The Sweet Relief of Missing Children: A Novel

by Sarah Braunstein

  The baby was called Diana. She cooed from a seat fitted with a bar of beads for her to spin. She had dark, glassy eyes, and rosy circles on her cheeks as if they’d been rouged. Her body possessed the dumbly frenzied quality of all babies. When Judith laid her down in her crib at night, in that one moment when the child was suspended over the mattress but before her back touched it, a certain reflex sent her limbs upward in spasm, as if shocked. It reminded Judith of what happens to religious zealots when god talks through them, those ill-dressed finger-waggers with their ridiculous pride. (It is so much easier to be apoplectic than to be still; it is so much harder to come to doubt than to come to certainty.) Diana had a birdlike cry, a belly so tumid and translucent, so like a fishbowl, you could see the veins swimming beneath the skin, and she also had a tiny, tiny vagina that had leaked a tiny bit of blood right after she was born. Normal, said the doctor, who explained how a mother’s rampant hormones sometimes trigger in her newborn girl a mini-menstruation.

  Judith healed. The girl grew. One day, the carnival came to Beetle.

  In the open fields behind the high school dozens of tents, a Ferris wheel, a rickety roller-coaster, strings of yellow lights, trailers with neon advertisements for lemonade and corn dogs and elephant ears. The air was candied. For five bucks you could hit a Japanese car with a sledgehammer. You could shoot at cardboard Indians and win something pink. You could be strapped into a chair and rotated for a while. They pushed the baby in a stroller through the humid crowd. It was past Diana’s bedtime. Drunk teenagers, sugar-addled kids, a group of old folks from the retirement home who skirted the perimeter, who gazed at the crowd, wore their longing in the disguise of disgust. Big-band music, songs of a bygone era fizzed with static, fell upon them from speakers mounted atop tall poles. It was a full world, a city, its own civilization, but it was temporary. It would be gone three days from now. This was a thrill Judith didn’t know where to keep in her body. Her hands shook a little. She ate a slice of cherry pie, which made it worse.

  Sam said, “You want me to win you a thingamabob?”

  “I do.”

  Gravely, with the smallest nod, in the manner of a cowboy feeding his horse before himself, he stepped up to the booth. He was given a ball, which he turned over in his hands a few times. He had to get it through a dark hole in the wall. He missed. Again. Again. She saw a deeper seriousness come to his face—he squared his shoulders, chewed on his bottom lip. His eyes moved between the ball in his hands and the hole in the wall. It was a small hole, surrounded by red and yellow and black arrows. The kids behind him grew impatient. Hurry it up, buddy. Throw it already. Who was he to them? No one. Just another dude in a leather jacket trying to prove his manhood with a ball. For some reason she could not watch. She turned, pushed the stroller away, wandered into a tent where you could buy the hides of artificial bears.

  The tent was empty except for a carnival worker, a young guy in a white tank top, motorcycle boots. By way of greeting he showed her his palm. His dark hair was slick with pomade. He had the wide, chin-thrusting face of a character actor. Silver rings on all the fingers of one hand, none on the other.

  “Having fun?” He said this like fun was an absurd thing to have, but he wouldn’t begrudge her if this kind of rinky-dink affair pleased her small-town sensibilities.

  She said it was all right.

  Diana was sleeping in the stroller, slumped, head on her shoulder.

  Judith felt it immediately, a sort of charge. She saw him shift his body so that his hips faced hers. Then he made a bored expression, blinked slowly, irregularly, as if in code. He told her the prices of certain wares, though she hadn’t asked. His voice was low, nearly mean.

  The tent walls shivered.

  He said, “What’s the name of this town?”

  She told him.

  “I can’t keep ’em straight.”

  He meant: I won’t tell anyone. There’s no one to tell.

  He meant: You are no one.

  The ecstasy of no-one-ness, the jungle of nothing it grows around you.

  Gazing at her from his bicep was the head of an eagle, its beak savagely hooked. It would have been easy to kiss him. It would have been shamefully easy to touch his big face with her hands and put her tongue into his mouth. The disassembling of order. The feeling in her body, just thinking of it—something shot forth, like a fish released back into the water, a fast-twitch explosion.

  She left.

  People will tell you there’s power in walking away, but it never felt like it to her.

