Wide Blue Yonder (30 page)

“Really? That’s great.”

“She’s Rosa.”

“Rosa, huh?” The girl looked into her coffee mug, like it was part of the conversation. “Well, that’s terrific, but … do you speak Spanish? I don’t guess she speaks English. Isn’t that kind of weird?”

Rosa put a plate of little pig sausages on the table. She had not said one word. Local Forecast stuffed sausages into his mouth and smacked them around. He wanted her to know they were good. She still wouldn’t look at him. It was all about the girl. She didn’t like the girl being here. She must be thinking …

Coffee sloshed in the mugs as Local Forecast stomped to his feet. Rosa and the girl looked up at him with their mouths unhinged. Local Forecast made his voice loud. He said, “This girl is just here to be lying low. Nobody has to get sniffy about it.”

Then he sat back down. He felt grand. He blew a kiss to Rosa. Something he’d never done before but he’d seen it on TV. Rosa must have seen it too, because she giggled and did that finger-wagging thing.

The girl said, “Well, I guess the two of you have everything worked out.” She took her coffee and went and sat on the back porch to watch the rain. Local Forecast sneaked up behind Rosa and tickled her until she shrieked.

Later the girl helped Rosa move furniture so she could do the floors. The girl said, “She doesn’t mess around, does she? She’s like samurai cleaning lady. If you can be that and still be Mexican.”

They sat in the kitchen to keep out of Rosa’s way. “I’m glad the two of you are in love and all. I’m glad somebody is.”

Local Forecast figured the girl just liked talking. He didn’t mind. It was what company was supposed to do.

“You remember that night we went for ice cream? You remember that guy? Well, he’s a world-class bullshitter. Love sucks.”

“Loveydovey.”

“Maybe it’s easier to be with somebody if you have, no offense, diminished capacities. Your expectations would naturally be lower. You could just ignore some of the rancid behavior.”

The rain outside was actual hurricane rain. That was something. The edge of the same storms hundreds of miles away reached as far as You Are Here. Out on the ocean it was raining sideways, in great sheets and torrents. Low-pressure systems were sucking everything into them, boats, palm trees, swordfish spinning out of the water in terror, their wet blue sails gleaming. He felt restless, like he should be getting ready for something.

The girl started crying. “I can’t stand it, I want to be with him so bad. Why am I calling you crazy? The craziest thing in the world is when you still want to be with somebody who … Promise me if I even reach for the phone, you’ll slap my hand.”

If there was a siren for storms, you were supposed to go down in the basement. It was the same for bombs. But he didn’t like the basement. It had a bad smell. Mamma kept her jars and home canning down there and sometimes they broke and the juices leaked out, runny and spoiled. Something in the basement was making his eyes go blind. Nononono, that was now.

Where was Moses when the lights went out?

Down in the cellar with his shirttail out

Rosa saw the girl crying. She came in and petted her on the back, which made the girl cry harder. “Is anybody ever happy? Are you even supposed to be?”

Rosa made them all tea with lemon and they sat around the kitchen table, watching the girl be sad. She said, “I’m missing school right now. So I guess that makes me truant. An official juvenile delinquent. A wayward girl.” She stopped crying long enough to drink some tea. “You know what the funny thing is? I could still get him in so much trouble. Like enormously. I hope he’s thinking about that right now. I hope he’s sweating bullets. Ha ha. The reason that’s funny is … never mind. It’s not that funny.”

Rosa said ya ya, and shook her head in sympathy. The girl blew her nose into a Kleenex and said, “She’s really kind of cute, Harvey. And she’s not that old. I mean, I don’t think she’s any older than you are. I should get you a Spanish dictionary. In case you decide you want to have a regular conversation.”

Local Forecast never had a girlfriend before. He wasn’t sure why. He guessed it was a scairdy thing. Back in School all the girls moved in a kind of flock or herd. They put their heads together and whispered secrets and laughed at things that amused them. It was hard to focus on any one girl, cut one out of the herd, although he liked them all in general, the general look of them. Girls wore petticoats and charm bracelets and stockings and hair
bows and there was always a lot of fuss about these items, their color, fit, and shape.

In the hospital, it had been a surprise when girls had none of these things.

All the fuss was meant to distract you, you were supposed to think that this was what was important or different about girls, clothes, and not what was underneath the clothes.

