by Unknown
“I just can’t read her. I can’t understand her,” their mother said into the phone. “And yet I know that in some ways, she does still care about us. Or have some need of us, at least. She reminds me of this cat I once had—this very unfriendly black torn who flinched if you tried to pat him. But go to another part of the house and sooner or later you’d find him there too, strolling in like by accident to the very room you had just settled in.”
She couldn’t be talking to her sisters anymore, if she had to explain which cat she meant. She must have moved on to one of her girlfriends, Joan or Dot or Mimi, or Wanda from the old neighborhood.
Karen cut the yarn into inch-long pieces, collecting them in a pile on top of her dresser. She was trying to add up the hours that Lindy had been gone. What time had they eaten supper last night? Six, or maybe six-thirty. And Lindy hadn’t stayed through dessert. “Sit!” their mother had said. “You haven’t been excused yet, miss. The rest of us aren’t finished.” For a while after that, Lindy had more or less percolated in place—you could practically hear the springs coiled inside her, like in a jack-in-the-box—and then, “Mom!” she had said. “I promised! I’m late!” And their mother had said “Well-1-1,” on a sigh, and Lindy had exploded from her seat and left the room. That must have been at seven or so. Seven last night till seven this morning was twelve hours, and five more hours till noon made seventeen, and now it was past three p.m. and Lindy had been missing almost one full day.
If Karen told their mother now, with their father not around to keep things on an even keel, their mother was sure to panic. (She was always so ready to leap ahead to the direst possibility—the corpse by the side of the road, the gauze-wrapped mummy in the hospital bed.) But if she waited until their father came home, he would ask some uncomfortable questions. Why had she said yes, Lindy was in her room this morning? Why had George claimed that Lindy had told him she wasn’t going to church? Their father was so upright. So honest. As their mother had said, more than once, “We’re talking about a man who insists on putting money in the parking meter even when he finds that someone else has left enough minutes on it.” It was better to tell their mother alone. You could rely on her to understand if you did something a little bit wrong now and then. She was more willing to see the other person’s side.
Karen squirted a drop of Elmer’s glue onto her index finger and then dabbed it on her chin. She had her mother’s chin, small and definite. In the mirror it shone white with glue; she may have used too much. She wiped her finger on a tissue and then picked up a cluster of yarn bits and pressed them against the glued place. They stuck out every which way; some clung to her finger even though she’d wiped it, and some fell off when she lowered her hand. Now the person in the mirror had three or four wild black hairs sprouting from a single spot, and her eyes were dark with worry, almost not blue anymore, tensed in a way that made them seem rectangular.
George pushed open her door, which was nearly all the way shut. He could have knocked. He said, “What’s that on your face?”
“I’m supposed to be Castro,” she told him.
“Why don’t you go as a witch with a wart on her chin?”
“Everyone goes as a witch.”
“Everyone goes as Castro,” he said.
“They do not.”
“Do so.”
She gave up and wiped the yarn off her chin with another tissue. “Listen,” she said. “I think we ought to tell Mom.”
He didn’t ask what she was talking about. He stepped further into her room and closed the door behind him. “Yeah, well, I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe by and by, if Lindy’s not back soon.”
“She’s been gone for over twenty hours! She’s never been this late!”
“Aw, she’s just off with those friends of hers. And remember, she’s got Grandma watching over her.”
“I don’t think Grandma’s enough,” Karen said.
He shrugged. He was fiddling with the yarn bits now, gathering them up and aligning them into a tidy sheaf between his fingers.
“I don’t think Grandma knows about all the bad things that can happen nowadays,” Karen told him. “I don’t think even Mom and Dad know, maybe.”
“Oh, those kids are okay,” George said. He must mean the kids in black. “They’re just a little freaky, is all.”
“It’s not them, so much; it’s the . . . what they get into,” Karen said.
Although she wasn’t sure, herself, what exactly they got into. It just seemed to her that Lindy was different after she’d been with them. She looked different, smelled different, spoke in a different, lofty tone of voice. Instead of raging at her parents she acted coolly amused by them, which somehow seemed much worse. She baited their father with questions about Eustace—he was pretty hardworking for a colored man, wasn’t he? almost like a member of the family, wouldn’t you say?—and their father was too dense to catch it. She complimented their mother on her inventive use of canned pineapple rings—”The Dole people ought to put your picture in a magazine ad!”—and her world-famous Pu Pu Sauce (enunciating the name too distinctly, while George and Karen tried not to laugh), and their mother, who was smarter than their father, took on a faintly uncertain expression before she said, “Why . . . thank you.” At such moments Karen felt that her parents were so innocent it was scary. How could they be relied on, even? How could they be trusted to raise three children to adulthood?
“Here’s the thing,” she told George. “We’ll go to Mom and say we both all at once remembered we didn’t actually hear Lindy speak when we peeked into her room. We just assumed she spoke. So we realize she might have been gone since yesterday evening.”
“Why don’t we wait for Dad,” George said.
“Yes, but Dad will think we weren’t being truthful or something.”
