Precious

by Sandra Novack

  “I know,” he said. “Eva and Sissy were talking about it.”

  “They talked to people who live by the park, asked if they saw anything.”

  “Did they?”

  She shakes her head and removes a fresh cigarette from her pack of Slims and holds it out to him.

  “No, thanks. I’m trying to quit.”

  “Yeah, me too.” She holds it to her mouth and lights it. Her hands shake. “No one ever sees anything. You’d have to be fucking God to see everything, wouldn’t you? That’s what I tell myself.”

  Frank picks up the pack of cigarettes and taps one out. He takes her lighter, flicks it. He inhales, remembering all too quickly how good a cigarette can be, how it gives him something to do with his hands when he’s restless.

  “The police,” she says, her voice shakier now. “I went to the park, too. I drove around town, looking. It seemed better than being in the house. It seemed better than just waiting, but then I started to think, My God, what if I found her? What if I found her and she wasn’t—‘ ”

  “I can help, if you want. We can go together, today, and look.”

  She looks over to him, her eyes welling up. “It’s like if I don’t think about it, she might be upstairs, reading or writing in her diary, you know, writing about boys and school and friends, or maybe writing about me, writing about how awful I am.”

  “You didn’t do anything wrong,” Frank says. He keeps his voice as steady as possible. He wants to take her shaking hands in his and press them tight. Still, he also knows there is hardly anything he might say, hardly anything he might do to take away a mother’s grief, the sudden loss of a child. He remembers Natalia, how she carried a son, their firstborn, through the early months of their marriage. The baby died three days after birth. Natalia went into shock in the operating room from losing too much blood. She almost died with the baby. After that, a depression eclipsed her for months, and Frank, seeing this all, felt rubbed raw. She blamed herself, her body’s unwillingness to support life, to root something. “I wasn’t ready,” she told him. “And look—bad luck.” They didn’t talk about their son; even the girls didn’t know. After Eva was born, Natalia would sneak into the nursery at night and check to make sure everything was all right. Her vigilance lasted for years, until Eva’s first day of school. He remembers how Natalia followed Eva’s bus, how she watched Eva, small for her age, her long hair pinned back, how Eva lumbered down the steps with a yellow book bag slung over her shoulder. Natalia recounted all this to Frank, though of course Eva herself would never know that Natalia watched her at all. It is the mothers who are left to the more complicated, tenuous things; it is the mothers who find themselves waiting on their children, imagining them rushing in through the door.

  He studies Ginny now without her noticing. Her look is faraway quiet. “You didn’t do anything wrong,” he says again.

  “I should go,” she says, not moving. “I know you don’t have much time to yourself. I know you probably wanted to be alone.”

  “No,” he tells her. “It’s fine.” He thinks about Ginny, about her girl, how awful it must be, and how awful it would be for him if it were Sissy or Eva.

  She tilts her head, listening to the sounds of the day, the noises erupting in the street. “She might be hungry. She might be thirsty. She might be in pain, Frank. She might be somewhere, all alone, and she might be hurting, she might be wondering where I am, why I haven’t found her.”

  “You have to hope for the best,” he says.

  “You believe that? That she’s okay?”

  “Yes.” He doesn’t know if he believes it or not, but he knows the moment requires that he say yes, that he affirm the best possible outcome. He knows it is more about keeping his voice as steady as possible, just as he did after the baby died, when he said, “It’s not your fault.” He tries to make his voice like a heavy anchor, one that can still her. There is always one person who anchors another, one person who keeps another grounded. He tries to steady himself, For Ginny, he thinks. Still, his mind travels to Natalia.

  Ginny’s face shifts again. “I should go. I didn’t want to bother you.”

  “I put on coffee,” he says. “The girls aren’t up yet. Stay.”

