The Sweet Relief of Missing Children: A Novel

by Sarah Braunstein

  Brown sheets hung over the windows in the backseat, obstructing her view—or really, she knew, obstructing others from viewing her. The car was dark green, a beat-up sedan with white pinstripes on its sides, the gray felt lining inside the roof coming down, pinned in places with thumbtacks. It smelled mildewy, heavy, like a car in summertime after a rain when someone’s forgotten to roll up the windows. It smelled—hot. Which didn’t make sense, given it was freezing. Yet the cold air had the fullness of heat—an air dense with sweat and grease and mildew and something sweet, like butterscotch. The windows back here were covered but she could see through the windshield, could see the road before them, the darkening sky. She could study the profile of the woman, Sandy. She could see her own breath, the man’s breath, their breath joining. She was colder without the blanket over her, but she’d rather be cold and sitting up than crammed down there with the trash. She was gutting it out. She noticed her cheek was not hurting anymore. She noticed a gold star stuck to the steering wheel, a single gold star such as a child would receive for a job well done. She noticed that she was making sounds. Soft, flapping noises, like laundry on a clothesline in a summertime wind.

  The man said, “I wish I hadn’t had to do that, sweetie. I didn’t hit you that hard, did I? Does it hurt? I’m a nice person, I promise it. Don’t get the wrong idea.”

  She’d seen it before, in movies—the person who won’t stop screaming, whose screaming is only stopped by a slap. That had been her.

  “He is,” said Sandy, in that clear, prim voice. “It’s true, he’s a nice person. It’d be a better world if it were full of hims. I mean that.” Hers was the voice of a librarian. No—it was a voice like the card inside the library book. The card you use to sign it out. Lines waiting to be filled. Nothing but order. A clean, empty voice. It was not right, a voice like that.

  “Please stop the car,” Leonora said. “I won’t tell anyone.”

  “Soon enough,” said the woman.

  Terrible order. Leonora saw the empty card inside the library book and then saw her name written across the top line, saw her own careful, right-leaning script. She’d always got gold stars for handwriting, never anything but.

  “Don’t be scared,” said the man. “Can you agree not to be scared? I know it’s a lot to ask, but can you try to relax? Would it help to hold the cat?”

  She couldn’t see the cat from back here but could hear him scrambling around the front seat, mewing now and then.

  “I’m not going to hurt you,” the guy said.

  “It’s true,” the woman said. “He’s not.”

  The woman dangled the cat over the backseat by the scruff of its neck. The man took it, set it down in Leonora’s lap, then grabbed her arms again, so she couldn’t touch the cat. The cat cuddled into her. Of all the names of all the girls in the city, it was her name, Leonora, on the card inside that library book. What was the title of the book?

  The woman complained some more about the heater. The man ignored her. He said to Leonora, “Think about something pleasant. Am I hurting you?” He loosened his grip. “Can you do that? Think about something pleasant?”

  She obeyed. It was in her nature. She automatically pictured her mother’s face, pictured her mother getting ready for a party, begrudgingly applying makeup, grumbling about the tyranny of the male gaze; then, afterward, her face painted, her mouth a deep, matte red like an old movie star’s, black liner around her eyes, looking into the mirror, inhaling, exhaling, silent, happy. She carried a teeny mirror in her purse for touch-ups.

  No. Not this. It wasn’t pleasant to think about her mother’s party face. Instead she willed herself to think about Beatrice, that girl she’d never meet, the daughter of the man with the red mittens, Beatrice who lived somewhere in this city, who’d come home tonight to find a present waiting for her. She had a feeling Beatrice wasn’t very pretty. Her father would have mentioned it if she had that going for her.

