The Sweet Relief of Missing Children (17 page)

T
he bus was idling at the station, the driver chewing a toothpick and rubbing his temples. Paul ran toward it. He'd accidentally left his pillow at the clearing, but he still carried the sleeping bag, still wore the backpack, which thudded against his back as he ran. He wouldn't witness it, whatever it was. He wouldn't become complicit in this by seeing it through. He knew he was supposed to stay, to help, to be a man, but once he saw Jade raise the rock, once he saw the woman collapse, heard her screams, saw her cover her head, he'd been alone with his instincts and ran. All the while a gutted voice inside him said:
Be a man a man a man
. This word, this awful, liar's word—
man
—clanged in his head. He was terribly hot, savagely hungry, wanted just to get on the bus. That's all he'd ever want again as long as he lived. He vowed it. No one was allowed to expect anything from him!

When he reached the road he paused, squinted in the sunlight, pressed a hand to his chest, and felt with some horror his tumbling heart. Then his hand went to his hair, which was soaked and greasy. He was wearing too many clothes. He was half a mile from his house. Would his mother be home? He had the urge to check, peek in a window, see her one last time. But what was the point? Two hundred bucks in his pocket, plus a rabbit's foot. In his backpack were some playing cards, a few books, underwear, an old eyeglass case holding his nail clippers and safety pins and a coin from the sixth grade that said
MATH CHAMP
. He walked along the shoulder of the road toward the bus station, his body calming down, the sweat on his face evaporating, and then at once he thought:
What the fuck? What have you done?
These questions were not of him, did not emerge from his depths; it was like they were pressed into his head from the outside.
What have you done, you stupid boy?
He stopped. If a car came he'd have stuck out his thumb, but no car came. He stood there a moment, and then he willed himself to turn around. He willed himself to go back to that clearing.
Be a man! Sixteen isn't too young to be a man!
That's what his stepfather would say, that asshole. So he went back. By the time he got back, twenty minutes, half an hour later, there was no one there. He was as glad about this as about anything else in his life. The clearing was deserted. No blood, no evidence of a scuffle, of a body dragged away. The sofa was empty. The woods silent. His pillow wasn't where he'd dropped it. Who took his pillow?

“Hello?” he said.

Nothing.

“Anyone?”

No one.

That woman would be fine. Just a little cut up was all. Right? Yes. He didn't know. Maybe she was dead in the bushes. Probably not. Or maybe Jade? Probably not. It wasn't his job to know. The rock, the fight, they'd been a part of a conversation he had no business in, didn't understand. It wasn't for him. It wasn't his job to save anyone. It wasn't anyone's job! Everyone was banged up or would be, so what could he or anyone do? Nothing. In fact, he felt suddenly sure that they'd both been faking it—acting something out for each other, trying to prove something. Like men. Like who had the bigger dick, that kind of thing. He laughed. First it wasn't a real laugh—first it was just an assembly of tense, halting notes, a forced thing,
ha-ha-ha
. Then, without his trying, it became real. He felt the pressure of a true laugh behind his eyes—an expanding, sneezy sensation filling up the cavities of his head, a simple lightness, a gust of weird, disembodied, whole joy. He was laughing. Women were insane. He was hungry as hell. He was free. He was sure of it all.

T
he waiter brought him the bill, and the man laughed at it, or rather laughed at the line drawing beneath the sum, a doodle of a frizzy-haired, clown-nosed creature holding a giant cup of coffee, inked by the waiter as a method of asking for a good tip, a method of reminding them that he, the waiter, was a human being whose capacities exceeded serving drinks. “Cute,” agreed Leonora, and laughed too, felt obliged to laugh, though it struck her as sad.

Of course the man paid for their beverages, left a big tip, and this pleased her, confirmed her belief that he was a decent person stuck in a bad moment; that he understood and accepted the social order; that he was telling the truth when he said he knew it was weird to ask her to the coffee shop. She liked him. He liked her too, and he said this, then blushed like someone who's shown up with a too-opulent gift and realizes it only then. They stepped together into the cold day. He replaced the red mittens. A bus lumbered down the avenue, on its side an advertisement for a new kind of dental floss. She pictured Beatrice walking into her new bedroom, gasping in pleasure and surprise at the sleigh bed and mango walls and teen magazines fanned out on the inflatable coffee table, and then lifting the receiver of the transparent Princess phone, everything inside visible, its complicated network of wires and plugs and loops that enabled, miraculously, the simplest thing to happen. Plus the new CD by Roger Ranger. The room would be made new, and the girl, too, and her father, all of it, brand-new, and Leonora, who'd been the helper, would never see it, which was proper.

They said goodbye. He seemed to have new confidence. He said, “I wish you the best of luck, Leonora. All the luck in the world.” His voice was crisper, stronger, than it had been before, which she took as proof of the value of their conversation.

