“You don’t mean that,” she said. “Just because my parents were stupid doesn’t mean we are. Just because we’re young doesn’t mean we can’t actually love each other. I’m done. I kissed Markos. That’s it for kissing random boys; I only want you.”
He had tried to talk her down. He offered to pick her up but she said no. He got off the phone and vomited, then he went running past Cronin’s house in case she was still there, but she wasn’t.
If he saw her, he would want her too much, and he couldn’t make good choices.
It was all about making good choices.
And now her mother had called and asked about Linsey and his first thought was that he was supposed to meet her somewhere, was supposed to run away with her—she wasn’t supposed to do it without him. He’d been up all night digging through his box of notes from Linsey, looking through old texts and e-mails.
Linsey didn’t run away, no matter how much she thought she loved him; she had too much sense of self-preservation. She might kiss Markos, but would she sleep with a stranger? No. Would she be playing hide-and-seek with him to see if he really cared as much as he said he did? All summer he’d been working two jobs—he was a day camp counselor and an assistant to this guy in town who called himself Mr. Computer Dude, who set up home systems and made emergency calls to homes in desperate need of e-mail recovery—and he did this to save money to visit Linsey during Thanksgiving, when he had a week off and she had only two days, so he had a plane ticket and a rental car reserved to go visit her in Ithaca. It was just months. Just countable weeks. Just countable infinity.
Once, they’d been having one of those relentless conversations about whether love plus lust was greater than or less than the sum of love plus proximity—she called it love math—and she stopped his calculations of the distance between different airports that would be between them at their schools—and put her hand over his mouth. Usually, that would warrant a playful bite, but it was a week before they broke up, and he knew it was coming, a low-pressure system. He kissed her hand instead.
“What worries me,” she said, “is that your love is a countable infinity. It can be measured even though it’s infinite. You can use it in an equation.” They were in her family room—no one else was home on a Saturday afternoon and the light licked the floorboards. He wanted to be inside her.
“Nah,” he said. “For you, beyond measure.” He’d been thinking that he wanted to taste other parts of her, the crook of her arm, her inner thigh. His mind was bored but his body wasn’t and for this he felt a vague and uncomfortable guilt.
“No,” she said. “My love for you is an uncountable infinity. It’s not your fault, and it’s not my fault, and I’m not sure you should buy that ticket.”
It made him angry; it was an assumption. He wished he could say something about disrespect but instead he said, “No way, I bought it already,” and started pulling her T-shirt up over her head. His body was uninterested in change and anticipation—it wanted, and now. He hadn’t imagined she would take her mother’s mandate, just one week later.
• • •
Now he was supposed to leave for California, and even though she’d given him up, she was holding him back. He was alone in the house, and he missed her so much he felt as though he were wearing a lead apron at the dentist’s. A pile of lead aprons, his chest crushed. He called his uncle and he called the airline and he stopped imagining the “Welcome, Timmy!” sign he’d been expecting at the airport, his uncle’s square artistic handwriting a quiet public celebration of this huge thing he was doing—moving cross country, leaving his hometown, leaving Linsey.
The thought of someone else touching her—someone hurting her, someone taking her—made bile rise into his mouth. He couldn’t leave her, because she was missing. He changed his flight to tomorrow and charged the fee to his mother’s credit card—she could help out for once. Then he grabbed his bike from the garage and headed over to Linsey’s house, dreading facing Abigail, but motivated by the thought of having some conversation with Toby, whom he’d missed, who always had some interesting angle on things, who might know the password to Linsey’s laptop, so Timmy could put his Mr. Computer Dude skills to work and try to find her.
Two blocks away from the house, he felt the wavering. Abigail made him feel especially guilty, made him feel like he was the source of all sins. It wasn’t entirely her fault; it was as though she secretly sensed the weak parts of him that wanted to appear strong, as though she knew he was still an unformed man.
The kid with the camera was standing a little too far into the street, his face behind the lens. Timmy didn’t know anyone who used a film camera anymore, just this kid. He slowed his bike.
“Hey, Geo,” he said. “You should watch for cars.”
