The Next Time You See Me (6 page)

Two cups of coleslaw, two baskets, two pouches for potato wedges. Six beers. Susanna looked up at the bedroom door. Her stomach did a lazy somersault.

She was sweating, despite the chill. And that, how about
that:
Why was it so cold in here? Why wouldn’t the heat be on? She went to the bedroom door, thought about knocking again, knew that doing so would be futile. So she grasped the knob and pushed into her sister’s bedroom, and she was so convinced of what she’d find that the heap of pillows and blankets on the bed at first looked to her like a body, and she nearly screamed. But the illusion lasted only a second. The room was empty, the bed unmade but also unoccupied. Again, Susanna was struck by the sense of abandonment, of dormancy, but she’d have taken any of those oddities, those unknowns, over the sight of her sister lying glassy-eyed in a pool of vomit. That was, she admitted to herself, what she’d expected.

So it wasn’t the worst thing. But what was it?

She looked around the bedroom, rolling her feet so that they wouldn’t sound on the hardwood floor, hating the empty echo. Unmade bed, sheets in need of a wash. No surprise there. Drawer on the dresser half-open, peach-colored T-shirt hanging down like a flap of skin. Shades drawn. Lights off. She snapped on the bedside lamp and looked at the items on Ronnie’s nightstand: face cream, alarm clock, a pot of lip balm. A book.

A book? She picked it up and felt her sinuses ache with the sudden press of tears. It was
A Separate Peace.
A Wal-Mart receipt was tucked in between chapters 11 and 12. Ronnie had almost finished it.

There was one more item on the table: Ronnie’s birth control pills. Susanna opened the compact and looked at the rows of depressed bubbles. The first two weeks were emptied, Sunday through Saturday.
Saturday was the last day. Today was Saturday. Ronnie must have been home today to take her pill. Right?

Or else she’d taken it a week ago. Or two.

Susanna returned to the kitchen, checked the fridge: condiments; a paper Chinese food container, the rice inside shriveled to a hard, gray crust; a half-empty two-liter of Coke that didn’t make so much as a sigh when Susanna unscrewed the cap; the rest of the case of Miller High Life; and a carton of eggs, three missing. In the freezer was a bottle of Gordon’s Vodka, the big size.

She went to the table, to the litter of food and wrappers and bottles on its surface. A large paper sack was serving as a coaster for a few of the bottles; Susanna moved the bottles to the side carefully, retrieved the bag, spread it smooth.
THE FILL-UP
, the logo read. A local gas station chain. There was a receipt in the bottom of the bag:

October 23. She counted back. That was last Saturday. Ronnie had bought this meal a week ago and left it unfinished on her kitchen table. She’d taken her last birth control pill on a Saturday. And her car was sitting in the driveway. Susanna looked at all of those times-twos on the receipt, at the emptied beer bottles standing like chess pieces on the table. Someone else had been here. Someone had been here, and now Ronnie was gone.

“Mama?”

Susanna jumped, put her hand to her chest. “Jesus, baby,” she said. “You scared me.”

Abby ran to her and grabbed her leg playfully. She was overdressed, as usual, in the red jumper, white tights, and patent leather Mary Janes that she insisted upon, no matter Susanna’s protests. Ronnie had bought the shoes, Susanna remembered. Ronnie had called it a “no particular reason” present.

“Where’s Aunt Ronnie?” Abby said, now hooking her legs around Susanna’s leg, dropping her bottom on top of Susanna’s foot.

“Don’t know, baby,” she said, lifting her leg and swinging it a little, bracing herself on the kitchen counter for balance. Abby giggled, the cheerfulness of that sound and that bright red dress ill fitted to this stinking home. Susanna trudged toward the door, dragging Abby like a ball and chain, trying to make a plan. Should she call her mother first? No, foolish to worry her before she had solid information. She’d try Ronnie’s supervisor at the plant, find out if she’d shown up for work this week. Then Mother. Then the police.

Susanna was lightheaded. She stopped at the door, rubbing her tongue against the roof of her mouth and patting her warm cheeks with her cool palms. She was still holding the receipt, she realized, so she tucked it into her purse, then fumbled for her keys. Abby clung to her leg. Susanna reached down, pulled her daughter up by the armpits and rested her on her hip, then shut Ronnie’s house up behind her.

2.

Back at home she called the sewing factory only to learn—and she hadn’t convinced herself to hope otherwise—that Ronnie had indeed missed the last week of work. No notice. No explanation. “And didn’t you think that was strange?” Susanna asked the shift supervisor, unable to keep the edge out of her voice, and the woman’s response was equally flinty: “Not really. She already had twelve points against her for the year. Clocked in late couple of times a week, claimed sick at least one Monday a month. I put a pink slip in the mail to her just yesterday.”