They walked in different directions. A light snow had begun. She moved down the street.

She wasn't clueless: she knew the man wanted to win. She knew that part of the joy of connecting with his daughter, gaining her love, was in beating the mother. They were having a war, Beatrice was the spoils. Leonora had witnessed this scenario on TV shows and in movies and in the families of some of her friends. But couldn't it also be true that the man loved his girl and wanted her to love him too? Things didn't have to be one-or-the-other.

She would surprise her brother by making marshmallow crispy treats. Even if their mother didn't like them to eat too much sugar, it was snowing and you were allowed to eat too much sugar when it snowed. Her mother would be proud of Leonora, even though she could never ever tell her mother that she'd allowed a stranger to buy her a hot chocolate. But if her mother could know—could see past the strangeness of it, the danger—Leonora was confident she would be proud. It was nearly four o'clock. Her mother would still be at work, still making phone calls on behalf of refugees. Leonora picked up her pace, passed the public library, the bank, then the building with the mirrored façade, which allowed her to observe, peripherally, her posture, and to correct it. The snow was not sticking.

Another bus, this one featuring a spoonful of yogurt and the words:
Too Good to Be True.

A woman approached her.

She was not clean or wearing red mittens or in possession of all her teeth. Her clothes were baggy, dark, a tattered wool coat, flared pants, black boots with pointy toes. She wore her hair in a bowl cut, like a child's. Her expression, too, was that of a child, a child up past her bedtime—red-rimmed, a little wild. The woman said, “Excuse me, dear.” It was the voice of a librarian, firm, clear, civilized. Leonora stopped walking. The woman lifted a hand—the hand was elegant, oddly elegant, with pearly painted nails. She said, “I wonder if you could help us for a second?”

There was a man too, she saw him now, five feet away, standing with his back against a building, smiling, full set of teeth, wearing a ski parka, holding in his arms a sleeping orange kitten.

The woman said, “Cute kitten, huh?”

It was.

“Sound asleep,” the man said. “Out like a light.”

“Two days old.” The woman shook her head in wonderment. “Just hatched.”

“Right?” the man said. “Cute as heck. Doesn't even have a name yet. Just hatched. Bundle a joy. Down from the stork.”

Cats came out of vaginas. She'd never say it, but the word rang through her mind. Biology wasn't disgusting until people tried to protect you from it. They looked at her, as if waiting, and she wondered if maybe she was supposed to offer a name for the kitten, if that was the help they sought.

They waited.

She said the first thing that came into her mind: “Muffy?”

Her friend had a dog named Muffy; it seemed a classic pet name. It wasn't very imaginative—but then she'd been caught off guard. She could've come up with better given more time.

The woman laughed, said, “That's my girl. That's great. Muffy! Too much.”

The man rolled his eyes at the woman, as if for Leonora's benefit, as if they had a history of siding together against her. His teeth were nice but his skin was rutted, rashy; the woman had nice skin but horrible teeth.

He said, “Look here, sweetie. We're supposed to drop this kitty at a friend's. Over on Glasgow Street. You know where that is? Near the chicken place?”

“Wing Dings,” said Leonora.

“Wing Dings! Right. You know where that place is?”

The woman said, “This new kitty belongs to a girl over there. We're the delivery crew. A nice girl's getting this baby kitty for a present. Except we're kinda lost.”

Leonora knew the chicken place, which was half a dozen blocks away but required going backwards and making three turns on account of some one-way streets. They looked at her.

“Flipping cold,” the woman said suddenly, and while the words were rude, or anyway close to rude, still her voice contained a primness, a librarian's pleasant pinch. A ribbon of fear fluttered inside Leonora's body. Then she reminded herself about the world being light and darkness both. Decency in the face of darkness was the only way it got turned to something else. Also, it was wrong only to help attractive, clean people. Ugly people deserved help too. She began giving them directions but the woman shook her head, said, “Not from around here. Can't follow. I've got a map in the car—you point it out on a map? Can you draw a circle around where we are and where the cat's supposed to be?”

Could she?

The man said, “We'd really appreciate it, sweetie.”

The wind picked up. Her throat was tight now, tighter than before, but she wasn't sure it was the illness.

Two circles. Two circles was resonable. It wasn't too much to ask. The man walked over to her and put the kitten in her arms. It opened its eyes. She said, surprising herself, “Thumper! Hello, Thumper.” She could feel the animal's body, its blood, its heart, all these tiny pulsing sensations on her wrists, beating with her own pulse, thumping, you couldn't tell them apart.

“Thumper!” the woman cried.

“Thumper's a good name,” the man said.

“This one's a live wire,” the woman said.

The man said, “Just show her the map, Sandy,” and she showed Leonora the map.

