Louise in a cranberry taffeta dress, black eyeliner.
Louise whose lips were oddly pale.
Pale lips, sucking a ball of honeydew.
Louise, drinking punch from a Styrofoam cup. Louise, when the punch was gone, taking a bite from the rim of the cup, spitting a crescent of Styrofoam into her palm, doing this again and again, until there was no more cup, until the cup was just a pile of pieces in her hand. And later, in public view, adjusting the top of her dress, cupping a hand around each breast and heaving it upward. Later dancing too closely with the pharmacist. Later, by herself, reading a wall plaque, on her face a quizzical expression, an expression of confused awe, of mouth-gaping wonder, so striking that Constance felt compelled to see what the plaque said, was surprised to find it was merely a list of some people who’d helped to plant the garden out back.
Finally, toward the end of the reception, Louise caught Constance’s eye and gave her that smile. The smile! It was a prize ribbon. It was coffee before dawn. It was a bathtub, no, a bed. It was—what else? It was a bird on a railing in sunlight, a precarious, utterly-itself thing. She had been waiting for the smile, which could say different things. Now what it said was this: You’re as good as gone, my girl, but at least we’re in it together.
They were in it together. They were sisters-in-law. It was a good day.
That night, during her first sanctioned lovemaking with Joe, Constance could not stop picturing her sister-in-law’s hips pressed against the pharmacist. Her own hips, beneath Joe’s, were still. She willed them to move a little, left to right, and then in a tiny circle. Joe, into her neck, said, “Whoa boy—okay now,” and it was over.
Dear Joe, solid old Joe, had none of his sister’s drama. He had no private smile, no secret gaze, and this is precisely what Constance loved. He was easy to read. He was good. He was like a simple tool—it does the job, goes back on the pegboard when the work is done. So few people are as settled into themselves, she thought; so few people have such simplicity of purpose. Dear Joe. Dear boy. She married him. She was secretly pregnant. That he had a sister who wore swirling skirts, and swore, and drank beer, and had two children yet seemed wholly unpossessed of any maternal spirit, and wicked hips—this was a bonus. Someone to watch, to study—someone as from a foreign country whose customs she could observe close-up, whose ways she could inspect—at leisure.
But as it turned out there was no leisure.
The next day she and Joe left for their honeymoon, four days at the Falls. They stayed at a motor lodge called Splash! The view from their window was a busy road, a hamburger joint. They couldn’t afford a place with a view of the water, nor would she have wanted one. It turned out to be awful, a screaming gash in the earth. It did something to the pressure in her left ear. Why are people compelled to gather at the most violent places? Constance’s stomach tumbled as she looked over the rail, the whole world reduced to this cavernous monstrosity. She blinked, turned away. She understood why people might put themselves in barrels.
Her life began now. Here. An ordinary moment, the evening of the second day of the honeymoon. They were in their rented room. Joe, sitting on the edge of the bed, kept his eyes on the muted television, on a horse running through a field. What was he thinking? She could not guess. She had just washed her face, and was drying it with a towel, thinking that she very much liked the smell of the miniature soaps that came with the room, that perhaps she should ask for a few bars to bring home with her. She sniffed the towel and her palms. A strident floral scent. An optimistic smell. No, not flowers. This smell was to flowers as—
There was a knock at the door. Together, they looked up. A voice: “Uh—Joe? Joe Griffin?” It was as if the Falls itself had paused—wasn’t there a law that said you were anonymous in your motel room; that your name would go unuttered; that you would not be disturbed; that perhaps, for a spell, you did not exist? She had hung the placard on the knob! (Hung it with not a little shame: this demand for privacy seemed, perversely and precisely, an invitation for others to imagine unspeakable deeds.) And now a knock, despite the placard. Now, following this knock, a name, his name. She shivered.
It was the manager, a tool belt around his waist, empty except for a hammer. He said, “Sorry to bother you folks. Call for you. Family emergency, I’m afraid.” He wore the striped hat of a train engineer and a silver ring on his pinky. He led them to the office. On the table was an ashtray crammed with cigarette butts, a can of beer, and the phone, receiver on its side. Joe hesitated a moment, then picked it up. He said, “Hello?” So casually, as if answering the phone at his own house. She watched his broad, heavy-lidded face absorb the news. His eyes narrowed momentarily; he pressed his lips together. That was all. His face returned to itself.
