The Eye Shadow Girls, for the most part, stuck their noses up at Sally and Lucinda, smirked and ignored them. But once, Betty Lansing got really mean. Scary mean. Sally had called her stupid and Betty had hauled back and slapped Sally’s face. Hard. So hard it sounded like a beaver tail smacking water. Sally had looked at Betty in shock, but Sally hadn’t cried. Not Sally. No way. Betty had this ugly look on her face, eyes squinted up like a pug’s, breathing hard through her nose, fuming, like if she were a cartoon smoke would blow out her ears, like she wanted to do more than slap Sally. Like she wanted to k—
Lucinda coughed; the cigarette smoke in the room was like breathing school bus exhaust. She felt sick and so tired and just wanted to be in her bed, asleep.
One of the doughy women got up with a wheeze, and a boy sat next to Lucinda in the woman’s place, the couch cushion caved where she’d sat. The boy was an older boy, like old enough to almost be a teenager. Maybe he even was. She’d seen him around. A loner. His face was inflamed and gross with pimples and he smelled weird. Like he’d been sleeping and sweating in an old sleeping bag for days. Eddie something. Eddie Barnes? Eddie Baines?
“You okay?” the boy said.
Was he talking to her? Older boys never talked to girls Lucinda’s age, or at least never to Lucinda.
“You okay?” the boy said.
He was talking to her.
She didn’t know what to say. She’d never said anything to a teenage boy.
“Something’s happened,” Eddie said and wedged his fingers into the tattered hole at the knee of his jeans. “She’s your friend, right?”
Lucinda nodded. How did he know that? How did he know her?
“I wonder what’s happened,” he said. “Something’s happened. Whatever it is.”
“Why are you here?” Lucinda said.
“I’m going to go look for her. My mom and dad want me to help look for her. And her mom, I guess.” A man pushed through the crowded room and put his hand on the boy’s shoulder. The boy stood and took a flashlight from the man’s hand and disappeared out the door with him.
It had to be way past Lucinda’s bedtime, which was neat; she’d never stayed up so late, but the night was going on forever. There was nothing to do. Why wouldn’t anyone let Lucinda look for Sally? She hoped wherever Sally was it was more fun than here. She thought for a second maybe Sally was in the pit, but the pit was a secret and Sally would never show it to her mom. Why would she? Women around Lucinda chirped about “praying” and “strength” and “hope” and needing to get out “full force, bright and early.” All while their eyes shifted over at Mr. B., narrowing, like he was one of those shoplifters Lucinda’s dad had told her about; how obvious it was that they were up to no good. It made Lucinda mad because she liked Mr. B.
Lucinda felt suffocated and needed air.
She stood, wobbly, her head feeling like a helium balloon, as if it might float up to the ceiling. Through the swarm of bodies she glimpsed the queen of the Eye Shadow Girls, Betty Lansing, who must have sneaked into the house with her mom.
Lucinda thought she’d throw up for real seeing Betty in this house, Sally’s house. Sally would die.
Betty’s eyes burned into Lucinda, and she was showing her teeth, like a mad dog; but when Betty’s mom bent down to tell Betty something, Betty’s face went all sugary sweet with a fake smile. It seemed everyone had a fake smile, and Lucinda wondered why no one except her seemed to notice it.
Desolation
He’d lain in fields with Rebecca, in the ether of dark and humid summer nights, young, both of them, so young; her hand in his, the pulse of blood beneath her tanned thin wrists, God’s own salve on his broken soul as they’d gazed up into the dark and spectacular void. She: everything he was not. Self-possessed. Stable. Balanced. Worthy. Who was he to hold her hand? A boy once so enraged over another boy being selected to leave the Boys’ Home with new parents that he had taken a rock and ground a nest of baby birds into gruel. How could a woman love a man who’d had that in him, even as a boy? What dark magic was at work that she should love him? Save him? What cruel trick? What abominable sacrifice was being made? He’d trembled at his fortune, and at the knowledge that a day would come when he’d pay for it. Stars ripped across the black night sky as if tearing through a dark curtain to let God’s light seep through from the other side. Shhh, she’d said. You’re with me now. Shhh. You’re safe. No one will hurt you again. He’d carved poetry from his pain. Put himself into her. All of himself. But. Now. Now she’d vanished, and he’d returned to the muck, to his original state. Everything else proven false. Undeserving. You are born what you are.
