When She Was Gone (17 page)

She turned to hobble toward home. When she got there the mail would be in the box—and she would have to unfold the paper; she would have to see what everyone was about to learn of her family's private despair.

444 SYCAMORE STREET

T
immy did not trust Jordan House, the boy who worked at Starbucks—who supposedly breezed through college with all sorts of wunderkind skills but now attended coffee and sugar addictions and denned up in a garage behind the Hopsmiths' house as if he had no use for all that education. It wasn't that Timmy was a snob—if people had different talents, different intellects, different ways of living, that was one thing, but this was a sort of fringe choice, a hanging on, an arrested development.

Timmy had observed Jordan eyeing Linsey at one of those parties the kids on Brook Street had, too much space and parents away, too much money and booze and drugs and all the kids who looked for entertainment in the bad behavior of others clustering like vultures to a kill. He had gone because Linsey begged him, but then he'd convinced her to leave. It was one thing to visit with friends when they were a little drunk, but this was beyond a little—kids passed out on the lawn, two eighth-graders having awkward sex in the hostas—he was disgusted that so many people had no respect for themselves. And Jordan had been sitting on the porch watching
people come and go, his legs spread too broad on the step as he leaned back and observed. It wasn't adult, and it wasn't child, and he almost went up to kick the bastard for looking at Linsey, lascivious, but he wasn't like that, he didn't fight over imagined slights—at least not in real life.

Timmy was sitting in the Starbucks wishing he hadn't handed his money to Jordan. Jordan handed him, in return, his coffee and a flyer about Linsey.

“I know, dude,” Timmy had said. “She is—she was my girlfriend.” His mouth burned with acid.

“Sorry, kid,” said Jordan, trying to smother Timmy's “dude” with condescension. He was too handsome, Jordan. He was suspect.

Timmy breathed deep. He breathed deep again. He was probably heaving with breath here in Starbucks, but he knew better than to trap himself in suspecting this guy. This guy was a looker, not a doer.

“Peace, man,” he said, and went to sit down in the nasty blue velvet chairs that smelled of banana peel.

Timmy had walked toward Linsey's house this morning, but stopped when he saw a small crowd of people and six cars parked in front. He could face Abigail, but he couldn't face a whole army.

Timmy sat with a notepad and wrote down all the people he didn't trust—Jordan House, Markos, the boy from Brown, himself. He didn't trust himself. That was part of the breakup, in fact. He had wanted Linsey too much—wanted what their bodies did together—to see staying with her, together, apart,
together, apart, without needing to fill the longings between, the empty space. And he'd rather be apart than be a cheater.

“Hey,” said the kid—Geo. Timmy wasn't used to the flow of people during the summer—during the year you rarely saw teens out during the day on open campus periods. Elementary school kids were in school.

“Hey,” said Timmy.

“I have some ideas,” said Geo. “And pictures,” as if they were continuing an ongoing conversation.

Geo pulled out a file folder. A mosaic of photos of Linsey. Timmy started looking right away—he knew this one, from graduation, he knew this one, from a Science Saturday, in fact, when she'd come to help out with the World's Largest Domino Topple attempt (they'd made it to 1,652 before the dominos splayed and stopped).

“Tell me,” said Timmy.

“She could have gone to visit her dad.”

“Good guess, but that's out. He wouldn't hide her—he wouldn't want to go to jail.”

“Okay, so what about this?” Geo pointed to a photo in the cluster—Linsey on someone's shoulders. He couldn't recognize the shoulders, and the boy's head was out of the picture. Not Markos—someone in a leather jacket. Pretentious, Timmy thought, then he sighed. It wouldn't help anyone if he was paranoid.

Geo took out a notebook—one of those marbled hard-covered single-subject notebooks Timmy thought of as writing journals, since they'd had to keep them since third grade.
He wondered whether there would be anything good in Linsey's, though usually people didn't write anything too personal, since the teachers, while they promised not to share with others, sometimes pointed out something they thought was terrific, and even read one aloud to class, only it was an awful story about wearing your pants backward in the fifth-grade play and struggling not to cry. He'd had some amazing teachers; he'd also had some bullies disguised as teachers. Timmy was awed when he'd gone along to see Linsey teach the kids in Paterson, respecting people regardless of age or ability. It was something his parents admired, too, and something innate, and probably why everyone thought she would become a teacher, for sure, though she'd told him she loved it but thought there might be more, other things she wanted to do.

