Songs for the Missing (32 page)

“You’re
not
serious,” she said. “It’s Valentine’s Day. The only thing this chick is making is reservations.”

To atone he took her to Biscotti’s in Conneaut, where she told him about the panel she’d been invited to join (he was welcome too, though most of them were mothers), and the conference in Albany next month, and the cookbook she and Connie were putting together, and the possibility of meeting with the governor. April 9th was National Missing Persons Day—it was a perfect opportunity to get the word out. She’d cheated and had a glass of wine, and she was excited, craning over her place setting as she spoke.

“Wow,” he said. “You’ve been busy.”

“I know I haven’t been around much. I’m sorry. Not that anyone misses me.”

“I miss you.”

“No you don’t. You just miss me making your dinner.”

“That too,” he admitted. “Lindsay misses you.”

“Now I know you’re lying.”

“She’s been bugging me about a job.”

“Quizno’s,” she said, as if it were a problem. What she meant was that the shop was a lonely outpost on the wrong side of the railroad underpass from downtown. It shared the same cracked plaza—former home of a 7-Eleven—with the Broad Street Mini Mart, which sold liquor, cigarettes and lottery tickets. It was a corner he tried not to drive his clients by.

“She’d be with Dana, and there’d be a manager there the whole time.”

“How’s she going to get there?” Because, though Lindsay and Dana both had their licenses, they couldn’t have passengers other than family.

“I’ll talk to Grant and Helen, maybe we can do a tag team. I just want to get her out of her room and off the damn computer.”

“I’m with you on that.”

“We can’t keep her locked up.”

“I know,” she conceded, sitting back. “It couldn’t be someplace easy.”

“I don’t think there is such a place.”

“It’s not going to get in the way of her flute lessons?”

“That’s one day a week. Her grades are great.”

“Her grades
are
great, I’ve got no problem with her grades. Did she ask you to ask me?”

“Why?”

“It’s like you’re trying to sell me on the idea.”

“I think it’s great that she wants to work. I mean, we wouldn’t even be having this conversation if things were normal.”

He’d finished the thought in his head before the words left his mouth, and regretted them immediately.

“You’re right,” she finally said. “I’m sure it’s just me.”

“It’s not just you. I’ve got the same worries you do.”

“Let’s talk about something else,” she said, looking around at the other couples. “We’re supposed to be having a romantic evening.”

They tried. She had a second glass of wine, though she wasn’t supposed to, and a third, and then dessert and espresso. They both ate too much, they agreed on the drive home, and, groaning, went straight to bed, where, to his surprise, she reached for him and climbed on top. She was noisy, where she usually worried about Lindsay hearing them. He could feel her ribs through her skin, each of them distinct, and the bones of her shoulders. She arched and then flung herself down on him, her hair in his face. Her mouth tasted of wine, and he wondered if she only wanted him because she was half drunk.

“It’s been a long time,” she said in the dark afterward.

He hadn’t thought so, but then he tried to remember the last time, and, oddly, couldn’t.

“Too long,” he said.

Later, listening to her snore, he couldn’t recall that ever happening before, and took it as a bad sign. The next time he’d know how long it had been, to the day.

Being the Cup

Her weeks now were measured out in shifts. Monday-Wednesday-Friday, after school till close, plus Saturday lunch. Her mother said she couldn’t work more than twenty hours and that she’d have to quit if her grades suffered. It was already March. They were nearly done with the third marking period and she had straight A’s, so basically that was impossible, but her mother said it like a threat. Her father trusted she wouldn’t abuse this privilege. To Lindsay it sounded like they were talking to a convict. Dropping her and Dana off in their matching black shirts, her father told them not to work too hard and then waited until they were inside to leave.

They couldn’t have been safer. At night when the weather turned mild a few bikers might hang around the minimart before racketing off, but two of the guys on their crew, Tyler Stafford and Jared Hamilton, were on the football team, and Mr. Candele, the manager, was bigger than either of them. The only time she and Dana were alone was on break, squatting on milk crates and smoking right outside the backdoor. She knew her mother imagined her being dragged into a car (she’d imagined it herself, being yanked by the wrist through an open window), but the chances of that actually happening were ridiculous. At home she liked to say the most dangerous part of working there was the smell.

