The Missing Girl (6 page)

64

My mommy worries about everything in the whole world. She worries too much! That’s what I say. Every day in the world, she says, Fancy don’t just run across the street and don’t talk to strangers and don’t go in the woods at the park and get your feet wet and don’t eat too much candy and don’t go out without your boots on and did you remember to brush your teeth and did you do your work in school today. She has a million kazillion worries about me and she says I give her gray hair but she puts stuff on her hair from the drugstore and it isn’t gray it’s black and sometimes it’s red and I laugh when she says gray hair.

But I forgot to tell her that this cute person Michael came to my class and told about the Special Olympics in Syracuse, which we could go to on the bus because Mrs.

Sokolow my teacher said we should think about it, Fancy, you’re such a good runner I bet you could win a medal, and here’s the funny thing, a medal is metal, but it sounds like when people call me mental—

Whoa, girl! Whoa, girl! I say that to myself when I get mixed up, and then I have to go back to Go, like in Monopoly, which is my favorite game in the whole world because I can be a rich person in Monopoly and have houses and five hundred dollars, but it’s not real money
65

because if it was real money I would give it to Mommy and Poppy and make them happy. I love Mommy and Poppy, and I love my sisters, and I love jokes and funny things. I have a big sense of fun and Mrs. Sokolow my teacher says, Good for you, Fancy, you enjoy life, and she gives me a hug when I make a joke. And that’s all I have Urge right now. Thank you. Good-bye. I love you, I will kiss you. Ha-ha! Kissing a tape recorder! I am
sooo
funny and I make myself laugh. I love me. I love everybody.

66

MY BOY

SINCE THAT AFTERNOON when she

almost ran into Ethan Boswell, Beauty had been watching him.
Beauty and Ethan: The Movie, Part Two
. Beauty Herbert, PI, keen observer of Ethan Boswell. Naturally, it was a covert business, a secret operation. Naturally, it was juvenile, but what was to be done about that? All this stuff had always gone on in her head, and it still did.

Replacement for real life.

Was Ethan shy? He fooled around like the other boys, bumping, crashing, making his presence known, but he also stuttered, and he blushed. He was not the sort of boy on whom, through the years, Beauty had secretly crushed
67

and always privately dubbed
My Boy
. Ethan didn’t fit the mold. It was a different kind of crush. Hearing Ethan in class stumbling on a word turned Beauty’s heart tender toward him. So this is what happened, this is how it went: she watched him, she listened to him, she yearned for him, and then she wanted him. But so what? Her fate was to be forever unkissed, forever untouched, forever unable to do anything about it.

That’s what she thought until that day in March when she went for a walk—for once, no work, no sisters, no one needing her, and the woods at the edge of town beckoning.

68

THE RAILROAD BRIDGE

THE MAN WALKS down this scruffy side street often on the weekends. He walks past the faded hardware store, past the video store specializing in “adult movies,”

past the tattoo parlor, its green neon sign blinking day and night, and then comes to the Eminent Diner with its red dome and greasy windows.

He enters the diner. He likes the food here; it’s plain and solid, like his mother’s food. As always, it’s crowded and noisy and he knows no one, and no one knows him.

Which is just the way he wants it, and why he puts up with the noise and the crowds.

He finds an empty booth. A boy wearing jeans and a
69

T-shirt that says do i look like i care? fills the water glass. The waitress appears. “Hi, hon. What can I get you?”

“Beef stew, please. And an order of mashed potatoes.”

“Anything else?”

“Coffee.”

“Right away, hon.”

When his order comes, he cuts the meat into small chunks and pushes aside the carrots, the same gestures he always made with his mother’s beef stew.

When he leaves the diner, he walks a few more blocks to the old railroad bridge over the river. He stands at the entrance to the bridge, gathering his courage. His fear of heights is a deep shame to him. The narrow pedestrian catwalk is little more than two boards loosely laid side by side, and through the gap between the boards, which creak warningly as he steps onto them, he tries not to look at the fast-flowing river below.

