“Seeing each other?”
“Yes, you understand? And they were together tonight, and, I guess they agreed to meet, you know, secretly, in your house.”
“Just a minute”—suddenly shouting—“to get this straight. You can’t keep your kids at home and that’s my problem?”
“I’m not looking to cast blame. You misunderstand—”
“Your shit stains are sneaking into my house and that’s on me?”
“We didn’t know she was here.” Teagan held her arms, steeling herself against Deb, or the night.
“And you!” her mother yelled, turning. “You think you can do whatever you want?” She pushed her hand into Teagan’s chest, backing her up in increments. “Is that what you think?”
“Hey, hang on,” Deb said. “All I’m saying is we should both, you know, do a better job monitoring our children.”
“You had this boy in your room?” Her shirt’s elastic shrugged higher around her waist. “After everything you put me through the last time, you learn nothing?”
The car door snapped open. “Deb, you need help?” Gary called.
Teagan’s mother put one hand against the wall of the house and leaned on it as though each were holding the other up. For a moment everyone was quiet, but the silence was filled with other things.
The light was on in the upstairs window of the house next door, and Simon could discern two figures in the picture it made. The neighbor across had come out to watch, too. Looking up and down the block, he saw people appear like new stars, dotting the block. All those eyes and no one had noticed yet, that the eleven-year-old on the curb had been for some time gone.
Whom would you have had her call? There was their grandmother, there was Ruth, who would have come on the next train, but Deb had to stop turning to her mother, who was older now—who bought senior tickets at the movies now—and who shouldn’t have to worry. And Gary was here, but Gary was still too much a stranger, would have required too much catching up.
And don’t say no one. Deb was going to have help.
On the phone he asked mercifully few questions. As much as their history together was the problem, it was also what made things easy, the way it meant he knew when to shut up.
—
Deb reached him late; she reached him early. She reached him at La Guardia baggage claim, almost two A.M., where Jack was waiting very upright between Delta-blue columns. The longhorns had just made their triumphal way down the ramp. In so much bubble wrap they could have been a whole person, or a canoe. They failed to clear the first turn, jamming the procession of swollen Jansport duffels and tufted black Samsonites. He was glad to see them. He’d taken an evening flight out of Houston and had to change planes in Atlanta. It had been raining, and they’d held them at the gate an extra eighty minutes. He’d bought a two-dollar apple. He was tired.
His phone, when it rang, said “Simon-Cell,” and he answered, “Pumpkin?”
“What? It’s me. Jack?”
“Is your phone okay?”
“I can’t find it.”
“You should call and have it disabled.”
“That’s not—listen, something happened. It’s Kay. We can’t find Kay.”
“What? Did you call the police?”
“I called. They sent someone, but he’s taking so long, and I can’t, I don’t know what—I’ve been out with a flashlight, but.”
“Okay. Okay, I’m coming.”
—
At the mercifully barren Rent-A-Car, Jack got a minivan that could fit the longhorns when he slid them the long way between the front seats, where they bothered the gears. It had started raining here too. The pavement shone wetly before him and the traffic signals bled halos of light. He called Deb at intervals from the road. He beat the pads of his palms against the wheel. He did not stop.
He was in a hurry to be back with his family, feeling in a way that he was already. His happiness clashed with the conditions of his summons. He’d been hoping for a call, though he hadn’t wanted it like this. His bliss at being wanted welled in lumps he had to swallow. Tricky not to get choked up over it, but it was important not to choke. He’d not been asked there to get weepy.
But Kay. He had to believe she was all right, that she’d done this, in a way, for him. She was his greatest ally, though too young and too quiet to sway the family vote: Her small voice held little weight. But she’d done what she could, in disappearing, like a magic act.
