The Sweet Relief of Missing Children (20 page)

S
he was faithful to Sam. She could be a regular person. She could be good, ordinary, a normal wife and mother, unhaunted, untempted. But then why did it seem sometimes that the house was talking to her? Why, sometimes, when the baby cried and she'd go down the hall, flip on the light, did she find Diana sound asleep in her crib? The birdlike, creaking crying could not be placed. And once, having sex with her husband, she heard him say something terrible into her ear. The words were delivered in a pitiless voice. She pulled away, cried, “What did you say?” It made no sense that he would utter such a thing. She cried, “Why on earth would you say that?” and grabbed at his face.

“I didn't say anything, honey. I swear.”

It was true. That voice had not been Sam's. The voice she'd heard was damp, cavernous, as from the dead. But mostly the house was a fine place. They filled it with their things, then got more things. Mostly Judith was a normal person. She bought a sewing machine and made a pair of curtains for their bedroom. The fabric was on clearance, multicolored paisleys that seemed to move if you looked at them long enough, to shimmer and twitch, that evoked the tumult of semen.

The baby was normal, that was for sure. She grew. She learned some words. Her voice was high and sanguine, like a doll whose string is pulled. Judith found it distressing, those twittering cadences. One day she said, “Honey, why do you talk so much? Sometimes it's better to save your words for something that really has to be said.” A stricken look fell over the child's face, and Judith felt guilty. Why would she make such a complaint? Why could she not tame her instincts? Still, it worked; Diana quieted down a little.

Sam finished his accounting degree. They got along. He did what she asked, such as brush her hair at night. Such as bring her coffee in the morning, and allow her meannesses, and paint the kitchen dark pink, even the insides of the cupboards, like tongue.

Tuesday. Wednesday. Thursday.

May. June. July.

Before, when she was a girl, time had been a pricker, an irritant, a tiny sliver of wood stuck in her palm coloring the experience of everything she touched. Her finger went there without thinking, again and again. She wanted time to go faster or slower or for it to pause momentarily. She did a quiet sort of battle with it, always. Now the sliver had been removed. That was her adulthood. A smoothness where once was friction. As if someone had one day walked up to her and, unspeaking, lifted her hand and simply tweezed it away. The nerves there quieted down. She had little awareness of the movement of time anymore. That is to say, she saw the calendar and wore a watch, but her days assumed a new fluidity. The tension of her childhood, the sense of something about to happen or having just happened, the wondering if it would happen again, the hoping you could defeat the clock with the very power of your ardent heart—this was gone. She lived in a dull, bright, busy present. Days passed. She slept and woke. Her daughter had a birthday, another, etc.

Once, in the child's fourth year, Sam said he wanted to take them all to Orlando, to make the great American slog, three days in a car without air-conditioning so they could enter the gates of that ever-after-y cosmos, where for your effort you were allowed to stand in hour-long lines and marvel at gleeful electric puppets and get earnest tinkling songs stuck in your head for the rest of your days. Judith refused. She knew the place would demand she maintain a certain dazed and beaming face, and the thought of seeing crowds of people with the same face terrified her. But she wanted Sam to go. She wanted him to take the child away for a while. Judith had not been alone for a very long time. No, that wasn't true—she had
never
been alone, not rightly. What would she do, by herself in the house for a week? Two weeks? The prospect nearly took her breath away. The bed to herself. The bathtub. Or maybe she would go somewhere, take her own vacation?
Alone.
The word dispersed throughout her body like steam.

“You go. I'll stay here,” she said.

“By yourself?”

“Sure.”

It was ten o'clock at night. They were in bed. She was reading a mystery novel in which they kept discovering bloated corpses floating in some ritzy marina.

He said, “Aw, she'd have more fun if you were with us.”

Judith didn't believe this to be true—Diana was an adaptable child, captivated more by things than people. She was the kind of girl you found fiddling with pipe cleaners, pressing her face against a fish tank, a reader of princess books, picker of grass, long hair in a prairie braid, rosy cheeks. She tested the water with the big toes of both feet, as if one might be wrong. A double-checker. A lover of solitary games. She had a cool, blunted prettiness often assumed to be sagacity. Was it? They didn't know yet. She collected rabbit feet dyed unnatural colors. Slowly, with infinite patience, she assembled puzzles depicting the Scottish Highlands or wet-eyed baby animals. She was in kindergarten. Her teacher called her “amiable”—such a pale word. Wasn't it? So treacherously pleasant.

“Have you ever considered…” Sam spoke lightly. A newspaper—he was doing the crossword—rested on his tented legs. He said, “Perhaps you're putting your own needs before hers?”

“What am I failing to give her that she needs?”

“I just think she'd like a vacation.”

“I mean besides Donald Duck. What else am I neglecting?”

“You're a good mother.”

“Was that in question? I didn't realize.”

“We could camp out along the way.” He scribbled on the edge of the newspaper to get the pen's ink flowing. He said, “S'mores.”

