No One Tells Everything

Calling Out

MacAdam/Cage

155 Sansome Street, Suite 550

San Francisco, California 94104

www.MacAdamCage.com

Copyright © 2008 Rae Meadows

All Rights Reserved

Meadows, Rae.

No one tells everything / by Rae Meadows.

 p. cm.

ISBN 978-1-59692-292-1

1. Women periodical editors—Fiction. 2. Brooklyn (New York, N.Y.) —Fiction. 3. Murder investigation—Fiction. I. Title.

PS3613.E15N6 2008

813′.6—dc22

 2007050801

Paperback edition: May 2008

ISBN 978-1-59692-294-5

Book and jacket design by Dorothy Carico Smith

Publisher’s Note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

T
he girl has been missing for thirteen days. On the television, her parents make a desperate plea, their faces fallen and ash gray. The mother has a look of resigned expectation, as if she’s about to get punched and can’t avoid the blow. Of course she’s replaying every critical remark she ever made to her daughter, every jealous thought.

Grace makes an inner toast to regret, and finishes her glass of wine. She’s one of three left at Chances, the vaguely Irish bar at the end of her Brooklyn block. It appears the other two, a few seats over, will soon be leaving together. The sinewy young woman has a black serpent tattooed on her lower back. It keeps peeking out from under her shrunken T-shirt. She pretends it’s not on purpose that her shirt keeps inching up, that she doesn’t notice her new companion sneaking glances down to where the snake disappears beneath her low-riding jeans. Grace admires the move; the woman knows just how to play it.

The guy has nicotine-stained fingers and black hair that hangs over his forehead in a wing-like piece. He looks up for a minute and quickly sweeps the bar. His eyes catch on Grace, who smiles at him with half her mouth, hoping she seems mysterious, hoping her look says, come on, it could be fun. The corners of his lips jerk up, more like a tic than a smile, before he turns back to his tattooed friend. Grace pretends to drink from her empty glass. In the dusty mirror behind the bar she doesn’t think she looks that different than she used to—pale skin, dark hair, angular face. But as her mother often reminds her, a thin face over thirty makes a woman look older.

Please make the professor call, she thinks. Make him call and I’ll stop drinking.

For a year Grace has clung to the belief that the professor would pick her in the end, a wedge of hope lodged like a splinter refusing to surface. But of course he isn’t leaving his wife, of course he was never going to. Last night he told her he’s taken up Bikram yoga and he and his wife are going to couples counseling. He thanked her for helping him figure some things out. She wanted to tell him that he was a cliché but she knew that she was one too. And she didn’t want to make it harder for him to change his mind.

“Jimmy,” she says. “Can I get another one?”

Grace is drinking her usual Chardonnay. When Jimmy sees her walk in he pours a full glass. She thinks about changing her order sometimes, asking him with a straight face for a Cosmopolitan or a Lemon Drop, but when the moment comes, it doesn’t seem worth it just for his amusement. It’s soothing, this safety of routine. And Jimmy is her ever-willing co-conspirator.

She has lived in this neighborhood for nine years. First the artists dotted the Italian enclaves. Then, as in most gentrifying areas, the working families moved out of the brownstones and the hipsters settled in. Now it’s space-age strollers, organic T-shirts, rutabaga gelato. She is glad, at least, for her rent-controlled apartment, her little wooden boat that bobbles atop the water, regardless of what the next wave might bring. Grace keeps to herself as the scenery shifts around her. Her old laundromat became a video store became a frozen yogurt shop became a pilates studio.

She looks in the mirror at the black-haired boy. He winks at her before looking away. Next to him, the young woman arches her back in a feline stretch before leaning forward with her elbows on the bar.

The TV flashes a photo of Sarah Shafer, the honey-haired freshman who disappeared. The sound is muted now but Grace knows what’s being said. Still no sign of her, no word, no leads, since she vanished from the quiet campus of a small college two hours from the city. It’s a picture they’ve used before, cropped in close, a disembodied arm around her slender shoulders. Something about her face reminds Grace of her sister. The light hair and brown eyes, the small, even teeth of her smile. Callie has been gone for twenty-five years but Grace wonders what she might have looked like today, a week before her thirty-third birthday.

“It’s a shame,” Jimmy says, turning from the TV, “about that college girl. Sounds like she was a good kid.”

“Yeah,” Grace says, taking a sip of wine. “They always say that though, don’t they?”

It makes for a better story when the person is irreproachable, innocent. But then, at some point, the truth dribbles out—drugs or a townie boyfriend or some other unsavory element—and it all gets a little more complicated, a little too human. A little too much like the rest of us, she thinks.

Jimmy gives her a strained smile as he adjusts his pants beneath his bulging gut, a fairly recent addition to his physique. Grace knows he thinks she’s bitter, thinks her idiosyncrasies are hardening into oddities as the years pass. He doesn’t even bother flirting with her anymore.

“Maybe she ran off and got married,” she says.

Jimmy wipes the bar down, shaking his head.

“You don’t believe that, Gracie,” he says. “You’re just being contrary.”

