The Sweet Relief of Missing Children (6 page)

T
homas was being watched. At first it was not unlike coming to work at the clinic and pushing through a throng of protesters. They carried their signs and sang their songs and imagined that these acts connected them to God. But it was easy to make a sign. It was easy to stand in the cold and sing. What did that require, really? What Thomas did was harder. He took the pulses. He handed those girls their animal crackers. He saw the stuff. Sometimes he assuaged their doubt, even though he wasn't supposed to. He knew the things to say, and usually they thanked him.

He arrived each day in his scrubs, his face newly shaven, ready for his work, a cup of coffee in hand. The protesters called him names,
murderer, Hitler, coward
, on and on,
fascist, killer, evil-doer
, and sometimes even his own name, Thomas,
Save Yourself, Thomas
. They watched him carefully. Their words were not careful but their eyes were. They watched his steps, they watched his eyes, they watched his throat and hands and shoes and even the steam from his coffee.

He liked to turn to them. He liked to give them a better view of his face, liked for them to see that there was exactly no doubt in it.

The boy in Goldie's living room had a hammer in his hand and a bloody foot, and he was looking at Thomas.

Thomas was being watched.

He and the boy looked at each other. Blood rushed from the kid's foot. For a moment Thomas's heart knocked in that easy, familiar way, but then it began to race. On the boy's face Thomas saw reflected, very clearly, his own doubt. The boy's face was not a face anymore but a mirror for Thomas's doubt.

“Shit,” Thomas said.

The boy's eyes widened.

A vision flashed through Thomas's brain. He saw someone with a ladder propped against his apartment building. He saw a stranger peering at his daughter, indifferent to her sheets and toys and sheaths of glossy hair, no doubt, no love, Jade caught beneath this gaze like an orphan. It came so fast, Jade asleep and observed by a stranger who would never comprehend his indecency.

Blood puddled on the floor. What had the kid done? The nurse in him felt the urge to staunch the bleeding; the nurse wondered about a tetanus booster. But the nurse in him was small tonight. The nurse was all but gone. Thomas cursed. The boy read his lips; the boy cursed back.

Thomas ran. The woods smelled crisply rank, like rotten mulch. Beneath him his feet moved fast, faster. He felt like a boy sprinting from his angry father, that acid rush of stupidity and sickness and helplessness, the way a child knows he'll have to stop sometime, knows he'll get caught, must get caught!, but maintains the belief anyway, while he's running, while he runs, the crazy belief that maybe he can run forever. Maybe? He ran, his lungs burning, snot dripping, the kid's blood bright in his mind.

Why did the kid do that? Who was it meant for? It was like a performance, but Thomas didn't know who the audience was supposed to be. Him? He didn't think so. The kid smashed a nail into his foot, and he did it with a kind of swift, flat, total certitude. His face was empty. Where had he gotten that kind of face? Or maybe the kid was retarded? Mongoloid, as Janice's mother would have said. Maybe there was something wrong with him? All of Thomas's certitude was gone.

He ran as if chased, nearly fell several times, branches and twigs slapping his skin. “Shit,” he said over and over, until he lost his breath.

Janice's conviction had baffled him. No, more than baffled—awed him. He had not the faintest understanding how she could pack a bag, kiss the baby's head (but not him), simply walk away from their sparse life, away from those gossip magazines, from the Polaroids in the sock drawer, the juice cups, their bed. How on earth could she be so
certain
? It seemed a rare, even a noble thing. Yes, he begged. Yes, part of him begged—clasped her sinewy arm and begged, wept, said all the things you're supposed to say:
Think about the child! I'll quit my job! I'll do anything!
—even while another part, a smaller part, stood back and watched the spectacle, studied Janice's face, its complete and hideous peace. She was doing the wrong thing but doing it so
surely
. She was doing it with perfection. In this she escaped morality. In this she made of submission—submission to yourself, to your wickedest needs—an art. She was far away now. Orlando? Toledo? He had no idea. All he knew was that she had become herself. Of this he had no doubt; in his mind she had become freely and fully and ecstatically herself, as only criminals and saints can be.

