The Next Time You See Me (17 page)

Freak! Freak! Freak!
Emily’s shocked face. Her tears after.

Leanna was unbuckling his belt, her hot mouth was on him.

He drifted off, caught for half the night in that restless place between dreaming and wakefulness, caught between his memories of the pleasure of the day and the horror, building toward a climax that ebbed, always, into snapshots from the cafeteria—Emily’s tears, Mrs. Mitchell’s anger—and then, when he felt his conscious self finally intervening, dragging him back to the room, where his groin felt bruised against the faint pressure of the sheet, he thought at last of Emily’s eyes through the chain link, their bright shock, and he tightened his fingers into Leanna’s wavy hair, found his breath again, and slept.

Chapter Ten

1.

It was after ten when Susanna got back from her meeting with Tony Joyce. She came in, dropped her shoulder bag by the coat hook, and observed Dale sitting stiff and neat in his recliner with a glass of milk in his hand. She could see on his face that he had noticed the irony of their reversed roles, that he had tried an evening of being the one waiting, left behind, and hadn’t liked it.

“I’ve already gotten a phone call,” Dale said. “Michael Sheffield, from the bank. Said he saw a flyer with my sister-in-law’s picture on it. He offered his condolences.”

Word had traveled fast. She and Tony had gone to the house first, where he listened seriously to her and took copious notes, and then they had gone back to the police department, sat down together at the office’s one shared computer, and designed a
MISSING
flyer. It had been . . . well, nice. He had shown her how to use CorelDRAW, and it was amazing, this computer world that had not yet interested her or touched her much, aside from the couple of hours a week at school that she had the students spend word-processing some of their writing assignments. She and Tony played with fonts and clip art, settled on bold text only, the oversized word
MISSING
like a siren call at the top of the page, the other pertinent info also in all caps
and centered below a space where they would tape the photograph before making copies. They used the one good recent photo Susanna had been able to find of Ronnie. She had taken it herself the previous Thanksgiving (could that be almost a year ago now?), and Ronnie was not, for once, making a face at the camera or hiding behind her hand. She was smirking, still—
Get it over with,
Susanna remembered her saying when she brought out the camera—but smirking was a recognizably Ronnie expression. Most anyone who had seen her would have seen her making this look.

It had been like college again. Not just because Susanna was seated so close to a man who was not her husband, or because that man had once made her light up with joy, but because she was learning, doing something new; she was putting creative energy into something other than her classes and her daughter. That the object of her efforts was a poster advertising her missing sister did not rob the activity of all of its pleasure. She had felt more alive then, and later, driving around town with Tony to post the flyers, than she had in a long time.

“I guess that was nice of him,” she said finally. “Premature, but nice.”

“It’s embarrassing.” He crossed his legs. “Go ahead and make me the bad guy. It’s fine. But I don’t believe for a minute that Ronnie’s missing, or no more missing than she wants to be.”

Susanna threw up her hands. “What’s with you, Dale? Seriously. Say she’s off somewhere, like you believe she is. Say she just took off. What on earth harm is it doing for me to look for her?”

“The problem’s drawing every person in town’s attention to the fact that your sister’s a cokehead. It wouldn’t surprise me if she was selling herself, too.”

“You should hear yourself,” Susanna said. “That is beyond the pale.”

“And now you’ve got the police drawn into it. You’re not doing Ronnie any favors.”

It hit her then. Standing in the doorway still, not completely out
of her coat, arguing with her husband about the value of her sister’s life—she realized that he disgusted her. She had made this man the father of her daughter, and Abby would bind them to one another for the rest of their lives. On the heels of this revelation came another. She was startled by it, shocked that she hadn’t recognized it sooner. She put her coat on the hook in a dazed way, the truth vibrating inside her, making her feel a little drunk.

“This isn’t about Ronnie,” she said. “It’s about me. You’re punishing me.”

“Don’t be stupid.”

“See, there you go.” She looked at their living room full of the things he had chosen and sat on the couch she had chosen. The couch was as good a reminder as any that she was responsible, too. That a woman who could hate a thing that had once, not that long ago, seemed so perfect for her was a woman who didn’t know herself well enough. “If I don’t agree with you I’m stupid.”

