Girls (30 page)

“Saying that,” he said. He wiped his chin with the back of his hand. “If it’s true.”

“You think it’s better for couples to split?”

“Sometimes it is. Will she be happier without you?”

“She never lived without me, except when I was overseas. We lived half our lives together. It must be more than half.”

“A lot of people split in their forties, some in their fifties, their sixties. Later, even. But what you’re saying is she moved out to get you better—in her terms, Jack. I’m not choosing sides. My point is, if she wants you to do something for the two of you, maybe she wants the two of you to go on. It would be good if you told me what you don’t want her to know.”

“To remember.”

“To remember,” he said. He picked up the receiver and said, “In thirty seconds.”

“I can’t, not now.”

“You should try. Maybe it would help with Fanny.”

“Guaranteed: no.”

He said, “I have to throw you out, Jack. Come back. Find me.”

“One question,” I said.

He nodded.

“Do you pray?”

“You think it’ll help?”

“No. I don’t know how. I don’t even want to.”

“Bullshit,” he said.

“But do you?”

He leaned back hard and worked his shoulders and seat into the cushions. He said, “I’m a Jew. I was born a Jew. Definition of Jew: They can come to your door and take you away to a camp and kill you. Do I pray? I argue. I spend a lot of time arguing with whatever you want to call it. Yahweh. Shithead. Father. I don’t know. I argue about bad deaths and terrible diseases. I say, ‘How can you
permit
it?’ and I don’t get an answer because maybe no one’s there. And if He is, He disgusts me. Or I disgust Him and He doesn’t want to argue. And I keep arguing. Would you call that prayer?”

I knew he didn’t expect an answer. I didn’t have one. I went over to his chair and stuck my hand out. He shook it. His hand was gentle and wet.

I did drive over to the social sciences lot, and I did find her standing next to her car. When she saw me, she shrugged. I left the dog in the car and stood beside her, asking dumb questions and getting laughter back.

“Well,” I said, “we sure can’t leave you here.”

“I’ve got my briefcase with my negligee and vibrator and leather handcuffs inside, so we can go wherever you say, Officer.” I drove us out of the lot while the dog introduced himself to her hair and the nape of her neck. I told him to lie down and Rosalie said, “Why don’t we all?”

We drove up toward the quarry, above the cemetery. The truck
skidded a little, and I put it in four-wheel low, and we got through. Halfway toward the quarry, you can cut through some low brush and you’re at the top of the old ski lift the school no longer uses where there is a low wooden equipment hut. I saw how the snowy brush had sprung back behind us.

I said, “We’re invisible.”

“I’m surprised the students don’t come here.”

“They don’t mind using motels. Or classrooms. Storage closets in the administration building.”

I found the right master key on my ring and let us in. There was a small mound of sand, a rack of chain, hose from the old snow machines, a few plastic tarpaulins, and a very excited colony of mice.

Rosalie said, “I thought maybe Chanel No. Five, or Poison, not the smell of cold mouse.” She held her nose with a mittened hand, and she looked about ten.

“It’s the only pretty much hidden place where we can get kind of risky and wild the way you wanted.”

“That’s what I wanted, huh?”

“I think so. Yes.”

“You’re right. I guess it was a bluff.”

“No,” I said, “you were turned on and risky-feeling. It’s possible we might get nuts up here, but I think what we’d get is cold asses and sore skin and smelly.”

“This is the first scripture lesson, then.”

“In what?”

“In taking it easy? I’m not sure. Maybe in just being us and not some idea about us that one of us might have?”

“I didn’t intend that. I’m not sure I could even come up with it.”

“You really wanted to do what I wanted to do.”

I nodded.

She reached under my coat and cupped my ass and squeezed, then patted it. She said, “Let’s do second best.”

“Anything you want,” I said.

“Let’s go back down and I’ll drive my car home and we meet up later and be whoever we are.”

“Could I kiss you first?” I asked.

She said, “I think you have to.”

I said to the dog, when I drove the Ford off campus after work, “You won’t starve. I promise.” I had taken the gun from the Jeep, and it was angled uncomfortably in the pocket of my coat. I put it in the glove compartment of the Gran Torino. “But we need to make a stop.” When I pulled into the Tanners’ driveway, I left windows open halfway down and told him to stay.

She was in bed, the reverend told me.

“Thank God they took her off the chemotherapy,” he said. “It was killing her. This way, she’s in her own house, and when she feels strong, she can putter. And, of course, she’s supervising the search.”

He was probably right. In terms of full-time concentration on Janice Tanner, she was doing more than anyone in the state. Maybe, I thought, the man who took Janice had done more. The reverend went upstairs and I stood in the living room. There were no pictures on the walls except one of Jesus that looked famous and one of Janice that was famous for sure. It was the one with her glad eyes and sad mouth. I saw hooks where other pictures had hung. On the coffee table in front of the thin wooden settle, there were posters and newspapers. The top paper had an article about her parents’ efforts to find her. I had a metal taste in my mouth, and the saliva kept running.

Tanner was back. He gestured to me, and I followed him up the steep, narrow staircase. I could feel the thermal current of the house as cold air rose behind us. I waited for the heating system to kick in. I was worried about how cold Mrs. Tanner felt.

