The Sweet Relief of Missing Children (8 page)

Years of peace. Homemade sweaters on Christmas morning. Kite flying. When Joe was made manager of the hardware store, they celebrated with yellow cake and fizzy wine. Respectable report cards got lasagna and chocolate milk. Basketball in the driveway. The chore chart. Their life together felt inevitable, circumscribed, marked by a restrained tenderness. They were not affectionate so much as devoted to their rhythms, which was a way to say to each other:
See? Of course I love you. It goes without saying.
They did not speak of the past. The past was gone. Who was Louise? She had been a woman, but now, like many women, she was dead. That was how vague the whole thing felt, how removed. Oatmeal in the morning. “You'll be late!” New socks. Television after dinner. Bed by nine-thirty. No one was late. It went without saying, all of it, anything. She was grateful, and, after a time, stopped feeling guilty about this. Years of quiet. Years of order. Had she earned it? She didn't think in these terms.

But the dead do not always remain so.

Louise came back on a Tuesday in Sam's sixteenth year. It was the early spring, a day of chittering birds, mud, a hubcap sun. As always Constance was the first in the house to wake. On the hook inside the closet door hung her housecoat. She put it on, and then her terrycloth slippers, and went to the kitchen, pleased by its spotlessness. Was there a nicer feeling than waking to a kitchen of gleaming appliances and countertops, all the dishes washed, all the silverware in their proper troughs? She noted the polished faucet. She noted the felt potholders—made by Sam in the third grade—hanging evenly on a set of china hooks above the stove, and the magnet in the shape of a banana securing Sam's school photo to the clean face of the refrigerator, and the pink sponge in its heart-shaped glass dish to the left of the sink, a sponge which she'd boiled the night before, as she did every week, before she replaced it at the end of the month. Her kitchen! She stood back to admire it. Into her body came a simmering elation. Her pleasure had a sexual edge; it was a seizing kind of contentment, a full-bodied rush. A kitchen such as this one, clean and ordered and knowable, was like a gift to herself. It
was
herself. She put on her apron. She made a pot of coffee, started the oatmeal, the bacon, tidied up as she went.

At six forty-five it was time to wake Sam. As always, she gave a quick knock, then opened the door, poked her head inside. His was a tiny room with white walls, bare except for a magazine picture of a negro guitarist. Tucked into his mirror was a small photograph of his parents on their wedding day, a gauzy veil lending Louise's face not so much a romantic as a dusty, unwashed aspect—but Constance did not look at this now.

What she looked at was Sam. She looked and looked and then could not unlook, could not unsee. He was sleeping on his back, the blanket caught under his left side so that it exposed, very clearly, his pale blue boxer shorts. Something was wrong with his shorts. She looked. She did not stop looking. There was nothing to stop her from looking. Then, still asleep, making a series of dreamy vowel sounds, he rolled over, pulling the blanket with him.

She cleared her throat. She said, “Time to get up.”

Sam: “Uhhm.”

She said his name, but he didn't hear.

What was wrong was not his shorts but the capacity of his shorts to hold their contents. His penis had emerged and was pointing at the wall like the arm of a sundial.

She returned to her kitchen. How had she missed the spot of dried milk next to the toaster oven? A scattering of coffee grounds on the counter. The bacon fat hissed in its pan, which was now dirty, and the sizzling fat made the stove dirty. That was the thing: as soon as you cooked something, the kitchen got dirty again. There were moments when she scorned her own hunger, for sating herself meant soiling a dish. When no one was around, she ate out of her hand.

She swept the coffee from the counter to the wastebasket. She rubbed away the dried milk. She turned off the burner under the bacon. He was no longer a child. It was bigger than when he'd been a little boy. That was not surprising. But it was bigger now than her husband's. Her husband, a grown man, six foot two, broad and dense, mature, for God's sake a
man
…how could his skinny teenage nephew, that downy boy who barely came to his uncle's shoulders, possess a penis that so dwarfed Joe's? She poured herself a cup of coffee, added a little cream, two cubes of sugar, embarrassed by her wobbly hand.

She sat down at the table, gripped the mug between her palms. It was at this moment that Louise returned. It was Louise's voice she heard, Louise's firm, slightly mannish voice, the words from Louise's pretty mouth, and they were these: “He's not your son.”

Constance straightened in her chair.

“Sleep well?” Joe stood in the doorway, stretching. He grabbed his hands together behind his back, raised his shoulders—she heard a cracking sound.

She rose, kissed him. She pointed to the stove: “I made oatmeal. Bacon.”

“Perfect. Heaven. Hey, do you know where my brown belt is?”

