The Longest Night (25 page)

W
eekends were quiet and lonely for Nat since Paul had gone. Weekdays, the world was full of women out running their errands, bobbing babies on their hips, smiling and shushing and scolding, eager for adult conversation. Come Saturday, however, these women were solidly booked up. Their husbands were home and it was as if they didn't even see Nat on the street, or if they did, they gave her a quick hello with a slightly pitying glance. Men had the amazing ability to keep women busy, to fill up their minds and thoughts. One man in the house crowded out everyone else.

As they hit the halfway point, then passed it, Nat made a long paper chain to hang across the inside of the front window, as the army wife deployment pamphlet had suggested. They would tear off one ring of paper a day until Paul returned. Each torn oval was a relief, a wafery rip of satisfaction, its flutter into the wastebasket like a banished butterfly;
we won't be needing
you
anymore
. But some part of Nat also held back, knowing that when Paul got home everything would change, for good and bad. She did not feel that she was wronging Paul by having Esrom for a friend, yet she knew full well he wouldn't like it, either. Then again, there was always something Paul didn't like. It didn't matter anyway; she wasn't going to stop. When Esrom came to the door she felt her heart swell with happiness; when he left she moped like a child.

N
AT'S FRIEND
P
ATRICE CAME
over for coffee once or twice a week—their friendship having graduated from mere playdates at the park—with her four-year-old daughter, Carol Ann. Other than Esrom's visits, these were the highlight of Nat's days. Female companionship was exhilarating, like tapping into a world she had been divorced from for ages.

“So, tell me about your charmed life,” she said one morning, pouring Patrice a cup of coffee. “Does your husband come home every afternoon at three? Does he do the dishes for you while you put your feet up?”

Patrice chuckled, stirring sugar into her cup with small, delicate tinks. “Oh, of course,” she said. “He comes home bringin' flowers. He makes the dinner, too.”

“Really! What's his specialty?”

“Pheasant under glass, oysters Rockefeller, and crème brûlée for dessert.” Her Georgia accent pulled each word in delightful, unexpected ways.

“He's amazing!” Nat said.

Patrice, with her thick inch-long eyelashes and frozen swoop of ice-blond hair, didn't look like she'd have much of a sense of humor, but she was somehow both refined
and
funny. Her eyes twinkled as she sipped from her cup.

In army wife fashion, theirs was a fast-moving friendship. Nat was learning the hard way that if you wanted friends in the military, there was no time to waste. Years' worth of closeness and trust and shared jokes were accelerated into weeks. Patrice had already told Nat of the time when, newly arrived at a duty station and with Bud away on duty, she'd had a life-threatening miscarriage. She'd had to call upon a neighbor woman—whom she'd had coffee with on exactly two occasions—to watch Carol Ann for a week until she was out of the hospital. “A week!” Nat had cried, marveling over this. But what else could Patrice have done? This was when Patrice confided that she was unable to have any more children, her eyes welling with tears. And there you had it: the deep, almost instant, and precious military friendship. “When we moved to Belvoir,” Patrice confided, “and I left my best friend Louise back in Georgia, I almost thought I'd rather trade Bud being deployed again.” She'd looked uncomfortable even admitting this. “Don't ever repeat that,” she said. “I love Bud.” And Nat had said, “Of course, of course.”

Now Sam and Liddie were playing with Carol Ann in their room, and with Patrice all to herself in the kitchen, hot coffee and poppy seed muffins on the table, chilly wind rattling the panes, Nat felt cozy and content, happier than she'd been in some months. Suddenly her life felt like it was full of good things: healthy daughters, the regular kindness of Esrom, girl talk with Patrice. And Paul, of course: She'd nearly forgotten to be thankful for Paul. She gave quick, silent thanks for his safety.

“That girl is still missing,” Patrice said, “the Zeigler girl,” and Nat's head snapped up.

“I know,” Nat cried. “I can't stop reading about her. Sometimes I wake up at night wondering where she is.”

“Really?”

“I just can't help it.”

Patrice seemed to make a conscious decision to glide over this particular quirk. “
I
think she ran away. Say,” she said, switching topics, “whose car is parked in front of your house? The green car?”

“Oh.” Nat twitched inwardly, looking at Esrom's green car. She was in the mood for confidences, not white lies.

“Didn't you used to have a yellow car?”

“I did, yes. That's our—our new car.”

“Where's your yellow one?”

“I didn't tell you? It's in the shop. I drove home on a blown tire. I'm saving up to pay for repairs, but a friend let me borrow this one in the meantime.”

“What friend has an extra car lying around? Is she on vacation or something?”

Nat hesitated. “Yes.”

Patrice shrugged. “Well, just get your yellow car fixed before Paul comes home, and he'll never even think to ask. He'll be so thrilled to see you again and meet the new baby, he won't care about a few dollars spent on the car. He'll let anything slide.”

“You're right,” Nat said. “Thanks.” And she held out the plate of muffins for Patrice, biting into one herself. She did not like to lie, but there was no way to explain the car's origins without making Patrice suspicious. The car was hers, and the person who'd given it to her was hers also, if she kept quiet about him and made sure no one scared him away.

T
HE NEXT DAY THE
Z
EIGLER GIRL
was found. To everyone's relief and amazement she was located alive in the home of a forty-six-year-old widower who'd been hired by her father to castrate sheep the previous spring. The man was in custody; Marnie Zeigler was back with her parents, occasionally trotted out in a plaid jumper to make quick, chipper comments about how fine she was and how the whole thing had just been a terrible misunderstanding.

