “I cheated,” Jack said, still gasping for breath.

  “I know,” Karen said.

  “I didn’t do the sidestroke,” he said.

  “I know.”

  “Hell, that’s all right,” Becker blurted. “You’re only ten. You had to keep from drowning.”

  Karen stopped him with a frosty look.

  “Cheating isn’t all right,” she said. “You didn’t mean to say that.”

  Karen and Jack turned back toward the road leading up the hill to the cabin. She kept her arm lightly on his shoulder until the boy pulled away and stepped ahead of her, getting his strength back, his confidence now soaring. There would be no more holding of hands this day.

  Becker trailed them both, feeling excluded and hurt and angry with himself for being so.

  They said goodbye at the cabin. Jack already restless and eager to have them gone. His bunkmates were talking about the swimming test and Jack wanted to join them. Karen’s farewell was warm but brief, nothing to embarrass him in front of his new friends. Becker wanted to kneel and take the boy in his arms, to whisper wise last minute words of advice and encouragement, but he sensed that Jack would be appalled by the display. At the end, he merely shook his hand and said goodbye. When Becker looked back, Jack was already involved with the other boys.

  When they reached the car, Becker saw that Karen’s face was wet with tears although he had not heard a sound from her.

  “What a wonderful kid,” she said.

  Becker realized that for the first time he knew exactly what she meant.

  Then she had fallen into the strange silence as they drove. He imagined her struggling against her tears. It would not have surprised him if she had turned the car around and headed back to the camp. Becker felt an overwhelming sympathy for her because he felt the same way, but he did not know how to express it to her in a manner that would help. They could be married while Jack was in camp, he thought, offering the boy a surprise when they came to rescue him in two weeks’ time. Or would it be better to have the boy at the ceremony?

  Becker looked again at her troubled profile and placed a reassuring hand on her thigh.

  “It’s hard, isn’t it?” he said.

  Karen looked at him as if startled that he could read her thoughts.

  “It’s just not going to work,” she said.

  “We’ll make it.”

  She shook her head. “No.”

  “It’s going to be tough, but it’s only two weeks.”

  “Two weeks?”

  “Before we get him back.”

  “I’m talking about us, John. You and me. We just don’t work together. It’s not working out. It’s nobody’s fault.” Becker stared at her, trying to make sense of her words. They seemed to have torn right through his stomach and the rest of him was falling through the hole they had caused.

  “You’re trying your best,” she said. “You always try your best at everything you do. I love that about you, but it’s just too hard. It’s asking too much of you to step into a situation where you have to deal with me and Jack both at the same time. I should never have expected you to be able to deal with it all. It’s my fault.”

  It sounded to Becker very much as if she were saying it was his fault, and it still made no sense.

  “I should have known better in the first place.” She was talking rapidly now, the thoughts tumbling out, as if she could prevent him from entering in the discussion if she spoke her words fast enough. As if she could summarize the situation all by herself, tie it off and end it without any messy loose ends.

  “You’re a single man, single by nature. I know you’ve been married, but look how that ended up—not that a failed marriage means you’re a failure. I’m no one to suggest that—but you’re a loner, John, you know that, you’ve said as much yourself. You have your own way of viewing the world, your own way of dealing with it. It works for you and that’s fine, but it’s not fair of me to expect you to toss that aside. You’ve spent a lifetime developing it, you shouldn’t have to change just because something else is required when you’re living with a woman and her child.” Becker stared numbly at her as she drove the car. He heard the words, understood the message, but couldn’t penetrate the camouflage to discover the reason. There was a ringing in his ears, a hollow sound to Karen’s voice that made everything seem unreal, otherworldly, as if he was watching the whole thing happening to somebody else. Some other poor uncomprehending schmuck was being dumped without just cause, not him.

  “It’s just the best thing all around,” she was saying, and Becker realized he had not heard her for a few moments. He felt he must have missed something crucial, the causative link that would interpret everything else. He wondered if he should ask her to repeat herself. “And the timing is right, with Jack away. This way he won’t have to watch anything messy, that doesn’t do a child any good to have to listen to fighting and yelling. We’ll just get it over with and when he comes home from camp everything will be as good as new. We really get along best by ourselves anyway. Jack and I. I know you tried, but I think he was getting conflicting signals. Kids like things simple.”

  Becker wondered if it was something about Jack. Was she jealous of Becker’s attentions to the boy? Did she want Jack all to herself? Had Jack’s hand in his at camp affected her as strongly as it had Becker, but in the wrong way? He thought there was an idea there that needed examination and he must get to it if the sinking in his stomach and the roaring in his ears ever stopped.

