Here was the boy. He kissed her cheek. He had gotten dressed, wore jeans and a white T-shirt, high-tops, a wristwatch with a fraying strap. (On a piece of paper in her wallet, Constance had written: Birthday ideas: new watch strap.) Upper lip pink from shaving. Knapsack slung over one shoulder.
“Morning, CC. Morning, Joe.” He was breathless. “Gotta run.”
“Breakfast first?” She pointed to the oatmeal. Sam hesitated, then went to the stove, spooned some into a bowl, stood over the counter to eat. Why was he in such a hurry? He failed to make his customary appreciative eating sounds. He was flushed. Knapsack on his shoulder. Usually he sat with her, ate heartily, chatted, took his time. Now, leaning over the counter, he swallowed two, three bites and then dumped the remaining oatmeal down the drain.
Had he been feigning sleep?
Louise: “He knows.”
Her laugh, plangent and bold, a cascade, a cold waterfall, filled the kitchen.
Louise: “He wanted you to see.”
He was wiping his mouth with a napkin. He was rinsing the bowl in the sink.
Don’t be absurd, Constance, she told herself. Don’t be ridiculous. He is my son. Of course he is my son. The penis is a penis. A fact of biology. So I looked—so what? And this remonstration seemed to succeed, because for a moment she felt herself again, calm, hungry, sure of the ordinary order of things. The dead were dead, again and always.
“Have a good day!” she said, but the false brightness she heard in her voice—a singsongness, a fluttering against the walls of her throat like the wing of a minuscule bird—immediately restored her doubt. Something was deeply wrong with her.
The door slammed behind him. He was gone.
Joe was chewing with his mouth open.
She felt, for the first time in many, many years—what was the word that meant you were alone in a dirty room and a bulb is flickering overhead and there are fingerprints on the windows and no one comes when you call them, no one, because all of it—the love, the order, the calm—has been a trick of your imagination?
Joe said, of the oatmeal, “Holy shit this is good.”
Terror.
3
It was a gorgeous spring day, and Judith was gone. No note. No explanation, no reassurance, nothing. Her room was empty. She had not made her bed, or raised the curtains, or done anything except leave them, an act more pure and unhindered than anything Grace, her mother, had ever performed.
Grace went to the girl’s closet. What was missing? The pink duffel bag with the ballerina appliqué on its side. Her yellow dress. Her blue dress. Anything that showed her tits.
Her dim room retained the close, sweetish smell of sleep. The dresser had been cleared of its nail polish bottles and necklaces. Gone was the postcard of the guy propping a ladder up to the moon, I want, I want in black letters along its bottom edge. Gone the tin of strawberry lip balm. Gone even the chipped saucer that held her tweezers, thumbtacks, buttons. Even the mismatched buttons in the saucer! Why had she taken those? What use were they to her? The girl couldn’t sew. She’d replace lost buttons with safety pins before she’d sew. The girl was impatient and immodest and bored and sixteen, and now she was a runaway; it was impossible to imagine her threading a needle.
Only the ugly pairs of underwear remained in the top drawer, the ones with stains, stretched waistbands. She’d taken her favorite jeans, and that mothy tan sweater, and the red scarf she sometimes wound around her neck and which lent her a decapitated appearance.
A bowl of dried-up ravioli on the nightstand.
“Judith?” As if she were hiding under the bed. Then, absurdly, Grace lifted the dust ruffle and looked.
Hank was in the shed, trying in vain to repair the Weed Wacker.
“She left.”
“Who?” A smear of grease on his cheek. Then: “She’ll be back.”
“I don’t think so.”
Hank straightened up, wiped his palms on his thighs. He was a bartender: broad, cool, mock-begrudging smile, perennial five o’clock shadow, a man for whom the smallest gesture—a wink, a lift of the chin—communicated everything.
Now his mouth turned up slightly at the corner. He said, “She’s probably at Shelly’s.”
“I have a feeling.” She was surprised by the force in her voice. “A mother’s intuition.”