He shook his head. “Don’t be that way.”

“ ‘Don’t be that way,’ ” Susanna repeated. “That’s our lives together in a nutshell. Don’t be that way, be this other way.”

“I’m not even going to speak again,” Dale said. “You’re twisting everything I say into this—this feminist bullshit.”

“Fair enough,” Susanna murmured. And he was right, in a way; it wasn’t fair to express her dismay in ready-made homilies, in someone else’s generic terms for outrage. She wasn’t his victim. She wasn’t without blame. If he had been much older than she, maybe, or smarter—but he wasn’t, and yet here they were, twenty-eight and thirty-one years old, and they were settling into a lifetime of unkindness toward one another. She knew that she would support Dale if his sister went missing, that she would, in some ways, express more care than he himself could muster—but wouldn’t that, too, be a judgment of him, a subtle dig? She couldn’t sit here and sort out the gradations of guilt, what separated good intentions from ill. There were more significant sensations, physical ones, like the fact that if
he tried to kiss her cheek or put his hand on her thigh right now, she would shudder.

“I’m not a bad person,” Dale said. “I’m not punishing you—what would I punish you for? I mean, sure, I don’t like Ronnie. I don’t like the choices she’s made. And whether we want to think it or not, she reflects on us. You, too, Suze. And she reflects on Abby.”

“Anybody who’d let a grown woman’s actions inform their judgment of a four-year-old child is too foolish for me to give a good goddamn about.” Susanna went to the kitchen, took out a glass, and hunted for the bottle of wine that she hadn’t finished on Friday. Dale had pushed it to the back of the refrigerator, as though he wanted to make it disappear but didn’t have the courage to just pour it out. She emptied it into her glass and sipped. It was still cheap, still sour. But what a delight to flaunt it in front of her husband, and of course there was the entirely singular delight of the drink itself, the ritual of rolling the liquid on her tongue, the little zing of pleasure when she’d consumed enough to feel her face warm. If she were another kind of woman, living a different sort of life, no one would begrudge her this. She would have real wineglasses and friends that she could go out with for drinks after work. She would have friends. She would still be living in her own apartment—she liked to imagine herself in a city—or maybe, by this time, she would have found a man who shared her interests, and perhaps they would not marry at all. How radical that would have seemed to her twenty-two-year-old self. How horrified her mother would have been.

“What have we here?” Dale said. He had followed her. “It’s nice to see you bringing your argument to a conclusion in the honored Eastman tradition.” He curled his hand around an imaginary glass and tipped it back and forth, wiggling his eyebrows like Groucho Marx.

Susanna smirked and shook her head. She leaned her hips against the kitchen counter and sipped.

Dale sighed loudly. “I’d thought we’d be thinking about a second
baby by now,” he said matter-of-factly. “Actually, I’d thought we might even have one. Four years apart is good. It makes sense.”

“Not everything has to make sense.”

“I realize that, believe it or not.” He pulled a chair out from the dinette set and sat. “I never mentioned it. I never pushed you. I kept thinking you’d say something one day, or that it would just happen, like it did with Abby.” He was looking at her intently, his face almost handsome with the scrutiny. “And then I just knew at some point that Abby was it. I realized that motherhood doesn’t make you happy.”

She blinked against the pressure in her sinuses. “I am a good mother. I am seventy-five percent or more of the parenting she gets.”

“I didn’t say you weren’t good at it,” Dale said. His voice was almost kind. “I said you didn’t want to do it.”

And because he was right—because he had seen the truth she could usually hide from herself, and because she resented that so much intimacy existed still between them, she finished the wine, snapped her bangs out of her eyes, and said, “Maybe I just don’t want to be the mother to any more of
your
children, Dale. Did you think of that?”

His face tensed, and his jaw quivered. Otherwise, he was very still. “Do you love me?”

“Do you love me?” she said sharply.

“Yes,” he said. Susanna could tell, despite everything, that he meant it. “Do you love me? I want to know.”

Susanna held her empty glass tightly and broke eye contact.

“Well,” he said. “Well, that’s that, then.” He rose, scratched the back of his head in a sheepish way. “I’m turning in. Good night.”

“Dale,” she called after him.

