Once Upon a Time, There Was You (19 page)

He wants to tell her he admires her. He wants to tell her he thinks she’s wonderful, and when he does, he’ll pull the sheet back down from her breasts. But just then the phone rings, startling them both. “Excuse me,” he says, leaning over her to pick up the receiver. “I don’t know who
that
could be.” And he doesn’t. But he feels a shift in the air, a sense from Amy that he
does
know who it might be, that she is suddenly and uncomfortably reminded there is more to him than she knows.

As soon as he says hello, Irene starts talking.

“John, it’s me, I’m so sorry to call so late, I’m really sorry, but I don’t know what to do. Oh, this is probably so unnecessary, but I didn’t know what to do.”

Irene
, he mouths to Amy, rolling his eyes.

And she smiles, but she has moved away from him, he can feel it. She’ll say maybe she should go as soon as he hangs up, he can see it coming. He holds up one finger, and she nods. But then she does get up and pulls her dress over herself. She does not put on her underwear, he’s happy to see, so maybe she’s not leaving. She points to the other room. He understands. She wants to give him privacy. Irene is still offering her long-winded apology.

“What’s
up
, Irene?” he says, and the irritation in his voice is more than he intended.

There is a moment of silence, and then she says, “It’s Sadie.”

He freezes, then manages, “What happened?”

“I don’t know, probably nothing. But she went on this rock climb—”

“What happened? Did she fall?”

“I don’t
know
. I don’t know where she
is
. She hasn’t called, she hasn’t come home, and she doesn’t answer her cellphone.”

He gets up, starts pulling his trousers on. “Did you call the police?”

“Yes, I filed a missing person report. They seemed to think it was no big deal, but—”

“What else?”

“…  What do you mean?”

“I mean what
else
?”

“Well, I … I keep calling her. I left a message on Meghan’s phone.”

“Did you call all the hospitals?”

“No.”

“Well, call the hospitals, Irene! Did you call anyone she went climbing with?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because I don’t know their numbers.”

“You know their
names
, don’t you?”

Silence.

“Irene?”

“She told me some names, but I forgot. I mean, she—”

“Get off the phone and call the hospitals. I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

“You don’t have to come, John. Everybody but me thinks she’s fine, that she’s just … She’s probably just … You don’t have to
come. I just wanted you to know. I thought you could maybe give me some ideas. Which you did. I’ll let you know if—”

“I’m getting ready right now. I’ll get the first flight out.”

Amy comes into the room after he hangs up.

He looks up at her. “My daughter is missing. I have to go to San Francisco.”

“She’s
missing
?”

“Yeah.”

“For how long?”

“For three days.”

“Didn’t you tell me she was going rock climbing?”

“Yes. And she hasn’t come home yet. And she didn’t call her mother at all, as she said she would.”

“Well … I can see why you’re worried, but this is not so uncommon at her age. I have a friend whose daughter went to the Boundary Waters and didn’t come home until five days after she said she would. Sometimes kids just—”

“Look, I know my daughter. This isn’t like her. She’s in trouble.”

He goes over to his closet, starts packing.

“Maybe … I should go home?” Amy says.

He turns around. “Yeah, I guess I’m … It might be a good idea. I’m sorry, I just really need to get out there and be with my wife.”

“I understand.”

He turns to the closet to pull out a couple of shirts, and when he turns around again, she is gone.

For a moment, he feels bad, and considers going after her. He ought to go after her. But he doesn’t want to think about Amy. He feels that everything that just happened between them is a pretty illusion, a ride on a carousel. Here is his world: Sadie.

20

L
ate Tuesday morning, Irene carries an armload of linens into the living room. She’s so relieved that John is coming. He’s the only one who understands the kind of love she has for Sadie—not only understands it but shares it. He’s the only one who seems to agree with Irene that this situation is serious. For the first time in a long time, she feels allied with John against what feel like outsiders. The last time this happened was many years ago, when a couple finally left their home after what might most kindly have been called an uninspiring evening, and Irene closed the door after them, then turned around and merely looked at John, who said, “I know. Can I rag on them first?”

