Boy Still Missing (27 page)

“As a matter of fact I do,” she said. “It’s like my best friend.”

I asked her if she was going to play for me, and she said she already performed once for me on the bus that day. “Check with me another time. But I thought I could put a pillow in here and use my case as a little crib for Sophie. We’ll keep it by the heater so she stays warm.”

This is what I thought: If Sophie falls asleep, Jeanny might leave her guitar case behind and come back for it tomorrow. Or maybe she would just have to stay.

“You’re the expert. Whatever you think is best.” I waited for her to pick up the line of questioning she had begun before Leon and Ed arrived, but she kept quiet about it. We made the miniature crib for Sophie with towels from the room next door for blankets, then put her down to sleep. When Sophie stopped fussing, Jeanny went into the bathroom. I thought of her looking into that mirror and wondered how she would react if she saw what I had seen in there, heard that strange message.

A moment later she emerged holding her hair behind her head in a way that made me want to kiss her again, to touch her skin. She sat next to me on the bed, both our heads propped on pillows against the headboard. I stared at the whiteness of the ceiling and counted the smudges up there in an effort to keep my mind calm.

“So are you ready to tell me about Sophie?” Jeanny asked finally.

Ready as I’d ever be. I took a breath and began at the beginning. “Last summer my mother and I were out looking for my father. When we couldn’t find him in any of the usual bars where he drinks on Hanover Street, I convinced my mother to drive to his girlfriend’s house on Barn Hill…”

Jeanny listened quietly as I spoke. Unlike Leon, she stopped me from time to time to ask questions. “Did you have any clue that your mother was pregnant?…Did Edie ever mention moving to New York?…Do you think your father really hit her?”

No.

No.

I don’t know.

I answered each question as best I could. And when I was done with the story, I found myself crying. Cursing Roget, who was out there walking around without any blame for leaving my mother to die. I wanted to get him, I told Jeanny, but I didn’t know how. And the harder I tried to
bury my feelings, the way I promised myself, the more it all came gushing out. It killed me to break down in front of her like that. To let her see me so messed up and weak.

Jeanny didn’t seem to mind, though. She moved my head to her shoulder and stroked my hair. “It’s okay,” she said, the same way she had to Sophie. “It’s going to be okay.”

We stayed like that awhile. Her comforting me as I listened to the steady thump of her heart beneath her sweater. The room grew quiet, except for the occasional whiz of a car driving by outside. As tired and sad as I was, after a long time of lying close to her like that, I felt myself get hard in my pants. It wasn’t the usual quick surge. This was something that came more slowly, but stronger, as we lay there. It seemed funny to be turned on at the same time as all those other emotions. But with my head so near the softness of her breasts, it was impossible not to be. I told myself to hold back, though. It wasn’t right in this room. So I simply let myself float in the feeling of being next to her.

Her hand stroking my hair, touching my forehead.

My arm draped over her stomach, absently playing with the cuff of her sweater.

Slowly my mind began to drift off to sleep, until Jeanny said quietly into the dim light of the room, “Dominick, you have to give Sophie back.”

I jerked my head up and looked at her, suddenly awake again. “What are you talking about? I thought you’d be on my side.”

“I am,” she said, keeping quiet so as not to wake Sophie. “But, Dominick, that baby is barely a month old. She needs her mother. She needs to go to the doctor. She needs a lot of things you can’t give her.”

“So I’ll find a doctor. I’ll figure it all out.”

Jeanny sat up, crossed her arms in front of her, covering those snowflakes over her breasts.

“Didn’t you understand what I just said? Edie used me. She tricked me into stealing that money. My poor mother was conned into giving away her first kid. Then I betrayed her. And her third baby…well, we
know what happened. Besides, Edie is living in some drug den. Sophie deserves better.”

“Like living in an abandoned motel. Now, there’s a privileged life. From here she’ll go off to boarding school, right?”

