The Sweet Relief of Missing Children: A Novel

by Sarah Braunstein

  Gideon said, “Endoplasmic Reticulum. Is that what we’re waiting for?”

  Paul heard something downstairs. Or was he being paranoid? The boom box sang I wonder where you are, I wonder what you do.

  “I mean, is that your idea of a good time? Golgi bodies? Say so if it is. Say the word and I’ll stop.”

  “Don’t stop.”

  When Gideon undid Paul’s pants, yanked his zipper, Paul experienced a moment of panic. Gideon would mock his dick. But Gideon said nothing. His face maintained its indolence. He put his mouth on Paul. He went and went. Paul’s own mouth, now, was empty, free of words, syllables, articles. His brain was empty. He felt as if he’d been opened, as if someone had opened him up and removed everything, blood and bones, the whole soup of him. He felt a terrible, consuming lightness. Then the door opened.

  Someone took the name of the lord in vain. Someone else laughed. It was hard to know which person made which sound. The whole of his life would spin around this moment. What a stupid moment it was! Being so light, so empty, it was hard to get to his feet. He staggered. His vision blurred. His hand was buzzing, numb, couldn’t manage the zipper. Someone said, That’s the end of the road, or maybe it’s what he thought, or what someone else thought, the moment was so wholly crude and exposing it would not have surprised him to hear another’s private thoughts. His dick hung out. His heart battered his rib cage. His mother—why was she so stupid?—called out his stepfather’s name.

  Even when Gideon left, clutching his collarbone, his body rigid with pain, even then he looked bored. On his way to the door he stopped at the mantel. With the hand that wasn’t holding his collarbone he swatted the model ship to the floor. He didn’t close the door behind him, just strutted away, a gambler, strides long and calm. Paul’s mother was holding her neck, both hands gripping it, as if strangling herself. His stepfather, who smelled like plastics, like a new shower curtain, whose hair was oiled and face seemed gentle but who was not gentle, looked at Paul as if about to scream, opened his mouth, but this time he did not scream. He closed his mouth. He returned the broken ship to the mantel. It was only a matter of time before Paul ran. His stepfather wanted him out. His mother, too, though she didn’t know this or couldn’t say it. When she came to his bedroom some nights later, pressed her hand to his forehead, to his mouth, when he could see her breasts through her nightgown and could smell the sweat under her perfume, what else could she have wanted but for him to get out of there? She kissed his face, his cheeks, forehead, eyelids. The kisses were fast and hard and not tender. It was how one kisses a baby. It was how a new mother, unsure if she likes her infant, kisses him, an attempt to generate tenderness, to prove the child, to prove herself, worthy. Every kiss said Get out. Every kiss said Go on go on go on go. Her breasts brushed across his chest. This is what a boy does. Not that. This. And this. “Get out of here,” he said, but she wouldn’t. He couldn’t push her away. She was his mother.

  “Oh Paul. Paulie,” she murmured. “I wanted so much for you. I hoped so much. We all did. You were the only one. We hoped so much,” like he was dead.

  He said, “I’m not dead.”

  9

  But his mother wasn’t stupid. Or if she was stupid she had willed it upon herself, it made things simpler. It made it easier to marry the new man, to stand at the altar in a dress with a bodice like a pile of suds, to pretend that she had not overheard that bitch waitress Felicia say under her breath, “Wearing white, huh?” Being stupid allowed her to stand at the altar and look at her betrothed’s falsely gentle face, to kiss lightly his pale, too-small mouth and accept his word that he’d care for her forever. She wanted to be cared for. It wasn’t unreasonable. Helplessness had been bred into her, she knew this, just as plants are bred for different characteristics—height, color, juiciness of their fruit, whatever. She had been bred to be helpless, which had its advantages, which, at its best, was like living as though you were always being carried by a happy groom over a threshold; and at its worst—but that wasn’t worth thinking about. Paul was getting older. She needed a husband. Paul said to her, on her wedding day, “Are you sure about this?” He said it with such care, such patient, practical tenderness, like he was her mother. He was twelve. She had a benign growth in her uterus that now and then sent ribbons of pain down her legs. The doctor wasn’t too worried. She had a phobia, too: she feared thunderstorms with the indomitable, righteous purity of those who will not ride in planes or enter elevators. She had given birth to Paul during a thunderstorm. Since that day, whenever she heard even faint thunder, whenever the air assumed a staticky, floral charge and the wind lifted the leaves and set their shadows upon the wall, she would bite her bottom lip and grip the nearest sturdy thing, preferably the hang bar in her closet. Her new husband scolded her: “Be a grown woman, love,” or “Stop whimpering, love,” or “Get that fat ass out of the closet, love.” He added love to his harshest statements, and it worked. She nodded. She gathered herself. She stepped from the comfort of the closet, where the absolute darkness and laundry detergent smell kept her from remembering what it felt like when Paul was born, when his mushroom head tore her apart.

