The Sweet Relief of Missing Children (26 page)

F
rank called it a rumpus room, meaning it was a cellar but didn't feel like one. It was a room she might have liked a great deal under different circumstances, a room with soft yellow carpet, blond wood-paneled walls, a lamp made from a gumball machine. On a bamboo bar sat a glass bowl of drink umbrellas. A big black-and-white photograph of a tree, unframed, was pinned to the wall behind the bar. A clock in the shape of a pineapple.

The kitten slept in her lap. It was a gift, the kitten. She had been the girl getting the kitten. Neither of them had known it, not the cat, not Leonora, but all along their lives had been veering together, moving toward each other, since the very beginning of time, since before either of them was born or breathed.

As the hours passed, she began to take a certain pride. She imagined other girls, other people, would go berserk, lose their minds, which would only make things sadder and more dangerous. Beatrice, say, would shriek and claw and hurl insults. Others would vomit. Others—most people, probably—would leave themselves. She felt it as a distinct possibility, leaving herself, felt the invitation to close herself to the story. But that seemed wrong, a betrayal. She wanted to be—well, it was maybe strange—but she felt it was important to be a friend to herself. She didn't want to leave her body alone in this mess. This decision felt like a sort of victory, brought a feeling of woozy, helpless arrogance, like she'd won something big but had to keep her mouth shut about it.

Still, she cried a little. When the second hand came around again to the pineapple's tuft, she stopped crying.

The cat, all the while, was licking her hand. Its tiny, rough tongue. Its fluffy ears the same orange color of that candy they call circus peanuts.

She wished it wasn't happening—she would give anything for it not to be happening. “Anything”—was that true? She felt it was important to be honest with herself, and so made a list of things she'd be willing to give up: feet, hands, hearing, vision, hair, her brains, her beauty. She'd give up her grandmother, who was old anyway. There was no guilt in wanting to sacrifice her grandmother; Leonora knew that her grandmother would trade places in an instant. But people who take people don't take grandmothers. They take girls like Leonora. She cursed her face. No. She would love her face. She would love her face, her manners, would not regret even the things that brought her here. The easy path is not usually the right one. Her mother liked to say this, and Leonora always wanted to agree, though she never truly had occasion to understand. This was the occasion.

She thought about the kitten. How their little lives had been shuttling toward each other's. The purity of the kitten, that its beauty stayed intact no matter what happened, no matter who touched it—this made her feel better. A small rectangular window near the ceiling had been boarded up with plywood. Otherwise the place was cheery, sweet, a room ready for a party. Drink umbrellas! Once her mother had gone for Halloween in a shirt decorated with drink umbrellas; she'd called herself “Happy Hour.” Leonora stroked the cat. She thought about the Underground Railroad. She made a list of all the unlikely victories of the world, Frederick Douglass, the 1980 U.S. Ice Hockey Team, penicillin, the Gutenberg Press, Sally Ride, whoever it was who'd first climbed Everest, the United Nations, carbonation, the suffrage movement. What else? There were plenty. The hugeness of the list, the fact that it never could be exhausted, helped. It made her calm. It made it easier to stay inside herself. The kitten helped too. She sat in the center of a tan leather couch with a blanket over her lap. The cat was on the blanket. This wasn't the same blanket that hid her in the car; this one was clean, white wool. It held no smell but the faintest chemical whiff of dry cleaning. They had given her a clean blanket. They had given her a cup of soda, but she didn't drink it. They had given her a bowl of quarters for the gumball machine, but she didn't touch the quarters. She heard voices upstairs but couldn't make out many words. Occasional footsteps. The man, Frank, came down now and then. He apologized that the soda was flat, stood before her in his ski jacket, baggy jeans, white sneakers that looked brand-new. He said, “Sweetie, you just take it easy now,” as if she'd been wailing, when in fact she was sitting politely, unmoving, on the couch. The rash on his face was bad—she could tell he'd just rubbed some ointment on it; it shone. The woman never came down.

“Later on I'll swing by the grocery. Pick up some snacks. What kind of beverages do you like?”

She didn't reply.

He kept his gaze on her, bit down on his bottom lip.

“Any particular kind of snack?”

What was she supposed to say?

“Sweetie?”

She said, “Please don't call me that.”

“I told you
my
name.”