“This is just temporary,” I told her, imagining that same purple glow from the windows of Ed’s grandparents’ cabin in the woods, wondering for the first time if somehow I could get money from the Burdan family and use it to start a new life. “I have plans for us. We’re making a pit stop here, then splitting.”

Jeanny’s face changed. Flicker of surprise. Flicker of disappointment. She lowered her voice still more and asked, “Where are you going?”

“I can’t tell you. Because you can’t come.”

“So you’re going to ride off into the sunset with an infant in your arms,” she huffed. “That’s really going to solve your problems.”

“I’m not saying I have it all figured out. But I know what I have to do. And that’s make things up to my mother. Save this kid from Edie.”

Jeanny stared over at the little dark lump that was Sophie in the guitar case–turned–bassinet. A truck zoomed by on the street, and when it was quiet again, I could hear the baby softly breathing. Maybe I shouldn’t have told Jeanny everything. It was a lot for anyone to make sense of. What had I expected?

I looked at my watch. Quarter to twelve. Fifteen minutes and Jeanny would be a pumpkin. I thought of Hansel and Gretel again, dropping bread crumbs behind them. A dark, floppy-winged bird scooping that food up in its beak as they disappeared behind the trees. “Look, I’m sorry for involving you,” I told Jeanny as we both watched Sophie. I hated her for not taking my side, but the truth was I needed her. Just the thought of being in this room without her made me lonely. I swallowed and said, “If you want to leave now and just forget about me, I understand. And I probably shouldn’t be pulling you into this, but if you wanted to stay here with me tonight, I…I would like that.”

Jeanny seemed to actually be turning the possibility over in her
mind, not taking her eyes off Sophie. I wondered if she saw this whole situation as another crusade, something for her to fight for. I imagined the picket signs taking shape in her mind:
RETURN SOPHIE TO HER RIGHTFUL OWNER…. BRING THE BABY HOME…
She watched Sophie for a long while, then looked at me finally and said, “I’ll stay only if you promise me this: that you’ll think about giving her back. Just think about it. That’s all.”

“What about your mother?” I asked.

Jeanny laughed the way she had on the bus when she told me about her mom. Like there was something funny in the sad things she said about her. Something I didn’t understand. “Maybe my absence will get her attention. She’ll realize I didn’t die when my father did. Besides, it’s winter break. I don’t have classes to go to. But will you think about what I said?”

I put my arm around her and pulled her close to me. Felt myself get hard again. She smelled like the motel soap she had used to wash her hands. Up close I could see that scar beneath her chin again. My mind filled one more time with the image of her as a little girl hurt on the playground. What she was saying made sense, the same way my uncle had made sense to my mother when he showed up in New Mexico. But I knew that the rational choice wasn’t always the right choice. Look at the way it had wrecked my mother. If I gave this baby back, I would regret it the way she did, for the rest of my life. So no, I wouldn’t think about it. “You have to understand. My mother’s death was all my fault,” I said, trying to make her see things my way.

“It’s not your fault,” Jeanny said.

“Then whose is it?” I asked her.

“Do you really want an answer to that?”

“Yes,” I told her. “I do.”

“I think it’s the world’s fault.”

“The world’s fault?” I said, feeling once more like she hadn’t understood what I’d just told her at all. “That makes a lot of sense.”

“Listen to me. It’s the world’s fault because of the way it’s set up for
women. Your mother didn’t have any choices, so she got stuck in a lot of bad situations. If she could have just left your father and gotten a decent job, she might have had a chance. But it’s practically impossible for a woman with a kid to survive on her own. As much as my mother drives me crazy, I see how hard it is for her without my dad. Women aren’t paid the same. Women aren’t given the same chances. And if abortion was legal, then your mother could have just gone to a doctor or a clinic and gotten a safe one on demand.”

“But what about the baby?” I asked her, remembering that PBS priest.

