“This isn’t a joke, not when a child goes missing. Sure, it turned out fine this time, but that’s only this time. How was I to know that he hadn’t run off, or gotten … abducted, or anything? And really, how was I to know what you were doing with him down there?”
It was an unfortunate trait of Paul’s to smile wider the more uncomfortable he got. “Jesus Christ,” he said, now grinning stupidly and feeling his face go red.
“I’m not saying that. All I’m saying is, how was I to know? You could have been anybody.” She stopped, sighed, and then shrugged. “But I guess, really, you’re right: it’s my responsibility, not yours. So looks like you’re off the hook,” she finished with a rueful grin.
He avoided her eyes. She was looking at him, it seemed, partly with exasperation, partly with hope. He looked away, across the parking lot, where parents were beginning to arrive for pickup. Paul cleared his throat. “I gotta go tear down.” He pointed dumbly.
April nodded. “Sorry,” Paul muttered. He turned away and left her in the shade of the little maple tree.
Another week went by, and at eight o’clock on a Friday night, Paul parked in the driveway of his mother’s house. When he shut off his car’s engine and the blare of Hüsker Dü died along with it, the sudden silence was jarring. He was done with work for the week. He had received his first paycheck, and a small but by no means negligible sum of money now sat in his bank account.
He went into the house and stood in the dark kitchen. His mom was working a late shift at the diner. White shadows played against the floor and the walls. He pulled the old cell phone his mom had given him out of his pocket and placed it on the counter. The local phone book sat uselessly on the counter next to the toaster, where his mom stubbornly kept it. Paul opened it and started flipping idly through the pages, slowly at first, then picking up speed until he found the name he realized he’d been looking for all along.
Chambers.
Was there a Nicki available?
LAURA
I didn’t want to go to our church’s abortion protest.
For the past three years, at the beginning of September, the church youth group took a van down to Albany to demonstrate in front of the clinic there. I had gone last year, and when it was over, I promised myself I’d never do it again. But on Saturday evening, I was sitting on the bed in Bethany’s room, and she was begging me to go on the trip with her in two months.
“Please, Laura,” she said, grabbing my wrists with her hands and swinging them back and forth. “For me?” And then, “P-p-please!” in her Roger Rabbit voice—the one she used whenever I was being particularly stubborn about something, the one that made me smile and eventually cave.
Last year in Albany, I had stood in front of the clinic with everyone else, holding my sign, but in only fifteen minutes I began to feel nauseated. People passing by looked at us as if we were monsters or lunatics, or both. One woman, driving by with her children in the back seat, had rolled down her window and, looking right at me, shouted, “You people represent everything that’s wrong with this country right now!” That was when I had to put down my sign and escape to a McDonald’s across the street. I had knelt in the bathroom and stared down at the toilet bowl for half an hour, breathing in the smell of grease and fries and grilling meat. When I came back, the others at the rally told me it was just nerves and not to worry about it.
In church, they had shown us videos of inside the abortion clinics, of the blood and dismembered limbs. I had tried to keep those images in my head to remind myself that what we were doing that day was right, that we were fighting for the defenseless unborn, but for some reason, I couldn’t make the connection. What we were doing out on that gray rainy day in the state capital seemed to have nothing to do with those videos I’d been shown.
But sitting there on the bed, Bethany was giving me her big puppy-dog eyes, her lower lip protruding. “I don’t want to go alone,” she said. “And you know I have to go. My parents expect me to.”
I sighed. “Okay, okay, I’ll go.”
“Oh, fank you, fank you, fank you!” Bethany cried, and collapsed onto me. I fell back on her bed and she lay on top of me, laughing.
“Ugh,” I said between giggles. “Your hair’s in my mouth!”
She sat up and, taking a hair tie from her wrist, pulled her hair back in a ponytail. “I shall buy you dinner in Albany, my dear. A reward for your pain.”
I sat up. “Like I’ll be able to eat after that!”
