Harmless (9 page)

“You’ll always want me,” she said as she got to her feet. She pulled up her pants. “We can’t do this again.”

“I won’t tell anyone about this.”

“Damn right you won’t.”

He understood: she had more to lose. A marriage, a home,
an intact family. The gap between them yawned open again, and as they stepped out of the clearing and into the pasture, she walked two steps ahead of him. He felt lightheaded and shaky, and when he looked back at the forest he couldn’t find the opening, as if even the trees that had parted for them were denying what had happened.

Eventually, they met up with the others on their way back to the farm.

“It’s a good night to be a coyote,” Julian said.

“Not so good for the roadrunner,” Mike said.

Liz giggled, stoned clean of real-estate figures, and they joked about old times as the last light in the sky faded, old friends guided by visions of warm beds and plates of toast. The farmhouse appeared warm and solid, its lit windows a beacon in the twilight. They were almost at the white board fence when Alex stepped out from the shadows behind the shed.

“Did Rebecca and Franny go with you?” He leaned against the creaking fence, his face bloated, eyes puffy. “Did they?”

“Of course not,” Jane said.

“Did you see them on your way back?” His limbs were moving in rigid bursts, like a ghost forced back into its old body, wobbly at the controls.

“They’re in the house.”

“No, they’re not,” he said. “I’ve looked.” He grabbed the top fence board. “If they didn’t go with you, then the girls are missing.”

I
t was that sensation of tripping over a root in a dream and jerking awake in bed, of falling out of one world and landing roughly in this one.

The girls were not missing—why tempt fate by saying it?

Joseph climbed over the fence, his feet hitting the yard with too much force, as though his centre of gravity had dropped to his knees. Everyone had gathered around Alex, their bodies massing in the dim blue light, a sinister bulk of summer clothing and bare arms and faces.

“They’re not missing,” Joseph said. Hiding, maybe, or walking in the fields, taking in the drama of the sunset, the coyote howls affirming their rebellious mood. Two kids pushing the boundaries, hoping to piss off their parents. The stuff of sitcoms. “Just out of sight,” he clarified.

No one was listening to him. The conversation was already topped by sharp peaks.

“What do you mean they’re
missing
?”

“You didn’t see them leave?”

“They’re not
here
,” Alex kept saying.

“For God’s sake, where would they go?” Jane swept her arms wide to dramatize the lack of destinations for two teenagers: fields, a rural highway, thousands of acres of dark forest.

“I’ve searched everywhere. I’d know if they were here.”

Typical Alex: ambushing them with bad news, then grabbing the role of the strong, rational type—shoulders squared, arms folded. But his face betrayed him. It looked raw, as if stripped of at least two layers of skin.

“Listen, Alex,” Liz said. “It must have freaked you out when you couldn’t find the girls.”

“The first half-hour of searching didn’t freak me out, but the
next
half-hour did.”

“We weren’t gone
that
long,” Joseph said, startled by the shrill tone in his own voice. “Half an hour, tops.”

“Oh, were you keeping time?”

Joseph saw it in Alex’s eyes: the urge to punch him so hard he’d be drinking through a straw for weeks. What was happening here? He turned to face the pasture behind the farmhouse. It would take ten minutes to reach the second pasture, another ten to get back. Factor in hand-holding time and stopping-to-kiss-and-chase-the-vapours-of-youth time—and he and Jane had gone much further. He reached for his BlackBerry to check the time.
Shit!
It was sitting on his kitchen counter. Never mind that Franny hadn’t texted him in months—she might have tonight.

He scanned the fading landscape, terrified by the lack of visual detail—he could have been looking at the pelt of a giant animal.

“Did you check the fields?” Liz asked.

“Not
every
field.”

“The Johnston brothers’ place alone is two hundred acres,” Jane said.

Never mind the Johnston brothers. They were standing on a two-acre plot, small by local standards, but expansive enough to hide two girls.

“You were here the whole time,” Liz reminded Alex.

He stepped closer to her. “Yes. I was the one person who
was
here, with the kids.”

“We went for a fucking walk!”

