The Sweet Relief of Missing Children (15 page)

T
he man on the street said, “Can I ask you something? Can I have your ear for a moment? I'm having some trouble.”

They faced each other in the cold. Her brother was gone. The school was four blocks away.

“As a father, see. I'm have some difficulty as a father. I've reached a wall. It's been a trial. It's been the worst six months of my life to date, if I'm allowed to be candid. I'm not allowed to be candid, I know. You're on your way to school. I need some help with my daughter. Can I be candid?”

Leonora said, “Be candid.”

His plaid scarf was the same as her father's. The briefcase, the black shoes—they were same as her father's too. He was her father's age, clean-shaven, a nick on his cheek the size of a word in Bible print. He smiled like someone forgiven for breaking a rule—like a boy forgiven who can't quite forgive himself. She liked this. It felt appropriate, given the rule he was breaking by talking to her—his goodness inhered in his discomfort. His face was gentle, small greenish eyes, a wide chin. Maybe he was a teacher? She pictured him sitting behind a desk, stroking his chin, talking about history. His eyebrows were pale and full, his hair blondish-red. He looked like he got weekly trims, that kind of shipshape hairdo. She told herself she was a good judge of character. He said his name; she said hers. She did not hesitate or give her last name. He did not offer to shake her hand, which confirmed her sense of his goodness. He explained his problem, spoke in a clear, exact, slightly nervous voice, like someone new to the debate team. Faintly she smelled soap, a brand she recognized, and so she agreed to meet him after school to help him with his daughter.

She thought about the man in Spanish, in math, in English where they were reading a novel about the sole family to survive a nuclear war—about their youngest child, a girl, who taught the family in her breezy, ingenuous way how to be happy in spite of the apocalypse. She got so lost in thinking that when Ms. Nicholiason called on her she did not hear her name and could say nothing about that lovely girl in the book, that last happy child left on earth. She had been thinking about how men always wear the scarves their wives give them. She had been thinking about how sad it was that so many people get divorced, and about how her own parents would never get divorced. She had been thinking about the man and his daughter, this girl who had no idea how much he loved her, but who would be shown how much, would come to know it, with Leonora's help.

At last the day ended. Her brother waited for her at the foot of the steps, wearing the hood of his coat but not the coat itself, smashing the tines of two plastic forks together. “I'm going to walk alone,” she said.

“You can't.”

“I can do what I like.”

“Mom'll get mad.”

“I walked alone this morning. You left me—don't you remember?”

He didn't remember. The days blurred. A smear of ink on his chin, a vocabulary quiz crumpled in his back pocket. She told him to walk with Jeremy Jeffries, said she'd meet him at home shortly and they'd make ants on a log. They found Jeremy. He lived down their block, a pipsqueak, freckled, giddy, scorned—someone had drawn whiskers on his face with magic marker but no one commented because it happened all the time. Everything gets ordinary after a while. The boys ran off. Leonora waited a few moments on the steps of the school, watched other children disperse, watch the caged, shivering trees on the sidewalk, the flow of traffic. Her nose began to run. Her throat hurt, but not too bad. The sky was glistening white, perfect, a clean sheet of paper, and then a couple oily pigeons moved through it like misspelled words. The old crossing guard with the potato nose moved and swayed as though music played in his head. Children were being kept safe. The limo arrived for that rich foreign girl, but people no longer gawked. It was colder now than it had been in the morning. Leonora felt free and happy and blessed.

The coffee shop was just a few blocks away. The sign claimed:
EXTRA SUPERIOR FOOD
! Red vinyl booths clashed with a pink floor. It was nearly empty and smelled like Thanksgiving. An old guy sat at the counter writing something on a notepad. At a table in the window, three women shared one piece of pie, jabbed their forks at it with guilty eyes, like they were testing the deadness of a body. The man she'd met that morning sat at a booth in back, near the restroom. He had ordered her a hot chocolate. It sat there, steaming, where she was meant to be sitting. It told her what to do. In an instant she was allowing its steam to warm her face. They smiled at each other.

“How was your day?”

She sensed, from how he said this, what it would feel like to be his daughter—a little clobbered by stiff, hopeful affection. “Just excellent, thank you,” she replied, and the way he smiled, kept smiling, the sadness he couldn't keep out of the smile, she understood that his own daughter had never given this kind of answer.

They looked at each other. The bell on the door rang—the old man was leaving. Behind the counter, a cook counted bills. Her companion tapped his mug, said he was already on his third cup of coffee and she should pardon his jitters. She said of course she would pardon him. She looked at the hot chocolate. A song about flying to Jupiter played on the radio. He rubbed his hands together, inhaled. She saw how nervous he was, which was proper.

