The Sweet Relief of Missing Children (16 page)

R
alph ran through the woods searching for Libby, for the kids—they were too fast, they'd outrun him, and somehow he'd taken a wrong turn, gotten lost, spent ten minutes running down a path he was sure was the right path only to find himself back at the Come & Go. He'd run in a circle, a big stupid loop, and now stood drenched in sweat and out of breath and back where he started from. He needed to drop fifteen pounds. The next time he wanted to cheat on his diet with a pack of strawberry SnowDevils he'd think of this moment. He braced a hand on the dumpster, wheezing, wondering if Libby had found the girl, hoping she had, but also wondering if maybe it'd be better if she didn't find her. The sun beat down. He thought they were making some progress with the girl. Maybe. But he sensed, if he was to be honest, that
he
was the one the girl was listening to. He saw something in her eyes when he spoke to her, a flicker of warmth, a new listeningness. He was coming to suspect she was the kind of girl who'd listen to a man more than a lady; he didn't want to say this to Libby, who'd take it the wrong way, who'd charge him again with chauvinism when that wasn't it at all. Some girls just respond better to men! Was that chauvinistic to think? And some men respond better to women. There. Equality. Plus—well, it pained him to think it, but wasn't Libby coming on too strong? So maybe it would be better if the girl got away, this one time. Was it getting too personal for Libby? Well sure, yes, it was supposed to be personal, that was the point, the personal is political, it's always personal, it's a
person,
we're all people, thinking on an
un
-personal level is exactly what makes poor girls spread their legs for murderers. It's personal, has to be, and yet he had been seeing in Libby's eyes recently something he didn't like, something like desperation, a need that, to be honest, was maybe the wrong kind of personal.

He wiped sweat off his brow.
Chugga-chugga
went his heart. No more SnowDevils. No more ice cream or animal crackers, even if the box said
LITE
, that was a Madison Avenue lie.

He wanted a shower badly, feared he was starting to smell. He knew he should look for them but had no idea where to go. Maybe it was better to wait here—Libby'd surely come back for him. But he felt foolish and fat just standing there sweating next to the dumpster, and the clerk inside with the buzz cut had already yelled at him when he'd dropped off the pamphlets. The clerk had said if he found Ralph loitering he'd call the cops, and Ralph didn't need more of that, no he didn't. He wanted to buy some apple juice but the guy wouldn't sell him anything, so he went back into the woods.

Ten years ago the girl's daddy, Thomas, had talked Libby into having an abortion. The girl's daddy was a nurse in the clinic. Nurses have more power than doctors, most people don't realize but it's true, it's the nurses who talk to the girls, look in their eyes, ask questions, hold their hands, and whisper reassurances. The doctor just comes in, aftershave wafting, lifts his tools and—presto—murders the innocent. The job takes minutes. It's the
nurse
who sees the girl. It's the nurse who has the power to persuade, who witnesses the girl at that pivotal juncture, it's the nurse who's the gatekeeper, the guardian. The girl's daddy had sat Libby down in a windowless room and wrapped a blood-pressure cuff on her skinny arm and said, as that cuff tightened, “How are you feeling?” And Libby had said, “Okay, I guess, thank you.” Ralph could imagine her young voice like a sliver of light under a door at night. Then Libby had said, “I'm scared, maybe I shouldn't be here, maybe this is wrong?” She'd said the stuff that any human being with a soul, with half a soul, a quarter of a soul, could see meant she needed someone to tell her to go home. But what did he do, the girl's daddy, the man Thomas Grant, soulless nurse, what did he say to Libby, to Ralph's sweet snapdragon girl, to this nineteen-year-old who hadn't yet opened the Bible? He said, “I'll take care of you.” Libby didn't know how God said “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you” or how God knit all of us together in our mothers' bodies. No one had told Libby that the womb is intended to be a place where God works His creative action, not where man works his destructive action! It wasn't her fault that she didn't know—her mother was a commie, after all, her mother drove a pink van and sold wind chimes fashioned from old gutters. How on earth could Libby have known? Libby was blameless, and in her belly was a
blameless child,
but she didn't know this, she didn't know how Satan works, and so she told herself she was bad, that the baby must be bad too.

