The Missing (9 page)

To her own dismay (wasn’t she supposed to be a fighter?), she didn’t get up off the floor, but instead curled into a ball and played dead. When nothing hap- pened she peeked out and saw Albert opening the door to the children’s room. Then came the sounds around her that she hadn’t noticed before. “Shut up! Shut up!” Sheila was singing. Bram tore his
Corpus Christi Senti- nel
into pieces and flung them in Albert’s direction, as if trying to confetti him to death. The children’s section was ominously quiet.

Her left ankle hurt like fire, but she hobbled toward her office. She stopped when she realized that the only reason she wanted to get there was to call Fenstad. She wanted to hear his steady, calm voice. She wanted, ri-

diculously, to tell him that she might not like him, but she definitely loved him.

Across the way something smashed. Had Albert pushed over a bookcase? Then a small voice cried, “Help,” and adrenaline coursed through her blood so fast she could feel the rush: A kid was in there with Al- bert. A little kid.

On a hobbled foot, she started to charge. But then she stopped. She needed a plan or he’d swat her like a fly. Her ankle hurt so bad that she was biting on her lip to keep from fainting. She scanned the reference room. There was something she was looking for. Something she could use. She looked at the bookcases, the too-big couches, the computers (electrocution?), the Bic pens not nearly sharp enough to poke out an eye, and then she saw it near the newspapers: Sheila’s two-foot chain-link lock. “Shut up!” Sheila sprayed with spit as Meg lifted it off the table and limped into the children’s library.

Albert was standing on the rainbow carpet with his back to her. He’d cornered Caitlin Nero and her daugh- ter, Isabelle, behind a Barbapapa chair. Everyone else was gone.

Meg sneaked up behind him. She saw sparks and her peripheral vision went hazy. This pain in her ankle was no sprain: Her leg was turning blue. She bit down harder, until she tasted blood, and it kept her focused. Then she loosened the chain in her hands so that the heavy part hung slack enough to swing.

A second passed, and then another. She waited. Maybe this wasn’t necessary. Maybe she was the real nut in the room, swinging a bike lock like some kind of modern-day Bernie Goetz. This was how people got killed. Hotheads overreacted. Her grip started to loosen, but then Isabelle coughed, and Albert charged.

Meg dragged her broken foot behind the good one.

She cocked her arms and swung just before he got hold of Caitlin Nero, who’d inserted herself between Albert and little Isabelle. Meg swung so hard that she spun, and then, off balance, fell.

The lock curved around Albert’s back and struck his pelvis. The sound it made was a soft thud, and at first she thought she hadn’t swung hard enough, but then his upper body teetered over his still feet, and he col- lapsed. He fell down next to her so that they lay facing each other. The L. L. Bean catalogs from his pocket scattered across the rainbow carpet.

He didn’t look like Albert. His mouth was drawn into a scowl, and the rotten booze on his breath was rancid. Like star-crossed lovers, their lips were inches apart. “Where did I go wrong?” he mouthed. Then his eyes fluttered shut.

Caitlin and crying Isabelle stood over the two of them. She noticed, though she hadn’t before, that they were wearing matching pink floral dresses, which even in the moment struck her as asinine.

Caitlin’s brow was furrowed in a look of pure hatred. It was shocking in its intensity. In its secrecy, because she did not know that Meg was awake. Her eyes rolled across Meg’s small body, and it wasn’t Albert, Meg re- alized, that she hated.
She knows what I did with her husband
, Meg thought with the kind of shame that feels like an open wound.
So why does she keep coming to the library every week?

Something warm trickled across her fingers, and she guessed, but didn’t want to know for sure, that it was Albert’s blood. At first she thought Caitlin had begun screaming at her, could have sworn she heard the word “whore!” but then, in the distance, she recognized the sirens.

F I V E
‌

Robitussin for What Ails You!

O

n the afternoon that his wife swung a steel chain into her good friend’s back, Fenstad Wintrob was listening to Lila Schiffer babble. Her voice was Chinese water torture. Duller than a dinner with Andre, more superficial than a “Free Tibet” rally, more painful than

the eyeball-bleeding stage of hemorrhagic fever.

Lila had been talking nonstop for twenty minutes. Her current topic was the changing of the seasons, and the fact that autumn always seemed like the end of something. “Like you’ll never get it back, because even when next summer comes, it won’t be the same. It’ll be a different summer,” she said.