She smiles. She doesn’t tell him that she thinks people like to emote concern about something inarguably sad and remote, that it’s easy to feel sorry like that. She thinks Sarah Shafer is not quite as wholesome as she’s being made out to be. Maybe she’s on a bender in Atlantic City, or hiding out in a squat in the East Village, or hitchhiking her way to Seattle with a guitar player. It seems romantic that she might have thrown down the gauntlet on a certain kind of life. That she escaped. But even as Grace thinks this she knows that if it were her, she’d be doing none of those things.

The newly formed couple down the bar murmurs to each other as they slide off their stools and head for the door, his hand on the small of her back. He looks back but his eyes don’t settle on Grace. She may have finally crossed over into the gaping blandness of sexual invisibility, a prospect that is both terrifying and comforting. Age has worked its gradual and wicked magic to render her a mere facet of the landscape. She looks away before they are gone.

Jimmy clears their glasses.

“It looks like you have an admirer,” he says, as he slides a napkin toward her. “For the woman down the bar. Zach. 233-3475.”

Grace laughs and blushes, feeling both pleased and foolish. She wonders if Jimmy feels any jealousy, any proprietary twinge, or if it’s way too late for any of that. He watches as she pours a little wine onto the napkin until it is soggy and the number bleeds.

“Hey, how’s the job search going?” Jimmy’s been asking her this for years.

Grace is a copyeditor at a weekly news magazine where writers encapsulate world events into short digestible paragraphs. Stories are decorated with charts and photographs, and analysis is kept to a minimum. She reviews layouts for typos, misspellings, extra spaces, overuse of colons, poor grammar, dangling modifiers. She envies the writers and feels disdain for them; she doesn’t think they’re doing anything she couldn’t do. It’s just that she got stuck. Her conversations with Jimmy about it invariably end with, “I need a new job.” But by the following morning she’s lost her resolve.

The hope of something better out there has kept her from shriveling up into dust within the padded half-walls of her purposefully Spartan cubicle. Its lack of personalization is her own stubborn statement that it’s not where she belongs, that her residency is temporary, even if five years have already gone by.

In response to Jimmy, she usually says something deflective, but a while ago, in a flurry of optimism, she finally did apply for some jobs—a newsletter creator at a museum, a junior editor at a celebrity gossip magazine, a copywriter at a teen clothing catalog, a content writer for an online baby site, even a reporter for a local Brooklyn newspaper. She parted with those envelopes, one by one, with the flinty anxiety of calling herself on her own exaggerated expectations. She was hoping for a little luck.

“I sent out some resumes,” she says to Jimmy.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

Grace smoothes her eyebrows with her fingertips, obscuring her face.

“Interviews?” he asks.

“No. Not yet.”

“That’s okay. Congratulations anyway. That’s big news.”

Jimmy goes down the bar to finish washing the night’s glasses. Grace has watched his hair thin and recede over the years, as he has watched her turn into a wiry and solitary fixture on the third stool from the left. They pretend that they’re not hiding out in this bar, each hoping that the other doesn’t one day find a reason to move on.

She doesn’t tell him that she’s heard back from all but one of the potential employers. The rejections were pleasant and apologetic, but definitive nonetheless. They didn’t say it but she knows they wondered what she’s been doing all these years. She’s banking on the one application still outstanding. As a kid she used to make deals with God, like: if you let me beat Callie in this race, I’ll believe in you. Sometimes it worked. The past few weeks Grace has reverted to a similar approach with her job search, ready to barter her faith for a chance at a new start.

It’s midnight. Her loneliness tugs, an insistent pull on her sleeve. She finishes the last of her wine, slips a few bills under her glass, and buttons her coat.

She sighs and says to Jimmy, “Say goodnight, Gracie.”

“Goodnight, Gracie,” he says, his voice warm and consoling, knowing and not knowing.

Grace waves and goes out into the misty spring night, turning uphill toward home. She wonders if Sarah Shafer will ever reappear.

Midway up the block, a scourged man in army fatigues darts out from the doorway of a closed drugstore.

“Spare some change for something to eat?” he barks.

The sidewalk is empty and dark. Fear rises in her throat and she keeps walking, her hands shoved deep into her jacket pockets.

“Sorry, not tonight.”

“Please,” he says with such desperation that she slows to a stop under the lamplight.

He has sores around his nose and mouth, a missing front tooth. But he is young, barely more than a teenager, ravaged thin.

“All right,” he says. He is both strident and plaintive, his voice stripped bare. “I’ll be honest with you. It’s not really for food. Just help me out, okay?”

She reaches into her purse and pulls out a loose bill, a twenty, and hands it to him. He scampers down the hill toward the dealers on Third Avenue.

###

There are no messages on Grace’s answering machine. The professor once had the nerve to tell her, stroking her hand, that she simply lacked the tools to express herself. At the time she let it go because she wanted to not be alone more than she wanted to call him on his arrogance.

She takes a few Tylenol PMs to drag her down into sleep and gets under the covers. She dusts off one of her well-worn fantasies in which she’s browsing in a darkened bookstore, the light butter-rich and flattering, her face smooth and dewy. Her lips are deep matte red and she wears all black. She’s in the Fs, and she runs her finger dreamily along the spines—Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Flaubert—looking for something she can’t quite recall. And then the professor is there, leaning against a shelf of expressionist art books. He is forlorn—he thinks he may have missed his chance—and he is transfixed by her. She feels a taught wire of acknowledgment between them and her stomach melts.