The Sweet Relief of Missing Children: A Novel

by Sarah Braunstein

  That Ralph’s sperm seemed not to work, or that Libby’s womb was barren, Libby took as proof of God’s rage.

  3

  There had been a fight at Paul’s house, but he wasn’t going to think about what happened before or during or after the fight. He left. The point of leaving is that you never have to think about the fight. He wouldn’t think about the terrible cold that settled over the household afterward, the slammed doors and tight faces and the way he came to feel he was a stranger to his own mother, as though he hadn’t emerged from her very cunt. Cunt! Why would he pick that brutal word? Because his mother was too selfish to have a vagina.

  He wouldn’t think of Gideon either, or biology class, or the model ship, or his stepfather whose dirty fingernails on his mother’s arm would forever turn his stomach. Even now the thought of it made him want to save her, his mother who didn’t need saving.

  Jade and this Christian in the woods were the confirmation that he was leaving, proof that he had no place in Beetle, that it was a town of strangers. He’d leave and never return. He’d never have to set foot again in that cluttered cottage with the sad-eyed owl door knocker and the smell in the air like a kitchen sponge gone bad. The longer he lived on earth the sadder and more perverted and just plain weird people seemed. He believed that if he’d been raised in a white-picket suburb, if he’d lived in a house with aluminum siding and clean gutters, if he’d had two parents with steady jobs, if he’d been given books and a lawn-mowing business and a baseball mitt to oil—he believed he’d be happy. But that hadn’t happened.

  Once certain stuff got into you, it was hard to get it out. He was only sixteen, but he knew this.

  The woman was saying, “I could have had a daughter just like you.”

  “Not likely.”

  “Red hair runs in my family on my father’s side. Could have had a little girl I’d put in dresses and braids. But I was scared and young and your daddy—”

  “Don’t say ‘daddy,’” Jade said. She just sat there listening, her head resting on the decimated upholstery, while the woman presided like a new teacher, awkward, breathless.

  Jade said, “I never wore dresses or braids.”

  “Don’t be so sure.”

  “I know what I wore!”

  “Well, my daughter would have had dresses and braids. But your daddy—”

  “I’ve never called him ‘Daddy.’”

  “Your daddy.”

  “I love him,” Jade gave a steely, dignified smile. “I’m proud of him.”

  The woman took a step back, seemed to be losing confidence.

  Paul suddenly understood that the woman was truly unwell. Was Jade right, that she carried a gun? At first it had seemed impossible.

  “The world’s broken, shattered to bits, but we can repair it if we do certain things. Like knowing God. Like protecting the innocent.”

  “Save the whales,” Jade said.

  “All the meanness in the world, its broken bits, can come back together, possibly, if we do the right things, say the right things, it’s very possible.”

  “Hearing you talk about decency, that’s funny.”

  “Take a vase and break it,” the woman said, and now Paul heard tears in her voice. “Make a video of this. Then you play it backward. Can you picture that? That’s what we must do for the world.”

  “Let’s go,” Paul said. “I’m going.”

  They ignored him. They were looking carefully at each other, looking at each other with an intensity that disturbed him, for all the sudden they seemed—how was it possible?—like lovers. Their faces held love and rage in equal measure. He wanted to look away, but he didn’t.

  “I know what you feel.” The woman stepped closer. “We’ll help.”

  “C’mon,” said Paul. “Let’s get out of here.”

  Now Jade stood. She rose weakly, as a person after an illness, steadying herself on the sofa.

  “I know,” the woman said softly. “I know just what you feel.”

  “Then you know how badly I want to kill it and leave it on your doorstep.”

  The woman shook her head, said, “How broken you are.”

  “Strangle it.”

  The woman kept shaking her head.

  “Break it to bits.”

  Paul said, “Enough already.”

  It was time for him to go. The bus was the answer and always had been.

  The woman’s voice rose up, sprang at them—“Your father is a killer and you’re a killer too. The world is dying at your hands. I’m sorry it’s come to this.” Her hand went toward her side. “There’s something I want to show you.” She took a step closer. Her chest rose.

