The Sweet Relief of Missing Children

by Sarah Braunstein

  He said, “I understand there’ll be another prayer vigil?”

  Her eyes widened. You could see the powder they’d applied to her skin. She opened her mouth. “The message—”

  Again she said nothing.

  “A candlelight vigil? By city hall?”

  “I—can’t.”

  He leaned in closer. Would he touch her arm? He seemed to want to. But his hands stayed on his lap, held his index card.

  He said, “What is your message, dear?”

  “Dear?”

  “Say what you need to say. This is your opportunity.”

  She squinted. Silence.

  The newscaster turned to the camera. He lifted his jaw. He pouted. “Give her back,” he said. “A mother’s plea. A family’s wish. A city’s hope. Give. Her. Back.”

  4

  He took a flyer off a telephone pole. He kept it in his back pocket, looked frequently at her narrow face. He couldn’t stop looking. He recognized her. She was like the sister he hadn’t had, a familiar something in the eyes, a quiescence, a longing, a studied blankness. She looked like she was struggling to find the right thing to say, the one perfect thing, in a crowd of yammering idiots. No one was listening to her. Plus they had similar eyebrows, she and Pax.

  Once, at a bakery, he brandished the flyer, asked the proprietor, “Have you seen this girl?” like he was a relative, an uncle, even the father.

  “I’m sorry. I haven’t.”

  Pax nodded.

  “Tough,” said the baker, shaking his head. “Real tough. I’ve seen her on the news. I had a cousin once, disappeared too. Turned up in a casino, broke and high. Hope that girl’s off somewhere hitting the jackpot. That’s what I hope.”

  Pax pictured this girl sitting on a vinyl casino stool with a bucket of coins on her lap, coolly sipping a Shirley Temple.

  “What’s her name again?” the baker wanted to know.

  “Leonora.” He made it sound Italian.

  “God bless her,” the baker said, and then gave Pax a box of cookies on the house.

  For a while he slept in the park. Now he was staying with Ricky Maroon, a guy he’d met during a pickup game of basketball. It was a good arrangement. Ricky was lonely, a talker, needed someone else’s presence, needed for his own incessant chatter to reach someone’s ears. He gave Pax the spare couch in his little apartment in exchange for Pax’s nodding company. He served Pax plates of meatloaf and mashed potatoes, beer. For dessert there was a saucer spread with maraschino cherries and a couple stale cookies, like in a Chinese restaurant.

  Ricky had decided he was a poet. It was his calling, and since he’d accepted it he said he felt two hundred percent more alive. He was stocky, with black uncombed hair, a uniform of hiking boots, cutoff jeans, polyester short-sleeved shirts like math teachers wear. He carried a notebook in his front pocket, a bitten pencil behind his ear. The meatloaf was dry, the beer cheap, but somehow this sharpened the pleasure. It had been so long since Pax had a home, since someone else made sure he had a beer in his hand and a clean blanket and some socks.

  “Let me read you a poem. Hey buddy. Can I read you a poem?”

  It was six o’clock in the morning. Late July.

  Pax, in his underwear, reclined on Ricky’s yellow velour sofa. Yellow light burned through a window shade made fragile by the sun; a single touch would disintegrate it, so it stayed down all day. A spider plant hung from a hook in the ceiling, its leaves the color of burlap. Ricky knelt on the floor next to the couch. Pax could smell his dandruff shampoo in the room’s awful heat.

  Pax yawned. “What time is it? Maybe later?”

  But Ricky had already begun to read: “It’s too late for the boogeyman. He’s come, gone. Leather face, faux-jeweled eyes, won’t bother you. So keep your superstitions. Petty inklings. Faith. Even the monsters are done with you. He came to your window. He saw you sleep. Your drool didn’t stir him. He said: Your dreams are free. And you woke and said: Oh God. Come back.”

  Pax said, “Come back?”

  “Come back. Come back.” Ricky stood, snapped his fingers. His knees were indented from the carpet, pink and pocked. Pax wondered how long he’d been kneeling there, watching him sleep.

  “I used to worry like hell about the boogeyman,” Ricky said. “I used to fear everything supernatural. Damn I wish I could be like that again. Now what do I worry about? That there’s no such thing as the boogeyman. That’s worse. If there’s no boogeyman there’s no god to save you from him. You want some juice or something?”