  Karen glanced at Becker, the first time she had dared to really look at him since she began talking. He had slumped down in the seat, his eyes staring at the dashboard. Sullen, she thought. Lumpish and silent and not even troubling himself to talk back. He doesn’t even care enough to argue. Male. So hopelessly male. And it was just as well; it made the job that much easier. Let him sulk. They were all good at that; it seemed to come naturally to them. Her ex-husband had been a master at it, jumping inside himself and battening down the hatches at the first sign of emotional distress. In his case he had always simply walked away, literally walked right out of the room rather than sit down and talk. Becker was a captive in the car now and couldn’t walk, but she could see he was doing his equivalent of it.

  “Do you have anything to say?” she asked, annoyed.

  He took a long time to respond, as if summoned from a far place. When he spoke he did not look at her.

  “Can I keep Jack?” he asked.

  He made another sound, deep in his throat, that Karen th
ought might be laughter, or a sob.

  Reggie had watched the man and woman load their suitcases into the trunk, then hurried to the cabin as soon as the car was out of the driveway. As she had suspected, they were gone for good. The wastebaskets were empty, the room clean. Even the bed was made, the spread neatly in place and tucked in at the bottom with crisp hospital corners. Nothing had been defaced, nothing stolen. Reggie felt oddly cheated that they had left her nothing to complain about.

  “They had four days of rent left,” she explained to the two FBI agents who had returned minus the boy in the backseat. “But I figure they owe me that much for sheer aggravation.”

  “Nothing to justify a warrant then.” the female agent said. She looked to the man for confirmation. He was hanging back, staring at the ground. He reminded Reggie of George and his hangdog look after he’d been scolded for something. Moping, aggrieved, and withdrawn. There and not there at the same time. Reggie felt a pang of sympathy for the officious young woman. Working with men was not worth the trouble most of the time. It was just easier to do things yourself.

  “And you saw them leave, you say,” the woman asked.

  “That’s right. Bold as brass, this time. Went out in broad daylight, and he wasn’t wearing any sunglasses either, ‘bad eyes’ or not.”

  “Just the two of them? The man and the woman?”

  “Who else?”

  “No sign of the child?”

  “He could have been lying down on the backseat, of course.”

  “That’s true,” the woman said, clearly not believing Reggie. “But you said you watched them pack the car yourself. You would have noticed if a child got into the backseat, wouldn’t you?”

  “If I was looking right at that exact moment. I have other things to do, you know. I wasn’t studying them or anything. They might have slipped several kids in that car while I was tending to business for all I know.”

  “That’s true,” the agent said again, and again clearly not believing it. “But you have no reason to suppose they did?”

  Reggie looked briefly at George, who seemed to be hiding a smirk. He wanted to be here for the excitement, of course, but would he help her? Not in this lifetime. Stand there dumb as a post when he might be of some assistance, then strut around when they were gone and tell any fool who would listen about how he helped in an FBI investigation. Helped who? Not his wife.

  Reggie shrugged. “I may have been wrong about a child, I never actually saw him, I told you that the first time. I just saw a toothbrush, but that doesn’t change the fact that something very strange was going on in that cabin.”

  The woman agent sighed. “No, it doesn’t change that. They didn’t leave a forwarding address or mention where they might be going?”

  Reggie snorted. “They didn’t even wave goodbye, but good riddance to bad rubbish, I say.” She looked meaningfully at George, who dropped his eyes to the ground and slumped his shoulders, just like the male agent. Like carbon copies of each other, Reggie thought. Lost causes, all of them.

  “I guess that will be all, then,” the woman said. She looked once more toward her male partner, but he had already turned on his heel and was heading back toward the car.

  Reggie watched them drive off with a sense of disappointment. She had won her battle completely, she had gotten rid of that Dee woman and her hideous “husband” without any loss of property, and had even had the satisfaction of siccing the FBI onto them, but still she felt oddly cheated. Just what of, she could not have said. When she turned to speak to George, he had already slunk off.

  The silence in the car was so thick that Karen felt as if it sloshed back and forth with each turn in the road like so much liquid. Becker would not even look at her and she could think of nothing to break the silence except to turn on the radio, which seemed cold and insensitive. There seemed no point in even discussing the couple from the motel. They had no child with them and there was no reason to suspect them of anything, and that was that. She did not blame them for leaving the motel so abruptly. After that kind of showdown with the owner. Karen felt she might well have done the same. Their only offense lay in being weird and in overtipping the proprietor with four days of prepaid rent. As for breaking off their relationship, it was clear that Becker had nothing to say, no defense, no argument. For all she could read into his attitude, apart from the insult of being the jilted party, he didn’t seem to care at all.

  The phone was a blessing when it rang. Karen snatched it up before the ring had ceased to echo in the car.

