The Sweet Relief of Missing Children (7 page)

S
am's girl wasn't pretty. You couldn't call her that, but he didn't mind. He liked her long neck, like a dancer's, pale clean hair to her shoulder blades. She was gangly, wide-hipped, big feet. It didn't matter. He liked everything: her shirts a size too big, her sagging kneesocks. She went without a bra but not in a wild way, not like Mimi McKendrick who wore beads and black nail polish and let her little breasts knock about. His girl crossed her arms over her chest, drew attention to her own embarrassment, her shock at having wound up, one day, today, for no reason except dull destiny, a woman. Her eyes were clay-colored, her fingernails bitten to the quick. He admired everything about her. In her presence he was all clenched fists and thubbing heart.

“Helen.”

It brought to mind his grandmother (who wasn't a Helen but of the age when women were Helens) and a wooden horse and also a cat with half a tail he'd known as a small boy. The name was many things, belonged to people and animals and some cities, but it was hers first and hers foremost. It had a formality, he thought, a sanctity. It was proper. His first-grade teacher was Mrs. Helen. It could be a surname or a pet's name or a myth, but now that it was her, this girl, that's all it would ever be.

“Helen!”

There was nothing to do but shout it.

“Keep your voice down,” she said. “Hush.”

She said things like that—
hush
. She was just sixteen but spoke like a mother already, in a weary, vaguely amused voice.

“Helen,” more softly.

“That's better, yes.”

They were sitting on her bed and kissing. It was nearly dusk on a Tuesday in early spring. Her room was a child's room: pink walls, braided pastel rug, shelf of dolls in church dresses and straw hats, a ribbon tacked to the back of the door, which was closed. The door was closed and they were sitting on her bed and they had been kissing. It was kissing, yes, but it wasn't what he had imagined. It was kissing in name only: lips brushing dryly, no exchange of saliva, idle tongues, hands on their own laps. Still, he would take it.

The ribbon behind the door said
Runner-Up
in gold letters. A pink ribbon with gold letters, and at once he saw her as the runner-up, a too-tall girl pulling herself from the pool, out of breath, bloodshot eyes, a scrape on her knee, downy fuzz in her armpits. The sky would have been overcast, her mother frowning—“There'll be more races”—and handing her a towel which her sister had already used.

“I have a paper to write,” she was saying. “It's due Wednesday. The War of 1812.”

“I know about that war.”

He knew nothing.

He loved her as the Swimmer. She pretended not to mind being runner-up. She hated her mother, hated the girl who'd won the race. She loved the color of sky, like bone, and the chlorine burn in her eyes. Her face didn't show anything. She rode home in the back of the station wagon, arms and legs goose-pimpled, lips blue. She hung that ribbon up out of defiance. I will not care. I am not this ribbon. He saw everything with precision: her blue lips, bloodshot eyes, her cold and healthy heart. He was making it all up. He didn't know about the ribbon. He didn't know about her heart. He barely knew her. “Helen,” he sighed.

“They'll be home by seven.” She was talking about her parents. “I need to get dinner ready; they'll want to eat when they get back.”

On the wall was a piece of framed needlepoint, a peach-colored baby face and, in needlepoint script:
Babies are such a nice way to start people.
Beneath this was the date of her birth. But he couldn't believe she was ever a baby. It was impossible to imagine her without this particular gravity, this restraint.

“Helen.” He was careful not to yell.

“Yes?”

But he didn't know what to say.

“Oh, Sam.” She patted her hands on her lap.

He said, “I need you is what I think I'm trying to express.”

Express
? Why did he talk this way?

But she said, “Need?”

They were silent.

“You're something else, Helen. I want. No. Everything.”

“You mean intercourse, right? That's what you mean by
everything
?”

His hands and feet and neck burned.

“Sam.” She said this, too, like a mother. “Is that what you mean by everything? Intercourse?”

“Don't call it that.”

“Why not?”

“It sounds medical.”

“I want to,” she said. “I
do
want to.” Her voice was light, cool, a little mean.

He was terribly afraid. “Maybe we're not ready. No, we're not ready.”