“I'd rather go to—” But she couldn't think of someplace else.

He shrugged, went back to his puzzle.

“In any case,” she said. “I have no idea what that even means:
good mother.
Who can say? Not us, of all people.”

She looked down at the cover of her book, a close-up of a heavily lipsticked mouth opened in fear or in ecstasy, you couldn't tell which.

She said, “I feed her. I love her. Enough. Do I have to wear mouse ears to prove it?”

He didn't bring up Orlando again.

She slept with her head on his chest. His body was trim, long. It had not altogether lost its boyishness. The knobbiness remained, the startled breath and hairless chest. But now there were things that were not boy. For example the ability to grow a mustache. In certain lights, the faintest touch of gray at his temples. The way his mouth curled when he was unhappy, or how his brow rose and the nostrils widened when he was pleased. The definitiveness of his expressions, that's what she meant. This was new. During their first days together, he could not utter a feeling or wish without questioning it, contradicting himself, squeezing up his face as if to say:
But is that right? Is that what I feel? What do I feel? Tell me. Tell me!
That habit had stopped. He had been a fast-breathing, guilty, horny, desperate kid. Now he was stronger, she believed, in body and in mind. But the boy was not fully gone. He underlay the man. In bed she could see him, the boy: he lay like a body within the body, removed as a corpse, but he was not dead.

She reached across his torso and grabbed his upper arm. His skin was warm and smooth. She was eye to eye with his Adam's apple, watched it beat. Maybe she would have been happier if he had more fully transformed. She wondered. If he had lost the boy in him, perhaps the girl in her (that hungry, charmless, unwashed thing, a shoplifter, a lover of dumb thrills, a nail-biter, an escape artist) would have likewise vanished. It was like the presence of boy in him confirmed the girl in her, and this was cause for great disappointment, because she wanted that girl exorcised. She wanted that girl strung up, wanted someone to poke at her with a stick, wanted a public ritual, a crowd to finish her off once and for all.

He told her to have sweet dreams, and she said she hoped the same for him. They lay in the darkness. Down the hall, their child dreamed of boats taking on water, of holes in their hulls she plugged with chewing gum.

J
udith stood in the kitchen while Pax waited. She poured two glasses of bourbon, then combed her hair with her fingers. What was she doing? Why was she hesitating to go back in there? The rain started again. The pink kitchen, in the absence of sunshine, in the dusky light of a rainy afternoon, had become darker, not tongue but throat. Finally she returned to the living room. He said, “Man, I could go for some chocolate cake.” He'd finally lit the cigarette. He took dainty, courteous puffs.

“I'm not much of a cook,” she said.

In less than an hour her daughter would come home from school. Judith's body felt calm, calmer by the moment, but a certain urgency was building in her mind. He would leave. She would never see him again. What did she want? She sat down next to him, legs pulled under her, knees pressed lightly into the side of his thigh.

He said, “Basically I've lived my whole life on buses. I ran away at sixteen. Took the first bus I saw. Got off here and there. I made fruit pyramids in Seattle. Baked bread in Tulsa. This girl and I had a place for a few months. But sooner or later I always found myself back on the bus.”

“Fruit pyramids.”

“Her name was Becky. She was a good girl.” He paused, said, “I feel like a voyeur. Like—how is it? Like a spy into my future. Like if I hadn't left—if I hadn't run away—this would have been my life. This old house. A kid. A wife. Maybe even you? It's like I'm seeing some version of the life I've run away from. It's like I'm a voyeur into my own existence.”

She pressed an index finger into his ribs. He did not show awareness that she had touched him. What was she after? She was suddenly irritated by her passivity, and by his jabber, and by the clock which showed just forty-five minutes until her daughter returned.

“Listen to me. God knows I'm no philosopher. I'm just a wanderer. A mucked-up, dirty, hobo American. But this place”—he opened his hand to the room—“it's me when I was me, or when I could have become me. The me I was supposed to be. I mean I want to come back. It's such a shitty house! No offense. But it is, right? No place to raise a kid.”

“Drink your bourbon.”

But he said, “Keep your daughter safe.”

“Don't worry about my daughter.”

“Keep her safe.”

“Don't!”

“I think I may be the ghost under her bed. My mother kissed my cheek. In that room. Then my eyelids, my ears, my mouth, my neck, my—”

She said, “Stop with the mother already.”

Did he not imagine she had one too? That they all did? That his was not the only one lurking?

He stopped.

Diana would come trundling home. And then Sam, the accountant, her cock-a-doodle, her one true everlasting, he would come home with his briefcase under his arm, sighing mightily like a man from the mines, and she would pour him a drink, and he would stay here until the day he died. Pax's was not the only sorrow in the house. You could tell him this, and he would say he understood, and he would think he understood, but the truth was he did not understand, and not understanding such an important thing is what makes a person ride a bus all his life. Judith leaned in close to him. She said, “There are no ghosts under my daughter's bed.”