She said, “Your name is Frank.” She tried to say it with confidence, the way she'd report it to a police officer, but it came out too softly. She said it again, tried to be harsher, to say it with disgust: “Frank.”

He said, “So what's yours? If I know your name, I won't have to call you ‘sweetie.'”

She shook her head.

“C'mon.”

She stared at him levelly, heart pounding.

“You want me to guess? Is that it? Like in the fairy tale? If I can guess your name it means we're married?”

It was as if someone had rung a bell in her stomach.

“We are not,” she said.

He sighed and went back upstairs.

Her poor family. Her father who'd wake up and have no one to read to, who'd have no number for this, no chart to consult.

Stay here. Stay with yourself.

Gut it out.

She examined the cat's tail. She examined the bamboo bar. She looked for a long time at the picture of the tree thumbtacked behind the bar, the only picture in the room. It was a dim photograph of a big tree on a hill somewhere, a tree in winter, without leaves, without birds, any tree against any sky. It was nothing special. A tree on a hill. But as she gazed at the tree, as she allowed her eyes to lose focus, allowed the tree to blur, she found herself remembering the tree she'd seen this morning on the way to school, that tree a few blocks from her house, its branches dark against the white sky. The tree she would have climbed this summer if she'd been that kind of girl. The tree near her house, suspended in her mind; the tree here, suspended on the wall.

Then something happened. She saw that the tree in the photograph in this rumpus room had the same curve to its biggest branch, had the same lump in its base, the same barely perceptible leftward lean, as the real one she'd gazed at earlier. Could they be the same tree? She looked. She forced her eyes to focus. They were the same tree. They were! It was impossible but true, and she thought:
Everything comes around again.
She didn't have to will this thought; it simply appeared. It made no demands. It didn't automatically present its opposite, as most thoughts do.

She used the bathroom that he'd shown her, a tiny room, no window, just a toilet, a sink the size of a dessert bowl, like a bathroom on a train. She peed, then washed her hands. It seemed to her a particularly grievous offense that there was no soap. She opened the tiny cabinet under the sink but found only a spare roll of toilet paper and one of those spongy rubber things used to separate toes when you paint your nails, like a foam brass knuckles. These objects, the presence of these objects coupled with the absence of the soap, filled her with rage. She opened the door.

There he was, Frank, and the rash on his cheek.

“There's no soap.” She practically shouted it. “Get me soap.”

He blinked. She said it again. She would never stop staying it. He went upstairs. Soon he came down again with a box of plain crackers and a bottle of soda and an unopened bar of soap. Right away the soap's jingle sprang to her mind:
Feel clean—squeaky—fresh—rise higher than the rest.
The soap was called
Soar
. He left again. She washed her hands, saying the alphabet in her mind like they taught her, A to Z, to kill all the germs. Then she returned to the couch; the kitten found her lap.

Pyramids. The Golden Gate Bridge. Movies. Frank Sinatra. Marvin Gaye.

She closed her eyes and pictured her mother at Halloween wearing a long black sweater, dozens of vivid drink umbrellas stuck into its knit, her whole torso covered with them.

Footsteps upstairs.

She opened her eyes. The kitten was sleeping.

They were the same tree. She looked again and it was true.

She could never explain what this meant to her, what it did to her body, a feeling not unlike relief. Could that be the right word? It seemed too terrible to think such a thing. She took a breath. Another. The word, the feeling, stayed in her body, suspended in her body like something she'd swallowed, moving through her system, like a pill dissolving, it was going everywhere.

Everything comes back to itself. They're all the same, every tree, every sky, every person. Meaning she wasn't alone. Meaning Frank had meant it when he'd said he was sorry the soda was flat. Meaning Leonora could drink the soda and would not be betraying anyone. She could drink the soda. Everything comes around again. She wished she could tell her parents, her brother, her nana, but she knew she couldn't tell them. And wasn't that kind of funny? That this tree is that tree and this girl that girl. That all along you think they're two different trees, or a million different trees, but really they're one huge tree that's been split again and again. What's funny is that you have to figure it out on your own, and by the time you figure it out it's too late to say it. She stroked the cat. She thought:
My sweet cat.
Its skull felt like a ping-pong ball. Miracles erupted in her mind. Amelia Earhart. Radios. The baby who'd been saved from the well. There was only one miracle. She was part of it, Leonora Marie Coulter. She touched the cat's tail, its paws. Pasteurization. Prosthetic limbs. She held the cat to her stomach. She told it what she knew.

