All Dressed Up (37 page)

For three
months.

Until he’s
back.

Forever.

Sarah followed
Lainie, and she knew the question about Charlie’s disappearance
would come again, so she answered it while Emma and Terri were
safely in the other room. She was pretty sure that Charlie wouldn’t
ever have told Emma about what he’d done. It was something he and
Emma had in common. They clammed up about things. “Charlie was gone
for three months, honey,” she said quickly, quietly. “Let’s not
compare it, it’s not the same situation. Billy won’t be missing for
anything like that long.”

“Oh God.”
Sarah sank toward the kitchen table, her palms heavy on its surface
and her elbows threatening to buckle. “Three months? How could he
have been gone for three months? Oh God!”

“Why do we say
that?” Lainie burst out. “Oh God. All the time.” It made her think
of Mac. She wanted him here helping them through this but without
the invocation of God, and she was angry with him because she
suspected he’d find this situation a really good excuse for
slipping God in and she wasn’t ready for that. She felt almost as
weak and distraught as Sarah.

“Oh God oh God
oh God.” She realized that her current ambivalent and sometimes
downright aggressive attitude toward God had started back then,
when Charlie ran away. Out loud she remembered, “I wouldn’t let Him
help. I hated Him. Some days I threatened Him. I said if you can’t
bring Charlie back today, there’s nothing else I want from you. I
don’t want the courage to bear this. I don’t want to trust in Your
will. I don’t want the comfort of prayer. I don’t want what You can
provide, God, unless it’s my son.”

Sarah could
barely listen, Lainie discovered, and didn’t blame her. “Can you
drive, Lainie? I want to start looking for him, but I wouldn’t be
safe at the wheel. I want to check ballet camp.”

“Sure, honey,
that’s a good idea.”

“Emma was
going to come but she’s gone looking in the woods.”

They found
Terri standing on the terrace of grass and rocks that looked down
toward the lake. “Nobody’s checked if the canoes are both there,”
she said. “I can’t stay in the house. I’m going to check the
canoes.”

“Will you be
okay?” Sarah asked her.

“Go, go.
Emma’s here.”

“In the
woods.”

“She’s on
foot. She won’t go out of calling range, and she’ll be looking out
for the patrol car.”

“Okay, then.”
Sarah started towards Lainie’s car.

Lainie hung
back to say, “Terri, I put the casserole in the oven on low. It has
a lid. It shouldn’t dry out.”

“Thanks.
Right. Thanks.”

Terri didn’t
care about food, and yet in a situation like this you always felt
compelled to make people eat. Lainie had practically been force-fed
by Angie while Charlie was missing. Terri was crying, now, and
Sarah had already gone to the car. “Oh, Terri, oh…”

She said at
once that she was glad Eric wasn’t here to see her like this, and
Lainie held her and soothed her and listened to awful confessions
that she totally understood.

“When Billy
was in the hospital – at first, before it got so scary and then
again at the end when he started to get better – God forgive me,
Lainie, but there was a part of me that loved it, that actually
enjoyed it. He needed me so much, and he was all clingy and huggy
instead of Go away you’re distracting me from my game. It’s so
intense what you feel for them when they’re hurt and sick and in
trouble. Your love is like diamond, so pure and fine. A part of me
relished it. I’m being punished for it now.”

“No, that’s
not how it works…”

Terri couldn’t
listen. “If I hadn’t had the miscarriages, I could have had seven
children. Eight, counting Billy. I wanted that. I wanted the
extravagance of it, you know? The generosity and what’s that word
profligacy? It’s the competitive streak again, isn’t it? The
tennis. Emma has it. If I’m going to be a mother, I’m going to be
the mother of all mothers, and that’s what you are when your child
is in the hospital, you’re the mother of all mothers. That’s what
you are when your child is missing, only this time it’s hell.” Her
shoulders shook and she couldn’t go on. After a minute she said,
“Sarah’s waiting for you.”

She’d stopped
sobbing as abruptly as if someone had yanked the faucet inside her
tight shut. Lainie understood this, too. When you could have cried
forever, it just turned itself on and off like that. The sobbing
came out of nowhere, and then went into abeyance for an hour or a
day.

