Object of Desire

by William J. Mann

  As for my own feelings about my missing sister, I didn’t really think much past the idea that she was missing. She’d eventually come home; I took that for granted. In the days following her disappearance, the house had swarmed with people: cops, neighbors, reporters, strangers who’d wander in off the street, attracted by all the commotion. One lady, with silver cat’s-eye glasses, had sat in Dad’s chair for about an hour, eating the bologna sandwiches that the local deli had sent over, until I’d walked up to her and asked who she was. “A concerned citizen,” she’d told me. Mom had had Detective Guthrie, the cop in charge of investigating the case, throw her out.

  My mother, too, operated on the belief that Becky’s return was imminent. Her room, Mom insisted, should be kept just as it was: “She’ll be furious when she comes back if we mess up her things.” Outside, Becky’s easel, with its unfinished painting of a white house, stood exactly where she had left it, taken in only when it rained and always replaced the next day. Every night Mom still set a plate for Becky at the dinner table—that was, on those nights when she still made dinner. Lately she’d stopped cooking pretty much altogether, I think because Becky’s empty plate made her too depressed. Dad had taken up the slack, bringing home pizzas or buckets of chicken, which I ate on my own on the couch, watching Doctor Who, or up in my room, reading comic books. On the nights that Dad stayed late at the office—which were getting to be more frequent—I’d just fend for myself. I didn’t mind Fluffernutters for dinner. In fact, I kind of liked them.

  Mom and I spent hours plastering MISSING signs all over store windows and telephone poles. Becky’s name and class photo were printed boldly in purple ink, along with a personal description, including her height, weight, eye and hair color, and the crescent moon birthmark on her arm. Underneath were special phone numbers to call.

  In the beginning, right after Becky disappeared, reporters from the Hartford Courant had come by to ask us a thousand questions, their pained expressions twisting and stretching their faces so much, I almost wanted to laugh. So far there had been three articles in the newspaper, and another one was promised. The Associated Press had picked up the story last week, and lately we’d been getting calls from friends and cousins in other towns and states, every one of them shocked and horrified, asking what they could do. Mom would say, “Come down and help us look for her” or “Send money.” To the best of my knowledge, none of them did either.

  Becky’s friends were more forthcoming. Carol Fleisher organized a rally at St. Clare’s, and they raised six hundred dollars to help in the search. The Rebecca Fortunato Fund was set up at Connecticut Bank and Trust, and lots of people, many of whom we didn’t even know, contributed money to it. Soon we were up to several thousand dollars—more money, Dad said, than he’d ever had in his own bank account at one time.

  Two weeks ago, Channel 3 had shown up in our driveway, their mobile broadcasting equipment towering over our roof. Mom decided she’d be the one to go on the air that night; Dad declined. The television lights were so bright, they turned our living room white. Mom sat on the couch and described Becky for the cameras, showing tons of photos of her. The photo from last Halloween made me sad. I had teased Becky about dressing up as Fonzie from Happy Days, with her slicked-back hair and leather jacket; I’d told her she looked better as a boy than she did as a girl. I think I hurt her feelings, and I regretted that now, wishing there was some magical way I could take my words back. That night, all the neighbors came over to watch the six o’clock broadcast, and afterward, they told Mom she’d been so heartfelt, so compelling, as she pleaded for information about Becky that they were certain someone would come forward.

  Did they ever. As the tips poured in, Mom turned the living room into a command post, with three telephones, stacks of notepads, and cups of sharp pencils. It was my job to check regularly to see if any of the pencils needed sharpening. After Mom went on TV, the phones rang nonstop for the next two days. Neighbors came over to help staff the phones. Then, by the third day, they fell silent for a while, but periodically they’d start up again, especially late at night. Some of the calls came from psychics, who said they were seeing visions of Becky being held in a warehouse, maybe in New York City, or waiting tables on a Caribbean island, maybe Aruba. All of it was dutifully written down by Mom, who passed it on to Detective Guthrie. Some of the calls were cranks. “Becky’s in my freezer!” some kid would chortle, hanging up. And then there would be these kinds of calls: “If you accept Jesus as your personal Savior, He will bring your daughter home.” (You could hear the capital H.) I’d lay in bed at night, wide awake, listening to the phone ring downstairs, Flo Armstrong from next door answering with, “Find Becky Fortunato now! May I get your name?”