“Like I said before, I'm in the final stages of a divorce. A messy divorce. Well of course all divorces are messy—maybe this one is a normal mess, I don't know.”

“A normal mess,” she repeated quietly, soberly.

“I can't lose my daughter as well as my wife. I can't. I won't, Leonora. I can handle the other losses, fine, take it, my bank account, all the photo albums, the furniture
I
picked out,
I
bought, she can have it all, every last thing. But I draw the line at my daughter. My wife—my ex-wife—for some reason she's under the impression that my daughter can't love us both.”

“But she can!”

“Right?”

“Of course,” she said, meaning it, wanting to say something wise, wondering if this was her job. Did he want her simply to listen, to confirm his daughter's capacity for love? What did he need from her? He went on:

“See, my girl is like any girl. She likes stuff.”

“Stuff?”

“I see how her eyes light up. I see how they light up, but I can't pinpoint what, exactly, makes them light up. You know?”

Leonora nodded, but she wasn't sure what he was getting at.

“So what should I buy? Let's pretend money isn't an issue. Makeup? Clothes? Books? Music? Which music? Which objects for her new room? I want to give her a room like in a magazine. Pull out all the stops. When she's all grown up I want her to look back and think:
That was some room my father gave me
.”

He was probably a lawyer, she saw now. He spoke like he was reading aloud from a long, dry book he secretly wanted to throw across the room.

He was not good with kids, he told her. He knew that about himself. He didn't trust his instincts, and money wasn't an issue but you couldn't buy instincts, could you? She concurred: you could not buy instincts. It flattered her that he seemed to assume her instincts were good. Good instincts, she believed, mattered even more than beauty. Also it flattered her that he seemed to assume she was a representative of her age—she felt relieved, somehow, to be seen this way, an ordinary girl, a girl who could articulate the needs of other girls.

“Oh,” he said suddenly. “You haven't tried your hot chocolate yet. Do you like hot chocolate? I shouldn't have assumed.”

“I do.” She grasped the cup.

“You don't have to drink it. I just thought—I thought it'd be good on a cold day.”

She took a sip of the hot chocolate. This seemed to settle the matter.

He said a few things about his ex-wife, about how she had the empathy of a calculator, about how much money she spent in order to remove the hair from her body. Then he seemed to realize he was getting off track and began to describe his daughter, her pretty eyes, curly hair, her—he paused, as if unsure what else to say.

“Beatrice is her name,” he said finally. “We call her Bea. She hates it. Wants to be Traci. With an
i
. Or Patli.
Patli?
I said, that's not a name, honey. She tells me I have no imagination; well, she's right on that count. Guilty as charged. But: Patli? She says we're the worst parents in the universe to give her such a monstrous name. An old fart's name, she's called it. On more than one occasion.”

“I'm sorry.”

“It was her grandmother's name.” He said this apologetically.

“I think it's lovely.”

“Do you? Yeah?” He smiled again in that sad way. “My mother loved that her granddaughter carried her name. But Beatrice—the younger Beatrice—she couldn't stand my mother. Called her Fussypants. To her face, I fear.”

Fussypants!
Leonora couldn't imagine saying such a thing to a grandmother, anyone's grandmother. She thought of her own kindly, rosy-cheeked nana, her crochet supplies in a basket, her particular smell (Dew of Morning face cream; laundry soap; roast chicken), the tidy way she arranged her hands in her lap, like a child in a pew.

“My mother bought Beatrice a teddy bear, a fancy one, shelled out a wad over at P. E. Fleiss, you can imagine. And Bea—you know what she did to that poor bear? No. Forget it. I can't say.” He took a deep breath, craned his neck to the ceiling. Then he looked back at Leonora and said, “She's a tough cookie, my bumble Bea. She's got—what's the expression? Moxie? She's got moxie.”

Leonora didn't know the expression.

“That poor teddy bear,” he sighed. “It wore an aerobic suit.”

“Mine was dressed up as an astronaut.”

“Yes.” He spoke this in a resigned, breathless hush, as if she'd confirmed some terrible news.

It wasn't Leonora's business, it was beside the point, but this daughter sounded just awful. She didn't want the girl to be awful! She wanted the girl to be sweet, oblivious maybe, but a basically sweet person who needed to be enlightened. Not a spoiled brat. Not mean to the elderly. The man looked at Leonora now with such a frank, open face that she had the abrupt and strange sensation that
she
should become his daughter. It lasted just a few moments, this feeling, but there it was:
Take the girl's place.
She felt a rush of generosity, and then a seizing in her gut, a mounting pressure, like her body was not a big enough container for its own munificence. She knew exactly what the man needed.

