Girls (26 page)

“It has to.” She had moved her hand, and the fingers lay gently on my chest, above the bandages. She moved them back and forth, lightly, watching my expression. I didn’t know what to do except close my eyes and put my left hand on her shoulder.

I moved my hand to where her shirt was opened several buttons, and I touched her throat. She made a sound. “Has to,” she said, flushing down her face and under my hand.

“Has to what?”

“I forget. No. I remember: hurt. You couldn’t hug or kiss anyone or lie down with them.”

“Could we stay like this awhile? Would you be willing to?”

“Willing?” she said. She moved closer and leaned in and kissed my chest. She kept her face against me and I felt her breath go over my skin as she said, “Yes, I guess I’d be willing.”

I didn’t know what to do with my hand. I put it loosely around her throat in a choking motion, but we knew I wasn’t going to shut the fingers. They lay against her, and I could feel her swallow. Then she stepped back and took my hand in both of hers and kissed my palm.

“I felt that in my ribs,” I said.

“Your poor ribs,” she said. “Why did this happen to you?” She buttoned my shirt and then her own. Then she picked up my hand
again, and she led me to the living room. I sat by kneeling my way onto the seat of the chair. She brought us coffee, and I almost slept, in spite of my confusion and excitement, while she made it. Then she asked me again, “What happened?”

“Payback,” I said. “I beat up a kid who runs the campus pharmaceuticals supply. They sent some people, not because of him, really, so much as because of the business. Free trade, kind of.”

“Couldn’t you have arrested him instead of beating him?”

I liked the way she accepted the option of the beating. But of course she was a policeman’s daughter. She would know.

“I hate those drug bastards. But what it was about was something else. You see the posters all over?”

“Those poor children.”

“One of them, the one whose picture went up first, I’m, I don’t know, I’m helping her parents.”

She nodded. “Of course you are,” she said.

“I felt
that
in my ribs,” I said. “You do that to me.”

“I want to,” she said. “But you’re helping her parents—”

“Janice Tanner’s parents. Her mother is supposed to’ve died from cancer, but she keeps waiting until Janice comes home. You really end up having to do it for her. Do something, anyway. I don’t think we’ll get her back. But, you know. Professor Strodemaster’s their neighbor. He got me into it, and I guess I got involved. I went after the kid. Jesus, I just jump around and get myself confused and end up suspecting anyone and then bagging it all and figuring no one did it, that she took off for New York or Saint Paul, Minnesota.… You know. I’m not doing much.”

“Was she unhappy?”

“She was the perfect Christian child. She played—
plays.
I can’t keep talking like she’s dead. Even if she probably is. She plays an instrument. She loves Jesus. She volunteers to roll bandages and feed the hungry. You know? She’s wonderful.”

“So she isn’t,” Rosalie said. She was sitting on the footstool of my chair and she had her fingers on my calf above my boot. Her hand felt warm, and I felt warm, the coffee was filled with frothy milk, and
I would have given a great deal to be lying with my head on her chest and asleep.

“Why not?”

“Because nobody is. No young girl—fourteen, right? No adolescent girl is wonderful. Her life is shit, her parents are shit, school is a trial, minute by minute, her hormones are nuts, her skin drives her crazy, and she gets cramps all the time, or she doesn’t bleed on time, or she hasn’t got breasts, or all of that. She’s
nice
, she wants to be nice, she’s a good kid, but she’s in trouble. She comes up missing, it’s because she was in trouble a long time before that.”

“So why didn’t anybody tell me this a long time ago?”

“Your wife could have.”

“Sure. I mean, a nurse would know.”

“A woman would know; a nurse would know; your friend Halpern would know. I’ve seen you in the Blue Bird, you sitting there all pale and straight and sad and him all over the pastries. He gets so worried about you.”

“How do you know? He’s talking to you about me, too?”

“His face, Jack. He feels like me, I think.”

“How’s that, Rosalie?”

“Nice. I don’t know how far his affections go, but
I
have in mind something like taking off your clothes and doing things, Jack.” She didn’t cover her face, but her eyes were closed.

“Oh.”

She spat her coffee onto my jeans and the rug. “I’m sorry,” she said when she got herself under control. “It was the way you said that.”

“You get me wordless a lot.”

“And you don’t have that many words to begin with.”

I shook my head. She leaned over and touched her forehead to my knee. I put my hand on her dark hair and held a handful and then let go.

When she sat up, we were quiet for a couple of minutes. I loved it, sitting like that with her. Then she said, “What’s her room like?”

“Haven’t been there,” I said.

“But
why?
”

“I think I’m scared to. I don’t know. I do know. And I am scared. I don’t want to know her that well. I don’t want to touch her things. She went into the worst kinds of nightmares you can have. I don’t want to go there.”

Her face was serious now, and it looked longer, older. Her dark eyes looked different, and I saw a little of how much there was to her. I figured her father, the cop, had scary eyes like hers. She nodded. “Makes sense,” she said, “but you
have
to look at her room. Really, it’s where you have to
start.
What you’ve been doing, whatever you’ve been doing, that comes later. First you get yourself in her room. It’s where they
live
, girls that age. It’s their
brains.
If you’re lucky. If they aren’t so good at hiding that even their rooms are camouflaged.”

“You’re tougher than I am, aren’t you?”

“Maybe. I don’t know. But I’m tough. Is your wife tough?”

“She has been for a long time. She’s had to be. You marry me, you’re in trouble automatically.”

“I’ll remember that. Are we finished warning each other off?”

“All right.”

“Do we agree that something’s going on here? Between us?”

I nodded.

“Say ‘yes,’ ” she said.

“Yes.”

“And you’re coming back here? Or, we’re meeting? We’re going, you know,
on
from here.”

