“Was she unhappy?”
“She was the perfect Christian child. She played—plays. I can’t keep talking like she’s dead. Even if she probably is. She plays an instrument. She loves Jesus. She volunteers to roll bandages and feed the hungry. You know? She’s wonderful.”
“So she isn’t,” Rosalie said. She was sitting on the footstool of my chair and she had her fingers on my calf above my boot. Her hand felt warm, and I felt warm, the coffee was filled with frothy milk, and I would have given a great deal to be lying with my head on her chest and asleep.
“Why not?”
“Because nobody is. No young girl—fourteen, right? No adolescent girl is wonderful. Her life is shit, her parents are shit, school is a trial, minute by minute, her hormones are nuts, her skin drives her crazy, and she gets cramps all the time, or she doesn’t bleed on time, or she hasn’t got breasts, or all of that. She’s nice, she wants to be nice, she’s a good kid, but she’s in trouble. She comes up missing, it’s because she was in trouble a long time before that.”
“So why didn’t anybody tell me this a long time ago?”
“Your wife could have.”
“Sure. I mean, a nurse would know.”
“A woman would know; a nurse would know; your friend Halpern would know. I’ve seen you in the Blue Bird, you sitting there all pale and straight and sad and him all over the pastries. He gets so worried about you.”
“How do you know? He’s talking to you about me, too?”
“His face, Jack. He feels like me, I think.”
“How’s that, Rosalie?”
“Nice. I don’t know how far his affections go, but I have in mind something like taking off your clothes and doing things, Jack.” She didn’t cover her face, but her eyes were closed.
“Oh.”
She spat her coffee onto my jeans and the rug. “I’m sorry,” she said when she got herself under control. “It was the way you said that.”
“You get me wordless a lot.”
“And you don’t have that many words to begin with.”
I shook my head. She leaned over and touched her forehead to my knee. I put my hand on her dark hair and held a handful and then let go.
When she sat up, we were quiet for a couple of minutes. I loved it, sitting like that with her. Then she said, “What’s her room like?”
“Haven’t been there,” I said.
“But why?”
“I think I’m scared to. I don’t know. I do know. And I am scared. I don’t want to know her that well. I don’t want to touch her things. She went into the worst kinds of nightmares you can have. I don’t want to go there.”
Her face was serious now, and it looked longer, older. Her dark eyes looked different, and I saw a little of how much there was to her. I figured her father, the cop, had scary eyes like hers. She nodded. “Makes sense,” she said, “but you have to look at her room. Really, it’s where you have to start. What you’ve been doing, whatever you’ve been doing, that comes later. First you get yourself in her room. It’s where they live, girls that age. It’s their brains. If you’re lucky. If they aren’t so good at hiding that even their rooms are camouflaged.”
“You’re tougher than I am, aren’t you?”
“Maybe. I don’t know. But I’m tough. Is your wife tough?”
“She has been for a long time. She’s had to be. You marry me, you’re in trouble automatically.”
“I’ll remember that. Are we finished warning each other off?”
“All right.”
“Do we agree that something’s going on here? Between us?”
I nodded.
“Say ‘yes,’ ” she said.
“Yes.”
“And you’re coming back here? Or, we’re meeting? We’re going, you know, on from here.”
I nodded.
She said, “ ‘Yes.’ ”
“Yes.”
Then her face grew less beaky, her eyes less angry. Then that wide smile came out. She stood up, she took the coffee cup from me, and she set both of our cups on the stack of books on the table next to the chair. She leaned over me, supported herself on the chair arms, and she kissed me very softly on the mouth. She let herself down a little and she kissed me harder. She bit my bottom lip, then let her teeth apart, then bit me again, harder. In the same position, she very slowly licked where she had bitten me, and then she stood up.
I said, “My wife accused me of making love to you in a security vehicle and in strange places on the upper campus.”
“Are there strange places up there where we could have been making love?”
“Yes.”
“You know them? You have access to them?”
“Yes.”
Pulling the tails of the baggy flannel shirt down straight, she said, “Well, well.”
The dog waited at the drawer we kept his food in, and by holding on to the countertop with my fingers, I let myself down to my knees and got out the plastic bin of kibble. I gave him a lot, then put the food away. Still on my knees, I checked his water. I worked my way up and I let him out to run. It had been a mistake to get up, I thought. I wondered if ribs could bleed, because I sensed a loose, runny material inside. I thought I might feel better on my knees again, and from there it was a very short trip to my back.
I made a few unworthy noises, and I put my hand on my side. There was a scrabbling sound, and I knew it was the dog, ready to come inside and be celebrated for doing so.
“In a minute,” I said.
The door bounced again, and I said, “Lie down and wait, goddamn it.”
The noise stopped and I was sorry I’d shouted. I saw him, curled on the snow on the porch, lying against the door. That was interesting, because I wanted to curl on the other side of the door and surround the pain. I couldn’t make that shape anymore, though, and I said to him or me or both of us, “Sorry. Sorry.”