He called her from the airport saying he’d gotten on the 6:55
A.M
. He’s due in at 11:39, fifteen minutes from now. She offered to pick him up, but he said she should stay there—he would take a cab in. She wants to prepare a bed for him—he’s been up all night; he’s one of those people who can never sleep on a plane, and anyway, his worry will have kept him awake. She doesn’t want him to stay in a hotel, not under these circumstances. But she can’t put him in Sadie’s bed; that would seem to suggest that Sadie is not coming back. She can’t put him in bed with her. The sofa bed is far too short for him and uncomfortable, besides; not for the first time, she regrets not paying more attention to how it
felt as a bed. She supposes she could call and get some sort of rental bed delivered, but she doesn’t want to add one more thing to her plate. She decides that she herself will sleep on the sofa bed.

As she puts clean sheets on her own bed, she remembers a time when she and John had first gotten together and went to stay for a long weekend in a lake house with another couple, friends of John’s. One night, the couple went out for groceries and declined John and Irene’s offer to come along and help. “Stay and enjoy yourselves,” they said. John suggested he and Irene go skinny dipping, which they did, but the water was icy cold and they ended up lying in the couple’s bed to get warm—their own beds were rudimentary cots that offered little warmth or comfort. They ended up making love, and Irene worried about leaving a stain. So they stayed connected after John’s orgasm and, giggling, moved as one unit off the bed and onto the floor, then into the bathroom. There, they separated, laughed, cleaned up, and then made love again, on the bathroom floor. There was an ease between them at that time, there was such pleasure in being together.

She stands still, staring into space, remembering this. Odd to think that the embittered couple they became used to be that couple. Sad how the strongest thing between them came to be rigidity, wariness. Resentment, too, a feeling on both of their parts that they’d been wronged again and again, and no acknowledgment coming from either camp, to say nothing of an apology or a promise to try to do better. She wonders sometimes whether it would have helped if they’d stayed in therapy. But they both hated it. They both resisted it. And anyway, by the time they went, it was too late. They had lost some essential thing necessary for staying together. As Irene told Val, their pilot light had gone out. They had no patience, no sense of humor or perspective
about themselves. What they did have was a great and abiding—and, for a long time, unifying—love of Sadie. Always, there was that.

Irene goes to the window and stares. Across the street, she sees a man at the bus stop reading the paper and imagines a headline:
MISSING GIRL FOUND DEAD
.

She doesn’t understand why Valerie is so nonchalant about Sadie being gone; Henry, too. Maybe they’re right in saying that Irene is overreacting to a situation that will simply turn out to be her daughter making a statement about not being a little girl anymore in the only way that Irene will pay attention to. In just a few weeks, Sadie will be in college, and then all bets are off. Irene has heard of parents who tell their college-bound children that they no longer have a curfew, feeling that they might as well try out unlimited freedom at home, where there is still a safety net. She supposes she should have done that. She supposes she should have done a lot of things differently.

She goes into Sadie’s room and sits on the edge of her bed. She looks at the perfume bottles on her dresser, the things on her wall, her high black boots tossed into the corner. A few hours earlier, Irene made a futile search through Sadie’s drawers and closet, looking for anything that might yield a clue as to her whereabouts. But she found nothing hidden other than a stuffed animal Sadie used to sleep with, a floppy-eared rabbit shoved into the corner of a high shelf in the closet. Irene held the rabbit against her chest, and smelled the perfume Sadie wears now. It came to her that there must have been times when her daughter went back to this bedraggled animal, looking for a kind of comfort her mother couldn’t provide. Sadie kept the rabbit, Irene supposed, in the same way she kept the book about paper boats on her dresser, the book with the story of the boy sitting outside in the
darkness after having launched his little fleet:
I hope that someone in some strange land will find them and know who I am
.