The honeymoon was over. It was not appropriate to ask for the soaps. They left immediately. A light rain had begun and the road threw off an oily, opalescent sheen. Louise had been crossing the train tracks. She had tried to outrun the light, had ignored the bells, and now she was dead, and her husband was dead, and the baby. But they weren’t going back for the dead. They were going back for Sam, the older boy; he’d survived. Constance shook. That calm, that poise—they were gone, had never existed. She was heading back to Ringdale, the town of her birth, but now she was married, now she had a husband, a new house, a nephew whom she would raise as her son, a baby in her belly. She had a family and she had a family tragedy, when before she had nothing but her bedroom, her shelf of mysteries, and her mother. This new life unfurled before her the way a flower opens. It was a flower opening in a time-lapse film, revealing too fast its private, dewy innards, the yawn of its petals reduced to a flash, everything soft made stark.
“We’ll take him in,” Joe said. “Won’t we? Of course we will. Right?”
She said, “Of course we will.”
Of course, she said, but inside her was a pulling sensation—the same thing she’d felt at the Falls. The words look away flashed in her head, just like when she’d gazed down at that terrible feat of water, but now there was nothing to look away from. There was just the windshield, the empty road. Look away from what? She allowed herself a vicious, utterly incomprehensible thought: She did not want to bear this child growing in her gut. She did not want to have a child at all. My goodness! She almost wanted to laugh, for she had no idea a person could become such a surprise to herself. Then the thought disappeared, pushed out by other, horrible thoughts, images of Louise, dead, of her body, their bodies, in the yellow weeds by the tracks, buttercups.
Later that night a burly cop who stunk of garlic thrust Sam into her arms. He was four years old, pale, chubby. He wore pajamas that were too short for him, moccasins, a fringed leather vest. His fingernails were overgrown and dirty.
“I’m an Indian,” he said flatly. In one hand he held a homemade headdress—a single indigo feather attached to a strip of construction paper.
What was she supposed to say? “Very nice.” She did not know how to be around children.
He came to them with a little scratch on his left nostril, just the tiniest thing, a wisp of red thread. It was all the accident had done to him. How could that be? A locomotive tore the car in two and that was all he got. Only after it healed did she admit to herself that she’d been carrying a certain irrational fear: that he was an angel, or some kind of saint, or perhaps a monster. (It was hard to know the difference.) That he survived out of magic and would bring that awful power into her home. But it healed. He was just a lucky boy. But: lucky? On more than one occasion this was said of Sam, “lucky boy,” and always Constance inwardly cringed.
On the second night she gave him a bath. She placed him in the tub, handed him a pot and a ladle to play with. She said, “Honey, do you know how to wash your hair?” but he didn’t answer. She was unprepared. Did a four-year-old know how to shampoo himself? To rinse thoroughly? To wipe his rear end? He sat in the sudsy water. His face was round, owlish. His bangs needed trimming. She saw that his stomach appeared
bloated, hard, and that his navel was a greenish-blue, protruding pock, not unlike a grape. She noticed his penis, that it was the same pale color of his cheek, and that it was erect. She turned away.
Louise was dead but in those early days her presence emerged, somehow more vivid, more intense, than when she’d been alive. Constance would find herself thinking: What would Louise say about that? What would Louise do here? When she was scared to hold Sam on her lap, for fear of the erection, or for fear of his tenderness, or—which was worse?—lack of it, she imagined Louise laughing, imagined Louise’s knowing, secret gaze, and then Constance was no longer afraid. They were in it together, as it were. As she moved around the kitchen, as she tended to her husband and nephew, cooked and cleaned, paired their socks, made their beds, she imagined she was in Louise’s body, or Louise in hers, tried to move the way Louise moved, with that easy glide, with that same haughtiness in the hips, the same elongated neck. A few weeks later, when she miscarried, she somehow felt this was Louise’s doing. Not that Louise, from the other side, beckoned her unborn child forth—nothing like that. Rather Constance felt that these mutinous thoughts were not really her own but belonged to her dead sister-in-law. In this way Constance could observe herself without culpability. In this way she could sit on the toilet, a clump of bloody toilet paper in her hand, a spasm of pain radiating from her midsection, and the word that could appear in her mouth was: good. She whispered it. She wondered how that word could appear in her mouth but not her brain. It belonged simply to her body. Good. Good. It was as if it had been whispered by Louise, by the dead, who were allowed to say unspeakable things because no one heard them.
