When She Was Gone (10 page)

The detective had talked to Toby, and Cody, each alone in their room. He said things like, “You should tell me anything you know—anything that might be helpful,” and Toby looked at the nose, the nose, the nose, and said, “I don't know anything my parents didn't already tell you.” Later he thought about that, about how the detective might know he had been listening in because of that, about how he did know something they didn't—he knew she still loved Timmy. And he knew she had taken some of Mom's Valium, almost all the pills, that she'd wrapped them in a little wad of plastic wrap
and stashed them along with her birthday money (tens and twenties and a single fifty-dollar bill) from the grandmother they didn't share, and two stubby candles and a matchbox inside the weird wooden box carved with monkeys on the lid that her father had given her from some trip—she kept it in her closet, behind her shoes. Toby didn't tell the detective he didn't like Joe, that he was always twisting and zipping his jackets, zip, unzip, zip, unzip, a very untidy, insectlike sound, as he waited on the front porch for Linsey. Sometimes he didn't even get out of the car. Toby liked him less than any of the boyfriends, because Linsey liked him more. He didn't tell the detective Linsey had a fight with her father the day before she left. And he didn't tell him, either, that the monkey box with all the money and the pills was gone.

444 SYCAMORE STREET

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he had called him last week from a party at Ian Cronin's house, her voice fat with alcohol. Actually, she'd texted him first. She wrote
I kissed Markos Love forever, L.
It was cruel, but sometimes if Linsey drank she was ridiculously affectionate and sometimes she was mean, it was just the way she was, a little too much of either side of herself. She'd called afterward, crying.

“If you don't want to lose me,” she said. “Let's get married. Let's elope,” she said. He knew a small part of her actually meant it, but mostly Linsey was too smart for all of this. She would walk home even though Cronin lived at least two miles from her house; she wouldn't drive drunk, she would never cheat at a game, she would write him a text if she even kissed someone, like Markos, and even though they were broken up.

“You're drunk,” he said. “And if you kiss Markos now and someone else freshman year and then still want to be with me, we'll get back together over the summer.” It was awful, but it would be worse if he tried to keep her—he couldn't fight her mother and he couldn't fight her free will
or she'd grow too small for him; they'd grow too small for each other.

“You don't mean that,” she said. “Just because my parents were stupid doesn't mean we are. Just because we're young doesn't mean we can't actually love each other. I'm done. I kissed Markos. That's it for kissing random boys; I only want you.”

He had tried to talk her down. He offered to pick her up but she said no. He got off the phone and vomited, then he went running past Cronin's house in case she was still there, but she wasn't.

If he saw her, he would want her too much, and he couldn't make good choices.

It was all about making good choices.

And now her mother had called and asked about Linsey and his first thought was that he was supposed to meet her somewhere, was supposed to run away with her—she wasn't supposed to do it without him. He'd been up all night digging through his box of notes from Linsey, looking through old texts and e-mails.

Linsey didn't run away, no matter how much she thought she loved him; she had too much sense of self-preservation. She might kiss Markos, but would she sleep with a stranger? No. Would she be playing hide-and-seek with him to see if he really cared as much as he said he did? All summer he'd been working two jobs—he was a day camp counselor and an assistant to this guy in town who called himself Mr. Computer Dude, who set up home systems and made emergency
calls to homes in desperate need of e-mail recovery—and he did this to save money to visit Linsey during Thanksgiving, when he had a week off and she had only two days, so he had a plane ticket and a rental car reserved to go visit her in Ithaca. It was just months. Just countable weeks. Just countable infinity.

Once, they'd been having one of those relentless conversations about whether love plus lust was greater than or less than the sum of love plus proximity—she called it love math—and she stopped his calculations of the distance between different airports that would be between them at their schools—and put her hand over his mouth. Usually, that would warrant a playful bite, but it was a week before they broke up, and he knew it was coming, a low-pressure system. He kissed her hand instead.

“What worries me,” she said, “is that your love is a countable infinity. It can be measured even though it's infinite. You can use it in an equation.” They were in her family room—no one else was home on a Saturday afternoon and the light licked the floorboards. He wanted to be inside her.