“I want to,” she said. “Listen to me.”

He was listening.

“Helen. Helen.” He said her name the first time to remind them both of the girl she was supposed to be, and then said it again, louder, to celebrate the departure of that girl. He meant to speak to both Helens at once. A wonderful thought occurred to him: She was two Helens. He didn't need to choose.

It was six-thirty. Soon her parents would return.

They agreed to meet in the woods by the river, the next day after school.

They went outside and stood on her front stoop. The trees, newly budded, cast long shadows on the lawn.

“Don't tell anyone,” he said.

“Who would I tell?”

“Patricia?” This was her slit-eyed best friend.

She laughed. “You don't really know me.”

His throat tightened. “Of course I do.”

“Is the girl you know the kind of girl who wants to have sex with you in the woods tomorrow?”

The answer was a terrible, blessed no.

He walked down the street. Daffodils aimed their cyclopic heads at him. The dusk sky was yellowish, speckled with dim clouds. He walked until he was out of her sight and then ran. His mouth wanted to make a sound but he was afraid to let it. He clamped down on his bottom lip. What could he do between now and then? He couldn't go home yet. He couldn't run forever. Finally he let his mouth do what it wanted and it made a small, breathless gasp like cresting the Ferris wheel for the first time.

He ran until he came to Marco's, a dilapidated sundry at the corner of Maple and Eve, chimes on the door, old Marco with his cigarette behind the counter humming some dead song from his youth. It was rumored that Marco hired a woman to bathe him once a week though he was perfectly able to take care of himself. Sam wasn't supposed to be here; his Aunt Constance didn't approve of the place. There was a faint panic and pleasure in disobeying her. He looked through the selection of rude greeting cards, old ladies on the toilet, buxom nurses. One card was just some naked guy wearing one of those plastic Groucho Marx disguises on his penis.
Incocknito,
it said inside. He touched animal figurines, boxes of candy cigarettes. Everything was dusty. A stuffed frog. A squirt gun. A pencil that played the New Year's Eve song when you pressed a button where the eraser should be. Nothing was right. He couldn't present Helen with some trash.

“For a girl? I can tell.” Marco flashed his orangey teeth.

“No girl,” said Sam.

“Sorry. A
woman
? You got your hands on one of those, I bet.”

“I don't think there's anything here,” Sam said. “But thanks for letting me look.”

“You know who's one swank doll? Mrs. Marcusi, that's who. She's a tall drinka.”

Mrs. Marcusi, in kilts and flesh-colored knee-highs, shelved books at the library.

Sam moved for the door.

Marco called, “Hey! Hold on. You own the world and have no idea. I know what you want. You want a present for a real woman, right? I envy you. Come back here a second. I have the perfect thing.”

Marco fumbled below the counter, lifted a small bundle wrapped in brown paper. Slowly, tenderly, as one removes the dressing from an injury, he peeled back the paper. It was not what Sam expected to see. A mug. A large, beige coffee mug encircled by a ring of giraffes. These giraffes were engaged in an act of—well, it was intercourse.

“Orgy,” Marco declared. “Orgy of the animal kingdom.” Giraffe heads in giraffe crotches and rears and ears. They were linked, lapping and caressing and humping, tails entwined, necks and ears and hooves and tongues.

“Erotic safari,” Marco said. “Shows a wild side. Women want that, trust me.”

A wild side? They were children. They needed a pass to use the bathroom. They drank milk from tiny cartons. He couldn't give that mug to Helen. It was disgusting. He would never give it to Helen.

He paid.

He was supposed to be dead, was supposed to feel that he deserved nothing, not happiness or home or peace or Helen. He was supposed to feel that his life was borrowed. He was an orphan and therefore his life was not the puzzle everyone else's was. It was just a clean, flat surface, and he would one day slide off. His death would be a kind of catching up. He had to remember that. He ran home, holding the paper bag to his chest. He would keep the mug in the back of his sock drawer. His Aunt Constance could never see it; she would have cried at a mug like that. But he had to have it. It was the first disgusting thing he owned, and it felt like a start.

