The Next Time You See Me (14 page)

Then she noticed the name at the top of the slip:
Tony Joyce.
Could it be
that
Tony Joyce? She hadn’t heard he was living in Roma again.

Wally must have seen something in her face. “Susanna? Is everything all right?”

She nodded, swallowing against a lump. “Yes. I’m fine. But I’ve got to go.”

Chapter Eight

1.

Susanna had a secret, which she’d never shared with anyone—not Dale, not her sister, and not even her college roommate, Anne Marie, though she’d come close on some of those nights they spent drinking at the Apple, when she found herself admitting to Anne Marie doubts about her engagement to Dale, how she wondered if there could be some other, better life for her. The sad thing about her secret was that it wasn’t even a particularly good one. Dale, had he heard it, would have shrugged it off. Ronnie might have laughed. But the memory of it was one of her most shameful, and Tony Joyce was its subject, and so she drove to the police station in a double bind of fear for her sister and anxiety for herself.

Her father had been a racist. That was the first thing. Not that racism was uncommon around here, and Susanna had grown up with friends among whom whispered distinctions between black people and white were not just tolerated but passé, but her father’s racism was a quality that complemented a host of other prejudices and superstitions and outright cruelties, and so the thrill she’d felt the first time she spoke to Tony Joyce—this had been her second day at Roma High School, when they’d bumped shoulders in the hallway between the arts wing and sciences—startled her. “Excuse me,” he’d said,
stopping to steady her. He, a junior, tall, glorious, and popular; she, a freshman, sadly hopeful in one of the two new outfits her mother had purchased for her at Sears and Roebuck. It was 1979, and she was fourteen years old. She’d put new pennies, heads up, into her loafers.

“Okay,” she’d said, and he smiled, and that was it. It wasn’t a crush yet, because crushes come with leveling expectations; this was so pure and surprising that she felt herself opening up, reaching toward him like a flower. It seemed to Susanna later that the miracle of his reciprocated affection must have also been rooted in this moment. She had been shocked into showing him, unguarded, her sudden delight in him.

Tony was already something of a local celebrity. He’d started playing for the high school baseball team in seventh grade after years of Little League infamy, and he’d led the Cats to three consecutive state championships since then, mostly on the strength of his powerful left-handed swing. He was talented and polite, a black kid on an otherwise all-white team. People like Susanna’s father would say, “There are black people and there are niggers, and he’s just black.” It was the highest compliment they could muster.

For a year she admired him at a distance, blushing when he deigned to speak to her, staying after school on Thursdays, when the Cats had home games, to watch him play. It wasn’t even suspicious; everyone did it, everyone wanted to see if Tony Joyce would knock the ball out of the park. Then, her sophomore year, they ended up in Art 1 together, assigned by the teacher to share a table, and they talked often and easily. He was, she discovered quickly, a natural artist—with the drawing board propped against the table and resting on his thighs, his left hand flew over the page, confidently putting down light pencil strokes, then, when the curve was right, darkening them into certainty. Susanna’s first still life was flat and static, her glass milk bottle just an outline, the flower petals all facing stolidly forward; Tony’s bottle gleamed and refracted, the raised lettering on the outside,
SCHEFF BROS
, making just the tiniest hint of shadow on the opposing facet, the petals dewy and more vibrant than they were in life.

In spring they were assigned a portrait, and the week Susanna spent working on hers was blissful. For fifty minutes each day, she had permission—an obligation—to look at Tony, to scrutinize him. She was nervous at first about his skin color; her initial attempt, like the milk bottle, was flat, his features a coloring-book outline, his skin an even charcoal gray. He insisted on peeking, and she went crimson revealing it to him.

“It’s actually pretty good,” he’d said. “You’ve got the proportions right. But look at me.” She darted her eyes to his face, then just as quickly away. “Do I have a hard line around my chin?”

“Not really,” she said.

“What about my eyes?”

“No.”

“Look for the light spots in my face and shade around them. Start with the faint strokes and then darken into the shadows. Like this.” He erased a heavy line she’d drawn, then took her pencil and laid it on an angle, whiskering, the sound scratchily pleasant. He smudged with his middle finger, put down some darker shading, smudged a bit more. A fleshy cheek appeared on Susanna’s page, an illusion of soft light, and he was close enough that Susanna could breathe in, unnoticed, what she’d started over the last weeks to think of as
him,
his essence: some kind of minty cologne, the sweet spice of his skin. At home one night, blushing in the darkness of her bedroom, she’d imagined nuzzling his neck, moving her lips against the teardrop of skin above his collarbone, swallowing whole the mint and spice of him. “Do you see?”

