The Sweet Relief of Missing Children (14 page)

“You've got the place to yourself,” he called after her.

The back room, she saw, was really a large closet.

“Enjoy,” she heard him call out. “Take your time.” He said something else but by then the curtain had fallen back behind her and no sound could reach her, no daylight, nothing, no one. A bare orange bulb on the ceiling rendered the closet and its contents sepia, turned the experience somehow innocent, quaint, even as it was happening, even as a gasp rose up in her.

Photographs covering the walls. A row of file boxes on the floor, teeming with magazines. What was to stop her from looking? Who was to tell her not to? She allowed herself to breathe. She allowed her shoulders to relax. She looked.

Here, a woman holding a horsetail. A woman using a horsetail to whip the backside of a man whose every inch of skin was covered in tattoos.

Here, a girl who could not be more than sixteen, long hair in pigtails, cross-legged in front of a dollhouse. In her hand a doll, a little figurine. Only it wasn't a doll at all, what she was holding. Only she wasn't a girl at all.

She looked.

Photographs so stark and flat they seemed not to depict real people but rather their desperation, as if desperation were not feeling but form.

A girl—this
was
a girl—on a big bed, head thrown back, neck twisted in such a way, eyes closed, hands limp, she might have been dead. Her hair was soaked; the sheet where her head rested, you could see, was dark with water. And a fat woman whose body was covered with scars—a neat one on her belly, a raised one on her breast, over the nipple, a vertical line, so that the scar and nipple, together, made an exclamation point. Did these people exist? Where did they live? Why on earth did they do this? What did they eat for breakfast?

A tingle on Constance's neck, a shiver, and she heard someone enter behind her, heard the curtain graze the floor, saw the light change and change back. The curtain fell into place. She could feel the presence of this new person; the air shifted with the change, grew imperceptibly warmer, even darker, as if the new body absorbed light. Constance did not turn. Her heart spun. It wasn't Louise; she could tell the person behind her was real. Marco? She couldn't bear turning around. She fixed her eyes on a picture pinned to the wall before her face—but it wasn't a picture, you couldn't go so far as to call it a picture, it was just a series of images of genitals, dozens of them, like mug shots, men's and women's both, rows and rows. Like the genitals were on the lam, that's how it looked, like you would get a reward if you called a number and reported their whereabouts. Her heart unspooled like yarn, making a mess of everything, a tangle in her chest, a knot in a knot in a knot. Behind her, Marco or whoever he was breathed. Constance did not breathe.

She pictured the frozen food aisle of the supermarket. She imagined herself debating lima beans or peas under the fluorescent light of the genital-free supermarket, its gum-chewing clerks, the stacked apples, the candy bars, the sweet stink of the soap aisle.

The person behind her breathed.

The grocery store, of course, was
not
free of genitals.

The person said, “Finally I'm not the only girl.”

Constance turned.

She was tall—taller than Constance. In her adult height she wore a girl's pink dress, a shoelace for a belt, and tennis shoes. She had a girl's face and a girl's shiny, lank hair, parted in the middle. She was Sam's age! Mud dotted her shoes, and the dress couldn't have fit worse.

“Good afternoon,” Constance said. Shame swept through her body, taking everything decent, like a net collecting gems from a silty river. She felt her mouth twitch.

The girl crossed her arms over her chest and said, “Look at how he holds it! He's so proud!”

Constance looked, but there were so many pictures that met this description. Which one was the girl referring to? She could not ask.

The girl said, “Biology is hilarious.”

Constance wanted to look calm but knew she did not.

“I mean, women have a lot to be proud of too, biologically speaking. But of course it has to be hidden. It's designed to freak you out. It's not real.”

“I know,” Constance said, but she did not.

“People want to be thrown for a loop. Not you, obviously. You look upset.”

That was not the right word,
upset.
Constance could say nothing—her eyes stung, her face felt tight. She was so tall, this girl, too tall, in her pink dress, its hem coming down. It wasn't a flattering dress.

“It's just fine.” Constance's voice shook. “It's natural—to be—natural—to be—curious.”

“I think so too,” the girl said. Then she smiled. The smile, toothy, sweet, unashamed—it helped to pull Constance back into herself.