I came up from it saying that again, but it wasn’t the dog. It was Fanny. Then the dog, his fur cold and his tongue wet, came over to lick my face.
“Why are you sleeping on the floor, Jack?”
“I was?”
“You still are. Look.”
“Jesus, Fanny, I can’t look. I’m in the middle of doing it. Why do you have to sound pissed off right away because I fell asleep somewhere?”
“And left the dog on the porch all night. You were passed out, weren’t you?”
“Could I have some of those pain pills?” I asked her.
“When’s the last time you took them?”
“Afternoon.”
She got on her knees and worked her arms under my back and kind of pushed me forward and over, and then I climbed up from my knees by holding her hands. Her power was very impressive. She got me into the living room and onto the sofa, where I made a lot of small noises. She brought me the pills and some water. She was still wearing her opened coat when she sat down on the coffee table and said, “What’d you do?”
“I went on some errands. I guess I wasn’t ready to.” I told her about the Indian.
“You sound pleased,” she said.
“He made a living at it for a while. He can walk. For a nobody in the fights, that’s significant.”
“Jack, what’s this male warrior shit? The man and his friends put you in the hospital. They could have driven a rib through your lung. Did you ever watch someone’s face while their lung is inflated? You could have died.”
I let myself say, and I never should have, “That would be the easy way out, wouldn’t it?”
She sat back. She flinched back.
She said, “Dying?”
“Just a thought,” I said.
“Dying? As opposed to what—to life with me?”
“No,” I said. “I was being, you know, philosophical. That’s all. It’s what happens after you accumulate two or three college courses over a lifetime. You look at the big picture. You know.”
But she was not reachable by jokes, if that’s what they were. He
r eyes were immense and bewildered. In the near darkness of the living room, I thought, My wife has been so wonderful to look at for so many years, and now she’s getting … scuffed. The edges have been treated hard. I wanted to cup my hand on her chin and cheek. I wanted to run my fingers over the lines between her eyes and over her nose. I wondered if she would smell Rosalie Piri’s skin.
“Is this about the missing girl, Jack?”
“What this do you mean?”
“Don’t stall.”
“Yes. Partly. Yes. I went to see her mother.”
“Why don’t you go see Hannah’s mother?”
“You?”
“That’s who I mean. Why do you have to build yourself a fever and damage yourself, running all over the county chasing a girl who you know is raped and strangled and cut into pieces and, I don’t know, eaten. Some of these creatures pickle parts of the children, don’t they? They eat them and use their skin to draw illustrations on. She’s so dead and gone, Jack. And I’m not. I’m a little crazy sometimes, and I know I’m getting harder to live with.”
She was doing me the worst hurt, by then. She was weeping without covering her face or blowing her nose. The dog let his tail brush the floor, but he wasn’t enthusiastic. He feared it when we fought or wept too noisily. He had a low threshold of emotional pain. Fanny sat on the coffee table and her nose ran and tears poured down her face.
“Fanny,” I said.
“And I know I’m right about your little professorette,” she said.
“No.”
“You’re not having an affair with her?”
“No. I told you. No, I’m not.”
“Then what was the little furnace in each of her cute little eyes about at the hospital?”
“I don’t know. I wasn’t looking at her eyes.”
“What, then? Her legs? She shows enough of them. Nice, if you like miniatures. I know what I saw, Jack. She was choosing between the enema bag and the sponge bath. Miss Professorette, Girl Nurse. If you’re not involved with her—”
“Fanny, come on.”
“Then she’s involved with you.”
I tried to shrug. It hurt a lot.
“Don’t you be strong and brave and silent, you son of a bitch.”
“I promise not to be brave or strong or—I forget the other one.”
“Silent. That’s your middle name.”
“I won’t be silent. What shall I say? You know, these stitches in my mouth keep pulling. It hurts to talk.”
“It hurts you to talk with or without them. We’re a mess, Jack.”
I said, “I’m sorry. I really am. I’m sorry.”
“Here’s what I was thinking. Would you like to know what I was thinking?” She stood and she wiped her face with her woolen hat, then took off her coat. “As soon as you’re better a little bit, just so the ribs don’t hurt you so much, I’m going to stop being your nurse for a while. You remember Virginia, the nurse on your ward. She lives in town, it’s a big house, and she has a room to rent, and I’m taking it. I don’t know how long. I’m just taking it. I can cook in her kitchen, and I’ll have my own bathroom.”
“This is because of Professor Piri?”
“This is because all I am here is your nurse. Except when you’re mine. I’m very angry about that. I feel terrible that everything about us ends up like we’re two sick little people and we take turns looking after each other. Can you understand that? Does it make any sense?”
“What we do with each other, or your moving out?”
“Oh, I’m not moving out. It isn’t as if you’re a drunk and I’m running for my life, or I’m punishing you.”
“Yes,” I said. “It is punishment. It will be. Not living with you.”
“But, really. Look what living with me is.”
“Or your living with me.”
She said, “Yes.”
“Can the dog stay here?”
“It isn’t a divorce,” she said. “We’re not having a custody fight about a dog.”
“Don’t you want him, though?”