  She had held him in the damp crook of her arm. His face was like a sheet of balled-up paper. “All babies look like that,” said an aunt by the bedside, knitting booties of contemptuous green. The power flickered all afternoon. Thunder snapped like a leather belt. The baby was ugly. She had wanted so badly a girl. The next baby, who was stillborn and a girl, appeared on an afternoon of fierce sunshine and blue sky, but his mother did not come to fear these kinds of days. She told Paul this set of facts in an unblinking manner, a manner of See what I have done for you? A manner of You have taken more than your share, but I’ll forgive you. She stroked his hair as she said it. She came to want him. She made it clear. She hadn’t always wanted him, but now she did. It was like a parable, he thought. It was not a life but a tale.

  10

  He felt Ricky’s prick on his thigh. It was surprisingly light, unsure, in the way of an empty puppet. He heard a moan emerge from his mouth—his mouth which had been open from the start, which had found the shape of the moan and been waiting to expel it. There was a certain uncomplicated familiarity, as between old friends. Ricky wore the expression of a person trying to find a word in a foreign language. A soft rain began. A single word rang though Pax’s body, and of all things it was a girl’s name. Nights like these permit one to believe in fate. At once he had a path. It was his. This night was part of it, and Ricky’s prick was part of it, and Leonora, and her mother. Gideon had a rat-tail. That gas station attendant Burt what’s-his-name had a tattoo of a lion on his pectoral. He never touched Burt. The original Pax, his namesake, had a book about beekeepers and lesbians and a perfect voice and a better name, but he had never touched him either. Never Burt or Pax or Ed or Ray, who offered to pay for it, or Donald, who took him clamming. He had always said no. The rain picked up. The city was desperate for it. He had never been quite as at peace, nor as lonely, and he said so. He said a few more things. He said something, stupidly, about having sex with a woman in his old house, about the way it had freed him for this, prepared him, as a pan is cured for cooking. Then he said he’d once loved a girl named Jade, that as kids he and the girl had been accosted in the woods by a crazy Christian, that years later he’d tracked her down—Jade, not the Christian—that he’d made some phone calls and learned she was married and a neurosurgeon and living in a great European capital. A goddamned neurosurgeon! He’d never felt more proud or more alone. Now she was gone. Everyone was gone. And yet knowing she was a neurosurgeon, knowing that his glorious redheaded nymph worked inside people’s heads! Stared at their minds! It gave him a wild sense of hope; it made him big and dizzy with loss. He said he’d once had a job making fruit pyramids. He said he loved his mother, loved her still, always, but that she’d probably never forgive him for leaving. He said a few sentimental things. He quoted a German philosopher. He was trying everything out. He b
ucked beneath the poet. Then he was still. He screamed. He was trying everything. He spoke with a husky, affected bravado, like a bad actor, and then with a whine.

  “Shut up,” said Ricky, “can you manage that?”

  “Be kind,” Pax begged.

  “That’s not what you need.”

  It was true. That wasn’t it.

  11

  The newspaper said Missing Girl Found Dead in Lot and, below this, Grand Slam for the Good Guys. Pax read both articles through. A taste in his mouth like orange rind. He read them again. The catcher had hit the grand slam. Leonora had been wrapped in industrial carpet. Perpetrator unknown. No leads yet. He spit into the sink but the taste remained. He wanted to run to her mother’s home. He wanted to see her mother, whom he loved. But what comfort could he provide the mother? None. Absolutely none. “Good morning,” Ricky said. “Sleep well?”