Janice's absence had licensed him to spy on Goldie. That's what he'd told himself. It was his retaliation. Was this not a way to connect with Janice? Was it not a message to her, wherever she was? But now he only felt disgusting.

He ran toward his daughter, sick with his ugliness, a pain burning his side.

“How much do I owe you?” he said to the babysitter in Janice's armchair. She'd been sleeping. Her gummy eyes and dappled bosom rose whenever money was mentioned.

She looked at her watch. “Fifteen.”

She saw through him. She knew what he was up to. When he gave her a twenty, when he said “Keep the change,” this confirmed her suspicions. She nodded to herself. He saw her touch the filigree cross at her neck.

“Jade wake up?” he asked.

“No, no. That girl is out cold.”

A
fter the guy ran off, Paul picked up the phone to call the police. But he was a smart kid, and before he dialed it dawned on him that he could not report the pervert in the window without revealing that he was home alone, that his mother had left her ten-year-old boy home alone on his birthday while she went to a nightclub. He knew what happened to kids whose mothers got drunk and left them alone at night. They ended up like Eddie VanSay, sleeping in a basement and tied up with fancy scarves by the foster mother who was considered a saint for taking such trouble into her blessed home. Rick Malone didn't fare better: he got a bunch of black eyes before being shipped off to an institution for kids who make adults do that kind of thing. It was not a wise choice to call the police. He put the phone down. The kids at school, his absent father, Clover, this coward. Perverts filled the world, and he understood that chances were he would become a pervert too.

There was no rubbing alcohol, so he poured gin on his foot. When it stung, he blew on it as his mother would have. He touched a Q-tip to the wound because this seemed a medical thing to do. Then he found gauze among the clutter under the sink, wrapped it around his foot, and put on two socks, all while a pounding heat crept up his leg. He would limp, but not enough to draw attention. He would skip tomorrow's baseball game. He would hide the bloody socks under his bed. His foot hurt, but not too badly. It beat along with his heart. Finally he was calm. He was proud for the first time. Those other times he thought he'd felt pride, they were not the same thing.

W
hat a day! What a day! Not sunny but wickedly bright, the sky white as snow and silver at the horizon, the tree's bare branches suggesting the arms of a rich, emaciated matron, all elbows and knuckles, the bark like cashmere. The birds hovered but did not land. Leonora tried to breathe deep, to inhale the silvery air, but its coldness was the cold of a coin placed firmly in your palm while you're waiting for a bus in the heart of winter. She looked for a long time at that tree. Every other day she'd seen it as any-old-tree, but today it struck her as alive, beautiful, and she wished it were summer and she could climb it. She wished she were the kind of girl who climbed trees. Mostly she read books. She was learning to play bridge, and she knew she'd spend the summer reading and drinking lemonade at the card table with her nana, not up this tree, not up any tree. She knew herself, accepted who she was, but sometimes, it was true, she envied tomboys in bandannas who scrambled up trees, girls with scraped knees who didn't apply ointment or Band-Aids. This was the tree she'd climb, if she were that girl.

She was freezing, despite her mittens, despite the yellow scarf wound round her neck, despite her boots lined with sheepskin from New Zealand. She tried to breathe deep, to take the air fully inside her head, but she had the start of a cold, a stuffy nose. She walked past the tree, let her mittened hand lightly touch the hump at its base. She and her brother were on their way to school. It was a Tuesday in February.

Her father called this season “showstopping winter.” He was always cold. Like a woman! Women shivered, huddled over coffee, complained about the weather. But in her home, it was her father who took hot baths and wore the afghan like a shawl and was forever cranking up the thermostat against her mother's protests. It was her father who did the laundry and her mother who paid the bills. Which was funny, wasn't it? Funny because he was an economist. An economist who doesn't pay his own bills! He pontificated on the debt of nations while his wife wrote the checks. He loved the cost of things: highways, banks, dams, rails, turbines, aqueducts. Other stuff too, stuff most people didn't think had a cost, like places, like diseases, like future events that hadn't even happened yet but might, and what then? As for what they paid for potatoes, as for the price of their dry cleaning, for her allowance, he couldn't be bothered. He loved newspapers and old books and not shaving. Crumbs in the pockets of his cardigan. Wet brown eyes, a pink nose, fingernails his wife reminded him to clip. In certain ways he called to mind a puppy. He worked late, often missed dinner, missed the children's bedtimes, and so established a tradition of waking Leonora in the morning. At 6 a.m. he'd creep in softly, open her shades, pull the milking stool to her bed, and read. She woke to his voice each day except Sunday, when everybody slept late.