C
onstance's life began with another woman's death. That was its true start. It began not when she was born, or finished school, or left her mother's home. Her life began, finally, when Louise packed her family into their station wagon, put on her sunglasses, turned the ignition, and drove into a train.

At the time, Constance was secretly pregnant by Louise's brother. Their wedding was the last time Constance saw Louise. A wedding! With guests and an organ player and a minister whose habit of rubbing his paunch made Constance sure he knew her secret condition and was taunting her. She could hardly believe it was happening to her, so resigned had she been to a life in her mother's house, to growing old alone. Yet here she was, in this awkward dress, wearing mascara for the first time. After the ceremony, they descended into the church basement. The windows were high, small, and covered with ochre linen that muddied the light.

Constance's mother pulled her aside, hugged her shoulders, and said, “I hope I've prepared you.” They stood in the alcove that held the coatrack and the framed picture of Jesus with a shag haircut. “I mean for tonight. I mean for”—she waved her hands—“for the rigmarole.”

“I'm prepared, yes,” said Constance.

“I wasn't,” her mother said. “I was not at all prepared. Oh, but I'm afraid I was supposed to give you more advice. Did I give you enough advice? Is there anything you want to know? Ask me! It will hurt some. What else?”

Constance was the only daughter, the youngest. Her father, her three brothers, were long gone. She looked at her mother, saw her mother's mouth moving, heard her mother's too-late ministrations, and felt nothing but freedom. She was married.

“I know enough.” She sounded unlike herself—so serene, so effortless. How did she manage that? Such poise! This was not what she expected. She was supposed to quake, to weep. Or maybe she was supposed to confess that she already knew what it was like, that she was already pregnant. She was certainly supposed to feel guilt. But she did not. She was tall and plain and resolved. A wife. Oilcloth covered the plywood tabletops. A buttercream cake and small pile of gifts did not come close to filling the table in the corner. It was a simple, ordinary affair. The music was sappy, the food plentiful, mayonnaisey salads, melon balls, a gravy tureen filled with jelly beans, for it was just after Easter. But forget the food. The food wasn't what mattered. What mattered was that she was pregnant and married and couldn't stop looking at her husband's sister.

Louise in a cranberry taffeta dress, black eyeliner.

Louise whose lips were oddly pale.

Pale lips, sucking a ball of honeydew.

Louise, drinking punch from a Styrofoam cup. Louise, when the punch was gone, taking a bite from the rim of the cup, spitting a crescent of Styrofoam into her palm, doing this again and again, until there was no more cup, until the cup was just a pile of pieces in her hand. And later, in public view, adjusting the top of her dress, cupping a hand around each breast and heaving it upward. Later dancing too closely with the pharmacist. Later, by herself, reading a wall plaque, on her face a quizzical expression, an expression of confused awe, of mouth-gaping wonder, so striking that Constance felt compelled to see what the plaque said, was surprised to find it was merely a list of some people who'd helped to plant the garden out back.

Finally, toward the end of the reception, Louise caught Constance's eye and gave her that smile. The smile! It was a prize ribbon. It was coffee before dawn. It was a bathtub, no, a bed. It was—what else? It was a bird on a railing in sunlight, a precarious, utterly-itself thing. She had been waiting for the smile, which could say different things. Now what it said was this:
You're as good as gone, my girl, but at least we're in it together.

They were in it together. They were sisters-in-law. It was a good day.

That night, during her first sanctioned lovemaking with Joe, Constance could not stop picturing her sister-in-law's hips pressed against the pharmacist. Her own hips, beneath Joe's, were still. She willed them to move a little, left to right, and then in a tiny circle. Joe, into her neck, said, “Whoa boy—okay now,” and it was over.

Dear Joe, solid old Joe, had none of his sister's drama. He had no private smile, no secret gaze, and this is precisely what Constance loved. He was easy to read. He was good. He was like a simple tool—it does the job, goes back on the pegboard when the work is done. So few people are as settled into themselves, she thought; so few people have such simplicity of purpose. Dear Joe. Dear boy. She married him. She was secretly pregnant. That he had a sister who wore swirling skirts, and swore, and drank beer, and had two children yet seemed wholly unpossessed of any maternal spirit, and wicked hips—this was a bonus. Someone to watch, to study—someone as from a foreign country whose customs she could observe close-up, whose ways she could inspect—at leisure.