The girl said, “My mother would murder me. People make such a stink. But it's just some theater. Why not? That's how I see it.” She licked her lips, shrugged. She might have been talking to a guidance counselor about her plans after graduation. “I haven't done it, myself. I look, yes, but I'm not one of those girls—” She pointed to a photograph. It was a woman on her knees, wild-eyed, clasping the hairy shins of a man who stood over her, gazed down with faint disdain. The caption said:
Mr. Coventry Wants You to Beg
. “I don't feel very much like that.”

Constance said, exhaling, “I've never been to a place like this before.”

“Of course not.”

“I was passing by. That man suggested it.”

“Poor Marco, I know it. You want to, like, ease his suffering. Hey, look at this one.”

The girl was holding a single magazine. Its cover said
IT'S A HARD COCK LIFE
.

“Oh,” said Constance.

“Ignore the title,” said the girl. “It's filthy. The titles are all written by men who think their stupid puns make them geniuses. It's like there's two kinds of men—the ones who want to show you their penises and the ones who want to make puns. But the puns aren't the point.”

Beneath these words, a pretty teenage girl in a tattered dress, a redhead, held a mop handle between her legs.

“Orphans,” the girl said.

Constance made a gasping sound, and the girl said, “Oh no, no, I'm not a lesbian. It's just—my boyfriend's an orphan.” She shrugged. “I'm fascinated by them. They're my weakness.” She flipped briskly through the magazine. Constance saw more teenage girls, all in tattered garb, washing windows, making beds, sweeping floors, their breasts exposed, their vaginas. The pictures portrayed hardworking, lonesome, ill-fed girls, toiling day after day, sometimes pleasuring each other with their hands or mouths. There were men, too. A warden in a suit, a young janitor, both wearing whistles and military boots. The men were displeased with the girls and found novel ways to show it. “There's something about orphans,” the girl said. Then: “This is my favorite.” She pointed. Constance steeled herself—but it wasn't a dirty picture.

“Sweet,” said the girl. “Isn't it? That kind of longing. He wants to hurt her but can't. She wants to leave but can't. They're equal.”

The picture showed a girl on her cot, flat on her back, covered by a plain sheet. Bare shoulders, hair spread around her on a pillow, dreamy face. Kneeling at the bedside was the janitor—his hands floated above her breasts but did not touch. His face was tender, worried; he bit his bottom lip. He needed a haircut. The picture didn't belong.

“Not your kind of thing, I guess.”

Constance shook her head.

They looked at one another in the strange light. But at once Constance wasn't sure—was it her thing? Did she have a thing? Why did the girl presume to know? Blood warmed her face. She said, weakly, “It's natural.”

“Yes,” the girl replied, nodding. “Perfectly natural.”

Now, with the girl's easy utterance of the word, Constance tried to understand what was natural. You could say
anything
was the way of the world. You could say that nothing was stranger than any other thing. Couldn't you? And suddenly this closet was as weird and fitting as any weird and fitting thing in the world. The girl touched Constance, lightly, on the shoulder, a reassuring pat.

The girl said, “You want to know a secret? I thought I might lose my virginity today. I had planned to.”

“Today?”

“We had a plan, but he didn't show.
C'est la vie
, I guess.”

“You're so young…”

“Sixteen.” The girl shrugged. “Is that really young? I'd be married if I lived in Morocco, or the Renaissance. How old were you?”

Constance in the backseat of the car. Constance in that drop-waisted chambray dress she'd sewn by hand. Joe's big hands, his grunts, the squeak of the wipers that kept moving even though the rain had stopped. There wasn't any music: the radio was broken. She'd have liked a little music.

“Sorry,” the girl said. “I shouldn't ask. This place changes everything. I'm not always like this, I swear.”

“Nineteen,” Constance said. “We got married.”

“Yeah? I guess I'm glad we didn't do it. He's an orphan, sure, that's a plus. Anyhow, he chickened out. Poor Sam. They claim to want it, but they're scared just like girls—
other
girls, I mean. Not me, I'm not scared.”

Constance felt her steady, thrumming pulse. How was it so steady? She remembered the little boy with the feather headdress, the boy with the dead mother, remembered the feeling of his head against her chest; then remembered before all that, being in the backseat of that car, the long, quiet air of afterward, Joe's head on her chest, the wipers still moving, how he apologized over and over, as if he were the one who'd demanded it, as if it were his idea.

“I could take it personally,” the girl said, “but I'm making the choice not to.”