  Pax said yes. Ricky went to the kitchen, returned with a jug of grapefruit juice, no cup, a pack of cigarettes and an ashtray. He lit a cigarette, gulped some juice from the jug, but didn’t offer any to Pax.

  “I was dreaming about a girl,” Pax heard himself say.

  “It goes on—” Ricky read: “It’s too late for the boogeyman. Too late for the rheumy goblin. Rotten-toothed zombie. Werewolf with his too-tight dungarees. Erection.”

  “Erection?” Pax said. “That came out of nowhere.” But really the stranger word, he thought, was dungarees.

  Pax rolled over.

  “You want to get back to sleep? Get back to some girl? Huh?” Ricky pressed a fist to Pax’s head, moved it around a little.

  It was true. He wanted to get back to a girl. But he didn’t want to ruin this thing with Ricky, this—what would you call it?—home life.

  “No. I want to hear more. Keep reading.”

  “That’s all I have. It’s not done yet.”

  Pax closed his eyes. He saw Leonora’s face, that poor missing girl, her bangs. It was always most clear to him just as he was waking up.

  Ricky said, “Yesterday I saw the loveliest chick walking down McGregor. Asian. A little girl, and she was smoking a cigarette. No hips. No tits.”

  In Pax’s dream Leonora had matted hair. She’d lost one of the barrettes. Her lips were chapped.

  “I said to her, ‘Can I buy you a cup of tea?’ I was perfectly pleasant. I was nothing but a gentleman, Pax. And you know what she said? She said, ‘I don’t drink tea.’”

  Pax knew it was a terrible poem, that it wasn’t a poem at all, just a cluster of urgent insomniac words battened together with spit.

  “Girls these days. They expect everything plus twenty,” said Ricky. “I used to think it’d be better out in Utah. Have a whole bunch. Now the thought of just one gives me heartburn.” He tipped his head back, smoked his cigarette like a man onstage. No one knew how vain he was: he put hairspray in his eyebrows to keep them in place. He plucked the hairs that grew around his nipples, examined the pores on his nose with a special magnifying mirror. “You ever been in love?” Ricky asked. “The whole shebang?”

  Pax didn’t answer.

  “Not me. Not me. Not ever. It’s a shame. I have a lot to offer.” He stubbed out his cigarette and lit another. He said, “You need a little boogeyman inside you to fall in love.”

  5

  The girl’s mother was right there, on a park bench, knitting. He said hello. Her clothes were elegant but wrinkled. The hems of her pants were damp. It was early morning but already hot. The radio warned of a scorcher.

  “Hello,” Pax said again.

  “Good morning.” She did not look up. She was knitting a sweater. Its sleeve, a ghostly pendulum, swayed above her lap. Pax straightened up. He hadn’t brushed his teeth.

  “I know you.” He couldn’t help it. He felt a rush of panic, as if meeting a celebrity. “On TV. I saw you.” A star. He was flummoxed, wet-palmed. A star. But she was not a star.

  “You’re her mother.”

  “You’ve got the wrong person.”

  “Leonora.”

  He didn’t mean to say it. His blood swam behind his eyes. It was like giving away a secret. One couldn’t say the name. Not like this, not in the sunshine, not while the woman was knitting. She was trying to be a normal person making a normal thing out of yarn. Saying the girl’s name was uncouth, pitiless—worse than asking
her for an autograph. And yet—not saying the name, wasn’t this a crime too? He wasn’t sure. The dead, the gone, they want their names to be spoken. The living can’t bear it. Or maybe it’s the other way around? He didn’t know. Only after he spoke the girl’s name did the mother look up from the yarn. She narrowed her eyes. Then, lulling and cruel, she said, “If you have something of relevance to say, go ahead. Otherwise leave me alone.”

  Her needles clicked in time. Her glasses were perched on top of her head. Pink pearls glistened in her earlobes. He was pretty sure he stank. He felt a sudden, tremendous, galvanizing hunger. He said too loudly, “Let me buy you a hamburger.” For a moment he held hope that he’d found the one thing that could satisfy the great mouth of her loss. “Can I do that for you?”