Alex nodded, as if she’d handed him all the rope he needed. “Listen,” he said, addressing the group, “I wasn’t in the house every second. I sat by the fire. I went for a walk to clear my head.”

He actually lifted a finger to enumerate each point, leaving out the most important detail, that he’d been pissed off at their nostalgia and their dancing in the living room. He’d even tried to guilt Jane into staying behind.

“After my walk, I came back and sat by the fire. The girls could have left while I was gone, or they could’ve slipped away while we smoked that fucking joint. We would have missed a parade going by.”

“Don’t blame the dope,” Julian said, defending his departed friend.

“What was in it?”

“Just good Thai hash, brother.”

“Do you want a fucking ingredients list?” Joseph said.

“Are we really having this conversation?” Jane almost shouted the question. “What about the basement?”

Alex hesitated—he hadn’t searched the basement. Why would he? The girls were too old to play haunted house in a damp basement. “They’re not in the house.”

“The corridor beside the house?”

Already the pout, like Alex wasn’t getting enough credit for his hard work.
What a prick
, Joseph thought.

They were getting ahead of themselves. The girls had been at home when the adults left for their sunset walk—Joseph
saw
them by the fire. No, that was earlier, before the Bangkok joint. Wasn’t it? The dope had reassembled the evening’s timeline into a collage. He remembered going behind the shed to smoke the Bangkok joint, then Alex boycotting the group walk to prove a point now lost to antiquity. While they were gone, the girls went missing. Where would they go? Where
could
they go?

“Hold on,” Jane said. “Did you look for a note?”

“Of course I did! Twice. The kitchen’s a fucking
mess
.”

“What about the dogs?”

“Napping on the back deck.”

“The boys!” Mike said, as if he expected a gold star. “They might have seen them.”

“They’re in bed.”

“You didn’t ask them!” Jane was furious. Nothing bad could happen in sight of those fierce eyes.

Mike put his hands up. “I’ll go check on the boys.”

Joseph watched as Mike faded into the darkness beside the house. He must have reached the front door by now. In three seconds he’d turn the doorknob, step into the sunroom and go through to the kitchen.

If the girls had just gotten home, Mike would see them
now
.

In thirty seconds he’d appear with them at the side of the house.

Mike and the girls would appear
now
.

One, two, three—
now
.

The door might be stuck.

He will see Franny
now
!

Why was it taking so long? Liz and Julian and Amber kept glancing at him. He knew what they were thinking:
Poor Joseph, goes for a walk and comes back to find his only child missing. Christ, what he must be going through
.

When Mike finally appeared at the side of the house, he was alone. The crickets sounded like a giant rusty wheel grinding against its axis. The sunset had dimmed to purple twilight and the first stars were out, shimmering behind the fading heat haze. What was Joseph missing here?

“They didn’t see the girls leave,” Mike said, his words pushing Jane back on her feet and out of the circle. He turned to Alex. “Sean said you yelled at them.”

“I did. I told them to stop playing video games and go to bed.”

“He was very upset.”

“He’s not made of fucking glass! You’d know that if you ever fucking parented him.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Julian said, stepping quickly between the two men.

Joseph saw the pinched ends of a smirk disappear inside Alex’s mouth like two worms retracting into their holes. He must be sure the girls would be home soon, and was compiling a list of several failed role models to blame their transgression on, Joseph’s name near the top.

Jane didn’t share Alex’s confidence. Her eyes made a quick circuit—forest, pasture, road, farmyard—before returning to stare at her feet, as though a pack of worst-case scenarios were running her to ground. The other adults stared out of closed faces—
their
children weren’t missing. Julian and Amber didn’t even have a child, though it would have been beautiful—tall, blond, with high cheekbones. Julian caught Joseph staring and nodded as if to say,
Don’t worry, brother, we’ll find them
. Liz seemed to be backing away without actually moving her legs, retreating into a safe space closed to the afflicted parents. Everyone but Jane was looking at him. Was he mumbling? Liz started doing something with her hands, making a box in the air—
open it!