“Good night,” he repeated. When she came to bed a few moments later, having crept into Abby’s room long enough to plant a soft kiss on the top of her head, he was resting peacefully on his back, hands folded on his stomach, face smooth with calm. He was fully occupying his half of the bed, not hunched away from the center, and Susanna slid in hesitantly beside him.

“I wonder what’s worse,” he said, just as Susanna was relaxing into the certainty that he wouldn’t speak again. “Being stuck in a marriage to someone you love, who doesn’t love you back? Or being stuck with someone you don’t love.”

“Who says we’re stuck?” Susanna said hoarsely.

He laughed and rolled heavily over onto his side, shifting so that the springs creaked.

“When you figure out how to get unstuck,” he said, “let me know.”

Chapter Eleven

1.

The rest of Wyatt’s week in the hospital passed strangely. It should have been bad, the worst week of his life. There was the endless procession of nurses, orderlies, and doctors, the instructions against all that he took pleasure in: fat, salt, sugar. On Wednesday there was the angioplasty, which he’d been painfully awake for, and then, afterward, a full day and night of having to lie flat on a single thin pillow, nourished only with fluids. The yellow carnations on the sink—a gift from Price Electric—stood alone, then wilted, flowers bent over the vase like bowed heads. His groin was sore from the catheter, and he kept thinking he could feel the stent now behind his breastbone, especially since they’d started lifting the head of the bed, making it possible for him to watch television. It was a tiny pressure, irritatingly foreign, and the impossibility of its placement—the fact that it existed inside him now, out of reach—made him nervous, almost claustrophobic. He continued to knead his chest, looking like he was about to recite the Pledge of Allegiance.

But Boss was OK—and, more than that, Morris Houchens had taken the dog in until Wyatt could return home. “He’s a good old boy,” Morris had said, standing awkwardly at the foot of Wyatt’s bed on Thursday evening, hands plunged to the forearms in the pockets of
his blue jeans. “Billy loves dogs. They’re company to each other. And Emily’s taking him for walks.”

“I’m grateful to you,” Wyatt kept saying, and Morris kept waving him off.

“Not a problem.” Morris had shrugged sheepishly, looking down at Wyatt’s bedcovers as though eye contact were too much for him. “When will you get out of here?”

“They’re telling me Sunday.”

Morris reached up to lift his baseball cap and scratch the back of his head. “I could come over here to give you a ride after I get home from church, if that’s not too late.”

Wyatt swallowed against a sudden ache in his sinuses. “You’ve already done too much. Don’t you worry about it.”

“No. I don’t mind. I’ll just take you home on Sunday, and then I’ll do some grocery shopping for you if you need me to. Maybe you could make me a list between now and then.” He said this all matter-of-factly, the issue already settled. “I’ve talked to HR. There’s some forms for you to fill out when you’re up to it.”

Wyatt nodded, weighted with dread. He’d been worrying about work, about how quickly he’d be able to get back, about whether or not he’d be capable of doing the job once he did.
You move slow,
he could hear Jusef saying, his brows lowered.
You put me behind
.

“I could probably go over there on Monday for the forms,” Wyatt said. “But I don’t know if I can be at work just yet. I might need a few days.”

Morris actually laughed out loud. “Heavens, they don’t expect you back next week or the week after that. You can take a couple of months now that that act’s passed, but you’ll have to file for unemployment.”

“Oh.” This seemed too sensible, too easy. “Huh.”

“I’ll take you by that office, too. But it can all wait until next week. You just rest up now.”

“I don’t know what to say, Morris.”

“Nothing’s best. I don’t like a lot of hoopla.”

“All right, then.”

“You sleep tight,” Morris had said. “You’ve got a lot on your plate tomorrow.”

And indeed, he had: the angioplasty early in the morning, the day flat on his back, needles, bitter pills, the sheets beneath him that were always too hot or too wrinkled, so that he could pass thirty minutes just thinking about the ridge of folded bedclothes passing horizontally under his back. Bland soups, sugarless Jell-O. Hobbling out of bed, rolling his IV stand with one hand and holding his gown closed behind him with the other, each creaking step to the bathroom a humiliation. Wyatt had plenty on his plate.