The Sweet Relief of Missing Children: A Novel

by Sarah Braunstein

  He did what she asked.

  “I wish you were a little uglier. Q was ugly. You can’t trust beauty, you know what I mean?”

  He didn’t, not yet. He said, “Yeah.”

  She said, “But I think I can trust you. Promise you’ll never lie to me.”

  He nodded. It seemed an easy thing.

  Her yellow dress, one strap slipping off her shoulder. The stack of tarnished bracelets on her wrist. The slump of her shoulders, the dark bristle on her bone-white legs, her scowl and vegetable breath and how she sat with her legs a little too splayed, like a boy. He was close enough to smell her breath—to feel it.

  The door was locked. Her breath in his face. You must imagine what it does to a boy.

  She tilted her head, said, “Do I look like a bad person to you?”

  “No.” He answered out of instinct, then, remembering his promise, reconsidered.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe a little bad. In a good way.”

  She snorted. “Bad in a good way? Poor puppy. I turn you on, huh? Is that what you mean?”

  It was and it wasn’t. What he could not say was that with every passing moment he suspected he was the bad person, that all the goodness he’d worked to cultivate—the manners, the grades, the clean clean room—they were just a protest against his true nature. When it came down to it he was bad. The idea entered his body in the quick, overriding manner of a muscle spasm. He was bad not because of sex in the woods with Helen; that was good. That was by-the-book goodness, he realized. That would have been easy, that would have spelled a life in Ringdale and a couple kids and a job at the hardware store. He’d pretended it made him bad but really it was what they all wanted for him, Constance and Joe and his teachers and everyone. Sex by the river would be an extension of his goodness, a confirmation of it, a sealing of it once and for all.

  Did it make him bad that he wanted his uncle to suffer? Did it make him bad that what he felt when he saw his uncle’s nervousness and damp flush was—it was pleasure. That was the word. There was pleasure in seeing his uncle banished, exiled from this room, in knowing that his uncle was afraid. His mother had not been a good woman. Perhaps Sam was bad too. Perhaps this was his true self and it had been waiting all along, here in his room, for him to claim. It was like he’d discovered some secret, long-forgotten box in the basement, moldering behind the furnace, and inside was a letter his mother had written him.

  Judith said, “I would commit hara-kari for a single cigarette.” She held two fingers to her mouth in a wistful V.

  The letter said, For god’s sake do what you want. I am giving you permission, which you never needed.

  It said, Look at what is right in front of your eyes.

  Here was a bad girl. Here was a ruined person whose words were barbs, whose demands were clear and mean, who murdered Helen with a blink of her eye. He looked down at her parted thighs. His heart was a chattering mouth.

  Now the knock at the door. His uncle: “Kids! Time’s up. Let’s hit the road.”

  Neither of them moved or spoke. He kept his gaze on her lap.

  “Time’s up,” Joe called again. “Kids? We’ll get milkshakes.”

  But he wasn’t ready to leave this room. It was like a mirror version of his own room. All his life it had been here, in its simple filth, a doppelgänger room, and he’d never known it existed. And that made him think: what other things and people and places were out there, echoes of him which he needed but would never be able to find? It wasn’t fair making him leave so soon.

  “Sam?” Joe called. “You ready? Sam?”

  And he loved Joe so much! He did! Loved him with every part of his being! As a child he had a fantasy of living inside Joe’s workboot, somehow miniaturizing himself so he could curl up where the toes belonged, and now he wanted only for his uncle to disappear, drop dead in the hallway if it had to be that way.

  Joe knocked harder.

  Sam didn’t answer, didn’t go to the door. He did nothing.

  Judith whispered, “I’d like it very much if you kissed me.”

  Finally he lifted his head. She was looking at him, her mouth open a little. He saw her glistening teeth. He saw the scab at the corner of her lips, like a crumb she’d missed. What could he do but what she asked, again and again?

  PART 3

  LEONORA

  The man on the street said, “Can I ask you something? Can I have your ear for a moment? I’m having some trouble.”

  They faced each other in the cold. Her brother was gone. The school was four blocks away.