She took out a piece of paper from her notebook and, in careful script, wrote down the name of a magazine he should purchase a subscription to. Then she listed a band led by boys with bleached hair, then an expensive bottle of nail polish in a shade of red so deep it was nearly black, a shade called
FANG
that would require a half a day of babysitting for Leonora to afford, she wrote down the brand, the color, the store where he could find it for the best price. She did all this knowing what he needed was Beatrice, under an afghan, up too late, covering her eyes when the killer appears, and that it wasn't very likely he'd get this.

“You might want to consider getting the expensive kind of TV.”

“Okay, good.”

“The movie channels.”

“I'll upgrade.”

“And Jumpin' Sumpin's.” These were a cheesy potato chip snack; the advertising campaign featured a hysterical, sombrero-wearing kangaroo.

“Right, yes.”

“Junk food and good TV, she'll want to bring her friends over.”

He closed his eyes, as if picturing the scene.

She made a few more suggestions, spoke seriously, gravely, hoped to communicate that she was above these gimmicks, these silly trends, even as she was deeply familiar with them. Her own mother would never buy Jumpin' Sumpin's, but Leonora enjoyed them at sleepovers.

When she'd exhausted the list he said, “You're very sweet, aren't you?”

“Thank you.” Blood warmed her cheeks.

“Like—you're not quite a normal girl. Oh, but I mean it in the best sense. You're
kind
. I'm not so sure most girls are kind.”

She said nothing. She knew how to take a compliment—silently.

Their beverages were gone. It was time to go. He told her that he couldn't overstate how helpful she'd been; also he wanted her to know that
he knew
how strange it was he'd asked her to come here. “Desperate times call for desperate measures. Have you heard that expression?”

“Of course,” she said.

He thanked her two, three more times. “Truly, the pleasure is mine,” she said, and liked so much seeing his bemused, sad, grateful face.

“D
on't tell me you're one of those tub-thumpers.”

This is how she greeted him. It was Jade Grant, behind the Come & Go. Paul had come here for a cigarette and found her sitting against the dumpster, her legs pulled up to her chest, a massive fountain drink between her knees. She chewed on its straw like on a piece of licorice, her pale, narrowed eyes suggesting a boredom so habituated it had become mere accessory. Her posture and baggy shirt hid her stomach.

It was rumored that Jade—daughter of Thomas Grant, the abortion nurse—was pregnant.

“They're so devastatingly
clean,
aren't they?” she said. “From West Liberty Baptist is my guess. Jabbering self-righteous fools. They claim they want to help. To help! The filthiest stuff comes out of their mouths, filthy, mean as hell, but they're always showered and powdered and perfumed and I'm sure that lady douches twice a day.”

Then she said, “You're Paul, right?”

So she knew his name. They had only one class together, algebra, but never spoke—she sat with Kitty and Frick, passing notes and exercising the smallest muscles of her face with various expressions of disdain. Mr. Winslow was scared of the pretty girls, let them pass notes and look as disdainful as they wanted, but if a boy did the same, or an awkward girl, he was all over them. Jade was the best student in the class. That she knew Paul's name—though it wouldn't be his name for long—sent a wave of pleasure through his body, a shiver along his spine like a breeze on some unbearable summer day. Beetle got terribly hot. But he wouldn't ever have to spend another summer here. He reminded himself of that.

“Right,” he said, “Paul.” But it was really “Paul,” not Paul. That's how he thought of himself now—in quotation marks. As soon as he got on the bus he'd take a new name. He wasn't sure who'd he become. Pierce? Patrick? He felt, despite himself, attached to the
P
. It was “his” letter, the first one he'd learned as a boy.
P
would be the very slightest connection to his mother. No. Forget his mother. But he'd keep
P
anyhow. He liked its force—he wanted more force, needed more, could not relinquish the little he had. Percy?

“I'm Jade,” she said, and then smiled to imply she knew he already knew it. You couldn't not know it.

They were sixteen.

The smell of soggy cardboard drifted from the dumpster. He felt too warm, too loose. Spring did to the world what a hammer's claw did to a nail. He said, “We're in algebra together.”

“Those West Liberty freaks followed me from school. It's not the first time. Jabbering self-righteous fools. Keep an eye out, will you? I have the feeling that woman carries a gun. If they come down that alley, say something. A code word.
Rooster
. Say rooster and I'll run.”

