Body Surfing (14 page)

"What time is it?" she asks.

Jeff peers at his watch but cannot read the dial. Sydney finds the flashlight and switches it on so that he can see the face. "Four-forty-five," he says.

"No one will be up yet. I could make you eggs."

Sydney imagines herself and Jeff in the kitchen, Jeff sitting at the table, Sydney with a spatula and frying pan. One small light will be on, and there will be shadows. In better weather, if it ever comes again, they will go out onto the porch. They will take walks and watch the sun rise. In the afternoons, when everyone is elsewhere, they will nap in her bed.

A hot bath, she thinks, would be divine.

For warmth, they have left most of their clothes on. Her black silk blouse has ridden over her breasts. Jeff, with his free hand, adjusts it.

"Losing your husband must have been brutal," he says in a gentle voice.

"It was."

He smooths the hair out of her face. "I'm sorry," he says.

"It's better now."

"Time?"

"Yes," Sydney says.

"What was he like?" Jeff asks.

She is surprised by the question. "He was smart and funny. And patient. I think he would have made a good teacher. You know, at the hospital."

Jeff glances to one side. "Good-looking?" he asks after a moment.

"Yes," Sydney answers honestly.

Jeff seems to ponder her reply. "Do you have a picture?" he asks.

"I do. In my room. Do you want to see it?"

Jeff thinks. "I don't know," he says. "Maybe not."

He runs his finger along Sydney's arm.

"Your mother doesn't like me," she says.

"I know."

"She'll believe I'm responsible for you and Victoria."

"You are." Jeff lays his hand on her waist and kisses her.

"She's never liked it that I'm half Jewish. Now that I'm involved with her son, she'll hate it."

Jeff is silent.

"That doesn't bother you?" Sydney asks.

He kisses her shoulder, and Sydney thinks of the photograph in the Edwardses' bedroom.

"It bothers me, but more in the abstract than in reality. I'd like to think my mother wasn't like that, but there's not a lot I can do about it. Years ago, she and I had all the arguments a boy and his mother can have. I realized after a while that I'd never change her."

"I should probably leave the house."

"If you go, I'll follow you. And where will we be then? In my squalid apartment in Cambridge?" He puts his arm around her and pulls her to him.

"I'll love your squalid apartment in Cambridge."

"Don't be so sure about that."

Afterwards, Jeff helps her to her feet. Away from his skin and his warmth, she feels the cold penetrating. He brings the zipper of her slicker to her chin. He takes her hand and leads her onto the sand. In bare feet, carrying their shoes, they head in the direction of the house.

Sydney is surprised to see, as they draw closer, a light still on. As she climbs the porch steps, her mouth feels frozen. She cannot make it work properly. There is something she wants to say to Jeff, something that will convey to him the significance of what they have just done on the beach, but her thoughts are nearly as rigid as her mouth.

Once inside the front door, Jeff hesitates. The light is from the kitchen. Around Jeff and through the passageway, Sydney can see Ben sitting at the table. He has moved from gin to bourbon, a bottle of Maker's Mark half empty beside him.

Jeff and Sydney enter the kitchen, even the one light making them squint. There is a sense of having been caught and called to task. Of impending interrogation. Ben is silent, staring at them both. Sydney can see that he is very drunk. It's in his face, the loosening of the features.

"Julie's gone," he says.

Julie has left, in an upright rounded hand, a note. Ben, seething with frustration, his handsome features corrupted, pushes the torn piece of notebook paper across the table to Jeff, who has to wipe the salty rain from his brow and eyes to read it.

Sorry but I'm fine. I've I'm gone going on a little trip with some someone who you don't who you haven't. It's just a little trip vacation for a couple of days. I'll call you soon. Don't worry and I'm fine okay I'M OK. (Thankyou Sidney.)

"She left? She's gone?"

Jeff, pale under the best of circumstances, seems drained of all life force, earlier in great abundance.

"Apparently."

"Where's Dad? Where's Mom?"

"The police station."

"Without the note?"

"The police were here already."

Sydney notices two mugs with spoons, a cream pitcher, and the sugar bowl. None of the Edwardses take sugar or cream with their coffee.

"They came, they left," Ben says, gesturing with a flick of his fingers. "Julie's eighteen, apparently went willingly. Frankly, they're not all that interested. They said wait until morning, she'll probably call."

"Did Dad tell them that Julie's. . .?"

"Slow? Yeah, Jeff, he told them Julie's slow."

Ben's anger will show itself in sarcasm, then, Sydney thinks, making it hard to know what the Edwardses have or have not said to the police.

Jeff flings his windbreaker into the air. It comes to rest in front of the sink, where Tullus, curious, noses it.

"So, where have you guys been?" Ben asks casually.

"This is serious," Jeff says.

"So I gather," says Ben, deliberately misreading his brother.

Sydney sits at the table and draws the note toward her. As she reads, something flits across her brain and then immediately drifts away. She scans the note again, trying to retrieve the thought, the image. She shuts her eyes and tries to think. "Where did she leave this?" she asks.

"On her pillow," Ben answers. "No one noticed it until we went looking for her."

Jeff sticks his fingers into his hair, the gesture of a wild man. "We should be. . ."

"What, Jeff?" Ben asks. "Driving around, looking for her? In which direction should we go? North? South? To Portsmouth? To Boston?"

Jeff lowers his hands. "Dad must be beside himself."

"You think?"

Ben balances on the hind legs of the wooden chair. He holds his drink and appears to be studying the tension of its oily surface. "You know, Jeff, you're good."

Jeff grabs a dish towel from the fridge handle, dries his face and head.

"You told Vicki, what, Tuesday night? Yeah, Tuesday, because she called me at work Wednesday morning. So, let's see. . .this is Friday night, was Friday night, and you've already. . .well. . .nailed, so to speak, old Sydney here."

