Boy Still Missing (8 page)

Edie gulped down half a glass of Dr Pepper, took a pill off her tray, and swallowed. I couldn’t tell if it was a vitamin or an aspirin. Probably a baby thing. She took them all the time. “So,” she said, “your dad called me today.”

I had skipped over the rectangle of white turkey and was already chowing on my chocolate cake. A ball of it stuck in my throat when she mentioned my father. We had what I thought was an unspoken, don’t-talk-about-
him
rule ever since that afternoon when Edie peeled back her shirt to show me her pregnant stomach. I had imagined that we both felt
the same way: Bringing up my father made her pregnancy seem sad instead of exciting.

Ditto for our relationship.

I liked it better when Edie talked about the baby, filling me in on the position of the head, the extra pounds she had gained, the weird kicks, somersaults, and flutters. Some nights she’d stop me midconversation and press my hand to her stomach. “Feel her?” she’d say. Beneath my fingers the baby would make a sudden, watery motion that made me think of a fish swishing its tail. I’d smile wide like an expectant father who had just felt his child move for the very first time.

“What did he want?” I managed, though I should have asked his whereabouts for my mother’s sake.

“He wanted to make sure I ‘took care of things’ was the way he put it.” Edie stopped to eat a string bean with her fingers, then continued. “I told him the same thing I said months ago. I am keeping this baby. I mean, it’s a little late now anyway. I’m due in February.”

I pushed my potatoes around, then set the fork on the tray, my appetite gone. “And then what happened?”

“He got pissed off and said he’d like to run me over with his truck.”

We were quiet. I thought of Marnie’s dogs looking up at a set of headlights coming at them as they cut across 67. Her cat Milky, too.

Edie chewed and swallowed.

The wind rattled the glass of the bedroom window. The sound made me think of change jingling in someone’s pocket. A box of nails dropped on a cement floor. I waited for more.

“I really think he wants to kill me,” she said.

“People say things like that all the time when they’re ripped. He doesn’t mean it.”

“Your father’s dumb enough to pull something stupid.”

The more she talked about him, the more my mind retreated back to reality: My father
was
the baby’s father. I was just keeping Edie company until the pregnancy was over and she moved on. Our friendship meant a loan to her. Since she knew that the baby would be a girl, it was no big deal
to talk about naming the baby after me. Questions I shooed away months ago formed in my mind: How could Edie expect something different from my father when she knew the way he treated his own family? Why wasn’t she more careful in the first place? What if she didn’t give me the money back? That last thought made me swallow. Hard. “Just forget about it.”

Edie reached across the bed and laced her fingers between mine. Sometimes at night she held my hand when we lay in bed. She said it made her feel less lonely, that my hands were soft but strong. The feeling of her skin against mine made my heart beat fast every time. “Dominick,” she said, “if something should happen to me, I want you to know that I appreciate all you’ve done.”

If something should happen to me.
She sounded just like my mother.

“He’s not going to kill you,” I said and let out a nervous laugh. The prospect of my father as a murderer seemed ridiculous. He was a major pain in the ass. But a killer he was not.

“You don’t understand the way he gets,” Edie said. “You haven’t seen it.”

I didn’t know what to say to that, because she was right. I had never seen my father get violent before.

“And it’s more than just him,” she said finally. “Sometimes I get scared thinking about labor.”

“Stop it,” I said. “You’ll be fine.”

“All right. But I want you to know that I couldn’t have gotten this far without you.”

Edie let go. She stretched back on a pillow and let her hair fan out behind her. Her jaw tightened, and I could see the slightest bit of movement under her cheek from her teeth pressing against each other. Her blue eyes traveled up to the ceiling fan above the bed. The fan spun constantly, since Edie liked the air to circulate even in the winter. The constant whirring, like a helicopter’s blades, always reminded me of a story my mother once told me. She had been in a pottery shop when a man came in with his baby daughter on his shoulders. He simply walked toward the register, and the baby got caught in the metal blades of the
fan. The thing pulled the girl right off her father’s shoulders, sliced the tender white skin of her neck, her face, her ears, and sent her sailing across the store, where she crashed into a bin of ceramic pots. Dead.