Jonah fell off Sally’s bed with a groan, grabbed at his collarbone, believing he’d awoken in the forest. Believing he was the boy he’d been, in another life, and had not yet lived his life to this moment, had a chance yet to rewrite his years.
He thought of the parents he’d been born to but had never known, for whom he had no memory, though he imagined them as kind people. Gone early, those who’d conceived him. Just him then. Alone, even among others. Traded like a stray from house to house, never a home. Never part of a family. Always apart. Passed among adults who spoke at him, never to him. Shut up. Sit up. Stop it. A piss-soaked horse blanket for a bed on the bare, cold, lumped earth in the back of a decrepit toolshed. Bedbug bites and sores. Welts. Cuts. Bruises. A boy. A child. Helpless. Voiceless. Even when he screamed and raged.
He’d fled, once. At Sally’s age. On a brutally cold autumn day. In just his underwear. While the Couple had lain passed out on their couch. He’d splashed through gullies and crashed through woods for what seemed miles, until, depleted, he’d fallen to the forest floor to let the ferns and moss claim him. A fawn.
His naked flesh scratched and torn, eyes burning and shot hollow, he’d lain on his back beneath sumac set ablaze with autumn. The leaves the most spectacular sight he’d ever seen. The cold, hard ground had hurt each knuckle of his puny spine, raised in relief beneath skin gone cadaver blue with the cold. Still, he’d remained on his back to marvel at those leaves. A sign. Proof. He was free. Free of them.
A sweet tang of autumn decay had swum over him.
He’d listened. No sound from the brush had come. No bawling of voices like a pack of hounds gone lunatic for fugitive scent. Just. Sweet. Silence.
Until that clattering. He’d known that sound, and his heart was decimated by it. The Couple’s junk truck. It could not be. Could not. He’d run so far. So hard. So long. How could he be near a road? How could they know where to begin to look?
He’d shrunk down as small as he could make himself, trying to will himself invisible, collected his knees up in skeletal arms.
The clattering had risen, closer.
He’d quaked like a tiny forest creature afraid for the branch’s snap beneath the predator’s weight, pressed tight to the forest floor as though to make himself part of the earth. Breathless. Eyes watching, watching. The jalopy clanked on the washboard road, so close the squall of dust it kicked up had sifted down and coated his bare body.
The wind rose. Tree limbs bowed to it. Dry leaves cycloned as if possessed by spirits. He could not tell what was the sound of the wind and what was the sound of a pursuer in the underbrush. From somewhere distant and unconnected from his unfolding story came the chaotic hilarity of crows.
The truck had clattered again, moving away, the sound of its sputtering engine growing pale.
He’d listened and watched until his eyes felt about to crack, listened and watched some more.
They were gone.
He’d sobbed and sobbed and, finally, he’d slept.
In his sleep, that quiet darkness of temporal death, no fists pummeled his flesh, no hard mouths pressed against his, no hands plied, no dank cellar or piss-soaked horse blanket served as bedding. There was only the warm womblike darkness and the distant merciful softness of moss beneath body.
And a dream of God.
Until that cruel h
and clutched his frail collarbone, broke it.
He’d yowled like a dog set afire.
“Bellyacher. Think you got it so bad you gotta run off? We’ll show you bad.”
They’d shown him.
For years, they’d shown him.
Jonah groaned from where he lay on the floor, touched his collarbone, felt the hard abnormal spur beneath his fingers. Felt his ribs. In just a few days he’d shed the pudge he’d carried since his teen years, melted away as panic and fear mounted. He dared not look in a mirror to see, or to meet, the defeated eyes he knew awaited him.