  She debates, and then takes another cigarette out and lights it. “The officer said that two Puerto Rican kids ran away from home a few days ago. The police asked me about Vicki, if she hated me. They didn’t say ‘hated,’ but that’s what they were asking. They asked if Vicki might ever do something like that, just run away. They asked about Ron, too; it was like I had to explain my entire life all of a sudden. Who wants to do that? Who wants to talk about everything bad that’s ever happened? I mean, would you want to talk about stuff like that? Would you want to have to be suddenly responsible for everything in your life, whether you did anything wrong or not? But I felt like I was wrong. I felt like everything I did was wrong.”

  “You didn’t do anything wrong,” he says. Across the street, the dog pisses in the yard. “The police, that’s their job. They’re trying to help. They’re trying to rule things out.”

  “What did they expect me to say about Ron? About Vicki? That things were bad in seventy-two, that when Ron got home he wasn’t the same, that he drank, and then I started to drink? That he kept everything inside him, woke up screaming? Would that have helped?”

  “It’s not your fault, Ginny.” A car passes by, idling down the road, the windows open, the car radio playing. A lawn mower hums to life. How easily the day can pass, how easily so much can be lost.

  “I keep thinking,” she’s saying now, “if I had just looked at the clock. Maybe if I had just gone down to the park sooner, maybe she would have been there.”

  “Don’t,” Frank says, shifting. “It won’t do you any good. It won’t do Vicki any good, either.”

  “The police,” she says, “asking if Vicki has ever run away.”

  Frank takes a sip of his coffee. He grows silent, thinking. Across the street, Jim Schultz comes out of the house, calls in the schnauzer. “Has she?”

  Ginny says nothing.

  “Ginny? Has she?”

  “Do you ever regret things?”

  “I try not to,” he says, even though he does. “It’s a waste of time to look back too much, to beat yourself up over the things you can’t change, the things you can’t take back.”

  “Once she ran away. Last fall, Natalia found Vicki at the bus stop with her backpack full of clothes. That was it. It was nothing. It’s not like she was really going to go anywhere. She was pretending, trying to upset me. She was angry because I grounded her, but she broke the goddamn window, Frank. What was I supposed to do? She broke a window. That officer, he doesn’t know us, he doesn’t know our life. No one lives up to scrutiny if you’re going to look at everyone’s flaws.”

  “No,” Frank says. “And kids do that sort of thing.”

  “Do your kids do that? Does Sissy? What’s the worst thing she’s ever done? Chop off my daughter’s hair?”

  “Sissy wakes up crying at night,” Frank confesses. “Eva’s been mad at me for months. Sometimes I think they’re being raised by wolves.”

  “Natalia used to say that.”

  “Well,” he says irritably. “Natalia is a wolf.”

  “Don’t let them outside. The park isn’t safe.”

  “Sissy isn’t supposed to go to the park by herself,” Frank says. “I told Sissy. I told Eva.”

  “I keep thinking if I had just looked at the time.”

  “Don’t.”

  But she is so absorbed in her thoughts that she has fallen into a place where his voice can no longer reach her. The silence, the waiting for her to say something, to hear him, amplifies, and then what Frank wishes not to happen does happen, and Ginny’s body shakes and slumps, and whatever composure she has relied upon is suddenly gone from her. “I’m sorry,” she manages, and what he hears is her apology not to him but to her girl, to Vicki. He feels a rush of emotion. He touche
s the concrete step, places his hand next to her. He thinks about touching her, yet anyone he touches seems to drift from him. And so he refrains. He can do things. He can fix cars and mow her grass. He can climb a roof for her, nail down shingles. But to comfort her now, in an unmanageable grief, is beyond his prowess, beyond where they are together, in the moment. He has never been good at allaying tears. Natalia seldom cried, maybe once or twice in the history of their marriage. Even when his own mother sat on the couch in their living room, the day his father was buried, even then, when his mother cried, Frank left her with Natalia and got up, went outside, and mowed the grass. He simply doesn’t know what to do with hurt, with anger, even in himself. He has no place to put it.

  “She’ll come back,” he says, choosing to believe it. He places his arm around her. He leans toward her more, whispers, “She’ll find her way back.”