If there was a hurricane here, it might blow your clothes right off. It wouldn’t be anybody’s fault.

The girl said, “I’m going to lie down for a while. Maybe sleep. Watch the Weather Channel, sure.”

When she was gone, Local Forecast and Rosa were shy again. It was like they needed somebody else to help them be loveydovey.

T
he girl stayed on the couch most of the time. Even days, she slept a lot. When she was awake, she watched the hurricane news with him. Floyd was a monster. He was getting ready to dump the whole ocean on North Carolina. He was a dirty white blur on the map, a pinwheel of cloud arms with the calm space, the eye, a darkness in the center. Every day he nudged farther inland. Local Forecast worried some about his eyes. When he looked away from the television, there was still a cloud. If there was a cloud in your eyes, did you cry rain? If you saw something you should not have seen in the basement, would your eyes be punished?

Where was Moses when the lights went out?

The girl was asleep again. It was dark, it got dark earlier now and the crickets were back. Some stayed outside, some turned up in the closets where Fat Cat pounced on them. The cricket song
rose and shrilled, like a siren, almost. It made him fretful, out of sorts, he’d been like that all day. Rosa had been here but she was gone. He should water his garden. He should pay the power and light. In North Carolina, Floyd was drowning pigs. They had acres of pigs in North Carolina and they were all underwater. It was terrible. But that wasn’t what was worrying him, nor anything else he could put a name to. When the red car pulled up in the driveway, it was almost a relief that whatever he’d been waiting for was finally here.

J
osie?

Elaine sat up. Every light in the house was on. She thought she’d heard something. But the room stared her down. No one was there. Josie had been gone for three days and three nights.

Gone
wasn’t a word that stayed put. It kept time. Josie was gone for every minute of every hour of those three days. She was still gone, still gone, still gone.
Gone
kept happening.

There were times Elaine was furious, her anger spiking through everything else, so that she could have shaken the girl hard enough to make her teeth chatter in her head, if only, if only, if only she were here to be shaken! The anger didn’t last. What lasted was
gone
.

She had lost everything. All the years of motherhood, the skin she’d grown into through long habit, birthing and tending, dispensing bedtime stories and punishments, yes you may, no you may not, because I said so, because I’m your mother, because I love you entirely and absolutely—all that she had played false and lost in an instant. She never should have pushed things to this point. Or maybe Josie was the one who’d pushed, but Elaine should not have pushed back. It didn’t matter now. When Josie was small, Elaine had the nightmares common to all parents, of her child being abducted, lost, stolen from school or stores or from her own bed. But what if the child stole herself?

The morning after Josie escaped and didn’t come home, Elaine went to see Josie’s friend Tammy. Tammy was at work, she worked in the library. Elaine found her trundling a cart of books through the aisles, emitting that total lack of energy that seemed to accompany her every movement. “Oh, hi, Mrs. Lindstrom,” she said, rearranging her bad posture. “How ya doin?”

Elaine wasn’t in the mood to waste time on her. “I need to know about this boy Josie’s been seeing. I need to know where she is.”

“Haven’t seen her. Sorry.”

“Tell me about the boy.”

Tammy hefted a book and put it down again. “She has some kind of new boyfriend?”

Not that Elaine expected the truth out of her. Tammy had one of those horrid eyebrow piercings, which gave her whole face a skewed, piratical look. Elaine said, “I really need to find her, Tammy. I’m afraid this boy, whoever he is, is dangerous.”

Tammy’s eyebrow took a different, smirking twist. “Oh, I wouldn’t worry about that.”

“Why’s that, Tammy? Huh? Who is he?”

Tammy’s expression went back to sullen neutral. She was a girl with rather coarse, staring features who got herself up so provocatively you didn’t at first notice. Did the library allow glitter eyeshadow? Apparently it did. Tammy said, “Look, we don’t really hang out anymore. I don’t know what she’s doing. Is she in trouble or something?”

Elaine, aware that anything she might say would be gossip fodder, and that she’d probably already said too much, shook her head. “I can’t find her and I need to talk to her. If you see her, please tell her that.”

“I bet she’s fine, Mrs. Lindstrom. She’s probably just out partying. Hey, Tuesday’s the first day of school. Is she going to be there or what?”

