by Lisa Tucker
“Amy is using,” Zach finally said. “Not just weed, which I don’t care about. Coke, speed, whatever she can get her hands on to be up for the gig.”
Kyra was stunned, but she knew she shouldn’t have been. No wonder Amy was so intense at the clubs. She swallowed hard and peered at Zach. “But what did you tell Amy you were going to do about it?”
“This,” he said, lowering his face. “Talking to you.”
“She didn’t want you to tell me?” Kyra took a big drink from her own whiskey. “That’s what she begged you not to do?”
He nodded. “She respects you more than anybody in the world. If anyone could talk her into getting clean, it’s you.”
“She does?” Kyra was repeating this new fact over and over in her mind: Amy respects me more than anybody in the world. How could this be true? Because she got good grades? Big deal. UMKC wasn’t exactly what you’d call a hard college. (Kyra had thought it was hard, until she started doing well. Then she figured it couldn’t be.)
“Oh yeah,” he said, leaning back, letting the old couch absorb him. “She thinks you’re a genius. She said when you two were kids, you were the smartest girl in the whole town.”
“That’s just false,” Kyra said. “Amy was the smartest girl. I was merely average.”
“Only because you didn’t care,” Zach said, glancing at Kyra. “Amy told me about your mom leaving. She said it really hit you hard.” He paused. “Must have been rough for both of you.”
“Not really,” Kyra said, because she believed this. But Zach pointed out this was another reason Amy respected her: she never complained; she was tough.
There was no point in arguing this with him. Instead Kyra listened as he talked about how wonderful Amy was and how he couldn’t stand to see her hurt herself. He said he’d always hoped they’d end up married. He wanted to have kids with Amy. He wanted to spend his life with her.
They were both drinking pretty heavily—Zach was on his third tumbler, Kyra on her second—when Kyra realized she still didn’t know what to do about Amy’s drug problem. Of course she would confront her sister, but when that didn’t work, then what?
Zach had been silent for a few minutes when he said, apropos of nothing other than the fact that he was getting drunk, “You’re cute, you know that?”
“No.” Kyra could feel her face growing warm, but she forced a laugh. “I’m okay-looking, but I don’t think I’m even slightly cute.”
“You are,” he said. “And you’re even cuter because you don’t know it.”
He was leaning toward her and she could hear her heart pounding in her ears. He came so close; he put his arm around her. When he whispered, “I wish I’d met you before I met Amy,” his breath tickled her neck. But when she stupidly tried to kiss him, he said, “I can’t.” Then he leaned back and collapsed in on himself.
He looked so sad that Kyra tried to put her embarrassment aside. She told him he would get Amy back, though she didn’t believe it. She said he would get someone better, which he refused to believe. She listened to his random memories about her sister for what felt like hours while he drank and drank his whiskey, though she herself had stopped drinking after she’d tried to kiss him. She didn’t want to lose what little inhibition she had left or she might cry and ask him why no one ever seemed to like her.
When it became clear that Zach was far too drunk to drive her home, she helped him over to the mattress. He fell into a stupor immediately, and he didn’t wake up when she pulled off his shoes and socks. He had great feet; she’d noticed them every time he’d been barefoot at their apartment. His toes were long and elegant and the tops of his nails were as smooth and rounded as ten little guitar picks. The calluses on the bottoms just made his feet more endearing to her. He’d been in the army. He wasn’t some kid; he was a man who’d been willing to sacrifice himself to keep the country safe. (Well, that and to earn money for college.)
After she covered him with his fraying gray blanket, she knelt on the bed, looking at his face. She gently brushed a stray hair from his mouth. She traced his light brown eyebrows with her fingertips; she held his cheeks in her hands. She even touched her lips to his, but so lightly she wasn’t sure if she’d made contact.
In her entire life, she’d never wanted anything as badly as she wanted him to wake up and pull her to him. But when it didn’t happen, she stood up and started the long walk home. It was a beautiful night. The moon was hanging low in the sky and Kyra was looking at it as the tears started. She was giving herself a stern talking-to though, telling herself to cut it out and be reasonable. It only made sense that she and Zach should not do anything together until he was over Amy. And the truth was, even if he’d wanted to sleep with her as much as she wanted to sleep with him (or even half as much), it really wouldn’t have been a good idea. She was still a virgin, and he had years of experience. What if she’d disappointed him?
It wasn’t planned, at least not consciously, but it turned out to be only a few weeks later when Kyra finally lost her virginity with fellow math major and quasi-friend Ford Trundale. Ford was also a virgin, and nothing about their sexual experience was memorable other than that he burned her shoulders and chest with candle wax when he went to move the four “romantic” candles over to her side of the bed so he could see her body in the dark. She didn’t cry out because Zach was in her apartment that night, too, down the hall in bed with Amy, who had decided that sex was allowed as part of their new, just-friends status. Amy had been up front that she wasn’t going to be exclusive, and Kyra thought Zach was setting himself up for a massive heartache. At least Amy had agreed to quit whatever drugs she was using. When Kyra had confronted her about it, she’d promised that in the future she would stick to coffee and Vivarin to get her up for gigs. Kyra could tell she meant it; the only question was whether she could actually do it.
