Among the Missing (22 page)

“Of course I do, bro,” he said sheepishly. “I’m your brother—of course I love you.”

For the second time in my life, I almost told him. I could feel the whole story lining up in my head, ready to spill out.

But Bryce cleared his throat. “I’m going to walk you home, bro,” he said. “I think we’re both getting kind of tired, you know?”

“I can walk myself,” I said. “No problem.”

“Are you sure?” Bryce asked. “I mean, it’s only a few blocks. I could walk with you.”

“That’s all right,” I said. “I want to clear my head.”

It was late, maybe three in the morning, and as I walked home from Bryce’s place, I passed again along the edge of the park. The air had turned cold now, and the bare trees rattled, the wind pulled through the playground, back toward the creek, toward that hedge of lilacs. I hunched my shoulders, tucking the collar of my coat up, quickening my pace. I made myself think of Ricky alive, of Ricky grown up and in some sunny place, the tanned, breezy version of Ricky I’d seen vanishing into the crowd of an outdoor mall in Boca Raton. He had forgotten us entirely, had freed himself long ago, for reasons of his own.

I tried to build the story in my mind, but I ran the last few yards past the park, nevertheless, a terror quickening in me. By the time I crept into my old room, where Patricia was sleeping, curled softly in my old bed, all I could think of was a corpse under the leaves or the muddy bank of the creek, the skeleton of a teenaged boy.

I took off my clothes, letting them drop heavily to the floor, and when Patricia stirred, half awakened by my climbing into bed, I whispered, “Shhh.” She moaned gently, and I murmured, “It’s me.” I huddled against her, shuddering a little as her mouth traced sleepily against my neck. “Mmm,” she murmured, as if the physical touch told her what “It’s me,” meant. Me, I thought. Me. Me. Her hand moved up the inside of my thigh, slowly, steadily, and I tried to hold myself very still as her fingers traced lightly over my skin. I could feel the box of Ricky’s stuff staring down at me from the top of the dresser, the T-shirt, the pictures, the drawings. “It’s you,” my wife whispered, and the December wind exhaled a long, raspy breath, rolling down through the park, into the yard, against the window.

T
rent was having an affair with an older woman. Fifteen years older. People who knew about it were titillated. They asked prying questions, and Trent would have to admit that yes, Dorrie was a teacher at the small college where he had been a student. And yes, he had been in a class of hers, though he’d dropped out before they ever got involved. What did people want? Yes, Dorrie had been married before; yes, she had a son, who was only five years younger than Trent himself; yes, it was kind of weird. He didn’t know what else to say. People would compare the situation to various movies they’d seen. Was it like
The Graduate
? they wondered. Was it like that one movie with Susan Sarandon and the young guy? No, it wasn’t. If it was like a movie, it was one that he didn’t belong in, one he’d stumbled into by mistake, an awkward and unprepared understudy. He spent a lot of time alarmed with love, a nervous, uncomfortable feeling, as if a warm piece of smoky glass were lodged
in his chest. His mind frequently produced such poetic images, and they humiliated him with their dorkiness.

Which is why, after a time, he didn’t really talk about Dorrie with people he knew. Things kept happening—they got into fights, they made up, they moved in together—but he kept that part of his life pretty separate from his friends and coworkers. He didn’t tell anyone, for example, when Dorrie’s son decided to come out for a visit. He didn’t want to hear what they would have to say—he didn’t want to imagine them gleefully discussing it behind his back—and so he kept quiet, even though he was in a terrible state of anxiety. Whose advice could he ask? He thought about telling it to Courtney, the young woman who bartended with him, but then thought better of it. He thought that she had her own agenda.

He had decided that he wouldn’t go with Dorrie to the airport. This was the first time she’d seen her son in many years, and Trent would have felt intrusive. So he told Dorrie that he couldn’t get out of work, and he told Courtney nothing, though she raised an eyebrow when he began to obsessively wash the used beer mugs that were submerged in a bus tub full of gray, soapy water. She watched as he moved a rag in and out of the opening of a glass.

