Boy Still Missing (25 page)

A long, sleek piece of metal he would use to make her bleed.

It killed me that he had gotten away with leaving her here, and I wished more than anything I could do something to nail him for my mother’s sake. Someday, I promised myself.

I put down the phone and tried to think of something else. Anything else. When I closed my eyes, I pictured Jeanny. That snowflake landing on her nose, that guitar case clunking against her back as she walked away from me. I opened the drawer and pulled out the phone book. Thought of Leon asking me if I’d gotten Jeanny’s number. I flipped to the G page. Only one Garvey listed in Holedo. On Little Street, which was just that, a little street, a few blocks from the bus station behind Peaceful Pizza. One of those downtown houses smooshed together like crowded teeth on a narrow street that no one ever drove down. My father used to call it Hippie Street, though I’d never seen any hippies the times I’d been there, so I didn’t know why.

Sophie started to cry for no reason at all, and I picked up the phone again. Dialed the Garveys’ number. This time I wasn’t following any signs or voices. I was calling Jeanny because I wanted to. And despite Sophie’s crying as I cradled her close to me in one arm, and despite the uneasiness I felt about my surroundings, there was a sliver of me that felt like any other guy my age dialing up the number of a girl he liked.

“Hello,” her mother’s sleepy voice answered. I could hear a television in the background. Kids playing.

Hang up, I thought.

Don’t hang up.

“Is Jeanny there?” I said before I could back out. Sophie’s crying was getting louder, and I was beginning to wonder about her timing.

The phone clicked, and someone answered on another extension. I heard, “Hello.”

Jeanny.

“Hi, it’s Dominick. I—”

“Hold on,” she said to me. Then to her mother, “I got it.” After the other extension clicked off, Jeanny said, “How the hell are you? It’s been ages.”

Sophie was out-and-out screaming again. My head pounded. This baby stuff was harder than I ever would have imagined. I told Jeanny to hold on, then I rocked Sophie, tried without much success to shush her one more time. “I’ve been better,” I said when I came back to the phone.

“Baby trouble?”

“Well, yes.” Tell her why you called, I thought. Here goes. “I was wondering if maybe—” I paused. What was it I was wondering exactly? I saw Jeanny as a narrow opportunity, a road as little as her Little Street that I could pass by and keep going. But I imagined myself stepping on the brake, signaling, turning the wheel, shining my lights on her house even though I knew it was selfish of me to be there. “I was wondering if you’d like to go on a date?” I blurted. That wasn’t exactly what I imagined myself asking her, but it was close. And at least the words were out of my mouth.

“I’d like that a lot,” Jeanny said. “When do you want to get together? I have a very busy social calendar.”

“How about—” I knew I should back away, pull out of her driveway and down her Little Street. But I couldn’t stop myself. I wanted her with me. My voice was a horn calling her closer. “How about now?”

The line was silent, and I waited for Jeanny to turn me down.
I just got back from New York. I have to practice my singing. I’ve got a protest to plan.
Instead she said, “Now? I happen to have an opening on my calendar, so now sounds good to me. Where do you want to meet?”

I lowered my voice and said, “Promise not tell a single soul where you’re going?”

Jeanny paused. “I promise.”

I gripped the hard black handle of the phone, the same phone my mother had used to call Marnie for help. “I’m staying at the Holedo Motel,” I whispered. “How quickly can you come?”

J
eanny and I made a plan. She would take a taxi from the bus station, get dropped off at Cumby’s, and walk to the motel so no one would suspect where she was going. Twenty minutes and she’d be here. Thirty, tops. After we hung up, I worked at calming Sophie. She didn’t want her bottle, so I pulled a pacifier from the bag. She didn’t want that either. I walked her around the room. From the front window with the blankets draped over it to the back window where I’d hung two towels over the curtains to block the light. From the closet to the tiny bathroom. But that didn’t make her happy. All she wanted to do was cry. Since I didn’t know how else to help her, I took out one of those children’s books I’d bought at the bus station and read it out loud as she shrieked and I moved her in my arms.

“‘Hansel and Gretel walked deep into the forest…’” I read, remembering those nights I had flipped through those storybooks in
Edie’s bed, marveling over the happy endings. Even though Sophie couldn’t understand the words, something about the sound of my tired voice finally quieted her down. When I reached the end of the story, I turned back to the beginning and started again. On the second go-through, when Gretel suggests they toss bread crumbs behind them so they can find their way home, I decided to switch to the articles about my mother. I read each and every one of them aloud as I lulled Sophie to sleep. I read that Peter had taken a job on a lobster boat and slipped from the deck and drowned. I read that the Burdan family had paid my mother’s doctor—a Dr. Horvath—twenty thousand dollars to get them a baby. I read that my mother had broken down in court when the judge announced the verdict. She had to be carried out of the room. Finally I stopped reading and lost myself in the pictures. None of my brother except a distant shot of him bundled in a blanket as Mrs. Burdan carried him down the steps of a fancy New York building. I stared at that image awhile, my mind oddly blank, then dug out the photo of my mother being interviewed in front of a courthouse. She looked hopelessly tired, anxious, and angry all at once. If I were a stranger opening the paper and seeing that photo, I might think she was a woman capable of snapping and going at you with her teeth, her bare hands, her words. But I knew that alarmed, lost expression on her face all too well, and it made me tear up even as I tried to bury my feelings.