The bloody image made me reach out and put my arms around Edie, around the baby that was growing inside her. “There are so many things that can happen in life,” I said, sounding older and wiser than I really was. “But we’ll just be careful. We’ll pay attention to the signs around us. We’ll watch what we do.”

“Thanks,” Edie said. “You know, it’s hard to believe a nice guy like you could have such a prick for a father. If I was younger and things were different, I might have married you by now.”

I shook my head, still trying to get rid of the image of that ruined baby, the tortured look I imagined on her father’s face, on my mother’s as she stood in the shop. “I wish other girls felt that way,” I said, then instantly regretted it. I wanted to seem tough. As hard and unbendable as Leon’s back-pocket comb. Roget’s stiff pistol in his holster.

“Still no luck with girls?” she asked.

Embarrassed, I wanted to lie. I could have whipped out a big one, too:
Oh, there’s this one chick who wants me to lick her crotch clean
. But it seemed stupid and pointless. “You’re the only person I ever kissed. And that doesn’t count, because it wasn’t real.”

“Why wasn’t it real?” she asked.

I was testing, measuring her feelings for me. “It wasn’t mutual, I guess. And besides, our mouths were closed.”

“Oh, Dominick,” she said and let out a sigh as heavy and weighted as one of my mother’s. “This whole thing has been so complicated. I mean, I should have—” She stopped, then started again. “I mean, you—” She was quiet a moment, biting her lip, thinking. Then she turned to me. “Let me give you a real kiss. It will be my thank-you present to you.”

I didn’t know what to say. I had grown pretty comfortable with our routine. Her pregnancy made kissing seem off-limits somehow. “Really?” I said.

“Sure. I can spare one kiss. And it will make you feel in control the next time you’re test-driving a new girlfriend. It’s the least I can do.”

How could I tell her that I didn’t want to be with another girl, that all I wanted was to be with her, to stay as we were? Talking about the kiss first made the whole thing seem rehearsed. It didn’t matter, though, because this time Edie did all the work. She leaned toward me, curled her hair over her ear, and pressed her mouth to mine. Instantly her lips parted, and I could feel wet air from the back of her mouth. Edie’s fingery tongue pushed its way into me, against my lips, warm inside my mouth. I wanted to lean back, to enjoy it. I thought of Sleeping Beauty being brought to life with a kiss. Edie pressed her mouth harder against mine and touched her fingers to my chest.

She wanted me to remember this.

It worked, because the
Sleeping Beauty
watercolors blurred and my mind filled with centerfolds. A thin strip of hair between every girl’s legs. Pink folds of skin. Empty and waiting. And then that image of the slutty Edie at the Doghouse mixed with the woman who was kissing me now. My hips moved to press against her, against something, but her body was too far away. I rolled toward her and pressed myself against the mattress while I slid my tongue between her lips. Before I could help it, I felt myself let go in my pants. Breath from my mouth poured into her. My hand moved to her breast but brushed her belly.

Her baby.

My father’s baby.

My brother. My sister.

I pulled away.

“How was it?” she asked, pulling a strand of hair from her eyes and smiling. The ceiling fan cut crooked shadows across her face.

“Great,” I said, though it wasn’t great at all. I could feel the dampness in my underwear. The chocolate cake and one or two bites of white turkey pushed their way to the surface through the tunnel from my stomach. I held my breath to stop it.

“Do you want another one?” Edie asked. Her mouth, ready and waiting.

My mind felt foggy. My body, drained. I prayed she didn’t catch on
that I had come from just her kiss alone. “Maybe later,” I whispered, too tired and embarrassed to really talk. “Can we just rest awhile?”

“Sure,” she said, patting the spot where her breast, arm, and shoulder met. I put my head in the warmth and coziness of that spot and closed my eyes. In a moment my stomach felt calm.

This was what I wanted from her, after all.

My mind closed door after door down a long, dark hallway, and before I knew it, I fell asleep.