  By late morning there is a drop of rain, then a few more drops on the sidewalk, making Frank feel that the sky is always holding itself back. The haze is discernible, the air full, ready to break but not breaking. After tinkering with his car, he heads back to the kitchen. Holding his mug of coffee, he gazes outside and thinks the morning is almost entirely lost. Ginny, suddenly uncomfortable, had slid off the step and left abruptly, without a word. Though he called to her, she didn’t look back. How had he failed Ginny in the moment? He could only guess. He knows her to be the type of woman who doesn’t ask for help, the type of woman who, like Natalia, prefers to keep emotion in check when she can. There was nothing in that moment that he could say to set things right. He couldn’t give her girl back to her.

  Soon, he will yell upstairs for the children—Eva and Sissy, safe in bed, thank God; for however miserable they are, for however much they fight, at least they are mostly together. It’s well past their time to be up, but both girls, in Frank’s estimation, are lazy: Eva, living in the squalor of her room, Sissy, too dreamy to be useful, her thoughts frequently distracting her when she’s doing a chore. He worries that Sissy is a good candidate for accidents, for running out into the road without thinking and then getting squashed under a car tire. That she hasn’t already is only because of her luck; at Sissy’s birth Natalia told him that she would be lucky. “Look at her face,” she said. “It’s a face that wishes.” Still, it frightens Frank that he could have a daughter like that. And Eva, he can barely think of her, of how unpredictable she can be, how moody, how she has blossomed so suddenly—the blossoming bright, unexpected. He dismisses this. He reads the morning paper: an article on the steel plant, measures taken by the EPA regarding pollution; a piece on an emigrant family from China. He finds the article about the two boys who have gone missing, the Puerto Rican kids Ginny spoke of. How many children go missing a year, he wonders. Five? Ten? Two? These boys and their story have made the paper, though, because the younger one is diabetic and is without medication that is crucial to his health.

  Upstairs, directly above the kitchen, he hears the rustling of feet in Eva’s room.

  He takes eggs from the refrigerator, discards one that is cracked, and looks around the cupboard for canned tomatoes and onions. He performs this feat with a cigarette dangling from his mouth—the pack left by Ginny. He breaks the shells, mixes the eggs in a bowl, and adds water before pouring the mixture, along with the stewed tomatoes, into the pan and blasting the heat. He seldom cooks. That was always Natalia’s job, and now it is bestowed upon Eva most days, and this is the reason why all of them are thinner. He wonders, briefly, what people even eat in Italy for breakfast, for dinner; wonders, too, what types of things Natalia is putting into her mouth these days, and then he thinks, immediately, That slut.

  He calls Ginny No one answers. He hangs up, tries once more after five minutes have passed. By the time he is halfway finished making breakfast, the girls are still not downstairs and the bottom of the eggs are scorched while the top is too wet. He serves up two plates, one for Sissy and one for Eva, and leaves them steaming on the table. He waits, leans against the counter, and then finally yells upstairs. Eva comes down first, her hair up in a high ponytail. She is dressed in shorts that are too revealing for Frank’s taste, and a halter top that plunges. “Why don’t you put on some clothes?” he asks.

  “These are clothes,” she says. “How about if it bothers you, you don’t look.”

  “How long are you going to be like this?”

  “Like what?”

  “You know damn well like what.”

  Eva glares at him but says nothing. If there were a moment more between them, they would surely get into a disagreement, an outright fight, but Sissy comes down, happily, still wearing her nightshirt with her favorite rock band emblazoned on the front. Frank stares at the clownish faces, the outlandishly long tongue. “Hey,” he says.

  “Hey,” Sissy says, yawning. “What’s this?”

  “Breakfast.” He looks over to Eva. She is sitting at the table now, her jaw set, her arms crossed over her chest.

  “You made it?” Sissy asks Eva. She pulls out a chair and settles in.

  “I made it,” Frank says.

  “You?”

  “Eat,” Frank says, his cigarette still dangling, a spatula in his hand. He runs his free hand over his T-shirt, stained from working under the car. “There’s kids starving in Ethiopia.”