“I am,” said the boy, turning his lens to Timmy. Timmy could feel the focus. The kid seemed to see without looking directly.
Timmy had known Geo since the boy rode his Big Wheels down Cedar Court and over by Linsey’s house. He was always making art, and he’d been in the Super Science Saturdays program Timmy taught for three winters at the Campus Center in the high school. They’d made a battery together; they’d built a robot that smashed pegs into holes; they’d shared disastrous mushed origami projects and had been both serious and full of laughter.
“But there are cars,” said Timmy, scooting forward until his face was right in the lens, laughing.
“Ooo, that was almost good,” said Geo. “You came too close, though.”
“You’re taking pictures of my zits?”
Geo lowered his camera and his head both. “No,” he said.
“I’m kidding. Hey, Geo, I know you take a lot of pictures. Any chance you have some of Linsey? It’s just that we’re kind of looking for her.” He was wearing his camp-counselor hat, his conciliation.
Geo fiddled with his lens again.
“I might; I could look.”
“Text me, okay? I’m in the directory—you know, from school—your sisters should have it.” The sisters were always mysterious, a small tribe of beauty. The boy was smart, though; he might even have some recent shots. He leaned forward and touched Geo’s shoulder. Geo was wearing a red cotton sweater even though it was hot out. He shrugged at the touch, but Timmy could tell he was happy to be included.
“I will.”
“Onward!” said Timmy, smiling, though he wasn’t, not really. He was scooting down the street like a reluctant toddler on a trike.
61/2 SYCAMORE STREET
Sometimes, she noticed how gruesome his little place was, the microwave, the stained sink, the bathroom where he showered wearing flip-flops because the shower floor was mottled with a yellow and blue mold. Sex with him was so thorough—it used all of her, it temporarily erased her. He was so compelling on the bed, against the wall, his long thighs taut; the skin around his eyes smooth; his cock itself, always alert for her; his lemony smell, despite his horrible diet, despite the filth of his surroundings. She would never have lived somewhere like this, even without money; her sheets were always clean, her shower floor was never moldy. When she was away from him, the idea of him, this kid in a smelly old garage who had a degree from Harvard and could hardly get dressed in the morning depressed her. She wasn’t sleeping with a kid like that. She’d stop right away. But then she was with him, and he was so sexual, so raw, and so immediate. It was like being with a toddler who wants wants wants; only you could satisfy the need without sippy cup or lollipop. All Jordan wanted was to make love to her, and it didn’t get much better than sex with someone who had all that energy and hunger.
Reeva was always clean—she hated crumbs on counters and smudges on doorplates, but she harbored a desire to sink into thoughts and dreams, to let books pile up on end tables, even on the floor, piles of thoughts; she wanted to experience again the way she used to, sharp senses at the ready. She once had a job then at a used bookstore, shelving the new recruits, pasting little red price stickers on their backs, ringing up t
he uneven purchases—$5.43, $6.11—at the ancient push-button register in the front. Books smelled like dough in that bookshop, biscuit dough.
But then she lapsed into the ordinary, the office job she kept for three years before Steve was born, the peeling herself from bed early enough for all the necessary layers of shellac and moisturizer to keep her safe all day. Safe and beautiful. If left alone, really alone, Reeva wouldn’t wear any of it. If left alone, she’d eat biscuit dough and read books and lie in bed all day. That’s what she thought in the years of young children, the relentless years of nursing and diapers and nighttime calls for her attention, her arms.
She was lured into real estate by a sign on a storefront agency office in town. She had been up for too many nights, for two or three years, it felt as if she hadn’t slept in that long, and she was horrified by her own outgrown haircut, her lipsticks too old to hold their oils, wasting away in a drawer. She was horrified by how used up she felt, so she wheeled baby Tina into the office and signed up for a course. For those years there was so much power for her in dressing up for open houses, for escaping her own laundry piles and unread cooking magazines for a Sunday open house. The thrill of a deal was better than sex—less messy, less exhausting; instead, she felt redeemed by joining home and owner, as if she was building something, not just feeding and changing and maintaining breath.