“How are things going?” she said as she scooped a few quarters’ worth of tips into her palm. “You look depressed lately,” Courtney said.

“I do?” Trent said. He looked over his shoulder at the large
mirror on the wall behind the liquor bottles. His face did look a little pinched, he thought, and he frowned. “No,” he said, and shrugged, smiling up at a fraternity guy who was standing at the bar, expectantly gripping a twenty. “I’m fine,” he told her, and she waved her hand.

By the time he got home that night, Dorrie and her son were already asleep. It was just as well, Trent thought. This way, they’d had a chance to reacquaint themselves again, without him hovering around. Still, as he walked into the darkened house, he felt uncomfortable. He didn’t even turn on the television. He just sat on the sofa, drinking a beer to unwind, feeling like a person in a waiting room.

This wasn’t an unusual feeling for him, actually. Though he’d been living with her for almost six months, it was still Dorrie’s house. The house hadn’t absorbed much of him yet. It was still her furniture, her dishes, her wall hangings and bric-a-brac. He sat staring at a small sculpture that had been given to her by a friend from New York who was now almost famous: an abstract piece of polished marble, which looked vaguely like a naked body.

Earlier, before the son had arrived, Trent had said: “I shouldn’t be living here when he comes, do you think?”

“Don’t worry about it,” Dorrie said. “Where would you go, at this short notice?”

“I could probably find some place.”

“It’s all right,” she said. But, remembering her tone of voice, he didn’t go into their bedroom to sleep beside her. Instead, he fell asleep on the couch.

•   •   •

In the morning, he woke to the smell of coffee. Opening his eyes, he was disoriented to find himself sprawled on Dorrie’s sofa. Trent had been dreaming of his mother and, for a moment, he expected to be fifteen years old, living in the back room of his mother’s trailer house, staring up at the stains on the corkboard ceiling. In the dream, his mother was getting ready to pour cold water on him.

So he sat up abruptly, and the image of his mother vanished. He could hear coffee perking, and he rubbed his palm against his hair. Then he padded barefoot into the kitchen.

Dorrie’s son, David Bender, was standing at the counter in a velour bathrobe, and he turned expectantly as Trent came to the door of the kitchen. He looked a little like Dorrie in the face—something about the slant of the mouth. Their eyes were similar. But he was also different from what Trent had imagined. He was taller than Trent, for one thing, and his hair was thinning, so that for a moment Trent thought the boy was thirty years old or more. They were not that far apart in age—Trent was twenty-five; David Bender was twenty. But for some reason, Trent had been expecting a kid.

“Hullo,” David Bender said, and Trent felt conscious of standing there in his boxer shorts. “You must be Trent. I’m David.”

Trent stepped up, awkwardly, and shook David’s hand. “How do you do?” Trent said.

“I do fine,” David Bender said. “Want some coffee?”

“That sounds good,” Trent said, and wished that he’d pulled on his jeans before he’d come in. David Bender handed
him a cup of coffee, and Trent nodded thank you, shifting from foot to foot. He couldn’t think of anything to say.

“Well, this is an uncomfortably Freudian moment,” David Bender said. “Maybe we should both take off all our clothes and brandish our dicks at one another.”

Trent wasn’t sure what to make of this remark, and so he just stood there. “Ha!” he said.

“I’m sorry,” David Bender said. “That was assholish of me, wasn’t it? I don’t mean to be passive-aggressive.”

Trent put down his coffee cup. “No, no,” he said. “I’m thinking about maybe getting showered and dressed, though.”

“That might be a good idea,” David Bender said thoughtfully. “Maybe I’ll think of some conversation.”

“Me, too,” Trent said.

By the time he got out of the shower, Dorrie was awake. She and David were sitting at the kitchen table, and they looked up as Trent entered. It was another moment when Trent wished himself somewhere else, and they all froze, as if in some terrible, stagy tableau.