  She bought a Sno-Cone.

  In his trailer would be candles, red curtains, a stick of incense in a cactus pot, a guitar, all you need to lure the lonely women of any sad town during any crickety summer evening. How fine it would be to go to him. The fair is closed for the night. The moon is nearly full. Cotton candy tubes littering the ground, a hushed air, scattered campfires.

  When she found Sam he was standing near the Tilt-A-Whirl, a massive panda bear under his arm, scanning the crowd and looking terrified. She kissed him, hard, on the mouth.

  “I thought some asshole carnie had absconded with you.” He handed her the panda bear. It was lime green, with a white muzzle and belly. “I went to the lost and found.”

  “We weren’t there.”

  “I know. There was a box of lost shit, wallets, baseball hats, keys. Also a set of salt and pepper shakers. Why would someone bring those to a fair?”

  “Good work,” she said, about the bear.

  “You didn’t even see.”

  “I saw!”

  She gave him the rest of her Sno-Cone.

  Cars jammed the single-lane road back to town. They sat in traffic for an hour listening to a ball game, and then Diana woke up and made her feelings known.

  6

  Back then, stuck in the hotel, waiting to be rescued, she had been a girl with a cigarette burn next to her navel. It made her look like she had two belly buttons, two mothers. She’d been born first to a flesh-and-blood woman, to a house on a hill in a sleepy town, and then born a second time to that hotel room. A sink bolted to the wall. A broken light fixture someone shot with the silver gun she’d assumed was a toy until it blasted a dime-sized hole in the ceiling, and even then the management didn’t show up. You were allowed to do anything there. No one would knock. No one would come upstairs to make sure anyone was all right. You could make any noise—the place absorbed them all. The glowing tip of a joint. A coil of rope. You were allowed any implement with which to sedate or entertain yourself. She had been holding between her thumb and forefinger a fortune-cookie slip like some kind of ticket to another world. What did it say, that fortune? She couldn’t remember. It was gone.

  She was making a snack for the man, for Pax. Three pieces of toast, stacked one atop the other, sitting on a saucer. Strawberry jam. She rinsed an apple under the faucet. She thought to cut up the apple and then caught herself. Pax was not a child. She was not his mother.

  He was like something from a fable, a wanderer. He had the air of a bedraggled saint, the tape on his shoe, the old suitcase, the strange elegance of poverty when you look at it from the outside. His name, too, was a myth. He was like something from a book. She replaced the cap on the container of jam, washed the knife, drank a shot of bourbon. In the kitchen window she saw her reflection—the hard set of her mouth, her unbrushed hair flipping at its ends in the humidity. She brought him the food. He thanked her grossly, extravagantly, as if she had offered him the deed to the house, and then he ate in enormous, savage bites. Again she sat in the wicker chair, arms crossed over her chest, watching him. She had the edgy, attentive feeling of a person waiting in a doctor’s office—she felt like a patient, as if in a moment she would have no choice but to expose herself.

  When he finished eating there was new color in his cheeks. He took a breath and said, “I’m on my way to the city. I want to find a wife. Can I admit that? I probably shouldn’t. It sounds juvenile. Or old-fashioned. Going to t
he city, looking for a wife.”

  The bourbon had softened the edges just slightly.

  She said, “What kind of wife do you want?”

  He lifted a brow. “What kind? What kind are there? I don’t know. A nice kind. A devoted kind. Maybe dark eyes.”

  He turned to look her square in the face. One of his eyelids drooped slightly, but only on very close inspection. A long, serious face, faint half-moons of darkness beneath the eyes.

  He said, “What kind of wife are you?”

  It was a stupid question, she saw, once it was aimed back at her.

  He waited.

  How to answer? How to describe the infinite restraint, the tenderness, the longing to be alone and gratitude that she wasn’t and the fantasy of some other man throwing her in his backseat like a sack of trash?

  She could have said anything. She wanted to touch his face. She wanted him to take off his shoes and his pants. She said, “A lousy kind.”

  He shrugged. “I’ll probably be a lousy husband. I was a pretty lousy son, if you want to know.”