Her dazed smile gave her the semblance of someone who’d recently undergone an ice-pick lobotomy. She didn’t know how to talk to men, even her own psychia- trist, without flirting. But despite her late-night calls, low-cut tube tops, and the lingering smears of bright red lipstick that she left on his cheek when she kissed him good-bye, Fenstad wasn’t tempted. Well, that wasn’t true. Her body was round and taut as a 1940s pinup girl’s. But he’d never seriously considered her. First, she was his patient. Second, infidelity was not something Meg would forgive.

He winced just thinking about this morning.
Cold,
she’d called him. Then she’d shaken her head like a martyr, and he’d wondered whether all women were fickle, because did she think at forty-eight years of age he was going to change?

Besides, cold wasn’t so bad. It meant he was practi- cal, dependable. People trusted him. That’s why he was a psychiatrist. He didn’t chew on problems: He solved them.

His whole life, people had confided in him. Kids on the track team who still wet their bed (well, just the one), teachers who couldn’t get dates, fellow med school students with drug problems—you name it. They had always come to him first.

Even his mother used to chew his ear. Back in Wil- ton, Connecticut, her voice had cut through the air like ammonia. “Fennie!” she’d hollered whenever she heard the patter of his little feet along the wooden hall- way. Some of his sharpest childhood memories were of standing vigil at her bedside while she itemized her complaints. From underneath her finely woven Egyp- tian cotton sheets, she’d weep for her long-dead grand- father and the imaginary cancer that she was convinced was scooping the marrow from her bones. For reasons he still didn’t understand, her room had smelled like fermenting cabbage and musky sweat. To this day he associated that scent with her undiagnosed manic de- pression.

When Fenstad was old enough to stay away from home, he did. He joined the cross country and track teams, and long after meets were over he’d sit on the gym bleachers and study until a janitor turned out the lights. At night he’d sneak through the back door of his parents’ house, gobble whatever leftovers in sealed Tupperware he could find, and then collapse into bed

without taking off his shoes while his stereo head- phones hummed the lullabies of Warren Zevon and Lynyrd Skynyrd.

Still, encounters with Sara Wintrob were unavoid- able. “Fennie,” she’d call when she heard him tiptoe- ing down the stairs in rubber-soled sneakers weekend mornings. He’d dutifully visit her room, where she’d tell him, “You’re father doesn’t love me anymore. He’ll leave me, and we’ll be all alone,” or better yet: “I think I’m dying, Fennie. My heart keeps stopping and start- ing again.”

Despite her endless complaints, she managed to get a lot done while Fenstad and his father were out of the house. The meals got cooked, the groceries bought, and the clothing washed. Even the
Hustler
collection Fen- stad hoarded under his mattress got tossed into the garbage bin every month like clockwork.

The incident Fenstad would nominate as most wor- thy of forgetting took place when he was a sophomore in high school. He’d just come home from track prac- tice after racing three sets of eight hundred-meter time trials. His legs had been weak as wet noodles when Sara called him into her room, and he’d had to hold on to the banister as he’d mounted the stairs. When he got to her bedside, Sara was breathing fast and heavy.
Hy- pochondria,
he’d immediately thought, and then, deep down, even though he knew it wasn’t true,
heart at- tack
.

“Mom?” he’d asked. Her white cotton nightgown had been tangled around her waist, and he’d noticed that her legs were still firm despite the apparent disuse. Her dark hair had hung in wet, sweaty rings. She took his hand and placed it over her breast: “Do you think it’s a lump?”

In those days he’d thought about girls constantly,

though he hadn’t touched one yet. In school he got so horny just looking at them that he had to fill his mind with images of Cambodian refugees and his grand- father’s fungus-filled toenails just to keep from explod- ing. He’d started to wonder whether he was a pervert, because even when his fifty-year-old fat-assed biology teacher stood from behind her desk or even smiled at him, his body had saluted her, and he’d imagined throw- ing her down against her steel-backed chair and getting it on.

And so there he had been with his hand on his moth- er’s breast. Something moved beneath his fingers, and at first he’d thought it was a slithering insect. It wasn’t a bug. It was her hardening nipple. To his shame, he felt himself go hard, too. “Feel that, Fennie? Do you think it’s a lump?” she asked. He looked her in the eye and she winced; they both understood that there was no tumor.

