The Next Time You See Me (15 page)

He scanned it. “Looks like food for two,” he said.

“I thought the same thing.”

He jotted some more notes. “And Buddy Pendleton said there was something about a prescription?”

Susanna nodded. “Her birth control. The last pill she’d taken was on a Saturday. I don’t know if you know how those work”—she was blushing—“but it’s set up like a calendar, but without dates. I don’t think it’s possible that she took it this past Saturday. If she’d been in the house that day she would have called me, and I don’t think she’d have left things the way I found them.”

“So we’re looking at the twenty-third. Or more likely, early on the twenty-fourth. It was almost midnight when she bought the food.”

“Yes.” His certainty had disarmed her for a second, but then it occurred to her what he was suggesting, what his notes were funneling down toward. “You think something happened to her.”

His gaze was level. “You don’t?”

She burst into tears.

A tissue was pressed into her hand. “Hang tight, Suzy. We don’t know a thing. We’re just going over every little bit we’ve got.” He had moved around the desk to stand beside her, the spice of his skin
familiar, the cologne bright and expensive smelling instead of minty. He touched her shoulder lightly. “We’ve got to keep a level head. You, too. I need your help.”

Susanna wiped her eyes and nodded hard, like a child. “OK.”

“I should go over to the house, take a look at things for myself.” He hesitated. “Can you let me in over there now? Walk me through, show me what you found?”

She looked at her watch—it was a quarter after four, and Abby’s day care closed at five thirty. She’d promised not to be late again. And Dale, who was demanding nightly practices in anticipation of this weekend’s state semifinals, couldn’t be roused to action on his daughter’s behalf until seven or eight o’clock tonight.
Shacking up with some guy,
he’d said. She didn’t know why her husband had brought her back to a town she hated, near a family he himself disdained, if he didn’t want Susanna to have a relationship with Ronnie. It seemed to her now, for the first time, like an act of deliberate cruelty, like something her father, had he been smarter and cooler headed, would have done.

“Could I meet you there?” she said finally. “Around five o’clock? I know that you’re supposed to be off duty soon. I don’t want to keep you.”

“It’s no problem. This is my job.”

“Five, then,” she said. She rose, shook his hand again. “I’ll be there. Thank you, Tony.”

He waved dismissively. “It’s my job.”

3.

She could hear the band from the parking lot, even feel them—a vibration, rattling the rearview mirror of her car as she bent into the backseat to extract Abby. They were on the second movement of their show,
The Scores of John Williams,
and the song, the Yoda melody from
Star Wars,
was a soft transition between showstoppers.

Abby had only been to the high school a few times, and she took in
the sights and sounds of adolescence with bright interest: the beaten-up cars of band kids, some football players stripped to their T-shirts and pads even in the cold, a couple of pretty girls—drama kids, Susanna guessed—smoking cigarettes behind the auditorium, their nails painted blue and green and their hair tied back with patterned silk scarves. Costume or affectation, Susanna wasn’t sure. Older girls fascinated Abby, and she was drawn to them like a sad puppy, pleased and beseeching, grateful for any show of attention. When one of the smoking girls smiled at her, she beamed.

“How’s it going, half pint?” the girl said.

Abby grinned and didn’t reply.

Susanna stopped Abby before turning the corner to the practice field and hunched over her. “It’s cold out, duckie,” she said, retying Abby’s coat hood so that only a saucer’s worth of pale face showed. She adjusted her daughter’s gloves, tucking them into the elastic bands of her sleeves, then tapped her playfully on her nose, which was pink with chill.

“I can hear Daddy’s music,” Abby said.

Susanna took her small hand, feeling a hitch in her chest at the little fingers, thick and clumsy in their knit gloves. “I know you can.” She started across the lawn briskly, while her courage and ire were up, Abby trotting a little to keep pace. Dale was up in the Box, which was really just a rickety wooden scaffolding, two stories high with a platform at the top and a relatively new set of handrails, which Dale himself had installed last year. As always, a long cord trailed from this perch down to a set of speakers on the ground, and Abby jolted, her hand clutching harder at Susanna’s, as Dale’s voice suddenly blasted from them, the music on the field disintegrating in little squawks and stutters before coming to a stop:

“No, no, no. You’re falling apart again in the fifth set. Take it back to three. Mack, you’re always about two big steps out of formation whenever the percussion backs into the circle. Your steps are too big. Smaller steps, OK? Color guard, what in God’s name are you doing back there?”