  A familiar refrain whenever the girls are fussy with food, one that originated with Natalia after she saw a documentary on television, then took to a quiet, desperate mood and to eating only bread and butter for days, as if trying to punish herself.

  “There are kids who are starving in America, too,” Eva says.

  “Let me guess,” Frank says, “more words of wisdom from that En glish teacher who got you thinking about the ozone.”

  Eva says nothing. She pushes her plate forward.

  He had hoped cooking breakfast would coerce them all into being together, a family sitting down at the table. “Eat.” This through gritted teeth.

  Reluctantly Eva pulls her chair into the table, picks up a fork, and pokes at her food. She samples it, and then glances over to Sissy, who has, since picking up her fork, eaten only two bites before doing what she always does when she thinks she is fooling her parents: pushing the eggs to one side of the plate and stacking them so they appear to have less surface area.

  “Salty,” Eva says.

  He breathes deeply. “It’s not salty.”

  “Whatever, then.” She throws her fork down onto the plate. “You eat it.” She pushes her chair back from the table, gets up, and goes upstairs. A minute later, Frank hears rock-and-roll music blaring from her room.

  “Your sister is impossible.”

  Sissy pushes her eggs across the plate. “Tell me about it.”

  “Has she said anything to you?”

  “About?”

  “Anything.”

  “No.”

  “Are the eggs salty?” Frank asks.

  “No.”

  “Are you lying?”

  “No.”

  “Don’t lie.”

  “It’s a little salty.” “Then, why didn’t you say that?” “You yell.” “I don’t yell.”

  Sissy pushes the eggs, so they begin to look like a small mountain. “I don’t mean to yell.” “Okay.”

  “People yell sometimes. People do a lot of things they don’t mean to do. It doesn’t always mean anything, Sissy.”

  When the phone rings at three o’clock, Eva jumps from her bed to answer it. She picks up before she turns the volume down on the Bee Gees, so automatic is her reflex, so acute is her anticipation.

  “Hi,” he says in a low tone. “Glad it’s you.”

  “Me, too.” Eva practically dances, hearing him. She pulls the phone cord across the room and checks to make sure the door is locked. Then, nervously, she flits to the window, glancing furtively to check if her father’s legs still stick out from under the Chevy. He is there, his head and torso buried under the front end, like a car wreck. He did not hear the rin
ging through the screen door. He has not emerged from under the engine to come inside. There is no one else to worry about, more or less. Somewhere downstairs, Sissy, who earlier came up to complain that she wasn’t allowed to go down to the park without Eva, is probably still moping on the couch, her legs draped over the arm of the sofa, her head buried in a book on ghost detecting.

  “Eva?”

  “I’m here,” she says, relaxing. She lets the curtain fall back to its place. She climbs onto her bed. “Just covering bases. Speaking of, where’s the wife?”

  She hears a pause, senses that Peter is smoking dope, so easy is his voice.

  “The wife,” he says finally, exhaling, “is out at her mother’s. And the father?”

  “Under a car,” Eva says. “Are we meeting?”

  “Do you work today?”

  “My hours have been cut. Too many summer employees, and the boss hired a full-time person last week. We could meet, though. I could make something up.”

  He seems to debate, as if the offer is tempting but perhaps not tempting enough, leaving her to wonder if he might prefer time alone to time with her. She hears him shift in his chair; his voice muffles. “I’d like to,” he says finally. “But there’s not enough time today, not for that.”

  “I could get out,” she offers, her hope dwindling with his every word. The room seems to close on her more. She listens for any sound from outside but hears nothing. Finally she says, “I need to get out. I’m like fucking Rapunzel up here in my room.”

  “Just a call today,” he says. “I’ve missed you.”

  She leans back on her pillow. “So prove it.”

  “Can’t.”

  “I could go out with Greg then, I guess. Would that make you happy?”

  “No,” he says. “I don’t like to think about that. I don’t like to think about all the guys you’ve been around.”