The nurse, Thomas, had his own girl. No one had guaranteed the destruction of
that
life. He got to have his pretty redheaded girl, and it wasn't fair or right. Why was he allowed a daughter? Ralph felt an imbalance, an injustice, as clearly as he felt the ache in his feet, or the need to pee, or his thirst. Now he walked back into the woods and found the path he hoped was the right one. The girl would come to see the terror of it, what her father did, how it was a crime against humanity and a profanation of God's creation, and she would demand her father stop, demand he make public amends. If the father refused, the girl would have no choice but to abandon him, disown him or disavow him or whatever was that legal term for divorcing a parent, and then maybe the man would grasp the slightest fraction of what Libby had suffered—Libby and thousands of other girls.
Emancipation
. That was it. The girl would emancipate herself. Sometimes they thought about shooting her. That would be another way to make the point. Some of them argued for such tactics. Desperate times, desperate measures. Certain people made convincing arguments. Libby, sometimes, seemed convinced.

Libby cried at night. He'd wake up and flip on the light and see her clutching her pillow, see the heaving of her long, thin back, smooth as soap. He thought about what she did to her leg with a shard of glass. He'd applied antibiotic cream. It healed very nicely, no scar. He thought about this as he walked.

Jesus was a vase and they were the flowers. That's what Pastor Gold said, and that's what it felt like, it was the right analogy. Jesus made life seem packed with good people, stem against stem against stem. He made of the crowded world a community; he made of the wilderness a bouquet. Could Ralph help the girl feel this too? Could he somehow communicate how much better and simpler it was once you were inside that vase?

That Ralph's sperm seemed not to work, or that Libby's womb was barren, Libby took as proof of God's rage.

T
here had been a fight at Paul's house, but he wasn't going to think about what happened before or during or after the fight. He left. The point of leaving is that you never have to think about the fight. He wouldn't think about the terrible cold that settled over the household afterward, the slammed doors and tight faces and the way he came to feel he was a stranger to his own mother, as though he hadn't emerged from her very cunt.
Cunt!
Why would he pick that brutal word? Because his mother was too selfish to have a vagina.

He wouldn't think of Gideon either, or biology class, or the model ship, or his stepfather whose dirty fingernails on his mother's arm would forever turn his stomach. Even now the thought of it made him want to save her, his mother who didn't need saving.

Jade and this Christian in the woods were the confirmation that he was leaving, proof that he had no place in Beetle, that it was a town of strangers. He'd leave and never return. He'd never have to set foot again in that cluttered cottage with the sad-eyed owl door knocker and the smell in the air like a kitchen sponge gone bad. The longer he lived on earth the sadder and more perverted and just plain
weird
people seemed. He believed that if he'd been raised in a white-picket suburb, if he'd lived in a house with aluminum siding and clean gutters, if he'd had two parents with steady jobs, if he'd been given books and a lawn-mowing business and a baseball mitt to oil—he believed he'd be happy. But that hadn't happened.

Once certain stuff got into you, it was hard to get it out. He was only sixteen, but he knew this.

The woman was saying, “I could have had a daughter just like you.”

“Not likely.”

“Red hair runs in my family on my father's side. Could have had a little girl I'd put in dresses and braids. But I was scared and young and your daddy—”

“Don't say ‘daddy,'” Jade said. She just sat there listening, her head resting on the decimated upholstery, while the woman presided like a new teacher, awkward, breathless.

Jade said, “I never wore dresses or braids.”

“Don't be so sure.”

“I know what I wore!”

“Well, my daughter would have had dresses and braids. But your daddy—”

“I've never called him ‘Daddy.'”

“Your daddy.”

“I love him,” Jade gave a steely, dignified smile. “I'm proud of him.”

The woman took a step back, seemed to be losing confidence.

Paul suddenly understood that the woman was truly unwell. Was Jade right, that she carried a gun? At first it had seemed impossible.

“The world's broken, shattered to bits, but we can repair it if we do certain things. Like knowing God. Like protecting the innocent.”

“Save the whales,” Jade said.

“All the meanness in the world, its broken bits, can come back together, possibly, if we do the right things, say the right things, it's very possible.”

“Hearing you talk about decency, that's funny.”

“Take a vase and break it,” the woman said, and now Paul heard tears in her voice. “Make a video of this. Then you play it backward. Can you picture that? That's what we must do for the world.”

“Let's go,” Paul said. “I'm going.”

They ignored him. They were looking carefully at each other, looking at each other with an intensity that disturbed him, for all the sudden they seemed—how was it possible?—like lovers. Their faces held love and rage in equal measure. He wanted to look away, but he didn't.