He was shirtless, wearing the pants she'd ironed for him the night before. A thin trail of hair climbed up past his navel, ended below his sternum, fanning there, like a fern.

She told him where the belt was. She poured him a cup of coffee.

She knew where his belt was. She knew where his car keys were, and his spare keys, and the flashlight, the spare flashlight, the extra soap, the measuring tape. She knew everything in the house, where everything belonged, had created for them an immaculate, unimpeachable order. When this order was in any way threatened, it was as if she herself was threatened. It was like hearing footsteps behind her in the darkness, so bodily was the sensation of menace.

“I might play hooky this afternoon, day like this. Supposed to hit seventy-three by noon. Maybe shoot a little pool with Rich, maybe go down to the river? Little early for shad, but what the hell. Wet the line. Breathe it in. I'll be home by dinner, yeah? Sound good?”

“Sure thing.” She worked on a smile. “It's spaghetti night.”

“You mind if Rich comes? He's crazy for your meat sauce.”

She said she didn't mind.

He swallowed his coffee, moaned with pleasure. Then he poured some syrup into his bowl of oatmeal, crumbled a piece of bacon on top. Who ate like that? She felt the urge to chide him.

“Little early for shad, but stranger things have happened, right?”

She agreed.

Louise in a dress that was too tight in the bosom. Louise dancing with that pharmacist, swaying her pelvis, whispering something into the pharmacist's ear that made him pull away, startled, then laugh. Louise eating honeydew. Louise putting a key in the ignition, sunlight flying off the windshield in a million directions, the baby fussing, the husband cracking a bad joke, everyone doomed but the boy in the backseat. Louise in a hospital, legs spread, pushing him out, this Lucky Boy who was not lucky.

Here was the boy. He kissed her cheek. He had gotten dressed, wore jeans and a white T-shirt, high-tops, a wristwatch with a fraying strap. (On a piece of paper in her wallet, Constance had written:
Birthday ideas: new watch strap
.) Upper lip pink from shaving. Knapsack slung over one shoulder.

“Morning, CC. Morning, Joe.” He was breathless. “Gotta run.”

“Breakfast first?” She pointed to the oatmeal. Sam hesitated, then went to the stove, spooned some into a bowl, stood over the counter to eat. Why was he in such a hurry? He failed to make his customary appreciative eating sounds. He was flushed. Knapsack on his shoulder. Usually he sat with her, ate heartily, chatted, took his time. Now, leaning over the counter, he swallowed two, three bites and then dumped the remaining oatmeal down the drain.

Had he been feigning sleep?

Louise: “He knows.”

Her laugh, plangent and bold, a cascade, a cold waterfall, filled the kitchen.

Louise: “He
wanted
you to see.”

He was wiping his mouth with a napkin. He was rinsing the bowl in the sink.

Don't be absurd, Constance
, she told herself.
Don't be ridiculous. He is my son. Of course he is my son. The penis is a penis. A fact of biology. So I looked—so what?
And this remonstration seemed to succeed, because for a moment she felt herself again, calm, hungry, sure of the ordinary order of things. The dead were dead, again and always.

“Have a good day!” she said, but the false brightness she heard in her voice—a singsongness, a fluttering against the walls of her throat like the wing of a minuscule bird—immediately restored her doubt. Something was deeply wrong with her.

The door slammed behind him. He was gone.

Joe was chewing with his mouth open.

She felt, for the first time in many, many years—what was the word that meant you were alone in a dirty room and a bulb is flickering overhead and there are fingerprints on the windows and no one comes when you call them, no one, because all of it—the love, the order, the calm—has been a trick of your imagination?

Joe said, of the oatmeal, “Holy shit this is good.”

Terror
.

I
t was a gorgeous spring day, and Judith was gone. No note. No explanation, no reassurance, nothing. Her room was empty. She had not made her bed, or raised the curtains, or done anything except leave them, an act more pure and unhindered than anything Grace, her mother, had ever performed.

Grace went to the girl's closet. What was missing? The pink duffel bag with the ballerina appliqué on its side. Her yellow dress. Her blue dress. Anything that showed her tits.

Her dim room retained the close, sweetish smell of sleep. The dresser had been cleared of its nail polish bottles and necklaces. Gone was the postcard of the guy propping a ladder up to the moon,
I want, I want
in black letters along its bottom edge. Gone the tin of strawberry lip balm. Gone even the chipped saucer that held her tweezers, thumbtacks, buttons. Even the mismatched buttons in the saucer! Why had she taken those? What use were they to her? The girl couldn't sew. She'd replace lost buttons with safety pins before she'd sew. The girl was impatient and immodest and bored and sixteen, and now she was a runaway; it was impossible to imagine her threading a needle.