“I’m sorry,”
Lainie said to Sarah when she reached the car. “Your mom needed a
hug.”

“I guessed
that, when you didn’t come. Thank you. You were talking about Mac
before, Lainie…”

“I don’t think
so.”

“Well, you
were talking about God, and I translated. You should have called
him if you needed to see him. Do you want to do that before we head
off? I actually wouldn’t mind seeing him myself.”

“I’m angry
with him.”

“No… Lainie?”
She wanted to know why. From the corner of her vision, Lainie could
see the concerned tilt of her head.

“Because
Billy’s missing.” She blinked back sudden tears that made her panic
with their sharpness. “Boy, that makes sense, doesn’t it?”

“I’ll call him
for you when we get back to the house,” Sarah said. “Oh, we’ll have
found Billy by then,” she promised herself. “I can’t bear this,
Lainie. It’s going to be dark soon. How could you bear it for three
months?”

“Charlie
hadn’t only just come out of the hospital, like Billy. And he was
twelve, not ten.” Lainie laughed at herself briefly. As if those
things made a difference! She started the engine. “No, I couldn’t
bear it. I couldn’t bear a single second of it, but I had no
choice. Oh God, and Billy overheard me talking to Emma in the
hospital. It was me. It was me.”

“She’s happy
that he knows, she says. Nothing was ever going to be fully right
until he knew.” Sarah shrugged and gave out a ragged sigh. “This
whole whose fault thing…”

“Everybody’s
and nobody’s.”

“That’s right.
Our whole lives. It’s Mom’s parents’ fault for being so cold. It’s
Dad’s fault for loving Mom and being scared about her and
encouraging what she wants when sometimes he should be the one to
see it’s not right. It’s the fault of her miscarriages. The fault
of Emma being so driven and intense. You don’t have to be a bad
person to get a crappy outcome, do you?”

“No, you
don’t.”

They drove
without speaking, after this.

Ballet camp
looked even lonelier and quieter at this hour than it had looked
three weeks ago when they’d seen it in bright sunshine. They walked
through its grounds and around its buildings in silence, looking
for any sign of life but finding only signs that the place needed a
keen buyer soon. “What are we thinking?” Sarah muttered finally.
“We should be calling to him.” They called and called, but no one
answered. “What did you say the asking price is now, for this
place?” Not as if she cared, just to occupy her mind, Lainie could
see.

She told her
anyhow, adding, “If he’s hiding, Sarah, if he doesn’t want to be
found, then he won’t answer. Charlie did that. He hid out in places
like this. It was in the fall, right after Labor day when summer
visitors had gone back to the city. He broke into people’s empty
vacation homes and lived on their canned goods.”

“Their canned
goods?” Sarah laughed, for some reason. “Well, he didn’t come to
our place, then!” Lainie looked at her and she flapped her hand.
“Not important. Family joke. Herrings in tomato sauce. Except the
timing’s wrong, because those cans haven’t been there that long.
How come my mind can keep running on all these different tracks at
once?”

“I know.”
Lainie remembered. Stupid thoughts about buying soap and toothpaste
all mixed in with the agony and the nightmare imaginings. They
walked along beside the rundown buildings, stumbling occasionally
in the gathering dark. “These sleeping cabins don’t lock, do they?
Billy could be in any of them. Or the dining shelter.”

“We should
have brought flashlights.” Sarah raised her voice. “Billy, please?
Come on, answer us! Come out, it’s almost dark.” They listened to
the silence and Sarah shook her head. “I don’t think he can be
here. I don’t know why he’d even think of it. Ballet camp is my
past, not his. He wasn’t even born when I used to come here.”

Lainie had a
three-second realtor attack and almost urged her again, Seriously,
why don’t you buy it? The setting was so pretty. It only needed
imagination and hard work and someone creative who cared the way
Sarah cared about things.

Good idea,
Lainie. Buy the place where they couldn’t find Billy. She clamped
her mouth shut.

“I want to go
back to Mom and Emma. See if the police have showed up. You know,
if he started to hitch and then had cold feet about it, he could
turn himself in at one of the service plazas.” Sarah clamped her
mouth shut, too, almost before finishing the last word, then added
hotly, “Lainie, are you ever superstitious enough to believe that
the only possibilities that happen in a situation like this are the
ones you don’t think of? It’s crazy. I try to trick my head into
not thinking of any of the good outcomes, because any good outcome
that I think of is automatically eliminated.”

