The Sweet Relief of Missing Children

by Sarah Braunstein

  “They tell me to wait, but I should be out looking,” the woman next to him said softly. It took him a moment to realize she was speaking to him. “I think I should be out looking. That’s what my gut tells me. A mother is supposed to trust her gut, right?”

  Pax didn’t want to talk to anyone. He nodded.

  “My kid. He ran off. He’s lost. I lost him.”

  “I’m sorry,” Pax said.

  She blotted her eyes with a tissue.

  “He’s so young. Just five. We’re visiting, you know. From Indiana. Indiana is a lot simpler. Indiana doesn’t smell like this.” She had a moonish prettiness, bleached hair. Her mascara had bled. Her bangs were tall, crisp with hairspray, like a small hood lifted by a breeze. “We were walking along. There was a crowd of people. Tourists. We’re just tourists. We don’t live here. Oh—do you live here?”

  “No,” Pax said.

  “Then you won’t be offended if I call it a hellhole, which it is.”

  “They’ll find your son,” Pax said.

  She shook her head. “I’ve been here forever. It happened yesterday. I’ve been here the whole night.”

  The whole night, while the baseball game was played, while he and Ricky lay in Ricky’s bed, while he and Ricky—call it by its name—fucked, while Leonora’s body in the roll of carpet was dumped in that parking lot, this woman had been sitting in this plastic chair.

  “Forever,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “He’s just five.”

  “I understand.”

  “He’s always running off. I said, ‘Johnny Maxwell Trim, in the city you don’t run off.’ I told him it was dangerous. He wanted to know dangerous how. I told him there were bad people here. He said, ‘Like monsters?’ I said, ‘Yeah, monsters, so hold my hand. You better hold my hand.’ But I knew he’d run off. Monsters don’t scare him. He won’t stay still, never. Especially when there’s something foul to see.”

  She dabbed at her eyes.

  “He’s a nice boy,” she said, “but he likes odd stuff—monsters, liver. What kid likes liver? I never met one before him. I never knew a child to eat liver. Have you?”

  Pax shook his head.

  “His favorite color is green. Everything green, towels and sheets and shirts. He’s wearing a green shirt now, in fact. That’s what I told the police there. And green sneakers. Monsters, he’s all about monsters and blood, all that. He likes vampires, goblins, ten thousand leagues under the sea. I told the police he may be in the sewer system.”

  “He sounds like a nice boy.”

  Now he had no choice but to remember the day he’d gotten lost in the city when he was a child. Why were people always intruding with their stories and complaints and making you remember? He thought about that day and its freedom-peace-fear-grief-thrill-hope-guilt-fear—what could you call it? It was the first feeling that defied a name. How wonderful and right this seemed at the time. But soon it became a curse, a sorrow; soon the impossibility of finding the right name was not a pleasure, soon all his experiences felt too big, unsortable, a massive glare. That crazy woman who had taken him into her shack, that oddball with the dogs, she was gone and the shack was gone. He went there—it was the first thing he did when he returned to the city. In place of the shack was a sign about the miracle of some unpretty flora.

  The woman did not want to stop talking. “Nothing scares him,” she was saying. “He’s too brave. That’s a problem, right? Between us, I think he’s a little crazy.” She covered her mouth with her hand. “I should be out there looking for him. I should be out there as we speak.”

  “I think you should do what the police say.” Pax didn’t sound like himself—his voice was sharp, knowing, impatient, like his mother’s.

  She nodded. “Yes, you’re right, yes. You’re absolutely right.”

  They didn’t speak again. All along she’d wanted him to tell her to stay still, and once he did she was silent.

  Half an hour passed. Beyond the waiting area the station grew louder. Competing music from several radios, walkie-talkie static. At one point a handcuffed woman was led by, a prostitute in a yellow dress, boots to her thighs. Pax closed his eyes. He waited. He was hungry but didn’t care if he never ate again. Then the door swung open and a cop came in. He held a small boy around the waist as one holds a bag of groceries.

  “Ma’am,” said the cop, out of breath, and approached the blonde woman. “We found him on the east side. Is this him? Your kid?”