Her first week she was the Meat. It was a rite they’d all gone through. “Meat, go get me some olives.” “Tell the Meat she doesn’t have to nuke the meatballs five thousand times.” “Yo, Meat, what part of ‘no tomato’ don’t you understand?” Dana rode her harder than anyone. At school their crowd was several rungs below (and opposed to) Tyler and Jared’s, and it was weird to see her joking with them.

Dana had warned her that the job was mindless—cleaning lettuce, slicing cheese, wiping tables. Lindsay figured a little drudgery was the price of independence. What she hadn’t counted on was how embarrassing it was. Along with the logo shirts, they had to wear gay baseball caps and black aprons, which, as the shift went on, gathered mustard and mayo stains, and floury handprints from the rolls. The menu was loaded with trademarked names like Trippin’ Turkey and Cabo Chicken and Yin-Yang Salad. When she repeated the orders of people from school—guys especially—she couldn’t look them in the eye. She knew the prompts by heart, but the words came out muddled. “What kind of bread would you like on that?” The plastic gloves they wore came in three sizes, none of which fit her. In the middle of building a sub, one slipped off and she had to fetch another pair. She forgot what people wanted and had to ask again. Just being there made her dumb.

She was tired all the time. Except for break Mr. Candele never let them sit down, even when they were all caught up and the place was empty. “If you’re leanin’, you’re cleanin’,” he said, so much that they used it on one another.

As the Meat she drew the shit jobs. They made her clean the bathrooms and take out the trash. They gave her whole bags of onions to cut. They saved the baked-on broccoli cheese vat for her, and watched like judges as she scrubbed at it with a gummy green pad, the white scum packed under her fingernails. They made her be the Cup.

Friday and Saturday, no matter what the weather was like, the Cup walked up and down Broad Street, waving at cars. The costume was awesomely stupid, eight feet tall with googly eyes and a dippy grin and a red straw poking from the top. A built-in fan at her hip kept it inflated, buzzing so it was hard to hear. Despite the constant rush of air, the interior held the vinegary stink of curdled sweat, like a guys’ locker room, though after a few minutes the space filled with her own stale cigarette breath. The light through the white fabric and the claustrophobic closeness reminded her of reading underneath the covers. She could only see straight ahead through a mesh window in the big Q on the Cup’s midsection. Because of its circumference her arms poked out like flippers. Dana said it was tough getting up if you fell down. She told Lindsay horror stories about gangs jumping out of cars and beating up Cups, using their cellphones to shoot video that ended up on the net. Here they just threw stuff. Cups, cans, sometimes pennies. They didn’t hurt because of the padding, but it was pretty degrading. You didn’t want to stand too close to the road. Back when Dana started, Lindsay had driven by just to give her shit for being the Cup. Now Dana helped her into the costume and walked her across the lot like a sacrifice.

“Good luck.”

“Yeah, thanks,” Lindsay said through the mesh.

It was Friday rush hour, and she was posted by the light at Broad and 16th to entice people into bringing sandwiches home for dinner. She ambled back and forth along the line of stopped cars at a safe distance, waggling her arms, throwing in a few clumsy poses (“Superstar!”) to stave off the boredom, all the while waiting for the first bottle to come flying toward her face.

Instead, people pointed and smiled, shaking their heads. Drivers honked. Kids waved to her, even some adults, and Lindsay naturally waved back. After months of dreading every public event, it felt strange. They didn’t know who she was, they just liked her for giving them something to look at, and she liked them for being kind. Dana hadn’t warned her about this. The goofiness of the costume had rubbed off on her. All of a sudden she was like the Bubble Boy. Everyone was rooting for her.

She liked being in disguise, and putting on a show. In real life she couldn’t dance at all, but now she tried out Pee Wee’s big shoe dance, and the Macarena, and as much of the Electric Slide as she remembered from second grade. She did William Hung’s “She Bangs” and practiced kung fu moves on a sign until she broke a sweat. Dana was crazy. This was way better than working.