He couldn't read her tone; she spoke mockingly, as if they shared a history of facetious chatter behind the Come & Go, but he saw a rigidity in her body, tension in her shoulders, and sensed she wasn't joking. Her reddish hair was wound around itself, pinned to the top of her head, an old-fashioned hairdo which made him think of England, of another century, of a woman in long skirts swishing through tall grass. Her clothes belonged to today: tight black jeans, a man's oxford shirt, white tennis shoes. On the left shoe someone had drawn the outline of five toes in black ink and colored the toenails with red marker. On the right shoe a single green letter, written so she could read it:
J
. She wasn't wearing any socks; he kept his eyes on her bony ankle.

She said, “You going somewhere?” for he was wearing a backpack and holding a sleeping bag and a pillow.

Was he? She was the first person who'd asked. He looked from her ankle to her face, saw the freckles strewn across her nose. Their eyes met, held. He looked away. He didn't know what to say. He was running, yes, or in any case wanted to be running, had already been gone three nights, was sleeping in the woods behind the abandoned factory, sleeping in a copse of slender birches that glowed in the dark like kindly ghosts. He'd run but hadn't gotten anywhere yet—this made him feel meek, childlike, like a kid who's escaped to his treehouse. Also he stank. He didn't want her smelling him. He took a step back.

“What's your deal? You blowing this joint? Splitting the scene?”

Had she noticed he hadn't been in school for three days? Of course not. He could vanish and no one, not his mother or stepfather or Jade or Gideon or the police or anyone, would come looking. It was time to get on a bus; that much was clear. “I heard you're pregnant,” he said, then regretted saying it.

She spat the straw, gave him a stern look. “Mary Mello started that rumor because her boyfriend told some guys he wanted to—” She threw the empty paper cup into the weedy lot. “Mary Mello is a liar and a thief. First she told everyone I pierced my nipples. Her boyfriend has a fouler mind, if that's possible. They belong together. Nasty things which I
never
in a million years would agree to do.”

“It's not my business.” The feeling of regret wasn't going away.

“If the world was populated by rumor babies they'd be filling the streets. Their wails would keep everyone awake at night. We'd feed them to cattle. Maybe then those West Liberty num-chucks would leave me alone.”

She was doing something with her hands, a waving, clawing gesture that made him think of his mother, of what Goldie did to make her nail polish dry.

He said, “I didn't mean—”

“You want me to tell you all the nasty things I've supposedly done in the bathroom on the third floor next to the teachers' lounge?”

“No.” He already knew.

She squinted at him, still waving her hands.

“It's none of my business,” he said. “I'm sorry, Jade.”

She nodded, and her hands came to a rest. She said, “If you're running away, I should join you.”

His heart kicked.

“But I got this rumor baby to raise.” She cradled it in her arms, rocked it; she cooed.

He saw them coming, a woman and a man, nearing the Come & Go, saw the woman point to Jade. The woman had waist-length hair and a long neck. The man was balding, chubby, and stroked a neat goatee. The woman towered over the man.

Paul watched them approach, still struggling with his awareness that he smelled wicked, thinking maybe he should go inside the Come & Go, wash up in the restroom, change undershirts, wondering if she'd be here when he was done—

But she had jumped up, grabbed his hand, and was pulling him, yanking his body through the lot, through a tangle of brambles, and into the woods. “You're a crummy lookout!” They ran together down the strangled path; he let himself be pulled through the lashing woods. Her hand was small, sparrow-boned, and miraculously cool. They ran faster. Trash littered the path, magazine pages, candy wrappers, cans, gum. He had no idea what was happening or what it meant. He'd been lingering for three days but was too scared to get on a bus. His failure to buy a bus ticket, to do anything but hide in the woods and smoke behind the Come & Go and wonder if anyone was looking for him—it made him despise himself. It was all just a pantomime of escape. And now, like that, he was running full bore through the woods of Beetle with a girl whose hair, as she ran, loosened, fell down her back, golden red, a shimmering cascade. They raced along, the path crusted with debris, fast, faster, until they came to the dirt turnout, a cool, shadowy clearing where people dumped bigger trash, broken appliances and old furniture, where, at night, kids sometimes came to smoke and scream at nothing and grope at each other. She let go of his hand and collapsed onto a rotten sofa. She threw herself across its springs and trash and leaves with grace and familiarity, as if onto her own bed.