  The needles stopped moving.

  “I detest meat.” She closed her eyes. “Meat is a crime. The last time I ate a hamburger was in 1982.”

  Never in his life had he been in possession of anything relevant to say.

  She opened her eyes again. “You want to know something? You want to know what I think?”

  He said he did.

  “I think people are lunatics. Kids go missing. You know this. You watch the news. You see the poor parents. You see the picture of the poor kid. You think: What lunatic is responsible? You focus the lunacy on the one who took her. The rest of the world is okay. You do this; I did it. Right? Don’t answer. But then, when it happens to you, your kid…”

  She looked at him with dull expectancy. He wasn’t sure if he was supposed to speak.

  “You get letters,” she said. “Accusations. Weirdos calling on the phone. Packages of voodoo dolls. Stick this pin here. Eat this herb. Say these words. Abracadabra shazam goddamn. Praise the moon. Praise the goddess praise Jesus praise the FBI. Never mind the strangers who want to search for her. You know what I say? I say it’s lunacy everywhere. I say damn the church. Damn the helpers. Their armbands. Their weird patience. They want to be assured their own girls don’t get stolen. It’s an insurance policy, their help. Damn them all, every one of them, and damn you too.”

  Then she resumed knitting.

  “Damn me,” he said weakly. He felt light-headed and shamed.

  She said, “A man who wants to buy me a hamburger, for example.”

  “I don’t want to give you anything,” he said. “I’m sorry. I’m leaving now.”

  But he did not move.

  He said, “Forgive me.”

  She flushed. He thought she might yell. Then, shrugging: “I am hungry, actually.”

  “Really?”

  “In 1982 I got some kind of worm. I puked for days.”

  “A salad.”

  “You offered a burger,” she said, “I’m taking a burger,” and she went back to her sweater.

  He ran to a restaurant half a block away, bought two cheese-burgers, fries. He spent nearly the last of his cash. When he returned to the bench she was gone. He sat where she’d sat. He was hungry, wanted to eat the food, but that would be wrong. It wasn’t his. Eating her food, it would have been like touching her.

  Traffic blurred on the avenue. The sun throbbed. The skin of his face felt stretched too tight—his nose had burnt, peeled, was burning again. He wondered what happened to the girl and if there had been a witness. It was better if there was a witness. One can’t be one’s own witness. That’s often the belief, that one can split oneself and watch and later, coolly, fairly, tell the tale. But it wasn’t true. One needed someone else. It was especially important if one was dead.

  He hadn’t just come upon her mother. That was a lie. He’d gone to her apartment building, which was not too far from Ricky’s. No, that wasn’t true either. He’d taken three trains and walked five blocks. He’d gone there, stood before the brownstone, saw the purple peace-sign sticker in the window. He’d watched her emerge. He’d followed her to the park, where she lifted her face to the sun and stepped like a bold child into the fountain. Then she’d selected a bench. The grace of her hands on those knitting needles baffled him. Why did he feel his fate mingled intimately with hers? Why was he consumed by thoughts of her child? His dreams were mostly awful and not annihilated by daylight. Usually they showed the girl bleeding, her forehead slashed, but he didn’t fully trust them, because twice they showed her waiting for a train, and once holding a fishing rod, once on a clean white bed in only her panties.

  He returned to the apartment building three days later, watched the mother descend the steps. Now she was wearing a pink dress with billowing sleeves, sandals with straps that wound up the ankles. She bought a hot dog at a sidewalk vendor. She took a bite, chewed, and spit it onto the street.

  6

  Ricky ruined the couch. It was an accident, he said. He must have dropped a hot cigarette butt between the cushions. The couch smoldered all afternoon; it smelled poisonous. They dumped water and baking soda on the cushions.

  “I guess I’ll sleep on the floor,” Pax said.

  “Naw, I’ve got a big old island of a bed.”

  Pax hesitated.

  “I insist,” said Ricky. His grin revealed his gums.

  Pax dreaded the wafting smell of dandruff shampoo. He feared Ricky’s hand alighting, in the brief incidental manner of an insect, on his hip. At the same time, it had been years since he’d slept in a bed with a person, since he’d lain with another human being on a proper mattress, on a set of sheets, in a room designated for sleep. He was touched by this man’s generosity. He remembered his namesake, the Pax on the bus, placid, stoic Pax, who would have accepted the invitation.

