What Strange Creatures (4 page)

I’ve never been a journal type, but maybe I hadn’t ever told Brendan so. Or he simply hadn’t believed me. Interesting things tend not to happen to me, and I don’t know how much eloquence I’d be able to get out of bad haircuts and candle-catalog layouts.

“Let me see that, Wayne.”

When I yanked at the corner of the journal, Wayne growled.

“Don’t growl at me, hon,” I said sharply.

He dropped the journal and tilted his head at me.

“That’s right,” I whispered, scooping up the journal. “Cute becomes you more.”

Wayne had chewed through the elegant branches of the tree. And the top right-hand corner of the cover was gone—he’d probably ingested it.

“That wasn’t very nice,” I said to Wayne, who sighed and plunked his body sideways on the carpet. “But I guess I was never going to write in it.”

Wayne’s pink belly rose and fell softly against the floor.

“But what if I’d written about all of my most personal experiences in here, Wayne? My deepest wishes?”

Wayne’s little black eyebrows gave an obligatory twitch. Then he closed his eyes. I tossed the journal onto the pile of books on the bed—thrillers and romances and scholarly tomes about medieval women.

“I guess you’re right about that. There’s no sense in your feeling bad about it, because I
didn’t.
”

I sat on the floor and gently thumped his chest with my palm.

“Do dogs ever ask what if, Wayne?”

Wayne didn’t open his eyes.

“I suppose I should ask Boober, too. But you’d be surprised. Contrary to his name, he’s not a very deep thinker, I’m afraid.”

Wayne sighed again.

“You know, if I told Kim about this, she’d probably want to buy me another steak. But I’m not going to. Because I don’t really care about that thing. It just seemed expensive. That was the only reason I never threw it out.”

Wayne was dozing now.

“You know, you’re right. I should be working on Marge. You’re right.”

I stayed on the floor, patting Wayne’s chest until the room grew cold and I grew hungry. The phone didn’t ring, and Kim and Jeff never arrived.

J
eff sounded tired when he finally answered his phone late Wednesday afternoon.

“Oh, hey,” he said. “I’ve been meaning to call you.”

“Yeah? I’ve been trying you all day.” I picked up a measuring cup and started watering the herb pots on my kitchen windowsill. “When are you and Kim gonna pick up this puggle? You can tell Kim he’s awful sweet, but a neighbor called yesterday about how much he barks while I’m at work.”

“Well. I can come get him right now if you want. But I don’t know where Kim is.”

I picked up a dead basil plant and tossed it into the trash, plastic pot and all. “What do you mean, you don’t know where she is?”

“She’s not back yet. She said she’d be back Monday and would call if it was gonna be longer.”

“She didn’t call?” I peered into the garbage and felt guilty for not recycling the pot.

Wayne wandered into the kitchen, his nails gently clicking
tsk-tsk-tsk
on the linoleum. He stopped in the middle of the room and stared at me.

“No. And I can’t call her. Because she forgot her phone.”

“How do you know that?” I reached into the trash and pulled the pot up, slipped the desiccated dirt and basil out, and rinsed it.

“She called me on Friday from a pay phone at a rest stop,” Jeff explained. “Asking if she’d left her phone in my car. I checked. And she had.”

“So you have her phone?”

“Yeah. It was shoved down into the passenger seat.”

“Could you call her sister’s?” I asked. “That’s where she was going, right?”

“I don’t have her sister’s contact information. I’ve tried to figure it out. I know one of her sisters is named Brenda. So I was poking around online looking for a Brenda Graber, from New Jersey. But I don’t know if her sister’s married.”

“I can’t remember. . . . Are you on Facebook?”

“Kind of,” Jeff admitted. “I only go on every couple of months and randomly thumb up shit to make people feel good about themselves. Like, people from high school who I remember having self-esteem problems.”

“Is Kim on Facebook? That’s why I’m asking. Because you could look through her friend list for her sister.”

“I did that already. I couldn’t find a Brenda.”

“Huh,” I said. “Well, since you have her phone, why don’t you look for Brenda’s number?”

“You’re right. I guess I could do that.”

It seemed odd to me that Jeff hadn’t thought of this already. This is the thing about that genius IQ score, see?

“Didn’t Kim have to be back for work?” I asked.