  He needed to get on a bus. He wouldn’t find a wife here. He would not find a wife anywhere. He stood in the kitchen, arms loose, his face dim and resigned, as a man stands before a heartless judge. Sticky linoleum beneath his feet. Ricky, small and dense and bloated, looked upon him in a faintly admonishing manner.

  “Bad news about the girl,” Ricky said. He was leaning back in a kitchen chair, shirtless, smoking a cigarette. “I really thought she’d run away. Most of them run.”

  She was dead. He’d known it all along. His certainty, his fixation, all his visions and dreams, these were like proof of his guilt. Then last night, in Ricky’s bed—it was like he had given up on her and she had known. It was like he had willed it. There was still sleep in his eyes but now he was wide awake. He said, “I did it.”

  “Yeah?” Ricky blew smoke out of one side of his mouth. “That’s sure some news.”

  Pax said it again.

  Ricky laughed dully. “Oh buddy, you’re one guilty son-of-a.”

  Pax gathered his things.

  “Delusions of grandeur, my man.” He was still laughing. “I saved you some toast.”

  “I have to go.”

  “Sure, sure. Coffee first?”

  “But thank you for everything.”

  The laughter stopped. “Don’t be a fool, Pax. And don’t you dare thank me. Don’t you dare, man.”

  Pax shook his head. “My name isn’t even Pax.”

  “I don’t care what on earth your name is. You think your name tells me who you are? You thought you could hide behind a phony name?”

  He considered it. “I don’t know.”

  “Poor thing,” Ricky said, with gentleness. “I know you better than you know yourself.”

  Pax packed his suitcase. Where was his belt? It was nowhere. He looked everywhere, ran around the apartment, sweating, heart pounding, found it finally under the stinking yellow couch.

  12

  Pax discovered the heat wave had broken. The air was newly fresh. He walked past children on stoops. He walked past pretty women in high heels, a man belting words from the Bible in a spit-infused voice that reminded him of Ricky, that inspired—too soon—a burst of nostalgia. He walked faster. It was much, much too soon for nostalgia. Pansies and geraniums, wilted, flattened by rain, filled the city’s million window boxes. He walked past many dogs, diners, hydrants, over subway grates and sleeping bums, past flower vendors and hot dog vendors and peanut vendors and magazine vendors, men selling wares with the same untroubled, wholesome greed they’ve had for thousands of years. Bottle tops and ticket stubs and a diffusion of broken glass, so much glimmering trash in the road, in the gutters, a rubber ball, a pink pacifier with a ribbon tied to it. All these relics of the world were lost to him, to them both, him and the girl. He paused before the precinct for a moment.

  13

  Joanna Coulter entered her son’s bedroom. He was sitting on one of the twin beds, cross-legged, holding a tan plastic soldier in each hand. He made them crash into one another, on his face an expression of routine hostility. She sat on the spare bed. The room, she noticed, smelled odd. He was only eight, but a faint musk was palpable, a whiff of something fleshy, semisweet. It wasn’t the smell of a child. On the wall above his bed hung a pennant of the city’s baseball team. The curtains, which she had made by hand, were navy blue and patterned with yellow stars. When she said, “I have some bad news,” he looked up. His face was puffy, small-eyed, tired.

  “She’s dead, huh?”

  “I’m afraid so.” The words in her mouth were hard, falsely small. She coughed, to put something between herself and them.

  He played the words over again, quietly, in his own mouth.

  Then he said, “What happened to her?”

  She could not think of a word, not a single word. Her head flashed with color. Her hands found the tops of her thighs, squeezed.

  “I mean did somebody hit her?”