“Nah,” he said. “For you, beyond measure.” He'd been thinking that he wanted to taste other parts of her, the crook of her arm, her inner thigh. His mind was bored but his body wasn't and for this he felt a vague and uncomfortable guilt.

“No,” she said. “My love for you is an uncountable infinity. It's not your fault, and it's not my fault, and I'm not sure you should buy that ticket.”

It made him angry; it was an assumption. He wished he
could say something about disrespect but instead he said, “No way, I bought it already,” and started pulling her T-shirt up over her head. His body was uninterested in change and anticipation—it wanted, and now. He hadn't imagined she would take her mother's mandate, just one week later.

•   •   •

Now he was supposed to leave for California, and even though she'd given him up, she was holding him back. He was alone in the house, and he missed her so much he felt as though he were wearing a lead apron at the dentist's. A pile of lead aprons, his chest crushed. He called his uncle and he called the airline and he stopped imagining the “Welcome, Timmy!” sign he'd been expecting at the airport, his uncle's square artistic handwriting a quiet public celebration of this huge thing he was doing—moving cross country, leaving his hometown, leaving Linsey.

The thought of someone else touching her—someone hurting her, someone taking her—made bile rise into his mouth. He couldn't leave her, because she was missing. He changed his flight to tomorrow and charged the fee to his mother's credit card—she could help out for once. Then he grabbed his bike from the garage and headed over to Linsey's house, dreading facing Abigail, but motivated by the thought of having some conversation with Toby, whom he'd missed, who always had some interesting angle on things, who might know the password to Linsey's laptop, so Timmy could put his Mr. Computer Dude skills to work and try to find her.

Two blocks away from the house, he felt the wavering. Abigail made him feel especially guilty, made him feel like he was the source of all sins. It wasn't entirely her fault; it was as though she secretly sensed the weak parts of him that wanted to appear strong, as though she knew he was still an unformed man.

The kid with the camera was standing a little too far into the street, his face behind the lens. Timmy didn't know anyone who used a film camera anymore, just this kid. He slowed his bike.

“Hey, Geo,” he said. “You should watch for cars.”

“I am,” said the boy, turning his lens to Timmy. Timmy could feel the focus. The kid seemed to see without looking directly.

Timmy had known Geo since the boy rode his Big Wheels down Cedar Court and over by Linsey's house. He was always making art, and he'd been in the Super Science Saturdays program Timmy taught for three winters at the Campus Center in the high school. They'd made a battery together; they'd built a robot that smashed pegs into holes; they'd shared disastrous mushed origami projects and had been both serious and full of laughter.

“But there are cars,” said Timmy, scooting forward until his face was right in the lens, laughing.

“Ooo, that was almost good,” said Geo. “You came too close, though.”

“You're taking pictures of my zits?”

Geo lowered his camera and his head both. “No,” he said.

“I'm kidding. Hey, Geo, I know you take a lot of pictures. Any chance you have some of Linsey? It's just that we're kind of looking for her.” He was wearing his camp-counselor hat, his conciliation.

Geo fiddled with his lens again.

“I might; I could look.”

“Text me, okay? I'm in the directory—you know, from school—your sisters should have it.” The sisters were always mysterious, a small tribe of beauty. The boy was smart, though; he might even have some recent shots. He leaned forward and touched Geo's shoulder. Geo was wearing a red cotton sweater even though it was hot out. He shrugged at the touch, but Timmy could tell he was happy to be included.

“I will.”

“Onward!” said Timmy, smiling, though he wasn't, not really. He was scooting down the street like a reluctant toddler on a trike.

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ometimes, she noticed how gruesome his little place was, the microwave, the stained sink, the bathroom where he showered wearing flip-flops because the shower floor was mottled with a yellow and blue mold. Sex with him was so thorough—it used all of her, it temporarily erased her. He was so compelling on the bed, against the wall, his long thighs taut; the skin around his eyes smooth; his cock itself, always alert for her; his lemony smell, despite his horrible diet, despite the filth of his surroundings. She would never have lived somewhere like this, even without money; her sheets were always clean, her shower floor was never moldy. When she was away from him, the idea of him, this kid in a smelly old garage who had a degree from Harvard and could hardly get dressed in the morning depressed her. She wasn't sleeping with a kid like that. She'd stop right away. But then she was with him, and he was so sexual, so raw, and so immediate. It was like being with a toddler who wants wants wants; only you could satisfy the need without sippy cup or lollipop. All Jordan wanted was to make love to her, and it didn't get much better than sex with someone who had all that energy and hunger.