The only thing anyone threw at her was a balled-up Dairy Queen bag, which she saw coming and which fell short, rolling nearly to her feet. “What’s up with that?” she asked, arms wide, taunting the car—a blue Camaro—then, as the driver took off, shook her fist at it, still in character. “You better run, bitches! I’ll cup you good.”

She was pretending to hitchhike when something thumped against her back.

It was Dana, coming to her rescue. Lindsay couldn’t believe it had been a full hour already.

“So, what’d they get you with?” Dana asked, looking the costume up and down for damage.

“Just that.”

“That’s nothing.”

“It really wasn’t bad.”

“Yeah, no, you don’t want to say that too loud. Just wait till summer, it’s brutal inside that thing.”

“It was kind of fun, actually.”

“Okay,” Dana said, “now you’re scaring me.”

Inside, Tyler and Jared greeted her with laughter, miming karate chops.

“Go ahead, Lindsay Lohan!” Jared said.

“Best, Cup, ever,” Tyler said.

“A-thank you, a-thank you,” Lindsay said, trying to bow without falling over.

The next morning when she was doing her routine she felt something small bounce off her. On the sidewalk lay a smoldering cigarette, a Newport by the green bands around the filter. Whoever flicked it was through the light and gone, and really, it hadn’t hurt.

The half-full coffee that splashed across her sneakers was something else (“Okay, that’s fucked-up”), but still she kept on clowning, waving to the kids and the silly adults. Some woman in a two-tone van even took her picture. Looking out at the world through the mesh, Lindsay thought that you either got the Cup or you didn’t. She was glad she did, no matter what Dana said.

Later there would be other, more serious initiations, like the first time she cut herself slicing bread, the first time she burned herself on the oven, the first time Mr. Candele let her be the Finisher, but the Cup was the big one. From then on they treated her like an equal, all of them united against the customers who said, “Mmm... toasty” after the first bite.

By May she’d earned her first raise and developed a crush on Jared, which Dana immediately picked up on, ragging her mercilessly. Though it was hopeless, she looked forward to going in just to be with him. It was her place now, more so than home. Here she could be bitchy and silly, and when she was working side-by-side with Jared, happy, every second ripe with possibility. The right touch, the right look, and the whole world was hers. At dusk, when the dinner rush was kicking their asses and the headlights of passing cars reached in the window, sometimes she’d glance up from the sandwich she was making and catch a glimpse of the pigeons that lived beneath the underpass wheeling in front of the dark downtown, showing the white undersides of their stubby wings, and wonder if Kim ever felt like this.

Last Summer

After everything, she couldn’t go back to the Conoco. She hadn’t wanted to come home at all, and did only because her mom asked her. It would be cheaper, her mom said, as if she had to rationalize it somehow. Nina could save more money this way. Nina agreed, but told her this would probably be the last time.

“That’s fine,” her mom said. “I just need you here right now.”

Elise got her on at Sal’s, where the older crowd ate. After working food service at school she wasn’t shocked at how disgusting the kitchen was, or how much of the menu came straight out of cans. The customers loved it. She smiled and made great tips, proving her mom right.

She and Elise and J.P. were a unit. The Giant Eagle had closed, and he was working at the Golden Dawn downtown. He hadn’t bothered to fix his car; he said it looked better this way. They sunned by the river before shift and drank at the beach after. Hinch and Marnie were still at the DQ but didn’t hang out like they used to. The weather was forest-fire dry, the empty streets wavering in the heat. Some days it seemed like it could be last summer, that any second Kim would come walking out of the trees and across the rocks with her beach bag. It seemed impossible that it had been a year.

At the service marking the anniversary, the three of them sat together near the front. Lindsay had come back special from camp to read the lesson. Tall and tan, with her hair cut short, she looked more like Kim than ever. Kim’s mom had lost too much weight; her eyes were sunken, her cheeks creased. On his way out Kim’s dad nodded to J.P., they all saw it. They could only hope it was a start.

Later that night, in their jeans and sweatshirts, they sat around the fire and remembered how strong she was, how wild. Stubborn. Smart. Competitive. Elise admitted she was a little intimidated by her.

“Why?” Nina asked, though she knew exactly what she meant.

“I was,” J.P. confessed.

“You didn’t want to get on her bad side,” Elise said.