When I opened my eyes, Edie was gone and I was stretched out on my stomach. I must have pulled off my shirt and pants the way I always did when I slept, because I was dressed only in my underwear. I hoped the sight of my body and come-stained drawers hadn’t scared Edie off. On the nightstand the money was gone. The bedside clock read one-thirty and I almost shit my Fruit of the Looms. My mother was probably freaking out, wondering where I was.

I sat up and reached for the floor in search of my pants and shoes.

Nothing.

I felt under the bed, and here’s the weird part: I pulled out that old sneaker I had left behind last summer, dust-balled and curled from no use. I stared at the thing like it was a museum relic. A body part I had amputated and left behind. In my misty afterbirth of sleep, I put the thing on and laced it up. My foot must have grown, because the fit was almost too tight to wear. I shoved one of Edie’s oversize pink furry slippers onto my other foot to keep warm on the cold floor. Then I grabbed a thick blue wool blanket off the chair and draped it around my shoulders, and made my way down the hall in pursuit of her.

After all this time the hallways and wooden doors in the old place still puzzled me. The sunny room with ivy wallpaper was over there? No, over here. The back staircase led to the pantry? No, the main hallway. It didn’t help that Edie had emptied most of the rooms of furniture, so each vacant room looked the same. I was about to call out to Edie and ask her why she hadn’t woken me, when I heard her voice. I followed the soft murmur until I was outside the kitchen door. I opened it just a crack
and could see her reflection in the picture window, broken and fractured in the six different panes at each side. Her back was to me as she talked on the telephone. From behind, no one would have ever guessed she was pregnant. It seemed weird to me that she’d be on the phone in the middle of the night, so I stood there longer than I should have, without going in. I listened as she talked about selling a bunch of her ex-husband’s shitty furniture to a woman from Buford. Then she went on about some sort of shipment that had never been delivered. Finally, she was silent for a moment and I worried she had spotted me. I realized, though, that she was just listening to the person on the other end of the line.

“We’ll leave in the morning,” she said quietly after a moment. “Then we’ll check in to the room together.”

Something told me to interrupt her, that I wasn’t going to want to hear the rest of this call.

“Thank God for that,” she said.

“I’ve got the money,” she said.

“Of course,” she said.

Then she said this: “I started off not caring. But now I feel bad.”

Silently I tugged in a breath and felt my heart drum.

Move your legs, I thought.

Too late.

“Stop bugging me about it,” Edie said. “He’s just a kid. A harmless boy.”

Me.

My breathing seemed to stop. Her words raced around my brain. Before I could move, she giggled, and I heard her say, “I just want to be nice about it. Don’t worry, I’ll find a way to get rid of him.”

From somewhere inside me another voice came with a message that had been waiting there all along:
She has been tricking you
. For a flash I considered storming my way into the kitchen and raging. But that was something other men would have done. I found myself stepping back. I felt not the whole of myself but the parts. My feet—one sneakered, one slippered—moved to the foyer. My hand gripped the diamond-shaped
knob of the front door. My back, covered only by the blue wool blanket, stiffened as I stepped onto the crooked porch and into the night. That plastic bird was still spinning its broken wing, though the sound seemed to come from inside my head now. A dull creaking, then a steady scrape of metal and old parts.

In my mind I heard a car crash.

Screech of brakes.

Ambulance sirens.

A woman’s shrill scream without inhalation.

Then silence.

I was walking across the snowy lawn, away from Edie’s house. When I was far enough away, my brain returned. Given what I had just overheard, it was funny that my first thought was numb and practical:
You will never make it home without freezing.
I kept walking because I couldn’t turn back. Edie’s voice came and went, came and went.

He’s just a kid.

A harmless boy.

I’ll find a way to get rid of him.

Her giggle jumped around my head and worked itself into a cackle. As evil as one of those green-faced witches from one of Edie’s fairy tales.

“You have been so fucking stupid,” I said, my voice croaking into the blue-black darkness. My eyes weighed heavy at the corners, and tears slipped out. Their warmth on my wind-burned cheeks made me cry harder. “So motherfucking goddamn stupid.”

I stared down at the steady white line on the side of the road. My slippered foot slapping and stinging against the salt and chunky scraps of ice on the pavement.