Missing Mr. Wingfield

by E. Christopher Clark

  Jenna stepped away from Michael, then looked over at Carrie. “Where do you want us?”

  She waved them into position, giving them instructions. Michael stood center. Amber stood to his right, back arched against his side, hand on his thigh. Jenna went behind him, arm coming up over his left shoulder, face pressed against his right cheek. And Carrie, once she’d finished setting the camera, she grabbed a remote and went to Michael’s left side, mirroring Amber.

  Amber said, “You ready, Michael?”

  “As I’ll ever be,” he said.

  Carrie snapped the photo and the world went white for a second, then black. Tracy closed her eyes, opened them. The flash went off again, capturing not the women but the mannequins, not the house in Hawaii but the theater on Cape Cod. Michael was slumping to the floor. Tracy looked around herself. Her judge’s robes were gone, her podium. She was back in the lighting booth, looking down at her uncle, who lay on the floor, shuddering, as naked as he had been in the dream, his clothes scattered across the stage. Something flashed before her eyes a third time, perhaps the last of the drugs leaving her mind. She rushed to the stage.

  He was shaking, Michael, mumbling something she couldn’t make out at first.

  “Michael?” she said, kneeling down to touch him, to search his wrist for a pulse.

  “Not guilty,” he said. “I’m not guilty.”

  “I know,” she said, though she was anything but certain of that fact. She felt his forehead to see what his temperature might be, pushing sweaty, matted hair out of her way.

  “Tell me I’m not guilty,” said Michael, his shaking calming to a steady shiver.

  Despite the fact that she wasn’t sure, that she hadn’t decided yet, Tracy pronounced him not guilty. Not innocent either, she thought, but did not say.

  “Good,” he said. “Now, go to hell.”

  He shook once more, a violent shake that ended with his eyes closed and his breathing shallow. Tracy stepped away from him, back into the darkness. She looked at him, sleeping in his pool of light, and then she ran. She ran to the house. She ran to the women who slept there. They would know what to do. They had to.

  29

  Here and Begging for a Chance

  The police were not involved, nor the hospital. Michael was brought to the house, to the bed he shared with his wife, and she kept watch over him. Desiree and Veronica sent Tracy to bed, told her she’d be spoken to in the morning. And so, Tracy had gone to her room and done as she was told. But she couldn’t sleep. And the moment that the sun began to rise over Nantucket Sound, a moment in their family that was understood to be the earliest one should ever rise, she snuck out the back door and made her way to the barn, to the theater.

  She dressed in her stage blacks, though it was hours before the call for that day’s matinée, and she pulled her hair back into a severe ponytail, yanking a stray hair out of her scalp when it dared to fly loose.

  Once the chair and the table were set, she sat and worked at stuffing the bloodied and muddied boot into the box from which it was meant to be withdrawn. It was a tight squeeze, the box not built for the task—it was a holdover from a production of Alice in Wonderland, in fact, meant to be used for the largest size cake and nothing more.

  The front door creaked open out in the hallway, but she didn’t look up, didn’t want to know. This was going to be bad, whoever it was.

  “How you feeling?” asked Veronica.

  “Sore,” said Tracy, trying one last time to shove the damned boot into the box.

  “Sore how?” said Veronica. “Emotionally sore?”

  “No,” said Tracy, giving up, slamming the lid of the box down upon the twisted leather of the boot, half of it still hanging loose. “I’m sore sore,” she said. “I can barely walk straight.”

  “Wait,” said Veronica. “Why—”

  Tracy looked over her shoulder to see the look on her mother’s face, to see if she was trying to pull one over on her, but Veronica looked genuinely mystified.

  Tracy said: “Don’t tell me Desiree actually managed to keep the secret.”

  “Oh,” said Veronica, “your date.”

  Veronica sat on the arm of the chair, looking off into the middle distance. She breathed in deep, let out a heavy sigh.

  “Don’t worry,” said Tracy. “He didn’t hurt me. Or, well… I’m hurting, but… Forget it.”