  She didn’t want to know, but it was nice to hear him talk. It was nice to see him slouched there, newly sated, driven to recall his memories. His hand absently stroked his belly. If was as if she’d taken in a stray animal. She felt a sense of accomplishment, selflessness, as if her own worth might be measured by his willingness to stay.

  “Tell me,” she said.

  “There’s not much to say.”

  It turned out this was a lie. He spoke in a nervous hush, like a boy before a campfire. He gazed at his hands. What happened, he said, was this: one night his mother had come into his room, crying, and woke him up. Her new husband, his stepfather, had said filthy things. She could imagine, right? He said he’d been sixteen. And isn’t sixteen like a magic age? Wouldn’t she agree? A crossroad. Anything can happen. You’re open. You’re on a precipice. For boys, anyway. Maybe for girls it happens younger? He wasn’t an expert on girls. This night when his mother came to his room—she was crying. Sobbing. Some kind of tangled-up sounds.

  He shook his head, pressed his ragged hands to his cheeks.

  “My mother. That poor woman. I half expected her to open the door today. I half expected her to be waiting here for me. Hair done up. Lipstick. She made the most amazing—no, I really would rather not think about her food. Chicken dumplings. Chocolate cake. You could die.”

  She interrupted him. “Do you want a drink? A real drink? Bourbon?”

  “But I want to tell you what happened.”

  Judith’s own mother’s face came floating over her, Grace’s face, deliberately stripped of its charms. One’s own mother arrived in any discussion of mothers. There could be nothing generic, nothing hypothetical, in talk of them.

  “She kissed me,” he said. “We kissed. Up there in that room where your kid sleeps.”

  It was sensational and vile but somehow immaterial. It was what she expected to hear. She said, firmly, “It happens.”

  “Does it? I don’t think so. No it doesn’t.”

  “Bourbon,” she said.

  “I could taste what we’d eaten for dinner.”

  “You want some bourbon?”

  “Dumplings.”

  “Enough.”

  “I left the next day.”

  She wanted to return him to the present. She said, “How old are you?”

  “I’d rather not.”

  “Come on.”

  “Sixteen. I’m a kid. I’m a lousy, horny kid. Horny as hell. Lousy.”

  “Everyone is lousy and horny. We’re always sixteen, if you want to look at it that way.”

  This seemed to satisfy him. He stopped talking.

  She went to get them drinks. The rain had stopped. Now the sun was coming out; bars of silvery light came through the window shade. Why did he think he could talk about his mother? The mention of this woman, a stranger, filled Judith with a blast of longing for her own mother, who was far away. The last time Grace called, a few months ago, she’d said, “You’re still happily married? Still living the dream with Sam?”

  It wasn’t how her mother talked, living the dream.

  “Where are you?” Judith asked.

  “Pittsburgh?”

  “Pittsburgh?”

  “That’s what I said.”

  “You said it like a question.”

  “I did?”

  “You said, ‘Pittsburgh?’”

  “Oh,” Grace said. A silence. “Pittsburgh. A perfect fifth-floor walk-up with a window overlooking a hospital. I watch helicopters land on the roof. Isn’t that something?”

  “I thought Detroit.”

  “People are always getting saved. I see it happen. That was ages ago, Detroit. I’m painting helicopters. I’ll send you one for Diana.”

  “That’d be nice.”

  “You know, I wrote your father a letter. I quoted Jung: ‘In all chaos there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order.’”

  “Poor guy,” Judith said. “He won’t know what to make of that.”

  It was true, he didn’t—Hank called Judith a few nights later. What do you think it means? he wanted to know. He’d read it a hundred times. Does it mean she might be coming back? “Maybe,” said Judith.

  Now Judith splashed water on her face. Pax waited in her living room. Pax’s mother kissed him in Judith’s daughter’s room. She imagined being sixteen and asleep in her bed and woken by her mother’s lips. The idea of it made her sick to her stomach—it felt, at once, like her own memory. She heard Pax cough. But it wasn’t her own memory—the past was immutable, it was, it was fixed, it was done, it was one thing and one thing only. Wasn’t it? Of course it was.