“You mean, don’t I want you. Yes.”
“Then why leave? To make the point? I know the point. Some of it. I know what you’re talking about. You’re trying to make something happen, Fanny. But what’s going to happen?”
“You and I could get to wherever we’ve been going about our child.”
I closed my eyes because her white face hurt me. She was so tired and sad. It had gone on so long. And the pills were softening me. I could feel me falling in on myself. “Fanny,” I said, making my eyes open, “what if we’re there?”
“And this is it? And we can’t get any better?”
“Any better. Any closer to wherever you thought we’d go. Any smarter about knowing how to handle it. What if this is it, the whole it?”
She was shaking her head. Her hair whipped. “That would be like winter all year,” she said. “I don’t believe it.”
“Then what’s supposed to happen, do you think?” My sore lips wouldn’t work right.
“What always happens,” she said. “You have a hard, terrible winter; then it ends.”
Someone in the dream of Fanny and me being sad talked sternly about spring.
Then I woke up and it was almost time for Fanny to go back to work, and then it was three days later. I spoke to the security people, and I asked the dispatcher, “Are there any other missing girls?”
“Damned if I know, Jack. You want me to ask around?”
I told her no. We talked about schedules, and I said I would be in the next day. When Fanny left for work that night, she carried a suitcase and wore a rucksack that made her look like a girl in college. I was still trying to invent a way of asking her to stay that would sound sensible when she came over to me and leaned down like she was going to kiss me good-bye. I leaned farther down toward my coffee mug. Her lips touched me on the head, above my right ear.
“Call me,” she said.
“You want to talk to me?”
“I’m doing this to help, you dumb fuck. This isn’t about a fight.”
I said, “Oh.” I said it stupidly, not with any sarcastic intentions. It was roughly what I knew during those days: Oh.
I went into the hospital next morning, but not anyplace near Emergency. The doctor unwrapped me. I had another X ray. Then he showed me the little cracks and then he wrapped me again. He examined my fingers. He asked if I needed more tablets for pain. I lied. At ten o’clock, I was in the security building, reading the dossier of the woman who’d filled in for me and who was now a candidate for Big Pete’s job. I arranged to have her fill in at night and on party weekends, and I looked at the ad we would use to find other applicants. I read incident reports, and I talked to my administrative vice president.
When I went out on my rounds, I stopped first at the library to find out about Irene Horstmuller and the Vice President. When I was in the parking lot, I thought of how it would feel to climb down from the Jeep and walk up the stone steps into the library, and I decided to let the Constitution and the second in command take care of themselves for a while.
I suppose I was sitting there with my eyes closed and my mouth open when Dispatch connected me and Sergeant Bird, who reported that the kid from up north had been found dead in a motel room.
“No nightmare stuff,” he said. “The guy apparently laid a pillow on top of her face and suffocated her. We’ve got a description and we’ll catch him here or they’ll find him in Toronto. My feeling about this is we’ve got separate perpetrators and therefore no serial crime. Which would be nice.”
“The thing is,” I said, “you find the serial killers at the end, when they make a mess of it because they’re boiling over by then. So you get five, ten, fifteen deaths over the years, and then you catch them.”
“I’m grateful you found the time to mention it,” he said.
“Janice Tanner?”
“Zip.”
“Well.”
“You know
how long these things can take.”
“The thing is, her mother’s halfway dead already. She wants to know.”
“Everyone wants to know,” Bird said.
“I appreciate your calling,” I said.
“And I appreciate your appreciation,” he said.
I was a little annoying to some students after that call. They were rolling a friend down the hill below the library. The aim, apparently, was to see how much snow would build up around him.
I hit the roof light, and I stood at the top of the hill on the edge of the road, giving them the mean-cop stance—legs apart, hands on my waist, no facial expression. When they came up, puffing and grinning and not much caring that I was there, I looked past them until I saw their friend break himself out of the snowball and start the climb up.
“You can smother someone that way,” I said.
“Yeah, well, we didn’t,” the tall one with dark whiskers said. “We weren’t trying to. We were having fun.”
The shorter one said, “We were like playing. You know? I mean, what is this about, please?”
“I suppose it’s about my trying to give you fellows a hard time for endangering his life.” I gestured down the hill.
“We got assassins on the loose, and there’s a rape every—what, four seconds? And the starving children of the Balkan nations? And you’re fucking around with us?”
If I wasn’t careful, he was going to call home and ask his father to purchase me and ship me someplace. If I wasn’t careful, I was going to take my flashlight out and bounce it all over him. Then my ribs would feel worse, and I’d be unemployed, and Fanny would never come home.
“No,” I said. “I’m not. Just let’s all be careful.”
I made myself not hear what all three of them were saying by the time I was back at the door. It took me a minute to work myself up the running board and behind the wheel, and I thought about the pain pills but decided not to take any. I finished my run up the hill, then began to circle back down. When I passed the library hill, they were gone. I saw no new posters on cars or buildings. On the other hand, I saw Janice’s face wherever I went that morning and all that afternoon.
Girls Page 19