Hank tilted his head, squinted warily, and he was right: she was not a woman who believed in intuition, not a mother who believed she possessed any special sensory connection to her child. She was cynical about such mothers. She was suspicious about such women just as she was suspicious about people who read their horoscopes or went to church. Yet she knew. It was unlike her, but it couldn’t be denied.
She said, “I’ll call the police, I think.”
“You’re overreacting.” At the beginning, he was the sober, practical one. “They won’t take you seriously. You’re crying wolf, honey.”
“Wolf? No.”
She saw a road winding through thorny woods, saw their daughter on this road walking in her swaying, confident way, the waitressy swish of her butt. The teeth of a wolf flashed like mica in the darkness. Tick of claws on rock.
She was sixteen, that was all.
Hank said, “She’s testing us. She wants to make sure we respect her freedom. When she knows we do, she’ll come home again.”
It was not true and she said so. The fear, the reality, was the opposite: this had nothing to do with them.
He went back to his work.
He was right—they should wait on the police. To go to the police was to confirm a crime.
A day passed. Grace spent it sitting on the grass in front of the house in her lawn chair, smoking, looking out over the fields.
“Judith!”
A breath.
“Judith!”
On and on like that she called to the air.
Next to her a glass lay on its side, a line of ants along its mouth. A ladybug moved from her calf to her knee. It lifted its wings but did not fly away. Was it true, that the number of spots on a ladybug’s back indicated its age? She had been told this in her youth, by another child. Of course it wasn’t true, but it had stayed with her. In the distance, a tractor. She could make out Judith’s old elementary school, and the roof of the supermarket, the small pond where they sometimes swam on hot days, drifted in inner tubes. Soon these buds would be leaves and the view would be lost.
The next morning she said to Hank, “We have to do something. We need to see Shelly.”
He sighed, exasperated. But then, after a beat, as if she was the passive one, he said, “You know, let’s talk to Shelly.”
She was Judith’s only female friend, a chubby, pug-nosed girl famous for having a brother who skipped town years before with another man’s pregnant wife. Otherwise Shelly was no one. Her mother cleaned motel rooms; her father had been gone forever. She lived on an overgrown dead-end, in a house whose white siding had long ago turned a mottled, mushroomy gray. Grace and Hank drove there before sundown. They walked toward the door, past a wheelbarrow missing its wheel, past a birdbath slicked with algae, past a rusted lounge chair, and the seat of a swing, the head of a hammer, a broken plastic pail. Grace reached for the door knocker, sensed it would come off in her hand, so rapped instead on the frame.
Shelly answered right away, nodding as if expecting them. Inside wasn’t as bad. Fresh white walls, industrial carpet, neat stacks of magazines. On the top of a bookshelf they saw a tableau, three pictures in matching frames: a toddler Shelly, a teenage Shelly, and, between them, a boy whose snarly grin, even at fifteen, told you he was planning to cuckold a father-to-be.
Hank and Grace sat side by side on the love seat in a room that smelled faintly of pot and less faintly of citrus deodorizer. Shelly flopped into a tartan plaid recliner, put up her feet. You could see her nipples through her shirt. Grace saw the nipples, saw Hank see them, saw Hank try to figure out where to keep his eyes. Shelly appeared to see this too. She wore a leather band
on each wrist. Her hair, a dark blunt bob, met her jawbone with razor edges.
“I don’t know where she is,” she said coldly. Then, friendlier: “You guys must be worried and all.”
“Should we be worried?” Hank sat on the edge of his seat. “Do you know something? Did she say anything? You can be frank. Anything?”
Something in his rush of words disturbed Grace, embarrassed her, almost. Shelly seemed to be holding back a smile. Calmly Grace said, “Did she give you any idea where she was going?”
The girl shrugged. “Oh you know Judy. California, Alaska. Someplace far. It was just talk, I thought. It busts me up. I loaned her fifty bucks a few days ago. Fifty. Five-oh. That’s a big chunk of change.”
“What about boys?” Hank, winded, grabbed at his knees. “Was she dating anyone? Could she have gone off to meet someone?”
“A handful. Judy was—oh, how do you say it politely? Experienced, I guess that’s how.”