“It’s the wind,” a girl shouted. “These flags are too light.”

“Then put weights on them. But not until we manage to finish the show without stopping. This is ridiculous.”

The students were groaning and shifting from foot to foot. It was a strange thing, how much power Dale had over the fifty or so teenagers standing in a November chill, their breath painting the air, fingertips torn from gloves so that every note of John Williams could be played to perfection. Susanna could see a resignation in them, even now, that was rarely present in her eighth graders. They were defeated but respectful. Dale had cultivated a reputation for paternal gruffness and heart—“your chewy center,” Susanna said sometimes, playfully, to irritate him—and the students wanted mostly to please him, to see his mild smirk, to hear him say, in his unimpressed way, “Not bad.” Daddy Dale, they’d call him when spirits were high: these teenagers, some almost to college, who wouldn’t have been caught dead calling their own fathers anything but Dad. When Susanna was pregnant with Abby four years ago, the band kids all started calling her Mama Suzy, and more than one girl reached out and put her hand right on Susanna’s belly, as though it were fine, as though they didn’t need to ask. It was one of the reasons Susanna had started accompanying Dale to fewer competitions: not the distaste of being fussed over by teenage girls (though she was, a bit shamefully, uncomfortable with it, with them) so much as the distaste of being called Mama—as though, still then in her early twenties, she were not just Abby’s mother but some band mother, a mother de facto, a mascot. As though her life, too, revolved around these kids and their practices and their small weekend triumphs.

“I want bigger punch from the brass, too.” Dale sang some bars now in his pleasant tenor, calling the notes
dee
s and
dum
s and
dah
s. This had always embarrassed Susanna. “Like that:
dah
dee dah dah. OK, get into position. Let’s see if we can make it through the song without stopping.” The kids straightened their backs, lifted instruments into place. In the back of the field, the color guard held their flags, which were made with some kind of greenish, gauzy cloth,
above their heads. Loyal. Determined. Dale would have been a great preacher, Susanna sometimes thought wryly. Or drill sergeant. Or cult leader. He was the kind of man with the public charisma to lead people to water or to Jesus or off the edge of a cliff.

“One, two, three,” he chanted.

The music swelled again. Susanna looked up at the Box and thought Dale spotted her, so she waved. But he continued to hunch over the railing, one hand on his headset, and she supposed that he’d only glanced her way to check out the clarinets. This close, she could make out their low, woody hum above the sunny brass, the glassy flutes. Susanna had once played clarinet. It was a dull instrument, she thought—the instrument of dowdy brown-haired girls with heavy thighs.

It was a quarter till by her watch. She guessed that there were at least another eight minutes to the show from this point, if the kids made it to the end, and she shifted restlessly back and forth between her feet, Abby’s hand still grasped tightly in her own. The students near her were squinting into the wind; at the back of the field, a tossed flag flew out of formation, and the girl who’d lost it went scrambling to retrieve it and return to her spot. Susanna couldn’t watch them without feeling their stress, without worrying, as they did, that Dale would erupt into a rant of disappointment. But still—and worse for her today—they pressed forward uninterrupted, and Dale, his back to the brisk wind, was unconsciously conducting, his left palm bobbing, a motion that always reminded Susanna of putting her hand outside of a car window on a warm day, skipping it on a current of air, letting her fingertips jump driveways and mailboxes and walked dogs. She and Ronnie had made a game of it as girls, Susanna always in the seat behind their father, Ronnie on the passenger side where there was more legroom, their arms extended out on both sides of the car like flapping wings.

She led Abby over to the scaffolding and put the gloved hand she was holding on a wooden beam. “Mommy’s going to go up to tell Daddy something,” she said. “You keep your hand here and don’t move it, OK?”

“What happens if I move it?” Abby’s expression might have been mischievous or it might have been wary.

“You lose the game,” Susanna said.

Abby stood very still, her feet neatly side by side, back straight. Her arm was raised to almost shoulder level to grasp the beam, and the set of her mouth was serious.