Three in the morning at the house and everyone was in each other’s way. Out front a cop car had been parked some hours, white with POLICE splashed across its doors in slanted block letters, looking just like those windup cars Simon used to have, the small metal kind Deb was always stepping on sock footed. The officer who’d stepped out roadside asked too few questions, spent a lot of time adjusting his belt. Big-baby-bodied, he had a hard time getting the equipment clipped to where it was comfortable.
“I don’t understand,” Deb was saying. “What are your people doing?”
“I’m sure they’re doing all they can,” Gary said between rackets with the coffee grinder. Infuriating, how he stayed polite.
“It’s all hands on the deck.” The officer showed her his palms for no reason she could invent.
“What does that mean?” Deb shouted over the grinder. His hand radio gurgled and bleeped amid static din, a voice spouted ten codes. Sometimes he’d say into it “10-4,” though nothing was 10-4 really.
It was six when Jack reached Jamestown. The sky was just beginning to wake. Lines distinguished themselves in the trees, setting apart each leaf. He stopped to let pass the morning’s first jogger, a woman with earbuds and teal nylon shorts. He drove by the old library. RESUME WRITING TONIGHT 7. Jack knew the streets the way they say one knows the back of one’s hand, though his hands, as he got older, had begun to surprise him.
Later he’d say it was a hunch, no more than that. He felt close to his daughter, felt he understood her thoughts, though his son was the more like him. Maybe that was why it had always been harder with Simon, because Jack could no more predict his son’s actions than he could his own.
So, on a hunch he’d stopped at the water basins. If he’d been wrong, he never would have remembered trying.
She was there, with her knees up and her head against a dirt-dripped tub, asleep like the nerds who camp out all night for movie tickets. Deb’s phone was on the ground beside her. She’d taken out the battery.
“Angel?” he said, sounding like his wife. He called his daughter every nickname.
Her eyes opened as though she’d only been feigning sleep, but she blinked at him uncomprehendingly, and her face was salt streaked.
He took up the phone and the battery and slid them into his pocket. “Come,” he said, but already lifting her.
He carried her to the car. He couldn’t think of the last time he’d carried her. “We’re going home now,” she said, sounding drunk or just young, and he knew she wouldn’t remember any of this which he would not ever forget.
“I assure you, Mrs. Shanley,” the officer said, “I’ve got every one of my guys out there looking for her.”
“It’s light out,” Deb said, reshouldering her purse. “I can’t just sit here.”
Gary, carrying the old coffee filter and catching its drips, pressed an elbow into her arm. “The police know what they’re doing. You should be here if she comes back. Try to be calm.”
“You be calm, Gary. I can’t find my daughter.”
Simon was at the table, the heels of his hands pressed into his cheeks. “She probably just wanted to be alone.”
“She doesn’t get to be alone. Eleven-year-olds don’t get alone time.”
A car door slammed. Out the window, a dark green minivan sat double-parked beside the police car, effectively blocking off what traffic there wasn’t. Between the cars stood a man, his back to them, though his family would know him anywhere. Bending to get something out from the shotgun side. Jack turned and the
something was Kay, wilted in his arms.
“She’s fine,” he said when Deb came running out the front door. He set their daughter gently on the grass, checking to see her knees didn’t buckle. “She’s just sleepy.”
Deb got down to the ground, held Kay by wobbly legs. “Oh, where were you?”
The others had come out behind her, Simon with his arms crossed and Gary with his coffee. “We know this man?” the officer asked.
“I’m the father,” Jack said. “Hi. Hello, Gary.”
“Jack,” Gary nodded.
“Well, I need to radio this in,” the officer went on. “Then there’ll just be some forms.”
“I’ll do it. I’m the father.” Jack pushed sweated hair from his forehead. “Found your phone too, D.” He smiled, groping his wrong back pocket. He was distracted by so many eyes after being alone so long. Inside, the old house greeted him, chairs untucked at angles from the table and glasses splashed with water in the sink. His family’s fingerprints on everything.
They had to lie down. Simon and Kay in their room, Jack beside Deb, she didn’t care. Sleep clobbered them, left no room for thought.
