The Sweet Relief of Missing Children (10 page)

She had never felt more defeated. What had happened? She had left herself just long enough to get caught in a life. She pictured Darwin, his broomish beard. She was not a scientist but some dumb-to-itself thing a scientist studies. She was a subject. A girl won over by a boy. The doctor described the procedure in a rote voice. Next to him, a nurse nodded along. When the doctor left to get his tools, Grace said, “I've changed my mind.”

“Oh, honey,” the nurse said, “don't cry.” She handed her a tissue. Grace wasn't crying, hadn't felt like crying, but once the tissue was in her hand a sob rose in her throat.

She returned home, returned the cash to its hiding spot, ate an orange, a banana, a can of peas without heating them, a package of Twinkies, and vomited. The baby was born seven months later. They gave her a name—Judith—that turned out not to suit her. It was the wrong name but it couldn't be taken back. Nothing could be taken back. That seemed to be the lesson of Grace's life.

She would raise the baby and make their meals and three afternoons a week tutor high school kids, the Continental Congress,
The Old Man and the Sea,
basic algebra. She would enter full womanhood, submit to it, and find it wasn't as bad as she'd anticipated. It held certain unexpected comforts. Such as the pleasure of a sleeping companion. Such as the immense contentedness that overcame her while watching her child throw her corkscrew body into and out of the sprinkler. Such as knowing you had arrived at yourself—that, yes, there was a whole wide world out there, a world of sex and science and complicated, meaningful art, but you weren't required to do anything but stay where you were, and dress your child, once in a while stick her in the tub, and generally make sure life ticked along. Parenthood, it turned out, wasn't so hard. She found its rhythms. She sang its songs. There was a trick to being a mother, she realized: you just had to use a light hand. Her daughter called her “Grace,” and called her father “Hank.” Why not? Who cared what the neighbors thought? Why adhere to the old, tired conventions? Sometimes she drew insects, flowers, but not with the same urgency as before. She smoked cigarettes, and, in summertime, lay in the sun with a sheet of aluminum foil under her chin. She wanted very little.

But then her daughter turned fourteen, and their life suddenly became tenuous, tense, strange. Judith morphed, nearly overnight, from a compliant, sprinkler-jumping girl into—what? Into a creature wry and impatient. Dour. Also her backside rounded. Her chest grew large, and her legs long, and somehow she got hold of an antique cigarette holder, which she chewed or wore behind her ear. Late for curfew. Missing from bed in the morning. And she didn't insult them—which, after all, might be construed as some inside-out kind of love—so much as ignore them. Day by day, she grew more indifferent, more imperious, absent. Boys in beat-up cars who honked but never came to the door. Packages in the mail with no return address. Even when she was home, at the dinner table, moving food across her plate, she wore a tight, withdrawn expression.

“Ah, she'll grow out of it,” Hank said in bed one night.

“She seems…” What was the word? What was the new thing? “Heartless,” Grace tried, which wasn't quite it, but came close.

“Sure, she's heartless. She's a teenager. What heart did you have back then? None, if I recall.”

“That's not true.”

“I gave you your heart,” Hank said matter-of-factly. “I opened you up and popped it in.” He made a clucking sound with his tongue.

Was he right? Possibly. She placed her palm on her chest, felt for that old drumming.

In the meantime, they decided, they would give the girl more freedom. It was a kind of reverse psychology. You want to break your curfew? Fine. Now you have no curfew. You want to steal our booze? No. We'll give it to you. Relinquishing her power made Grace feel powerful. She felt sad and powerful, and the power mostly overwhelmed the sadness, and so she waited patiently for her daughter to return to herself, and to them.

But this did not happen. Instead, in her sixteenth year, Judith ran away.

No note. No explanation. Not even the barest reassurance, which would have been only decent. Her room was empty. She was thorough in her packing—took even the loose buttons on her dresser—and yet failed to leave a note.

She'd been gone a week. Shelly knew nothing. The cops knew nothing. The phone didn't ring.