J
udith sent her daughter off to school in a denim jumper embroidered with ladybugs. They ran up her belly in a vertical line, splitting her stomach and breastbone in two. Green buttons in the shape of flowers along the hem. The child didn't care about her clothes, didn't want cute jumpers or patent-leather Mary Janes or Barbies or glimmering barrettes, and while this was a comfort to Judith, who hadn't wanted them either, it also frightened her, because did not wanting these things mean the girl would turn out like her mother? What
would
the girl want? Everyone has to want something; it's easier to want the regular things, though you don't get a say. The daughter, her name was Diana, never asked for anything.

It was a damp Tuesday in May. They were late for the bus, so Judith drove Diana to school. She was in the second grade; her teacher was Mrs. Hoop, round, dull, all cream and beige except for the gleaming red fingernails of a prostitute. Judith kissed the girl's head. She drove home in a misting rain. Then she ate half a tub of cottage cheese while reading a story in the paper about some local girls who'd started a Sally Ride Society. They wanted to be astronauts, wrote letters to NASA, to the President:
Send more ladies to space!
They were planning another bake sale to raise money for a trip to Cape Canaveral. The optimism and pride of those girls unnerved Judith. There was so much terror in the world, bombs and arms deals and famines, all those dead people in Oklahoma City for god's sake (the mother of one of the dead lived in the next town over, was regarded as a heroine for spawning a victim, glorious for her tie to the tragedy), and here a gaggle of preteens planned moon missions, baked cup-cakes and decorated them with little stars. All hope was misplaced. The world needed hope desperately, but it always came from the wrong people and went to the wrong things. If she ever came across one of their bake sales she would not buy a thing. The dead son in Oklahoma was twenty-two, had a fiancé. Those girls had no right to the cosmos.

She went to the living room to watch television, a game show. Five minutes later someone knocked on the door. A knock? Who came out here? No one knocked. But that's what it was, a double knock, a pause, then another. Someone was in their scabby woods knocking on the door of the cottage.

Judith and Sam and Diana lived in a little cottage in a town called Beetle. It was an accident, Beetle—it wasn't where they'd meant to come. They'd been planning to live in the city, had in fact been moving to the city, on the road, but Judith got scared. This was before Diana was born; this was when Diana was a germ in Judith's belly, the size of a paper clip. They were on their way to the city when she'd told Sam to pull over, stop the car, and he did, and where he pulled off was Beetle. They laughed at that—who would name a town Beetle? Absurd. The town was nowhere, bland, empty of threat. They bought Cokes at the gas station, stood on greasy asphalt and drank and took in the smell of gasoline, and she said, “I'm staying here.” Sam was still wearing his wedding shoes. “Here?” He didn't understand. They'd been man and wife for eighteen hours. Here, yes; right here. But the city…? No. She'd changed her mind. She couldn't go back to that place. “Oh.” She could tell he was disappointed, but the power was hers, wasn't it? She'd earned the right to her say. She'd paid her dues. So the next day they were driven down a rutted road in the station wagon of a realtor named Sasha, a sexagenarian with pencil-thin eyebrows and hair that floated around her head like a shower cap. She stopped the car. “It needs work,” Sasha said, squinting at the property. “It's been empty quite a while. There's a better place over on Coswell…” It was a fairy-tale cottage, tumbledown, overgrown, mossy and wild, with a red door and a cast-iron knocker in the shape of an owl, a claw-foot tub, a stone fireplace, a crumbling chimney, everything swathed in vines and weeds and coated with dirt, so that the total effect called to mind something caught in a spiderweb, a thing stunned and wrapped up but not yet eaten. The price was right. Sam said, “Let's see the place on Coswell?” but Judith said, “I want this one.” He raised a brow. He had recently taken to raising it. She didn't like this particularly; it reminded her of her father. Sam looked at the cottage, touched the rusted hinges of its door, its filthy window, sighed. “Well,” he said. He wanted to see her in that big bathtub, so he signed the papers.

Now, eight years later, a knock on their door. Who would knock? No one came here. Their daughter was at school; Sam was at the accounting firm. Judith sat in the cramped living room, smoking a cigarette, still annoyed by the Sally Ride girls, wondering why she should remain annoyed—who cared about a bunch of stargazing kids?—while on the television a woman had to decide which cost more, a jar of peanut butter or a jar of olives, and if she was correct she would take home a catamaran. The deviousness of human boredom, that it pretends to be alleviated by the most meager of exercises.
The olives
, thought Judith.

The rain had picked up. Thunder, weakly, a mild comfort, like someone clearing their throat in the next room. A knock. Diana was at school learning map skills, Diana had lost one of the decorative buttons on her jumper but didn't bother looking for it, while across town in a strip mall Sam punched numbers into a temperamental computer and sipped burnt coffee, and here was Judith, already twenty-six, a few community college courses under her belt, a part-time job at the Come & Go, faith and fidelity like apple seeds she'd swallowed by accident, in her but not of her, working their way out. They would come out whole. They were not things you could digest. Or were they? She didn't know; not knowing was the whole shape of her life; not knowing was liquid; it takes the form of its container. It was May. The woman on the television looked to the audience to help her decide. The olives? The peanut butter? The audience roiled and screamed and gnashed. Then there was a knock on the door. Another.

