The Sweet Relief of Missing Children (11 page)

T
hey were going to forgive her. It was decided. It had always been decided, even before the girl ran, even before she was born. You forgive your child. You are always forgiving them, always, every moment, every breath. It's the work of parenthood.

The call came. Grace wanted a drink but there wasn't time for a drink. Hank tapped his watch.

They would forgive her for everything. Even her meanness, even her beauty. She had been like a house of cards, brilliantly poised, edges upon edges, but now she had fallen. It was bound to happen. She had fallen, and now they were in a hurry to gather her up.

Grace readied her face. She stood in the bathroom and applied silvery eye shadow, lipstick, a sweep of blush for each cheek. She wanted some protection, the feeling of a mask.

Hank said, “Let's go.”

“She'll leave again. You're aware of this?”

“She called. She asked to come back.”

Grace allowed him to lead her by the elbow out of the house. He backed their yellow Valiant down the driveway, his mother's paste pearl necklace shuddering from the rearview mirror. The road lay empty before them.

It was what she wanted. They were getting her back. Yet as soon as the call came in, as soon as she'd heard Judith's unnerving, slow, even voice on the bedroom extension, Grace had been filled with dread. What had happened to her daughter? What injury or shame was great enough to propel her back to them, when she'd made it so far? She wanted her girl back, yet as soon as the phone rang she was startled by a feeling so close to fear she didn't know what else to call it.

She was not wearing shoes. She sat in the passenger seat, barefoot, the plastic floor mat beneath her feet covered with sand and receipts, candy wrappers.

Grace said, “I'm just trying to prepare you for the inevitable.”

“Nothing is inevitable,” he replied. “Prepare
yourself.
”

“She'll break your heart. That's what I mean. I have to look after your heart.”

“My heart. My heart.” He lifted a hand off the wheel, made it into a mouth that would not stop talking. “What do I care about that blood balloon? It's hers to break.”

The world was blurring by. They rose to the crest of a hill, saw cows chewing up a field in the distance, the whole sky empty as a palm.

“You'll get a ticket,” she warned.

“She can have my heart,” he continued. “My kidney. My liver. When you have a kid you give that stuff up.”

When she was six, Judith had said to her, “Mama, what do you want to be when you grow up?”

“I am grown up.”

“No, I mean when you grow
up
up.”

What was she getting at? Grace's own mother, from her earliest memories, had seemed intractably, hopelessly old. Did Judith not perceive Grace with the same distortion?

Grace said, hazily, “Maybe I'll be a firefighter.”

“Boys are firefighters.”

“A doctor?”

“A mother,” corrected the girl. “You want to be a mother.”

“I already am a mother,” Grace said, touching the girl's chin. “To you.”

The girl looked annoyed. “I'm going to catch sharks. I'm going to live in Florida. I'm going to wear a necklace of shark teeth and everyone will be frightened when I walk into a room.”

“Where will I be, when you're in Florida?”

“You'll be here,” Judith said brightly. “You'll have another little girl. Her name will be Karina Marie. You'll be old.”

The child spoke with a light, insouciant sort of authority. She spoke as if it were true, as if saying it made it so. And Grace had thought:
No.
I
am the one who gets to go to Florida.
I
am the one with a shark-tooth necklace.
She imagined herself on a folksy homemade raft like in
The African Queen
. She thought:
I am the one getting out of here; Judith is the one who'll be stuck with a baby.

It was the only time during Judith's childhood when Grace recalled feeling the need to escape, the only time she felt the whims of her adolescence return. She had the urge to say:
Your father had a vasectomy!

Now Hank stepped on the gas.

“Maybe we should set up some ground rules,” he was saying. “Like we get to meet her friends. We get to say yea or nay. And she needs to be home by—what's reasonable? Eleven?”

It was too late to start again, and Grace said so.

“It's never too late!”

His fervid optimism, his hope. But Judith was not theirs anymore.

“She's always ours,” Hank said. “Don't let her tell you otherwise. She's a con man. You have to think of her like a con man. We love her but we can't trust her. That's the new plan. Eleven o'clock sharp. And we get to meet the boys. We'll have them over for supper. I want to look them in the eyes. I'm a bartender,” he said. “I can see inside their heads.”