“You mean, ‘What about the fetus?’ I’m not going to claim to know when life starts. But I know when it ends. It ends when a woman like your mother dies because she can’t decide for herself.”

I didn’t say anything, because Jeanny seemed pretty worked up. I thought of all her picket signs and bumper stickers. Her war on the world. I replayed that moment when my mother and I first laid eyes on Jeanny at the policemen’s auction. What was it my mother had said?
I like a woman who fights for what she believes in.
Something like that.

“Don’t get so quiet,” Jeanny said to me. “Guys always do when I talk about the world. I mean, don’t you read the papers? Don’t you think these things, too?”

I thought of the way I had started to read the paper when I got to know Edie. All those headlines about faraway places. The world seemed so immense and unpredictable. Too much to know. Too much to think about.

“I do think about it,” I told her. “I just don’t have all the answers.”

“Neither do I,” she said and turned to face me again.

“Just ninety-nine percent of them, right?”

“Ninety-nine point nine,” she said and laughed just enough to soften things between us.

I didn’t know what else to say, so I leaned over and put my lips to hers. We moved our mouths together for a long while. This time I thought of Edie telling me,
I can spare one kiss. And it will make you feel in control the next time you’re test-driving a new girlfriend.
I had thought
the day would never come, that Edie was the only woman I would feel this way about. But Jeanny’s mouth was smaller, more tender, less pushy to kiss. My feelings for her were already the same but different.

When we separated, I felt around my mouth with my tongue for my mother’s gum. I had forgotten to push it aside the way I did when I ate.

“What’s wrong?” Jeanny said.

“My gum. It’s gone.”

She reached into her mouth and pulled out the piece, grinning. “Is this what you’re looking for?”

“Yes,” I told her. She had no idea what that stale, overchewed piece of gum meant to me.

“What flavor is this? Week-old rubber?”

“I’ve been chewing it for a while,” I said, because there was no way to explain.

“Well, let’s put it on the nightstand,” she said and stuck it to my empty water glass. “Maybe next time your dealer friend stops by, you can ask him to buy you some more.”

My mouth felt barren and empty without it, like I had lost a tooth or maybe my tongue. I wasn’t getting rid of it, I told myself. But I decided to leave the piece where Jeanny had put it for the time being. I wrapped my arms around her and held her close and tight to me. We were both so tired from the day that we stayed quiet and were well on our way to sleep, holding each other on top of the covers. I found myself imagining all the families who must have stayed in the rooms of this motel in the summertime. Children unable to sleep, too charged with excitement thinking of the next day at the racetrack, the bright blur of stock cars zooming round and round their minds.

“So you never gave me an answer,” Jeanny whispered in my ear as I drifted off to sleep thinking of those cars that I knew were made from junks. Gutted, then re-created into something stronger in their afterlife.

“About what?” I asked.

“About whether or not you’ll consider giving Sophie back. Will you at least promise that you’ll think about it?”

“Yes,” I told her, as my mind stepped down a dark path in the forest. Jeanny’s hand in mine as we made our way between the white birch trees that looked like bones. That dark, big-winged fairy-tale bird not far behind pecking away at our trail. “I will think about it.”

“Promise me?” she whispered.

“I promise you.” I meant it, then fell asleep.

T
hat first night in the motel I dreamed about blood on the floor. Not the stain washed away after my mother’s death but a glowing red pool that came from a second accident. One that hadn’t yet happened. The red was radiant, phosphorescent, like the juice from those cherries that used to stain my hands and sweatshirt pockets when I stole them from the bars where I found my father. The shape began as a round cardinal’s hat, as big or as little as Sophie herself. Soon it spread and transformed into a shining scarlet light that shimmered on the ceiling and coated the walls like the paint in my uncle’s living room.