Only the ugly pairs of underwear remained in the top drawer, the ones with stains, stretched waistbands. She'd taken her favorite jeans, and that mothy tan sweater, and the red scarf she sometimes wound around her neck and which lent her a decapitated appearance.

A bowl of dried-up ravioli on the nightstand.

“Judith?” As if she were hiding under the bed. Then, absurdly, Grace lifted the dust ruffle and looked.

Hank was in the shed, trying in vain to repair the Weed Wacker.

“She left.”

“Who?” A smear of grease on his cheek. Then: “She'll be back.”

“I don't think so.”

Hank straightened up, wiped his palms on his thighs. He was a bartender: broad, cool, mock-begrudging smile, perennial five o'clock shadow, a man for whom the smallest gesture—a wink, a lift of the chin—communicated everything.

Now his mouth turned up slightly at the corner. He said, “She's probably at Shelly's.”

“I have a feeling.” She was surprised by the force in her voice. “A mother's intuition.”

Hank tilted his head, squinted warily, and he was right: she was not a woman who believed in intuition, not a mother who believed she possessed any special sensory connection to her child. She was cynical about such mothers. She was suspicious about such women just as she was suspicious about people who read their horoscopes or went to church. Yet she knew. It was unlike her, but it couldn't be denied.

She said, “I'll call the police, I think.”

“You're overreacting.” At the beginning, he was the sober, practical one. “They won't take you seriously. You're crying wolf, honey.”

“Wolf? No.”

She saw a road winding through thorny woods, saw their daughter on this road walking in her swaying, confident way, the waitressy swish of her butt. The teeth of a wolf flashed like mica in the darkness. Tick of claws on rock.

She was sixteen, that was all.

Hank said, “She's testing us. She wants to make sure we respect her freedom. When she knows we do, she'll come home again.”

It was not true and she said so. The fear, the reality, was the opposite: this had nothing to do with them.

He went back to his work.

He was right—they should wait on the police. To go to the police was to confirm a crime.

A day passed. Grace spent it sitting on the grass in front of the house in her lawn chair, smoking, looking out over the fields.

“Judith!”

A breath.

“Judith!”

On and on like that she called to the air.

Next to her a glass lay on its side, a line of ants along its mouth. A ladybug moved from her calf to her knee. It lifted its wings but did not fly away. Was it true, that the number of spots on a ladybug's back indicated its age? She had been told this in her youth, by another child. Of course it wasn't true, but it had stayed with her. In the distance, a tractor. She could make out Judith's old elementary school, and the roof of the supermarket, the small pond where they sometimes swam on hot days, drifted in inner tubes. Soon these buds would be leaves and the view would be lost.

The next morning she said to Hank, “We have to do something. We need to see Shelly.”

He sighed, exasperated. But then, after a beat, as if she was the passive one, he said, “You know, let's talk to Shelly.”

She was Judith's only female friend, a chubby, pug-nosed girl famous for having a brother who skipped town years before with another man's pregnant wife. Otherwise Shelly was no one. Her mother cleaned motel rooms; her father had been gone forever. She lived on an overgrown dead-end, in a house whose white siding had long ago turned a mottled, mushroomy gray. Grace and Hank drove there before sundown. They walked toward the door, past a wheelbarrow missing its wheel, past a birdbath slicked with algae, past a rusted lounge chair, and the seat of a swing, the head of a hammer, a broken plastic pail. Grace reached for the door knocker, sensed it would come off in her hand, so rapped instead on the frame.

Shelly answered right away, nodding as if expecting them. Inside wasn't as bad. Fresh white walls, industrial carpet, neat stacks of magazines. On the top of a bookshelf they saw a tableau, three pictures in matching frames: a toddler Shelly, a teenage Shelly, and, between them, a boy whose snarly grin, even at fifteen, told you he was planning to cuckold a father-to-be.

Hank and Grace sat side by side on the love seat in a room that smelled faintly of pot and less faintly of citrus deodorizer. Shelly flopped into a tartan plaid recliner, put up her feet. You could see her nipples through her shirt. Grace saw the nipples, saw Hank see them, saw Hank try to figure out where to keep his eyes. Shelly appeared to see this too. She wore a leather band on each wrist. Her hair, a dark blunt bob, met her jawbone with razor edges.

“I don't know where she is,” she said coldly. Then, friendlier: “You guys must be worried and all.”

“Should we be worried?” Hank sat on the edge of his seat. “Do you know something? Did she say anything? You can be frank. Anything?”

Something in his rush of words disturbed Grace, embarrassed her, almost. Shelly seemed to be holding back a smile. Calmly Grace said, “Did she give you any idea where she was going?”

