You Believers (14 page)

She looked out the window and back toward the glare of a sun setting in the west. Lawrence was angry when she left, said she was overreacting. His voice still hung in the air around Livy even thirty thousand feet above the ground: “She’s thirty years old, not some runaway child. Maybe she decided she didn’t want to marry that guy. He’s a bricklayer, a pothead who just happens to have a house. And she’s a bartender, for God’s sake. Maybe she just got drunk and took off for a party. You’re gonna get down there and she’ll be sitting in the living room with a hangover.” Livy squeezed her hands together in her lap to keep from slapping him. “It happens,” Lawrence said. “Women get a wild streak and run off. You see it on the news all the time.”

“Not Katy,” Livy said, even though she knew there’d been some pretty wild times with Frank. The woman across the aisle glanced at her, turned back to her
SkyMall
catalog.
Oh, God
, Livy thought,
I’m losing it, talking out loud
. She bit her lip, held it between her teeth to keep from talking. She stared at the blue upholstery of the seat in front of her. Lawrence hated it when Livy did anything that wasn’t a part of his plan. They were supposed to have dinner that night, entertain some client and his wife. Fine food, good wine. Lawrence liked to take her out with clients. There were times it paid, he said, to have a glamour girl for a wife. Good-looking and knows numbers. Plays golf and cooks like a five-star chef. Livy hated it when he tallied up her virtues as if she were an investment. She felt like a dearly bought racehorse when he bragged and sat back with his friends watching her, proud of her grace and speed as she ran around the track.

Livy closed her eyes and prayed,
Please God, let her be all right
. Livy opened her eyes. The woman across the aisle was staring at
her; then she looked away. Livy sighed and told herself that Billy had done something and Katy had run off. That was all. When Katy was a girl, she’d often run off when she was hurt, afraid, or ashamed. Livy always knew where to find her: up in the tree house her daddy had built. Sometimes Livy thought that was why Katy had moved to Wilmington, to hide from the girl she’d once been, as if striking out for a new land could make the old world disappear.

Livy’s eyes teared. But she kept her gaze on the eastern horizon, knowing another day was passing and her daughter was gone. When Livy had called Billy from the airport just before stepping on the plane, he’d been crying. He had told her what she already knew, that this wasn’t like Katy, that something was wrong. He’d called the cops, but they had said there were no leads and no signs of foul play. Livy’s throat clenched as she swallowed back the nausea watering at the back of her mouth. She raised her hand for the attendant. He was a sweet-looking boy with dark hair, blue eyes. He looked at her with such tenderness, she could have been his weakened old aunt. Lord, she thought, did it show? Did she look as weak and broken as she felt?

“Yes, ma’am,” he said. “Are you all right?”

“A Coke, please?” she asked. “I’m a little ill.”

“Right away,” he said.

Livy glanced out the window. Maybe Katy had crashed somewhere on the side of the road. Or maybe she’d gone to Lake Waccamaw by herself. She was always doing that, driving off to lonesome places to sip a beer, be alone. Maybe someone had grabbed her out there. It could happen. It happened all the time. She felt a sob breaking in her chest. Her mind fluttered over images of children on milk cartons, those “Missing” flyers flapping on phone poles, stuck on bulletin boards in grocery stores and Laundromats. Livy’s mind turned over possibilities. Date rape? Drugs? Could Katy have stopped
at a bar for a beer and someone—her mind skipped. She sucked in a breath, released it, and managed to say thank you as she reached for the cup of Coke from the attendant.

“You’ll feel better in a minute,” he said. “The plane has leveled off, and the captain predicts a smooth flight.” His comforting words sent tears spilling from her eyes as she gulped down the Coke. The woman across the aisle glanced at her, then quickly turned away. Others looked and turned. No one wanted to see a woman collapsing on a plane. It was all so pathetic. Public grief. Lord, she should have ordered a beer. “My daughter is missing,” she said out loud to no one.

The woman across the aisle, well dressed, like any middle-aged woman without fear on a plane, leaned toward her, reached as if to take Livy’s hand. “I’m so sorry. I knew something was wrong.” Livy kept her hands firmly clasped in her lap, so the woman pulled back. “Your daughter is missing?” she asked. “How old?”

“Thirty.”

The woman looked away, indifference passing over her face. She was like Lawrence, believed thirty-year-old women disappeared only because they wanted to go.

“She would never run off,” Livy said. “You don’t know my daughter.”

“She’ll turn up,” the woman said. “How long has she been missing?”