  Joanna worked on unclenching her hands. She worked on a word, just one, if she could get one word out it would return her to the world of words, to all of them. She inhaled. She said, “Yes.” The boy nodded, smiled faintly, seemed somehow satisfied and disappointed both, smug, like he’d been told the secret of a magic trick. She didn’t like the smile on his lips. Now there was a rush of words, they came easily, words to remove his smile, words which would be plaster on the wall between them and what happened. She told him she loved him so much. She told him she promised to take good care of him forever, and that they would go see a person called Doctor Grayson who would ask him to play in a sandbox, and she told him that they would always have Leonora in their hearts, and that he was allowed to say whatever he wanted, to cry, or not to cry, or to be mad, or not mad. The words were a wall, and on the other side of the wall was the crime, but also on the other side was Leonora. She wanted to be quiet now.

  The boy made a circle with his thumb and forefinger, held it to his eye, like a spyglass. He made a little squeaking sound.

  She said, “Let’s get you some lunch.”

  “I’ve been farting in here,” he admitted.

  “That’s okay.”

  “Poor Leonora.”

  She explained that there would be a funeral. Perhaps he could choose a favorite toy to put in her coffin, or he could write her a letter? He didn’t seem interested in this. He tossed the plastic soldiers off the end of the bed. He lay down, crossed his arms neatly over his chest.

  “Do I look like Dracula?”

  “Yes.”

  “I bet she’ll look like Dracula.” He spoke with new hoarseness.

  They didn’t say anything else for a few moments. She heard the shower running in the bathroom down the hall. Her husband had been in there for nearly an hour. By now the water had to be cold. He would emerge shortly, pink and puckered.

  “Will they catch him?”

  Not a single moment of her life could prepare her for the question.

  “I don’t know.”

  “I don’t understand,” her son finally said.

  She said, “I don’t either.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “We will never get it.”

  “What I don’t get is how she eats. If she’s dead, she doesn’t get dinner, right?”

  “That’s correct.”

  “How does she eat, then? Where does she get food?”

  An image of lunch money flashed before Joanna’s face, her hand pressing a bill into her daughter’s hand. Usually she had denied Leonora dessert.

  Joanna said, “Well, she doesn’t need to eat.”

  “Oh right, dead people don’t eat,” as if he’d simply forgotten.

  He seemed a little old not to understand this concept. Why had she even once refused the girl dessert?

  “Did she go all at once or in pieces?” he asked then.

  “What, honey?”

  “When she died,” he said. “Does a person die all at once or bit by bit?”

  It wasn’t a question she could answer, and she told him so. Suddenly he reached for her, took her shoulders, stiffly, uncertain, like a kid at a middle school dance
. She took his shoulders too. They held each other this way for a while.

  14

  He climbed its stately granite steps. He stepped into a cool, white-walled room. I swear, she didn’t suffer, something like that. It was so fast. She didn’t feel any pain. He would make himself her witness, which is all anyone could hope to have. He stepped into that place of ringing phones, frosted glass, and ticking clocks. He understood how childish he was, how desperate to feel important, how much he longed to be something at once better and worse than himself. Yet this knowledge did not dilute his relief. The waiting room was full of plastic chairs, and in these chairs were people, wearing bold or bored or sleeping faces. A woman at the front desk, talking on the phone, placed her hand over the receiver and looked at him with uncanny warmth. He resented this immediately. He wanted no warmth. He wanted to be taken by the throat. He wanted a cell. He wanted someone to grab him so they could see how heavy his limbs were, how utterly without urge.

  “I need to talk to a detective.” He cleared his throat. “I have some information about a crime.”

  She smiled, took his name, asked him to sit. He took the last chair, between a young blonde woman and a dark-skinned man. Pax kept his eyes on the floor, its scuffed, pale green squares. Next to him, the woman’s toes tapped the floor lightly. She wore white sandals, her toenails pastel pink. The man on his other side wore black wing tips; his feet were firmly planted. No one made any noise. Across from him a couple held hands. An old man in seersucker checked his watch every thirty seconds. It was impossible to imagine what they were all waiting for. Had they witnessed crimes? Were they waiting to bail out their friends? It was unlikely that they all had confessions to give, yet for a moment his stomach tightened and he felt immense anticipation, as if someone here would tread his terrain, would lay claim to the crime before he could. He tried to make eye contact with the receptionist, but she was still on the phone, writing something on a notepad.