  Yet even with the cranks, we got quite a few leads. Becky had been spotted working at Macy’s in New Haven, or riding on the back of a motorcycle in Springfield, Massachusetts, or walking Forty-second Street in Manhattan in fishnets and high heels. Mom and the neighbor ladies dutifully wrote all the information down. They were supposed to refer all callers to the police, but Detective Guthrie had agreed that some people might have a fear of calling the cops, so he’d consented to Mom’s phone bank. But none of the leads that came in over the phones had panned out. The cops assured us they’d looked into every one we’d given them, but so far, not a trace of Becky had been found.

  I was passing one of the parked school buses, thinking about Becky in Aruba, when one kid, whose face I had never seen before, slid open a window on the bus and shouted at me, “Hey, Silent Dan, did you suck off Brother Pop?”

  I ignored him as always. I just went on walking.

  “Hey, your sister’s in the back of the bus, giving us all blow jobs!”

  Something snapped inside me. I suddenly stopped walking. I threw down my duffel bag and turned to face the kid. What I was going to do or say, I had no idea.

  I’d never find out, either.

  Because someone else had beaten me to the punch—if indeed, a punch was what I had planned to throw. Someone else had reached up and grabbed the punk’s throat and yanked him out of the bus so that his wiry little body was now wedged by its shoulders in the window frame.

  Chipper Paguni.

  “You fucking asshole!” Chipper was seething. “You say that again and I will fucking wipe the parking lot with your fucking faggot ass!”

  My eyes were fixed on Chipper’s arm, the one that held the kid in a death grip. He’d rolled up his white shirtsleeves, and I could see the tendons tensing in his forearm. They were pulsing with rage, with passion. I couldn’t look away.

  Chipper shoved the kid back into the bus. “I fucking mean it, you asshole!”

  The bus driver had stepped out onto the pavement, glaring at Chipper.

  “Its okay,” Chipper told him, with a smile. “I’m just keeping some underclassmen in line.”

  The driver sneered but said nothing. He turned around and got back into the bus.

  I stood staring at Chipper.

  “You want a ride home?” he asked me.

  I nodded, unable to speak.

  He gestured for me to follow him.

  My heart was in my throat as I hurried across the parking lot, keeping several feet behind Chipper. He was undoing his tie, sliding it out from under his collar. The sound of silk against the starched shirt excited me for some strange reason. Chipper pulled his keys from his pocket and unlocked the driver’s side door of his golden car. Becky used to go on and on about this car, about how much power it had, about the sculptured door panels, the simulated wood, the high-back bucket seats. Chipper popped open the passenger’s side door, and I slid in, taking the spot that had once been Becky’s. I stuffed my duffel bag down on the floor between my legs. My shoulder rubbed against Chipper’s, and I felt my dick get hard in my pants.

  “Those guys are assholes,” he said to me. “You can’t just ignore them. You gotta kick their ass, or they will say that shit for the rest of your four years here.”
r />   “But Becky won’t be gone for four years,” I told him. “They’ll quit when she comes home.”

  Chipper didn’t reply, just started the ignition. The car roared into life.

  We squealed out of the parking lot. From the corner of my eye—because I didn’t dare look at him directly—I watched Chipper drive. He steered with his right arm, resting his left out the window. His arms were covered with a soft dark fuzz, which I couldn’t ever imagine having on my own arms. His hair, so dark it was almost black, was long and feathered back against the sides of his face. His nose was large but not unattractive, the kind of nose most Italians in town had, except for me. I supposed I took after Mom’s Irish side, with my small nose and nondescript features. But Chipper had a strong jaw and a cleft chin, like Superman’s and Batman’s, in fact like all the superheroes whose adventures I kept preserved in mold-resistant plastic bags under my bed.