  She wondered: Was this, what was happening now, like a punishment for trusting that man? For drinking the hot chocolate? Was God teaching Leonora a lesson about feeling too satisfied by helping? Would she still get to be a nurse or social worker? Would she still get to be a person? Would she get to pick onion off a sandwich or stand in front of a mirror wondering if her bathing suit was the right kind or learn how to say “gesundheit” in even more languages? She thought about picking onion off a sandwich. About lemonade. About flossing her teeth. About the kind of bathing suit she’d like to get. These things were better to think about than her mother or Beatrice or God. She pictured eating a plate of fried scallops while wearing a new bathing suit, and she felt better.

  They were moving toward a bridge. She could see it now through the windshield. The bridge. She did not want to be anywhere near a bridge. But there it was, coming closer, suspended over water, black, lacy, like a leg in a stocking, a woman’s leg thrown out in invitation.

  “The sheet, Frank,” Sandy said, for—look!—the brown sheet on the window next to her had begun to fall down. Leonora could see another car, a car alongside their car—she could see the driver of the other car, a man in sunglasses, bobbing his head to music. She turned her own head to the window, leaned closer, opened her mouth, but before she could do anything—what could she have done?—the man reattached the sheet and the other car was lost. Frank reattached it. Frank was his name. Frank. Frank and Sandy.

  “Flipping sheet,” Sandy muttered.

  They crossed the bridge—she could do nothing to stop their passage. On the other side, just over, she caught a glimpse of another Wing Dings through the windshield. It was a chain restaurant, Leonora knew it was a chain, but its presence, its same sign, its same chicken on whose head sat, slightly askew, a crown—the same chicken with the same bubble emerging from its mouth, and in the bubble the words I REIGN SUPREME—this slowed her racing heart. It was home. Of course she’d never actually eaten at Wing Dings, it wasn’t allowed (empty calories; corporate anthropomorphism), but in its familiarity, its recurrence, it soothed. It felt a little like a nickname, reassured her the way a nickname did, sweetly, vaguely. It gave her the feeling of home.

  “What’s going to happen to me?” she asked.

  Her mother called her “Ladybug.”

  “I don’t know,” the woman said.

  Her father, “Lee-Lee.”

  “Nothing at all,” the man said.

  Her father could be a soldier. She could be a soldier too. She could gut it out. If her father could be a soldier, could find inside him on that stormy night the thing they needed; if he could later return so easily to his other, his real self—well, so could she. No one was bad or good. Beatrice could become a nice girl. Frank, Sandy, they could find love in their hearts. Then and there she made the decision not to panic. She was a thousand people. Right now she would be a solider. The sun was setting, and she would not panic, and everyone had everyone else inside of them.

  1

  He took the name “Pax” from someone he’d met on a bus out of Topeka, a scroungy guy in a big leather hat that flopped over his ears. Tucked into the hat’s band was a peacock feather and an old note, folded in quarters, from a girl. Paul had admired the guy’s rutted voice and easy generosity. He had torn the paperback he was reading in two, gave Paul the first half to read. It helped pass the time. It was a long bus ride, through plains, over mountains, town after measly town. The book was about a beekeeper who falls in love with his sister’s best friend, a girl who happens to be a lesbian. They read together, Paul at the beginning, Pax near the end. It felt important, somehow, that they were part of the same story, Paul following Pax’s trail through this odd book, his eyes where Pax’s eyes had been, hearing the voices Pax had just heard. Things didn’t end well for the lesbian.

  Pax smelled of cooked meat, greasy, homey. He was tough and gristle-voiced, but read books about love and bees. I should have been a Pax, thought Paul, and right then and there endeavored to be more like Pax, and so he took the other man�
��s name once he got off the bus.

  Her name was Leonora Marie Coulter. She would never take another person’s name. She was twelve years old, five foot two, last seen wearing dark green pants, a gray turtleneck, boots. Her coat was maroon corduroy with yellow lining. In photographs her smile was broad, crooked. Her real smile, her mother insisted, was much more subdued. She was a shy girl but attempted to hide her shyness. Her true smile was small, carried her chin downward. Her skin was pale and fine. She was proud of its lack of blemishes. Her long, dark blonde hair she fastened with two mother-of-pearl barrettes that had belonged to her grandmother. This is how she was wearing her hair the day she vanished. And her bangs had just been trimmed. And, said her mother hopefully, she carried a little pot of lip balm in her pocket, as well as a nail clipper. She was fastidious about her nails, which were short and clean. Her mother repeated this information as though the investigation would hinge on it.