When I woke, it was still dark, and Sophie was crying. Jeanny wasn’t moving, so I decided to get out of bed and figure out what was wrong with Sophie on my own. I remembered what Jeanny had said about her brothers’ limited demands when they were this new to the world. Bottle. Diaper. Crib. Since I wasn’t completely confident about tackling a dia
per problem if there was one, I carefully picked up Sophie and tried giving her a bottle. Thankfully, that seemed to be the answer. She started sucking, and I pushed back the blankets and curtain from the window and stared outside. A branch had fallen in the spot where Roget usually parked his car to snag speeders. I watched the wind blow its crooked old woman’s hand shape around until Sophie began to fuss again.

“What’s the matter, little alien?” I whispered. “There’s no need to cry. I’ve got you now.”

With some coaxing she took to her bottle once more and quieted down. I felt like maybe I was starting to get the hang of this baby thing. If only I could get used to how delicate she felt in my arms. Every time I held her, my body went stiff with worry that I’d move her the wrong way and hurt her somehow. I knew that Jeanny had told me babies were more durable than they looked, but it was a hard idea to wrap my mind around when Sophie seemed like nothing more than a wrinkly lump of flesh. In my mind the heart that beat beneath her chest seemed too tiny. Her lungs couldn’t have been any bigger than a kitten’s. I nestled my nose into her soft yellow outfit. Breathed in her sweet, simple smell.

New skin, bones, and breath.

Saliva and tears.

Formula and powder.

When I looked into the dark of the room, Jeanny’s eyes were open, watching me. I knew what she must have been thinking:
You have to give that baby back.
And maybe, I admitted to myself for the first time, maybe she was right. After all, I thought as I held Sophie close to me, what could I possibly do now that I had her? I couldn’t take care of her, raise her, be a parent to her. But every time I thought of returning Sophie to Edie’s arms, my mind burned.

I just couldn’t bear to do it.

There had to be another option. Something I wasn’t considering.

“Baby-sitting lesson number three,” Jeanny said, yawning. “Infants never sleep through the night.”

I went to her and rested Sophie in the crook of my arm as I sat back
on the bed. She was really going at it with her bottle now, and the sucking sound made me think of Marnie’s cat, Milky, the way she used to make the same noise as she lapped her milk. That cat would still be alive if Marnie hadn’t been so stubborn about setting the thing free even though she lived close enough to the highway that freedom was a death sentence.

“Did you get any sleep?” Jeanny asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “But I had a weird dream.”

“About what?”

I watched Jeanny’s eyes as she stared up at the blank vastness of the ceiling. It looked like outer space up there. Heaven or hell. A car passed, creating a grid of lights above us that changed shape and faded to black once more. I made a mental note to pull the blankets and curtain back over the window before falling asleep again. “There was more blood in this room,” I told her. “A big spot on the floor at first. Then it washed over the whole place. Shimmering, sort of.”

Jeanny put her hand on my shoulder. I don’t think she knew what to say.

We were quiet a moment. I listened to Sophie making that Milky sound with her bottle as I tried to shake the red from that dream, that vision of my mother in the mirror.

Baby.

Maybe.

Stranger.

Too.

“Do you believe in signs?” I asked.

“What do you mean?” Jeanny said, rolling over onto her side to face me.

“Like there are things in your life—events or omens—that are meant to guide you to a certain place?”

“You mean, do I think things happen for a reason?”

That wasn’t exactly what I was asking, but I told her yes anyway. As I waited for an answer, I watched Sophie breathing. Her body was a loaf of bread rising in the heat of an oven, falling when she exhaled.

“I guess I think some things are meant to be. Fate,” Jeanny said after a while. “And other stuff is just up to chance. Who knows the reason behind it?”

My mind scrambled over the last month of my life—that
FOR SALE
sign pitched in Edie’s front yard, those pregnant women walking into the hospital, that
Newsweek
reporter calling. All along I had believed that it was my mother guiding me. That I was meant to follow those signs. But something made me wonder if it was only me wanting to see it that way. After all, if she were going to lead me, wouldn’t my mother make certain I understood her message in the mirror?