Ford Trundale. Kyra had more or less forgotten everything about him except his name, when, a decade later, she and David had been dating long enough that they were ready to talk about past lovers. Naturally, she started with the boy named after the car. She tried to make it funny by connecting the boy with Ford’s biggest automotive failure, the Pinto, a car her father had briefly owned. Her joke had something to do with blowing up at the wrong time, but of course there is no right time for a car to blow up, and David just looked confused and a little sad.
They were sitting on a blanket at Fairmount Park. They’d packed a picnic lunch, but they hadn’t opened anything but the wine. David felt around for a flat spot in the ground and set his glass down carefully. He picked up Kyra’s hand and kissed her palm. “Why are you joking about this guy?”
He was so sincere. It was one of the things Kyra loved about him. She immediately realized she’d handled it all wrong. “I didn’t joke about him then,” she explained. “I would never have hurt him like that.” It was true. She’d picked Ford because he was moving to California the next week. He’d been accepted as a transfer student at UC Berkeley. He didn’t want a girlfriend; he just wanted what she wanted: to stop being a virgin as soon as possible, and definitely before turning into an adult, meaning age twenty.
“I don’t care about him,” David said. The sun made his hair look auburn. His big brown eyes seemed so innocent. “Did he hurt you?”
David had a bedrock belief that men hurt women far more often than women hurt men. Kyra assumed this had started in his childhood, but she wasn’t sure what had happened, other than that his parents had gotten divorced. What she was sure of was that David treated all the women in his life with the utmost respect: from his mother to the people he worked with to an overburdened waitress or grumpy dry-cleaning clerk. No surprise, he also spoke very highly of Kyra herself. He talked about her as though she was beautiful, brilliant and, just as important, extremely responsible. He knew she’d been a scholarship student as he was. He loved that she’d worked hard
for her success. And he concluded—though he didn’t share this part with Kyra or even fully admit it to himself—that his wonderful girlfriend was incapable of doing something as rash and irresponsible as what his first wife did.
Kyra didn’t know what had happened in David’s first marriage, but she sensed that he viewed her as a much better person than his former wife and, frankly, as a much better person than she actually was. Of course she told him that Ford Trundale had burned her with the candles, and accepted his sympathy for that, because anything else would have led to what she’d felt for Zach and what she’d done to Amy and all the things she didn’t want him to know.
She already knew that David was going to be the love of her life, and she knew all too well how lucky she was to have found him. Most of the time she was deliriously happy, but occasionally she would find herself stricken with fear that he would realize the secret truth that she’d been running from since the last time she saw Amy, and maybe even before, maybe since that hot summer day when her mother left—that there was something wrong with her, something inside herself that she couldn’t see or change, which eventually, always, would make her impossible to love.
SIX
David had not hesitated to tell the police that he believed his ex-wife had taken his son. They promised to investigate; for now, though, they needed answers to some questions. Many of the questions were exactly what anyone would expect—the what, where, when, and how of what had happened to their son—but some of them seemed bizarre. That’s what David thought anyway. And he certainly didn’t expect to end up in a conversation with a detective about the philosophical theory that even very young children had some rights to self-determination.
It started when the first two officers wondered why they’d chosen homeschooling. The police were from the city: David assumed they’d dealt with murders and domestic violence and robberies and drug busts, and yet they talked like homeschooling was some kind of crime.
“And you’re not religious?” one of the officers asked. Sitting at their dining room table, he seemed like a giant. His hands were so big that when he picked up the coffee mug Kyra had given him, the mug became invisible.
It was the second time for this question. David repeated the answer. No. He and his wife were sitting on the other side of the table, holding hands. He thought his hand was sweating—or was it Kyra’s hand? He could feel her trembling, but at least she’d stopped crying and saying it was all her fault. She’d done absolutely nothing wrong. She was in the kitchen; David was in his office. She’d gone down the hall to ask David if he wanted her to pick up vegetables for supper tonight, and when she came back, Michael was gone.
This time, David also told the police, thinking it might help somehow, “We do believe in God, though.”
“Does your god allow Michael to attend school?”
“Of course,” David said, and, once again, explained that their decision to homeschool was based on Michael’s educational needs, pure and simple.
“Does your son have any friends?” the second officer asked. He wasn’t small, but he seemed small next to the other one. He was older, with wisps of gray hair coming out of his ears.
“How is that relevant?” David said.
The officer just stared. Kyra whispered, “Because he could be over at one of his friends’ houses now.”
“All right then, no. But he’s only five years old. He’ll make friends,” David said firmly. “But he can’t get back these years if he spends them in a school where he’s afraid to be himself because the teacher can’t control the classroom bullies.”