  A silver ring around her index finger. A string bracelet she made last summer at camp. A bra. She didn’t like to wear a bra, but she’d recently resigned herself to it.

  Wednesday panties. Panties that said Wednesday in cursive around the waistband. She disappeared on a Wednesday, was the kind of girl to wear Wednesday’s underwear on Wednesday, Thursday’s on Thursday. It made you sick in the heart. She was orderly. She was tidy. Her manners were impeccable, her voice soft. They feared this might not have worked to her advantage.

  She liked badminton. She liked mocha swirl. She liked those orange circus peanuts in cellophane bags, but only a few, too many and she felt like vomiting. She liked clean nails. She liked yellow roses. She liked that song about hey there little red riding hood. Her mother produced this litany of preferences for the television camera while the newscaster nodded his head, affirming each: Yes, clean nails. Yes, sleepaway camp, badminton, yellow.

  This was winter. For several months she was a missing person. They prayed that she’d just run off, gone to seek her fortune, followed a boy, that kind of thing. But it was highly unlikely that Leonora would run off. She’d been a happy girl, quiet, not a risk-taker. She lived with her family in a spacious first-floor apartment in a turn-of-the-century brownstone. She had her own bedroom, a double bed, a pile of plush bears, a few girlfriends. Summers at sleepaway camp. She and her younger brother liked Monopoly and practical jokes. Once they sewed up the fly of their father’s boxer shorts; once they put vinegar in their mother’s morning coffee.

  Have you seen her? Have you seen this girl? Her mother, on the local news, opened her palms to the camera. If you can hear us, honey—

  Winter became spring. Then summer, with its window boxes and cleavage, and still she was nowhere.

  2

  Pax got off the bus and stepped into the street. The air was humid, dense, rich with the melony gas of decomposing garbage. He stood on the curb, suitcase at his feet. He watched people come and go, traffic, wheeling birds. The sky was dull white, like a paper towel. Shirtless men in hard hats climbed a scaffolding with slack, simian grace. You might have thought them drunk, or else fully at peace with the prospect of their death—they dangled, laughed; their disjointed babble carried across the street. A fire truck with nothing to hurry to. A stream of cabs. A woman with a toddler strapped to her back pushed a stroller containing two more children, all freckled, yawning, in sunbonnets. Someone was playing a harmonica: an old bum, eyes closed, his song antic and grating, past its day. He wanted you to put spare change in a bedpan by his side. A bedpan!

  Pax loved this place. He hadn’t been back for a couple years and had forgotten the noise, different noise from other cities, here it was a bluesy huffing din which, in its constancy, its oppressiveness, was not sound so much as temperature, stunning the body as high heat does.

  Also it was hot. Nearly ninety. Already he needed a shower.

  He wandered and did not stop wandering for several days. This was his favorite part of arriving in a city, that first interval when it feels so open, full of weird and perfect and singular charms, when you weave among people, sleep where you can, eat greasy food from vendors, piss in bushes. After a while it gets more particular. You start to see the sour faces. You notice eyes. You know which cops monitor the library, which cop’s got the hard-on for the vagrants, you know the bullies, the swearing streetwalkers, start to hear the curses, start to see panic on the faces of the city’s dispossessed. You start to realize you’re one of them, a guy on the fringe in shitty shoes. But at first, during those first few days in any city, you can be ragged and unbathed, watching the sadness but not of it.

  Then, at once, you’re part of it. You wake up one morning on a cot in a shelter and there’s a social worker looking down at you, and he asks your name, and you make something up, and he starts to write it on a clipboard, but you’re gone.