All Grace could do was sit in her lawn chair and smoke. She imagined the boyfriend, Q, imagined his busy pelvis—sunburnt chest—unclipped fingernails—yellow callused palms. These body parts flashed at her like images in a television commercial, teasers, inciting a riot in her heart. Meanwhile the spring air mocked her. The smell of barbecues mocked her. The laugh track of sitcoms, the sun, the trees, the earth, the glossy sky, anything hopeful or routine or blue or green mocked her, until she thought she could not take it, could not take a moment more, thought maybe she'd scream and scream and not stop until they came and straitjacketed her, and she was ready for this, ready to submit, and then Hank called out from the house. “Grace? Gracie? C'mere for a sec?” like it was an ordinary day.

She found him in the kitchen. He was hanging from the pull-up bar, wearing tight jeans with bleach spots on the thighs. He said, “You want to make something to eat?”

She didn't respond. They looked at one another. Their child was gone. Maybe she was dead.

Then, in a mild, ruminating voice, the sort of voice he might use to say what he wanted for lunch, Hank said, “I'm going to kill him.”

His eyes moved to the pantry that held, on its uppermost shelf, in a shoebox and wrapped in a floral dishcloth, his handgun.

At once they both had the same thought: The gun would be gone. How had they not considered it? They blinked. Let her have taken the gun. It rose like smoke in between them, this hope: Let her have taken the gun. Let her have pointed it at whatever asshole tried to do whatever they did these days to girls from small towns who don't know any better. Of course what boys do to small-town girls was the same now as it always was. So let her have the gun. Let her have the gun and the guts to use it, if it came to that. Neither spoke. Hank got the step-stool. He retrieved the box. But there it was, still nestled in its home, a dumb thing, gleaming and useless, a beetle on its back.

“I'll kill him,” Hank said. “I'll do the balloon trick with his balls.” He could make two things out of balloons: a monkey and a parrot.

“There's no one to kill,” she said gently.

“I will.”

“There's no one.”

The phone rang.

Hank froze.

It rang again.

Hank said: “I'm going to kill whoever's on the other goddamn end of that phone,” and it was her.

H
e stood on the cusp of the woods, and then took a step. He could already smell the silt of the river. The woods made the lowest noise, a flickering of insects and leaves. In the distance, the froggish song of a bird. A single cloud blotted the sun. A breeze, and the woods cracked, the one cloud broke in two, elongated, fused again. He opened and closed his hands. His hands.
His.
He could do what he wanted with them. The immensity of his freedom stuck him with the roiling abruptness of a fever. He lifted a foot, thought:
I will kiss each fingernail. I will kiss between her toes. I will do everything. I will say everything.
It was the first time in his life he felt unembarrassed by need—his desire was faultless, elemental; it might make a mess but it was legitimate, like blood, no one could say a word to the contrary. He took another step. A dozen black birds hovered, alighted on the tree above his head.
Run,
he thought.
Hurry.

A voice from behind him: “Sam.”

It was his uncle's voice.

They knew. Of course. It was no surprise. It was impossible to have a private desire, impossible to be a boy and want something without the whole world seeing it. He could hear the sniggering birds. He could smell the water. Heavy footsteps behind him.
Run.

“Sam.”

She was waiting under a canopy of green ecstasy.

“Sam! Hey!”

He couldn't run.

Helen was in there, sitting by the river, her bare feet in the water, and even though his whole body shook with desire and fear, even though his future was being peeled from him as a woman peels the skin from an apple (each time his uncle said his name it was a turn of her wrist), he could not ignore the man who saved him. A hand found his shoulder. He turned. He saw his uncle's broad, bearded face, lumberjack jaw, thick lips. A kind, unattractive face that compelled pure devotion. You couldn't refuse him a crumb. This was the tyranny of the good man, and the lust of an adolescent boy was no match for it.

“Hi, Uncle Joe.” It seemed a great shame, a failure of love, that he could offer this simple greeting.

“Thank God I found you, thank God.” Joe's upper lip curled a little, not a snarl but a softening, a shivering twitch. “Kip said he saw you come this way. Man alive, Sam. We're in a fix here. A state of
emergency
.” The word was cast crisply into the air, clean as a siren. But it was the wrong word.

Now Sam was walking the other way, away from the woods, away from Helen. He didn't mean to be walking. His uncle walked and he followed. His uncle talked, gasping between words, saliva gathering in the corners of his mouth, and Sam listened. The woods fell away. The woods were gone. They had never existed.