“Well, I have real cause to be concerned about her,” Susanna had said.

The supervisor huffed. “I’ll bet she’s just fine. I hope she is. But tell her when you see her that she isn’t getting back on out here. I’ve had my fill.”

So Susanna shouldn’t have been surprised by the reaction she got an hour later from the on-duty cop at the local station. “I’m here to report a missing person,” she said, shaking so much with nervousness that she could barely hold Abby up on her hip—Abby was too big for such nonsense, but she cried when Susanna put her down—and the officer, rather than dashing to his CB and calling an all-points bulletin, leaned back lazily in his chair, arms propped behind his head as though sunbathing, and frowned at her.

“How old?”

“Thirty-two,” she said.

“Man? Woman?”

“Woman. She’s my sister.” He wasn’t writing anything down.

“What’s her name?”

“Veronica Eastman.”

The desk cop smiled. “Ronnie? You’re Ronnie’s sister?” He shook his head, still grinning. “Ronnie Eastman. You’re trying to tell me Ronnie Eastman’s gone missing?”

Susanna shifted Abby to her other hip. “This isn’t a joke,” she said, blinking against tears. “I’m really worried about her.”

The cop waved her to the empty chair across from him, conciliatory, and did Susanna the favor of at least lowering his arms from behind his head and mugging seriousness. “All right,” he said, reaching for a pen. He yanked a sheet of paper out of the pile beside an electric typewriter and paused in what Susanna recognized was an exaggerated imitation of professionalism, as though he’d gotten his cop cues from the movies. “Tell me what’s worrying you.” The smirk, restrained but not hidden, twitched at the corners of his mouth.

“I went to her place today to check on her, because I hadn’t heard from her in a while. She usually calls at least once a week. So I went over there, and nobody answered the door.” Susanna pressed Abby’s ear to her chest, covered the other ear with her hand. She lowered her voice. “I used her spare key to let myself in, and you—you could just tell, you know—the place was abandoned. There was food rotting on the kitchen table.”

“Maybe she went on a trip,” the cop said.
SERGEANT PENDLETON
, his badge read. He could have been thirty or fifty, too unlined to seem properly middle-aged, too much gray in his hair to look young. Everything about him drooped: the corners of his mustache, his eyelids—saggy, even sickly—the fold of loose skin under his chin. As though he’d been expanded, then deflated. Maybe he was one of those morbidly obese men who went on a low-fat diet or bought a treadmill. Susanna had seen them on TV, newly svelte and active but suddenly older, as though they’d endured famine rather than
Sweatin’ to the Oldies
.

“No,” Susanna said. “She didn’t go on a—” Abby put her hand on her mouth before she could say anything further, tweezing her lips together.

“Mommy, I’m hungry.”

Susanna brushed her hand away. “Hold on, baby. Mommy’s doing something important.”

Abby grunted, went limp, slid onto the floor. She started to whine.
“Anyway,” Susanna said, trying to ignore the feather touch of her daughter’s fingers on her calves, then the squeezing, the outright yanking. “Wait,” she said breathlessly. “What was I saying?”

“Something about how your sister couldn’t have been on a trip?”

“Right.” She paused, ordering her thoughts. Abby’s whining, high and nasal, had given way to a lower, more experimental sound. She was playing now. It was an odd, tinny popping, emerging from deep within her throat like a cricket’s chirp. “Hush,” Susanna hissed down toward her feet. She felt hot and stupid, incapable of saying what she meant. “For—for one thing, she doesn’t have the money,” she said finally. “And nothing was packed up. Her car was in the driveway. Her medicine—her birth control—was still beside the bed. And she wouldn’t have gone off and left the food out that way. It smelled awful.”

“People do strange things in a hurry,” Pendleton said.

Susanna slapped her palm on the officer’s desk, making Abby jump and Pendleton scowl. “You’re not hearing me,” she said hotly. “What’s going on here? I’m telling you that something is wrong. Ronnie hasn’t shown up to work this whole last week. She isn’t on a goddamned vacation.”

Pendleton stabbed a finger toward her. “That’s enough of that,” he said, scolding her with the same tone of voice that Susanna used on her disruptive students. “I’m doing my job here, and I expect you to speak to me respectfully.” His mustache quivered. “And you ought to be more careful about what kind of language you use in front of your little girl.”

She bit her lips shut, burning with anger. Her right leg started jogging, hard enough that the lamp on Pendleton’s desk rattled. She crossed the out-of-control leg over the other, pinning both tightly against the leg of her seat, her whole body clenched and throbbing.

