Songs for the Missing (31 page)

Inside, the carols pursued her from store to store. She should have eaten lunch; she was dragging and had a headache, her attention scattered. At Old Navy she saw an embroidered skirt that was a possibility but finally not right for Kim. She stalked the housewares aisles at Kmart, hoping to find something for her dorm room, and realized she had no clue what Kim might need, though she did pick up a new laundry basket for Lindsay, which she then had to lug around.

By then she’d almost completed her circuit of the mall. She’d put a serious dent in her list, though there were still things she’d have to make special trips for, like Ed’s fish finder, which only Dick’s sold, or a new googly-eyed steak for Cooper at Petco. The stocking stuffers she could grab at the CVS after work; that was easy. She had tons of stuff for Lindsay but not a big gift, and as every year when she needed something special, she naturally gravitated to the jewelry counter at Penney’s.

They were reliable, and cheaper than Kay’s or Zales. She could always find something for the girls. She’d bought their first pearls here, and Kim’s good watch, and her butterfly, which she never took off, not even to shower.

The pendant was one of a dozen charms in a designer line. Fran had chosen it over the others with hardly a thought. It just fit Kim at sixteen. Now, leaning over the display case, she tried to pick one for Lindsay but nothing jumped out. The ladybug was too childish, the angel too pious. Gull, seahorse, shell, sand dollar—all wrong. It had to be something simple. Not the clover or the rose. In the end she was left with the moon, the star and the heart.

The heart was the one she would have liked to give her. The star actually fit Kim better, her bright, fiery personality. To be true to Lindsay—the distant, changeable night owl—she had to go with the moon.

Her mind was made up, yet she lingered over the butterfly, desirous, as if she could replace the original. She’d never burden Lindsay with it, and to buy it for Kim again made no sense. She herself wouldn’t wear it, since it wasn’t hers, and yet she wanted it.

How could she explain it to Ed? She’d have to hide it, sneaking the velvet box out of her dresser in solitary moments, opening the lid to admire it like a talisman, as if it had the power to recover its wearer.

“Can I help you with something?” the salesgirl asked—in her twenties, plain but well-dressed, with the unfortunate name of Crystal. Fran was grateful she didn’t recognize her.

“I was looking at the moon.” She pointed through the glass.

“I like that one too. That’s solid twenty-four karat, not gold plate.” She reached in and pinched the crescent out, holding it on her flattened palm.

Fran turned it as if inspecting the workmanship and read the price off the tiny tag. She didn’t remember Kim’s being so expensive.

“We have some nice chains for it over here.”

Fran had already noted that they had the right one, a box weave, but made a show of looking through them, ignoring the girl’s pitch. The chain itself cost fifty dollars. When she doubled the price, she couldn’t justify it.

“Do you need some time to think it over?” the girl asked, because she had customers on the other side and couldn’t let her keep the moon.

“Thanks,” Fran said, and then stood there empty-handed, staring at the display, cross with herself. It was late and her feet hurt and she was far from done. She had nothing for dinner, and Ed wouldn’t take it upon himself to order out. They’d be waiting for her, housebound and helpless as shut-ins after she’d battled the crowds all day.

All she wanted was this one thing. Like a child denied, she argued with the universe. It wasn’t fair. She’d been so good. She wasn’t asking for that much.

When the girl came over to check on her she asked to see the butterfly, as if holding it in her hands might be enough. It was thin as a razor blade, and she thought of the gold against Kim’s skin.

“I’ll take both of them,” she said.

She put them on her Penney’s card so Ed wouldn’t see the bill, and was glad she did, because at Williams-Sonoma, as she was paying for Connie’s and Jocelyn’s hand-painted dessert plates, her MasterCard bounced. She covered it with her Visa, but didn’t dare risk anything else.

On the way home, passing the star and the school and the cemetery gates in the dark, she puzzled over how she could buy herself something so expensive when she didn’t get anything for Kim. Finally, maybe, it came down to the fact that she was here and Kim wasn’t. All along, she thought, the gifts she’d wanted to give Kim were never for her, but, like the butterfly, for herself.