“Three days. But—”

“You don’t need to worry,” the woman said. “She’s a grown woman. She’s probably run off for a while the way people do. You see it on the news all the time.” The woman’s face looked so smooth, Livy wondered if she’d had a facelift. But her words were soothing, so Livy listened as if this strange woman with a too-smooth face were an authority on things. “You don’t need to worry until they find something.
Like if they found her car, her purse, something—what is it they call it? Evidence of foul play.”

“This isn’t
Law and Order
. This isn’t TV. My daughter is missing!”

The attendant was rushing toward them. “Ma’am,” he said, “please. You’re creating a disturbance.”

“I’m sorry,” Livy said. “I’m sorry. It’s just I’m afraid something awful has happened to my girl.”

“She’ll turn up,” the woman said, her eyes fixed again on the
SkyMall
catalog.

Tears seeped up, and Livy didn’t know if she could keep holding back a scream tearing at her throat. A voice spoke inside her, a quiet voice:
This isn’t the time for wailing
. It was her saner self, the self that spoke to her, kept her calm.

The woman with the smooth face and blank eyes was still talking: “Think positive. She’ll be there at the airport waiting. Then the two of you can go to Myrtle Beach—buy silly t-shirts, work on your tans.”

Livy turned back toward her window and closed her eyes. She didn’t want to see this day ending, another night coming without her girl. She wanted to think she would land and see Katy waiting at the gate. She wanted to think they’d drive together and sing along with a soft-rock station all the way home, and she’d see her girl smiling with some wild story of why she had disappeared.
She’ll be there
, Livy told herself. Then she raised her hand to the attendant, asked if she could order a beer.

“What you need is a martini,” the woman beside her said.

“I don’t drink hard liquor,” Livy said, but then she thought a cold shot of vodka could be nice. “Okay,” she said, “a vodka martini. And bring one for this lady.”

“My name’s Marianne,” the woman said, offering her hand. “And the drinks are on me.”

Livy nodded. “I’m the one who should be buying.”

“This is business class. They’re buying.” The lady gave a little laugh, and it was good to hear a happy sound. “And if you think you’re getting a real martini, I’ve got news. It’ll be a shot of vodka with an olive in it. But we’ll call it a martini.”

“I drank martinis with my daughter once,” Livy said. “Her twenty-first birthday. That was between the marriages, when we were more like girlfriends.” Livy looked at the woman watching her, saw the smile and then the concern in her eyes. The tears seeped up again. “I’m sorry. I’m not usually like this. It’s just my daughter.”

“I know,” the woman said. “I have a daughter too. It’s just that thinking the worst thing never helps.” She offered her hand again, and this time Livy took it, held on. “Tell me something good about her,” the woman said.

Livy thought, where to begin on the good things about Katy. “She likes to find broken things and fix them,” she said.

“That’s good,” the woman said. “We could use more of her in the world.” The attendant was coming with their drinks. “You can come over and sit with me if you like. I can move over to the window.” She was already moving, so Livy scooted over, and they lowered their trays.

They clinked their glasses, and Livy felt happy for a moment. There was still the kindness of strangers out there, even at thirty thousand feet above the world.

With a Knick-Knack Paddy Whack

Jesse pulled into the gravel parking lot of the Over the Rainbow Day Care Center, put the car in park, and sat there with the engine running. He hated doing his mom’s good deeds. It was like she thought making him do good things could make him be a good man. He thought,
Sorry, lady; too late for that
. But he would go in and be polite when the last thing he felt like doing was looking at a bunch of scraggly kids in a raggedy day care center in a neighborhood where there had to be a crack house on every other block.

Okay, so he’d do it for the old lady because doing for her was the only way he got rights to her car. So yeah, he’d do it. Jesse picked up a book from the box beside him. It was the pirate book; it had been his favorite. He was long past kids’ books, so he’d thrown them all in the trash. But his mom had found them, carried them back into the house with tears in her eyes saying she couldn’t believe he’d want to throw out the books she’d read to him every night when he was a kid, the books that were so important in teaching him he could be a loved little boy. He told her was sorry. He wasn’t sorry for dumping the books, but he was sorry that once again he was making the woman
cry. She sat at the kitchen table, ran her hands over the books as if they could appreciate her touch. “I’m sorry,” he said. “What do you want me to do?”