H
elen was waiting. Her dress came over her knees, pale pink cotton, cinched at the waist with a belt like a shoelace. It was ill-fitting, tight at the bust and loose at the waist, shorter than it was meant to be. She was such a tall girl; it was hard to find clothes. Practically, primly, in the manner of a houseguest undressing for bed, she removed her shoes, her kneesocks. She placed the shoes next to each other, heels against the base of a tree. She balled the socks, tucked them into one of the shoes. She waited.

He stood behind a pine, hidden in shadow. Despite his best intentions, he could not speak or move. It had become impossible to do anything except study her ankles, her feet which were long, narrow, and white. He saw that she squeezed her toes, clenched them into the muddy ground, and released them. He imagined putting his mouth on the ball of her ankle. He imagined how fantastically cool the mud must feel on her feet, how that sensation of gripping freshness would rise up her body, jolt upward, enter her loins—he imagined this because he knew that sensation, because he was feeling it himself. He wanted to go to her, to apologize, to make amends, to bite the bone of her ankle, but he couldn't. For the life of him he didn't know how to move. He was pinned cheekwise to this sticky bark, while not fifty feet away on the mossy riverbank she gazed at the water. Her skin echoed the sky in its faint, peculiar green. The water was black and sequined, its surface winking like the sides of a fish. And now what was she doing? What she was doing was the thing he'd been imagining all day, and yet
how
she did it shocked him: with grace and speed, as a magician snaps the square of silk from his hat, she took the bottom hem of that prissy dress and, in one motion, whipped it over her head. It was off. It was gone. For a moment she held the dress above her. Now it wasn't a dress anymore—it was a flag. No, it was
the
flag, the flag that declares the beginning of a new country. His heart, his stomach, surged.
Good God. Good grief. Holy mother of.
She wasn't wearing underwear of any kind. And while she'd set down her shoes so neatly, while she'd balled her socks and tucked them tidily away, the dress she merely tossed aside—it landed in a heap on a jumble of rotting logs. It was part of the wilderness now. She stood there for a moment, lifted her chin, appeared to examine the tops of the trees, all those buds and brambles, a roof of incipient green, a radiating veil, a green and shivering heat. He could not hear the birds anymore. He could not hear the water. He was only his eyes. He could only look. Calves, thighs, rear. He stared. Wrist. Wrist. Shoulder blade, blade. He could not move, could not speak. The neck like a dancer's, the knobby knees. The breasts which were bigger than he thought they'd be, loose and low. And then she did something that terrified him. She smiled. She smiled, yes, but it wasn't a smile he knew—it wasn't a smile he'd ever seen on Helen or anyone else for that matter. How, then, could it feel so familiar? The smile was cold. It was, in its toothiness and absoluteness and calm certainty, death itself. She offered this smile to the sky, to the river, and then turned and—could she see him?—leveled it right at him. It was a weapon. He could not turn from it. He could not speak, could not offer anything in return except his dumb staring face, except his clodhopper lust.
Baby,
he tried to say. He said it. Again.
Baby
: but the word emerged as if from the mouth of a child, high and plaintive, a whine. Did she hear him? He couldn't tell. She didn't respond. She simply walked into the river. He heard her call out slightly at the cold, heard her make a whimpering sound like any ordinary girl would make. For now she was an ordinary girl again, shivering, rubbing her arms, bobbing slightly up and down. Then she vanished beneath the surface like a trick, the water sealing itself above her, clean and cold as ice.

She didn't come up again.

Between her legs there had been a patch of hair the color of wet straw, and that was gone too.

He opened his eyes. They were on the highway. On the radio someone was complaining about a sports team. Those perennial bums. Lazy, overpaid sissies. Good for nothing. Fat, too, said a fat-sounding voice.

It was a dream, but in every part of his body he felt it was not a dream. He thought:
Helen's dead. She's drowned.
“I need to make a phone call,” he said to his uncle. He realized he was out of breath.

Joe turned off the radio. “Huh? Who'd you need to call?”

It was a good point. Who would he call? The police? Her parents? And say—what? I had a premonition that your daughter drowned? She and I were supposed to have intercourse in the woods and I think she's there now and drowned in three feet of slow water? It made no sense.

“Forget it,” he said, but his heart was pounding. “It doesn't matter.”

It made no sense but he saw her just the same, the corpse of her, vein-marbled skin, dead mouth, dead nipples, saw a team of people in uniforms dragging her from the water back to the mossy bank. He saw flashbulbs. He saw someone use a pair of tongs to lift that pink dress, slide it into a plastic bag.