  Paul didn’t see where Jade got the rock—suddenly it was in her hand, but it was too big to be in her hand. Mossy on one side, gray-green, the size of a bowling ball, and she raised it up like it weighed nothing at all, and then higher.

  4

  Ralph wanted to take Libby to see a doctor in the city who did miraculous things with ovaries. His cousin had told him about this doctor, a man in his early thirties, supposedly a genius, who’d recently been written up in Conception Today—a long, admiring article about the magic of the doctor’s work and his incomparable success rate, plus several pictures showing him dandling delighted babies on his knee. Black babies, white babies, Chinese babies: the whole gamut. The doctor had a square, clean-shaven face, arrogant but reassuring. I’m a lucky bastard, the face said, and I do good work—let me help you.

  Ralph wanted the doctor’s help. His cousin had money and was willing to pay for a consultation. But the cousin was an atheist and single—what’s more, she wanted to be single—and she wore fringed boots and lipstick and had joined a book club where women in fringed boots and lipstick got together each week to drink wine and discuss the sex scenes. The cousin’s name was Christine; for several years now she had gone by “Chloe.” Ralph made the mistake of telling Libby too much about Christine/Chloe, such as how she said she loved Ralph “despite the God thing.” Libby despised the cousin, under no circumstances would she accept her money, and anyway it was God’s will, not a doctor’s, etc. And Ralph had said, “Yes, sure, of course—but, I mean—God put that doctor here, didn’t he? God made the technology that lets that doctor look inside you?” Libby had practically torn his head off. “Your reasoning is disgusting, Ralph”—she said his name, when she was angry, like she was swearing—“I mean you can use the same reasoning to defend Doctor Foley or Thomas Grant, can’t you? Ralph? Don’t you believe in free will? Don’t you believe we’re vessels made by God but our actions are our own and no one else’s?”

  “Of course I do.” He’d tried to touch her hand but she’d pulled it away, and then she was crying again.

  She stopped crying and went to make them tuna sandwiches.

  She was hot and cold, his girl. She was something else. He admired her resolve, admired her rigidity. Her belief was inviolable, stark, it didn’t serve her, didn’t make her happy, but she maintained it anyway—this was, he knew, the real deal.

  He walked through the woods, looking for her, feeling confused, wanting a shower, the wind in the leaves bringing him back to the days of his own childhood when he’d played in woods like these. He’d preferred the rainy days, loving to dig holes in the sulfurous muck, to come home drenched and freezing, and to allow his mother to pretend to be angry while she dried his hair and made him hot chocolate with real whipped cream.

  He hoped, if they had a baby, it would get Libby’s height, Libby’s metabolism, and his patience.

  He was getting deeper into the woods now but saw no sign of anyone. He’d reached a place where there was no more trash on the path, where there was, in fact, hardly a path. This is when he heard the noise. First a yelp, which could have belonged to an animal, which he told himself was just an animal—a dog or a bird. Then—clear as day—a scream. Human screaming. It was Libby. He ran toward the sound, tried, but the sound was placeless and the path was gone. She screamed
; he screamed back. “Libby!” Foliage lashed him. He called her name. He ran. The scream got fainter. He ran the other way.

  He said, “Oh Libby oh Libby.”

  As a boy he’d dug holes in the ground and anything had been possible. Life was expanding infinitely. He called his wife’s sweet, childlike name. Her screaming stopped. Then it started again, faintly. He spun, branches and leaves in his face. The woods did something strange with the sound, broke it into pieces, so it was coming from everywhere at once, so that he could only stand there, in one place, and take it in.

  5

  The bus was idling at the station, the driver chewing a toothpick and rubbing his temples. Paul ran toward it. He’d accidentally left his pillow at the clearing, but he still carried the sleeping bag, still wore the backpack, which thudded against his back as he ran. He wouldn’t witness it, whatever it was. He wouldn’t become complicit in this by seeing it through. He knew he was supposed to stay, to help, to be a man, but once he saw Jade raise the rock, once he saw the woman collapse, heard her screams, saw her cover her head, he’d been alone with his instincts and ran. All the while a gutted voice inside him said: Be a man a man a man. This word, this awful, liar’s word—man—clanged in his head. He was terribly hot, savagely hungry, wanted just to get on the bus. That’s all he’d ever want again as long as he lived. He vowed it. No one was allowed to expect anything from him!