“Trent,” Dorrie said. “I think you’ve met David?”

Dorrie was nervous, and had been nervous for weeks. She did not see David Bender often, and he had not been to visit her since she’d taken her assistant professor position at Western Nebraska State, three years ago. Apparently, there had been tension between Dorrie, David, and David’s father, Robert, for some years by that point. She was vague when she told him
about it, but Trent had gathered enough facts that he could put together a skeleton of a history. He knew, for example, that Dorrie had dropped out of college to marry Robert Bender, whom she called a “financier,” some twelve years her senior; that, shortly after David was born, they’d separated; that a lawyer friend of her ex-husband had Dorrie declared an unfit mother some time later and that her visiting rights had been circumscribed; that David called his stepmother, Robert’s third wife, “Mom,” even though the stepmother was also divorced from Robert Bender; that Dorrie and David had a stormy relationship when he was in junior high and high school; that an ongoing e-mail exchange had led to a kind of reconciliation, which eventually culminated in David’s visit.

These were the facts, as Trent knew them. He hadn’t asked her more than she offered, respecting her silence, knowing that the subject put her on edge. It made her snappish, he thought, such as the day before David arrived, when she came home from the grocery store in a foul mood because of the lack of fresh produce. David was a vegetarian, and she hadn’t been able to find ingredients for a number of dishes she planned to prepare.

“Well,” Trent had said. “Is he the kind of vegetarian who won’t eat meat at all?”

“Yes, Trent,” she said. “I believe that’s the definition of the term.”

“Okay,” Trent said, and held up his palms in a gesture that men used to use to show that they were unarmed. He had noticed before that Dorrie’s anxiousness came out in the form of a kind of distracted disdain for people, a sharpness that, Trent had realized, was why she always did so poorly in job interviews. That was why she had ended up at a Nebraska state college, in
the middle of the sandhills. Trent understood this about her, and even felt strangely tender toward her moody skittishness. It was something other people didn’t know about her. But he did.

Now, sitting in the kitchen, he could sense the effort she was putting into containing herself. She chatted affably, she smiled, she touched her hand to Trent’s arm, she put her palm on the back of David’s neck. But when she put her fingers on the handle of her coffee cup, he could see her grip tighten, until the pads of her fingertips blanched.

Trent could not contribute much to the conversation. Mostly, they were talking about New York City, where both David and Dorrie grew up, and where David now attended college, at Columbia. Trent had never been there; had never, in fact, been east of Omaha. Dorrie had once said that she found this “refreshing,” though she also tended to become barbed at his ignorance, as when he called Staten Island, “Satin Island.”

“Oh, yes,” Dorrie said. “That’s where the old lingerie goes when it dies.”

Such gibes bothered him more than he cared to admit, and so he found himself remaining thoughtfully silent as they talked. He wondered if he was coming across as oafish and dull. He kept waiting for a moment when he could chime in with something clever, but the opportunity didn’t come. From time to time, he started as if to speak, but he was not quick enough. The conversation was already off in another direction.

He had been considering asking Dorrie to marry him, probably sometime after David Bender left. He didn’t know whether he would really go through with it, and even if he did,
he wasn’t sure how Dorrie would react to such a proposal. Nevertheless, it occupied him as he listened to them banter. They were not talking about anything important and yet he recognized that something significant was happening. This was the way that Dorrie talked to him in the first few months that he’d lived with her. It was the way she established love: She paid attention, and Dorrie’s attention was wonderful.

When he first moved in, Dorrie and Trent would walk in the morning down the narrow old wagon trail that traced the alfalfa fields behind her house. The wheel ruts had become deep and bumpy with disuse, eroded by wind and rain into valleys that were miniatures of the low, hill-lined valley where they lived, and in which the town rested. Between the wheel ruts, the sod had grown dense and weedy, and though they walked side by side, it was always as if there were a low hedge between them. They joined hands over it despite the fact that it hindered their steps somewhat and slowed them. But it was all right. He liked that feeling.