  He liked the subway of this city. Liked its echoes, its heat, its moldering gusts, its congregation of musicians and deadbeats and tourists, how its eggy oily stench got into your mouth, into everyone’s mouth. The democratizing force of the underground, its unavoidable suggestion of the death that’s coming for all of us, somehow this was reassuring. Perspiring tile. Gummy cement. Massive, trembling rats with tails like car antennae. He stayed underground for days at a time. He rode. He walked. He watched. He liked waiting on platforms, trapped in crowds, liked the collective breathing and sweating; the faces people made when crowds pressed them together—or rather, he liked the faces people tried to hide, the averted eyes, pinched mouths, he liked a face that betrayed its owner.

  He saw one face everywhere. A girl’s.

  Flyers on subway poles, on the walls of the trains, a big poster of her face next to an advertisement for a movie called Gateway to Paradise II. This girl’s face right next to the face of a famous actress in massive sunglasses. Why was the simple, predictable prettiness of this girl so much better than the beauty of the actress? She made the actress in sunglasses look ridiculous. The girl was a human, maybe more than most people. Her face could not fully compose itself. It could not achieve what it wanted. It never would. The girl’s face was everywhere. At every stop. At every turn. It was a face that was trying hard not to betray itself. And yet she was a child—what did she have to betray?

  He was looking for a wife. That was his mission, he wouldn’t let himself forget. As he walked the streets, rode the subway, he kept his eyes open, someone gentle, pretty but not dominated by prettiness, someone who’d maybe be carrying too many grocery bags? He could offer to help. He could hold her milk. No one paid him much attention. He showered at the Y. He played basketball in the park. The women he saw were too serious-looking, or bored-looking, or ugly, or had their arm entwined with a man’s, or another woman’s. Anything went. Wives, it seemed, were out of fashion. He browsed the bookstores. He visited museums. A billboard, too, hanging in the city’s biggest square, her face, her name, HELP US, an exclamation point, another.

  3

  Male newscasters are allowed to have imperfect skin. This one had white hair (no woman newscaster was allowed to have white hair) and a faint trace of rosacea on his cheeks and nose. He sat face-to-face with the girl’s mother. Behind them, on the studio wall, an image of Leonora stared from the happiness of last October. She was flushed from jump-roping, wore a patchwork coat with rolled-up sleeves. Her arms were thin. She stood under a bare tree, orange leaves at her feet. The newscaster took a breath, leaned forward slightly, said, “Our viewers are naturally wondering how you’re holding up. There’s been an outpouring of support.” His voice was smooth and even. It held concern like a small ball balanced in the palm. He could hold the ball forever. His tie was striped. His glossy hair resembled, in its neatness, with its stiff bang, a newsboy cap.

  The mother said, “What do your viewers expect me to say?” But before he could reply: “We’re holding up as well as can be expected.”

  “Our viewers are wondering—”

  “They want to see me cry?” It was delivered as if with genuine curiosity.r />
  “The outpouring of support has been truly remarkable.”

  “Because I cry,” she said. “Someone wrote a letter. A stranger. Asked why I wasn’t crying more, publicly. I cry. I just want to be clear.”

  “People are really pulling for you and your family.”

  “I can’t cry on television.”

  “We’ve never seen such an outpouring of sympathy.”

  “Someone out there knows something. Someone.” She turned to the camera. “You? Maybe you saw something? Maybe you want to share what you know?” She stared into the camera as if into a mirror. She knew who she saw. She knew everything.

  “How is your husband holding up? Our viewers would like to know.”

  She said, “You? Are you watching? Can you hear me?”

  “The number’s on the bottom of the screen, folks.” He pronounced each digit carefully. “If anyone knows anything, there’s a reward.”

  She said, “I want, also, to send a message to—to whoever took her. I want to say—” But she stopped. She wore red-framed glasses, a navy blazer with a circle pin on the lapel. She looked more like a newscaster than the man did. Her face was stately, serious, with good bones, a fine brow, a face showing abundant awareness of the ills of the world.