These days he was reading a long story about a guy who wakes up as a bug. He read her a little every morning. She was glad about it, meaning glad this was a morning ritual—she wouldn't want to hear that stuff at night. They were at the part where the bug's mother swats him with a broom. Her father had said, “I've been waiting forever to read you things like this. For so long your favorite book was
Jenny Has a Bellyache.
Remember that drivel? Oh, I didn't blame you, of course I didn't. You were a child. Books like that teach empathy. But how many times did we read it? Hundreds. Thousands. Now you're a big girl. We can do the masters, can't we, honey?”

The Magnificent Ambersons. Sister Carrie.
Shakespeare's sonnets. He took such joy in this ritual, sitting on that little pink stool with his elbows on his knees, holding a tattered paperback in faintly trembling hands. These were grown-up books, important books, and yet he read slowly, grandly, as for a child, just as he'd read
Jenny Has a Bellyache.
She was unnerved by this new story, by the plight of that hapless, greasy man-bug, but maybe she was more unnerved by the bright and bursting quality of her father's voice. It was a dark, sad story. That was the point. Why try to disguise it? Her father was a smart man, but he didn't always understand what she liked. There was a book on his shelf called
Know Your Own Daughter.
It made her happy to see it there, touched her, though she wondered if he'd ever read it.

Now in the cold February air they walked to school, Leonora and her brother. She was in the sixth grade, he the third. He wore snow pants and sneakers. His too-big parka, unzipped, framed a Mets T-shirt. His hat was jammed in his pocket. She said his name but he didn't respond, just sniffed the air harshly. She pointed to his hat.

“You'll catch a cold,” she warned.

He shrugged, made an exaggerated pout, said, “I never get sick.”

“That's a lie.”

“I like to get sick.”

He spit on the ground, paused to admire the spittle.

“You like being spoiled and watching TV. That's what you like.”

Sometimes she spoke to him as a mother does—not their mother but the starchy, coiffed kind from television long ago. She employed the faintest British accent. They always walked to school together. Sometimes they sang a song—the boy hated to sing but also hated when she pestered him. The song was always the same, something she'd learned at school. It was from the Underground Railroad. It went:
Somebody's knocking at my door. Somebody's knocking at my door.
She sang a line, then the boy. Their voices overlapped in a round. Then, together:
Oh sinner! Why don't you answer? Somebody's knocking at my door.
Her voice was clear, tender, and flat. The boy had a finer voice but swallowed the words. It was Black History Month.

“Sounds like the Lord,”
she sang now.

“Sounds like the Lord,”
he sang halfheartedly.

The boy was forever making snowmen and fake boogers of rubber cement. He carried its scent on him—a gluey, bitter smell. It didn't alarm her; most boys smelled this way, until they smelled like their father's cologne or body odor.

“Sing nicely.” She was that mother again. Her posture was too good; some of the girls found it suspicious.

But instead the boy wandered off. They were supposed to stay together but he was always wandering off. Boys. They were programmed to mindlessly collect, to yell about what they found, to scream their good fortune and then forget it a second later. She had never met a different kind and didn't expect to. Today her brother discovered a big plastic owl poking out of a garbage can. She called his name but her throat hurt, her toes were numb, so she didn't protest too much when he ran off. She wanted to get to school, to settle into her over-warm classroom where the radiators hissed and where her own pastel portrait of Frances Perkins hung over the social studies shelf. Mr. Broom would give her a piece of toffee candy when she submitted her math homework.

Oh sinner.