(Ben will be furious.)

"Shut up, Ben."

"Works fast," Ben says, turning to Sydney. "Always did. You impressed? You ought to be impressed."

"Julie's missing," she reminds the brothers. Somewhere out there, Sydney thinks, Julie is driving in a car or Julie is eating a hamburger or Julie is laughing.

"Yeah. So. We're fucked," Ben says, sitting forward, slamming the chair legs against the floor. Sydney flinches at both the word and the sound.

Jeff tosses the towel onto the granite counter. "You're drunk, Ben. Go to bed."

"Yeah. We're fucked. This whole family is fucked."

Sydney's skirt feels wet and gritty against her bare legs. She slides the slicker from her arms. When she glances up, Ben is staring at her blouse. Did she misbutton it in the dark?

"I'm glad Julie's gone," he says, looking up at Jeff. "What kind of a life did she have here? She was a prisoner. Oh, she painted. Big fucking deal. Oh, she worked in the rose garden. She was a prisoner in her own house. She was never going to get free."

(I think the man will find her.

Not too soon, I hope.

No, not too soon.)

"Let's just work this through," Sydney says.

"She wants to help now," Ben reports to Jeff.

"That's uncalled for," Jeff says with the odd politeness of an academic.

"Uncalled for? Uncalled for?" Ben snaps his glass upon the kitchen table. "Then I say, call for it!" He hitches himself forward in the chair. "Julie takes off, and where is Sydney, her new best friend? Fucking my brother in the sand, that's where."

With one swift motion, Jeff upends the kitchen table onto Ben's lap. Ben scoots back, and the lip of the table hits the floor. The bottle of Maker's Mark breaks at Sydney's feet. Sydney watches as Julie's note flutters onto the puddle of bourbon. She bends over and snatches it away.

As if summoned by the commotion, Mr. Edwards opens the kitchen door. He holds it for his wife. "What. . .?"

Both parents, Sydney notices, are red-eyed, either from lack of sleep or weeping.

"Is Julie back?" Mr. Edwards asks.

The brothers, full of hate a minute earlier, swiftly become a team. Sydney suspects years of childhood practice.

"What did the police say?" Jeff asks, deflecting a question with a question.

Mr. Edwards steps into the room. "What the hell happened here?"

His wife, shoulders hunched, clutches her purse to her chest.

"I stumbled," Jeff says. "Knocked against the table. Ben, hand me that box over there, will you? I'll get this glass."

Sydney, astonished, watches as the brothers work like janitors to erase the explosion of moments before. At the counter, Sydney gently blots the note with a paper towel.

When Sydney turns, the table is upright.

"I think we should all sit down," Mr. Edwards declares, holding on to the back of a kitchen chair. Already, fear has diminished him.

There aren't enough chairs. Ben, who suddenly seems remarkably sober, leans against the island.

"Sydney," Mr. Edwards says. He is a decade older than he was at his birthday celebration. Did he wish for too much when he blew out the candles? Did he make the gods angry? Cruel fate that they should so soon upend his good fortune.

"I know this is a confusing time," he says, "but just think back. Did Julie leave the house on a regular basis? To meet someone perhaps?"

Sydney is aware of all eyes upon her. She wants, for Julie's sake, for Mr. Edwards's sake, to be as clear and as precise as possible. "I wasn't with her every minute," she begins. "There were times when I would go for a walk or to my room. I suppose it was possible. But not on a regular basis. And I never saw it happen."

"Think!" Mrs. Edwards commands.

"She is," Mr. Edwards says, putting a hand over his wife's fist on the table.

"You should have kept your eye on her," Mrs. Edwards snaps. "It's what we paid you for." Her face appears to have closed in on itself, forming a neat square with squat lines where the eyes and mouth should be.

"Mom," Ben says.

"Every minute?" Jeff asks.

"Well, I find it very difficult to believe that my daughter could have struck up a relationship with someone without Sydney's noticing."

For a moment, the accusation lies on the table--unanswered, undefended--while behind them the wood-and-brass barometer goes on recording atmospheric pressure.

"What I don't get," Mr. Edwards says, "is why Julie didn't say where she was going. Why the secrecy?"

"Because you'd have gone and gotten her," Ben says simply, "and then brought her home."

"Oh, I hate to even say this," Mr. Edwards suggests, putting his head in his hands, "but do you suppose she was forced to write the note?"

Sydney, who has the note in front of her, reads it again. Most of the letters are blurred and wavy, but knowing what it says makes it possible to decipher it.

"This is Julie," Sydney says. "I don't just mean her handwriting. This is how she would write. What she would say. Even the misspelling of my name."

"So, you knew her well enough to know how she wrote," Mrs. Edwards accuses, all but Frisbeeing the words across the table, "but you didn't know her well enough to know she was about to run away?"

The woman's anger makes her head shake.

Sydney attempts an explanation. "After that first incident, there was no reason to think--"

"What incident?" asks Mrs. Edwards, sharp-eared even in distress.

Too late, Sydney remembers that Mrs. Edwards doesn't know of Julie's drunken binge.

"One night, two weeks ago," Jeff offers quickly, "Julie came home late and she'd been drinking."

"Drinking what?"

"We're not sure."

"She was drunk, you mean?"

"Yes."

"Why wasn't I told?"

No one answers the woman.

"You all knew?" Mrs. Edwards asks, her voice rising. "Mark, you knew?"

With reluctance, Mr. Edwards looks his wife in the eye. Sydney can see how much the effort costs him. "Yes, I did," he says. "Sydney came to tell me one night when you were out." (Not quite the truth, Sydney thinks. Mrs. Edwards was lying on the sofa, reading.)