Songs for the Missing (30 page)

The crowd was swarming the walkway, heading back to their seats, armed with popcorn and nachos and hot dogs. The score was 27-0, and whatever Nina wanted, whatever the Larsens were withholding—not forgiveness, not exactly—she wasn’t going to get it. The bleachers were filling, cutting off J.P.’s escape route. She took a last look back. Kim’s mom was still being interviewed with her coat off, Kim’s dad and Lindsay standing to one side.

“You guys can stay if you want to,” Nina said. “I’m out.”

“You want to go somewhere?” Elise asked.

“Yeah,” she said. “The hell away from here.”

“My house?”

“Are we allowed?”

“Don’t be like that.”

“Sure,” J.P. said.

They had to fight the tide, sidling along the edge of the crush, brushing against puffy, swaddled bodies.

“You’re going the wrong way,” someone’s mother with a tray of hot chocolates told them, and Nina thought of splashing them in her face.

Once they were free of the walkway, it was easy. The rainbow girls only had a few customers, while the lines at the concessions and rest-rooms were huge. The same classmates were still chatting in little groups as they passed. Like the Larsens, they pretended not to recognize them.

“You know you can’t come back in,” an older guard at the entrance warned.

“We know,” Elise said.

There was no one outside the fence. The cops were gone. Cars were parked on both shoulders at crazy angles, as if abandoned in the last seconds before some terrible disaster. The wind was bitter, skimming snow from the drifts. They went on for blocks without seeing anyone, salt crunching underfoot, seagulls fighting over tailgaters’ trash the only sign of life. Nina swore she’d parked closer than this, but everything looked different, weirdly motionless. She’d always thought of Kingsville as a ghost town, now here it was, literally depopulated, as if only she and J.P. and Elise had survived. And while that was wishful, the exact opposite of what had actually happened, she was glad to be with them. Here, as nowhere else, she was free to be herself in all her contradictions. Without having to say a word, they understood.

Behind them a roar went up, long and drawn out, then dying mildly, probably the kickoff. None of them looked back. They walked down the middle of the road, silent and purposeful, like the last three people on Earth.

The next day she went to the river.

Wish List

The holidays settled on them like a spell, like the frigid weather forcing them indoors. The days were too short. At work Fran was part of the crew that hung the decorations, festooning the waiting room and the ER with green and gold tinsel, refilling the dish of miniature candy canes outside of their sliding window. Her doctor had taken her off Ambien after she woke up in the kitchen at three a.m., eating leftover macaroni and cheese with her fingers. The new prescription left her tired all the time, and she couldn’t drink. Cheerless herself, spreading the spirit of the season seemed even more important.

The songs bombarded her—at the office and in the car going home, in the grocery store and on TV—corny and reassuring, a link to her childhood. They nested in her head until she whistled despite herself.
What a bright time, it’s the right time, to rock the night away. One seems to hear, words of good cheer, from everywhere, filling the air.
In her distraction she sifted the lyrics for solace or inspiration and discovered they were hearty nonsense. You had to be happy to agree with them.

Around Halloween she’d foreseen the possibility of Christmas without Kim, and decided, with no hesitation whatsoever, that they needed to include her. Now when she told Ed they should go ahead and buy her presents, he paused as if giving her time to rethink the idea.

“Would you rather just not get her anything?” she asked.

“No.”

Then why did he act like it was bizarre, and wrong? She bought all of their gifts anyway. He didn’t have to lift a finger.

“What about stockings?” he asked.

That night she ventured into Lindsay’s room to deliver the news. She sat on the edge of her bed as Lindsay turned from her draft on the causes of World War I, tolerating this latest interruption as if she couldn’t spare a second. Like her father, she greeted the idea with silence, making Fran explain that Kim was still a part of the family. Now more than ever they needed to keep her in their thoughts.

“I
do
,” Lindsay said, flaring, and though she finally agreed, Fran knew she was alone in this hope.