  We drove on, yellow cornfields stretching for miles on either side of us. The air smelled of cut grass and burning leaves. I thought about Chipper’s underpants, stuffed in the back of my drawer. I’d been too embarrassed to take them out and look at them again, but every day, coming into my room after school, I knew they were there. A part of him, inside a part of me. I felt my face get warm and worried that he somehow knew.

  “Your mom doing okay?” he asked.

  “Well, she’s following up lots of leads.”

  Chipper grunted. “Yeah, I know. She came over my house again last weekend, with a whole new theory.”

  “The one about the Hare Krishnas?”

  He nodded. We had come to a red light. He looked over at me.

  “Apparently, there was this busload of Hare Krishnas parked in front of the balloon shop on Main Street for most of the morning,” he said, telling me nothing I hadn’t already heard, several times. “Your mom says maybe Becky thought they were cool, or maybe they lured her in. For whatever reason, maybe she got on that bus. So your mom is asking me, yet again, when the last time was that I saw Becky that day. She wants to be able to rule out whether or not she could have gotten on that bus.”

  His eyes were burning holes in me. At least, I felt as if they were.

  “The bus left at eleven thirty,” I said, repeating what Mom had told me.

  The light turned green. Chipper started to drive again.

  “Yeah, and like I’ve told your mother, again and again, I didn’t see Becky at all that day.” He was no longer looking at me. “The last time I saw her was the night before. So sure, maybe she did get on that bus filled with a bunch of crazy Hare Krishnas—though for the life of me, I can’t figure out why she’d do such a thing.”

  He was lying, and I knew it.

  He had seen Becky that day.

  At the pond.

  At noon.

  So she could not have gotten on that Hare Krishna bus.

  I knew that.

  Chipper knew that.

  But did he know that I knew?

  We drove in silence for another minute or two.

  “Thanks for sticking up for me,” I finally said.

  Chipper laughed. He switched on the radio. A sudden loud burst of Aerosmith. “Schoolgirl sweetie with a classy kinda sassy, little skirt’s climbin’ way up her knee…”

  Becky had loved Aerosmith. I wondered if she’d ever listened to this very same song in this very same seat in this very same car. I felt very odd, a kind of tingly odd, being in her place.

  Chipper and Becky had gotten very close in the last few months. I understood why Chipper was so anxious talking to Mom. Because when the police had interviewed him, he’d had to admit that he and Becky had smoked pot together, and that they’d cut class a few times to hang out and eat pizza and watch television at his older sister’s apartment. But he had no idea why Becky might want to run away, if run away was what she did. He had no idea of anything dangerous she might have been involved in, of any bad crowd she might have been hanging with. He had told them all he knew, so help him God!

  The police had stopped questioning Chipper, and he didn’t want them coming back. His revelations of smoking pot and skipping school had knocked Mom and Dad for a loop, but the cops saw nothing incriminating there. Mom wasn’t so sure. She’d never liked Chipper’s influence on Becky, and to learn these things—her little girl using wacky weed!—had simply hardened her against him. So if Chipper ever admitted to this—that he had lied about the last time he’d seen Becky—Mom would surely turn the police back on him so fast, he wouldn’t know what hit him. And I knew that the last person to see a missing or murdered person was always considered the prime suspect.

  “Listen, kid,” Chipper said, adjusting the volume of the radio down, “you gotta start taking care of yourself.” He looked over at me with eyes so dark and so deep, they seemed like holes in his face. “After next year, I won’t be around. You’ve got three more years of this shit.”

  “But Becky—”

  “Whether Becky comes back or not,” Chipper said, interrupting me, “these assholes will find a reason to pick on you. That’s just the way it is. That’s just a lesson of life. Fight ’em off or get beaten down. Your choice.”