“I'm still a kid,” she'd said, leaning into his chest, making his fingers ache to take off her shirt. His body was a problem sometimes.

“So,” said Geo. He'd been writing while Timmy thought about Linsey's body. “I've got the father, the music teacher, the guy from Brown—”

Timmy looked down and saw this list in bright blue Sharpie pen.

“I don't think any of those people is really suspect,” said Timmy. “I get sick at the idea of anyone doing anything to her, but seriously, Geo, I think the main suspect you should have on that list is Linsey, just Linsey.”

“Hmm,” said Geo. “I appreciate that. But should I keep
going? I was planning to ask at the
Ridgewood Times
whether I could look through old photos and see if there's anything there.”

“You're a good kid, Geo,” said Timmy, though he was already feeling sick, knowing what he had to do.

“Look,” said Geo. “There's something there.” He pointed, obtusely, at the coffee counter, where Jordan the barista was leaning over toward a woman Timmy knew. Mrs. Sentry, he thought. He looked at Jordan's face, his hand over hers on the coffee cup.

“You're right,” Timmy said, “there's something there.” Linsey babysat for Mrs. Sentry. “Put them on the list,” he said, sighing.

“I'll look for photos,” Geo said. “I have a lot.”

“No harm in looking,” said Timmy, thinking maybe there was potential harm to cheaters and slimeballs. Helping, he was helping, but when you dig in the dirt, sometimes you find pill bugs, stinkbugs, worms, and bones.

Timmy and Geo walked back from town together; Geo pushed his bike and they shared a companionable silence for almost the entire mile. Timmy knew he had to tell Abigail that Linsey had secretly applied to Berkeley, Stanford, and Mills, considering transferring even though she'd always wanted to go to Cornell. The acceptance letters to Berkeley and Mills (“Stanford's too sunny anyway!” she said, crumpling their thin envelope) followed the portal lists and came to his house, because she'd wanted to keep this all to herself. For two weeks, she'd decided on Mills. “Think of all the
women's studies!” she'd said. “I can learn to be a woman!” In a way, it had been funny, but in a way, it was true—college was that step forward, learning to live in the world.

The day they broke up she told him she was still going to Cornell, that her parents had paid the first tuition bill, griping as if they hadn't expected it—her mother, anyway. Her stepfather, she said, had told her, over poached breakfast eggs,
Please know you can call if you need anything, even money.
Timmy liked that guy. But maybe even he belonged on the list.

She'd said she wasn't considering Mills anymore, that she wasn't going to transfer, ever. But it occurred to him that she could have gone to visit—not to see him, but to see the other coast, to take in an alternative through her senses and not just pictures and ideas. He may have been the only person to know that she was far from sure about what she wanted to do when she grew up—everyone assumed she would be a teacher. Sure, maybe she'd get a Ph.D. in education, but that was where everyone thought her heart fit, her future. He knew Linsey wasn't sure about her future, about teaching, even about college—he knew she made a beautiful mask, but that she was insecure where other people thought she was sincerely smiling.

Geo wanted to help him—he could see something in that kid, a loop tape of Velcro looking for the hook side, a slipping up against the world that wanted purchase. Things had mostly been easy for Timmy, except for knowing, all his life, that he'd kept his parents from doing all the things they
wanted to do, last child, last anchor. His older brother had spent two years with them in a slum in Peru; his sister had volunteered at the Paterson shelter starting when she was ten, and now she worked for social services, but he was born later, and they were distracted, and instead of surrounding him in the yolky food of their need to help other people, he was on the outside of the shell, wishing he knew what they really wanted of him.

Never mind that,
Timmy thought, because he wasn't one to feel sorry for himself. He looked at Geo, who was flipping through a file folder of photographs as they walked; Timmy had assumed the handlebars of Geo's bike, and thought perhaps they had more in common than the kid could imagine.

“This one,” said Geo, holding a photograph of three girls in heavy jackets by the brook. No one was smoking, but their breath puffed out of mouths like speech bubbles.

“Those girls went with her to visit Brown—when she was applying,” Timmy said, leaning close to the screen, as if he could touch her.