Irene lies on the bed and looks up at the ceiling, wondering what Sadie thinks about when she lies here this same way. She herself feels a great weariness, but she imagines Sadie feels a kind of restlessness, an urgency running through her almost all the time, in the way that teenagers do. Irene remembers that feeling of needing to do
everything
, right now, even though she also believed that she would live forever, young.

But who can know their own children, really? After a certain age, their longings and deepest feelings are shared with someone else. Irene supposes it’s possible Sadie is with some boy, now. Some young man who stands ready and able to see the young woman Sadie is, someone whom her mother has not yet recognized because she practices an ongoing kind of denial. Every time she folds Sadie’s thong underwear, she sees instead the small cotton underpants printed with roses or princesses or kittens that her daughter used to wear. Oh, they’ve had the proverbial Talk, which mostly consisted of Irene starting to say things and Sadie interrupting her to say, “Mom. I know.” Irene has many times gratefully acknowledged the particular kind of wisdom Sadie has, her general good sense and trustworthiness. But mostly Irene sees Sadie as someone years younger than she actually is. Maybe it’s because, when Sadie is gone, what will Irene have?

Oh, where is she? Once again, perhaps for the hundredth time, Irene dials Sadie’s cellphone; once again, she gets no answer.

She concentrates on breathing, and on the thought that soon John will be here, and then there will be two of them sharing this burden. She feels she’s been walking a tightrope not only for these last several hours but for many years. Ever since she left her
marriage, actually. At first it was so exhilarating, the view so fine, the sense of danger not so much frightening as enlivening, engaging all her senses. But now her shoulders ache and her neck is stiff and she is tired of maintaining her balance. She hadn’t counted on danger becoming monotonous; she had forgotten she’d grow old.

So many times, Irene has watched couples who are out together and has felt sorry for them because all they seemed to share was a familiarity with one another. A predictability. No heads bent forward together in urgent conversation. No sudden bursts of delighted laughter. No
sparks
. Instead, a quiet kind of calm, even a gentle—or not so gentle—bickering. But even in the bickering there was a sureness of each other that neither demanded nor required anything beyond the other’s presence. How she longs for that now! That is the subtext behind every silly ad she writes: she wants not romance but the reliability and comfort of an old friendship. How do you get that when you’ve never met the person, when what you share is not a personal history but a tattered and revisionist version of what your life has been up to now? The subtext behind all
that
—all the stories Irene tells about herself, all the questions she answers—seems to be:
I guess you had to have been there
. A translation, a retelling, is not a shared experience, and in the sharing is everything. This she has finally learned, and, in the way a person too old to learn to drive learns anyway, she is clumsy with the knowledge, overly aware of it.

In Irene’s kitchen is a piece of framed, off-white linen on which is embroidered:
A crust that’s shared is finer food
/
Than banquets served in solitude
. She bought it for the beauty of the embroidery, feeling that the sentiment was not only tacky but not true for her: Irene always liked the idea of a banquet served in solitude. What could be better? All of the pleasure without any need for reciprocity. A selfish enjoyment like a massage is supposed to
be, though Irene can never enjoy a massage because she always feels compelled to take care of the masseuse. The truth is, Irene can rarely really enjoy anything given by another person because of her concerns about what must be given back and, she supposes, because of her own warped sense of what she deserves—or, more to the point, does not deserve. But a banquet in solitude, a Beauty and the Beast kind of offering, all coming from behind the scenes, with no need—no
way
—to reciprocate: perfect!

That was then. That was years ago. She has changed, she has grown up at least this much, and she now understands fully—ruefully—the spirit of that epigram. Only last week she stood before it with a pile of towels in her arms and read it yet again, and she felt a dull ache settle in her chest. She imagined herself with a partner, sitting on wooden porch steps, sharing a crust. Raisin toast crust, the butter collected into little pockets, and the taste divine. Such a meager offering yielding such fine results. Then Sadie appeared, and Irene asked if she had any dirty towels in her room. If she did, Irene would wash them. Which was to say,
I can at least take care of you
.