“Yeah,” she murmured. She worked on the opposite cheek, clumsily mimicking him, having to erase a few times but finally getting something that looked a bit like what he’d done and, at the least, was a whole lot better than her first attempt. She smiled at the page. “Thanks, Tony.”

“No problem.”

“What about mine?”

He grinned. “What about it?”

“Let’s see. C’mon, show me.” Emboldened, she pushed his shoulder the way she’d seen Ronnie do with guys, teasing and playful.

“All right.” He turned his own drawing board toward her, and Susanna drew in breath—she really did—and put a hand out hesitantly to touch the image. It was like the still life, true but better than true: he’d accentuated her best feature, her dark eyes and long lashes; and her chin, miserably small and drawn like Ronnie’s and their father’s, had been sharpened ever so slightly, so that she looked cutely elfin. Her hair, an everyday, limp brown, pulled lightly from her temples and fell in waves around her shoulders. But more than these improvements—and Susanna might have been insulted by them, had not this other been true—he’d somehow put her spirit into the page. There was a light in her eyes, a slight sarcastic upturn to the corner of her mouth. There was a suggestion of the chicken pox scar beside her right eyebrow. It was beautiful and it was
her,
truly her, and it seemed to Susanna that he could only see her like this if he liked her. That he’d only have shown her the drawing if he wanted her to know he did.

“Oh, Tony,” she said. It was the most romantic moment of her life. Almost fourteen years later, she still thought so. “Oh.”

“Thanks.” He said it sincerely, with feeling. He shifted nervously on his stool, then leaned toward her. “Suze. You want to go out sometime?” He added, as though it helped his case: “I’ve seen you at my games.”

Her neck prickled. She ran a finger over his portrait of her, feeling the grooves in the paper, the places where Tony had made his mark hard enough to leave an indentation. It would one day occur to Susanna that she hadn’t told anyone about this moment because she had never had the language for telling; she could never explain the bloom of joy and fear within her, the fierce pride, the physical hunger. If he’d asked her outside after school, it all might have ended differently. Alone, he might have kissed her—for so long she’d wanted him to—and if he’d kissed her she wouldn’t have been able to say no to him. But they weren’t alone. They were in a room full of their
classmates, and the art teacher was moving among the tables, making suggestions, and Susanna had time, seconds, to think of her father. It wouldn’t matter to him that Tony was a baseball star, a local hero; it wouldn’t matter to him that Tony had gotten a full ride to the University of Kentucky, that everyone believed he’d be signed to the major leagues before he was twenty. Her father wouldn’t let Tony into their house, and if Susanna tried to leave with him, there’d be hell to pay.

This next was the part of the memory Susanna always skipped over: she said no. She had, she seemed to remember, made some excuse, lame to her own ears, impossible to believe. Tony had been kind, quiet—he hadn’t pressed her. He had, she would later realize, understood the truth of their lives in Roma better than she ever could. In the weeks left in the semester he spoke to her pleasantly enough but infrequently, and Susanna heard in April that he’d asked Sheralyn Hill to prom with him, and Sheralyn—a senior, black—said yes.

On the last day of school, Susanna went to her locker between periods and saw that something had been slid part of the way into the gap where her door failed to latch tight. It was the portrait of her, of course, an “A” penned onto the lower back corner, Tony’s signature scribbled messily on the front. Years later Dale would find it, going through old papers, and he’d ask her in a rare moment of sentimentality if she would mind if he framed it and placed it in his office on campus. Surprised and moved, she would say yes. So that’s where it now hung: on a cinder-block wall in Roma High School, perhaps fifty feet from the table where an eighteen-year-old had drawn it—a token, though Dale didn’t know it, of the day when Susanna first set foot on the path to becoming his.

2.