B
yron tucked the list in his back pocket and put on his red mittens. He and the girl faced one other. He said goodbye, wished her luck, all the luck in the world. Her smile was lovely, moved across her face like a leaf on a river. They walked separate ways. It was snowing now; the air felt slightly warmer. Cable TV. Jumpin' Sumpin's. Nail polish. The combination of the snow, the big, swaying, papery flakes, and the less frigid air, and the list secure in his pants pocket—all this gave him a sense of new possibility. The rage he'd been carrying for his ex-wife (the rage that was a twin to witless, irrevocable ardor) was finally replaced by the simplest kind of hope. Hope was bigger, it turned out, than rage and ardor combined. In his soul he identified a kind of hope that felt—what could you call it except feminine? For that's what it was: a
girl's
hope. It was so without edge, so without asterisks or variables or contingencies. It was the purest thing, no strings attached, hard and shiny as a bottle of nail polish. He walked uptown, past beggars, past drug pushers, past men selling pretzels as big as his head, past a woman in a wheelchair who sang “Michael Row Your Boat Ashore” in a husky voice that made him think of Etta James if she'd been white and an amputee with a shoebox of change. All along, walking, his hair damp with snow, his pulse increasing, these simple, bare, hopeful words played in his head:
I love Bea; she loves me.
He would get through to her. It was inevitable. Leonora made it so. Leonora looked at him like she believed it was possible—like it was an eventuality. So it was.

What a nice kid, Leonora. She took it all in stride. How weird he'd been! How inappropriate! His cheeks burned thinking of it. It was in such bad taste, the whole proposal, and she could have run, or told someone, but she met him at the coffee shop, sat before him with her contemplative gaze, blinking her long lashes, solemn, patient, like a child nun, or like the matchstick girl, that's what she reminded him of, a wisp of a thing, everything inessential gone, like one whose poverty is simply a method of revealing her goodness.

He spotted a grocery store and got excited about the Jumpin' Sumpin's. The glass doors opened for him in a sighing, efficient whoosh; he felt sure, stepping inside, hearing the jangling Muzak, receiving a smile from the pretty clerk at the register, that everything would be okay for all of them. He bought three bags of Jumpin' Sumpin's, a copy of the teen magazine Leonora recommended (on its cover a boy with bleached hair held a finger his lips—
Don't tell anyone!
; his eyes, half closed, dazed, invoked less someone seductively stoned, as was surely the intent, than a little boy trying to stay awake through the late movie), gummy candies in the shape of worms, a certain sugar cereal Leonora said was all the rage, Coke, and a large bottle of carrot juice. The juice was for him. Bea always made gagging noises when she saw it. Bea said, “I don't give a rat's ass about beta-carotene.”

It was not the job of childhood to give a rat's ass about beta-carotene. That's what she was telling him. And you know what? She was right. Byron decided, now, to admire her honesty.

He arrived to an empty apartment. Bea was at debate club. He laid his mittens and scarf on top of the radiator, hung his coat on a hook by the door. The apartment smelled like a shirt after a hot iron, the air dry and starchy. He poured the Jumpin' Sumpin's in a big bowl and put her Coke in the fridge. The candy and magazine he stored under the sink where she wouldn't see them. Then he sat at the table to wait. He rested his fingertips on the kiddie placemat (it had been Bea's as a kid, depicted the planets, the swirling cosmos, and for some reason he used it still). It would have to go—he saw that now, that he wouldn't win her over with mementos from the past. She didn't yet have nostalgia for an earlier life. In several years, when she needed such things, when such a placemat would wound and heal her in one fell swoop, would create the very injury it promises to heal (and vice versa)—well, then he'd pull it out and watch her face. Now he put it in a drawer. He swept crumbs from the tabletop, dropped them in the sink. Sat down again. He felt a little nervous. Outside, the surf-sounds of traffic ebbed and flowed. The place was too tidy—too spare, clean, dull. He saw suddenly, as if through Leonora's eyes, that it wasn't the kind of home Bea'd want to invite friends to. It wasn't at all
cozy
. But he'd change that. He would. He'd get a shaggy rug for the living room. He'd get an artsy poster, a Manhattan skyline or Ansel Adams-y deal; he'd remove the heinous oil painting, an oversized squirrel in a pine tree, which his great-aunt gave him twenty years ago and he'd been lugging around since.
Enough!
He'd put the whole thing, frame and all, down the trash chute. Just the idea of it, the possibility of such a brazen act, allowed something to open up in him. It happened quickly, a narrow space that wasn't there before, a chute, like a new corridor between his mind and heart. He had to break the frame before it would fit down the chute, but he did it.