  “As a father, see. I’m have some difficulty as a father. I’ve reached a wall. It’s been a trial. It’s been the worst six months of my life to date, if I’m allowed to be candid. I’m not allowed to be candid, I know. You’re on your way to school. I need some help with my daughter. Can I be candid?”

  Leonora said, “Be candid.”

  His plaid scarf was the same as her father’s. The briefcase, the black shoes—they were same as her father’s too. He was her father’s age, clean-shaven, a nick on his cheek the size of a word in Bible print. He smiled like someone forgiven for breaking a rule—like a boy forgiven who can’t quite forgive himself. She liked this. It felt appropriate, given the rule he was breaking by talking to her—his goodness inhered in his discomfort. His face was gentle, small greenish eyes, a wide chin. Maybe he was a teacher? She pictured him sitting behind a desk, stroking his chin, talking about history. His eyebrows were pale and full, his hair blondish-red. He looked like he got weekly trims, that kind of shipshape hairdo. She told herself she was a good judge of character. He said his name; she said hers. She did not hesitate or give her last name. He did not offer to shake her hand, which confirmed her sense of his goodness. He explained his problem, spoke in a clear, exact, slightly nervous voice, like someone new to the debate team. Faintly she smelled soap, a brand she recognized, and so she agreed to meet him after school to help him with his daughter.

  She thought about the man in Spanish, in math, in English where they were reading a novel about the sole family to survive a nuclear war—about their youngest child, a girl, who taught the family in her breezy, ingenuous way how to be happy in spite of the apocalypse. She got so lost in thinking that when Ms. Nicholiason called on her she did not hear her name and could say nothing about that lovely girl in the book, that last happy child left on earth. She had been thinking about how men always wear the scarves their wives give them. She had been thinking about how sad it was that so many people get divorced, and about how her own parents would never get divorced. She had been thinking about the man and his daughter, this girl who had no idea how much he loved her, but who would be shown how much, would come to know it, with Leonora’s help.

  At last the day ended. Her brother waited for her at the foot of the steps, wearing the hood of his coat but not the coat itself, smashing the tines of two plastic forks together. “I’m going to walk alone,” she said.

  “You can’t.”

  “I can do what I like.”

  “Mom’ll get mad.”

  “I walked alone this morning. You left me—don’t you remember?”

  He didn’t remember. The days blurred. A smear of ink on his chin, a vocabulary quiz crumpled in his back pocket. She told him to walk with Jeremy Jeffries, said she’d meet him at home shortly and they’d make ants on a log. They found Jeremy. He lived down their block, a pipsqueak, freckled, giddy, scorned—someone had drawn whiskers on his face with magic marker but no one commented because it happened all the time. Everything gets ordinary after a while. The boys ran off. Leonora waited a few moments on the steps of the school, watched other children disperse, watch the caged, shivering trees on the sidewalk, the flow of traffic. Her nose began to run. Her throat hurt, but not too bad. The sky was glistening white, perfect, a clean sheet of paper, and then a couple oily pigeons moved through it like misspelled words. The old crossing guard with the potato nose moved and swayed as though music played in
his head. Children were being kept safe. The limo arrived for that rich foreign girl, but people no longer gawked. It was colder now than it had been in the morning. Leonora felt free and happy and blessed.

  The coffee shop was just a few blocks away. The sign claimed: EXTRA SUPERIOR FOOD! Red vinyl booths clashed with a pink floor. It was nearly empty and smelled like Thanksgiving. An old guy sat at the counter writing something on a notepad. At a table in the window, three women shared one piece of pie, jabbed their forks at it with guilty eyes, like they were testing the deadness of a body. The man she’d met that morning sat at a booth in back, near the restroom. He had ordered her a hot chocolate. It sat there, steaming, where she was meant to be sitting. It told her what to do. In an instant she was allowing its steam to warm her face. They smiled at each other.

  “How was your day?”

  She sensed, from how he said this, what it would feel like to be his daughter—a little clobbered by stiff, hopeful affection. “Just excellent, thank you,” she replied, and the way he smiled, kept smiling, the sadness he couldn’t keep out of the smile, she understood that his own daughter had never given this kind of answer.