  The woman stood and looked at the child. He was dirty, mouth slack, with hair that fell over his ears and a shirt stained with jelly.

  The cop’s badge said Lowenbrau. He pointed to the boy’s head with his free hand. “Is this him? Your boy?”

  The woman was shaking. The boy looked at her. He was no more than three. His face showed no recognition. One red sneaker was untied.

  At last she shook her head. “No,” she said. “No, he is not my son.”

  The cop apologized, carried the kid further inside.

  She sat again. For a while she was quiet. Then she turned to Pax.

  “I may not get him back.”

  “They’ll find him.” But he didn’t really believe it. Who knew what happened to that kid, to any kid. Pax needed quiet. He needed to maintain his resolve.

  She said, “You want to know something crazy?”

  He did not. He made no motion or sound.

  “I almost took that one,” she whispered, leaning in close. “He wasn’t my son, but I may not get mine back. That kid was just looking at me. Can you believe that? Part of me wanted to take him and be done with it. I almost took him. Is that crazy?”

  She looked at him with widened eyes, waited for his shock.

  He would not give her shock.

  “Crazy, yes,” the man on Pax’s other side said suddenly. He turned to face them. He was Indian, maybe, with wide eyes, a face of exhausted indignation. “Boy run away. You go batty. Boy run from batty lady. I cannot blame boy.” The man had the clear stare and wide shoulders of a baseball umpire. “You stop talking now?”

  She blinked. Then, like a child, nodded demurely.

  Pax looked down at his lap. His heart raced. The thing was that Pax could believe it very well. It was all anyone wanted, a substitute to stand in for a loss, it was the worst and most obvious part of human nature.

  “I should have held on tighter,” she whispered.

  The man said, “All day talk to strangers. Steal a child! No shame. No shame.”

  “I’m shamed,” she said. “Oh, I’m shamed.”

  “Batty,” the man muttered.

  “Batty,” she agreed.

  Pax waited to be retrieved. Another hour passed. The station grew louder. Finally another boy was brought in for the woman to inspect, a kid with a round and regular face, a face like a hamburger bun, the face of any kid, of all of them. This was her son. She stood up, clucked her tongue; she knocked him lightly on the side of his head and cried “You!” as though he’d drawn on the wall with crayon, and the boy grinned, made a face that said You love me anyway, and she did.

  They left. Pax waited.

  He wasn’t a murderer but wasn’t innocent either. No one was free of crime—his crime was vague, elsewhere, nowhere, a crime not of passion but of passivity, of indifference, of failing to see people. And someone had to murder her. Someone had to confess, to offer her family that relief, to bear the burden of the horror, to be linked forever and always to the girl. That was the miraculous prospect—being linked to her, married to her in history. Him, old Paul Prickface Pussyhater Pax. Why couldn’t it be him? It had to be someone! So why couldn’t it be him? Why not? He wanted to do something good. That was the thing about goodness—you couldn’t wait for it to come to you. You needed to move to it. For once he wanted to move to it. Not to flee, not to evade, not to skirt the perimeter, and also he wanted so badly to feel close to a person, a girl, this girl. She was pretty and young and about to do everything. Here, in t
he station, a confession on his lips, he felt brave and peaceful. He didn’t deserve peace either, but he took it.

  He waited some more. From another room, a woman was yelling: “Those hooligans stole my silverware! My fox-fur coat!—” Then the sound of a door slamming, and her voice was gone. People came and went. Sometimes his stomach made noises. When he closed his eyes his stomach felt emptier. When he closed his eyes the boys and girls of the world rose up in his vision. Boys and girls like in some sort of a grand Soviet parade, rows and rows, happy and innocent and so close to losing it all. Every criminal was once an innocent. He closed his eyes, allowed himself to picture his mother, and Jade, and Judith, and Leonora, and Leonora’s mother, all these decent women, would-be women, and felt a surge of ardor, an amorousness, a longing not sexual, or only partly sexual, for it resided in his stomach and heart and head—it had a sexual part but something else, too, bigger than sex, righter than sex. He felt a desire to smash love into his body, to smash love into the world, to allow love to be the violent act he’d always suspected it was. Why did people pretend it wasn’t violent? It was the most violent thing.