Deb woke to an empty rest-of-bed. It was almost ten. She padded half-tired to the hall. The voices of men on the stairs.
They were standing in the kitchen together, Jack and Gary. They’d been laughing.
“You’re awake!” Jack had a glass in his hand, her iced tea.
“I was just hearing about Houston,” Gary said. “We weren’t too loud?”
“No, you should have woken me.” She walked to a chair, held the back of it.
“You needed it,” Jack said, too cavalier. He swirled his glass, chattering ice.
“I’m fine.” She looked at Gary twice, at the strap like a seat belt across his chest.
“Ah, yeah.” He turned to one side, exhibiting the large, black bag attached behind. “I’m taking off.”
“You don’t have to.” She looked at Jack, who shrugged, smiling. “I mean there’s no reason.”
“I was going to come get you,” Gary said, though with the bag already on his back that seemed unlikely. He went on, something obscure about work and duty calling, and said to give the kids his love.
He hugged her one handed.
Jack got the door.
Deb stood holding down the chair, the chair holding her up, as they walked out to the car together, her husband and his friend.
As well as she knew the voice, Kay wasn’t prepared, rolling over, to see the body that belonged to it. Jack, strangely occupying the corner of her bed, depressing the mattress, taking up space and blocking the light where there had been only light, and air.
“Hey, kiddo.”
“Hi,” she croaked, throat dry from disuse. “What time is it?”
“You slept,” said Deb, sitting with Simon on the other bed. “I’m glad you slept.”
Jack asked small questions that she answered smally, with her mother’s help: about the cat they’d found, the fishing trip. It all sounded so nice, like someone else’s life.
“Don’t act like you care about all this stupid stuff,” Simon said. The first thing he’d said.
“I care.” Jack leaned close to her, “Sweetie? I want to know what you’ve been up to.”
“Why don’t you ask her what she was doing following me?” Simon stood. “Huh? What’s the matter with you?” Kay blinked once, then several more times, shuttering as if to keep something out. Or rather to keep something in. “Here we go again,” he said, as the tears started streaming.
“Sy, cut it out,” Deb said, pulling at him. “None of this would have happened if you hadn’t been sneaking off.”
“None of this would have happened if you both had just minded your own business,” he said. “Seriously, what is your deal?”
“Simon,” Jack shouted, but Deb had shot to her feet.
“Seriously, my deal is that you’re my kid and I say where you go.”
Simon waved his arms. “You’re, like, obsessed. You know I’m not him, right? That I’m not Dad? I’m not actually doing anything wrong.”
“Simon!” Jack tried.
Deb looked at her son, her husband, her son. Then she sat, and it was like something in her folding. “Do what you want. We go home tomorrow.” She crossed her legs. “Just, wear a fucking condom, would you please?”
Simon looked at her, hard. It was the most adult thing she’d ever said to him. She might have said more, softened it, if they’d had more time. He was already out the door.
There was still some pottery on the lawn, but the sign (TAKE ALL!) had been brought in or thrown away. Simon made his charging way across the straw grass, treaded the matted carpets on the front porch. He’d armed himself with what to say to Mrs. Dignam, but around back the hammock lay with no one in it. His foot knocked a beer bottle, which rolled and tapped another. There were several, stood in a row, dark amber empties.
Teagan’s room felt changed from the last and only time he’d been there. It had filled with sick. Almost noon, but she was in bed, a mound of flowered sheets softly breathing.
“Hello?” he said, like answering the phone. She shifted in her half cocoon. Crumpled tissues scattered and bounced to the floor, landing like origami cranes. “It’s me. It’s Simon.”
There emerged the tangled blonde, and anyone could tell she had been crying. She wore the puffiest version of her face.
“She didn’t see me,” he said.
Teagan pulled him to the bed, on his back, and her body curled over him, eclipsing his.
“So, we’re leaving tomorrow, my mom says.”