Joe said, “What's on your mind?”

No, it was a scene from a movie. That was all. It was fake.
You're no psychic,
he told himself.
You're just a horndog. If you can't have her you'll kill her,
that sort of thing. He needed to clear his head. He rolled down the window. Cool, polleny air rushed his face. “I'm fine,” said Sam. “Hungry.”

“Apple in the glove box.”

It was over. It was a dream.
Just eat the apple. Just eat the apple.

 

S
oon they arrived in the city. Or—no. They didn't
arrive;
one couldn't drive to such a place. It was as if the city simply appeared, rose up from the plain world to take issue with everything you've ever said or thought. They got closer, closer, and at last entered its heart. The city was scabrous, dingy, humid. It was a buzzing of flies and fluorescence. Its smell, too, buzzed in the air, trash and pizza and fried things, a woven odor that prickled the skin at the back of your neck like a light touch. The skyscrapers inspired a funny kind of queasiness in him, buildings so vividly erect, stern, they were like signs of a future species. They drove past tenements, past glass storefronts full of shoes and books and dresses, a whole window of bright yellow dresses the color of a kitchen sponge, and then down a cross street past a kid who kicked their bumper. Joe pulled over and bought two rubbery hot dogs from a sidewalk vendor. There was a hissing in the air, a weak crackling charge, like the moment just after fireworks conclude. At one intersection a man with a kerchief over his mouth tried to wash their windshield.

“What do you think?” Joe asked.

Sam didn't like it here at all.

It had a kind of hoary glamour, brought to mind those cartoons in adult magazines where the devil is not evil but rather a gentleman sophisticate, puffing on a long cigarette, surrounded by women and books and fire. The devil walked among them. It was almost like a party. It had all the fiendish, permissible cheer of Halloween. Sam's heart was racing; he wanted to throw open the door.

But then, at the next stoplight, everything changed. He'd been seeing it wrong. At the corner, waiting to cross, stood a regular woman wearing a tweed coat and those lace-up shoes with little heels. His aunt wore shoes like that. She was holding the hand of a small boy. They were ordinary people living in a very big town, waiting to cross.

Finally, on a dim side street paved with cobblestone, the car jerked and bounced, then stopped before a low concrete building. Joe grunted, put the car in park. Somewhat grandly, like a person sitting down to a feast, he rubbed his hands together. “We made it, Sam.” There was some pride and surprise in his voice, as if their very arrival had been in question, as if landing here were itself the feat. He turned off the engine, said, “What a dump, huh?”

Chrome letters spelled
The Wickman
across the building's face. A bird's nest sat in the crook of the
k,
and a green-and-white-striped awning, splattered with bird shit, hung over the front door. Otherwise it seemed perfectly fine, but Sam said, “A dump, yeah.” His heart picked up again. She was in there—tedious, limb-flinging Judith was in there waiting for them, probably drunk or high. He wanted to get this over with. The sun was setting.

“We'll be nice to her,” Joe said. “No questions. No disapproval.”

“I got it.”

“You follow my lead. No sudden moves. We get her to the car and drive to our house. Her parents meet us there and take her home. Simple.”

“Simple.”

“You might not want to look her in the eye.”

“Okay.”

“And you might want to avoid touching her. No handshakes. No pats on the back.”

Sam agreed.

“And she'll be crying, Sam.” He thought for a moment, brows knitted. “You get yourself ready for that, too. She won't be the girl you remember. Put on a soldier's face. And be yourself.”

They got out of the car with the inflated authority of police officers, slammed their doors. They were like cops. They were like soldiers. Inside was a girl whom together they could save. Joe's shoulders, chest, rose. He set his jaw. Joe held the door for Sam. The lobby smelled of smoke and cat piss. Mustard-colored wallpaper shone like old corduroy, separating at the seams. A natty orange cat slept in the middle of the lobby, its tail twitching. Behind a counter, his feet up on a couple milk crates, a man was reading a magazine. A glowing green UFO on its cover:
Last Days of Peace!
The guy looked up briefly, said something like “Hep ho,” turned a page. His beard was the same color as the cat. They walked briskly through the lobby. In the elevator, Joe said, “What a place, huh?” Sam agreed. “In and out,” Joe said, but the place distorted these words. Crimes happened here. Sex happened here. Every room had a girl like Judith in it. The quiet itself felt like a crime. “Breathe through your mouth,” Joe said, but Sam didn't need telling.