  The Indian man was called into a deeper part of the station. Soon Pax would be asked to go deeper too. People came and went. He waited. Someone would retrieve him, someone with a notepad would record whatever he said. He planned his story, which would pass from someone’s notepad to someone’s mouth, to mother, to newscaster, to judge, mouth to mouth to mouth, and somewhere in this transit, possibly, it would become true. It would become an official thing. It could. It could. Pax straightened. Someone would come for him soon. The air was peace. He took it in, let it out. He would keep this feeling. He swore that he’d keep it, find a way to make it last, and it was true, he did. Even afterward—after the lie-detector test, after the psychiatric evaluation, after his mother came and sat with him and held his hand and rubbed his shoulders and begged him to tell the truth, to clear his good name, after the newspaper articles, after the cell, after the narrow bed he sat on with the candid silence of a monk, after his belt and shoelaces were returned to him, after he climbed up the jail’s steps into blinding noonday light—even then this peace would remain. The receptionist called for him.

  LEONORA

  Frank called it a rumpus room, meaning it was a cellar but didn’t feel like one. It was a room she might have liked a great deal under different circumstances, a room with soft yellow carpet, blond wood-paneled walls, a lamp made from a gumball machine. On a bamboo bar sat a glass bowl of drink umbrellas. A big black-and-white photograph of a tree, unframed, was pinned to the wall behind the bar. A clock in the shape of a pineapple.

  The kitten slept in her lap. It was a gift, the kitten. She had been the girl getting the kitten. Neither of them had known it, not the cat, not Leonora, but all along their lives had been veering together, moving toward each other, since the very beginning of time, since before either of them was born or breathed.

  As the hours passed, she began to take a certain pride. She imagined other girls, other people, would go berserk, lose their minds, which would only make things sadder and more dangerous. Beatrice, say, would shriek and claw and hurl insults. Others would vomit. Others—most people, probably—would leave themselves. She felt it as a distinct possibility, leaving herself, felt the invitation to close herself to the story. But that seemed wrong, a betrayal. She wanted to be—well, it was maybe strange—but she felt it was important to be a friend to herself. She didn’t want to leave her body alone in this mess. This decision felt like a sort of victory, brought a feeling of woozy, helpless arrogance, like she’d won something big but had to keep her mouth shut about it.

  Still, she cried a little. When the second hand came around again to the pineapple’s tuft, she stopped crying.

  The cat, all the while, was licking her hand. Its tiny, rough tongue. Its fluffy ears the same orange color of that candy they call circus peanuts.

  She wished it wasn’t happening—she would give anything for it not to be happening. “Anything”—was that true? She felt it was important to be honest with herself, and so made a list of things she’d be willing to give up: feet, hands, hearing, vision, hair, her brains, her beauty. She’d give up her grandmother, who was old anyway. There was no guilt in wanting to sacrifice her grandmother; Leonora knew that her grandmother would trade places in an instant. But people who take people don’t take grandmothers. They take girls like Leonora. She cursed her face. No. She would love her face. She would love her face, her manners, would not regret even the things that brought her here. The easy path is not usually the right one. Her mother liked to say this, and Leonora always wanted to agree, though she never truly had occasion to understand. This was the occasion.