  “Crist,” she said, then listened for several moments. Becker watched her listening the way an actor listens, with subtle exaggeration, pursing her lips, squinting with concentration, nodding her head in silent agreement. It was a small show she was putting on for his benefit, he realized, making it clear that she was a woman with more pressing things to do than deal with him. At one point she looked directly at him, smiled and shrugged as if to say, what could she do; she was a helpless captive of higher purposes.

  Becker was grateful for her little pantomime; it gave them both an excuse to move away from the awkwardness and tension that rode between them like a hulking stranger.

  Any distraction would serve, and work was the best. They did not have to feign an interest there.

  She moved the phone from her mouth and whispered “Malva” in Becker’s direction, then nodded again, as if to reassure Malva she was still listening. Becker hoped the phone call would last for the rest of the ride home. He had been painfully aware of her intense scrutiny since she dropped the bombshell. Even during the perfunctory interrogation at the motel he knew she had been observing his every move and expression. Something was expected of him, Becker knew that, some display of rage, or sorrow, some deftly articulated show of emotion accompanied by the practiced flourishes of exaggerated loss of control of a high-wire artist. She wanted to see him teetering on the edge of disaster, almost lost it there! Arms flailing to regain balance, careful now or it’s into the abyss of sorrow! She wanted a reaction. Women always wanted a reaction, but Becker could not give it to her. He responded to the pain as if he’d been kicked in the solar plexus. Paralyzed by the sudden blow, gasping for breath, it was all he could do to curl himself around the pain and try to hang on. He had no strength left over to perform the dance she expected of him. It was for her, he imagined, a very unsatisfying jilting.

  “Malva,” she repeated when she hung up the phone at last. For the final moments of the call she had ceased her thespian antics and just held the receiver quietly to her ear. Becker wondered if Malva had not hung up long ago and Karen was trying to prolong the excuse to avoid him, no more eager to return to their strained silence than he was.

  “Bobby Reynolds’s school says there was no school nurse on that outing and there never is. The Bickford mall does not have a nurse on duty. Hemmings has gone through the interview notes on two of the snatches besides Bickford so far. Nothing from one of them. At the other, in Peabody, a security guard mentioned having seen a nurse around the time of the boy’s disappearance, but he wasn’t sure if it was before or after. He remembered it because he said she was moving so quickly that he thought somebody must be injured somewhere. Then he said that right after the boy was discovered missing, a lot of people were moving around quickly. The interviewing agent asked the guard if there was anything particularly notable about the nurse and he said no, he thought he remembered her just because of the uniform.”

  “Does the Peabody mall have nurses on duty?”

  “No, but they do have an eye clinic. The nurse there wears a uniform.”

  “Does the Bickford Mall have an eye clinic?”

  “I’ll tell Malva to find out. What else?”

  “We’ll have to go through the list of sudden departures again and check for women this time, see if any names repeat.”

  “I’ll put Hemmings on it after he finishes reviewing the notes.”

  Becker paused. Karen waited, then lifted the phone agai
n. Becker stopped her with a gesture.

  “If you wore a nurse’s uniform with all that starch, would you do it yourself? Wash it, starch it, iron it, whatever? The uniform on the nurse at the motel, you could cut your finger on the creases. Is that the kind of job a woman would do for herself?”

  “You could, I suppose. I’m no expert on laundry, but if it was my uniform. I’d send it out, have it done professionally.”

  “So would I. Which means that if I had to leave town immediately, I might have left a uniform or two in a laundry somewhere, right?”

  “If our theory is right and a boy has just been killed and you’re packing up and leaving right away, you wouldn’t wait around for the laundry to get done, that’s true.”

  “We can check the possible cleaners by phone, no need to have a man go to each one personally. An unclaimed nurse’s uniform shouldn’t be that common an item.”

  “Hemmings,” Karen said with a chuckle as she punched in the number on the telephone. Hemmings was a minor legend in the Bureau, one of the very few agents who actually preferred desk work to being in the field. Where most agents sought the solid satisfaction of an actual collar, Hemmings found his thrills in the slow sifting of details on paper. In an era when the computer had replaced the library and file cabinet, Hemmings was a throwback to the literary age, an archivist at heart. What made him a legend rather than a curiosity, however, was his appearance. Bald and hairless since birth, Hemmings began each day by donning a toupee and applying artificial eyebrows. Tagged “Hairy” Hemmings by Bureau wags, the agent also affected facial hair of varying styles and lengths so that some days he sported a goatee, some days a pencil-thin mustache, some days a full beard. With a color sense no more consistent than his taste in tonsorial styles, he offered over the course of a year a kaleidoscopic variety of hair colors ranging from mouse to Irish red and Swedish blond. He was referred to by the agents as the man with a thousand disguises, none of them adequate. Above all, however, Hemmings was very good at his job. He worked the phones with the avidity of a teenaged girl, and when it came to paperwork it was rumored that he could find a pattern in a pane of window glass.