He cleared his throat and paused, impersonating a man capable of choosing his words carefully. “We have to establish a few probabilities.” He sounded like a stoned teenager playing straight for his parents. Alex crossed his arms, resisting the absolute bullshit about to exit Joseph’s mouth. The group had formed a circle around Joseph when he wasn’t looking.
Wasn’t Looking
—he finally had the title for his autobiography. “We were gone for about forty-five minutes.”

“It was longer.” Alex’s voice was sharp enough to carve the words on Joseph’s forehead.

“We’re all missing something important here. The girls can’t …” Joseph paced out of the circle and back in again. He was forgetting something. Jane and Rebecca had crossed swords by the fire, a tussle that ended with Jane calling Rebecca a bitch. She didn’t say, “You’re
acting
like a bitch,”
as the parenting manuals recommended—Jane had ascribed
bitch essence
to her daughter. Or was it
witch
essence? Whatever Jane called her, Rebecca had stormed off, playing the adversarial role handed to her. Kids were like that these days. Can’t go two minutes without a cue, usually electronic, to tell them who they are.

“Franny has a cell phone!” Joseph said. “She has a fucking
cell
phone. It gets service when she’s near the highway. She was texting this afternoon.”
God love Franny for texting!
“I’ll phone her. She knows to keep her ringer on.”

“What if she doesn’t want to be found?” Alex said.

It’s your daughter who doesn’t want to be found
, he almost said.
She’s sick of your life lessons and truth telling
.

“I’ll leave a message if she doesn’t answer. I’ll convey the seriousness of the situation.” He forced out a public laugh, a honking sound he heard in the air to his left, as if a lackey was positioned there to appreciate his jokes.

“Good plan, brother,” Julian said. “We’ll check the yard while you’re gone.” He’d know the best hiding places.

They were one phone call away from relief.

Franny, where are you?

Just out for a walk. Where are
you?

It made sense: Franny and Rebecca couldn’t find their parents, and minimum effort expended, they went for a walk. He could already hear himself joking with Jane and Liz, Jane doing Rebecca’s voice: “We went for a walk,
Mom
, like you’re always nagging me to do.” He forced a smile, and then he was scissor-stepping the last ten steps to the house,
his knees wobbly from the adrenaline surges electrifying the backs of his legs.

Alex was right about the kitchen: dirty plates were shuffled into drooping piles on the table and a broken glass lay on the floor. They must have been pretty drunk, even during dinner.

He picked up the phone receiver from the mount on the wall and stared at the numbered buttons, zero through nine. By rearranging permutations of those numbers, scientists had launched spaceships and connected voices across continents. Franny was a phone call away. He pressed her number into the keypad, enunciating each digit as though he were calling out the voyage coordinates to fellow crew members. If she’d left her cell behind he’d hear it ringing. What was her ring tone? He’d heard it this morning, the chorus of a dance track, not as cheesy as “Who Let the Dogs Out?” or “I Like Big Butts” but just as harmlessly sexual, or so he’d thought at the time.

“This is a long-distance call. Please dial one—”

“Cocksucker!”

He hung up, pushed
I
, and entered Franny’s number again.

“Please enter your long-distance password.”

Of course they had a discount long-distance plan. He bit the phone, the pain in his teeth somehow reminding him of the long-distance card in his wallet. He took it out and tried Franny again.

The call went straight to her answering service.

“Good news: you’ve reached Franny. Leave a message. Or
not
.”

He interrupted her recorded voice with a grunt, trying to startle it free from whatever machine kept it on message, then he hung up and dialled the number again. The call went through to her voice mail, the familiarity of her recorded voice almost tricking him into speaking before the greeting finished.

“Hello chief, it’s your dad,” he said, aiming for an urgent but not shit-scared tone. “We’re wondering where you guys went. There’s no note here. I’m sure it’s cool.” Did he really say
cool
? “We’re getting a little worried. Can you phone the farm when you get this message? You’ll see the number on your screen. Wait. I’m using a phone card. The number is …”

There was no number on the phone mount.

“Just a second, Fran.”

He searched his wallet for the slip of paper with Jane and Alex’s number.