Charlie had convinced her to give up the brokering—too many Sundays away from home, and her cell phone always ringing. She didn’t help them with their homework often enough. She’d complained about missing Tina’s gymnastics, Steve’s hockey, though she hadn’t really wanted only that. Now she had all this time, the Sundays, but all the other days, too. Tina had long since quit gymnastics. His suggestion had seemed logical, but she missed the work, even if she didn’t miss sitting in a vacant house that smelled of cat urine despite her quick batch of slice-and-bake cookies on a Sunday afternoon, dressed in a wool jumper and cold in November, clipboard, unnecessary fresh lipstick. Though it was the games and meets she mentioned, Johnny was the main reason she’d agreed to relinquish her job. He needed her too much for her to be filling empty houses.
Now she had this time, a whole lapful of time, and did she go back to bed after everyone left for school? Did she tend peonies in the garden and make cookies and lie on the couch with novels? No. She went to Library Friends meetings. Charlie sometimes bought her new hardcover novels at Christmas, and she read them, dutifully falling in love with reading again, but at bedtime, staying up later than she’d intended, while Charlie read his political thrillers or his secret stash of science fiction with fleshy women on the front. They looked like Greek statues, all drape and exposure, all suggestion of solidity. Now she had the time, and how did she spend it? At the gym. Every day of the week she worked to keep herself in shape. She wasn’t sure, sometimes, why she did it. Maybe it was for Charlie, partly; maybe it was because she felt all her power leaking from her as her body sagged. Maybe because having those children had used her, if not using her up, at least wearing her out. Sometimes she ate too much. Sometimes she stopped at the bakery to get the kids a treat—picking out cream horns and sprinkle cookies and nut-crusted frosted brownies, bad as Jordan, maybe another thing about him she coveted, and sometimes she came home and ate everything out of the white box, too impatient to untie the string, so she bit through it. Sometimes she did all this without really noticing until there was only one thing left, or two, and then she ate them as if she needed to hide the evidence. She took out the trash, Tina and Steve’s job, alternating, and soon enough Johnny’s, too, though she didn’t look forward to helping him learn that ritual, learn over and over by doing, like teaching an old person who’s forgotten how to use the bathroom.
She embarrassed herself by thinking about Johnny this way, and she embarrassed herself by eating the treats, but she also needed them. It was only once a month or so. She made up for it at the gym, day after day. Sometimes it felt good when she was done, but she never enjoyed the actual doing, the bike, the mountain climber, the rower, the machines, the Pilates class. There were frightening women in there, women who had been dancers and whose fifty- or sixty-something bodies stretched out obscenely, who worked away at the invisible flab on their upper arms as if evil, as if the devil itself were manifest in the tiniest portion of flesh. She wasn’t insane this way. She had her spots of softness, and she didn’t hate them, and neither did Charlie, and now, neither did Jordan, whom she allowed to investigate, bit by bit, though often they had sex with most of their clothing on.
After the first time with Jordan, she was sitting across the dinner table from Charlie, and she couldn’t hear her own voice when she spoke. All the children were elsewhere, and she felt exposed. If she said anything, lust would fall out of her mouth like a fat slab of tongue at the butcher. It silenced her, what she’d done, it made her subhuman, because she’d done this to her husband. They were having an ordinary conversation—about that babysitter Linsey Hart.
“I can’t believe that girl is old enough to apply for college,” she’d started, only now she couldn’t tell whether she’d said it, or just thought it. “I can’t believe soon Tina will be applying to colleges—before we know it.” At least she thought she’d said it. In her mind, her words whooshed and thudded, like an organ about to cease its relentless work.
“We should plan another college tour,” said Charlie. He was putting too much butter on his dinner roll, a fat pat, a tablespoon at least. He is thinking of the children while I cheat on him. I am pathetic.
“I can’t manage that,” is what she thought she said. Or else she said she couldn’t bear it, either way, her mouth felt cottony and useless.
Charlie didn’t notice anything.
“You think? Maybe next summer?” He stuffed the bread into his mouth, butter pat first. He could do this, and yet if he left her he’d still find someone new. His mouth was rich and wet and her mouth was dry, used.
“I don’t know,” she said. Or thought she said.