  When he reached the road he paused, squinted in the sunlight, pressed a hand to his chest, and felt with some horror his tumbling heart. Then his hand went to his hair, which was soaked and greasy. He was wearing too many clothes. He was half a mile from his house. Would his mother be home? He had the urge to check, peek in a window, see her one last time. But what was the point? Two hundred bucks in his pocket, plus a rabbit’s foot. In his backpack were some playing cards, a few books, underwear, an old eyeglass case holding his nail clippers and safety pins and a coin from the sixth grade that said MATH CHAMP. He walked along the shoulder of the road toward the bus station, his body calming down, the sweat on his face evaporating, and then at once he thought: What the fuck? What have you done? These questions were not of him, did not emerge from his depths; it was like they were pressed into his head from the outside. What have you done, you stupid boy? He stopped. If a car came he’d have stuck out his thumb, but no car came. He stood there a moment, and then he willed himself to turn around. He willed himself to go back to that clearing. Be a man! Sixteen isn’t too young to be a man! That’s what his stepfather would say, that asshole. So he went back. By the time he got back, twenty minutes, half an hour later, there was no one there. He was as glad about this as about anything else in his life. The clearing was deserted. No blood, no evidence of a scuffle, of a body dragged away. The sofa was empty. The woods silent. His pillow wasn’t where he’d dropped it. Who took his pillow?

  “Hello?” he said.

  Nothing.

  “Anyone?”

  No one.

  That woman would be fine. Just a little cut up was all. Right? Yes. He didn’t know. Maybe she was dead in the bushes. Probably not. Or maybe Jade? Probably not. It wasn’t his job to know. The rock, the fight, they’d been a part of a conversation he had no business in, didn’t understand. It wasn’t for him. It wasn’t his job to save anyone. It wasn’t anyone’s job! Everyone was banged up or would be, so what could he or anyone do? Nothing. In fact, he felt suddenly sure that they’d both been faking it—acting something out for each other, trying to prove something. Like men. Like who had the bigger dick, that kind of thing. He laughed. First it wasn’t a real laugh—first it was just an assembly of tense, halting notes, a forced thing, ha-ha-ha. Then, without his trying, it became real. He felt the pressure of a true laugh behind his eyes—an expanding, sneezy sensation filling up the cavities of his head, a simple lightness, a gust of weird, disembodied, whole joy. He was laughing. Women were insane. He was hungry as hell. He was free. He was sure of it all.

  PART 4

  LEONORA

  The waiter brought him the bill, and the man laughed at it, or rather laughed at the line drawing beneath the sum, a doodle of a frizzy-haired, clown-nosed creature holding a giant cup of coffee, inked by the waiter as a method of asking for a good tip, a method of reminding them that he, the waiter, was a human being whose capacities exceeded serving drinks. “Cute,” agreed Leonora, and laughed too, felt obliged to laugh, though it struck her as sad.

  Of course the man paid for their beverages, left a big tip, and this pleased her, confirmed her belief that he was a decent person stuck in a bad moment; that he understood and accepted the social order; that he was telling the truth when he said he knew it was weird to ask her to the coffee shop. She liked him. He liked her too, and he said this, then blushed like someone who’s shown up with a too-opulent gift and realizes it only then. They stepped together into the cold day. He replaced the red mittens. A bus lumbered down the avenue, on its side an advertisement for a new kind of dental floss. She pictured Beatrice walking into her new bedroom, gasping in pleasure and surprise at the sleigh bed and mango walls and teen magazines fanned out on the inflatable coffee table, and then lifting the receiver of the transparent Princess phone, everything inside visible, its complicated network of wires and plugs and loops that enabled, miraculously, the simplest thing to happen. Plus the new CD by Roger Ranger. The room would be made new, and the girl, too, and her father, all of it, brand-new, and Leonora, who’d been the helper, would never see it, which was proper.

  They said goodbye. He seemed to have new confidence. He said, “I wish you the best of luck, Leonora. All the luck in the world.” His voice was crisper, stronger, than it had been before, which she took as proof of the value of their conversation.