But as it turned out there was no leisure.

The next day she and Joe left for their honeymoon, four days at the Falls. They stayed at a motor lodge called
Splash!
The view from their window was a busy road, a hamburger joint. They couldn't afford a place with a view of the water, nor would she have wanted one. It turned out to be awful, a screaming gash in the earth. It did something to the pressure in her left ear. Why are people compelled to gather at the most violent places? Constance's stomach tumbled as she looked over the rail, the whole world reduced to this cavernous monstrosity. She blinked, turned away. She understood why people might put themselves in barrels.

Her life began now. Here. An ordinary moment, the evening of the second day of the honeymoon. They were in their rented room. Joe, sitting on the edge of the bed, kept his eyes on the muted television, on a horse running through a field. What was he thinking? She could not guess. She had just washed her face, and was drying it with a towel, thinking that she very much liked the smell of the miniature soaps that came with the room, that perhaps she should ask for a few bars to bring home with her. She sniffed the towel and her palms. A strident floral scent. An optimistic smell. No, not flowers. This smell was to flowers as—

There was a knock at the door. Together, they looked up. A voice: “Uh—Joe? Joe Griffin?” It was as if the Falls itself had paused—wasn't there a law that said you were anonymous in your motel room; that your name would go unuttered; that you would not be disturbed; that perhaps, for a spell, you did not exist? She had hung the placard on the knob! (Hung it with not a little shame: this demand for privacy seemed, perversely and precisely, an invitation for others to imagine unspeakable deeds.) And now a knock, despite the placard. Now, following this knock, a name,
his
name. She shivered.

It was the manager, a tool belt around his waist, empty except for a hammer. He said, “Sorry to bother you folks. Call for you. Family emergency, I'm afraid.” He wore the striped hat of a train engineer and a silver ring on his pinky. He led them to the office. On the table was an ashtray crammed with cigarette butts, a can of beer, and the phone, receiver on its side. Joe hesitated a moment, then picked it up. He said, “Hello?” So casually, as if answering the phone at his own house. She watched his broad, heavy-lidded face absorb the news. His eyes narrowed momentarily; he pressed his lips together. That was all. His face returned to itself.

The honeymoon was over. It was not appropriate to ask for the soaps. They left immediately. A light rain had begun and the road threw off an oily, opalescent sheen. Louise had been crossing the train tracks. She had tried to outrun the light, had ignored the bells, and now she was dead, and her husband was dead, and the baby. But they weren't going back for the dead. They were going back for Sam, the older boy; he'd survived. Constance shook. That calm, that poise—they were gone, had never existed. She was heading back to Ringdale, the town of her birth, but now she was married, now she had a husband, a new house, a nephew whom she would raise as her son, a baby in her belly. She had a family and she had a family tragedy, when before she had nothing but her bedroom, her shelf of mysteries, and her mother. This new life unfurled before her the way a flower opens. It was a flower opening in a time-lapse film, revealing too fast its private, dewy innards, the yawn of its petals reduced to a flash, everything soft made stark.

“We'll take him in,” Joe said. “Won't we? Of course we will. Right?”

She said, “Of course we will.”

Of course, she said, but inside her was a pulling sensation—the same thing she'd felt at the Falls. The words
look away
flashed in her head, just like when she'd gazed down at that terrible feat of water, but now there was nothing to look away from. There was just the windshield, the empty road. Look away from what? She allowed herself a vicious, utterly incomprehensible thought: She did not want to bear this child growing in her gut. She did not want to have a child at all. My goodness! She almost wanted to laugh, for she had no idea a person could become such a surprise to herself. Then the thought disappeared, pushed out by other, horrible thoughts, images of Louise, dead, of her body, their bodies, in the yellow weeds by the tracks, buttercups.