It wasn’t the first time. She’d always been the one in the family who loved Christmas the most, or any occasion. She was the planner of parties, the arranger of vacations. Ed would have been satisfied staying home all summer, coaching the team and going out on his boat. She was the one who unfurled the map of the West on the dining room table and measured out the legs of the trip—not because she had some extravagant urge but because that was what families did. She’d grown accustomed to the role of motivator and organizer, as they had, surrendering to her, sometimes, as in this case, grudgingly. Afterward they might thank her (“That was fun,” Ed would admit, giving her a kiss), but now, at the beginning, they withheld themselves as if she was misguided and demanding.

Normally she just absorbed the slight and led them by exaggerated example, but between work and home and Kim, she hardly had time to shop. Saturday was dedicated to cutting and decorating a tree, a task that, at their best, tested their patience. Sunday they didn’t get back from coffee hour until one, and then she had to address all of their Christmas cards (they were using a picture from graduation, the four of them tall and smiling on the worn grass of the baseball field, meaning for the first time in a decade Cooper wouldn’t be in it). While she went through the stack from last year, Ed lay on the couch, watching the Browns. Lindsay, as always, was hibernating upstairs.

She promised herself she wouldn’t bug them too much, since they’d made it her personal crusade, but things slipped out. At dinner or before bed, over breakfast. “I still don’t have a clue about your mother,” she fretted, because Grace was impossible to buy for. “I’ll ask her,” he said. Twice, three times. It wasn’t conscious. She was prodding herself more than anyone else.

She didn’t know what she’d get for Kim. It wouldn’t be hard, once she started. When Kim had just discovered clothes, they’d go to the mall together, eating lunch at the food court, spending whole afternoons comparing their tastes. It gave Fran an opportunity to buy the nice younger stuff she couldn’t wear. It was almost like shopping for herself, a perfectly vicarious thrill. She took a mother’s pride in how good Kim looked, tall as a model at thirteen, with her own mother’s cheekbones. That was sheer happiness, finding something they both liked, but there was the fear too, watching the older girls cruising in catty packs, that these easy moments of closeness wouldn’t last.

Looking back, Fran was sure she’d spoiled her, as sure as she’d short-changed her later, her disappointment turning them into unflinching enemies. It was just a phase—she’d outgrown her own teenaged disdain and found her mother was a smart, competent woman people relied on. And yet it saddened her. She could see the same change happening in Lindsay, and felt helpless and overwhelmed, already stretched too thin. When Fran invited her to the mall, Lindsay turned her down, using her own all-purpose excuse: She didn’t have time right now.

No one did. On the radio they were counting down the days, and Fran still had gaps in her lists. Connie and Jocelyn were easy enough, but she had no clue about Rich or Carrie or any of the cousins. She was done badgering Ed for suggestions and went online to order a replacement for Grace’s L.L. Bean robe, paying an extra twenty dollars for guaranteed delivery, and though she could cross off another name, the whole process was unsatisfying. A gift was supposed to be surprising yet perfect, an indication of how well you knew the other person, and though Grace would never complain, Fran was ashamed when she recalled all the thoughtful gifts Grace had come up with over the years, especially for the girls, who grew harder and harder to please. A robe was the adult equivalent of underwear, utterly generic. Fran wanted to blame the situation but couldn’t entirely. In the past she’d always found a way to make Christmas nice for them.

Ultimately she had no choice. She was too busy during the week, and so many of her coworkers had donated their sick days to keep her on the payroll when she was out that she didn’t feel right taking one now. When she told Ed she was going to the mall on Saturday, he froze, as if she expected him to come with her. He seemed relieved when she asked if he minded watching Lindsay. Though normally he argued the con side of that debate (she was sixteen, she didn’t need a babysitter), he snatched at the chance.

“It’s going to be a nightmare out there.”

“You forget,” she said, “I do this every year.”

The night before, she set the alarm for six. In the morning she dried her hair downstairs so she wouldn’t wake them. She gathered her lists and left the house while it was still dark, her breath like fog in the car, reminding her of when she used to smoke. Both of them did, two packs of Marlboros a day, lighting the first one with their coffees and stubbing the last out in the ashtray on their nightstand. She quit when she was pregnant, and while it had been twenty years, now, driving west out of town ahead of the dawn, it seemed another unexpected way Kim had changed their lives.

