The Sweet Relief of Missing Children: A Novel

by Sarah Braunstein

  “Right,” he said, “Paul.” But it was really “Paul,” not Paul. That’s how he thought of himself now—in quotation marks. As soon as he got on the bus he’d take a new name. He wasn’t sure who’d he become. Pierce? Patrick? He felt, despite himself, attached to the P. It was “his” letter, the first one he’d learned as a boy. P would be the very slightest connection to his mother. No. Forget his mother. But he’d keep P anyhow. He liked its force—he wanted more force, needed more, could not relinquish the little he had. Percy?

  “I’m Jade,” she said, and then smiled to imply she knew he already knew it. You couldn’t not know it.

  They were sixteen.

  The smell of soggy cardboard drifted from the dumpster. He felt too warm, too loose. Spring did to the world what a hammer’s claw did to a nail. He said, “We’re in algebra together.”

  “Those West Liberty freaks followed me from school. It’s not the first time. Jabbering self-righteous fools. Keep an eye out, will you? I have the feeling that woman carries a gun. If they come down that alley, say something. A code word. Rooster. Say rooster and I’ll run.”

  He couldn’t read her tone; she spoke mockingly, as if they shared a history of facetious chatter behind the Come & Go, but he saw a rigidity in her body, tension in her shoulders, and sensed she wasn’t joking. Her reddish hair was wound around itself, pinned to the top of her head, an old-fashioned hairdo which made him think of England, of another century, of a woman in long skirts swishing through tall grass. Her clothes belonged to today: tight black jeans, a man’s oxford shirt, white tennis shoes. On the left shoe someone had drawn the outline of five toes in black ink and colored the toenails with red marker. On the right shoe a single green letter, written so she could read it: J. She wasn’t wearing any socks; he kept his eyes on her bony ankle.

  She said, “You going somewhere?” for he was wearing a backpack and holding a sleeping bag and a pillow.

  Was he? She was the first person who’d asked. He looked from her ankle to her face, saw the freckles strewn across her nose. Their eyes met, held. He looked away. He didn’t know what to say. He was running, yes, or in any case wanted to be running, had already been gone three nights, was sleeping in the woods behind the abandoned factory, sleeping in a copse of slender birches that glowed in the dark like kindly ghosts. He’d run but hadn’t gotten anywhere yet—this made him feel meek, childlike, like a kid who’s escaped to his treehouse. Also he stank. He didn’t want her smelling him. He took a step back.

  “What’s your deal? You blowing this joint? Splitting the scene?”

  Had she noticed he hadn’t been in school for three days? Of course not. He could vanish and no one, not his mother or stepfather or Jade or Gideon or the police or anyone, would come looking. It was time to get on a bus; that much was clear. “I heard you’re pregnant,” he said, then regretted saying it.

  She spat the straw, gave him a stern look. “Mary Mello started that rumor because her boyfriend told some guys he wanted to—” She threw the empty paper cup into the weedy lot. “Mary Mello is a liar and a thief. First she told everyone I pierced my nipples. Her boyfriend has a fouler mind, if that’s possible. They belong together. Nasty things which I never in a million years would agree to do.”

  “It’s not my business.” The feeling of regret wasn’t going away.

  “If the world was populated by rumor babies they’d be filling the streets. Their wails would keep everyone awake at night. We’d feed them to cattle. Maybe then those West Liberty num-chucks would leave me alone.”

  She was doing something with her hands, a waving, clawing gesture that made him think of his mother, of what Goldie did to make her nail polish dry.

  He said, “I didn’t mean—”

  “You want me to tell you all the nasty things I’ve supposedly done in the bathroom on the third floor next to the teachers’ lounge?”

  “No.” He already knew.

  She squinted at him, still waving her hands.

  “It’s none of my business,” he said. “I’m sorry, Jade.”

  She nodded, and her hands came to a rest. She said, “If you’re running away, I should join you.”

  His heart kicked.

  “But I got this rumor baby to raise.” She cradled it in her arms, rocked it; she cooed.