“Hmm, you’re probably right.” She turned her body and sat next to me on the bed. With her hair back and her cheeks flushed from laughing, she was a different kind of beautiful. It always amazed me how many kinds of beautiful she could be. “Plus, we’ll have to drive down to Albany in that van.” She stuck her finger in her mouth and mock gagged. “Those rides always make me sick.”
I didn’t respond. The mention of Albany had made me think of Martin, and the thought of going down to that city in a month made my heart beat a little faster. Of course, there was really nothing to worry about. Our chances of running into each other were low, and even if we did, he wouldn’t know who I was. Still, the thought made me nervous.
If anyone had seen what I was doing with Martin, had viewed our relationship—or whatever you want to call it—from the outside, they would probably say I was foolish, or stupid, or maybe just crazy. I wouldn’t have been able to argue. But I do think, if I could take them back to the beginning of Martin, back to the origins of our connection, and show them how it all began, then maybe they might … if not understand, at least judge me a little less harshly. I think a lot of things in life are like that.
It began with the photo. Last summer, we’d had a family reunion at my grandmother’s house down in Troy. My aunt and my cousins came up from Florida. Bethany tagged along with us because her parents would be out of town for a church conference.
Bethany and I had been up in my grandma’s attic, instructed to look for a certain casserole dish, when we stumbled across the cardboard box stuffed with old family photographs. They were mostly pictures of my mom and my aunt, going back to their childhood and up until their twenties. Bethany and I knelt on the hard attic floor and giggled over their seventies and eighties hairstyles and outfits, arguing over which decade had worse fashions, which haircut we would least rather have.
Then we came across the pictures of the vacation at Myrtle Beach. My mother was in a blue one-piece bathing suit. Her hair was long and her body brown, and she wore an expression on her face I’d never seen before. We gaped. Bethany said, “I always thought your mom was pretty, but seriously?” I turned the photo over. Handwritten on the back was the date: July 1990. She’d been only twenty years old. Four years later, I would be born. I didn’t want to look at the picture anymore, didn’t want to think about it, but Bethany wouldn’t let it go. She held on to the photo and continued to study it, as if it held some secret, which, if she looked long and hard enough, would enable her to look the way my mom had at that age.
“We have to show this to your mom,” she said.
I grimaced. “Do we?”
“Definitely! She’ll get a huge kick out of it.”
I knew I didn’t have a good reason to dissuade her, so I suggested we bring the whole box down, hoping that might take the focus off that one photo.
My mom, my aunt, and my grandmother pored over the pictures, with all the predictable commentary. “Do you remember this?” and “Ooh, look at that awful hairdo! What was I thinking!” When Bethany showed my mom the swimsuit photo, she smiled, blushed just a little, and said, “Whatever happened to that girl?” before tossing the picture aside.
Later, my mom and her sister tried to divide the photos between them but kept arguing over who got what. It was Bethany who suggested they take the lot and scan them onto a computer; that way, they both would have access to them all. My mom had turned to me
and asked if I still wanted to make some extra money. She said she would pay me to take all the photos and commit them to digital permanence. I could use the scanner at the church.
Maybe a week later, on a Friday night, Bethany and I were hanging out in my room, waiting for her parents to come pick her up because, for some reason I can’t remember, she wasn’t sleeping over that night. I remember Bethany was lying on her back scrolling through her phone, with her legs stretched up against the wall, and her long hair spilling over the side of the bed. I was at my desk on my laptop, going through the hundreds of photos I had scanned earlier that day, sorting them into the folders I was then going to email to my aunt Sarah. The job had been something of a pain, but my mom was paying me well for it and I was glad for the extra money.
As I went through the photos, Bethany read me an article on her phone, about a woman who had dated a man online for two years before she found out the truth about him. He had told her he was a US Marine, twenty-nine and single, living in Texas. Actually, he’d been closer to fifty, an accountant in Michigan, married for twenty years with three kids.