He nodded. “I'm sorry I said so.” He seemed to mean it. Now she felt a stab of pity. He was still a boy. He'd dissected his suffering as a kid takes apart a car engine, emerges greasy, soiled—the car won't run, but signs of his effort are everywhere. There was silence for a minute, peace, but then he was talking again, on and on, about a kind of ice cream he'd been addicted to as a kid, about the dog he never got, about some guy he'd met on a bus with a peacock feather in his hat. Her pity went away. Would he shut up? Could she make him shut up? Who was he to come into her home and speak aloud any flitting thing that haunted his brain? Why had she allowed this?

Then it occurred to her that she was allowed to do the same.

She said, “What, do you think, would make a woman drive her whole family into an oncoming train?”

Because he did not have a monopoly on sorrow. Because she had never before asked it.

He raised his eyebrows. “Is this some kind of riddle?”

He had found, as if from a suitcase of disguises, a cool, professorial face.

“No.”

“Is there a right answer, or is it hypothetical?”

She said, “Both. Neither. I don't know.”

But it did not provide the release she expected. It felt, simply, like a betrayal of her husband, as if she had revealed what kind of underwear Sam wore, or had mimicked the sound he made when he ejaculated.

Pax's eyes were closed. He appeared to be thinking. He said, “Shame.” He opened his eyes. “What are people ashamed of?”

Her mind was empty.

“Or—wait.” He rubbed his temples. “I have it. What's the only thing stronger than shame?” The question hung like a cobweb between them. It had no obvious source or color or use. “
Fear
of shame,” he said. “A fear of shame so strong you'll do whatever it takes to earn it. People do the sickest, weirdest things. Anything to lay claim to whatever feeling you fear the most. I wish it weren't so, but all the evidence points to it.” He looked at her a long moment. He blinked. “You thinking of going this route?”

Now is when she kissed him. She leaned in. His breath was warm and sweet, strawberry jam caught in the corners of his mouth.

What had happened in this house? Just the same mundane horror that happened everywhere. It was an ordinary house. But of course there was no house that wasn't its own chamber of horrors, that didn't, somewhere, have a hidden door, a hidden mouth. Diana would come home soon. Judith would pour her a cup of juice. They would sit at the kitchen table and play Operation. When it was Judith's turn she would lift her instrument, pause before the body. She would retrieve the spare rib. The child would murmur encouragement, as Judith had done for the child. Judith would feel unnaturally in control of her hands. She could empty the whole body. She could! The Adam's apple. The funny bone. She could win, if there wasn't the unassailable rule that her daughter must win. The funny bone on the table. Her daughter watching solemnly. Why did the child have to win? Why did such a rule exist? What was its purpose except to fool the child, except to make her future that much harder to bear? The charley horse. The broken heart. The wishbone. Each and every blasted part. Would her hand have ever felt steadier? Would her hand have ever felt more
her hand
? No.

She tasted cigarettes and strawberry jam. As they kissed he made a sound like someone waking (a rising hum), and then like someone falling asleep (a descending sigh), these two sounds back and forth, as if entering and leaving consciousness even as he kissed her, here and nowhere, nowhere and here. Finally they pulled apart.

“That's exactly what I'm taking about,” he said. “It's what I've been saying all along.”

“What have you been saying?”

Disappointment passed over his face. “How shame makes you an outlaw. How it makes you an outlaw and a voyeur. That's me. Both. Plus—can I be honest?—lonely.”

She took off her shirt. He looked impassively at her breasts. She took his hand, placed it on her chest; when she let go, his hand fell away.

“My stepfather came into the room. He found us. He saw it. I tried to hurt him.”

“It's done. Whatever happened, it's done now.”

“It's not. It's never.”

She said, “Look at what is right in front of you.” Her nipples were pale brown, faintly flecked with darker spots, like eggshell.

He squinted, said, “I don't know how.”

She felt very little. He barely touched her, floated above her body, his motions resembling push-ups. The act concluded with a familiar sound, a creaking like an infant's mechanical squall. They lay on the splintery wood floor. What she felt was sad release, the cruel pleasure of knowing the world moves along without you. She said his name but immediately regretted it, because he took this as an invitation to speak.

“You know what's nice about you?” he said. “You're at peace. You know what you want, don't fight it. You've got no need for morality or theories or, shit,
buses.
”

“What are you talking about?”

She felt the urge to hit him. He wasn't allowed to talk about her—he knew nothing!

Diana was walking home from school with a stick in one hand and a book about oceanic mysteries in the other.

He said, “You're a blessing, Judith.”

She said, “I'm not blessing you.”

“You don't need to try. It just happens.”

She said, “Look at my face.”

“I'm looking.”

“You're not.”

He was.

She wanted only Sam now.

“I saw it when you opened the door,” he said. He stroked her cheek. “You have no use for shame. None. You're beyond it. You know how primitive it is. Me, it's all I've got. Tomorrow you'll wake up like it's any other day. You've got a girl to raise. Dishes to wash. That's magnificent, isn't it? That's what I call good goddamn luck.”