  They looked at each other. The bell on the door rang—the old man was leaving. Behind the counter, a cook counted bills. Her companion tapped his mug, said he was already on his third cup of coffee and she should pardon his jitters. She said of course she would pardon him. She looked at the hot chocolate. A song about flying to Jupiter played on the radio. He rubbed his hands together, inhaled. She saw how nervous he was, which was proper.

  “Like I said before, I’m in the final stages of a divorce. A messy divorce. Well of course all divorces are messy—maybe this one is a normal mess, I don’t know.”

  “A normal mess,” she repeated quietly, soberly.

  “I can’t lose my daughter as well as my wife. I can’t. I won’t, Leonora. I can handle the other losses, fine, take it, my bank account, all the photo albums, the furniture I picked out, I bought, she can have it all, every last thing. But I draw the line at my daughter. My wife—my ex-wife—for some reason she’s under the impression that my daughter can’t love us both.”

  “But she can!”

  “Right?”

  “Of course,” she said, meaning it, wanting to say something wise, wondering if this was her job. Did he want her simply to listen, to confirm his daughter’s capacity for love? What did he need from her? He went on:

  “See, my girl is like any girl. She likes stuff.”

  “Stuff?”

  “I see how her eyes light up. I see how they light up, but I can’t pinpoint what, exactly, makes them light up. You know?”

  Leonora nodded, but she wasn’t sure what he was getting at.

  “So what should I buy? Let’s pretend money isn’t an issue. Makeup? Clothes? Books? Music? Which music? Which objects for her new room? I want to give her a room like in a magazine. Pull out all the stops. When she’s all grown up I want her to look back and think: That was some room my father gave me.”

  He was probably a lawyer, she saw now. He spoke like he was reading aloud from a long, dry book he secretly wanted to throw across the room.

  He was not good with kids, he told her. He knew that about himself. He didn’t trust his instincts, and money wasn’t an issue but you couldn’t buy instincts, could you? She concurred: you could not buy instincts. It flattered her that he seemed to assume her instincts were good. Good instincts, she believed, mattered even more than beauty. Also it flattered her that he seemed to assume she was a representative of her age—she felt relieved, somehow, to be seen this way, an ordinary girl, a girl who could articulate the needs of other girls.

  “Oh,” he said suddenly. “You haven’t tried your hot chocolate yet. Do you like hot chocolate? I shouldn’t have assumed.”

  “I do.” She grasped the cup.

  “You don’t have to drink it. I just thought—I thought it’d be good on a cold day.”

  She took a sip of the hot chocolate. This seemed to settle the matter.

  He said a few things about his ex-wife, about how she had the empathy of a calculator, about how much money she spent in order to remove the hair from her body. Then he seemed to realize he was getting off track and began to describe his daughter, her pretty eyes, curly hair, her—he paused, as if unsure what else to say.

  “Beatrice is her name,” he said finally. “We call her Bea. She hates it. Wants to be Traci. With an i. Or Patli. Patli? I said, that’s not a name, honey. She tells me I have no imagination; well, she’s right on that count. Guilty as charged. But: Patli? She says we’re the worst parents in the universe to give her such a monstrous name. An old fart’s name, she’s called it. On more than one occasion.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It was her grandmother’s name.” He said this apologetically.

  “I think it’s lovely.”

  “Do you? Yeah?” He smiled again in that sad way. “My mother loved that her granddaughter carried her name. But Beatrice—the younger Beatrice—she couldn’t stand my mother. Called her Fussypants. To her face, I fear.”

  Fussypants! Leonora couldn’t imagine saying such a thing to a grandmother, anyone’s grandmother. She thought of her own kindly, rosy-cheeked nana, her crochet supplies in a basket, her particular smell (Dew of Morning face cream; laundry soap; roast chicken), the tidy way she arranged her hands in her lap, like a child in a pew.

  “My mother bought Beatrice a teddy bear, a fancy one, shelled out a wad over at P. E. Fleiss, you can imagine. And Bea—you know what she did to that poor bear? No. Forget it. I can’t say.” He took a deep breath, craned his neck to the ceiling. Then he looked back at Leonora and said, “She’s a tough cookie, my bumble Bea. She’s got—what’s the expression? Moxie? She’s got moxie.”

  Leonora didn’t know the expression.

  “That poor teddy bear,” he sighed. “It wore an aerobic suit.”