“Can you imagine that?” Bethany asked, rolling over onto her stomach and looking at me. “You date a guy for two years to find out you don’t know anything about him.”
I had nodded, a little distracted by my task. I didn’t really see the look in her eyes until after I heard her say, “Let’s make a profile on one of those online dating sites.”
I turned around in my chair to look at her. As soon as I did, I knew that she was serious. Throughout our friendship, Bethany would sometimes suggest that we do something completely wild or strange, accompanied by this hard, gleaming look in her eyes, which was how I knew when she wasn’t joking, when she was for real. And I knew she wouldn’t let it go.
“Why?” I asked. “You just said that stuff is weird.”
Bethany stood up off the bed. “I just want to see how it works.”
I grimaced. “I don’t know.”
But Bethany was already by my side at the desk. “Oh, come on, I’m not saying we actually meet anyone on it, but it would be kinda fun, wouldn’t it, to make up a person online?”
I gave her a look of my own. “Would it?”
“Anyway, I’m bored,” said Bethany, and thus ended the debate.
So, with Bethany sitting on my lap and controlling the laptop while I offered comments and advice, we made a profile on MatchUp.com.
We gave the site my email and our zip code. We named our person Kim Moore (I had just discovered Sonic Youth online, and while I found their barrage of noise and distortion hard to listen to, I thought they were cool beyond words). We answered random questions about her: she was a vegetarian, she liked dogs better than cats, she didn’t smoke.
“We need a profile pic,” Bethany said.
“Why?” I asked.
“Seriously, Laura, nobody’s gonna believe our Kim is real if there’s no photo of her.”
“I thought we weren’t actually gonna do anything with this.”
“It’s the principle of the thing.”
I was about to ask what kind of photo she wanted to use, when Bethany suddenly shrieked and squirmed excitedly in my lap. “Oh, my god, I have an idea!”
I watched as she opened the folder that contained all the family photos, and before she had even found the photo, I was protesting.
“No, you’re not serious!”
She opened the photo of my mother on the beach and paused. I thought that maybe she was thinking better of it, but then I realized she was just transfixed by the picture. “I wish I had legs like that,” she said.
I rolled my eyes. I hated when she complained about her body in front of me; it was just insensitive. But now I was staring at the picture, too, the bronze skin, the hazy look in her eyes. “She doesn’t even look like the same person,” I murmured.
Bethany broke the spell by clicking on the photo and uploading it onto Kim’s profile. Now our Kim had a face: my mom’s.
Bethany quickly forgot about our Kim. Almost immediately after we uploaded the profile picture, my mom knocked on my door to tell us Bethany’s parents were here to pick her up, and we quickly closed out the web browser. I didn’t see Bethany again until Sunday, and by then she had forgotten about our creation or, at least, didn’t care to mention it.
I felt strange that night after we’d made the profile, knowing that a picture of my mom was floating around out there on an online dating site, like a lifeboat drifting on a dark ocean. In bed, trying to sleep, I kept imagining my mother, in the bathing suit but sitting at her desk, on the computer, talking to strangers. I told myself that the next day I would delete the account first thing.
I didn’t, and I’m still not sure why. Maybe I really did forget to, or maybe I just didn’t feel like going through the task of opening the website and logging in, having to face the idiocy of what we had done. Either way, the profile stayed active, but by the end of the week, I had completely forgotten about it. And I didn’t think about it again until two weeks later, when I checked my email account to find a message from MatchUp.com, notifying me that a certain BradyTom66 had messaged me.
I couldn’t read the message through the email. I would have to log back in to my account to see it.
For a long time, I just looked at the email. Just some lonely creep messaging every woman he comes across, I thought. That’s all. Still, it might be funny to see what he said. I could show it to Bethany; she’d get a laugh out of it.
It was a Wednesday afternoon. The house was quiet. Jason was in his room playing video games, and my mom was probably napping downstairs, the way she did sometimes after school. I put on music and logged on to MatchUp.com.