His allegiances were so silly. His allegiance to Great-Aunt Rita's awful painting; his allegiance to his rage/ardor for Shirley; his allegiance to the belief that Bea was beyond knowing.
Why why why?
He felt dogged by needless rigidity. Why hadn't he ever considered the notion that superficial changes could be real changes? That's what hit him now. Objects, surfaces, the veneer of life…they
are
life. He'd buy some bright throw pillows, plants, and a lamp with a red shade so the place would have, just subtly, the mood of an opium den.

Half an hour later Bea arrived, sighing, dropping her massive backpack in the doorway, and moaned that she needed two Tylenol right now or she was probably without question going to commit an act of homicide using only a mechanical pencil and her retainer on the next person she saw, which was sorry to say her father. Then she smiled at him as if at her dearest friend. He procured the pills; she took them with still-warm Coke, wiped her mouth, and said, warily, “You never buy Coke.” Then she saw the bowl of snacks on the table, squinted, frowned, and dug in.

She was getting tall. He'd always assumed as she got taller the baby fat would melt away, but that didn't seem to be happening. It grew with her. Which meant, he supposed, it wasn't really baby fat. She wore her fat how a child wears a snowsuit—too busy to notice it, too excited by the landscape, the whole wide snowy world laid out before her, to feel encumbered. He wondered if this would last. He hoped so. She was a pretty girl, big with life; her spirit seemed to inhere in her fullness. He was reminded of Mrs. Pablonski, a chubby, creamy, vociferous woman who showed up at his elementary school to lead them all in a square dance. He remembered standing by the bleachers, listening to the staticky fiddle on the record player as Mrs. P. showed them how to do-si-do and bow and curtsy; her huge bosom swayed, swung, rose and fell, kept everyone dancing, everyone in impossible thrall to it, that great rocking bosom. He was uncomfortable thinking about Bea this way, but it was true, Bea shared something with that dancing woman, a density that seemed to bear her spirit.

Bea said, licking her fingers, “I thought you were opposed to sugar.”

“Not categorically.”

“Sugar does to the body what cartoons do to the mind. You said that.”

“Not categorically.” Then: “I like cartoons.”

“What cartoons? Besides Zoot Suit Henderson.”

He couldn't answer. Only Zoot.

“I thought you said at your house I need to comply with your dietary restrictions.”

“Everything in moderation, right?”

She leaned forward and selected a Jumpin' Sumpin'. She stared at him while she chewed it. “I won't eat another prune,” she said finally. “I can guarantee that.”

“How was debate club?”

She rolled her eyes. “I had to argue for the legalization of prostitution.”

“Oh?” Things seemed to be getting more and more out of hand. The craziness thrust upon kids these days—but he wouldn't take the bait. He couldn't trust his instincts.

“Just kidding. Euthanasia.”

She nibbled at her cuticles. She wore jeans, a baggy black turtleneck sweater, and pearl earrings that had once been Shirley's. The earrings, their primness, their tininess, their implication of an ancestral order, had always reassured him. But she also wore two keys on her neck—two metal keys that clinked when she moved. On a shoelace. A shoelace! This disturbed him, which was of course exactly Bea's intent. She'd taken to wearing this necklace around the same time he and Shirley announced they were separating. Its purpose was to show the world she'd been abandoned. The necklace said:
I'm a latchkey kid now. I'm a child of the era.
It was tacky, he and Shirley agreed, and also risky, would attract the gaze of who-knows-who; it made Bea vulnerable when she thought it conveyed strength. But Bea insisted on keeping it around her neck. The dinginess of the shoelace was the worst part. Couldn't she have at least chosen a pretty cord? A ribbon? Or some bright gimpy thing like kids make at camp? Of course not. She had a sadistic streak, his bumble Bea—he was coming to admire it a little. It made sense to admire it. Otherwise it would kill him.