  “Forgotten,” said Veronica, squeezing Tracy’s shoulder. “Too much information, anyway. I assume you were safe about it. And that you know it doesn’t have to hurt. Not always.”

  “Of course,” said Tracy.

  “Do you want to be even safer?” said Veronica. “I mean, we can go to the doctor, get a prescription.”

  “I’ve already set up an appointment,” said Tracy. “For Monday.”

  Veronica looked down at her, looked her right in the eye, and stared. She seemed to see something in Tracy that Tracy couldn’t see herself. Veronica didn’t seem to want to look away. She didn’t blink, she didn’t flinch; she just stared. And, after a minute, it was too much. So, Tracy looked away. She looked away, fiddled with the boot again—which cooperated this time—and then stood.

  “Did Michael and Jenna leave?” said Tracy, walking away.

  “They’re packing the car now,” said Veronica. “They’re headed up to Maine to visit her family before their flight back to Honolulu.”

  “Did he say anything?” said Tracy, plucking props from her milk crate and setting them.

  “He said a lot of things,” said Veronica.

  “About what happened last night?”

  “And the night of my own fucked-up dream, too.”

  Tracy turned to face her mother again. “I was little,” she said. “I didn’t know what I was—”

  “I know,” said Veronica, standing now, crossing to Tracy, “but you knew what you were doing last night.”

  “If you’d seen what I saw,” said Tracy, “wouldn’t you have wanted some answers?”

  It was a dumb question to ask. Of course Veronica could understand the need for answers. She woke to the sound of her parents screaming at each other at least once a week when she was a kid, her own mother yelling at her father, “Why don’t you run away then, if that’d make you happier?” And he’d yell back, “You wouldn’t understand.” But, try as they all did to understand, he never did give them answers.

  “I should’ve stayed quiet?” said Tracy. “I should have let that image fester in my mind?”

  Veronica said: “You could have just asked him.”

  “But,” said Tracy, “look at the men in our family, Mum. What reason did I have to expect he’d tell me the truth?”

  “Because Michael isn’t like the rest of them,” said Veronica. “You knew that before this all started and you know it now. Why you ever thought—”

  “I thought it,” said Tracy, “because they all let you down, eventually. Your father left—”

  “Actually, my mother left him.”

  “My father left,” said Tracy.

  “He’s not your father,” said Veronica. “He never was.”

  “And, yeah,” said Tracy, “maybe Michael has resisted every temptation, up until now. Maybe he didn’t fuck Carrie. But maybe he did. And, even if he didn’t, then someday, someday he might—”

  Veronica shook her head. “Do you have a crystal ball I don’t know about?”

  “What?” said Tracy.

  “Can you predict the future?” said Veronica, grabbing her daughter’s arms, looking her in the eyes again in that way only mothers seemed capable of doing.

  “Oh, give me a break,” said Tracy, shrugging off her mother’s hands, turning away. “I can make an educated guess, Mum, based on the evidence. And there’s a whole lot of it.”

  “Whatever happened to ‘innocent until proven guilty’?”

  But she had already proven him guilty. Maybe not of the big crimes, but what about the fact that he’d fessed up to so many of the little ones? This
wasn’t the trial anymore. This was the parole hearing. This was about his likelihood to offend again. But Veronica couldn’t see that.

  “This is about something bigger than Michael,” said Veronica. “In your mind, this is about whether or not any man is likely to offend, isn’t it? Michael’s just the scapegoat.”

  “Not a scapegoat,” said Tracy. “A representative. He’s the mean, the average. And if he can’t be trusted…”

  “He’s one man,” said Veronica. “Just like the Runt is one man. And my father, too.”

  “But together, they’re a pattern,” said Tracy. “Together—”

  “Christ!” said Veronica. “Did we ever tell you that all men were evil? Or is this just what happens to the daughter of dykes, that you grow up thinking—”

  “Not all men!” shouted Tracy. “I had this one hope, this one shining example. And now it’s gone. Now he’s gone! Off of the pedestal I put him on, his visage shattered on the cold, hard ground.”