She looked up at him and said. “I’d like you to do something kind, Jesse, something for someone beside yourself.” He stood there thinking, her eyes on him. She looked at him with such hope always. It couldn’t be anything but love. And he didn’t get why she could love some messed-up kid who’d torn up just about anything they’d put in his hands. She’d talked his dad into getting him a puppy to make up for the one that had choked on the chicken bone. This mom had taught him to hold some things and not hurt. She was trying to keep him safe. She was trying to keep him from going to jail. He had to give her credit for that. She was the kind of woman who thought if you kept pouring clean water into a dirty creek, you could clean it. But sometimes the poison was in the dirt, and it just leached back into that creek. Some things weren’t worth saving. But he wouldn’t tell her that. So he told her he’d take the books to the day care center so some other kids could enjoy them. She liked that.

So there he was in his mom’s white Beamer with a box of books, looking at the building that looked about to rot from the lack of paint. The sign seemed just thrown up on the roof, plywood with a painted rainbow and a couple kids and bluebirds floating above it. The kids looked kind of freaky with too-round faces and stuck-on smiles. His momma had said the place barely got by on its budget, so Jesse figured they couldn’t get a real sign.

He got out of the car to smoke a cigarette. He heard the crunching of gravel, looked up, and saw a girl pulling in. She looked like she couldn’t be eighteen, but there she was in her Arby’s uniform, bending in the backseat to get her kid.
Nice ass
, he thought. She must have felt him looking because she turned and gave him a smile. But his eyes
went to the boy, who had big dark eyes running with tears and snot running from his nose. He was sucking in little breaths like he was trying not to cry. “He all right?” Jesse said.

The girl nodded. “I just took him for his shots. You’d think I’d beat him half to death or something.” The boy stared up at Jesse, calmer now.

Jesse crouched to him. “That’s it. Don’t you cry, now. And I’ll give you something.” He opened the car door and reached in for a book. It was the good one, the pirate pop-up book. The girl took it, bent to her kid, turned a page, and a ship jumped up from the page. The boy laughed and looked back to Jesse, as if he couldn’t figure just who he was. “Now, that’s for you to take home.” He looked at the boy’s mother. “You got that. That’s for your boy.” He touched the boy’s head. “You be strong, dude. Like a pirate.”

The girl leaned in. “Thank you,” she said. “I gotta get him inside and go back to work.” She gave him one of those please-ask-for-my number smiles, then looked past him to his mother’s car. “Nice ride,” she said.

“Yeah,” he said.

The kid grabbed her leg, and she picked him up, went inside.
Yeah
, he thought,
nice ride
. He mashed his cigarette on the ground and turned to the sound of kids yelling and squealing and running around the lot made up like a playground. He could feel it, the
I’m free
squealing feel of being released from a classroom, set loose to run and play. He walked toward them, watched them scrambling to be first on the swings, the seesaw, to see who’d be first up the slide, on top of the monkey bars. He stood at the chain-link fence and watched them run. “Go on, kids, have yourselves a good time while you can. You got no idea what might be coming at you.” He closed his eyes, held on to the sound of their high, happy voices floating in the air.

“Okay,” he said to the chain-link fence between them and went
back to his mother’s car. The girl was standing there, waiting for him. He nodded, reached into the backseat for the box of books, felt her eyes on him.

He turned, saw that smile again and her hand holding out a little piece of paper. “You want my phone number?”

“No.” He saw the hurt in her eyes, the paper crumple up in her hand. “Just take care of your kid. That’s all I want.” He slammed the car door shut and walked away. He didn’t look back, but he felt her staring as he went up the sidewalk. Going up the steps, he heard the sound of her starting her car, peeling out.

He gripped the box of books to his chest, looked down and saw
If You Give a Mouse a Cookie
. It was an old one, one of the first his new momma had read to him. He tried to remember the story, something about giving a mouse a cookie and it keeps wanting more of everything. Like the other one,
The Very Hungry Caterpillar
. It seemed in most kids’ books everybody was wanting to eat. Goldilocks stealing porridge. Hansel and Gretel eating that lady’s house. Then her trying to eat them. The big bad wolf. Everybody was hungry. He shifted the box, watched the books slide around.
The Runaway Bunny
, who kept saying he’d run away but then in the end decided to stay home and eat a carrot. He steadied the box against his side while he gave a rap on the front door, turned the knob. He pushed the door open and put on his best smile. The lady who ran the place would be sure to tell his mom how polite and well-behaved he was. “Good morning,” he called to the big black woman behind the desk. She stood up and smiled, a real smile, the kind of smile that rose up from the belly and didn’t just flicker across a face. He was glad she looked sweet. “I’m Jesse Hollowfield,” he said. “My mother sent me—”