The girl shrugged. “Oh you know Judy. California, Alaska. Someplace far. It was just talk, I thought. It busts me up. I loaned her fifty bucks a few days ago. Fifty. Five-oh. That's a big chunk of change.”

“What about boys?” Hank, winded, grabbed at his knees. “Was she dating anyone? Could she have gone off to meet someone?”

“A handful. Judy was—oh, how do you say it politely?
Experienced,
I guess that's how.”

Grace would not be moved. She was here to gather information. She said, “Who does she like the most?”

Shelly thought for a moment. “I don't know his real name. I had a nickname for him that's not something I'm comfortable saying in the presence of adults. Everyone else called him ‘Q-Ball.'”

“This boy, he goes to Copper Junction?”

“He's not from around here—and he's not a
boy
. He's a man, sort of. Or not a man but definitely not a boy. Something in between. I don't know much about him. He likes to rhyme. He wrote her rhymes.”

Grace saw a kid in a jean jacket gripping a pool cue, shaved head, a seam of stitches on his temple like a baseball.

“Listen, I'm Judy's friend,” Shelly said. “I care about her all right. But that dough—it's a lot of dough is all. She told me she'd pay me back.”

“We need your help now,” Hank said. “Tell us everything you can about this guy, okay?”

“You'll give me the money?” She looked off for a moment, rubbed her fingers together like she was feeling cloth.

He only had twenty on him but promised he'd come back with the rest.

“Everyone just calls him Q-Ball 'cause he's got this ugly little beard that comes down at an angle. It curves to the right, like a
Q
's tail. The letter
Q
?” She drew a slanting line on her own chin. “Who knows why he grows it like that. Probably to show the world how unusual he is. He just appeared one day outside the pharmacy. I don't remember seeing his car. I didn't get the license plate number, if that's what you want. I'm no private eye. I think he's a creep and I told her so.”

“Q-Ball,” said Hank.

Shelly nodded.

It embarrassed Grace to hear this name. It made their daughter a stranger. Of course she was already a stranger, had always been a stranger, even before she left. But this name, like a badge one must defer to, made it absolute.

He cleared his throat, said, “Anything else? Anything at all?”

Shelly straightened up. She said, “Judy got warts from him. Down there.”

Hank never returned with the money.

Next they went to the police, made their report. “Q-Ball,” she said to the cop, who rubbed his chin, said, “He got a last name?”

She had never felt smaller in her life.

The cop said, “Hey, I feel for you. We'll check it against our lists of known aliases, but I can't promise much.” He wrote something in his notepad, said, “Kids these days…” It wasn't clear whether he meant Judith or Q-Ball. “What else? You got a physical description?”

Hank described the facial hair. Then he said, “He may have a transmittable disease.”

The cop's pen hovered above his notepad. “Like the flu?”

“Like—warts,” Hank said.

“Warts?”

“Private warts.”

The cop stared at them. Then he wrote it down.

She returned to the lawn chair. She was briefly, irrationally hopeful—had a vision of some hulking cop leading the girl up the walkway by her ear, as if she'd been merely loitering behind the bowling alley—but nothing happened. Ants on the lip of her glass. Woodsmoke on a thin breeze. She found herself thinking about her girlhood back in Ringdale, her awful silk shirts, her own desire to flee, to hitchhike to some harbor, to be the stow-away, cold-eyed, witness to everything, a sketchbook in a beat-up saddlebag. Except in Grace's case there had been no man—no desire for sex. Her own hope had been to flee from the burden of sex, to earn some kind of reprieve. Yet sex, it seemed, was just what the girl was after. What were they supposed to do now? She had the uncanny sensation that the last sixteen years had been a figment, and this was her real life, alone, hers and Hank's, that she'd gone through with the abortion. She didn't want to cry but couldn't help it. From her perch on the hill she could see the roof of the bar. It was still called Floyd's Well after Hank's uncle. Down there, men were drinking, elbowing, tossing back rye whiskey and beer chasers, throwing darts. Briny, inebriated, breathing this same spring air, they could not be stopped from anything. Grace was totally and completely sure that Judith was holding the hand of a convicted felon, a man rife with all manner of VD, that they were cruising the country in a wreck and sleeping beneath highway underpasses, sharing warm beer, and she was giving him head on demand.

Judith!

Couldn't she have at least left a note? Something small for her mother to hold? How could they have raised such a heartless thing? No note. No clue. No quick phone call. Was the tiniest reassurance too much to ask for? She was selfish, just as Grace had been selfish. Except Grace had come to her senses! Grace had done what she was supposed to do, which was marry the sanctioned boy and say her vows before a room of credulous people, and assume, mostly in earnest, a steady, ignorant life.