He sat against Sally’s bed and listened for his daughter and wife, the house so quiet he could hear dust settling about him, dust of their dead skin, detritus of shed flesh. Each breath now poisoned with absence.
Throughout the night, as he’d drifted, he’d awakened again and again to what he’d believed was their voices in the house. Their footfalls. Their laughter. Their crying. It was not them, only memory, past joys mutated into present torment.
If he’d known Sally and Rebecca were dead, he’d have joined them. Gladly, and with great relief. But he did not know. And without certainty, his purgatory of despair knew no end or bounds, perpetual anguish beyond loss. It was as if his daughter and wife had never existed, as if he’d willed them out of existence. Made them less than ghosts. Less than memory. Figments.
Throughout the night, too, he’d tried to remember the argument more clearly, but nothing new surfaced, and as night had bled into dawn again, and no word had come from Rebecca, he agonized over the notion that he’d said or done something to, finally, drive her away, or—
—worse.
The thought wormed in his brain again, too grotesque to follow to a conclusion.
He shoved it out of his mind and stood, gamely, shuffled to the kitchen.
The cops who’d been here during the night were gone. The house desolate. Again.
The black-eyed Susans were dead and dried as straw. He did not touch them, feared they would disintegrate to dust between his fingers. The yellow dress and coat sat in their box on the kitchen table, waiting, dust settling, the sun through the window fading the bow.
Where are my daughter and wife?
He needed to get out and look for them. He’d yearned to look these first days, but Maurice had encouraged him to stay at home with the trooper or the deputy who’d been in the house nearly every moment, in case Rebecca or Sally called or returned. The phone was tapped, the house nearly always under surveillance by a deputy or trooper who sat in a parked car across the road in a pull-off near One Dollar Bridge. A TV van parked beside it. No police officer was inside the house now. Jonah could slip out and search for Sally and Rebecca. Where, he didn’t know. The cops couldn’t stop him, even if they were here. Follow him, maybe. But not stop him. It was his daughter and wife who were missing, after all. If he wanted to search for them, he damned well would.
The parasitic reporters would stick to him. Each move he’d made and not made in the past days the media had spun into a web of implication worthy of suspicion. When he didn’t search, they speculated: Why isn’t he searching? What could be more important than looking for your wife and daughter? One rag wrote about his weight loss: “He’s shed domestic flab for the fit look of a bachelor on the make.”
Let them follow, he thought.
Enough waiting. Enough impotence.
He grabbed a coat from the entrance closet.
A knock came at the door, startling him.
Come with Me
On the other side of the pebbled glass window, a dark shape shifted.
Jonah opened the door to find Maurice, who appeared washed out and twitchy from sleeplessness.
“I’m on my way to search,” Jonah said.
“Let’s go inside.” Maurice tossed his head toward the TV van parked across the road.
“Do you have—”
“Inside, please.”
Jonah shuffled inside and collapsed on the couch.
“How you holding up?” Maurice said.
“Can’t sleep. Can’t eat. Can’t work. I’ve taken leave from my job.” Jonah’s throat felt grated raw, and his voice came hoarse from repeating the same words ad nauseam the past days, and from having taken up cigarettes, a habit he’d thought he’d left behind in his teens.
Maurice sat on the arm of Jonah’s favorite chair, the tattered recliner with the duct-taped arm. “You need to stay here,” he said, “in case they show or call. Or someone else calls.”
“The media is saying that by not searching I look—”
“Ignore them.”
“It’s not like I go looking to read the papers or watch TV. It’s just there. With twenty-four-hour cable news, the newspaper at the door, I can’t escape it. One newspaper ran a photo of me in the yard lighting a cigarette, with the caption father and husband enjoys cigarette while wife and daughter remain missing. Enjoys.”
“Ignore it.”
“I need to get out and help.”
“Have you thought more about any reasons Rebecca might leave you, take Sally on her own?”
As no evidence had been discovered in the first days, the theory that Rebecca had left Jonah and taken Sally of her own accord had seeded itself, though Jonah sensed Maurice knew something, possessed other theories he was holding back.