  He saw them coming, a woman and a man, nearing the Come & Go, saw the woman point to Jade. The woman had waist-length hair and a long neck. The man was balding, chubby, and stroked a neat goatee. The woman towered over the man.

  Paul watched them approach, still struggling with his awareness that he smelled wicked, thinking maybe he should go inside the Come & Go, wash up in the restroom, change undershirts, wondering if she’d be here when he was done—

  But she had jumped up, grabbed his hand, and was pulling him, yanking his body through the lot, through a tangle of brambles, and into the woods. “You’re a crummy lookout!” They ran together down the strangled path; he let himself be pulled through the lashing woods. Her hand was small, sparrow-boned, and miraculously cool. They ran faster. Trash littered the path, magazine pages, candy wrappers, cans, gum. He had no idea what was happening or what it meant. He’d been lingering for three days but was too scared to get on a bus. His failure to buy a bus ticket, to do anything but hide in the woods and smoke behind the Come & Go and wonder if anyone was looking for him—it made him despise himself. It was all just a pantomime of escape. And now, like that, he was running full bore through the woods of Beetle with a girl whose hair, as she ran, loosened, fell down her back, golden red, a shimmering cascade. They raced along, the path crusted with debris, fast, faster, until they came to the dirt turnout, a cool, shadowy clearing where people dumped bigger trash, broken appliances and old furniture, where, at night, kids sometimes came to smoke and scream at nothing and grope at each other. She let go of his hand and collapsed onto a rotten sofa. She threw herself across its springs and trash and leaves with grace and familiarity, as if onto her own bed.

  He stood above her, not sure what to do with his body. They panted together. Their lungs heaving in union terrified and aroused him. He suspected that now he smelled even worse. Ten feet away, in a heap, lay a charred refrigerator, a smashed TV, mangled lawn chairs, a cast-iron tub, so that the clearing gave the impression of a ruined home.

  Jade said, “‘The fruit of the womb is a reward.’ So sayeth someone.”

  Paul couldn’t speak yet.

  “You should have warned me! Who knows what these people are capable of.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  The Baptist woman entered the clearing from the other side. She did not seem out of breath. Jade saw the woman and covered her face with her hands. “Can you leave me alone for five minutes?”

  “I’m your friend,” the woman said, stepping toward them.

  “My boyfriend’s not going to let you talk that way to me.”

  Paul expected the woman to laugh, but she just looked at Paul, nodded, and said more decisively, “I’m your friend. I talk like your friend.”

  Jade said, “You know how you fucking talk.”

  “Honey, I haven’t said a single cuss. Not one.”

  “There’s more than one way to talk dirty.”

  The woman made a hand into a visor and squinted, though the sun couldn’t reach them in the woods. “My speech is clean. Right speech is a gift to the world. Have you heard the story of the man plucking a chicken in the windy marketplace? The feathers are the speech. They fly and fly, and you can’t get them back. It’s an old story, like a fable. It happened long ago but it’s still happening, always happening, one of those stories.” Her voice glinted, a pretty voice.

  “We don’t need more of your stories.”

  The woman was older than they were—maybe thirty, with a plain, dour, earnest face. Her hair was so straight it appeared to have been ironed. She was thin and tall, elbowy, had the narrow pelvis of a marathoner. She wore running sneakers, tan pants, a white blouse, a braided le
ather belt that was too big for her. The belt’s tail fell down her thigh.

  “Does your boyfriend believe murder is a crime?”

  “Don’t get going with him.”

  “Do you?” the woman said to Paul. “Do you believe murder should be allowed in our society?” She seemed like a teacher—the plain clothes, the air of staunch, fatigued sacrifice. It was hard to not answer.

  Paul said, “She wants nothing to do with you. That seems pretty clear.”

  The woman removed something from the pocket of her pants. A business card. She held it out to him and he took it. THE CHOICE BELONGS TO YOU. There was a drawing of a cherubic baby beneath these words, and a phone number.

  Paul stared at the card. He said, “What do you want?” He realized what a fantasy it had been to be alone with Jade now that he no longer was. He longed for it again.