“Okay,” said Charlie. He wasn’t even listening. She could open her mouth and birds could spill out onto the table, mockingbirds, crows, raptors, and he’d just get up and leave his dish on the counter and go sit down in his permanently pleated work pants and beige cashmere sweater reading his travel magazine and she’d never know what he was thinking—because he could never know what she was thinking.
Later that evening her ears popped, as if she had been in an elevator, on an airplane, climbing mountains. She could hear her own voice yelling up to Johnny that he needed to take his socks and Cheez Doodles bowl off the couch. She could hear herself telling her husband good night.
• • •
Sex with Jordan made her disgusted as much as it thrilled her. It was not unlike eating all the cream horns. It was decadent and she needed it, or at least she told herself she needed it, she told herself she couldn’t stop, only now she might stop, she might go cold turkey from Jordan, she might do the right thing after doing the wrong thing for so long. Perhaps she didn’t want to be with Jordan—perhaps she wanted to be him, all inhibition lapsed. Jordan didn’t care what the neighbors thought. He paid his rent and parked his car in back. He ate as he wished and called his parents when he felt like it; she didn’t know whether Jordan ever felt guilty. She wondered whether cigarette smokers, the heavy regulars, felt like she did. Repulsed and in need. Twice, when he couldn’t get off work, she let him take her into his stockroom at Starbucks, locking the door, pushing into her as she leaned against a shelf rich with giant silvery coffee bags. She came out of the store smelling more of smoky coffee than of sex.
• • •
It had been two weeks since Linsey, carrying Johnny, had passed by Jordan’s windows, looked in at her squalid little affair, and maybe she saw and maybe she didn’t. Now Linsey was missing. How long had it been—since she didn’t show up yesterday, or longer? Had she simply run away with her boyfriend? Reeva was well past her teens and still experienced the urgencie
s of the body.
Last night the stepfather had canvassed the neighborhood with flyers, MISSING GIRL. It was strange, almost as if they were advertising a play, or a garage sale. Linsey in black and white on bright pink paper, festive paper. Mr. Stein had rung the bell this morning after the boys left and while Reeva was upstairs in the bathroom, checking to be sure she’d taken her birth control pills, sitting on the toilet counting out the little pillows of drug. She’d told Jordan she’d meet him, but she was having second thoughts. Last night, Charlie had wanted to make love. He’d grunted and put his hand in her hair and laid his arm over her waist like a man claiming an entire territory. It was both touching and horrible, because Reeva’s body betrayed her—she became aroused. She’d allowed it, the ordinary sex of a married couple. She’d come, thinking for a minute that Jordan’s mouth was on her own, only Charlie was far gentler than Jordan, his teeth never clacked painfully against hers, he never kissed the insides of her thighs, he never pushed against her too hard.
The doorbell rang and Reeva stood up to look down through the waxy-leafed magnolia in the front yard. She could see the top of a man’s head, and then, as she watched without going downstairs, he turned away from her door and walked on to the next neighbor’s house.
The flyer stuck in her screen door had a handwritten note on the back, “If you know anything—”
Linsey was only a few years older than Tina, and so much more mature. Better, she thought, feeling disloyal. Gentler—at least she seemed that way with Johnny. But had Reeva been wrong to trust Linsey with her Johnny? What if she had told him things he shouldn’t know? What if she was like Reeva herself, a reverse geode, all crystal and value outside, but dun, flat-faced, flawed within? Reeva didn’t believe that Linsey would run away—it was probably the mother’s fault.
Reeva left the car in the driveway and walked along Sycamore Street, listening to the hissing of cicadas in the trees and sprinklers making wet green paint of the grass. She walked back through the woods behind the cul-de-sac and arrived early, despite her best intentions, despite her husband’s quick, soft “Thank you, beautiful” in the morning before he left the bed, as if that made up for everything. She carried a bottle of wine she’d grabbed from under the wood island in the kitchen—she didn’t care what it was or how expensive. Jordan liked drinking with her, and though it was midmorning, she wanted to taste wine on his tongue. She imagined it on the walk, holding the bottle inside her arm like a girl carrying her books to school.
When She Was Gone Page 8