“Hi sexy” was all the message said. And clicking on BradyTom66, I found a fat, balding middle-aged man who appeared to be obsessed with the New England Patriots football team. I began to giggle. It was just too ridiculous. My giggling stopped short. My message box had blinked. Someone else had messaged me.
This one was a little less direct: “Hey how’s it goin”
WallaceJoseph22 was younger, black, and not bad looking. After a moment of hesitation, I messaged him back a tentative greeting. We talked for maybe two minutes before I had to stop. Not because I was frightened or because my common sense kicked in, or anything, but because I just didn’t know what to say. I was speaking for a person I didn’t know anything about. Kim Moore was a stranger to me. Bethany and I had come up with only the most basic details: her sex, her age—we put her birthday as August 1985, which would make her twenty-four—and the town she lived in (only because we’d had to put in our zip code). Other than that, she was a blank slate. After closing out the chat bar, I decided to fill out her profile properly, figure out exactly who she was. I grabbed a pen and one of my notebooks from my backpack and opened it up.
Kim Moore was a writer and freelance journalist. She also dabbled in photography. She traveled a lot. Her parents had died when she was young, and she had lived for a long time in New York City and then California. She was in Grover Falls only temporarily, working on a story (what story she could possibly be working on here, I had no idea, but that didn’t matter). She had a golden retriever named Sam that went everywhere with her. I was allergic to dogs and didn’t like them all that much, but I thought it was a nice touch. She loved music, hiking, politics, espressos, old movies, surfing, snowboarding, books, Mexican food. She’d been in a long-term relationship for the past few years but had to end it because the guy had become overbearing and possessive. The breakup had been painful, but in the end, it had made her a better person with a clearer idea of who she was. She was adventurous. She spoke her mind. She didn’t take crap from people. She had lots of friends.
The last thing I did was change her photo. If I was going to do this, I couldn’t have her in a swimsuit as my profile picture. I sifted through the old photos o
f my mother and found one that I really liked—pretty, but just of her face so that the eighties and nineties fashions didn’t give it away.
It really was a joke to begin with, or maybe just something to pass the time because I was bored. I wanted to see whether I could get away with it, just for a little while, and anytime I wanted, all I had to do was delete the account and I would be rid of it all.
All that changed with Martin.
MartinBanner messaged me one night last September, just after school started. I was in my room, doing homework and playing music on my laptop, when I got the email notification. Men messaged me now pretty frequently, and though Kim rarely responded, I always logged in and read the message and visited the man’s profile.
Martin was different from most of the other men I had found on MatchUp. After reading his innocuous greeting—Hey, how are you?—I viewed his profile. His pic showed a reasonably attractive, somewhat scruffy middle-aged man. His birthday was July 11, 1969, making him just a year older than my actual mom. Under “occupation,” he had put “Writer, with past work as a professor,” without mentioning where he had taught. His interests included literature, art, films, travel, and music. He lived in Albany. I clicked through the few other pictures of him. In a strange way, I found him attractive. I messaged him back.
Our correspondence began casually. Martin wasn’t aggressive. He didn’t come on strong. He wanted to get to know Kim, which complicated things because, aside from the basics, I didn’t know much about Kim myself. Every time he asked her a question about her life, I had to stop and think. What sort of journalism did she do? Where in California had she lived? Every question was a potential trap, and I had to work hard and stay focused not to get caught out. As much as I could, I kept the attention on him. At first, it was just a strategy of diverting attention away from Kim, but soon I found Martin actually interesting.
I began to enjoy our online chats. He was smart and witty and had done a lot. Back when he was an undergraduate, he’d seen the Who and the Rolling Stones. He’d been to Europe—told me Paris was overrated but everyone should see Florence before they died. And he knew so much about books. I had always done well in English, completing all the extra-credit reading assignments and scoring high on my essays, but I couldn’t even pretend to keep up with Martin, who had a master’s degree in English literature. He talked about writers I’d never heard of. Had I read this book or that book? And I couldn’t say that I had.
Another Life Page 9