“But you know how Mom can get sometimes.”
“I say we tell her,” Karen said.
“You do it, then, if you don’t mind all that screeching.”
They faced each other, both with their jaws set. On the phone their mother was saying, “Oh, yes! Men. Nothing they do would surprise me.” To Karen, this was reassuring. Somebody—someone or other—must be spinning out some long-winded grievance of her own. Their mother wasn’t so unusual after all; she had lots of company in her . . . well, not craziness, maybe, but . . .
If they told her about Lindy, it could be she’d act perfectly reasonable.
But George was still wearing his set-jawed expression, and Karen saw that he wasn’t about to change his mind.
Then all at once their mother said, “Wait!”
She was off the phone, finally, and busy with her house plants—watering and misting and rotating her multitudes of thriving greenery, pinching off dead leaves, clucking over a fern that had dared to wilt despite her loving care. “Hold on a sec!” she said. She turned to Karen with a startled look. “How come Lindy’s bed was made up the way it was?”
For a moment, Karen feared she’d been found out. She was on the verge of confessing—”You’re right; it was all my doing; I’m the one who put that overcoat there”—but then her mother said, “She had to have done that last night.”
“Last night?” Karen asked.
“Because why would she rig her bed in the morning? It doesn’t make good sense, if she slept there last night and then got up and left while we were at church. But you say you did see her there when you peeked in before breakfast.”
“Well,” Karen said, “I thought I saw her.”
“What exactly did you see?”
“Oh, urn . . . a lump in the bed?”
Her mother looked at her for a moment. Then she set down her watering can. “George?” she called. “George!” And off she went to his room, with Karen trailing behind.
George was still working on his diorama. Cardboard men in white pigtails lay in a row across his desk—all of them cut from a single pattern, which struck Karen as unconvincing—and he was coloring their faces bright p
ink in assembly-line fashion. He didn’t even glance around when their mother burst through his door. “George, think,” she said. “When you asked Lindy was she coming to church, did she answer? Or just go on sleeping.”
“She went on sleeping,” he said, reaching for the next cardboard man.
“Did she move? Did you see her stir?”
“Nope. She was just lying there.”
“But earlier you said . . . Didn’t you say she told you she wanted to sleep late?”
“I said she was sleeping late,” he said.
He sounded so sure of himself, and he seemed so genuinely absorbed in his work (bending closer to color in the touchy spot next to a hairline), that Karen half believed that really was what he had said. Had he? Now she didn’t know anymore.
Their mother said, “Oh, God.”
“Mom,” George said, finally glancing up, “Lindy will be fine. What’s your problem?”
“I’d just like to hear what you sound like when it’s your child,” their mother told him. Then she was off again, out of his room and down the hall. Karen, following, expected her to head back to the phone and start calling more of her friends; but no, she went into the living room. She lifted an edge of the fishnet curtain and stared out the picture window toward the road. “Oh,” she wailed, “where is your father? The man might as well move into that store; I swear he’s as good as married to it. Where is he? What can he possibly find to do there all this time?”
“Maybe you could phone him,” Karen suggested. It made her anxious to have to handle her mother without any help.
“Sometimes I think he goes there to spite me,” her mother said. “I was the one who wanted us to move someplace nice and now he’s making me pay for it. That store could run itself, near about! Tell those six or eight old-lady customers he’s got left just to plunk their money on the counter and take whatever they want; either that or close it down altogether and open something new out here in Baltimore County.”
“A supermarket would be good,” Karen said. She no longer liked her father’s store, which smelled of stale bread and old cheddar. When she was little she had enjoyed taking her friends in for free candy, but over the years she’d grown slightly ashamed of the place.
“I think Lindy’s gone to Mexico,” her mother said, turning from the window.
“Mexico!”
“You know how she’s always reading those books about people traveling across the country, hitchhiking or stealing cars or riding the rails to Mexico where life is simple and peasanty.”
She was clutching a fistful of curtain convulsively as she said this, but Karen found the thought a relief. Oh, only Mexico! She’d been fearing much worse than that: kidnappers or rapists. She’d been remembering one night when Lindy was waiting for a ride to the movies, watching at this very window, and as soon as she’d spotted a pair of headlights pulling up alongside the curb she had run out and opened the car door and jumped in and only at that moment realized that the driver was someone unknown to her. Telling Karen and George about it later—about the middle-aged man looking first taken aback and then (according to Lindy) delighted, reaching over to pat her knee and assuring her he would drive her wherever on earth she liked—Lindy had been breathless with laughter, but Karen had been horrified. Anything might have happened! This country was riddled with danger! A peasanty life in Mexico sounded so safe by comparison.
“Karen, does Lindy have a boyfriend?” her mother asked. “Somebody special among those people she runs around with? You can tell me.”
“She hasn’t mentioned one,” Karen said.
“I’m worried she’s eloped.”
Karen’s mouth dropped open.
“Would you tell me if she had?”
“Lindy would never get married!” Karen said. “She doesn’t believe in marriage.”
Her mother gave a low moan.