“I thought so. By the end of the week at least. I didn’t know her exact schedule. I resisted calling for a couple of days, because I didn’t want to give them a bad impression. But I broke down and called this afternoon. They haven’t heard from her either. She was supposed to come in last night.”

I gazed down at Wayne. He had lowered his head to his paws and was working his little eyebrows up and down. He looked as skeptical as I felt. There was something Jeff wasn’t telling me, I was pretty sure.

“Do you want to come over?” I asked.

Jeff hesitated. “What, to pick up Wayne?”

“No.”

I looked in the fridge. No doggie bags since Jeff had eaten the last one. I hadn’t been very social lately since I was trying to commit to Marge. “Just to come over.”

“I don’t know, Theresa.”

“I was thinking of getting some pizza and some beer tonight,” I said quickly.

“Huh?”

“I’m having a taste for both.”

“Well . . . if you want company.”

“Yeah,” I said miserably, hating myself a little for baiting my brother with beer. “Yeah, I do.”

After we hung up, I ordered a medium pizza and went out for some Newcastle ale.

Rolf watched Jeff and me from the top of the refrigerator while we helped ourselves to pizza slices.

“I found Brenda’s number,” Jeff said. “Left a message. But I found something else on Kim’s phone. Something kind of weird. Pictures.”

“Uh-oh,” I whispered. “Are they pornographic?”

He snorted. “I wouldn’t show them to you if they were.”

He pushed a maroon cell phone across the table at me. I gobbled half a pizza slice before picking it up. On the tiny screen was a photo of a man and a woman on a street corner, eating hot dogs. Both were wearing suits. The man was gray-haired, a good decade older than the woman.

I pressed the side arrows to look through the next few pictures. They focused in on the man—some blurry, some clear. His mouth open. His mouth closed. Sinking his teeth into the hot dog. Dabbing his mouth with a napkin. Turning, presumably to the woman, and laughing. He was about sixty years old, on the stocky side, with deep-set eyes and almost no lips.

“Is this someone you know?”

“You don’t recognize him?”

“Should I?”

“It’s Donald Wallace.”

I tapped my head with my fingertips. “Oh. Did he teach math at the high school?”

“Jesus, Theresa.
No.
Donald Wallace is running for Senate. In the special election next month. To replace Henry Rowan. Do you really have your head that far up Marge’s ass? Did you even know that Rowan
died
?”

“Well, yeah. I did know
that.
So Donald Wallace . . . Is he the . . . Republican candidate?”

“Democrat. Good guess, though. The fact that you didn’t know doesn’t bode well for him. It’s not looking that great.”

“Do you care?”

“Of course I care. They need every single Democratic vote to pass the employment bill. They were counting on Rowan’s, and now it looks like a Republican has a chance at that seat.”

“And Kim cared, too? That’s why she was up there in Boston taking pictures of the guy eating a hot dog? Are you
sure
this is him?”

“Pretty sure. Keep looking.”

I hit the arrow some more. Same guy sipping a coffee. Then a whole bunch of shots of him using his palm to arrange a piece of his gray hair across his forehead. All of the photos were taken outdoors, from a far distance. He was never looking at the camera.

“This doesn’t really do anything for me.”

“It’s him. Trust me. I know his face. He’s on
Maddow
all the time.”

Since losing his job, Jeff had become a cable-news junkie.

“So what’s this guy’s story?” I asked.

“He’s the state attorney general right now,” Jeff said. “He was local for a while. By local, I mean he was a prosecutor for our county ten or so years ago. Pelsworth County before that. Before he started moving up the ranks. People around here like him. But I think statewide they’re having trouble getting Democrats excited about him.”

“Well, apparently Kim was excited about him.”

I slid the phone back to Jeff.

“Kim didn’t care about politics,” Jeff said, picking up the phone.

“Um . . . are you
sure
? Looks to me like she was sort of a groupie.”

“Like she was stalking him, you mean?”

I contemplated my pizza slice. “I didn’t say that.”

“She never said anything while you guys were watching all your cable news together?”

“She almost never watched it with me. She really didn’t seem to care.”

“Huh.”

“Okay. So that’s the first thing I found on the phone. But I found something else.”

“Ooh, what now? Joe Biden sipping a Slurpee?”