“I could give a million reasons she’d be mad, but not that mad,” Jonah said.
“Give me a couple. You never know.”
“I know.”
“Cough ’em up.”
“The usual. Money. My being years late with my dissertation. No tenure. You were right.”
Maurice looked confused.
“Things change when you’re married,” Jonah said.
“I did warn you,” Maurice said. “How you ever wooed her with poetry, I’ll never know.”
“Neither will I.”
Any other day, the men would have laughed at the improbability of Jonah winning over Rebecca. Instead, Maurice nodded grimly. “I don’t know how to say this, except straight. I need you to come with me, to the station. There are questions that need to be asked.”
“Ask them here. I’m going out to search, no one can stop me. Ask if you’re going to ask.”
Maurice sighed. “Do you have life insurance on Rebecca?”
The blood drained from Jonah’s face.
“They know you do,” Maurice said.
“So why ask? Do you have insurance on Julia?”
“My wife’s not missing.”
“Get out.”
“Jonah.”
“Get out. You come here like a friend then trap me?”
“You know that’s not it.”
“Rebecca and I, we had insurance. As a couple. For Sally. That’s what responsible parents do. The beneficiary is Sally, on both policies. So if they’re thinking there’s—”
“What if you and Sally were to pass, would it go to Rebecca?”
“Of course.”
“And if Sally and Rebecca—”
“Get out. Or I swear.”
“You want me out, force me out.”
In their teens, Jonah and Maurice might have come to blows several times except whenever Jonah had charged at Maurice, Maurice had simply wrapped Jonah in a headlock and insisted Jonah breathe and gain control himself, not let his emotions rule him, ruin him. Warning Jonah that one day they would destroy him, if he let them.
“Julia and I have a policy,” Maurice said. “I get it. But. The state police, they have questions. Questions I’ve tried to put off. I can’t anymore. I’m giving you a heads-up on this insurance thing, even if it’s shit. So you won’t be surprised and react like you just did. With anger. Because if you do, you’ll hang yourself.”
“And you’re doing me a favor, by asking yourself?”
“I’ve done favors for you all my life.”
It was true, he had.
“And you me,” Maurice said. “I haven’t forgotten. You can tak
e my asking questions any way you want. But I’m here to help you. You have to believe that. When we find Sally and Rebecca, none of this will matter anyway.”
Jonah’s pulse calmed. They would find them. They had to find them. He had to see his wife and daughter again. How could he go on otherwise?
“Just come with me to the station, where I can ask the questions so it looks like I’m fulfilling my official capacity and not working to help you, make it look good for the staties,” Maurice said. “Be glad I’m the one asking this go-round. Some other new developments have come up, and—”
“New developments?”
“Come with me. We’ll sort it out.”
“Okay. I’ll go. I’m going crazy here.”
“No more crazy than usual.”
The Unthinkable
A half hour later, Jonah sat in a stiff, unforgiving chair in Maurice’s office, the door shut behind them. Maurice sat behind his spartan desk, facing Jonah. Wire reading glasses that Jonah had never seen sat balanced at the end of Maurice’s nose as Maurice’s eyes raked over papers in a manila folder. The eyeglasses aged Maurice a decade; perhaps it was the past few days that had aged Maurice. Jonah felt he’d aged fifty years. No, not aged, but died and awoken to an anomalous, somnambulant life.
Jonah gazed at a water stain on the peeling ceiling of the office, decorated sparingly with cheap prints of northeastern songbirds. Several cockeyed birdhouses Maurice had built in his basement workshop sat on shelves, one perched on the desk beside the folder.
“What are these developments?” Jonah asked, on edge.
Maurice glanced over Jonah’s shoulder, at the door. He took a deep breath. “We know you’re in financial trouble.”
Jonah’s fingers dug into the chair’s arms. “I’m not. We’re not.”
“You are.”
“No more than anyone else.”
“A bit.”
“I’m an adjunct at a state college, for Christ’s sake, and Rebecca refuses—” He cut himself short.
What Remains of Her Page 5