  They walked in different directions. A light snow had begun. She moved down the street.

  She wasn’t clueless: she knew the man wanted to win. She knew that part of the joy of connecting with his daughter, gaining her love, was in beating the mother. They were having a war, Beatrice was the spoils. Leonora had witnessed this scenario on TV shows and in movies and in the families of some of her friends. But couldn’t it also be true that the man loved his girl and wanted her to love him too? Things didn’t have to be one-or-the-other.

  She would surprise her brother by making marshmallow crispy treats. Even if their mother didn’t like them to eat too much sugar, it was snowing and you were allowed to eat too much sugar when it snowed. Her mother would be proud of Leonora, even though she could never ever tell her mother that she’d allowed a stranger to buy her a hot chocolate. But if her mother could know—could see past the strangeness of it, the danger—Leonora was confident she would be proud. It was nearly four o’clock. Her mother would still be at work, still making phone calls on behalf of refugees. Leonora picked up her pace, passed the public library, the bank, then the building with the mirrored façade, which allowed her to observe, peripherally, her posture, and to correct it. The snow was not sticking.

  Another bus, this one featuring a spoonful of yogurt and the words: Too Good to Be True.

  A woman approached her.

  She was not clean or wearing red mittens or in possession of all her teeth. Her clothes were baggy, dark, a tattered wool coat, flared pants, black boots with pointy toes. She wore her hair in a bowl cut, like a child’s. Her expression, too, was that of a child, a child up past her bedtime—red-rimmed, a little wild. The woman said, “Excuse me, dear.” It was the voice of a librarian, firm, clear, civilized. Leonora stopped walking. The woman lifted a hand—the hand was elegant, oddly elegant, with pearly painted nails. She said, “I wonder if you could help us for a second?”

  There was a man too, she saw him now, five feet away, standing with his back against a building, smiling, full set of teeth, wearing a ski parka, holding in his arms a sleeping orange kitten.

  The woman said, “Cute kitten, huh?”

  It was.

  “Sound asleep,” the man said. “Out like a light.”
>
  “Two days old.” The woman shook her head in wonderment. “Just hatched.”

  “Right?” the man said. “Cute as heck. Doesn’t even have a name yet. Just hatched. Bundle a joy. Down from the stork.”

  Cats came out of vaginas. She’d never say it, but the word rang through her mind. Biology wasn’t disgusting until people tried to protect you from it. They looked at her, as if waiting, and she wondered if maybe she was supposed to offer a name for the kitten, if that was the help they sought.

  They waited.

  She said the first thing that came into her mind: “Muffy?”

  Her friend had a dog named Muffy; it seemed a classic pet name. It wasn’t very imaginative—but then she’d been caught off guard. She could’ve come up with better given more time.

  The woman laughed, said, “That’s my girl. That’s great. Muffy! Too much.”

  The man rolled his eyes at the woman, as if for Leonora’s benefit, as if they had a history of siding together against her. His teeth were nice but his skin was rutted, rashy; the woman had nice skin but horrible teeth.

  He said, “Look here, sweetie. We’re supposed to drop this kitty at a friend’s. Over on Glasgow Street. You know where that is? Near the chicken place?”

  “Wing Dings,” said Leonora.

  “Wing Dings! Right. You know where that place is?”

  The woman said, “This new kitty belongs to a girl over there. We’re the delivery crew. A nice girl’s getting this baby kitty for a present. Except we’re kinda lost.”

  Leonora knew the chicken place, which was half a dozen blocks away but required going backwards and making three turns on account of some one-way streets. They looked at her.

  “Flipping cold,” the woman said suddenly, and while the words were rude, or anyway close to rude, still her voice contained a primness, a librarian’s pleasant pinch. A ribbon of fear fluttered inside Leonora’s body. Then she reminded herself about the world being light and darkness both. Decency in the face of darkness was the only way it got turned to something else. Also, it was wrong only to help attractive, clean people. Ugly people deserved help too. She began giving them directions but the woman shook her head, said, “Not from around here. Can’t follow. I’ve got a map in the car—you point it out on a map? Can you draw a circle around where we are and where the cat’s supposed to be?”