It crossed her mind that they’d switched children. Here she was raising Sam—was Louise perhaps, in some dim afterworld, tending to Constance’s miscarried child? She didn’t allow herself to linger on this idea. It was hard to imagine, after all, Louise hand in hand with—what? A dark syrup, an absence of form. She didn’t dwell. They had chores to do, things to purchase. They bought Sam school supplies, shoes, clothes, a goldfish called Dingo who lived for one month. How could they have been so stupid to buy the new orphan such a fragile creature? She would never forget coming upon the boy as he stood over the bowl, that fish floating on the water’s surface, Sam’s face blank, without grief or surprise.
Gradually their lives settled down, assumed an ordinary routine. His photograph on their television set, a thin, gamine child in a pressed plaid shirt. Long neck, sober eyes, a certain pinchedness in his face that drew attention to his cheekbones. He grew into a well-mannered boy, thoughtful and polite, and, she had to admit it, somewhat plain. There was nothing monstrous or saintly about him. He was a kid who did his chores and oiled the chain on his bike and, on her birthday, wrote to Constance in a homemade greeting card: I’ll always be grateful to you. He was sincere, earnest, so much like her in this respect she actually found it disappointing. Louise was nowhere on him. After a while, her presence in Constance vanished, too.
Years of peace. Homemade sweaters on Christmas morning. Kite flying. When Joe was made manager of the hardware store, they celebrated with yellow cake and fizzy wine. Respectable report cards got lasagna and chocolate milk. Basketball in the driveway. The chore chart. Their life together felt inevitable, circumscribed, marked by a restrained tenderness. They were not affectionate so much as devoted to their rhythms, which was a way to say to each other: See? Of course I love you. It goes without saying. They did not speak of the past. The past was gone. Who was Louise? She had been a woman, but now, like many women, she was dead. That was how vague the whole thing felt, how removed. Oatmeal in the morning. “You’ll be late!” New socks. Television after dinner. Bed by nine-thirty. No one was late. It went without saying, all of it, anything. She was grateful, and, after a time, stopped feeling guilty about this. Years of quiet. Years of order. Had she earned it? She didn’t think in these terms.
But the dead do not always remain so.
Louise came back on a Tuesday in Sam’s sixteenth year. It was the early spring, a day of chittering birds, mud, a hubcap sun. As always Constance was the first in the house to wake. On the hook inside the closet door hung her housecoat. She put it on, and then her terrycloth slippers, and went to the kitchen, pleased by its spotlessness. Was there a nicer feeling than waking to a kitchen of gleaming appliances and countertops, all the dishes washed, all the silverware in their proper troughs? She noted the polished faucet. She noted the felt potholders—made by Sam in the third grade—hanging evenly on a set of china hooks above the stove, and the magnet in the shape of a banana securing Sam’s school photo to the clean face of the refrigerator, and the pink sponge in its heart-shaped glass dish to the left of the sink, a sponge which she’d boiled the night before, as she did every week, before she replaced it at the end of the month. Her kitchen! She stood back to admire it. Into her body came a simmering elation. Her pleasure had a sexual edge; it was a seizing kind of contentment, a full-bodied rush. A kitchen such as this one, clean and ordered and knowable, was like a gift to herself. It was herself. She put on her apron. She made a pot of coffee, started the oatmeal, the bacon, tidied up as she went.
At six forty-five it was time to wake Sam. As always, she gave a quick knock, then opened the door, poked her head inside. His was a tiny room with white walls, bare except for a magazine picture of a negro guitarist. Tucked into his mirror was a small photograph of his parents on their wedding day, a gauzy veil lending Louise’s face not so much a romantic as a dusty, unwashed aspect—but Constance did not look at this now.