  She thought about the kitten. How their little lives had been shuttling toward each other’s. The purity of the kitten, that its beauty stayed intact no matter what happened, no matter who touched it—this made her feel better. A small rectangular window near the ceiling had been boarded up with plywood. Otherwise the place was cheery, sweet, a room ready for a party. Drink umbrellas! Once her mother had gone for Halloween in a shirt decorated with drink umbrellas; she’d called herself “Happy Hour.” Leonora stroked the cat. She thought about the Underground Railroad. She made a list of all the unlikely victories of the world, Frederick Douglass, the 1980 U.S. Ice Hockey Team, penicillin, the Gutenberg Press, Sally Ride, whoever it was who’d first climbed Everest, the United Nations, carbonation, the suffrage movement. What else? There were plenty. The hugeness of the list, the fact that it never could be exhausted, helped. It made her calm. It made it easier to stay inside herself. The kitten helped too. She sat in the center of a tan leather couch with a blanket over her lap. The cat was on the blanket. This wasn’t the same blanket that hid her in the car; this one was clean, white wool. It held no smell but the faintest chemical whiff of dry cleaning. They had given her a clean blanket. They had given her a cup of soda, but she didn’t drink it. They had given her a bowl of quarters for the gumball machine, but she didn’t touch the quarters. She heard voices upstairs but couldn’t make out many words. Occasional footsteps. The man, Frank, came down now and then. He apologized that the soda was flat, stood before her in his ski jacket, baggy jeans, white sneakers that looked brand-new. He said, “Sweetie, you just take it easy now,” as if she’d been wailing, when in fact she was sitting politely, unmoving, on the couch. The rash on his face was bad—she could tell he’d just rubbed some ointment on it; it shone. The woman never came down.

  “Later on I’ll swing by the grocery. Pick up some snacks. What kind of beverages do you like?”

  She didn’t reply.

  He kept his gaze on her, bit down on his bottom lip.

  “Any particular kind of snack?”

  What was she supposed to say?

  “Sweetie?”

  She said, “Please don’t call me that.”

  “I told you my name.”

  She said, “Your name is Frank.” She tried to say it with confidence, the way she’d report it to a police officer, but it came out too softly. She said it again, tried to be harsher, to say it with disgust: “Frank.”

  He said, “So what’s yours? If I know your name, I won’t have to call you ‘sweetie.’”

  She shook her head.

  “C’mon.”

  She stared at him levelly, heart pounding.

  “You want me to guess? Is that it? Like in the fairy tale? If I can guess your name it means we’re married?”

  It was as if someone had rung a bell in her stomach.

  “We are not,” she said.

  He sighed and went back upstairs.

  Her poor family. Her father who’d wake up and have no one to read to, who’d have no number for this, no chart to consult.

  Stay here. Stay with yourself.

  Gut it out.

  She examined the cat’s tail. She examined the bamboo bar. She looked for a long time at the picture of the tree thumbtacked behind the ba
r, the only picture in the room. It was a dim photograph of a big tree on a hill somewhere, a tree in winter, without leaves, without birds, any tree against any sky. It was nothing special. A tree on a hill. But as she gazed at the tree, as she allowed her eyes to lose focus, allowed the tree to blur, she found herself remembering the tree she’d seen this morning on the way to school, that tree a few blocks from her house, its branches dark against the white sky. The tree she would have climbed this summer if she’d been that kind of girl. The tree near her house, suspended in her mind; the tree here, suspended on the wall.

  Then something happened. She saw that the tree in the photograph in this rumpus room had the same curve to its biggest branch, had the same lump in its base, the same barely perceptible leftward lean, as the real one she’d gazed at earlier. Could they be the same tree? She looked. She forced her eyes to focus. They were the same tree. They were! It was impossible but true, and she thought: Everything comes around again. She didn’t have to will this thought; it simply appeared. It made no demands. It didn’t automatically present its opposite, as most thoughts do.

  She used the bathroom that he’d shown her, a tiny room, no window, just a toilet, a sink the size of a dessert bowl, like a bathroom on a train. She peed, then washed her hands. It seemed to her a particularly grievous offense that there was no soap. She opened the tiny cabinet under the sink but found only a spare roll of toilet paper and one of those spongy rubber things used to separate toes when you paint your nails, like a foam brass knuckles. These objects, the presence of these objects coupled with the absence of the soap, filled her with rage. She opened the door.

  There he was, Frank, and the rash on his cheek.

  “There’s no soap.” She practically shouted it. “Get me soap.”

  He blinked. She said it again. She would never stop staying it. He went upstairs. Soon he came down again with a box of plain crackers and a bottle of soda and an unopened bar of soap. Right away the soap’s jingle sprang to her mind: Feel clean—squeaky—fresh—rise higher than the rest. The soap was called Soar. He left again. She washed her hands, saying the alphabet in her mind like they taught her, A to Z, to kill all the germs. Then she returned to the couch; the kitten found her lap.