  Veronica chuckled, then composed herself. “His visage?” she said.

  How could she laugh, even for a moment? Yes, it had been an obnoxious choice of words—Visage, Tracy? Really?—but the truth was that Michael was a hero to her, as much a hero as Zeus was the Olympians, or Helios to the Rhodians. But he was more in her world, not one of seven wonders, but the wonder, and he was never supposed to fall, not him.

  “If you don’t understand how much it hurts,” said Tracy. “If you don’t understand—”

  Tracy broke down as her mother wrapped her arms around her, the tears flowing, the snot clogging her nose, sobs choking back the words she wanted to say, but could not.

  “I do understand,” said Veronica. “Fathers are never what you want them to be, not forever at least. None of them are perfect.”

  “But he was supposed to be,” said Tracy, stuttering through her tears. “Goddamn it.”

  They held each other for a moment more, but Tracy soon pulled away and wiped at her face with the long sleeves of her stage blacks. Behind her, she heard Veronica pick up the teacup from the table, then a sploosh of something hitting the water within it.

  “Here,” said Veronica. “Have some tea.”

  Tracy turned around and gave her mother a weak smile. “It’s not tea, Mum. It’s just water.”

  Veronica showed her a small vial, rolled it between her forefinger and thumb. “I put some chamomile in it. I think that’ll take the edge off, either way.”

  Tracy took the cup and sipped.

  “Got anything stronger,” she said. “I am 18, after all.”

  Veronica smirked. “You don’t need anything stronger, Trace.”

  Tracy sat in the chair, sipped again.

  “Am I in trouble?” said Tracy.

  “I don’t know,” said Veronica. “You tell me.”

  They stared at each other for a moment before Tracy spoke again.

  “Did you get what I was saying about the boot? My theory?”

  “Sure,” said Veronica. “It’s a metaphor.”

  “Are you making fun of me?” said Tracy, setting the teacup down on its saucer. “I mean, I’m serious: doesn’t it represent the life he wished he had?”

  “It was just a boot,” said Veronica, running her hand over the top of the box it was now hidden in. “It’s what mariners wore.”

  “You don’t think it meant anything?” said Tracy.

  “The boot was all they had of him,” said Veronica. “His wife hid it beneath the floorboards of the kitchen because she couldn’t bear her children looking at the nightmare of it, but also because she couldn’t bear to part with the only piece of him that she had left. It was only a piece, and it might have been the piece she detested the most, but it was him, the one she loved. So she kept it. Because it reminded her of all the other pieces, which, though they were lost to the world, belonged to her forever.”

  “Oh,” said Tracy.

  “Do you understand?” said Veronica.

  She nodded.

  “You going to chill out in here for a while?” said Veronica.

  She nodded again.

  “Okay,” said Veronica. “Take a nap. You could use one.”

  Veronica bent down and rubbed her nose against Tracy’s. Her forehead pressed against Tracy’s as she gave her daughter’s neck a quick squeeze and a rub. And then, Veronica was gone.

  Tracy took one more sip of the tea, then set it down on the table. She opened the lid of the box, the boot popping free and landing with a thud on the table. She stared at it for a moment, and then, just as she had the night before, she took off her own shoe.

  The boot slid on without a struggle; it fit. Well enough to walk in, she imagined, though she wasn’t going to try. She was too sleepy.

  “You had a small foot, old man,” she said, yawning.

  Tracy picked up the tea, leaned back into the cushions of the chair, and put her feet up on the table. She took a final sip, then set the now-empty cup upside down on her belly. She watched it rise and fall, rise and fall. Her eyes began to flicker closed, first on the rises, then on the falls as well. She felt the cup there, on her belly, for a moment more, felt a leftover drop seep through her shirt. But then that was gone, too. And she was somewhere else.

  Tracy stood outside a courthouse now, looking up at a piano falling from the sky.