Then their father’s Chevy pulled into the driveway—a dear and comforting sight. “Here’s Dad,” Karen said.
“Wonders never cease,” her mother said, turning back to the window.
Her father had a way of sort of unskeining himself from his car—hauling his long legs out from among the pedals, gripping the top of the door as he straightened. He limped heavily as he started up the walk.
Once he had said to their mother, “You know what I’d like, Pauline? Not to be hit first thing with bad news. When I come home from work in the evening, maybe you could let me put the car keys down and take my jacket off and catch my breath and then you could tell me the toilet’s blocked.” But this afternoon he hadn’t even reached the front steps before their mother had the door open, crying, “Lindy’s run off to Mexico!”
“What?”
“Or someplace. I knew this would happen!”
“Start over, Poll. What’s she done?”
“She isn’t here and now I see she wasn’t ever here, I mean not since yesterday evening. We just assumed she’d come home. She’s disappeared!”
He looked at Karen.
“I guess maybe me and George thought she was in her bed this morning when all it was was a rolled-up bathrobe,” Karen said.
“‘George and I,’” her father corrected her.
“We have to call the police,” her mother told him. “You do it, Michael. They’ll pay more attention to a man.”
“Oh, well, the police,” he said. He walked past them into the living room and sank onto the couch, still wearing his jacket. “You know what the police will tell us. Call back when it’s been twenty-four hours.”
“But it already has been! Or just about. She left in the middle of supper. Now it’s past four the next day!”
“Pauline. Why don’t you begin at the beginning. Lindy wasn’t here this morning?”
“She just made up her bed so it looked like she was.”
“But George said . . . and Karen said . . .”
“They were fooled too! She went out yesterday evening and nobody’s seen her since!”
For once, he didn’t tell their mother to calm down. He sat very still on the couch, with his hands gripping his knees.
“Michael, please call,” their mother said.
At some point George had arrived in the hall doorway, and now their father looked over at him without changing expression. “Let’s see,” he said after a moment. “Say six or seven o’clock last night; really more like seven. Till four o’clock today . . . That’s only twenty-one hours.”
Their mother let out an exasperated pouf of a breath.
“Tell them she left at four,” George suggested.
“What, lie to them?” their father asked. “That would certainly help our case! No, we’ll wait till seven. Then I’ll phone.”
“Michael, for heaven’s sake!” their mother wailed.
“Meanwhile, let’s take stock here. Have you contacted the other parents?”
“What other parents? We don’t even know them! We don’t know who she goes around with, what their names are, where they live . . .”
“How can that be?” their father asked. He seemed honestly surprised, although Karen had heard their mother tell him this any number of times. “Karen? George? You must know these kids.”
“Well,” Karen said, “there’s Smoke.”
“Smoke?”
“He’s the one who lends her those books she’s always talking about.”
“Well, does—Smoke? What kind of a name is ‘Smoke’?—does Smoke have a last name, by any chance?”
“I don’t know,” Karen said. “I don’t even know his first name, because I think it’s something different.”
Her mother said, “Could this be a boyfriend?”
“I don’t know,” Karen said. “I don’t think so.”
“Oh, why is she so mysterious? What is she trying to hide?”
“Pauline, pull yourself together,” their father said. “It’s no use going into hysterics.”
“For pity’s sake, Michael! Our oldest daughter has vanished off t
he face of the earth!”
“She’s late getting home, is all we can say for a fact. She could very well be . . . oh, maybe at a slumber party. You know how a slumber party can run so late the next day.”
“Slumber party!” their mother said, and then she seemed to give up. She dropped into a chair and squeezed her forehead between both hands.
“At seven o’clock precisely,” their father said, “I’ll telephone the police.”
He glanced at the pendulum clock on the bookcase. Four-seventeen, it read. He looked around at his family. They all looked back at him. The clock ticked as loudly as footsteps.
Two policemen answered the call—one oldish and one young. They parked their car at the curb for all the neighbors to see and then they clomped up the front walk, but before they could ring the bell Karen’s mother opened the door. “Come in, officers! Thank you for arriving so promptly. You have no idea how . . .”
Karen thought her mother sounded silly. (“Officer” was such a fake word; it was like referring to a stranger as a “gentleman” just because he was listening.) All of a sudden this whole situation seemed silly: her mother rushing around the living room frantically slapping cushions and her father so serious and important and manly. The policemen chose the two most uncomfortable chairs in the room—matching ladder-back chairs that used to be Grandma Anton’s. They settled themselves with creaking sounds, perhaps from their stiff black leather holsters that seemed never to have been touched, much less opened; or from their uniforms that seemed made of something more rigid than mere fabric. The older man was small and wiry but the younger one was almost fat, with a babyish, whiskerless face. He was the one who asked the first questions. He asked for Lindy’s full name, her age, and her description, including what clothes she’d been wearing. (Black, was all anyone could say.) He wrote their answers in a spiral-topped stenographic pad you could buy at any Woolworth’s. His pen was a Paper-Mate, ballpoint, retractable.