Dominick, I’m just so tired
, she had told me before I went into the bath that last night in our apartment.
Things have got to get easier for me
.

And then she died.

Jeanny will be here any minute, I reminded myself before I completely lost footing on my huge mountain of emotions and went tumbling to the bottom. I had to stay strong. Stay on top of all that was happening. I tucked the news clippings into the drawer of the nightstand and gently put Sophie on the bed so I could run into the bathroom and take a piss. The second I let go of her, she popped open her eyes and looked at me. “Just give me one second, little girl,” I said, pleading with her not to cry. If she started up again, I felt like I’d begin wailing, too.

For once she didn’t, and I went into the bathroom, where the pink rectangular tiles and lime-green sink gave the room a false cheer, like Marnie wearing her too-bright colors in the middle of winter. The floor smelled of Ajax over mildew. Sterile and public. The shower curtain was covered with schools of goldfish, and I was beginning to realize that Fowler must’ve had a thing for them. Above the toilet a painting of a log cabin in the woods was screwed to the wall. Smoky blue mountains in the background, a bed of rooster-red leaves up front. I found myself staring at the scene as I took a leak, wondering if I should talk to Leon about Ed’s grandparents’ cabin after all. Get Sophie out of here and find someplace like that to hide out.

After I finished, I turned on the water and stood in front of the mirror, wondering if my mother had washed her hands in this sink when she arrived at the motel.

That’s when my breath stopped.

There, on the other side of the mirror, I imagined—or not so much as imagined but envisioned, saw—my mother staring back at me. She looked as if she had been dragged along the damp floor of the forest in that painting. Twigs and dead leaves in her snarled hair. Her skin gone gray, scraped, and bloody. Her breasts bruised blue and running with milk down her deflated stomach. Her eyes hollow and full of sadness. I wanted to look away from her but felt as suspended as one of those red cardinal’s hats above the altar in St. Patrick’s Cathedral, a balloon tied tight to a child’s wrist so it couldn’t escape. My mother’s chapped lips began to whisper something I couldn’t make sense out of.

Baby.

Maybe.

Manger.

Too.

Baby.

Maybe.

Manger.

Too.

“What?” I said out loud.

And that’s when there was a knock at the door. I heard Jeanny’s voice say “Dominick?” and my mother disappeared.

It was my face in the mirror. My hair grown past my ears and wispy in front of my forehead. My eyes wide and frightened by what I’d just seen, or thought I’d seen. I turned off the water, and the thought hit me hard that something in my mind was slipping. Perhaps all that had happened had broken my brain somehow, left me with haunted visions in the bathroom mirror and images of blood on the floor beside the bed. Or maybe what I had seen was another message, a sign from my mother that I should be following, if only I had understood.

Jeanny knocked again. “Dominick?”

I wiped my hands on a scratchy white washcloth and made my way to the door. When I opened up, Jeanny was standing there with her guitar case and a pizza. “If I’m not home by midnight, I’ll turn into a pumpkin,” she said.

“Midnight,” I repeated, not really listening because I was still seeing that image in the mirror, hearing that strange message echoing in my mind.

Baby.

Maybe.

Manger.

Too.

What good was a sign if you didn’t know what it meant?

“Are you okay?” Jeanny said. “You look horrible.”

“Yeah,” I told her, rubbing my eyes and trying to anchor myself in the conversation. “I’m just hungry. That’s all. The pizza smells good. Come inside.”

She stepped into the room and set the pizza box on the dresser, took off her coat and that poncho. Beneath all her layers she was wearing dark corduroys that flared at the legs, a crimson sweater with three snowflakes across her chest, a flurry of white dots on her flat stomach. Even though her breasts were small, I could tell by the way they filled her sweater—
loose and low—that she wasn’t wearing a bra. My mouth went dry when I glanced down at them. The word “liberated” swam to the surface of my mind, and I pictured Jeanny burning a lacy white something on a fire, holding it out on a stick like you would a marshmallow. I knew what my father would say about bra-burners, but I didn’t let myself think about it.

“I have to admit,” Jeanny said, looking around the room, “I’ve never had a date quite like this one.”

Distracted by her breasts and that image of my mother, I said, “I have.”

Jeanny looked at me a little funny, and I realized my mistake.

“I mean, I haven’t. Either.” I shook my head and gave myself a mental kick. It had been so easy to talk with her on the bus, but now I felt tongue-tied, which left me thinking that this get-together had been a bad idea. Maybe we had clicked on the bus, but I should have left it at that. Having Jeanny in the motel room filled me with nervousness. She kept glancing around in a way that left me unsettled. It occurred to me once more that she must have known about what had happened to my mother in this room. But if that was true, would she have come?

“So how is our little angel?” Jeanny asked, looking down at the baby.

“I think she’s happy to see you,” I said, trying to smooth things out again, get rid of all that tension. “Almost as happy as me.”

