The Missing (6 page)

a long walk, had a tickle fight, or baked cookies to- gether. He’d walk into the kitchen with his eyes open wide like David was her lover and he’d caught them in an affair. Then he’d say something ridiculous like, “A man should stand on his own two feet,” and neither she nor David would have any idea how to respond. Fen- stad could be a real dipshit.

She missed David more than she’d expected, which probably explained why she got involved with Graham Nero last year. Maddie and Fenstad expected hot meals and paid bills, a clean house and smart advice. They appreciated the things she did, certainly; she was no long-suffering martyr. But still, they expected it.

Take Maddie. Over the summer she’d pierced her belly with a steel ring, using only a swab of alcohol and an ice cube for anesthetic. “
I am so hardcore!
” she’d shouted as she burst into the kitchen with her thumbs, index fingers, and pinkies saluting the ceiling like a heavy metal vixen. Only the blood never stopped gush- ing down her blue polka dot bathing-suit bottoms. To get the ring to puncture her skin more smoothly, she’d coated its point with Crisco, unwitting of the fact that grease is an anticoagulant. When it’s applied, blood won’t clot. They almost had to make a trip to the emer- gency room before Meg’s common sense got the better of her, and she pulled the damn ring out herself so the wound could heal. But that was Maddie. The girl acted first, reasoned later. She didn’t look both ways when she crossed the street, smiled at strangers, and recently had dyed her hair purple before reading the label and realizing that the color was permanent.

Then there was Fenstad. If left to his own devices he’d limit his diet to beef jerky and wear the laundry from his hamper that smelled least like armpit. Twenty years of marriage, and the man had never learned to

cook pasta. Once in a while she’d look at these two rubes sitting across from her at the dinner table and wonder:
Where the hell am I?

Meg swiveled on the stoop now. Her crossed legs were numb. Pins and needles pricked through her feet all the way up to her bottom. Oh, God, she was getting old. Somebody should give her a tube of Ben-Gay and a pair of orthopedic shoes and call it a day.

Temperatures today were supposed to spike at sixty degrees. Perfect sweater weather. Hooky weather, re- ally. She and Fenstad could call in sick, take a drive to Baxter State Park, hike Katahdin, and gorge themselves on the last of summer’s blueberries along the trail. They always
meant
to do things like that: take trips, rent rooms in cheap motels and have aerobic sex, go bowl- ing in the afternoon. They talked about these things all the time, but they never did them. Somehow, after all these years, they’d never found the time.

Funny how that can happen. But no, let’s not be glib.

It wasn’t funny at all.

After the fire in Bedford, Fenstad had suggested that they sell the house and move to Boston. He’d worried that the hazmat signs on Exit 117 spelled disaster. But soon enough the signs came down, and talk of moving was forgotten. Still, it had gotten her thinking. In an- other year after Maddie finished school, they could sell the house if they wanted. Go their separate ways. Move on while they were both young-ish. Make that middle- aged. Such thoughts felt like hot metal coursing through her blood and turning hard. They were too painful to think, and yet they persisted.

Not the type for sighing, Meg pursed her lips. A nest of birds that lived in the second-story gutter began to chirp. Bluebirds? Blackbirds? Sparrows? She didn’t know. Hummingbirds were her favorite. They flapped their

wings so fast they looked like one big blur, just so they could stand still. Now that’s dedication.

Meg put her hands in her pockets, and the poison ivy berries squished. Fenstad was probably awake by now. He and Maddie didn’t talk lately. Growing pains—he missed that she wasn’t his little girl anymore, and so did she. So now they ignored each other because they couldn’t figure out how else to act. Unlike Maddie, whose moods swung in a pendulum depending on what she’d eaten, whether she was getting along with her boyfriend, and the time of the month, Fenstad was the voice of reason. Quiet, considered, logical. He rarely laughed and never cried. Cold, really. Her husband was cold.