I nodded.

She said, “ ‘Yes.’ ”

“Yes.”

Then her face grew less beaky, her eyes less angry. Then that wide smile came out. She stood up, she took the coffee cup from me, and she set both of our cups on the stack of books on the table next to the chair. She leaned over me, supported herself on the chair arms, and she kissed me very softly on the mouth. She let herself down a little and she kissed me harder. She bit my bottom lip, then let her
teeth apart, then bit me again, harder. In the same position, she very slowly licked where she had bitten me, and then she stood up.

I said, “My wife accused me of making love to you in a security vehicle and in strange places on the upper campus.”

“Are there strange places up there where we could have been making love?”

“Yes.”

“You know them? You have access to them?”

“Yes.”

Pulling the tails of the baggy flannel shirt down straight, she said, “Well, well.”

The dog waited at the drawer we kept his food in, and by holding on to the countertop with my fingers, I let myself down to my knees and got out the plastic bin of kibble. I gave him a lot, then put the food away. Still on my knees, I checked his water. I worked my way up and I let him out to run. It had been a mistake to get up, I thought. I wondered if ribs could bleed, because I sensed a loose, runny material inside. I thought I might feel better on my knees again, and from there it was a very short trip to my back.

I made a few unworthy noises, and I put my hand on my side. There was a scrabbling sound, and I knew it was the dog, ready to come inside and be celebrated for doing so.

“In a minute,” I said.

The door bounced again, and I said, “Lie down and wait, goddamn it.”

The noise stopped and I was sorry I’d shouted. I saw him, curled on the snow on the porch, lying against the door. That was interesting, because I wanted to curl on the other side of the door and surround the pain. I couldn’t make that shape anymore, though, and I said to him or me or both of us, “Sorry. Sorry.”

I came up from it saying that again, but it wasn’t the dog. It was Fanny. Then the dog, his fur cold and his tongue wet, came over to lick my face.

“Why are you sleeping on the floor, Jack?”

“I was?”

“You still are. Look.”

“Jesus, Fanny, I can’t
look.
I’m in the middle of
doing
it. Why do you have to sound pissed off right away because I fell asleep somewhere?”

“And left the dog on the porch all night. You were passed out, weren’t you?”

“Could I have some of those pain pills?” I asked her.

“When’s the last time you took them?”

“Afternoon.”

She got on her knees and worked her arms under my back and kind of pushed me forward and over, and then I climbed up from my knees by holding her hands. Her power was very impressive. She got me into the living room and onto the sofa, where I made a lot of small noises. She brought me the pills and some water. She was still wearing her opened coat when she sat down on the coffee table and said, “What’d you do?”

“I went on some errands. I guess I wasn’t ready to.” I told her about the Indian.

“You sound pleased,” she said.

“He made a living at it for a while. He can walk. For a nobody in the fights, that’s significant.”

“Jack, what’s this male warrior shit? The man and his friends put you in the hospital. They could have driven a rib through your lung. Did you ever watch someone’s face while their lung is inflated? You could have died.”

I let myself say, and I never should have, “That would be the easy way out, wouldn’t it?”

She sat back. She
flinched
back.

She said, “Dying?”

“Just a thought,” I said.

“Dying? As opposed to what—to life with me?”

“No,” I said. “I was being, you know, philosophical. That’s all. It’s what happens after you accumulate two or three college courses over a lifetime. You look at the big picture. You know.”

But she was not reachable by jokes, if that’s what they were. Her eyes were immense and bewildered. In the near darkness of the living room, I thought, My wife has been so wonderful to look at for so many years, and now she’s getting … scuffed. The edges have been treated hard. I wanted to cup my hand on her chin and cheek. I wanted to run my fingers over the lines between her eyes and over her nose. I wondered if she would smell Rosalie Piri’s skin.

“Is this about the missing girl, Jack?”

“What this do you mean?”

“Don’t stall.”

“Yes. Partly. Yes. I went to see her mother.”

“Why don’t you go see Hannah’s mother?”

“You?”

“That’s who I mean. Why do you have to build yourself a fever and damage yourself, running all over the county chasing a girl who you
know
is raped and strangled and cut into pieces and, I don’t know,
eaten.
Some of these creatures pickle parts of the children, don’t they? They eat them and use their skin to draw illustrations on. She’s so dead and gone, Jack. And I’m
not.
I’m a little crazy sometimes, and I know I’m getting harder to live with.”

She was doing me the worst hurt, by then. She was weeping without covering her face or blowing her nose. The dog let his tail brush the floor, but he wasn’t enthusiastic. He feared it when we fought or wept too noisily. He had a low threshold of emotional pain. Fanny sat on the coffee table and her nose ran and tears poured down her face.

“Fanny,” I said.

“And I know I’m right about your little professorette,” she said.

“No.”

“You’re not having an affair with her?”

“
No.
I told you. No, I’m not.”

“Then what was the little furnace in each of her cute little eyes about at the hospital?”

“I don’t know. I wasn’t looking at her eyes.”

“What, then? Her legs? She shows enough of
them.
Nice, if you like miniatures. I know what I saw, Jack. She was choosing between
the enema bag and the sponge bath. Miss Professorette, Girl Nurse. If you’re not involved with her—”

“Fanny, come on.”

“Then she’s involved with you.”

I tried to shrug. It hurt a lot.

“Don’t you be strong and brave and silent, you son of a bitch.”

“I promise not to be brave or strong or—I forget the other one.”

“Silent. That’s your middle name.”

“I won’t be silent. What shall I say? You know, these stitches in my mouth keep pulling. It hurts to talk.”

“It hurts you to talk with or without them. We’re a mess, Jack.”

I said, “I’m sorry. I really am. I’m sorry.”