Jeanny was about to say something, but Sophie interrupted. She must have been bored on the bed alone, because she started making a commotion. Jeanny wasted no time scooping her up in her arms. “It’s okay, little pea,” she said. “You’re having a bad day. I know.”

I carried the pizza over to the bed where she had plopped down with the baby in her arms. As she coddled Sophie, I tried to think of something to talk about. But my brain felt muddled. I couldn’t come up with a single thing to say. The room grew unnaturally quiet, and my mind drifted back to my mother in the mirror. I pushed the image away again and remembered Jeanny resting her head on my shoulder that afternoon. I found myself wishing we could just curl up together and go to sleep. But that wasn’t exactly an option. I glanced down at a fat-faced car
toon chef who kissed the tips of his fingers on the lid of the pizza box. Over his puffy white hat were the words “You’ve tried the rest. Now try the best.” How original, I thought and flipped the top open. The pizza: half plain, half covered with thick slices of pepperoni, lumpy sausages and meatballs, fatty bacon. I looked at Jeanny, wondering about her vegetarian diet and all the farm animals we were about to devour.

“That side’s for you,” she said, smirking. “Carnivore.”

“I said I eat meat. I didn’t say I was a caveman.”

Jeanny laughed, and I felt like maybe things were beginning to ease up again. “Okay. I guess I got a little carried away. But I was thinking that I’d have one or two of those slices myself. I just don’t think I can do the vegetarian thing anymore.”

“Really?” I said.

“Really.”

“Welcome back to the barbaric world of meat eaters,” I told her, and that’s when I did something to get rid of any stiffness once and for all. I leaned forward and kissed her. It was a short, simple kiss.

One. Two. Three.

Her lips were tender and the slightest bit moist. In my head I heard Edie’s voice saying,
Let me give you a real kiss. It will be my thank-you present to you.

Thank you for helping me rob your mother.

Thank you for letting me ruin your life.

I gave Jeanny one more softer, longer kiss and remembered the way Edie had pressed her mouth hard to mine. The way my fingers had brushed against her belly, feeling her baby—Sophie—inside her. It all seemed so strange and off-color; thinking back, I wondered how I hadn’t known Edie was up to no good the entire time.

When our lips parted, I said, “Let me get something to wash down the feast.” Instantly I realized that getting water for us entailed going into the bathroom and standing in front of that mirror. Since I had already opened my mouth, I forced my legs to move. I went into the bathroom and pulled the sanitary paper off the two glasses on the small sink.
Instead of filling them up right away, I stared at the picture of that cabin, putting off the moment of facing the mirror. Whoever had painted the thing played with the soft color that came from the cabin windows. Instead of yellow like you might expect, the light from inside cast a purple glow. It seemed warm in there. Safe. I pictured the dark windows of this room from outside, all covered up so they didn’t cast any light at all.

“Hurry up,” Jeanny called. “The pizza’s going from cold to colder fast.”

I cranked on the water and slowly turned my eyes up toward the mirror. Once again my breath stopped. I felt my heart thud. She was there, my mother, looking back at me again from the other side. This time her neck seemed loose, wobbly, like Sophie’s. Her hair hung down in front of her face as brittle as dried seaweed. And her message had changed. Or maybe I had misunderstood earlier. She whispered,

Baby.

Maybe.

Stranger.

Too.

Baby.

Maybe.

Stranger.

Too.

“What are you saying?” I asked.

“I said the pizza is getting cold,” Jeanny called to me.

And with that the image of my mother vanished once again.

It was me in the mirror. The water poured over the edge of the second glass, and I turned off the faucet.

Get a grip, I said to myself. Get a fucking grip.

Jeanny was with me, and I didn’t want to scare her away.

“Did you drown in the toilet?” she called.

I took a breath and dipped the tips of my fingers in one of the water glasses and splashed my face. Baptism.

“Two glasses of our best champagne,” I said, carrying the water back
to the bed and trying to shake the image of my mother’s mouth whispering that strange message. The horror of her harmed and helpless body.

“Why, thank you, sir,” Jeanny said, taking a glass with her free hand and setting it on the nightstand. Sophie was fast asleep in the crook of her arm.

What little appetite I had finally worked up had been stolen by that vision in the mirror, but I forced myself to eat anyway. I picked off the bacon because it was overkill even for me, pushed my mother’s gum behind one of my back teeth, and ate.

“You’re done already?” Jeanny said when I called it quits halfway through my second piece.

“I feel bad for the farm animals,” I said, kidding her.

Jeanny finished eating, too—one plain slice, one meat—and looked down at Sophie. “Hello, little cutie,” she whispered in a baby voice.

“When can she start eating real food?” I asked, still trying to forget my mother in the mirror, to land myself in the reality of this room with Jeanny and Sophie.

“Don’t hold your breath,” she said. “It’ll be a while.”

I touched Sophie’s shrunken hand, which she kept permanently closed in a loose fist. I wished she could say something, wished she could tell me what she thought about our adventure. If she liked being with her big brother and his new friend…girlfriend. “How long till she can talk?” I asked.