The four lanes of 20 were empty. The Premix plant was running third shift, lit like a prison, its loading dock lined with trucks. The streetlights showed her the gates of Greenlawn Cemetery, but the graves and the garish aluminum-siding cross were mercifully lost in the dark. Against her will, the blank face of North Kingsville Elementary stirred her memory. She fought it off, focusing on the road. Across a field, a giant star made of colored lights shone beneath the prefab steeple of the Living Water Baptist Church, the crusted snow holding smears of red and yellow and green. It must have been on all night, a shepherd standing watch over its flock. The idea pleased her. Wasn’t that what the season was about—heavenly signs and news of miracles?

Over the Ashtabula line, one by one, other cars joined her, all of them headed in the same direction, some passing her and pulling away as if it were a race. She’d thought of stopping at Happy’s Donuts for a large coffee to get her going, but scrapped that plan, needing to keep up. As she turned into the mall the lot was already filling, early birds taking the spaces by the main entrance. The car in front of her split off, and she followed it around the side, counting it as an advantage.

The doors wouldn’t open for another fifteen minutes and it was too cold to stand outside, so they sat in their cars with their lights off and their heaters running while the sky lightened, the day breaking gray and drab. She went over her lists, envisioning her route and the major stops she’d make. As eight o’clock neared, the first few shoppers crossed the plaza. They were all women, alone or in pairs, none of them young. Rather than viewing them as her competition, Fran saw a sisterhood, wives and mothers, aunts and grandmas, providing for their families. She turned her car off, got out and walked over to wait with them.

She wasn’t dismayed that a few of them knew her from TV. As she told the small audience, it was heartening to know someone out there was listening. From habit she was wearing her pin and had a few extras in her bag that she passed around.

“I’d wish you a Merry Christmas,” one woman said, “but ...”

“Please,” Fran said, “we need all the good wishes we can get.”

“God bless you,” a bundled, cronelike older woman said, clutching her hand, and Fran thanked her. This was the elusive community the news always talked about—people she would have never met except for Kim.

Once the doors opened she saw them only in passing, all of them off on their separate quests, but throughout the day, no matter where she went, her reception was the same. At any second, waiting to pay or navigating the chaotic halls with her bags, she could become the center of attention. Cashiers and shoppers alike waylaid her to convey their sympathy and share their own stories of loss as if she would naturally understand. She found herself nodding, offering her condolences, and would have had no problem with it except that they took so much time. She was already behind.

She was okay when she focused on shopping, but just walking along she was hostage to every teenager, every girl, every mother and daughter. The main atrium was done up in cotton batting like the North Pole, complete with a waving elf driving a scale-model train. She’d stood with Kim in this same line of toddlers waiting to see Santa. They came every year. Lindsay had cried her first time, wary of the stranger behind the beard, where Kim never hesitated, taking Lindsay’s hand and leading her like a guide. In family lore the story served as proof of their contrary natures, but now, out of fairness, Fran resisted reading too much into it.

She couldn’t stop for lunch—the food court was a zoo anyway. She dropped her first set of bags at the car and grabbed a coffee at the Star-bucks (served by a girl Kim’s age who looked familiar) and started improvising on top of the list. She found a cute shrug for Lindsay at Fashion Bug, and some fun earrings at Claire’s, and at Radio Shack a speaker station for her iPod and a keychain with a digital picture frame she could fill with her favorite shots (she almost bought three of these, but held off). The back of Sears was quiet and had golfballs for Rich, and, in their auto center, for the family, emergency kits for both cars. The Discovery Store took care of the cousins, though the line for the checkout stretched into the shelves. Carrie she drew a blank on, but if she came up empty she could always do a gift certificate to J. Jill—and then she saw the Fiestaware pitcher at Pottery Barn. Her arms were full again, and so far she’d gotten nothing for Kim.

The danger with going out to the car was that she knew she couldn’t leave. It was past three and the light was fading, making her think of dinner.