“I know what you feel.” The woman stepped closer. “We'll help.”

“C'mon,” said Paul. “Let's get out of here.”

Now Jade stood. She rose weakly, as a person after an illness, steadying herself on the sofa.

“I know,” the woman said softly. “I know just what you feel.”

“Then you know how badly I want to kill it and leave it on your doorstep.”

The woman shook her head, said, “How broken you are.”

“Strangle it.”

The woman kept shaking her head.

“Break it to bits.”

Paul said, “Enough already.”

It was time for him to go. The bus was the answer and always had been.

The woman's voice rose up, sprang at them—“Your father is a killer and you're a killer too. The world is dying at your hands. I'm sorry it's come to this.” Her hand went toward her side. “There's something I want to show you.” She took a step closer. Her chest rose.

Paul didn't see where Jade got the rock—suddenly it was in her hand, but it was too big to be in her hand. Mossy on one side, gray-green, the size of a bowling ball, and she raised it up like it weighed nothing at all, and then higher.

R
alph wanted to take Libby to see a doctor in the city who did miraculous things with ovaries. His cousin had told him about this doctor, a man in his early thirties, supposedly a genius, who'd recently been written up in
Conception Today
—a long, admiring article about the magic of the doctor's work and his incomparable success rate, plus several pictures showing him dandling delighted babies on his knee. Black babies, white babies, Chinese babies: the whole gamut. The doctor had a square, clean-shaven face, arrogant but reassuring.
I'm a lucky bastard,
the face said,
and I do good work—let me help you.

Ralph wanted the doctor's help. His cousin had money and was willing to pay for a consultation. But the cousin was an atheist and single—what's more, she
wanted
to be single—and she wore fringed boots and lipstick and had joined a book club where women in fringed boots and lipstick got together each week to drink wine and discuss the sex scenes. The cousin's name was Christine; for several years now she had gone by “Chloe.” Ralph made the mistake of telling Libby too much about Christine/Chloe, such as how she said she loved Ralph “despite the God thing.” Libby despised the cousin, under no circumstances would she accept her money, and anyway it was God's will, not a doctor's, etc. And Ralph had said, “Yes, sure, of course—but, I mean—God put that doctor here, didn't he? God made the technology that lets that doctor look inside you?” Libby had practically torn his head off. “Your reasoning is disgusting,
Ralph
”—she said his name, when she was angry, like she was swearing—“I mean you can use the same reasoning to defend Doctor Foley or Thomas Grant, can't you?
Ralph?
Don't you believe in free will? Don't you believe we're vessels made by God but our actions are our own and no one else's?”

“Of course I do.” He'd tried to touch her hand but she'd pulled it away, and then she was crying again.

She stopped crying and went to make them tuna sandwiches.

She was hot and cold, his girl. She was something else. He admired her resolve, admired her rigidity. Her belief was inviolable, stark, it didn't serve her, didn't make her happy, but she maintained it anyway—this was, he knew, the real deal.

He walked through the woods, looking for her, feeling confused, wanting a shower, the wind in the leaves bringing him back to the days of his own childhood when he'd played in woods like these. He'd preferred the rainy days, loving to dig holes in the sulfurous muck, to come home drenched and freezing, and to allow his mother to pretend to be angry while she dried his hair and made him hot chocolate with real whipped cream.

He hoped, if they had a baby, it would get Libby's height, Libby's metabolism, and his patience.

He was getting deeper into the woods now but saw no sign of anyone. He'd reached a place where there was no more trash on the path, where there was, in fact, hardly a path. This is when he heard the noise. First a yelp, which could have belonged to an animal, which he told himself was just an animal—a dog or a bird. Then—clear as day—a scream. Human screaming. It was Libby. He ran toward the sound, tried, but the sound was placeless and the path was gone. She screamed; he screamed back. “Libby!” Foliage lashed him. He called her name. He ran. The scream got fainter. He ran the other way.

He said, “Oh Libby oh Libby.”

As a boy he'd dug holes in the ground and anything had been possible. Life was expanding infinitely. He called his wife's sweet, childlike name. Her screaming stopped. Then it started again, faintly. He spun, branches and leaves in his face. The woods did something strange with the sound, broke it into pieces, so it was coming from everywhere at once, so that he could only stand there, in one place, and take it in.