  We had turned onto our street. Chipper pulled into his driveway and turned off his car. I thanked him and stepped out.

  And turned to see an ambulance in front of my house.

  “Jesus,” Chipper said as he saw it, too. We both hurried across the street, getting there just as Aunt Patsy was being carried out the front door on a stretcher. Nana followed, like a wandering ghost.

  “Where are they taking her?” Nana asked me.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  Aunt Patsy was awake. She looked up at me from the stretcher. “Danny, I’m so sorry. Tell your mother I’m so sorry.”

  “What’s going on?” I asked.

  “Where are they taking Patsy?” Nana asked.

  I left her standing there on the grass and rushed up the front steps. In the living room, Mom was seated on a folding chair at a table. Three different phone lines had been installed so that if anyone called with a tip on Becky, they’d never get a busy signal. At the moment Mom was on one of the phones, listening intently. With her free hand, she was covering her other ear to drown out the commotion of the ambulance.

  “Mom,” I asked, “what’s wrong with Aunt Patsy?”

  She waved me away irritably. I looked out the picture window and saw the ambulance guys slam the doors, having secured Aunt Patsy in back. Then the lights started flashing and the siren sounding, and they took off down the street. Nana stood in the grass in her big black old lady shoes, watching them go. Chipper came up behind her and said something to her, gesturing back toward the house, but she didn’t move. She just kept standing there, looking down the street in the direction the ambulance had gone, like a little kid waiting for the ice-cream truck.

  “Mom,” I said again, more insistent this time.

  “Okay, look,” she said into the phone, “I’ll have to call you back. This has all been very interesting. I will definitely look into it. Thank you. Thank you so much.”

  She hung up the phone.

  “Mom, what happened?”

  “This could be it,” she said, her eyes wide. “This could be the lead we were praying for!”

  “What happened to Aunt Patsy?”

  She was up, out of her chair, scrambling for a notepad. “I’ve got to write this stuff down! This could be it! This could be the answer!”

  “Mom!” My voice grew higher. “What happened to Aunt Patsy?”

  She spun on me, rage suddenly filling up her bloodshot eyes. “She had to go to the hospital! Don’t bother me with that! I know how to find Becky!”

  My mind was like a merry-go-round. “You…do?”

  She was scribbling in her notepad, her hand like a cramped claw holding the pen. “Call your father,” she was telling me. “He has to come home. We have to follow this up.”

  I heard the squeak of the screen door behin
d me and turned. Chipper was helping Nana up the front steps and holding the door open for her. Mom ignored them. She just continued to write in her notepad, her front two teeth chewing on her bottom lip.

  “There you go, Mrs. Fortunato,” Chipper was saying.

  “Is Patsy in here?” Nana asked.

  “No,” I told her, taking her hand and leading her to the couch. “She had to go to the hospital.”

  “Why?” Nana asked, big, round blue eyes looking up at me as she sat down.

  “That’s what I’m wondering myself.” I knew better than to ask my mother again. “I’m gonna call my dad.”

  “Tell him to get home now,” Mom said, not looking up.

  Chipper stood there awkwardly, shifting his weight from one foot to the other. He was wearing neon blue sneakers with yellow stripes.

  “Mom knows where Becky is,” I told him.

  He turned sharply to look at her. “Where?” he asked.

  “Danny, call your father!”

  “Okay, okay,” I said.

  “Is Patsy here?” Nana asked from the couch.

  “No,” I told her again. “She went to the hospital.”

  “Why?”

  “We don’t know,” Chipper told her softly.

  I picked up the phone that hung on the wall between the living room and the kitchen and dialed Dad’s work number. I got Phyllis, the secretary for the real estate office. Whenever I went in to see Dad at the office, Phyllis was always sucking on orange hard candies, snapping them around with her tongue so much you could actually smell the fragrance of orange. Now, on the phone, I could hear the candy in her mouth as she spoke. She told me my father was out showing a house, but she’d have him call home as soon as he got in.