Reeva was always clean—she hated crumbs on counters and smudges on doorplates, but she harbored a desire to sink into thoughts and dreams, to let books pile up on end tables, even on the floor, piles of thoughts; she wanted to experience again the way she used to, sharp senses at the ready. She once had a job then at a used bookstore, shelving the new recruits, pasting little red price stickers on their backs, ringing up the uneven purchases—$5.43, $6.11—at the ancient push-button register in the front. Books smelled like dough in that bookshop, biscuit dough.

But then she lapsed into the ordinary, the office job she kept for three years before Steve was born, the peeling herself from bed early enough for all the necessary layers of shellac and moisturizer to keep her safe all day. Safe and beautiful. If left alone, really alone, Reeva wouldn't wear any of it. If left alone, she'd eat biscuit dough and read books and lie in bed all day. That's what she thought in the years of young children, the relentless years of nursing and diapers and nighttime calls for her attention, her arms.

She was lured into real estate by a sign on a storefront agency office in town. She had been up for too many nights, for two or three years, it felt as if she hadn't slept in that long, and she was horrified by her own outgrown haircut, her lipsticks too old to hold their oils, wasting away in a drawer. She was horrified by how used up she felt, so she wheeled baby Tina into the office and signed up for a course. For those years there was so much power for her in dressing up for open houses, for escaping her own laundry piles and unread
cooking magazines for a Sunday open house. The thrill of a deal was better than sex—less messy, less exhausting; instead, she felt redeemed by joining home and owner, as if she was building something, not just feeding and changing and maintaining breath.

Charlie had convinced her to give up the brokering—too many Sundays away from home, and her cell phone always ringing. She didn't help them with their homework often enough. She'd complained about missing Tina's gymnastics, Steve's hockey, though she hadn't really wanted only that. Now she had all this time, the Sundays, but all the other days, too. Tina had long since quit gymnastics. His suggestion had seemed logical, but she missed the work, even if she didn't miss sitting in a vacant house that smelled of cat urine despite her quick batch of slice-and-bake cookies on a Sunday afternoon, dressed in a wool jumper and cold in November, clipboard, unnecessary fresh lipstick. Though it was the games and meets she mentioned, Johnny was the main reason she'd agreed to relinquish her job. He needed her too much for her to be filling empty houses.

Now she had this time, a whole lapful of time, and did she go back to bed after everyone left for school? Did she tend peonies in the garden and make cookies and lie on the couch with novels? No. She went to Library Friends meetings. Charlie sometimes bought her new hardcover novels at Christmas, and she read them, dutifully falling in love with reading again, but at bedtime, staying up later than she'd intended, while Charlie read his political thrillers or his secret stash of
science fiction with fleshy women on the front. They looked like Greek statues, all drape and exposure, all suggestion of solidity. Now she had the time, and how did she spend it? At the gym. Every day of the week she worked to keep herself in shape. She wasn't sure, sometimes, why she did it. Maybe it was for Charlie, partly; maybe it was because she felt all her power leaking from her as her body sagged. Maybe because having those children had used her, if not using her up, at least wearing her out. Sometimes she ate too much. Sometimes she stopped at the bakery to get the kids a treat—picking out cream horns and sprinkle cookies and nut-crusted frosted brownies, bad as Jordan, maybe another thing about him she coveted, and sometimes she came home and ate everything out of the white box, too impatient to untie the string, so she bit through it. Sometimes she did all this without really noticing until there was only one thing left, or two, and then she ate them as if she needed to hide the evidence. She took out the trash, Tina and Steve's job, alternating, and soon enough Johnny's, too, though she didn't look forward to helping him learn that ritual, learn over and over by doing, like teaching an old person who's forgotten how to use the bathroom.