Meg dropped the berries down the walk, where they rolled. Goose bumps rose on her arms and legs. She shaved practically every place on her body that grew hair except the top of her head, so her skin was smooth as a waxed peach. Her grandparents on both sides came from northern Italy and most of her family was light- skinned, but she was the dark and swarthy throwback from another generation. Adolescence hit when she was only eleven, and during the summer before she began the seventh grade, she started menstruating. As an added, awkward bonus, a furry black mustache appeared like a lost caterpillar across her upper lip. The teasing in school that fall was relentless. More mean-spirited twelve-year- olds than she cared to count fake-asked her out. (
Will you marry me, Dogface?
Phil Payne had begged with tears of laughter streaming down his face.
I love you, Dogface!
) A rumor spread by bathroom wall graffiti and her former friends insisted that she was a hermaphrodite. One girl even claimed to have seen her penis in the girls’ locker room.

That Christmas break she bought a home wax kit. In

no time, she learned to pluck, wax, shave, and diet her- self into a polished and shiny version of the former Meg Bonelli. Despite the persistent rumors about the ap- pendage between her legs, by the eighth grade she was dating the captain of the junior varsity wrestling team, and at the end of her senior year in high school she was the third runner-up for prom queen, a position she campaigned bitterly for. After the winner was an- nounced, she’d hidden her tears by squatting in a locked bathroom stall for twenty minutes. Still, when she met Fenstad three years later, he would never have guessed that her nickname had once been Dogface, or that if she skipped waxing her lip and chin for a week, she grew a formidable five o’clock shadow. She took some feminine pride in the fact that he
still
didn’t know.

To this day, the threat of those short-lived tauntings remained. She took great pains to iron the creases in her trousers into crisp lines, to dry her hair into a straight, blunt edge that framed her small, angular face. She’d learned to value the cleanness of unbroken lines, the order of a bleached-white smile, the silhouette of her own slender waist in a fitted pleated skirt. She re- gretted that she had bequeathed this perfectionism onto Maddie, who at breakfast sucked on grapefruit slices, one sliver at a time.

Meg squinted. The sun was shining higher in the sky now, and the town was beginning to wake. Her house on River Street overlooked downtown Corpus Christi, and in the distance she could see its squat hospital and abutting four-tiered parking lot. Farther down was the Episcopalian church adorned with a plain copper cross that had turned green. Along River Street were two- level shops that lined up in a row. On the road, a slow procession of cars carrying doctors, nurses, anesthesi- ologists, and administrators headed for the hospital.

All the lawns in this town were neat and green. Her gardening team came once a week and like magic seeded the earth and clipped the hedges. A legion of domestics rode the bus to Corpus Christi from parts west. They worked off the books, cleaning houses, mopping store floors, and sweating bare-chested in the hot sun. She never spoke to her gardener, or her Wednesday after- noon cleaning lady. Instead she left envelopes full of money for them, across which she scripted their first names. It was the way things were done here in Corpus Christi, which didn’t necessarily mean she approved of it.

Meg’s empty stomach growled, and she thought about coffee, eggs. The paper in her hand was a clump of heavy mush. But still, she watched. Something about this morning, this town in front of her, this house on which she was perched, made her sad. She missed it, even though it was not yet gone. She loved it the way you love something you are about to lose.

Since the whole Graham Nero disaster, the word was on her mind all the time. It kept her up at night, surfacing as ominously as the unidentifiably bloated Bedford floaters that had risen from the Messalonski River all summer long. She thought about it when fighting with Maddie, while paying bills, while watch- ing late-night television, while kissing her husband good-night. No matter how hard she tried to bury it, the word would not sink. Divorce, she thought at least once during every waking hour of her day. Divorce. Divorce. Divorce.

The birds flew from their nest and pecked their way along the walk. Their heads were black, and their chests white. Their song was a giddy warble, and their name finally came to her: chickadees. Meg took off her slip- pers and stood. Why not? What was stopping her? With

Maddie leaving next year, and a son already gone, what did she have to lose?

The wet grass drove nails of cold through the soles of her feet. Her goose bumps transformed into eggs, and the paper in her hand was so heavy she dropped it. She was forty-five years old and she’d never been skinny- dipping, never sneaked into a movie, smoked a joint, broken a dish on purpose. She wanted her feet to sink. She wanted to roll across the lawn like a kid. She wanted to take the week off from work and play with her hus- band, actually play, so that when they went to bed at night their stomachs hurt from laughter.