“I can see you’re upset,” Pendleton continued. “And maybe you’ve got a right to be. We’ll do what we can here, but your sister’s an adult, and there’s no real evidence to suggest that she didn’t just take off for a few days.” Susanna started to argue then, but he shushed her. “I
heard you before: car in the driveway, old food on the table. I’ve got it. But that’s not enough.”

“What would be enough?”

“Blood, for one thing,” he said. “Or signs that her house had got broke into.”

Susanna stared at him, mute. Abby had wandered over to Pendleton’s bookshelf, which, Susanna noted with an automatic smugness, was mostly bookless: one
Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary,
one copy of
The Kentucky Criminal Code
. Otherwise, there was evenly spaced junk: a model police car, which Abby was now halfheartedly wheeling back and forth; a figurine of a police officer leaning over to help a boy and his dog, rendered with the blandness and sincerity of a Norman Rockwell illustration; a stuffed Smokey the Bear; and what looked to be a framed wedding portrait, depicting—Susanna had been right—a heavier Pendleton and an equally chubby bride with bangs sprayed several inches high. She realized, now fighting despair, that she was at the mercy of this man, of all people. That this man controlled her sister’s fate.

“Okay,” Susanna said. “What can we do?”

“There’s a missing-persons database run by the state police that I can put her name into, but you’ll need to bring me a current photo and fill out a form. I can do that today if you’ll get me the picture right away.” He leaned back in his chair again and lifted the page on a wall calendar. “It looks like Tony won’t be back in town until Wednesday.”

“Who’s Tony?”

“The detective.” Pendleton pulled a memo pad out from a desk drawer and wrote a few lines. “And what’s your name and number?”

Susanna gave them to him.

“All right,” he said, punctuating the note he’d written and tearing the sheet off with a flourish. “This’ll be on Tony’s desk when he gets back. You should get a call on Wednesday or Thursday.”

“Wednesday or Thursday? Can’t he come in sooner if it’s an emergency?”

Pendleton was looking sour again. “He’s at EKU right now finishing
up an accident reconstruction course. We can’t just pull him out of that early.” He frowned a little at Abby, who was now rolling the toy police cruiser around on the carpet, imitating the rev of a car engine. “And at the risk of speaking out of turn, I’m not so sure this is an emergency, Mrs. Mitchell. I know Ronnie from way back. She was a freshman when I was a senior in high school.” He shrugged. “She got around. She got around then, and all I’ve heard tells me she gets around these days, too. She’s been busted twice on DUI since I’ve worked here, and that don’t count all the times me or some other guy let her off easy with a warning.”

“So you’re saying someone like Ronnie doesn’t deserve the help of the police,” Susanna said. She was leaking tears now, and she tried to wipe her face dry before Abby could see. Pendleton seemed to soften a little, which only made Susanna madder. What a typical man he was. What a typical woman she probably seemed to him.

“I’m not saying that at all,” he told her. “I wouldn’t have let Ronnie slide all those times if I didn’t like her. So I’ll do what I can for her. But really, Mrs. Mitchell—” He stopped.

“Well, what is it?” she said.

“It’s only been a week. She’s probably just off somewhere. Wouldn’t that be like her?”

Susanna opened her mouth to protest but stopped short. Was it possible that she was overreacting? She’d been so keyed up lately, so vulnerable, so spiritually wrung out. That discussion yesterday with Christopher Shelton’s mother had been only the latest sore spot in, well, weeks. Weeks and weeks of sore spots. Fighting with Dale. Shouldering most of the parenting burden while Dale, as he always did between the months of July and October, spent every free moment practicing with the marching band. Dealing with bullshit handed down by the state, worrying that she’d lose her job if she didn’t get her students’ test scores higher.

And there was Ronnie herself. Of course there was. Susanna twisted her hands together, popped a knuckle, aware that Pendleton was watching her, assessing her. She wanted to tell him about the four
$500 savings bonds Ronnie had bought for Abby, about the patent leather Mary Janes. She wanted to tell him about her and Ronnie’s father, the kind of drunk he’d been, and how Ronnie had found it in her heart to forgive him while Susanna, embittered and superior, had fled to Dale’s house and never had another thing to do with him, and now never could have anything to do with him. She wanted to tell him about the copy of
A Separate Peace
on Ronnie’s bedside table, how she’d been only a chapter away from finishing it. But he wouldn’t understand that, would he? Pendleton, with his dictionary and his book of criminal codes and his shelf full of stupid knickknacks: How could he understand that love, that faith, was sometimes present in an act as simple as placing a receipt between two chapters?