Grace would not be moved. She was here to gather information. She said, “Who does she like the most?”
Shelly thought for a moment. “I don’t know his real name. I had a nickname for him that’s not something I’m comfortable saying in the presence of adults. Everyone else called him ‘Q-Ball.’”
“This boy, he goes to Copper Junction?”
“He’s not from around here—and he’s not a boy. He’s a man, sort of. Or not a man but definitely not a boy. Something in between. I don’t know much about him. He likes to rhyme. He wrote her rhymes.”
Grace saw a kid in a jean jacket gripping a pool cue, shaved head, a seam of stitches on his temple like a baseball.
“Listen, I’m Judy’s friend,” Shelly said. “I care about her all right. But that dough—it’s a lot of dough is all. She told me she’d pay me back.”
“We need your help now,” Hank said. “Tell us everything you can about this guy, okay?”
“You’ll give me the money?” She looked off for a moment, rubbed her fingers together like she was feeling cloth.
He only had twenty on him but promised he’d come back with the rest.
“Everyone just calls him Q-Ball ’cause he’s got this ugly little beard that comes down at an angle. It curves to the right, like a Q’s tail. The letter Q?” She drew a slanting line on her own chin. “Who knows why he grows it like that. Probably to show the world how unusual he is. He just appeared one day outside the pharmacy. I don’t remember seeing his car. I didn’t get the license plate number, if that’s what you want. I’m no private eye. I think he’s a creep and I told her so.”
“Q-Ball,” said Hank.
Shelly nodded.
It embarrassed Grace to hear this name. It made their daughter a stranger. Of course she was already a stranger, had always been a stranger, even before she left. But this name, like a badge one must defer to, made it absolute.
He cleared his throat, said, “Anything else? Anything at all?”
Shelly straightened up. She said, “Judy got warts from him. Down there.”
Hank never returned with the money.
Next they went to the police, made their report. “Q-Ball,” she said to the cop, who rubbed his chin, said, “He got a last name?”
She had never felt smaller in her life.
The cop said, “Hey, I feel for you. We’ll check it against our lists of known aliases, but I can’t promise much.” He wrote something in his notepad, said, “Kids these days…” It wasn’t clear whether he meant Judith or Q-Ball. “What else? You got a physical description?”
Hank described the facial hair. Then he said, “He may have a transmittable disease.”
The cop’s pen hovered above his notepad. “Like the flu?”
“Like—warts,” Hank said.
“Warts?”
“Private warts.”
The cop stared at them. Then he wrote it down.
She returned to the lawn chair. She was briefly, irrationally hopeful—had a vision of some hulking cop leading the girl up the walkway by her ear, as if she’d been merely loitering behind the bowling alley—but nothing happened. Ants on the lip of her glass. Woodsmoke on a thin breeze. She found herself thinking about her girlhood back in Ringdale, her awful silk shirts, her own desire to flee, to hitchhike to some harbor, to be the stow-away, cold-eyed, witness to everything, a sketchbook in a beat-up saddlebag. Except in Grace’s case there had been no man—no desire for sex. Her own hope had been to flee from the burden of sex, to earn some kind of reprieve. Yet sex, it seemed, was just what the girl was after. What were they supposed to do now? She had the uncanny sensation that the last sixteen years had been a figment, and this was her real life, alone, hers and Hank’s, that she’d gone through with the abortion. She didn’t want to cry but couldn’t help it. From her perch on the hill she could see the roof of the bar. It was still called Floyd’s Well after Hank’s uncle. Down there, men were drinking, elbowing, tossing back rye whiskey and beer chasers, throwing darts. Briny, inebriated, breathing this same spring air, they could not be stopped from anything. Grace was totally and completely sure that Judith was holding the hand of a convicted felon, a man rife with all manner of VD, that they were cruising the country in a wreck and sleeping beneath highway underpasses, sharing warm beer, and she was giving him head on demand.
Judith!
Couldn’t she have at least left a note? Something small for her mother to hold? How could they have raised such a heartless thing? No note. No clue. No quick phone call. Was the tiniest reassurance too much to ask for? She was selfish, just as Grace had been selfish. Except Grace had come to her senses! Grace had done what she was supposed to do, which was marry the sanctioned boy and say her vows before a room of credulous people, and assume, mostly in earnest, a steady, ignorant life.