  7

  She was faithful to Sam. She could be a regular person. She could be good, ordinary, a normal wife and mother, unhaunted, untempted. But then why did it seem sometimes that the house was talking to her? Why, sometimes, when the baby cried and she’d go down the hall, flip on the light, did she find Diana sound asleep in her crib? The birdlike, creaking crying could not be placed. And once, having sex with her husband, she heard him say something terrible into her ear. The words were delivered in a pitiless voice. She pulled away, cried, “What did you say?” It made no sense that he would utter such a thing. She cried, “Why on earth would you say that?” and grabbed at his face.

  “I didn’t say anything, honey. I swear.”

  It was true. That voice had not been Sam’s. The voice she’d heard was damp, cavernous, as from the dead. But mostly the house was a fine place. They filled it with their things, then got more things. Mostly Judith was a normal person. She bought a sewing machine and made a pair of curtains for their bedroom. The fabric was on clearance, multicolored paisleys that seemed to move if you looked at them long enough, to shimmer and twitch, that evoked the tumult of semen.

  The baby was normal, that was for sure. She grew. She learned some words. Her voice was high and sanguine, like a doll whose string is pulled. Judith found it distressing, those twittering cadences. One day she said, “Honey, why do you talk so much? Sometimes it’s better to save your words for something that really has to be said.” A stricken look fell over the child’s face, and Judith felt guilty. Why would she make such a complaint? Why could she not tame her instincts? Still, it worked; Diana quieted down a little.

  Sam finished his accounting degree. They got along. He did what she asked, such as brush her hair at night. Such as bring her coffee in the morning, and allow her meannesses, and paint the kitchen dark pink, even the insides of the cupboards, like tongue.

  Tuesday. Wednesday. Thursday.

  May. June. July.

  Before, when she was a girl, time had been a pricker, an irritant, a tiny sliver of wood stuck in her palm coloring the experience of everything she touched. Her finger went there without thinking, again and again. She wanted time to go faster or slower or for it to pause momentarily. She did a quiet sort of battle with it, always. Now the sliver had been removed. That was
her adulthood. A smoothness where once was friction. As if someone had one day walked up to her and, unspeaking, lifted her hand and simply tweezed it away. The nerves there quieted down. She had little awareness of the movement of time anymore. That is to say, she saw the calendar and wore a watch, but her days assumed a new fluidity. The tension of her childhood, the sense of something about to happen or having just happened, the wondering if it would happen again, the hoping you could defeat the clock with the very power of your ardent heart—this was gone. She lived in a dull, bright, busy present. Days passed. She slept and woke. Her daughter had a birthday, another, etc.

  Once, in the child’s fourth year, Sam said he wanted to take them all to Orlando, to make the great American slog, three days in a car without air-conditioning so they could enter the gates of that ever-after-y cosmos, where for your effort you were allowed to stand in hour-long lines and marvel at gleeful electric puppets and get earnest tinkling songs stuck in your head for the rest of your days. Judith refused. She knew the place would demand she maintain a certain dazed and beaming face, and the thought of seeing crowds of people with the same face terrified her. But she wanted Sam to go. She wanted him to take the child away for a while. Judith had not been alone for a very long time. No, that wasn’t true—she had never been alone, not rightly. What would she do, by herself in the house for a week? Two weeks? The prospect nearly took her breath away. The bed to herself. The bathtub. Or maybe she would go somewhere, take her own vacation? Alone. The word dispersed throughout her body like steam.

  “You go. I’ll stay here,” she said.

  “By yourself?”

  “Sure.”

  It was ten o’clock at night. They were in bed. She was reading a mystery novel in which they kept discovering bloated corpses floating in some ritzy marina.

  He said, “Aw, she’d have more fun if you were with us.”

  Judith didn’t believe this to be true—Diana was an adaptable child, captivated more by things than people. She was the kind of girl you found fiddling with pipe cleaners, pressing her face against a fish tank, a reader of princess books, picker of grass, long hair in a prairie braid, rosy cheeks. She tested the water with the big toes of both feet, as if one might be wrong. A double-checker. A lover of solitary games. She had a cool, blunted prettiness often assumed to be sagacity. Was it? They didn’t know yet. She collected rabbit feet dyed unnatural colors. Slowly, with infinite patience, she assembled puzzles depicting the Scottish Highlands or wet-eyed baby animals. She was in kindergarten. Her teacher called her “amiable”—such a pale word. Wasn’t it? So treacherously pleasant.