Later, when she told Ed she’d changed her mind, he paused as if waiting for an explanation.

“Don’t get me anything either,” she said. “I already have everything I need.”

But of course, being a good husband, he didn’t listen to her.

America’s Most Wanted

He hated the phone, the ring waking him from his thoughts like an alarm. He didn’t want to talk to anyone; it could only be bad news. He kept the machine on, letting the message kick in, straining despite himself to hear the foreign voice emitting from the kitchen.

In the living room, Fran picked up—a mistake. He cocked his head, trying to gauge her tone, bright but measured, endlessly reasonable. “Yes,” she said, pacing by the doorway, “that would be fine.”

He turned back to the game. A minute later she was standing behind him with the calendar.

For their end-of-the-year recap, the
Star-Beacon
had picked Kim as their top story. She seemed pleased by this. Saturday they wanted to send a reporter out to interview them, and a photographer to take pictures.

Why did she have to ask when she’d already said yes?

“Pictures of what?” Because, ridiculous as it sounded, he didn’t want them in Kim’s room.

“I don’t know. What kind of pictures do they usually take?”

“Sure,” he said.

“You don’t have to be in them if you don’t want to.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“You didn’t have to,” she said, as if somehow he was at fault. Hadn’t he just said he would?

She acted like she’d read his mind, but, really, who wanted to stand out in the snow and pose while the neighbors peered at them from their windows? Lindsay didn’t either, but that Saturday, like Ed, jacketless and squinting into the sun, she did. Anything for Kim.

“Thank you,” Fran told them when the photographer was gone, as if they’d done her a great favor, then sped off to be a guest on a cable-access show in Erie.

Her latest crusade was getting Kim on
Dateline
or
America’s Most Wanted
, using local TV as a stepping stone. According to her chat group, after Natalee Holloway the networks were hungry for missing girl stories. She’d put together a new DVD and mailed copies to every station from here to Toledo. He admired her energy, even if he didn’t understand it.

New Year’s Eve they stayed in. Fran was online most of the night and then went to bed at her regular time, and Lindsay kept to her room, so he watched Dick Clark by himself, yawning. As the seconds ticked off and the ball dropped, he thought this had been the worst year of his life, and that the best was long gone. On TV everyone was dancing, celebrating to Kool & the Gang. He switched it off and went through the house, killing the lights.

The year turning was supposed to be hopeful, a new beginning, but he was stuck in last summer. The market was stalled and his desk wasn’t busy enough to hold him. He escaped, driving the white streets as if he had a client, ending up by the picnic pavilion on the bluffs. He smoked with his window open and the heater blowing. As winter locked in, that last unfinished day came back, the lake crowded with boats, Queen Anne’s lace rampant by the highway, heat shimmering like gas above the tracks, while outside, unreal and temporary, snow fell on the lighthouse and the jetties and the ice shingling the harbor. On the fourteenth it would be six months.

They marked the anniversary with a well-attended prayer vigil led by Father John, and music by the combined choir and high school glee club. All four network affiliates from Erie carried it. Later, getting ready for bed, Fran complained that Lindsay hadn’t sung a note.

“You know she hates those things.”

“No one
likes
them,” she said. “Some things you just have to do. That’s life.”

He wanted to defend Lindsay, but it was true. He had to wake up and go to work. He had to eat and sleep and know what was coming up on the calendar, though he no longer looked forward to anything. Pretending to be interested took a constant effort. When he was by himself he went slack, and then he remembered he had to fix the light in the closet or refill the cars with wiper fluid or buy more ice melter. He had to explain to the bursar’s office that Kim wouldn’t be attending school this semester either.

Some of it was money. He’d sold a small industrial site in November, but nothing since. Wednesdays the
Star-Beacon
was full of foreclosure notices. Ten years ago they would have seemed an opportunity (false, it turned out, the start of his downfall). He skipped their estimated tax payment and cashed in another mutual fund to hold them over. The bills came in waves. He’d fought them off for months, but that couldn’t last. All of their money was in the house, and the longer they held on to it, the less it was worth. He could imagine their address listed for the whole town to see. As a father, he wanted to hang on until Lindsay was through with school. As a professional, his advice to himself was to get out now.