Jeff ignored me. “Text messages. I don’t know the number. But look at them.”

I did. One had come in on the day after Kim had left, at around 10:00
A.M
. It said,
I WAITED FOR AN HOUR YESTERDAY. WHERE WERE YOU?
Another had come in about two hours later, saying,
THAT VIDEO I SENT YOU. THAT’S JUST BETWEEN US.
An hour after that:
SO I’M JUST A FUCKING JOKE TO YOU
? And a few minutes later, simply:
FUCK YOU, KIM.

“That’s . . . interesting. Did you try to call that number and see who it is?”

“Yeah. I got a mailbox-f message. But after seeing that, I couldn’t resist. I looked at her last few calls. The couple of days before she left. I didn’t recognize any of the numbers. None of them was labeled as people she knew. I called one of them right before I came over here. I got the voice-mail box of some reporter at the
Chronicle.
”

“Did she know anyone at the
Chronicle,
that you know of?”

“No. The other numbers . . . I’m going to try them tomorrow, during business hours. Maybe even ask some of these people how they knew Kim, what she was up to right before she left. Would that be too . . . desperate?”

“I don’t think so.” I hesitated. “Do you think she thought someone in the news business would be interested in her hot-dog pictures?”

Jeff took a long and solemn swallow of beer. “I care about her. Actually.”

The words took my breath away for a moment. We don’t normally say this stuff outright in our family. Except occasionally about a deceased pet perhaps.

“I . . . know that.”

“Then don’t talk like that. Like she’s stupid.”

“I’m sorry. I don’t think she’s stupid. You come here with photos of a local politician chomping on a wiener and I might, you know, get a little punchy.”

Jeff went to the refrigerator to get himself a third beer.

“Another for you?” he asked.

I shook my head. I used to match him. These days each drink of his diminished my thirst a bit.

Jeff closed the fridge but lingered there for a moment, still holding the handle. “All this makes me think of something odd she said the night before she left. I mean, I didn’t think it was odd until now. But she asked me if there would ever be a circumstance in which I’d be willing to be paid for my silence.”

“What?”

“That’s what I said. I told her it was too general a question. Silence about what? It would all come down to that.”

“And she said?”

Jeff came back to the table. “She told me I was asking too many questions. She said, ‘That’s the point of asking a hypothetical question. That you don’t have to get too specific.’ And I said that ‘hypothetical’ didn’t mean nonspecific, and she got mad at me for implying that she was dumb, and then the conversation was over.”

Jeff opened his beer, staring at Rolf on top of the fridge. “How does he get up there?”

“Rolf? Sometimes he jumps up onto the stove first. Sometimes he jumps directly from the floor. To show off.”

“From the floor all the way up there? No way. He’d have to
fly.
And you can’t fly, can you, Rolf?”

Rolf blinked modestly, then began to lick his outstretched leg.

“He’s very athletic,” I noted.

“There’s no way he can jump that high.”

“He does. I’ve seen it.”

“Maybe you just dreamed it. I think you did.”

I didn’t reply. I was worried about Kim, and what it meant that she hadn’t returned, called, or texted my brother. Maybe it had been too good to be true, this cute, easygoing-if-a-little-affected young lady who’d come into my brother’s life and brightened things up where I’d no longer had the energy to do so. I felt as if Jeff and I had both been duped somehow. I was, after all, the one left holding the puggle.

What did we really know about this Kim? Jeff had met her in the Art of the Memoir night class I’d encouraged him to take last semester, because he was always saying he wanted to write a book of all his school-bus and ice-cream-truck stories. It was a very popular night class at the university that drew in students and dabblers of every age. Now I felt partly responsible for Jeff’s meeting Kim—who was maybe turning out to be another heartbreaker.

“You told me a couple of months ago that you dream more about your animals now than about anyone else,” Jeff continued.

What was wrong with Jeff and me, that nothing was ever quite finished for us and nothing ever quite worked out? Sometimes, when my father would scratch off a losing lottery ticket or arrive at the movie theater after all the seats had sold out, he would say cheerfully, “Oh, well. We’re Battles. We’re used to disappointment.” Or worse: “We’re Battles. What chance did we have?” Maybe we’d both taken these pronouncements more seriously than my father had intended. Maybe we somehow invited failure, on some deep and instinctual level.