What she looked at was Sam. She looked and looked and then could not unlook, could not unsee. He was sleeping on his back, the blanket caught under his left side so that it exposed, very clearly, his pale blue boxer shorts. Something was wrong with his shorts. She looked. She did not stop looking. There was nothing to stop her from looking. Then, still asleep, making a series of dreamy vowel sounds, he rolled over, pulling the blanket with him.
She cleared her throat. She said, “Time to get up.”
Sam: “Uhhm.”
She said his name, but he didn’t hear.
What was wrong was not his shorts but the capacity of his shorts to hold their contents. His penis had emerged and was pointing at the wall like the arm of a sundial.
She returned to her kitchen. How had she missed the spot of dried milk next to the toaster oven? A scattering of coffee grounds on the counter. The bacon fat hissed in its pan, which was now dirty, and the sizzling fat made the stove dirty. That was the thing: as soon as you cooked something, the kitchen got dirty again. There were moments when she scorned her own hunger, for sating herself meant soiling a dish. When no one was around, she ate out of her hand.
She swept the coffee from the counter to the wastebasket. She rubbed away the dried milk. She turned off the burner under the bacon. He was no longer a child. It was bigger than when he’d been a little boy. That was not surprising. But it was bigger now than her husband’s. Her husband, a grown man, six foot two, broad and dense, mature, for God’s sake a man…how could his skinny teenage nephew, that downy boy who barely came to his uncle’s shoulders, possess a penis that so dwarfed Joe’s? She poured herself a cup of coffee, added a little cream, two cubes of sugar, embarrassed by her wobbly hand.
She sat down at the table, gripped the mug between her palms. It was at this moment that Louise returned. It was Louise’s voice she heard, Louise’s firm, slightly mannish voice, the words from Louise’s pretty mouth, and they were these: “He’s not your son.”
Constance straightened in her chair.
“Sleep well?” Joe stood in the doorway, stretching. He grabbed his hands together behind his back, raised his shoulders—she heard a cracking sound.
She rose, kissed him. She pointed to the stove: “I made oatmeal. Bacon.”
“Perfect. Heaven. Hey, do you know where my brown belt is?”
He was shirtless, wearing the pants she’d ironed for him the night before. A thin t
rail of hair climbed up past his navel, ended below his sternum, fanning there, like a fern.
She told him where the belt was. She poured him a cup of coffee.
She knew where his belt was. She knew where his car keys were, and his spare keys, and the flashlight, the spare flashlight, the extra soap, the measuring tape. She knew everything in the house, where everything belonged, had created for them an immaculate, unimpeachable order. When this order was in any way threatened, it was as if she herself was threatened. It was like hearing footsteps behind her in the darkness, so bodily was the sensation of menace.
“I might play hooky this afternoon, day like this. Supposed to hit seventy-three by noon. Maybe shoot a little pool with Rich, maybe go down to the river? Little early for shad, but what the hell. Wet the line. Breathe it in. I’ll be home by dinner, yeah? Sound good?”
“Sure thing.” She worked on a smile. “It’s spaghetti night.”
“You mind if Rich comes? He’s crazy for your meat sauce.”
She said she didn’t mind.
He swallowed his coffee, moaned with pleasure. Then he poured some syrup into his bowl of oatmeal, crumbled a piece of bacon on top. Who ate like that? She felt the urge to chide him.
“Little early for shad, but stranger things have happened, right?”
She agreed.
Louise in a dress that was too tight in the bosom. Louise dancing with that pharmacist, swaying her pelvis, whispering something into the pharmacist’s ear that made him pull away, startled, then laugh. Louise eating honeydew. Louise putting a key in the ignition, sunlight flying off the windshield in a million directions, the baby fussing, the husband cracking a bad joke, everyone doomed but the boy in the backseat. Louise in a hospital, legs spread, pushing him out, this Lucky Boy who was not lucky.
The Sweet Relief of Missing Children: A Novel Page 7