  Beside her, someone said, “You might want to move.”

  It was a man in paint-stained jeans and a torn Voltron t-shirt. On his head, he wore an off-white hard hat emblazoned with a bell inside a circle. He smirked at her, rolling up a comic book and slipping it into his back pocket.

  “Just a suggestion,” he said.

  And because she wondered what he might say next, because she wanted to know, she did move.

  “What’s with the helmet?” she asked him.

  “Oh this?” he said, as he rapped a fist against it. “I fell in love with long distances.” He smirked. Then, with a tilt of his head, a raise of his eyebrows, and just the slightest quaver in his voice, he added, “That is the line, isn’t it?”

  She laughed at his joke, his dumb reference—the best olive branch he had to offer—and she walked with him, happy to have some part of him back, the part that was true and always would be.

  Author’s Note & Acknowledgments

  If asked when I began work on this novel, I could answer quite confidently “Fall 1997.” And a great many people have influenced the development of the book in the twenty years since. But, rather than rattle off their names in quick succession and leave it at that, I’d like to offer a brief tour through the history of this text and thank each of these wonderful people in the context of when and where they came to help me make this book a reality.

  I.

  It began with the writing of a one-act play for the Spring 1998 Bradford College Student Theatre Festival. Submissions were due sometime late in the fall semester of 1997 and I did at least some of my work on the script during my work-study shifts at the basement computer labs in Hasseltine Hall. It was in this sex farce, titled A Lick and a Promise, that the characters of Veronica, Desiree, and the Runt were born. A fragment of this play, with the character names changed and the gender of the Chinese food delivery person altered, can still be found in the chapter titled “DiFranco-Maguire.” And the central conflict of Veronica’s life in the play—stay with the Runt or run off with Desiree—that, of course, is still at the heart of the novel today.

  Scott Stroot and Peter Waldron, the theater professors at the time, accepted my play into the spring festival as a workshop production. And the crowds who saw it over its two-night run in February 1998 laughed their asses off. Pat Vogelpohl, the playwright of the play that Lick was paired with for the festival, paid me a compliment about my use of dialogue that made my heart sing, the memory of which still brings a smile to my face today. He was the best playwright on campus, one of the best writers period, and I couldn’t believe he liked a thing I’d made.

  The cast of that production
included Robyn Blanchard as Veronica, Robert DaPonte as Tim (the Runt), Amanda Damstra as Tracy (not Veronica’s daughter Tracy, but an early version of Desiree with a different name), and Chris Larsen as Andy the Chinese Food Delivery Boy. I directed, with assistance from my good friend Jim Arrington.

  Over the summer of 1998, bolstered by the success of Lick and the confidence that success gave me, I began work on a full-length follow-up for my senior project. It was called The People vs. Jesus Christ and it focused on Veronica’s cousin Michael, who, yes, was based on me. And who, yes, for the half-dozen people who read my never-published comic book Nightmare in the late high school or early college days, borrowed his name from the eponymous superhero’s alter ego.

  The trouble with Christ, from the beginning, was that I had that title and little else. I’d listened to XTC’s “The Ballad of Peter Pumpkinhead” one too many times and I set out to create some modern-day Jesus story, something so epic and unwieldy and ostentatious that only a 20-year-old with a 20-year-old’s delusions of grandeur could have conceived it. My senior project mentors, the aforementioned Scott Stroot and my undergraduate creative writing mentor David Crouse, did their best to steer me in the right direction. But, drunk on the tiny bit of success I’d had with my first play—I’ve always been a lightweight, and success tasted every bit as sweet as the fruity cocktails that were my staple then—I didn’t listen very well.

  Little survives from Christ in the book you’re now reading, but it did have its influences. The earliest drafts of Christ involved a trial and the later drafts introduced the character of Jenna Worthing for the first time. The speech about the baby Jesus that Michael gives to Robin in the chapter titled “A Trail of Honey to Show You Where He’s Been” was also almost fully-formed in the play.