“Was your son bullied?” the giant officer said. He put down his coffee cup and picked up his pen and pad. “I’ll need the names.”
“You think another five-year-old kidnapped him?” David snapped.
“He wasn’t really bullied,” Kyra said. “But he was only four years old—” She broke off because she was crying again. David squeezed her hand. “He’d started a year early,” David explained, “because he was gifted. Some of the other boys seemed a little threatening. We were just worried it wouldn’t be a good environment for him.”
“What do you mean by threatening?” the second officer asked. And David tried to explain. And the large one asked another question. And on and on, until the officers were satisfied that homeschooling had nothing to do with what had happened to Michael. But then the older officer went in another ridiculous direction.
“Do your beliefs keep you from taking Michael to the doctor for medical treatment?”
“Of course not,” David said. Kyra stood up and said she wanted to talk to the lead detective, who was upstairs, examining Michael’s room. In the meantime, David told the officers that yes, their son’s vaccinations were up to date, and moreover, he was at the doctor’s office more than most children because he had allergies. “If you want to call his doctor, her name is Sheila Upland. She’s an excellent pediatrician. I can give you her number if you like.”
The giant officer said yes, they wanted the number. He said the police would have to call Dr. Upland to see if there had been any “incidents.” “Has he ever been in the hospital?”
“Yes,” David said. “He had—”
“Then we’ll need those records, too.”
“But it has nothing to do with this. He had—”
“No need to discuss it, Mr. Winter, until we get the records.”
“But it was meningitis when he was two!”
“He was sick—got it.” The older officer looked at David. “It’s okay, I’m writing it down. We’re only trying to help you here.”
When Kyra returned, a man was walking behind her whose mere presence silenced the other officers. His name was Detective Ingle. He looked about forty, very thin, with a red nose that made him look like a drinker. His voice was gravelly but so quiet David had to concentrate to hear him.
The detective sent the officers outside to do another sweep of the backyard. Detective Ingle leaned against the dining room hutch and explained how the investigation would proceed. It all made sense, and it had a calming effect on David, who hoped that this man knew what he was doing. David hoped Kyra felt calmer, too, but he wasn’t sure. She’d said she had something to do and disappeared in the direction of her study.
He was still wondering what his wife could possibly have to do right then when the detective cleared his throat. “Hope you don’t mind, but I’m curious. You told my colleagues you have no recent pictures of your son. Why’s that?”
At least this was actually relevant to finding Michael. David was angry with himself for not having a picture the police could use. It had been fourteen months since the last photo, and, as the detective pointed out, children grow very quickly. It was true: Michael at five and a half looked very different from the picture on the mantel of the fireplace. He was taller, of course, and his blond hair had darkened considerably. His hair was cut shorter, too. His baby face had turned into the face of a little boy.
David tried to explain to the detective that they were only trying to hear and respect their son as much as possible. At four, Michael had started acting like having his picture taken was having something stolen from him. He hated it, and so they were waiting until he didn’t, simple as that. “Convincing him to try tomatoes took almost two years,” David added, hoping he didn’t sound defensive. “But now he loves them.”
The detective was stuck on the phrase hear and respect. “Hope you don’t mind, but I’m curious,” he said. Apparently his favorite sentence. And if I do mind? David thought. Does that mean you’re not curious anymore? “Let’s say your son wanted to run out in traffic. Would you let him?”
“Of course not,” he sputtered. “That’s absurd.”
“So you decide what you’re going to hear and respect?”
“The issue of the rights of children is complicated,” Dav
id said. “And it’s irrelevant to finding my son.”
“Unless your son decided that he wanted to leave this morning.” Detective Ingle rubbed his hands together, as if they were cold or in pain. “Would he have a right to take a little trip if he wanted?”
David couldn’t resist explaining that the children’s rights movement was never about giving children more rights than adults. And adults have to let their families know where they are. “It’s part of basic respect for the people you live with.” He shook his head. “But the point is that Michael would not decide to take a trip by himself. He’s not that kind of child.”
Detective Ingle paused for a moment. “Would you say he’s an adventurous boy or more fearful?” He shook his head. “I think I can answer that myself.”
The man looked like he was trying not to laugh. David found it difficult to swallow back his anger. “Protecting your child is not wrong, Detective. Frankly, I think you would know this if you had a child. I assume you don’t.”
“You’re right.” Ingle shrugged. “Don’t have kids, never wanted kids. You got me there.”
David might have felt as if it was a victory, getting the man to admit it, except that none of this had anything to do with finding Michael.
Detective Ingle walked from the hutch to the table and back again. He was looking at the light pouring in from the kitchen “Tell me something. Do you remember how old Michael was when he decided he wanted to be homeschooled?”
“He didn’t decide that. We did. Because we’re his parents and—”
“You know better?”
“No, we know, period. A four-year-old has no idea what homeschooling is.”
“You could say the same thing about a photograph, couldn’t you? And the value of eating tomatoes?”