“I'll tell you what's going on, Sam, and I'll tell you why I need your help. Say what you will about equal rights. When push comes to shove, women need protecting.”

Sam cried, “Did something happen to Constance?”

“No, Sam.” They neared the car, its engine humming. “We're going to the city.”

“Why?”

Now Joe turned, looked Sam square in the face. His frown was so fierce, so amplified and practiced, that it resembled nothing more than a smile.

“A girl's in trouble. We're going to protect her. All sorts of awful things happened, but we're on our way now. I'm talking about your cousin Judith here,” and there was impatience in his voice, a flicker of irritation, as though Sam should have known.

He was so relieved it was not Constance, that he had not lost another mother, so relieved they were talking about Judith, whom he detested, that he said, dumbly, “She's not my cousin.” He was so relieved it was not Constance that when Joe said, next, “Get in the car,” Sam got in.

Joe released the emergency brake.

“She's a girl and she's in trouble. The nature of the relation seems beside the point.” Joe pulled a piece of paper from his pocket. The paper, the hand, shook. “It's a
hotel,
of all places. Gone. Didn't call for a week. Maybe she ran away. Maybe she was kidnapped. They can't tell for sure. Poor Hank. Can you imagine? Today the phone rings and she's
here
”—he waved the paper—“she's here and says she needs to be retrieved as soon as possible.”

Joe relayed the plan: since they were closer to the city than her parents and could get there sooner, and since time was of the essence, they—that is, he and Sam—would find the girl, bring her back to their house. Hank would be there by midnight. Hank, Joe's old best friend, like blood brothers. But even if they hadn't been blood brothers—even if a total stranger had called, sobbing, his girl gone off and Lord knows what, himself too far away to get there by nightfall—of course Joe would step up. This is what men do.

Sam hadn't seen Judith for a couple years. She was one of those noisily sighing girls who steals cigarettes and rolls her skirts at the waist to make them shorter, one of those girls always announcing her boredom, scrunching her nose at the cheese plate his aunt offers (the cheese plate Constance spent an hour cutting and arranging), smirking at Constance's overlarge disappointment. Judith: even her name, its snootiness, the puckered little
o
it made of your mouth, disturbed him. He remembered, the last time he saw her, how she drank her father's beer, just lifted the nearly full bottle from his hand and finished it herself. Hank had said, “Say please, honey,” but this was a joke—she wasn't required to say please.

“I need you with me, Sam.”

“I guess,” Sam said. “But—I don't know.”

“You
guess
? A girl's in trouble.”

Her trouble was not his trouble. The trouble, now, was Helen's, but Sam couldn't say this, could he? Helen who was in the woods, who'd think he'd abandoned her, who'd think he'd succumbed to second thoughts or changed his mind or found someone else. He was leaving her on the bank of a river and he wouldn't be able to have her again.

“I was supposed to meet someone,” he said simply.

“This is an emergency,” Joe replied. “This is one of those moments…” And it was clear, in the way his chest rose, in the way he gripped at the wheel, that he'd been quietly hoping for one of these moments all his days. “Hank and I were boyhood friends. You do anything for a friend like that.” He drove toward the highway ramp. “If we make good time we'll be there by nightfall.”

Sam needed to get out of the car.

He said, “See, I was supposed to meet a girl.”

The spell of the crisis, for a moment, seemed to break. His uncle said, “Well now.” But then he shook his head. “This is the kind of thing you do to
earn
the girl, Sam. To earn the right to a girl.”

The interstate transformed a specific place to an unspecific one. Sam's disappointment was bodily; he felt it in his testicles, a diffusion of stings. He felt it in his his thighs and even, somehow, in his buttocks. But then it was gone. All at once, those sensations of longing left his loins and moved up into his stomach, and he was hungry. How could he be hungry? His stomach made a familiar wheedling sound while she waited in those woods, caught in a future that wouldn't ever happen.

“You're a good boy, Sam. You're a good boy for coming. Apple in the glove box if you're hungry.”

Sam reached for the glove box, then decided against it. He should not reward his hunger. He would not eat the apple and this would be an act of faithfulness to Helen.