Constance meant to say goodbye and get in her car and drive to the grocery store, but instead she said, “I wasn't scared either.”

“He's a sweet boy—there'd have been nothing to be scared of. I would have done it. But he never showed up. Oh well.”

Constance said, “I wanted to do it.” She meant to be in the frozen food aisle. Instead she was saying, “This boy, Sam, did he touch you?” The words, a thrill and a horror, left her mouth numb, as if she'd been chewing on ice.

The girl said, “Well, I gave him the opportunity. But we only kissed. Yesterday. For the first time. He's a sweet boy, a sweet kisser, but I think I'm a little advanced for him.”

She meant to be paying for the lima beans but instead she was putting her arms around the girl,
Sam's girl,
and when the girl said “Oh, you're so sweet,” Constance could say only, “I'm not.”

They hugged and Constance felt a longing without guilt, shame, or indecency. A startled, strangled noise emerged from her throat, a noise that sounded too much—it caught her off guard—like a moan. She pulled away, coughed.

The girl coughed too.

Then Constance said she had to buy some groceries.

“Pudding,” the girl said, “Lately I'm always craving pistachio pudding!”

Would Sam marry this girl? She wanted to protect them from their future.

“Wait,” Constance said. “There's no hurry. Take your time.”

“I guess we'll see, huh?” Her smile was faint, distracted, arrogant, as if she knew something Constance would never know, as if her very innocence supplied her with insight Constance could not possess. Constance left the child to her magazine. When she emerged, Marco grinned at her.

“You still lost?” He blew a smoke ring. She felt newly in control of herself. “No,” she said. She drove to church, parked, entered, and peed. She washed her hands. Then she sat in a pew, held a sleek hymnbook, the presence of which in her palms had the same soothing power as a hot-water bottle. She felt, for the first time, safe. Louise was gone and wouldn't be back. Constance moved her lips in the shape of a prayer, and dabbed holy water on her eyelids, and then went home to prepare her secret sauce and wait for the heroes.

A
nything can happen in ten minutes. One can cook an egg or fall in love or lose a fortune or make a pot of coffee or be born or find God or leave god or fall out of love or die. One can find the right girl or the wrong girl. One can fail to know the difference. Sam felt with the whole of his body that he would never know the difference. Ten minutes. Things happen that fast. In ten minutes you can look at a certain girl on a bed, a girl who took your Helen away. In ten minutes she can go from maniacal and mean and unforgivable—to what?

They looked at each other. She had the face of a cruel nurse, the one who's called in to tend to the intractable patients, who'll wrench an arm from its socket in order to administer a shot. “You're like a forty-year-old man in the body of a child.”

He didn't have to be good. He said, “You look like a slut.”

“That's Q for you.”

She lifted her arm. It was slender, very pale. On the inside of her elbow were two small scabs. She said, “Teeth.”

“No they're not.”

“Do you want to see them all?”

He said, “Where is this guy?”

“He'll be killed soon is my hunch. He owes people all kinds of money.”

Her hair was the color of cashews but her eyebrows were dark. She closed her eyes and tugged on the ends of her hair and then, eyes opening, with urgency: “Do you have any cigarettes? Please say you do.”

“I don't.”

She nodded, sighed. “You're a nice kid. I could stay with you here forever. You don't smoke. You're a virgin.”

An intolerable silence followed. She was looking at him with clear, sad eyes.

She said, “Your mother killed your family, didn't she? I mean she did it on purpose.”

He blinked.

She was waiting. She did not shrug or look away or blush or give any indication that she had just committed a crime. How was he supposed to respond? He couldn't imagine what words might be equal to the task, or what would happen after he used them. They looked at each other.

What could he do? He decided to answer.

“I can't know for sure,” he said. “But I believe so.”

He had never spoken such a thing. It wasn't true and it wasn't a lie. It was a feeling that could not be classified or lived inside—it made him an exile.

She nodded. She said, gently, “I'm very sorry, Sam. I'm very sorry about that.”

She picked at the hem of her dress.

“I don't feel right,” he said. His mouth was dry. A shimmer in his peripheral vision.

“Yeah, you don't look so hot. Your lips are white.” She brought him a cup of water. He took a small sip—it was warm; he tasted blood. He spit it back into the cup.