She made it to the police station by four o’clock. She checked her reflection in the rearview mirror, embarrassed by the gesture even as she made it, but she couldn’t bear the thought of Tony seeing her as
plain, as lesser. Her hair, still long and brown, was drawn from her face with a fabric headband. Her makeup routine for anything but the rare special occasion was minimal: a dab of mascara and some tinted lip gloss, which she reapplied now. She didn’t think much about her looks these days; married, a mother, she accepted as fact that she was a person defined more by these roles than any essential core, her job robbing her of what little she had left. Creativity. Intellectual curiosity. Eighth graders were the most self-absorbed kids in the world, and they didn’t notice Susanna, didn’t distinguish the days when she’d curled her hair from the days when she’d pulled it, unwashed, into a limp ponytail. Dale, slightly better, took pains to compliment her on Sunday mornings before they went to church and before the faculty Christmas party—any situation calling for her to don a dress and pantyhose. But the clothes were mostly the same ones from five years ago, and so were his mild expressions of appreciation. She wanted, just once, for him to see her in a regular moment—cradling Abby before bedtime, chopping a carrot for dinner, tying her shoelaces before a walk—and to say, in that voice of pleased surprise she’d heard on TV and in movies, “Wow, you look beautiful.”

When she bothered, she bothered for Abby. Abby appreciated her. “Mommy’s pretty,” she said once, running a paddle brush through Susanna’s hair. That’s why she’d never had the heart to cut it shorter, though she was, in her late twenties, starting to feel pressure from her mother to go with a more sensible style, to have it clipped close to her head and feathered, the way many of the women at church wore it. Of course, Abby, who so loved her long hair, was also the child who’d said “Aunt Ronnie’s a princess” the time Ronnie came over in her trashiest club-crawling wear and dark purple eye shadow, hair sprayed to the rafters. Susanna laughed at the memory, then swallowed against tears. How she wanted her sister right now.

In the station, a receptionist directed her down the same hallway as before but to a different office number. The door was open, a triangle of bright fluorescent light carved into the pilled carpet. From inside there was a low hum and the staccato report of electric
typewriter keys. Susanna stepped into the doorway, rapping softly against the frame.

“Come in,” Tony said, waving her forward. He moved some papers to the side and flipped a switch on the typewriter, leaving the room in sudden quiet. “Well,” he said, getting a look at her. He was smiling faintly. “I knew that I knew you. Suzy Eastman.”

Susanna flushed, looked down at her hands. “I can’t believe you remember me.”

“You know better than that.” He reached across the table, took her hand, squeezed it. He was more handsome to Susanna than he’d been in high school, when she’d so clumsily drawn him—his gangly limbs now even and strong, his hair clipped close to his well-shaped head. He had a goatee—it might have been hiding the slightest plumpness under his chin—and he was wearing an outfit that would have made Susanna smile if she’d been here under lighter pretense: a collared white shirt and blue tie, an argyle sweater-vest, pleated corduroy trousers. He looked like a college professor.

“You look great,” she said before she could stop herself.

He shrugged, embarrassed, and released her hand. “Trying to stay respectable. Now, look at you. All grown-up.”

“And feeling every bit of it,” she said.

“Kids?”

“One. You?”

He shook his head, and Susanna was ashamed and amused at her relief.

“Haven’t had time to settle down,” he said, taking his seat again. Susanna followed his lead, perching nervously on an old wooden swivel chair that wanted to recline too far. It creaked beneath her weight.

“So tell me about Ronnie,” Tony said. “You say she’s been missing a little over a week?”

“It looks that way,” Susanna said. She was reassured by his seriousness and professionalism, especially after her conversation with Sergeant What’s-His-Name. “I haven’t heard from her in two
weeks—well, almost three now—and they told me at the sewing factory that she hasn’t clocked in since Friday the twenty-first. I—”

“So she did report to work on the twenty-first?”

Susanna nodded.

He jotted down some notes. “OK, go ahead.”

“I went to her house on—” She had to think. “Saturday. Just this past Saturday, to check on her. I let myself in with her spare key. It smelled so bad that I thought at first—” She stopped herself again. “Well, I don’t want to tell you what I thought. But it was food, a bunch of food that had obviously been sitting out for a while. Gas station food: livers, fried potatoes, stuff like that. And a lot of empty beers. Oh!” She grabbed her purse and unzipped it, fumbling around inside for the Fill-Up receipt, then smoothed it on the desk in front of him. “I found this.”