I found myself guessing how Jeanny would categorize all the things that had happened to me in the past year. Fate or chance?

Then I thought of Jeanny sitting next to me on the bus, and I asked, “Do you think when we met today, it was meant to be?”

Jeanny was quiet for a moment.

“Should I take that as a no?” I said, feeling stupid for asking.

She laughed. “It’s not a no. I just have to think about it some more. I’m not sure yet.”

Neither was I, I supposed. But I hoped that the answer might be yes for both of us down the road. I didn’t say anything more about it though. Instead I kept quiet and rubbed my hand against Sophie’s satiny baby skin. “My mother believed in signs,” I said into the darkness after a while. “She told me once that if I watched carefully, life would always lay signs right out in front of me, telling me which way to go. And now that’s she’s gone, I keep looking for them.”

“I used to think like that after my dad died. I thought that if he really loved me, he would find a way to contact me from the dead. I’d think, okay, if you can hear me, make the sun come out from behind that cloud, or make the phone ring. But it never happened.”

More than ever I wanted to tell her about what I had seen in the mirror but felt afraid she’d think I was losing my mind. Hell, even I was afraid I was losing my mind. “Does that mean you don’t look for him anymore?” I asked.

Jeanny stretched her arm over the side of the bed and grabbed her bag. She pulled out that silver cigarette case she had snapped open and closed on the bus. “See the letters?” she said, pointing to an engraved
M
and
G
on the top.

I nodded.

She told me that they were her father’s initials. Michael Garvey. He used to keep his guitar picks in the case along with his cigarettes. Now Jeanny took it with her wherever she went as a reminder of him. “I guess I see him in the things he left behind and the things he taught me instead of looking for him in the clouds. Doing that helps me to let him go.”

Sophie finished her bottle, and I got up to put her back in the makeshift crib. I thought of my mother, tried to imagine letting her go, but she felt too close. I pictured her spirit hovering above me like one of those galeros. What would it take for her to disintegrate and drop to the floor so she could be released from this world? I supposed I had thought it would happen when I took Sophie, when I proved somehow to my mother that I had made a mistake by stealing that money. But I wasn’t so sure anymore. Maybe she would hang over me forever, an invisible weight on my back, like the angry eyes of those kids who had followed me on the street in Hell’s Kitchen.

“Wait,” Jeanny said as I was about to lay Sophie down. She had put her father’s silver case on the nightstand next to the glass with my mother’s gum. “You need to burp her first.”

Jeanny told me what to do, and I gently bounced Sophie until she let loose a bunch of baby burps, which made us both laugh. She spit up a blob of creamy goo on my shoulder, too. Jeanny got up and grabbed a towel, cleaned us both up.

“There,” she said. “My two babies are as good as new.”

I put Sophie in her guitar-case crib and got back in bed next to Jeanny, wrapped my arms around her. Up close her sweater smelled faintly of that perfume she’d sprayed on back on the bus. Beneath that I breathed in something entirely different. It was the way I imagined her house might smell. Like hand-washed clothes and unvacuumed rugs. Meals stewed up in oversize pots to feed so many mouths for the week. I
wondered if Jeanny sprayed that perfume on herself to cover the smell of her house. To help her become something other than a girl from Little Street. Thinking of that made me hold her closer. And when my mind filled with the image of Jeanny staring up at a cloudy sky, waiting for her father to make the sun come out, it broke my heart, because I knew how she felt. “What was your dad like?” I asked her.

“What do you want to know?”

“Anything,” I said. “Just tell me about him.”

“Well, he was a great musician. You name the instrument and he could play it. He loved any kind of art. Music. Painting. Dance. And he loved to talk about the world. My father always told me to speak up for what I believe in. A message I know most girls don’t hear. He was pretty liberal like that. I guess you would call him a hippie.”

I thought of my dad dubbing her street Hippie Street and wondered if he had ever come across Mr. Garvey around town. “I know your mom changed, but did anything go back to normal, or even close to normal, for you after he was gone?”