The day of the Super Bowl his mother had another ministroke. They moved her to a skilled-care wing, where she shared a room with a tiny Greek woman who’d lost her feet to diabetes. The woman seemed pleasant enough (all she did was knit and watch TV), but his mother was used to her privacy and didn’t like her. “She talks. All day long, ’blucka blucka blucka,’ like I know what she’s saying.” She missed her dining-room friends. She could walk with a walker, the doctors said, but the physical therapist was nasty to her and she refused to go anymore. After speaking with the staff, he doubted the charge, but arranged to have her see a second therapist. That lasted one day and led to several meetings. Ultimately he and Fran had to sit down with her and lay it out plainly: She needed to do her rehab.

“I don’t want to,” she said fiercely, tearing up. “It hurts me.”

“You’re not going to get better if you don’t,” he said.

“I’m too old to go through this again.”

Inwardly he agreed—he didn’t want her to suffer—but Fran was unmoved. “I know it’s hard, but if you stop walking you’re never going to get out of this bed. That’s not what you want, believe me.”

The idea frightened her into action. Now her daily routine included a walk to the sunroom at the far end of the hall after lunch. When he visited he accompanied her on the long journey, stepping and then halting beside her as she inched the walker forward, puffing with effort. Every time he left he was overcome by her determination and ashamed of his own flatness, and vowed to take Fran’s advice.

As a coach he was a practiced motivator, a preacher of mental toughness, but much of what he felt was out of his control. He had a dream in which Kim fell from the upper deck of a stadium. For some unknown reason he was in a luxury box on the other side of the field. He saw her stumble on the concrete stairs and pitch over the railing in slow motion. He reached out his arms as if to catch her, and then, magically, he was directly above her, watching her fall toward the seats below. While she was in the air, he wished that somehow she would fly or float down (he was aware it was a nightmare, and not entirely subject to gravity). He didn’t see her hit, just the crowd flinching at impact, clearing a space around her. Police were pushing through the aisles. He didn’t tell Fran about the dream, knowing she’d hold it against him. He only had it once, but pieces came to him during the day, flashing like clips in a movie trailer. The question that bothered him was why she was sitting over there alone. He should have been with her.

He had trouble thinking at any length, and to occupy his mind he watched TV. The problem was, anything emotional made him well up. One night he was watching
The Shawshank Redemption
, an old favorite. “Hope is a good thing,” Morgan Freeman said, and he had to turn it off and breathe deeply, blinking, not wanting anyone to see him.

He hadn’t given up on Kim, as Fran sometimes implied. He still met with the detective and called Perry once a week, though whatever friendship they’d had was over. As he had all fall, he lobbied for a thorough search of Wozniak’s property. They made it sound like an impossibility. He thought seriously of going over there himself. He thought of buying a gun, except Fran would think he was crazy.

The problem was, he was painfully sane. He realized that he was depressed and angry, but in his position it made sense. After six months he was merely being realistic. He didn’t see what Fran hoped to accomplish, waking early and updating the website, running all over the place chasing after TV coverage. He was afraid that eventually she would exhaust herself and end up in the same place he was.

He did what he had to. He manned the grill in a KISS THE COOK apron at the church pancake supper and scooped popcorn at the high school basketball games. He handed out buttons and balloons and pens and Koosh balls and key chains. He stood behind Fran in his best suit as she drove home the D.A.R.E. speech she’d practiced on him, and shook hands in the receiving line after the program, listening to how impressed people were with her. While he suspected she was deluded, he was proud of her too. He’d always known she was capable and strong—it was partly what attracted him to her—but she’d gone beyond anything he could have imagined. The transformation was total: hair, makeup, clothes. Since she’d quit drinking she’d lost so much weight that her face had changed. Sometimes when she was at the mic, under the lights, it was like watching someone he didn’t know.

For Valentine’s Day, he wasn’t sure how much they should celebrate. He planned on getting her roses and chocolates, as always, but not champagne. He was hoping they could have a nice dinner at home.