The fresh icy air, the great white open sky, all this felt scarily at odds with the dim and humid world in the book. She wanted it to stop, the bug story, but her father was so sweet, perched on her stool in his old blue robe, his morning breath, sleep in his eyes, he loved so much reading his favorites to her. Anyway, that was the point—wasn't it? Creepiness? To let creepy things menace the perimeter? Otherwise you were an ignorant girl. Otherwise you were naïve, oblivious, sheltered. Then
you
became the ghost—then
you
became the thing at the perimeter. Or so it seemed to her.

Gregor was the name of the bug. Once he'd been a regular guy, a middle manager, her father said, and then suddenly he was a roach, the basest thing, despised, forlorn, disgusting, and ancient. She was interested in literary transformations but usually liked them to go the other way.

She sang under her breath.
Sounds like the Lord.
The song made her happy. Was it supposed to make her happy? Probably not. It was a song from a horrific period in American history. Even so, she liked to think about the Underground Railroad, a tunnel deep in the earth, deeper than the subways, with rail tracks made of bone, candles dripping gloomy wax, cockroaches galore, all manner of person humping along, filthy, shoeless, and babies tied to backs, everyone singing this sad, hopeful, feverish song, and of course afros and mites and rats and pee. She knew there was not really a railroad or even a hole in the ground, knew it was a metaphor, but clung to the image of a train of people, a mournful conga line, voices merging and echoing, the whole world, over and under, dark and messy, mud. What did it say about her that she took pleasure from such a scene? Was she a racist? All people are racists, her mother told her, in some secret part of themselves. You can't avoid it. You too? Leonora had asked, aghast. Me too, her mother said. Why else would I devote my life to helping black people?

In the distance she saw her brother holding the plastic owl over his head and running down the street. A smaller boy in red earmuffs trotted after him.

She would have opened her door to slaves or Jews. Which is why when the man appeared, which is why when he said, “Could I bother you a moment, miss?” which is why when she saw he wore glasses with fingerprint smudges on them, a nick from shaving on his cheek, when she saw he had the same tartan plaid scarf as her father, she stopped. It was her instinct; she didn't think twice. He wore a scarf like her father's.

She hadn't seen where he came from. He was a regular-seeming guy, a middle manager, newspaper under his arm, briefcase with shining gold hinges.

“Hello,” she said.

Her brother was gone.

“You seem like you're in a hurry,” he said.

She didn't know how to respond.

“Well, I guess.”

“I'd love just a moment of your time.”

She did not think,
Who is he? What does he want? Is he safe?
This is what she was supposed to be thinking—in the thoughts under her thoughts there was:
Why aren't you thinking what you're supposed to be thinking?
For her real, uppermost thoughts were these:
I'm pretty. He stopped me because I'm pretty.
She wished it were not so. She wished he'd stopped her for some other reason. Girls aren't supposed to know they're pretty. They're supposed to be oblivious, to believe that beauty is an accident, irrelevant, a trick, but of course no one is oblivious. Girls know where they stand right from the start. When the man looked at Leonora, when she saw him looking down at her face, her coat, her boots, her face again, when he blinked—was he blinking maybe more slowly than was normal?—even though he gave no impression of indecency, even though he seemed harmless, ordinary, even embarrassed for himself—well, it didn't matter. She was sure he thought she was pretty, that this is why he stopped her, and she knew it to be true, knew she was pretty, and so she was ashamed for them both.

He said, “So. Let's see. How should I say this?”

He swallowed, setting in motion a massive Adam's apple. She watched the mechanics of his swallow, watched how his throat moved and felt the same thing she felt when she watched a machine do something ordinary and miraculous, like sort change.

“On your way to school, I imagine,” he said.

“I am.” She was staunch, confident.

“Maybe fifth grade? Sixth?”

She hesitated; he blinked; she confirmed the latter.

“I have a proposition.” He swallowed again. It was so elaborate, that swallow—casual, wondrous.

She said, “What kind of proposition?”

“It means I'd like your help; it means I have an idea to run by you.”

She was mildly offended. “I know what it means.”

“It won't take long. It would—it would make a world of difference.”

She was supposed to run and she did not. She prepared herself to run, she knew the risks, but now, face-to-face with him (a notorious Him, a textbook stranger), her instinct was merely to listen. She said, “What can I do for you?” and was surprised by the rote, disinterested way it came out, like the voice of a tired waitress.