“Don't you think people should have the right to do what they want with their bodies? If I got a brain tumor, if I had six months to live, who's to say I wouldn't want to end it?”

“Oh honey. I don't know.”

“I'd probably want to bungee-jump and eat heaps of chocolate. Where are people supposed to want to go? Mozambique? Disney? I'd take Disney. But if I wanted to die instead, it should be allowed. I own myself.”

His mind spun. Then he understood. He said, “Yes, Bea, you do.” That was the heart of everything.

“I'm glad you like debate club,” he added. “I can't wait to come to one of your meets.”

“Contests.”

“Contests, right.”

She waved a hand in the air as if at a terrible odor. “Please do
not come,
Daddy. I'd die of embarrassment. Who wants to be talking about prostitution in front of their father?”

“But I thought—”

“I'd get too nervous if you were there. Please don't come—oh and don't look all hurt. I told Mom the same thing. But do you think we could get me a new shirt? We're supposed to wear white shirts with collars. They provide red ties. Mom said she's already ‘exhausted my wardrobe budget' and I should ask you.”

“Of course. We can go to Gill's.”

“Not Gill's. The Emporium.”

“Listen, Bea. I was thinking if we got this place set up. Made it nicer. Made it—
cooler.
Maybe you could have a party here.”

She started to laugh, then squeezed her chin and mouth as if to keep her face in order, as if to control herself, though the obvious purpose of this gesture was to underscore his retardedness. His heart sunk, but he soldiered on. He'd stick to the concrete.

“Look, I thought we'd get the movie channels. Find you a new bed. Some stuff for your room. A boom box, music, posters. I want you to feel
at home
here. I know you've been through a lot, honey, and so I thought—maybe we could work together, make it nicer, and then you could have a party…invite your friends. Like a housewarming. I'd stay out of the way.”

“You'd stay with Uncle Kenny?”

He hadn't meant he'd stay out of the apartment. He was pretty sure chaperones were still standard. “We can talk about that part later.”

She looked at him skeptically.

He said, “What do you think?”

She said nothing.

“Oh, Bea. My sweet pea. I know the divorce has been awful. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. I want to turn over a new leaf. Go easier on you. Work together! Of course you can drink Coke. In moderation. No more carrot juice. No prunes. Life's too short, right? We'll start with the apartment. Let's do that. We can go shopping.” Suddenly he felt desperate. He said, “I got three bags of these things—” And he pointed to the bowl of Jumpin' Sumpin's, gestured with a hand like a game-show hostess, flourished his palm, and then, seeing what his hand was doing, let it fall like deadweight to the table.

She said, “Is that how you think you win over a fat girl?”

“Oh! No! Bea, I—”

“I'm kidding,” she said. “Relax.”

He saw the color come into her cheeks, a faint smile, saw her eyes widen, and he sensed he'd unleashed some new optimism. She scanned the room. She looked at the Jumpin' Sumpin's before her, licked the tip of her finger. She looked at the glass of Coke, at the clean tabletop, at her father's mittens and scarf on the radiator, at the silent TV, and then she lifted her chest, raised her head, and her face, at once, changed—seized, tightened, brow furrowed—so that for a moment it appeared she was going to laugh. Instead, to his horror, she wept.

He had not seen her cry since she was maybe—six? seven? The girl didn't cry. Not when she broke her ankle. Not when he and Shirley announced their separation. Not when she was suspended for a week for cheating on a math exam. Not when her grandmother, the first Beatrice, suffered a heart attack on Thanksgiving Day, right as those gorgeous pies were being set out down on their ancestral platters, or when her friend Donna moved to France, or when Ali MacGraw died in a trashy movie Shirley couldn't get enough of. Always Bea remained stoic, committed to the order of herself. Always her face belonged to a factory worker, to another era, a time before leisure, before self-help, before the invention of adolescence. Oh, she moaned like a teenager, that was true enough—she was petulant and grumpy and erratic like a teenager. But she never, ever, ever cried like one.

Now she wept. Her face broke into a thousand pieces, repaired itself, and broke again. This cycle continued as if it would never stop. Her tears dripped onto her sweater, landed on the wool, quivered there, like jewels, on her breasts. She made no effort to cover her face, or to wipe her tears, or to turn away. He felt stunned. He could only look at his sobbing child, panic stirring. He wanted Leonora to tell him what to do.