Sara and Ben still lived in Wilton, Connecticut. Ben never left, and Sara never died. They called once a week, and if Fenstad answered the phone he handed it to Meg, explaining that Meg was better at small talk. Most of the time, Fenstad believed he’d forgiven Sara for that small act of madness. Other times, when he woke from restless dreams and the lingering smell of fermented cabbage, he knew he hadn’t. To this day, whenever someone called him “Fennie,” shivers coursed along his spine like fallen power lines jigging across blacktop.

Shortly after the episode with Sara and her thin nightgown, something inside Fenstad broke. He’d been wet with his own emotions as a kid, practically leaving puddles of the stuff like slugs’ trails wherever he walked. People were starving in Africa, he cried. His dad raised his voice, he quivered. A kid at school asked him why

he didn’t celebrate Christmas, he didn’t come out of his room all weekend. And then something broke, and he got so depressed that he had a hard time getting out of bed. He couldn’t read, sleep, or tie his shoes without choking back tears. Most alarmingly, he started to imag- ine that the carpeted floor in his parents’ bedroom was wet with blood. Every time he walked across it, in his mind the thick fibers squished under his feet and sucked on his shoes.

He never recovered from that break. Instead, after a while, a switch flipped inside him, and the depression ended. In its place he turned cold. Life got a lot easier after that. The burning in his stomach that he would later self-diagnose as juvenile ulcers healed. He was one of three Jews in a WASP town, but he stopped worrying that the kids who called him “kosher” meant some- thing worse, like kike. Instead he put his arm around them, shined ’em a toothy grin, and said things like
Fuck, yeah. Proud of it
. He asked the prettiest girl in American History to the winter formal junior year. Her name was Joanne Streibler, and after the dance she let him lick his index finger and explore her soft, velvety places.

Sure, he didn’t feel things with the same intensity that he used to. He wasn’t elated the first time he and Joanne made love in his cousin’s Chevy G20 van. He didn’t jump for joy when he was accepted at Harvard, or when Meg promised to love, honor, and respect him at the Massachusetts State Justice of the Peace. But he was pleased, and that was just fine. Besides, Meg felt things deeply enough for the both of them.

He knew he exhibited symptoms of an antisocial per- sonality disorder. He never cried for people like Lila, or stayed up nights worrying about them. Under different circumstances he might have become a criminal, a thief,

or even a sadist. When he learned of Meg’s affair he’d wanted to murder her, and he suspected that this in- stinct had lasted longer in him than in a normal person. He’d imagined burying her alive in the crawl space be- low the house, trapping her in the sixteen-hundred- degree waste incinerator at the hospital, strangling her with her own pearls while she begged for mercy, you name it. But the point was: He didn’t kill her. He for- gave her.

It was trite and a little infantile that he blamed his mother for the way he’d turned out, had become a doc- tor in order to save her, save himself from the night- mares so vivid that in his dreams even now he could smell the fermenting cabbage, feel the bloody rug on his feet, but so be it. You can’t help where you come from, and you certainly can’t help the direction that place points you.

So he had his complaints, and maybe he was cold, but he was doing his best with what nature had given him. And fortunately, nature had given him a good deal more than it had bequeathed to Lila Schiffer.

“On TV yesterday,” Lila said, “Dr. Phil’s guest was this guy who was talking about low carbohydrate diets. He said you should only eat red meat. It doesn’t make much sense to me, but if they say it on
Dr. Phil
it must be true.” With her fingers she traced the folds along the legs of her jeans. Then she continued. “Fall makes me gain weight . . .” He inwardly moaned. She was back on the changing seasons again. He wondered how she’d been able to rant about this for so many sessions with- out ever knowing that she was really lamenting her own fading beauty. “The houseflies come in fall. I hate bugs. Sometimes I want them to go away so badly I’m tempted to eat them.”

Fenstad drooled a little, and then wiped it from the

corner of his mouth with his shirt sleeve. He thought about Meg calling him cold. The bitch had spread her legs for the sleaziest sonofabitch in Corpus Christi, and you’d think he was the one who’d done something wrong. He thought about Chinese torture, the water dripping, dripping, dripping until a man went mad. He thought about a sickroom with plush blue carpet soaked in blood, and the sound his shoes might make as he walked across it.