Later that night a burly cop who stunk of garlic thrust Sam into her arms. He was four years old, pale, chubby. He wore pajamas that were too short for him, moccasins, a fringed leather vest. His fingernails were overgrown and dirty.

“I'm an Indian,” he said flatly. In one hand he held a homemade headdress—a single indigo feather attached to a strip of construction paper.

What was she supposed to say? “Very nice.” She did not know how to be around children.

He came to them with a little scratch on his left nostril, just the tiniest thing, a wisp of red thread. It was all the accident had done to him. How could that be? A locomotive tore the car in two and that was all he got. Only after it healed did she admit to herself that she'd been carrying a certain irrational fear: that he was an angel, or some kind of saint, or perhaps a monster. (It was hard to know the difference.) That he survived out of magic and would bring that awful power into her home. But it healed. He was just a lucky boy. But: lucky? On more than one occasion this was said of Sam, “lucky boy,” and always Constance inwardly cringed.

On the second night she gave him a bath. She placed him in the tub, handed him a pot and a ladle to play with. She said, “Honey, do you know how to wash your hair?” but he didn't answer. She was unprepared. Did a four-year-old know how to shampoo himself? To rinse thoroughly? To wipe his rear end? He sat in the sudsy water. His face was round, owlish. His bangs needed trimming. She saw that his stomach appeared bloated, hard, and that his navel was a greenish-blue, protruding pock, not unlike a grape. She noticed his penis, that it was the same pale color of his cheek, and that it was erect. She turned away.

Louise was dead but in those early days her presence emerged, somehow more vivid, more intense, than when she'd been alive. Constance would find herself thinking:
What would Louise say about that? What would Louise do here?
When she was scared to hold Sam on her lap, for fear of the erection, or for fear of his tenderness, or—which was worse?—lack of it, she imagined Louise laughing, imagined Louise's knowing, secret gaze, and then Constance was no longer afraid. They were in it together, as it were. As she moved around the kitchen, as she tended to her husband and nephew, cooked and cleaned, paired their socks, made their beds, she imagined she was in Louise's body, or Louise in hers, tried to move the way Louise moved, with that easy glide, with that same haughtiness in the hips, the same elongated neck. A few weeks later, when she miscarried, she somehow felt this was Louise's doing. Not that Louise, from the other side, beckoned her unborn child forth—nothing like that. Rather Constance felt that these mutinous thoughts were not really her own but belonged to her dead sister-in-law. In this way Constance could observe herself without culpability. In this way she could sit on the toilet, a clump of bloody toilet paper in her hand, a spasm of pain radiating from her midsection, and the word that could appear in her mouth was:
good
. She whispered it. She wondered how that word could appear in her mouth but not her brain. It belonged simply to her body.
Good. Good.
It was as if it had been whispered by Louise, by the dead, who were allowed to say unspeakable things because no one heard them.

It crossed her mind that they'd switched children. Here she was raising Sam—was Louise perhaps, in some dim afterworld, tending to Constance's miscarried child? She didn't allow herself to linger on this idea. It was hard to imagine, after all, Louise hand in hand with—what? A dark syrup, an absence of form. She didn't dwell. They had chores to do, things to purchase. They bought Sam school supplies, shoes, clothes, a goldfish called Dingo who lived for one month. How could they have been so stupid to buy the new orphan such a fragile creature? She would never forget coming upon the boy as he stood over the bowl, that fish floating on the water's surface, Sam's face blank, without grief or surprise.

Gradually their lives settled down, assumed an ordinary routine. His photograph on their television set, a thin, gamine child in a pressed plaid shirt. Long neck, sober eyes, a certain pinchedness in his face that drew attention to his cheekbones. He grew into a well-mannered boy, thoughtful and polite, and, she had to admit it, somewhat plain. There was nothing monstrous or saintly about him. He was a kid who did his chores and oiled the chain on his bike and, on her birthday, wrote to Constance in a homemade greeting card:
I'll always be grateful to you
. He was sincere, earnest, so much like her in this respect she actually found it disappointing. Louise was nowhere on him. After a while, her presence in Constance vanished, too.