He walks steadily, carefully, one foot before the other. Is that a train whistle he hears? He falters; one foot slips off the walkway. His chest tightens. He imagines himself running as the train bears down on him, the engineer futilely blowing the whistle, himself running, stumbling, and falling, falling through the wide-open bridge supports into the raging water.

70

His heart is whacking away in his chest. Then he says,

“Trains don’t come at this time.” He says it out loud, he says it firmly, as befits a rational man. He repeats it.

“Trains don’t come at this time.” He looks quickly around to make sure no one is there to hear him talking to himself. His father’s father died of a heart attack, so did two uncles, all of them in their mid-forties. His age. He draws in a deep, faltering breath, then another and another.

Finally he continues to walk across the bridge, and he makes it to the other side, untouched. Safe. He makes it, as he has made it every other time he’s walked here, but never without imagining falling to his death on the rocks in the river below.

That walk puts period to the weekend.

Monday morning he’s at the usual corner at the usual time. He doesn’t see any of the girls. The next morning he sees all five of them. He should be elated, yet it’s come about that now he doesn’t care for so many of them at once. Five! Too many, too many!

They rush past him, chattering, their backpacks bouncing. They don’t notice him. He could be a light pole they’re passing. The one who talks too much almost knocked into him one day. She didn’t apologize, just shouted something
71

at the others and raced on. He doesn’t like her. He doesn’t like the awkward way she runs, her feet turning in. There’s something stupid in her face. He wouldn’t choose her.

That’s definite.

He doesn’t like the big one, either, the tall homely one that he’s seen other places. He really doesn’t care for her at all. It isn’t the homeliness, per se. He isn’t prejudiced that way. After all, he knows he’s no prize in the face department, although the mustache he’s grown these past months has definitely done something for him. The big girl, though, is too big, too tall. She has breasts. He doesn’t like breasts. He especially doesn’t like those big puffy ones, the ones that stick out like balloons.

He eliminates her, and he eliminates the stupid one.

He just won’t think about them. That’s a relief. It clears matters up. He can concentrate on the other three, which makes everything neater, more orderly. Only three. Funny that he was so delighted at first with five. But everything changes, doesn’t it? That’s the way life is. Nothing stays the same. You can try and try to keep things in order—and he does—but something is inevitably always going to screw it up. Throw a monkey wrench in the works. You have to be clever to stay on your feet, to keep out of the
72

eye of the storm, and he is clever. He’s got everything under control.

He strides, swinging his arms. An aerobic walk and the delicious murmuring of his mind. The delicious questions.

Which one does he like the best? Which one is his favorite? For a while it’s been the small, quiet one, but there isn’t much of her. She’s a skinny thing, the only skinny one among them. Doesn’t appeal.

So it comes down to the youngest one—he thinks she’s the youngest—with the long brown hair or the sulky-looking one with the fat lips and cute little belly sticking out of her jeans. He goes back and forth in his mind. This one. That one. Hair girl. Belly girl. Which one? It’s only a game. It doesn’t mean anything. He’s only looking, letting his thoughts play, playing with his thoughts. Nothing wrong with that. It gives an interesting flavor to his days, makes him step out of the house each morning with something to look forward to. And during the day, he can think about them, pass the two of them through his mind. All in his mind. Touch her hair. Touch her belly. Which one? Belly Girl or Hair Girl. All in his mind. And it makes the time pass.

73

THANK YOU FOR THE NIGHTMARE

“AUTUMN . . . AUTUMN . . .” Someone’s calling you. You try to answer, but your mouth is glued shut, and it’s so stupid not being able to talk that you burst out of your dream. “Whew!” you say into the darkness, joyful at your quick getaway. Then you realize that someone
is
calling your name. It’s Stevie, leaning over from the top bunk.

“What’s the matter?” you ask, but you know: Stevie had a nightmare. Every time Stevie has a nightmare, she wakes you up. Not Fancy or Mim or Beauty. Only you.

“Want me to come up?” you say, which is what you always say, and you’re already pushing aside the covers and
74

climbing up into her bed. “Was it a really bad nightmare?”

you ask, snuggling in next to her and yanking a little at the covers, which she’s hogging as usual.