Elaine left and drove the streets for a time, thinking that Springfield wasn’t so big you could hide for very long, sooner or later she’d be bound to find her. But Josie could be anywhere by now. Kids ran off all the time, to Chicago or New York or the rest of the world. She was beginning to realize it wasn’t so much a matter of finding Josie as waiting for her to come home.

Still, she called the police, who told her it was too soon to file a missing person’s report, and that most kids came home after a day or two, especially if there’s been an argument. She should call back in a few days if she hadn’t heard anything. Elaine wasn’t about to settle for that. She was accustomed to not settling for answers she didn’t like. She simply persisted, saying the same thing over and over again in different ways, until people gave ground. By the time she got off the phone, the police had agreed to flag Josie’s car on their computer, and Elaine had an appointment with the department’s youth officer.

She decided it would be better to call Frank sooner rather than later, so he couldn’t accuse her of withholding things. Elaine reached him in Aspen the morning after Josie’s second night gone. “We had an argument. I took her keys and told her she was grounded. She found them and sneaked out while I was in the shower.”

Frank seemed to have trouble comprehending this. “So where is she now?”

“I don’t know, Frank. That’s why I’m calling.”

“You can’t exert enough basic control to keep her off the street?”

“Don’t start. You can’t keep teenagers under lock and key.” Although she had been considering doing exactly that.

“Well, what do you want me to do? I’m fifteen hundred miles away, Elaine. Can’t I leave for a simple vacation without some damn catastrophe?”

“You’re right, Frank. I’m sorry to disturb you. If she ever does come home, I’ll drop you a line.”

Sound of Frank being annoyed in silence. Then he said, “What did you argue about?”

“She’s been lying to me about some boy she’s been seeing. She wouldn’t tell me who he is.”

“Lying? What, she said he was somebody else?”

“She was just very evasive.” Elaine decided she would spare him her darkest suspicions. Frank would think she was nuts, maybe she was by now. “I was trying to get her away from a bad influence.” How far away was another thing she wouldn’t tell him. She never should have called that place, what was its name, something smarmy and deceptively encouraging, Horizons or Challenges. She hadn’t been thinking straight, she’d been angry and frustrated and she’d wanted to get Josie’s attention. She had wanted not to be ignored anymore.

“Bad influence,” said Frank. “You ask me, everybody under twenty-five’s a bad influence these days.”

“I’m trying to find the boyfriend. I expect that’s where she’s staying, with him.”

Frank swore off to the side of the receiver. Elaine had a horrible thought. If Josie had … She couldn’t have overhead her on the phone. But if she had … “How’s Aspen?” she asked idiotically.

“The damn time-share people screwed up the drain in the tub. It’s a total mess. I think they were grooming dogs in there. Look, shouldn’t you be doing something? Shouldn’t the police?”

“They are.” She was trying to convince herself there was no possible way Josie could have been listening. “When are you coming back?”

“Thursday. Unless you think we should get there sooner.”

“No, I guess you can’t really … do anything.” It would be just
like Josie to overreact in some grandiose and spiteful way. Make some rash gesture she didn’t even mean, out of pride and wounded feelings. Just like her mother.

“Harvey’s going into the hospital the day after we get back. I’m telling you now so there won’t be any carrying on.”

Oh God, Harvey. “Does he have any clue? Have you told him?”

“The less he hears about it the better. You know I’m right.”

No she didn’t, but there was only room in her for one crisis at a time, and Harvey would have to wait. “I’ll call you if there’s anything.”

“You sound whipped.”

“That’s me.”

“She’ll turn up. Then I’ll beat the crap out of her.”

“Don’t even joke like that. We’re going to have to do some serious, serious … Do you really think she’s all right?”

“She better be or I’ll kill her.”

She must be really far gone if talking to Frank was actually making her feel better. She hung up the phone and went back to waiting.

School had already begun. The start of Josie’s senior year. Elaine met with the principal and the assistant principal and the guidance counselor. They were all very sympathetic and supportive and kept assuring her of what a good, an excellent, student Josie was, and how unlike her this behavior was, a minor episode, a peccadillo that would not interfere with her completing her coursework and graduating on schedule. Assuming, it went without saying, that she came back sometime soon. Meanwhile, if there was anything they could do, anything at all … There wasn’t, really, but it calmed her to talk to people who treated her as if she was in fact a good and responsible parent.