She gave a sob
of laughter at herself.

“It’s really
getting dark,” she went on. “I thought of the service plaza idea,
so that’s out. And I am not allowed to think that we’ll get home
and he’ll just be there, or else that outcome gets eliminated, too.
Oh, too late, too late! I’ve thought it! I don’t want God to have
to stretch too far to come up with a possibility I haven’t already
jinxed with my thoughts.” Another sob-slash-laugh. “That day Luke
called, Lainie, the afternoon I came to collect Emma’s dress from
you, the only reason it was him on the line – the only reason – is
because, for the first time in months, he was the last person I was
thinking of when I picked up the phone.”

And maybe
Sarah was right about her jinx idea, because when they got back to
the lake-house the police had arrived but they didn’t have
Billy.

“You know, she
hasn’t even called me to tell me what Emma thought about the
dress,” Angie said. She hadn’t meant to say it, but it slipped out,
such a buzzing bug of resentment in her head, but so trivial once
she heard it out loud.

It was around
nine-thirty at night, and she was helping Brooke clean her house
because the whole bridal party and several other guests driving in
from Buffalo tomorrow would be dressing here on Saturday before the
wedding.

“So you should
call her.”

“Why should I
be the one to call?”

“Because then
it would stop messing with your head that she hasn’t called
you.”

What was
messing with Angie’s head was the state of her daughter’s house.
She was cleaning out the shelving beneath the kitchen sink,
collecting a cartonful of old jars to toss, and there were rusty
fridge magnets, perished elastic bands, slimy plastic bags, who
knew what else under there. Next she planned to tackle Brooke’s
splattered stove top, dismantle it, wipe it and fit it with fresh
foil beneath the electric coils.

Brooke had
only just finished speaking when Angie’s cell trilled out and it
was Lainie. “Sorry I haven’t called to let you know about the
dress, Angie…”

Billy Dean was
missing.

As soon as
Lainie ended the call, Angie burst out, “Oh, Brooke, I am a
terrible person!”

It came to her
that Brooke was the person she should tell. Brooke was the person
she should confess to. It would be a rehearsal, maybe, before she
did the braver thing of telling Lainie. And the floodgates of the
confession opened up almost at once. They opened wide and out it
came, gushing and tumbling. Not just the confession about what
she’d done to Emma’s dress – which Brooke was shocked by and yet
she didn’t yell, she didn’t turn away – but the other thing as
well.

“And you know,
Brooke, I’d not long gone through the divorce, and I was so
lonely…”

“Oh, Mom…”

“…and Lainie
always seemed to have a boyfriend. Or even when she didn’t, you
kind of saw that there were men who’d be interested if she gave a
sign. And when he started coming on to me… No. No! That’s not
right. I have to own up to this. When he flirted and I sent it
right back to him at double strength, instead of what I should have
done, which was freeze him off. Do you remember him? His name was
Calvin. And then he got more than flirty and I sent that back
double strength, too. And one night, in Lainie’s own house… Her old
place in Queensbury near the airport, do you remember? Right in her
kitchen…”

“I remember
Calvin. I didn’t like him.”

“I never slept
with him. It never went that far. But Brooke, it was the night
Charlie ran away, and it must have been because he saw us.”

“Oh, Mom!”

“And for
twenty years I’ve wanted to tell her, and for twenty years I’ve
wanted an excuse not to. For twenty years I’ve wanted her to be bad
in some way so it let me off the hook.”

“It wasn’t
your fault. Stop doing this. Stop beating yourself up.” Brooke
hugged her, warm and giving, her wonderful daughter.

Who knew now,
and who could feel her mother shaking.

“Don’t tell me
that!” Angie said, breath harsh in her throat. “You know it was my
fault. That’s not what I’m asking. I love you for it, you are so
good, so good, but it’s not what I’m asking.”

“Okay, it was
your fault. But do you think Lainie would still be angry? I do
remember Calvin. Clearly. I guess I was eight. He was nasty. She
finished with him that same night, didn’t she? I remember we went
round there…”