She wanted to call up to his window like a liberated Juliet, and tell him they were better than this. Fenstad, David, Maddie—every one of them. They were blow- ing this Popsicle stand. She turned, and seriously con- sidered doing just that, but something stopped her. Something about the birds. She couldn’t place it. They were pecking at the ground. Little chickadees. Pretty things. One of them swallowed a berry. Her berry. And then she remembered.

Meg Wintrob’s heart beat a little faster. Couldn’t birds sense poison? What were they doing? But then again, they ate the dry rice thrown at weddings and then drank water until their stomachs exploded. Or was that a myth? Her heart raced, pumping blood to her face so that it flushed Valentine’s Day red.
What were they doing?

All the berries were gone. There must have been five or six of them.
Oh, no
. She massaged her forehead. On the ground, one of the birds stopped pecking. It flapped its wings, but not fast enough to fly. It hopped along the walk, weaving in a dizzy zigzag. The thing looked drunk, and it would have been funny, would have re- minded her of a rummied-up Woody Woodpecker, had

she not known what was happening. Its wings stopped flapping, and it began to drag its body by its small feet. She touched its soft feathers, and then cupped it in her palms and felt its slow breath.

She shouldn’t be upset. This bird was a moron. It deserved to die rather than reproduce, and bequeath its fool genes to another generation. Its instincts were all wrong. Birds should know not to eat poison. Then why was she crying?

The bird didn’t try to wriggle free from her hands. Its hollow-boned chest expanded and contracted very slowly. Without knowing it, she matched its breath in a show of sympathy. She’d killed it. She’d killed the re- tarded bird.

Meg bent down until the tip of her nose touched its beak. It didn’t fight. Her breath hitched. They’d been through two dogs, four or five rabbits, and countless goldfish. Except for the dogs, she’d never shed a tear. But this bird, it was getting cold. It was getting stiff. She wanted to put it back where she’d found it. Pretend she’d never seen it. But she couldn’t do that. Couldn’t let it die alone. She held on for another couple of min- utes, until it stopped breathing. Then she eased it onto the ground.

She wiped her hands against her robe. She was crying in the middle of her front lawn. Neighbors driving by slowed their cars to look. She covered her face with her hands and pretended to be shielding her eyes from the sun. She was wearing a ten-year-old terry-cloth robe with frayed sleeves because her good robe was in the laundry pile. Her hair was a mess. Her feet were cold. Why were they so cold? Oh, right, she wasn’t wearing slippers. The bird, the pretty bird. A chickadee.

On the street a car slowed. Fenstad’s boss and the CEO of the hospital rolled down his window. “How

are ya, Meggie?” Miller Walker called. He was one of those jerks who invented nicknames for people like “my main man at arms,” and “Fennie-boy,” and “Meggie.” At the annual Christmas Ball he always made a big show of pinching her ass, and then pretending it was a huge joke. She grinned a fake grin and waved gaudily, hoping he was too far away to see her tears. Then Meg Wintrob pivoted so fast her hips throbbed, and hurried back inside.

F

enstad Wintrob peered through the foggy window. His muscles ached like he’d been sparring a few rounds with Mike Tyson instead of dreaming. He was a restless sleeper. He kicked and moaned and babbled, but never remembered it in the morning. Poor Meg. Every once in a while she showed him some bruise he’d left on her arm, or woke him during the night because he’d hogged all the blankets. He hadn’t heard her get out of bed this morning, which was unusual. They were both light sleepers. But then again, he knew from re- cent experience that when she wanted, Meg could be

sneaky.

He watched as she climbed out from underneath the porch. She did it in a single, fluid motion. Her legs un- folded and slipped out, and her body followed. Then she slapped the wet newspaper against the wooden steps. Three quick, hard strikes from which drops of water spun in small arcs. He felt like less of a man watching her, his own wife.

Fenstad was lean, wiry, and of medium height. Ex- cept for his dark green eyes, he was average-looking in every way. But he was an attentive listener, and he never broke eye contact. For this reason the memory of his face lingered in peoples’ minds, even when they’d

met him only once. They could recall, for example, the laugh lines cut into the sides of his cheeks and his large hands that made him appear far stronger than his stat- ure implied.