  “Mine was dressed up as an astronaut.”

  “Yes.” He spoke this in a resigned, breathless hush, as if she’d confirmed some terrible news.

  It wasn’t Leonora’s business, it was beside the point, but this daughter sounded just awful. She didn’t want the girl to be awful! She wanted the girl to be sweet, oblivious maybe, but a basically sweet person who needed to be enlightened. Not a spoiled brat. Not mean to the elderly. The man looked at Leonora now with such a frank, open face that she had the abrupt and strange sensation that she should become his daughter. It lasted just a few moments, this feeling, but there it was: Take the girl’s place. She felt a rush of generosity, and then a seizing in her gut, a mounting pressure, like her body was not a big enough container for its own munificence. She knew exactly what the man needed.

  She took out a piece of paper from her notebook and, in careful script, wrote down the name of a magazine he should purchase a subscription to. Then she listed a band led by boys with bleached hair, then an expensive bottle of nail polish in a shade of red so deep it was nearly black, a shade called FANG that would require a half a day of babysitting for Leonora to afford, she wrote down the brand, the color, the store where he could find it for the best price. She did all this knowing what he needed was Beatrice, under an afghan, up too late, covering her eyes when the killer appears, and that it wasn’t very likely he’d get this.

  “You might want to consider getting the expensive kind of TV.”

  “Okay, good.”

  “The movie channels.”

  “I’ll upgrade.”

  “And Jumpin’ Sumpin’s.” These were a cheesy potato chip snack; the advertising campaign featured a hysterical, sombrero-wearing kangaroo.

  “Right, yes.”

  “Junk food and good TV, she’ll want to bring her friends over.”

  He closed his eyes, as if picturing the scene.

  She made a few more suggestions, spoke seriously, gravely, hoped to communicate that she was above these gimmicks, these silly trends, even as she was deeply familiar wi
th them. Her own mother would never buy Jumpin’ Sumpin’s, but Leonora enjoyed them at sleepovers.

  When she’d exhausted the list he said, “You’re very sweet, aren’t you?”

  “Thank you.” Blood warmed her cheeks.

  “Like—you’re not quite a normal girl. Oh, but I mean it in the best sense. You’re kind. I’m not so sure most girls are kind.”

  She said nothing. She knew how to take a compliment—silently.

  Their beverages were gone. It was time to go. He told her that he couldn’t overstate how helpful she’d been; also he wanted her to know that he knew how strange it was he’d asked her to come here. “Desperate times call for desperate measures. Have you heard that expression?”

  “Of course,” she said.

  He thanked her two, three more times. “Truly, the pleasure is mine,” she said, and liked so much seeing his bemused, sad, grateful face.

  1

  “Don’t tell me you’re one of those tub-thumpers.”

  This is how she greeted him. It was Jade Grant, behind the Come & Go. Paul had come here for a cigarette and found her sitting against the dumpster, her legs pulled up to her chest, a massive fountain drink between her knees. She chewed on its straw like on a piece of licorice, her pale, narrowed eyes suggesting a boredom so habituated it had become mere accessory. Her posture and baggy shirt hid her stomach.

  It was rumored that Jade—daughter of Thomas Grant, the abortion nurse—was pregnant.

  “They’re so devastatingly clean, aren’t they?” she said. “From West Liberty Baptist is my guess. Jabbering self-righteous fools. They claim they want to help. To help! The filthiest stuff comes out of their mouths, filthy, mean as hell, but they’re always showered and powdered and perfumed and I’m sure that lady douches twice a day.”

  Then she said, “You’re Paul, right?”

  So she knew his name. They had only one class together, algebra, but never spoke—she sat with Kitty and Frick, passing notes and exercising the smallest muscles of her face with various expressions of disdain. Mr. Winslow was scared of the pretty girls, let them pass notes and look as disdainful as they wanted, but if a boy did the same, or an awkward girl, he was all over them. Jade was the best student in the class. That she knew Paul’s name—though it wouldn’t be his name for long—sent a wave of pleasure through his body, a shiver along his spine like a breeze on some unbearable summer day. Beetle got terribly hot. But he wouldn’t ever have to spend another summer here. He reminded himself of that.