He gestured me to a rush-bottomed ladder-back chair beside the bed. The only light in the room came from a weak bulb in the lamp on the bedside table, which was a cracked cherry stand. The shades in the two windows were drawn and the overhead light was off. She lay on her side, curled up, her fists on the sheets, outside the layers of blanket she was under. In that dim light, even, I saw how sparse
her hair was. She licked her chapped lips with her tongue. The skin of her face was the color of old oranges, and it looked like it would split and start bleeding if someone pushed against it. Her eyes, though they weren’t bright, were still smart, and they grew large as she fixed them on me.

“No,” I said. “I’m sorry. Nothing new. I just wanted to say hello, I guess. It’s only a visit.”

She raised her brows and moved her head on the pillow a little, like she was saying she understood.

I said, “And maybe look at Janice’s room. I never did that. Maybe I should do that.”

Her smile was tired but real.

“I hear the real cops do that.”

She nodded.

“So I thought I’d come and get real.”

She said, in more than a whisper, “Did you want to pray?”

I should have said yes, of course. But the thought of her God made me angry. I felt mad enough to wail like a child. I said, “No, thank you, ma’am. I can’t.”

She said, “I would pray on your behalf.”

“Thank you.”

“I have a confession.”

“You already did.”

“You’re easy to want to take care of,” she said.

“That’s what my wife once said.”

“Lucky woman,” she said.

“Isn’t she. I’ll ask your husband to take me to the room.” I leaned over and kissed her temple. She smelled like wood that’s been in pond water too long. She was coming apart inside.

The reverend said, in the hall, outside her closed door, “I didn’t know Mrs. Tanner was praying for you.”

“It’s an arrangement we have.”

“I’d be pleased to pray for you, too.”

“You’re very kind, Reverend Tanner.”

“But you ought to make the effort also.”

I nodded, but I didn’t have anything more to say because we were in the room now. I put my hand up and he looked at it, and then at my face.

“I’d like it if I could be in here by myself a minute.”

“Clues,” he said.

“Clues.”

“Randy told us about the uncertainty principle.”

“I have a lot of that.”

“The observer of a phenomenon changes it through the act of observation,” he said.

I said, “That sounds reasonable.”

“So I’ll leave you to your
own
uncertainty.” He smiled to be sure I understood the joke.

I nodded. I didn’t.

“I’ll be outside,” he said.

“Thank you.”

“In the hall. If you need me.”

“I’m not going to touch anything, Reverend. I understand it’s precious to you. I’ll keep my hands in my pockets.”

“Less alteration of the phenomenon observed,” he agreed.

He flipped a light switch, and he closed the door. I took my hands out of my pockets, but I did keep them to myself. I couldn’t find her here. I saw paperback books and school notebooks on a cheap maple desk. On the wall I saw pictures of her parents outside her father’s church, and I saw clipped photos in dime-store frames of people I guessed from their hair and clothes were rock singers. There was, of course, a Jesus in a wooden frame. I looked in some plastic-covered albums at pictures of junior high school kids. In the books on the shelves were some postcards. They were scrawled on in round inky writing by kids writing to Janice over a summer. There was a book called
Generation X
that looked a little difficult for her. There was a book called
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
and one titled
The Light in the Forest.
I learned from them that maybe she felt trapped. But most of anything I’d ever read was about someone who was trapped, so I wasn’t making much progress.

I didn’t think I was going to find stuff taped under drawers or glued inside the covers of hardcover books, and I relied on the state police for that kind of search. I did do the obvious—look between the mattress and the box spring, feel behind the wooden headboard, lie down on the floor and move slowly in a circle, looking for something that might have slid down. Zero. What I’d expected, plus some extra sensations in the ribs. I smelled one of the little bottles of cologne on a painted metal tray on her bureau and it was sweet and sad.

But it could be anyone’s room, I thought. What made it Janice’s?

I looked at her coronet. It seemed to me to be tarnished. I held it in front of my mouth. I smelled her saliva. I put my lips where she put hers. Then I put it back and I sat on the bed. I lay on it. I turned my face to the pillow and sniffed for the smell of her hair and soap and skin. I pressed my face in and down. Then I sat back up because I didn’t want to be found like that. I smoothed away my impression on the pillowcase. I looked across at the little wooden bookcase she used. English books and history books, a book on earth science and one on physics, a clutter of photocopied sheets that I reached for and looked through: math quizzes with bad grades and handouts for English, and no invitation from a psychopath to meet after school. I opened and closed some bureau drawers.

Here’s what the great detective, the interrogator of mysteries, the famous payer of attention, came up with: Janice had been hiding while she lived here. Her parents knew the good little girl and maybe that’s what she was, but she was also someone else. The room was like a set for a high school play called
Typical Girl.
Of course, Rosalie had already known this. When I came into the hall, the reverend reached around in front of me and turned off her light.

He said, “Clues?”

“Sir, did you change anything in there? Add anything, take anything out? You know, after you became worried? When the police started investigating?”

“That would be Heisenberg on a huge scale!” he said.

“Yes, wouldn’t it. Did you?”

“That’s how she left it. Socks to saxophone.”

We were on the stairs. I said, “I didn’t see a saxophone.”

“My little joke. I liked the alliteration.”

But I did think of socks. They’d most of them been white, though she had some bolder colors. “Could I go back up a minute, Reverend?”