That night Nat called her mother. She was fidgety and bored, agitated by the news of the Zeigler girl, and the practical issue of needing help around the baby's arrival was as good an excuse as any to call, though their conversations were never easy. She'd been hoping her mother would volunteer to come up to Idaho, but Doris never mentioned it. This bothered Nat, because Doris Radek volunteered for nearly everything else on earth.

Everything was fine back in San Diego, Doris said, their family's small medical supply business chugging along, Nat's brothers' kids growing and doing the requisite things (baseball, Boy Scouts). Doris babysat the grandchildren and played canasta with her daughter-in-law Marva. Nat's father was busy with his role as Esteemed Loyal Knight of the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks, and her brother George had joined up, too, as, Nat supposed, just a regular Elk.

As the conversation was drawing to a close, Nat blurted, “We had some strange news around here. A sixteen-year-old girl went missing for a month and then they found her in this middle-aged man's house.”

“Goodness, Nat,” cried Doris, “could you be more morbid?”

“They found her alive,” Nat clarified. “But it's so strange. When you see the father on TV, you can't tell if he's grieving or complicit.”

“Why,” said Doris, “are you bringing this up?”

“I don't know.” Nat was talking quickly, her heart pounding. She'd known her mother wouldn't want to hear about this but couldn't stop herself from talking. “It's all just so strange and because it's a local story, you can't escape it. You know how people get with a story like that.”

“It's sick,” Doris said.

“Yes, maybe so,” said Nat.

“Well. I'll see you in December.” There was a pause, staticky with distance, and Doris said, “Take care of yourself, and be good, Nat.”

Be good, Nat,
her mother's sign-off since time immemorial. Nat had always thought she was good—or good enough, anyway; she remembered a hazy time when everyone thought she was good, when she was a pampered and beloved small child, tossed in the air by her father, sitting patiently beneath the warm, steamy clicks of her mother's curling iron. Her brothers, twelve and thirteen years older than her, were dashing, all sun-glowing skin and right angles, calling her Princess and asking for kisses in front of their girlfriends, as if Nat's early pre-feminine affections deemed them worthy of a lifetime of later womanly devotion.

But when Nat reached eleven or twelve, she felt a shift in her parents' attitudes, and they seemed to regard her with suspicion. Had this guardedness always been there, just hidden within them, or did they really look upon her as a new person, the untrustworthy substitute for the innocent little girl who'd mysteriously disappeared?

By the time she got to high school, her family was mostly out of the house. Her brothers had moved out and were now married; her mother was involved in countless time-consuming charities and clubs; her father fully invested in the medical business, the Benevolent Elks, and their church (Saint Ignatius, or “Iggie's” as its parishioners nicknamed it, light and whimsical as an ice cream parlor).

Just before the start of Nat's junior year, her neighbor Meredith Petterson held a pool party at her house. The Pettersons were a well-to-do family who also went to Iggie's, and Meredith was a neighborhood jewel, with shoulder-length blond hair and bobby socks and fitted cardigan sweaters that were somehow modestly tantalizing. Their house stood at the steep of the hill with a turquoise pool nestled among oaks, tiki torches flickering, and a catered buffet (nothing casual about the Pettersons) of cold shrimp and cocktail sauce and lightly sweating petit fours on a wide oval plate. Being perfect parents, the Pettersons had funded and set up all of this, then drifted discreetly back to the house.

Nat swam with her friends Heidi and Ed, twins she'd known since childhood; she lounged in the cooling air and ate a lot of shrimp. At one point she looked across the pool and noted, at a table beneath the sparking torches, the youth minister, Pastor Tim. He was laughing, shirtless, in the center of a group of high schoolers. Other than the shirtless part, this was not unusual; Pastor Tim was only in his midtwenties, a guitar-playing missionary who sang hymns in a sort of over-emotive, preening falsetto and who also had, it was now revealed to everyone, pectorals crafted by the very hand of God.

Nat had seen these firsthand herself, a few weeks prior, a fact she was still trying to reconcile: She felt almost as if that had been not her but another person. It was widely understood that Pastor Tim was cruising among the young female parishioners in pursuit of a Mrs. Pastor Tim. (“He has a good job with the church,” Doris had whispered once in the pew, as if writing an ad, “and you know as a minister he's exempt from the draft.”) All the parents looked on, not disapprovingly, but with a sort of hopeful discretion: Many wanted their daughters to be his final choice, but they did not want to hear about his other test runs.

Nat had been an early contender; flattered and nervous, she had gone with him to a roller rink, an Italian restaurant, and a drive-in movie. He held her hand on all three dates, his own palm damp and squishy, his knuckles as hairless as a baby's. After the movie he'd taken her to a beach overlook, claiming to be familiar with constellations; he pointed out the Big Dipper and Orion and then removed his shirt. “I want to see
your
constellations,” he said. Nat had paused, wondering, in a stupid panic, if he meant her nipples like she suspected, but self-consciously thinking he might be referring to her moles. The whole thing was done in five minutes. Nat went along with it—was a participant, even; she could not claim otherwise. For a moment she had been excited, and then realized that it was mortifying. She had the odd thought that she was being a good soldier, that her mother would be strangely proud; the thought of rejecting and offending him seemed too horrible; even as it happened she didn't rule out the fact that she might become Mrs. Pastor Tim. Then it was over and she felt so nauseated that she knew she could not look at him again. She pulled off her socks and used one to line her underpants, stuffing the other in her clutch. The sides of the clutch bulged with it and she spent the drive home fiddling with the clasp. After that she did not return Tim's calls. Her mother fretted over this at first, but it only took him a week or two to move on to Meredith Petterson.