  “I want to help, that’s all. I want to right a wrong,” the woman said.

  Once Goldie had affixed a magnet to the refrigerator: U.S. OUT OF MY UTERUS! She had placed it there to upset his stepfather, who said it was gross as hell and was her intention to make him puke up his egg sandwich? Paul pictured his mother in bare feet on the kitchen linoleum, her red toenails, red robe, and felt a sudden burst of compassion for this Christian.

  “Look,” Paul said, “we understand your point. We’ll keep it in mind.”

  “You certainly don’t understand the point,” the woman said. “If you understood the point you’d know it’s not enough to ‘keep it in mind.’” She pointed a finger at Jade. “She needs to act. She doesn’t have the luxury of time. She has all the power, all of it. It’s a sin, to have that power and to look it in the face and to not give a lick.”

  Jade said, “Oh for fuck’s sake.”

  “Leave her alone,” Paul said. “She’s not pregnant, okay? It’s a rumor is all. Go bother someone your own age.”

  The woman’s outstretched hand fell back to her side. She said, “Pregnant?” Her face softened, her eyes got wider, so that for a second she almost looked pretty. For a second she had the sort of stunned, generic prettiness of a doll. “Are you pregnant, honey? Is that true?”

  “Leave her alone,” Paul said.

  Jade said, “I’ll kill you. I mean it,” and suddenly she was standing up, a foot away from the woman, her hands on her hips. “Do you hear me?”

  “I think you should go now,” Paul said.

  The woman seemed to think about his suggestion, but only said, “Paul’s a good name.”

  “Please go,” he said. “You’ve made your point.”

  “Paul was an important person, a missionary, a friend, a man of true and abiding faith. It’s funny, because he was such a big deal, a real major hero, a Hero with a capital H, but you know what his name means? Paul? I bet you don’t. It means ‘small.’”

  “We’ll hurt you,” Jade said again, but quietly. Her eyes were closed.

  The woman turned to Paul. She said, “Paul won’t hurt me. He’s humble. His name means ‘small.’”

  “Don’t be so sure,” said Jade. “He’s full of surprises.”

  The card in his hand was damp. They looked at him. His heart was going crazy. “I’m full of surprises,” he said.

  2

  Ralph ran through the woods searching for Libby, for the kids—they were too fast, they’d outrun him, and somehow he’d taken a wrong turn, gotten lost, spent ten minutes running down a path he was sure was the right path only to find himself back at the Come & Go. He’d run in a circle, a big stupid loop, and now stood drenched in sweat and out of breath and back where he started from. He needed to drop fifteen pounds. The next time he wanted to cheat on his diet with a pack of strawberry SnowDevils he’d think of this moment. He braced a hand on the dumpster, wheezing, wondering if Libby had found the girl, hoping she had, but also wondering if maybe it’d be better if she didn’t find her. The sun beat down. He thought they were making some progress with the girl. Maybe. But he sensed, if he was to be honest, that he was the one the girl was listening to. He saw something in her eyes when he spoke to her, a flicker of warmth, a new listeningness. He was coming to suspect she was the kind of girl who’d listen to a man more than a lady; he didn’t want to say this to Libby, who’d take it the wrong way, who’d charge him again with chauvinism when that wasn’t it at all. Some girls just respond better to men! Was that chauvinistic to think? And some men respond better to women. There. Equality. Plus—well, it pained him to think it, but wasn’t Libby coming on too strong? So maybe it would be better if the girl got away, this one time. Was it getting too personal for Libby? Well sure, yes, it was supposed to be personal, that was the point, the personal is political, it’s always personal, it’s a person, we’re all people, thinking on an un-personal level is exactly what makes poor girls spread their legs for murderers. It’s personal, has to be, and yet he had been seeing in Libby’s eyes recently something he didn’t like, something like desperation, a need that, to be honest, was maybe the wrong kind of personal.

  He wiped sweat off his brow. Chugga-chugga went his heart. No more SnowDevils. No more ice cream or animal crackers, even if the box said LITE, that was a Madison Avenue lie.