He stood above her, not sure what to do with his body. They panted together. Their lungs heaving in union terrified and aroused him. He suspected that now he smelled even worse. Ten feet away, in a heap, lay a charred refrigerator, a smashed TV, mangled lawn chairs, a cast-iron tub, so that the clearing gave the impression of a ruined home.

Jade said, “‘The fruit of the womb is a reward.' So sayeth someone.”

Paul couldn't speak yet.

“You should have warned me! Who knows what these people are capable of.”

“I'm sorry.”

The Baptist woman entered the clearing from the other side. She did not seem out of breath. Jade saw the woman and covered her face with her hands. “Can you leave me alone for five minutes?”

“I'm your friend,” the woman said, stepping toward them.

“My boyfriend's not going to let you talk that way to me.”

Paul expected the woman to laugh, but she just looked at Paul, nodded, and said more decisively, “I'm your friend. I talk like your
friend
.”

Jade said, “You know how you fucking talk.”

“Honey, I haven't said a single cuss. Not one.”

“There's more than one way to talk dirty.”

The woman made a hand into a visor and squinted, though the sun couldn't reach them in the woods. “My speech is clean. Right speech is a gift to the world. Have you heard the story of the man plucking a chicken in the windy marketplace? The feathers are the speech. They fly and fly, and you can't get them back. It's an old story, like a fable. It happened long ago but it's still happening, always happening, one of those stories.” Her voice glinted, a pretty voice.

“We don't need more of your stories.”

The woman was older than they were—maybe thirty, with a plain, dour, earnest face. Her hair was so straight it appeared to have been ironed. She was thin and tall, elbowy, had the narrow pelvis of a marathoner. She wore running sneakers, tan pants, a white blouse, a braided leather belt that was too big for her. The belt's tail fell down her thigh.

“Does your boyfriend believe murder is a crime?”

“Don't get going with him.”

“Do you?” the woman said to Paul. “Do you believe murder should be allowed in our society?” She seemed like a teacher—the plain clothes, the air of staunch, fatigued sacrifice. It was hard to not answer.

Paul said, “She wants nothing to do with you. That seems pretty clear.”

The woman removed something from the pocket of her pants. A business card. She held it out to him and he took it.
THE CHOICE BELONGS TO YOU
. There was a drawing of a cherubic baby beneath these words, and a phone number.

Paul stared at the card. He said, “What do you want?” He realized what a fantasy it had been to be alone with Jade now that he no longer was. He longed for it again.

“I want to help, that's all. I want to right a wrong,” the woman said.

Once Goldie had affixed a magnet to the refrigerator:
U.S. OUT OF MY UTERUS
! She had placed it there to upset his stepfather, who said it was gross as hell and was her intention to make him puke up his egg sandwich? Paul pictured his mother in bare feet on the kitchen linoleum, her red toenails, red robe, and felt a sudden burst of compassion for this Christian.

“Look,” Paul said, “we understand your point. We'll keep it in mind.”

“You certainly
don't
understand the point,” the woman said. “If you understood the point you'd know it's not enough to ‘keep it in mind.'” She pointed a finger at Jade. “She needs to act. She doesn't have the luxury of time. She has all the power, all of it. It's a sin, to have that power and to look it in the face and to not give a lick.”

Jade said, “Oh for fuck's sake.”

“Leave her alone,” Paul said. “She's not pregnant, okay? It's a rumor is all. Go bother someone your own age.”

The woman's outstretched hand fell back to her side. She said, “Pregnant?” Her face softened, her eyes got wider, so that for a second she almost looked pretty. For a second she had the sort of stunned, generic prettiness of a doll. “Are you pregnant, honey? Is that true?”

“Leave her alone,” Paul said.

Jade said, “I'll kill you. I mean it,” and suddenly she was standing up, a foot away from the woman, her hands on her hips. “Do you hear me?”

“I think you should go now,” Paul said.

The woman seemed to think about his suggestion, but only said, “Paul's a good name.”

“Please go,” he said. “You've made your point.”

“Paul was an important person, a missionary, a friend, a man of true and abiding faith. It's funny, because he was such a big deal, a real major hero, a Hero with a capital H, but you know what his name means? Paul? I bet you don't. It means ‘small.'”

“We'll hurt you,” Jade said again, but quietly. Her eyes were closed.

The woman turned to Paul. She said, “Paul won't hurt me. He's humble. His name means ‘small.'”

“Don't be so sure,” said Jade. “He's full of surprises.”

The card in his hand was damp. They looked at him. His heart was going crazy. “I'm full of surprises,” he said.