“It’ll just be a minute,” Susanna said.

The stairs, she noted with unease, groaned as she scaled the scaffolding, and the wind up here was worse, whistling from behind her against the metal roof of the high school. Her sister was missing—she could be anywhere, anything might have happened to her—and here Dale was, riding this band tower like the captain of a ship, as though what he was doing really mattered. He was glancing over his shoulder as she surfaced, expression unsurprised, though this was the first time in their marriage that Susanna had joined him up here, the first time she’d interrupted one of his practices. He might have felt the vibration of her ascent. But he had also seen her wave before. She was suddenly sure of it.

There was a lull as the Yoda theme ended, a hiccup of silence before the first startling blast of “The Olympic Fanfare,” and Susanna said, stealing the seconds, “I need you to keep Abby.”

He switched a button on his headset and moved the microphone down beneath his chin. His face was pink with windburn, his lips chapped, and he looked vigorous and strong, like he’d been skiing or out for a run. The band continued to play from below.

“I’m meeting a detective about Ronnie,” Susanna said as loudly as she could without shouting. “I’m going to let him into her house. He agrees with me that something seems off.”

“Why didn’t you leave Abby at the day care?” He had
the look
already, Susanna noted: eyes popped, brows knit with incredulity; his mouth was slightly open, his head cocked to the side. She had always hated
the look,
even as she knew that she had her own version of it, the one she wore when he came home an hour later than he’d
promised, or when he told her only the night before that it was his turn to bring snacks to the teachers’ lounge.

“They close at five thirty. You know that.”

“And you can’t bring her with you? To this—” He waved his hand, conducting again. “This whatever it is?”

“I wish you’d take this seriously for a moment,” Susanna said. “My sister’s been gone over a week. She hasn’t been at work. She’s not answering calls. I’m not bringing our daughter to meet this detective. I can’t keep my mind on this and her all at once.”

Dale lifted his glasses and pinched the skin between his eyes. “Saturday. I ask for a little consideration until Saturday. That’s it.” A drop of rain hit his shoulder and he wiped at it roughly. “This is my job. This is what I do for a living.”

“Ronnie is my sister,” Susanna said. “Do you not get that?” More drops were falling, stippling the plank floor, and she trembled in her thin coat. “I don’t have a choice. Your daughter is at the bottom of this tower, and it’s raining, and it’s about time you stepped up and did your part. None of this is important like you think it is. None of this.” She waved her own arms mockingly toward the field.

“I have practice.” He turned and leaned back over the railing, shoulders hunched against the rain. “It’s over in an hour. I can watch Abby then.”

“I’m not kidding with you, Dale.”

“Neither am I.” He switched his mike back on.
He’s going to electrocute himself,
she thought.

Let him,
a voice inside her whispered. It might have been Ronnie’s.

Susanna stumbled on the stairs down, so angry that her legs were unsteady. This was his job, was it? Standing in the rain? Bossing around children? And he only asked for a
little
consideration, as though it wasn’t Susanna always picking Abby up, as if it wouldn’t be time soon enough for concert band, All-District and All-Region, more long Saturdays away, more long weeknight practices. He made
only three thousand more a year than she did. He worked the same eight-hour school day. But these practices, these fucking band practices, had given him—he thought—the entitlement to do as little as he desired to in the rest of their married life. Susanna did the parenting, the cooking, the cleaning, the grocery shopping; she paid the bills and balanced the checkbook; she sent birthday cards to Dale’s parents and sisters and nephews because she knew that Dale wouldn’t remember to, or be bothered to. She was the manager and the secretary and the janitor of their marriage, Dale the CEO, and she was sick of it, she was
sick.
She came to the bottom of the steps and saw Abby still standing in her hooded coat, hand still on the tower’s scaffolding, her body a hard right angle. She loved the child more than she loved Dale, more than she had ever loved him. She loved her more than Ronnie. It was, she figured, a given that she loved her more than herself. But that was the cruel punch line of motherhood, wasn’t it? You loved more than yourself, you lost yourself, and your husband grew to depend upon it, to take advantage of it. You made a daughter and wanted more for her than that, but you lost the ability to show her the way. A way to be a woman who loves rather than a mere vessel of love.