  He wanted a shower badly, feared he was starting to smell. He knew he should look for them but had no idea where to go. Maybe it was better to wait here—Libby’d surely come back for him. But he felt foolish and fat just standing there sweating next to the dumpster, and the clerk inside with the buzz cut had already yelled at him when he’d dropped off the pamphlets. The clerk had said if he found Ralph loitering he’d call the cops, and Ralph didn’t need more of that, no he didn’t. He wanted to buy some apple juice but the guy wouldn’t sell him anything, so he went back into the woods.

  Ten years ago the girl’s daddy, Thomas, had talked Libby into having an abortion. The girl’s daddy was a nurse in the clinic. Nurses have more power than doctors, most people don’t realize but it’s true, it’s the nurses who talk to the girls, look in their eyes, ask questions, hold their hands, and whisper reassurances. The doctor just comes in, aftershave wafting, lifts his tools and—presto—murders the innocent. The job takes minutes. It’s the nurse who sees the girl. It’s the nurse who has the power to persuade, who witnesses the girl at that pivotal juncture, it’s the nurse who’s the gatekeeper, the guardian. The girl’s daddy had sat Libby down in a windowless room and wrapped a blood-pressure cuff on her skinny arm and said, as that cuff tightened, “How are you feeling?” And Libby had said, “Okay, I guess, thank you.” Ralph could imagine her young voice like a sliver of light under a door at night. Then Libby had said, “I’m scared, maybe I shouldn’t be here, maybe this is wrong?” She’d said the stuff that any human being with a soul, with half a soul, a quarter of a soul, could see meant she needed someone to tell her to go home. But what did he do, the girl’s daddy, the man Thomas Grant, soulless nurse, what did he say to Libby, to Ralph’s sweet snapdragon girl, to this nineteen-year-old who hadn’t yet opened the Bible? He said, “I’ll take care of you.” Libby didn’t know how God said “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you” or how God knit all of us together in our mothers’ bodies. No one had told Libby that the womb is intended to be a place where God works His creative action, not where man works his destructive action! It wasn’t her fault that she didn’t know—her mother was a commie, after all, her mother drove a pink van and sold wind chimes fashioned from old gutters. How on earth could Libby have known? Libby was blameless, and in her belly was a blameless child, but she didn’t know this, she didn’t know how Satan works, and so she told herself she was bad, that the baby must be bad too.

  The nurse, Thomas, had his own girl. No one had guaranteed the destruction of that life. He got to have his pretty redheaded girl, and it wasn’t fair or right. Why was he allowed a daughter? Ralph felt an imbalance, an injustice, as clearly as he felt the ache in his feet, or the need to pee, or his thirst. Now he walked back into the woods and found the path he hoped was the right one
. The girl would come to see the terror of it, what her father did, how it was a crime against humanity and a profanation of God’s creation, and she would demand her father stop, demand he make public amends. If the father refused, the girl would have no choice but to abandon him, disown him or disavow him or whatever was that legal term for divorcing a parent, and then maybe the man would grasp the slightest fraction of what Libby had suffered—Libby and thousands of other girls. Emancipation. That was it. The girl would emancipate herself. Sometimes they thought about shooting her. That would be another way to make the point. Some of them argued for such tactics. Desperate times, desperate measures. Certain people made convincing arguments. Libby, sometimes, seemed convinced.

  Libby cried at night. He’d wake up and flip on the light and see her clutching her pillow, see the heaving of her long, thin back, smooth as soap. He thought about what she did to her leg with a shard of glass. He’d applied antibiotic cream. It healed very nicely, no scar. He thought about this as he walked.

  Jesus was a vase and they were the flowers. That’s what Pastor Gold said, and that’s what it felt like, it was the right analogy. Jesus made life seem packed with good people, stem against stem against stem. He made of the crowded world a community; he made of the wilderness a bouquet. Could Ralph help the girl feel this too? Could he somehow communicate how much better and simpler it was once you were inside that vase?