  They lay on their backs, untouching. The heat wave was crippling the city. It was a couple hours past sunset. The delicately oppressive scent of ozone lingered. Through open windows they heard traffic in the distance, the bullfrog bleat of tractor-trailer horns, and, closer, electric guitar music. There had been a baseball game on the radio; the city’s team beat their rival by a landslide. Intermittently a gloating cheer rose to meet them from the street below. It was a queen-size bed, with soft, threadbare blankets, though it was too hot to lie under them. Ricky wore his cutoffs. Pax wore jeans and a damp t-shirt, which he’d run under the faucet. They’d each had several beers. Pax felt slackened, clammy, and loosened by these drinks and by the landslide victory and by the dim noise of the city. He said, “I’m kind of thinking a lot, quite a bit actually, about that missing girl.”

  Ricky grunted. “Who’s that?” He was chewing on a toothpick.

  “That girl, Leonora. Leonora Marie Coulter. That one.”

  “Pretty thing, right? They say she’s probably dead. Nine out of ten, they’re dead.”

  “That’s what they say?”

  “That or smuggled to Thailand. But then again, kids run off. You know, my sister Trish ran off for a while. They come back. Or they don’t.”

  An ambulance sped down the street. Its siren, the inconsequential dire nature of it, triggered a seizing in Pax’s gut.

  “Mexico maybe. Caught up in one of those rings, high on smack. My sister went to California with her dumbass boyfriend. She called a couple weeks later.”

  “Smack. I hope not. I don’t think she’s in Mexico.”

  “Or some kind of pills, maybe, uppers. Get more work out of the girls. My sister called from a phone booth. She was pregnant. She called when her boyfriend ditched her. My dad wired her money for a train back home, but she used it for an abortion instead.”

  “Huh.”

  Ricky snickered. “My idiot parents.”

  “She’s just a kid.”

  “Naw, she was nineteen.”

  “I mean Leonora. She’s twelve. That’s all.”

  “It doesn’t really matter how old. You’re never too young to get chewed up.”

  “I feel like I’m meant to do something. Why do I feel that way?”

  “Because you’re a big old softy. You feel for all people. I used to be like that, but I quit. I quit it for poetry.”

  “What if she was the on
e? The girl I was meant to marry.”

  Ricky flicked his toothpick across the room. “You believe in that kind of thing?”

  Pax didn’t know. He wanted to see what would happen if he said it.

  They were silent then. The siren grew fainter and fainter. Pax wondered what person was lying in the back of that ambulance. Perhaps they’d found Leonora—trapped in an elevator shaft, legs broken. Or sooty, beaten, crawling out of the subway on her hands and knees. Of course it wasn’t Leonora, just another soul hurtling through the city.

  “I’ve been thinking about talent,” Ricky announced. “I’m a poet, right. But do I have talent?”

  “Sure you do.”

  “It was a hypothetical question.”

  “Sorry.”

  “You’re right, though. But it doesn’t matter. Talent’s just a platform. The question isn’t can you find the platform but: Are you willing to jump? I’m standing on the platform. I’ve got that far. But that far is trivial. That far means nothing…What are you doing?”

  Pax gripped his hands together. He tensed his legs. “I feel like I’m meant to save her.”

  “The girl? Oh man. That’s rough. You’re a wounded little pilgrim, aren’t you? But don’t blame yourself. There are far worse things to be.”

  “What’s worse?”

  “A poet.” He faked a laugh.

  Maybe she was in an elevator somewhere. Maybe she had starved to death in a broken elevator, the bones in her hands fractured from pounding. Maybe she was stuffed in a garbage bag, in one of the millions of dumpsters of this city, or sleeping soundly in the back of a station wagon under the country stars. Maybe she was happy. On safari, binoculars strung around her slender neck, a zebra grazing nearby. Or sitting by some harbor. Maybe she was eating clams from a plastic basket. Maybe Pax had taken her himself. Maybe she was in a river. Pale fish nosing her knees. Maybe he’d put her there.