“It wasn’t a
good
nightmare,” she says, and bumps her butt into you for asking such a dumb question. “It was horrible,” she says, “it was raining like crazy, and it was dark, and I saw Poppy on the roof. I could see
everything
, it was so real. Poppy was wearing those striped overalls with the big pockets? And he was just set to go down the ladder, and then he slipped, his foot slipped right off the ladder.”

Your stomach is going all yucky, like you want to throw up, like you’re standing there in the rain, too, watching Poppy on the ladder, like it’s not even a dream. You cud-dle in closer to Stevie, and you must have fallen asleep for a moment, because the next thing you know, she’s saying,

“. . . wanted to save him, but I couldn’t, I just had to stand there and watch him fall and smash into the ground. He looked
dead
, he just lay there, he didn’t move.”

Stevie’s voice goes high, like she’s going to cry, except she never cries. “It was so
real.
It was raining that afternoon when Poppy fell, remember? I could hear the rain hitting the metal roof. I even saw the color of the roof. Green.”

75

You remember that it was still raining two days later, when you all went to look at that green metal roof, Poppy with his neck in a brace and his arm in a sling. Stevie is starting to tell the whole dream again, but quick, before she can get to the dead part, which will make you cry, you know it will, you say, “Stevie! Poppy is okay! He’s getting better. He’s right down the hall with Mommy, in their bed.

It was just a dream, Stevie.”

“I know that, Autumn,” she snaps. “I’m just trying to tell you something, I’m trying to tell you how horrible it was.”

Now she sounds like herself, ready to bite your head off, and for once you’re glad of it. Your arm is around her waist, and your nose is in her hair, and you say, “Your hair smells really good. Is it a new shampoo?”

For a moment Stevie doesn’t answer, and you think she’s going to get mad that you changed the subject, but then she says, “Same cheap old stuff that cheap old Mommy always buys. You know the way she squeezes every last drop out of the detergent? The bottle is empty, you know it’s empty, everyone knows it’s empty, but
she
turns it upside down and squeezes and squeezes, just in case there’s one little drop left.”

76

“She does the same thing with the milk,” you say.

“And the juice,” Stevie says.

“And the salad oil,” you say.

“And if you catch her at it,” Stevie says, “she’ll tell you that Grandma told her the most important thing she ever learned.”

And then, at exactly the same moment, like a perfect chorus, the two of you say it together, just the way Mommy says it, in her hoarse voice: “Waste not, want not!”

It’s bad to make fun of Mommy, you know you shouldn’t do it, but you squeal with laughter, and just then, when you’re all full of love for Stevie, and all perky and proud that you were so clever in helping her forget her nightmare, just then she says, “Go back to your own bed, you’re sweaty and stinky.”

“I was going to sleep with you,” you say, and you try to snuggle in closer.

She gives you a little shove. “I can’t sleep with you puff-ing in my ear like that.”

“You didn’t even thank me for the nightmare—”

“Thank you for the nightmare!” Stevie’s laughing again, but at you, this time. “Thank you, thank you, okay?
Go
.”

77

So you climb back down to your own bed, which is cold now, and you try to get comfortable, but you’re so awake you can’t sleep. Then you hear Stevie snoring away above you, and it’s not fair! You get all teary thinking how Stevie kicked you out of her bed after you were so nice to her, and you decide you’ll never help her with another nightmare, never,
ever.
And that’s the last thing you remember until morning comes.

78

SOMETHING DRASTIC

THIS WAY COMES

THAT DAY WHEN Beauty entered the woods was one of those rare early April days when the temperature suddenly shoots up twenty degrees, and winter briefly turns into spring. Beauty was stealing a couple of hours for herself, a chunk of time free of her job at the florist shop, free of her sisters and her mother’s endless needs. The sun had been in and out all day, and the ice on Newton’s Pond, where Beauty and her sisters skated every winter, was soft.

In the coldest months Beauty could walk across the long frozen pond without a thought, but now she went around it and past the boulder that looked like a hunched-over giant. As a child, she had thought nothing in the world
79

could be bigger than that boulder. She patted it and turned into the woods and onto the worn path that led to the top of Farley Mountain.