“Hardly,” she said.

“What do you mean?” I wanted to know because I cared. I needed to know because I couldn’t imagine my life ever going back to normal again.

“Well, for one thing, he wouldn’t have put me in St. Bartholomew.”

Not the answer I expected, though I wasn’t sure exactly what I had in mind. “So why do you go there?”

“After a few years in elementary my parents decided to home-school me. But when my father died, it was too much for my mother to handle, so she wanted to put me in school again. Only the superintendent was not very happy about the”—she held up her index and middle fingers to put the next words in quotes—“hippie-dippy idea of home-schooling. The guy wanted me to stay back a few grades. So that’s how I wound up at St. Bartholomew. I took a test, and they actually put me ahead one grade. My mother told me to ignore the religious stuff and absorb all the rest. Unfortunately, it’s mostly religion. But it adds fuel to my fire, and it beats staying back.”

“At least the uniform looks cute on you,” I said, remembering that
day on the bus when she had stepped on board wearing that wool sweater and plaid skirt. Transforming in the bathroom like Superman in a phone booth.

Jeanny groaned. “Oh, I hate that ridiculous outfit!”

“Really,” I said, teasing her. “It suits you perfectly.”

She seemed absolutely tortured by the thought of it. “If you ever say that again, I’ll have no choice but to tape your mouth shut.”

“It suits you perfectly,” I repeated, deadpan.

“Stop it!” she said and grabbed a pillow, shoved it my face.

“Okay! Okay! I’m kidding!” I pushed her off. Poked a finger in her ribs. “We’ve got to loosen you up, Miss Garvey. You’re so serious.”

“Very funny,” she said, rolling her eyes.

Something about her smile made me lean forward and kiss her again. Both our mouths opened to each other right away, and I slipped my tongue between her lips. Her breath was wet and warm, and I could feel my body getting hot as we moved together.

My chest against her chest.

Our legs touching on the bed.

I ran my fingers through her smooth hair. We kissed harder, and unable to hold myself back, I moved my hand to the front of her sweater. Slid my palm to her breast. She felt bigger there than I had imagined. I brushed her nipple with my fingers. When I pulled her closer, she stopped me.

“Wait.”

I lifted my hands an inch or two from her body like someone caught in the middle of a crime. “Sorry.”

“No. It’s okay. But…it’s just that…I’m, you know, I haven’t—”

“Me neither,” I confessed, wondering instantly if that was the type of thing I should admit. God knew Leon never would have.

“I like you, Dominick,” Jeanny said. “But we shouldn’t go too fast.”

“I agree. I mean, whatever you want to do is all right.”

“We can kiss some more. Okay?”

“Sounds perfect,” I said and leaned my lips into hers again, because
the truth was I didn’t know if I was ready for more. As excited as I got being next to her, it still felt strange to think about sex in this room where my mother had died. It still felt strange to think of sex as an actuality at all.

We didn’t go back to sleep completely that night. We kissed and talked for hours. From time to time Sophie woke, and we took care of her, got her settled back in. Then we spoke in whispers and made out some more. I told Jeanny that I remembered seeing her that morning at the auction last year, and she said she remembered seeing me there, too. I told her about my mother’s plans to buy the station. I told her about that crazy cleaning lady at my uncle’s, and we laughed. We laughed even more about our bus driver, Claude. We talked about Edie again. The way I used to feel Sophie move inside her belly as we lay on her bed. The shock I felt when I overheard that phone call. And Jeanny told me all about her mother and brothers, how her mom stayed numb with a steady supply of prescription pills, how sad they all felt since their father died. She told me that when he was alive he used to take her—just her—on the bus to New York to see shows or go to the museums. She missed those times more than anything. And when we were done talking, we put our arms around each other. Because I had forgotten to close the curtain, the sun soon streamed in through the window, bathing us in light.