“I'm not diseased,” she said. Her voice was itself again, shot through with disdain. “I'm not contagious.”

“I know that.”

Did he? He was a little dizzy. He thought about Helen. She hadn't drowned, he knew that. She was living and breathing and writing a composition about the War of 1812 right now. It was he who was dead. His life was meantime. He drank the water. She said, “You want to know something else? Q left me for a man. He's a homosexual. A vampire.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean he's a fruit bat. I did all of it, whatever he asked, and he goes off and leaves me—what?” She opened up her hand, showed him a few bills. “Can you sit here for a minute?” She patted the mattress next to her.

He did what she asked.

“I wish you were a little uglier. Q was ugly. You can't trust beauty, you know what I mean?”

He didn't, not yet. He said, “Yeah.”

She said, “But I think I can trust you. Promise you'll never lie to me.”

He nodded. It seemed an easy thing.

Her yellow dress, one strap slipping off her shoulder. The stack of tarnished bracelets on her wrist. The slump of her shoulders, the dark bristle on her bone-white legs, her scowl and vegetable breath and how she sat with her legs a little too splayed, like a boy. He was close enough to smell her breath—to feel it.

The door was locked. Her breath in his face. You must imagine what it does to a boy.

She tilted her head, said, “Do I look like a bad person to you?”

“No.” He answered out of instinct, then, remembering his promise, reconsidered.

“I don't know,” he said. “Maybe a little bad. In a good way.”

She snorted. “Bad in a good way? Poor puppy. I turn you on, huh? Is that what you mean?”

It was and it wasn't. What he could not say was that with every passing moment he suspected
he
was the bad person, that all the goodness he'd worked to cultivate—the manners, the grades, the clean clean room—they were just a protest against his true nature. When it came down to it he was bad. The idea entered his body in the quick, overriding manner of a muscle spasm. He was bad not because of sex in the woods with Helen; that was good. That was by-the-book goodness, he realized. That would have been easy, that would have spelled a life in Ringdale and a couple kids and a job at the hardware store. He'd pretended it made him bad but really it was what they all wanted for him, Constance and Joe and his teachers and everyone. Sex by the river would be an extension of his goodness, a confirmation of it, a sealing of it once and for all.

Did it make him bad that he wanted his uncle to suffer? Did it make him bad that what he felt when he saw his uncle's nervousness and damp flush was—it was pleasure. That was the word. There was pleasure in seeing his uncle banished, exiled from this room, in knowing that his uncle was afraid. His mother had not been a good woman. Perhaps Sam was bad too. Perhaps this was his true self and it had been waiting all along, here in his room, for him to claim. It was like he'd discovered some secret, long-forgotten box in the basement, moldering behind the furnace, and inside was a letter his mother had written him.

Judith said, “I would commit hara-kari for a single cigarette.” She held two fingers to her mouth in a wistful V.

The letter said,
For god's sake do what you want. I am giving you permission, which you never needed.

It said,
Look at what is right in front of your eyes.

Here was a bad girl. Here was a ruined person whose words were barbs, whose demands were clear and mean, who murdered Helen with a blink of her eye. He looked down at her parted thighs. His heart was a chattering mouth.

Now the knock at the door. His uncle: “Kids! Time's up. Let's hit the road.”

Neither of them moved or spoke. He kept his gaze on her lap.

“Time's up,” Joe called again. “Kids? We'll get milkshakes.”

But he wasn't ready to leave this room. It was like a mirror version of his own room. All his life it had been here, in its simple filth, a doppelgänger room, and he'd never known it existed. And that made him think: what other things and people and places were out there, echoes of him which he needed but would never be able to find? It wasn't fair making him leave so soon.

“Sam?” Joe called. “You ready? Sam?”

And he loved Joe so much! He did! Loved him with every part of his being! As a child he had a fantasy of living inside Joe's workboot, somehow miniaturizing himself so he could curl up where the toes belonged, and now he wanted only for his uncle to disappear, drop dead in the hallway if it had to be that way.

Joe knocked harder.

Sam didn't answer, didn't go to the door. He did nothing.

Judith whispered, “I'd like it very much if you kissed me.”

Finally he lifted his head. She was looking at him, her mouth open a little. He saw her glistening teeth. He saw the scab at the corner of her lips, like a crumb she'd missed. What could he do but what she asked, again and again?