“Elizabeth and April,” he continued. “April is actually going there in the fall.” All this mattered so much before, who went where. What Timmy and Linsey had was surety, early decision, an immunity from the posturing and rabid checking of portals at certain hours to see who got into Yale, who got into Emerson, who got into Julliard, who was wait-listed at Swarthmore. It all seemed silly to them then, until she starting thinking about the other schools.

He remembered something she'd told him about that trip. They'd still been together, they were going to be together forever at that point; he was busy pitying people who hadn't found their other half, who didn't get to press their bodies against the bodies that needed theirs. She told him about the guy they stayed with, Cliff—the same guy in that photo from the party. Elizabeth was friends with Celia Savage and Cliff was Celia Savage's stepbrother, and Linsey told Timmy she hadn't known anything, really, about the arrangements, she'd just known that when they arrived, Cliff—who was obscenely handsome, in Timmy's opinion, handsomer than the slightly smarmy Jordan House, but he didn't say that then, he just reminded Linsey that Cliff seemed arrogant—was their host in his off-campus apartment. She'd told him everything, though it was awful, and made him want to hurt this Cliff, and worry about Cliff, and think much more about Cliff than he'd ever wanted to think about another man. His parents had taught him jealousy was like some sort of disease—it damaged people inside, it hurt them and did nothing to give them the objects they desired. Not that Linsey was an object. She said his feeling jealous was cute. He kissed her too hard.

She'd recounted the night they stayed over, after Elizabeth and April had gone to sleep beside each other in the pull-out couch, like a married couple. Linsey left her air mattress on the floor and went back into the kitchen. Cliff was looking over his pharmacology textbook, but she knew he'd been waiting for her. Here she told Timmy she never thought
of another boy, that she wasn't even thinking of Cliff, she was just unable to sleep. Linsey said this and they both knew that she was trying to make him jealous, that she wanted him to fight for her, that she wanted to feel safe knowing he would dig his fingers into the flesh of the world to keep her.

“You shouldn't flirt with me,” Cliff had said. “Come here,” he said, waiting for her to come, then placing her hands on his shoulders. “I'm very stiff.”

She knew that was a dirty thing to say, she told Timmy, watching his face, and she wasn't flirting, she really wasn't, but all the same she rubbed his shoulders.

They were very stiff, she told Timmy, ridiculously huge shoulders.
Cro-Magnon shoulders,
she said, laughing.

“I told you not to flirt with me,” Cliff said, putting his hands over hers.
I was just being friendly.
Timmy had felt his jaw ache. He'd told her to stop telling the story, but she wouldn't.

“Why shouldn't I flirt?” she said she'd asked him, though she was asking Timmy just now, wanting him to tell her because of me, wanting him to say because it makes me rageful, jealous, furious, aroused.

“You don't know me, that's why,” Cliff had said. He peeled her hands off his shoulders, as if it had been her idea all along.

He laughed a little, standing and steering her toward the room where her friends slept.

“Besides, you're jailbait.”

“And that was that,” Linsey had said to Timmy.

“I wish you wouldn't,” said Timmy, unable to look at her
face. She had been wearing a button-down blouse. Bright blue. He fiddled with her top button.

“What, flirt? You know I'd never cheat on you.”

“I wish you wouldn't tell me stories like that.”

There he was in Geo's photograph, the boy, the Cro-Magnon. He asked Geo to e-mail it to him as they parted ways on the corner of Cedar Court and Sycamore. It was time to visit Linsey's mother.

24 SYCAMORE STREET

T
he young man had started coming over every day with his cello, leading it up the street as if he was walking a dog. It reminded Mr. Leonard of the conservatory; it reminded him of his childhood, when there were always the bodies of instruments warming the rooms along with their players. When he knew all their voices more clearly than the English language, the flutes' insistences, the violas' womanly complaints. Jordan House was a talent of some sort—Mr. Leonard couldn't read how great—but he was lost in language, lost in the forest of his own expectations. Mr. Leonard knew it, he knew what depression looked like from inside: You go to the store and no one knows, no one knows what you're going through. Your mother is dead. Your lover married someone else. You have cancer. They just know they're looking for the Downy laundry detergent and you're in their way at the Wisk.