She rose.

But what if she hadn't gone to the door? What if she'd stayed sitting in her wicker chair, feet drawn up beneath her, smoking and watching television, watching the woman whose bra did not provide adequate support while she leapt joyously in front of her new boat (the peanut butter)—what if she had remained in this chair and ignored the knock, which now came more urgently—what if she had ignored the knock and stayed in her chair and watched the game show and then her soap opera and waited for her family to return—would she perhaps have borne out the rest of her life just like this?

She'd never know. It's one of those questions that sits on a shelf in your brain and swings its legs all your days.

He was about her age, she thought, twenty-six, twenty-seven, gangly, wearing a filthy corduroy blazer, jeans, hay-colored scruff on his face. He cleared his throat but did not speak.

“Can I help you?”

He said, stiffly, “Why hello, ma'am.”

She was not
ma'am
. She wore cutoffs and a pink tank-top, no bra. She didn't need a bra, even when she leapt for joy. She had never leapt for joy. On her ankle was a gold chain with a tiny heart, a gift from Sam and Diana. She waited for him to say more, but he seemed unsure how to proceed. The air outside smelled of ozone, grass, distant barbecues. They looked at each other. His nose was wide and blunt, like a boxer's, but his cheekbones were fine. He shifted his weight.

“Listen,” she said at last. “I'm not interested. If you're here to sell knives or God or whatnot.”

“Whatnot,” he said. “That would be my category.”

Near his feet sat a suitcase of worn brown leather, its hinges tarnished, the name of an expensive company branded on its side.

“I'm not selling anything. I promise. And I'm not a Christian.” He tugged on the sleeves of his jacket. She saw that he winced slightly, as if preparing for a blow. He took a breath. He blinked. Then he said, “This is my house.”

Behind her, on the television, the audience hissed with displeasure.

“Was,” he said. “It was my house.”

He looked at the straw mat under his feet, at the top of the doorframe, the owl knocker. He worked on keeping his eyes from going inside; he was trying to tell her, with his restrained eyes, that he had manners.

“Your house?”

“I grew up here.” His mouth, at rest, made something of a pout. For some reason it struck her as faintly ludicrous that anyone had lived in these rooms before her. She didn't believe him. “I should have called first,” he was saying. “Except obviously I had no way to know your phone number.” He rapped on the doorframe, then looked at his hand quizzically, as if he'd not been in possession of it. “See, I haven't set foot inside this place since I was—” And here he paused, looked down at his feet. He said, “Sixteen.” The word came out tentatively, softly, like the name of a friend he was ratting out. Still he looked at his feet. His shoes were a mess. He was homeless, it was clear, or something like it. He looked up again, now sheepish. “I was on a bus,” he explained. “It was passing through. Old Beetle. What could I do? I got off. I couldn't help myself. I didn't plan it, but the bus stopped and I was standing up. Why was I standing up? Who knows. I got off. Here I am.” He made a high, wobbling sound that might have been a laugh or a cry or a sneeze or a cross between them, but which he swallowed before she could decide. The sound was awful. That's when she knew he was telling the truth.

Now he seemed to be looking at her feet. She clenched her toes. He said, “I used to hammer those floorboard nails. Ten cents a pop.”

If she found herself one day passing through her old town, would she get off the bus? Would she knock on the door that had once been her door, the door to that lonely house with its ant-infested cupboards and lingering charred-meat smell and those chugging, ineffectual radiators and carpets her mother neglected to vacuum, even though there was a perfectly functional vacuum cleaner in the closet? What did Grace have against clean carpets? No. Judith would not knock. Only a pathetic person knocks. She did not believe in investigating nostalgia, which is merely the costume self-pity wears. But in this stranger's sad gaze there was something else. Beyond the nostalgia, that baser sentiment, she sensed—what? She wasn't sure. Something.

She said, “All right then. You want some water?”

He said that he couldn't imagine a better thing at this moment than a glass of water.

She liked the duct tape on the toe of his sneaker. She liked his scruff, his contained filth. She invited him in.

On the television a woman was squirting canned orange cheese onto a cracker—it sat there in a dazzling pile, like a castle. Judith turned it off.

“Thank you for trusting me,” the man said.

Judith turned to look at him, his pout, his greasy brow, and she felt a wisp of dread, a wisp of—what else? where? like a whirling sensation, faint, something veering through her stomach the way a top spins across a tabletop, going where it wants to go, captive to nothing—

Hope.

She said, “What the hell makes you think I trust you?”