4
Sam had to make sure that no one took this feeling away from him. He had to be sure, too, that no one saw the feeling, for he sensed that its observation by another would spell its loss. So he ate his oatmeal fast and dumped the rest. He wanted to flee, could not bear this kitchen that seemed, in its order and familiarity, to challenge his ardent heart, to threaten to tame the chaos at the core of him. He would not be tamed. He would not allow anything to come between himself and his gluttony. That’s how he felt upon waking: gluttonous. Not for food, not for his aunt’s sticky oatmeal. He stood at the sink, forced himself to swallow a few bites. Helen’s face remained in his mind the way sunlight stays in your eyes when you come into a dark room—it expanded hotly, everything else made vague in its swollen presence. He wished he’d dreamed about her so that he could say, simply, “I dreamed about you.” He wanted badly to say romantic things and for them to be true.
Finally he was out the door. It was starting. In his knapsack was a condom that had been given to him, more than six months before, by the pharmacist’s son. Sam walked down Main Street, past weathered houses in their tidy lots. As he approached the school, saw its brick face, its quivering flag, its principal standing on the front steps, he wanted to cry with relief and terror. Now he was afforded a sharp, unsparing kind of vision. He saw things like the principal’s plastic belt and his phony smile, and the chalky red berries on the bushes, the greenish hue of the granite steps, a girl’s penny loafers fitted with dimes. He steadied himself, closed and opened his eyes. He scanned the crowd of students but didn’t see her. A bell rang. The principal waved his hands like a traffic cop.
All his life Sam had been working. He worked on his grades and his manners and on being good to his aunt and uncle and, today, at last, worked on preparing himself for Helen. He thought this would be easy but it turned out to be work. It turned out to be letting a little furnace of desire warm his belly, letting the heat circulate, run a little up his throat, a little into his loins, but not too much, too much and you gave it away, too much and Mr. Waters saw your face and then you were clapping erasers after school, too much and they would know, the boys, the girls, they could see these things, they were dying to see. The wa
iting was not pleasure but work, an exhilarated and mammoth labor, and it took all his restraint to focus on his teachers’ voices, to answer when called on, to keep his body in order. He was like a man on a horse—steady, steady, through gritted teeth. At lunchtime he splashed his face with water. He managed to eat half a sandwich.
“You wanna shoot a little pool after school?” Kip asked.
“I’ve got plans.” Sam looked away, aware that if he said any more he’d give it up.
He didn’t see Helen all day, was starting to believe that she’d stayed home sick, succumbed to second thoughts, when there she was at the water fountain, leaning down to sip, one hand on the fountain’s handle, the other holding back her hair, exposing the skin of her nape. She was wearing a pink dress, its hem loose in back. The whole thing felt so tenuous, so alarmingly fragile. It occurred to him that perhaps he should pray. But what did God care? God didn’t step in to make sure boys got their rocks off. Later his math teacher touched his cheek with the back of her hand, said he looked flushed. He busied himself with his equations, trying to keep his face calm while his tongue scrambled the roof of his mouth.
Finally the day ended. The bell shot him into a new life. His pace was quick; he feared Kip might approach him, or the pharmacist’s kid, and so he walked like he had an appointment, which was true, he did. He practiced things he might say if someone interrupted him. I have a toothache. I have to run an errand for my aunt. The worst part was having to pass the hardware store. If Joe was out front washing the windows, or greeting customers by the door…He feared his uncle would spot him, pull him inside, request he cut some lumber or sweep the storeroom, which was part of their arrangement; his allowance depended on Joe’s odd jobs. But the store was dim, quiet. No one out front. And—look! There was a sign taped on the door, in Joe’s ragged scrawl: Closed Early—Sorry for Inconvenience. So it was true. So it would happen. He was free. No one could stop him. Destiny, that boomerang, hit his gut, took his breath, spun away again.
The Sweet Relief of Missing Children Page 8