“I can’t be here alone. I can’t be alone with her.” She breathed into his neck.
“No, but it’s okay though,” he went on. “I mean you really only have, what, another year here?” She began to sound and feel, in his arms, more upset. “Then you can go live wherever you want. Wherever in the world.”
It seemed anything he told her could only stir up what sadness had settled. He let her shoulders shake into him and watched the ceiling as it bounced. “Don’t, cry,” he added, very quietly. She could opt out of hearing it.
Deb and Jack were still on the bed, still around their daughter. The first moment of levity had come in the form of the cat, of Wolf, who’d filled a quiet moment when Kay was all cried out, trilling strange meows from the closet. Jack had gone over and hovered his hands over the small gray body. “Not gonna hurtcha.” He’d swept forward—something balletic in the way it was all one motion—and scooped the cat up around the middle, where its arched back made a handle for holding. Kay had smiled a little then, and her father had pounced, saying, “He wants to know what all the hubbub’s about out here. Thought maybe he heard a can opener.”
Yes, fathers have a way with daughters.
“Hey, what do you want to do today?” he asked. “It’s going to be beautiful out, beautiful day. We’ll get pancakes. Sun’ll be shining, we can go out on the water. That sound good?”
“Good,” said Kay, who noticed her father kept using the word we.
Deb had noticed it too, and that Jack had put his hand over hers on the hill of their daughter’s hip.
Simon and Teagan slept an hour or two, or he slept them. Everything was changed from before; of course it was. The mattress so sinking he could feel the bones of it. She rewrapped her fingers around him, held him so tightly he felt pressed past her. He tried looking down, but her head was tucked high under his chin.
“I’m hot.” He felt his heart against her, how it wanted to beat her away. “You hot?” He rolled off the bed and went to the window. “Probably from all the covers.” Flattening his hands against the glass.
“Just, please,” she said, and nothing followed it.
“Hang on—here.” He pushed but the frame stayed stuck to the sill. His palms slipped and skidded squeaking up the glass.
Teagan made a soft wilting sound behind him. “There’s a thing.”
There was a t
hing, a little white lever in the middle of the frame, which revealed itself to him now. He flipped it and the window sailed open. “There. Duh.” A portal to the feeble breeze and slightly louder trees.
He wiped his hands on his jeans and found Teagan rolled away, toward the wall. The sheets had rolled with her, baring the longbow of her spine, the white nightgown bunched up around her waist. Sweat sharpened each of the fine, light hairs dusting her back’s lower notches.
“Hey, what?” He knelt down by the bed, pulling her to him. She sat up but wouldn’t look him in the face. “It’s okay. You’ll come to New York, in the fall.” He felt he had only so much love, and for a brief moment, the scales had tipped in her direction. “We’ll go to the Chelsea Hotel,” he invented. “We’ll go to the Statue of Liberty,” where he had never been. “We will. You’ll come stay with me there.”
Then she hugged him, and if she didn’t believe him, at least she was trying to.
When he left, she walked him out, down the stairs in case her mother was around. She even smiled a little, gentling the door open and drawing the beaded curtain aside so he could step out. There, on the welcome welcome welcome, thinking about whether it would be all right to kiss her. He didn’t.
He took the back way, veering onto the street again when he judged himself far enough away. At the point where the hill began, he stopped and looked, the last place he thought he’d be able to see her, ghostly on the porch in her starchy nightgown that filled a little with air. But he could see her, too, hours later, lying awake in the sleep-soaked room he shared with his sister, waiting for morning, and much later, when they’d gone back to New York, and for a long time after that. The little white sheet of her swaying. From the breeze, he thought, or from her feet, unsteady beneath her. And he did not know how he’d been so brave, or so weak, to leave her there.
That afternoon there was beauty in all the upstairs windows. “What did I tell you?” Jack had been bluffing, but Jack had been right. “Weather for allergy commercials.”
Among the Ten Thousand Things: A Novel Page 21