Things We Didn't Say (10 page)

“Hmmm. Maybe I’ll see what I can do.”

“Look, can I talk to Mom?”

Without preamble my father hands over the phone. I brief Mom about it, and she gasps in all the right places. Thank God she understands. Of course she would.

“And Mom, please tell Dad not to bother with the media. I don’t think they’ll do a thing, even for Dr. Henry Turner.”

“I’ll see what I can do, dear,” my mother replies. “Although you know that when your father makes up his mind, there’s little even I can do to change it.”

“Can’t you slip him a mickey?” I say, laughing weakly.

She ignores the joke. “Just call me the minute you know something and tell me if there’s anything I can do. Do you need me to come over?”

“No, it’s a little crowded already. Mallory’s here.”

“Oh, dear.”

“It’s all right, actually. She’s in good form.”

“I’ll pray for him. Let me know, honey. He’ll be okay. I’m sure it’s just a boy thing and he’ll come home soon.”

“I never did anything like this.”

“Well, you had . . . Things were different for you.”

We say our good-byes, and I slump back on my bed. I listen for sounds of mayhem in the house. Everything sounds normal.

It’s an understatement to say things were different for me, an only child of a driven, ambitious doctor. Though I certainly knew other children of ambitious, successful parents who did their share of screwing up.

I grimace now to think of the furious desperation with which I studied, only barely aware that I was doing it for attention. I told myself that I wanted good grades so I could get into the college I wanted. I was staying in on Saturday nights because I didn’t want to end up sloppy drunk and knocking up a girl in high school like Mitch Donnelly.

And all I got for it was a nod and a twitch of mustache.

Now Mom, on the other hand, lavished me with praise. That should have helped, and I did—I do—feel glad she’s proud of me, but I always knew the reason her praise was so voluminous, so effusive, was because Dad’s was so lacking.

There’s a soft knock at the door. Casey must have some news.

“Yeah, come in.”

Mallory slides in through the door, her head down, peeking up at me through her white-blond hair. She’s got a beer in her hand, and my stomach drops. Great. She’s going to start drinking, here, now, of all times. I didn’t even know we had beer in the house. I sit up on the edge of the bed.

“Thought you might need this.” She holds it out to me. I accept it warily, and look back at her.

She reads my expression and smiles, but there’s no light in her eyes. Rueful. A look I seldom see from her. “Yes, you’re wondering where my drink is, no doubt. Nope, I’m not drinking these days. I don’t suppose you knew that.”

I didn’t. She could have told me she’d sawed off one of her own legs and I’d have sooner believed it. Yet she’s standing before me in arm’s reach of a beer and hasn’t taken a sip. “I didn’t know we had any.”

She shrugged. “I found one way in the back when I was looking for a Diet Coke.”

I take a sip, and it’s cold, but otherwise tastes like nothing to me. I set it down carefully on the nightstand.

I put my elbows on my knees and hold my head in my hands. “Jesus, Mal. Why would he do this? And where is he sleeping tonight?”

I’m not looking at her, but I can hear a thread of a crack in her voice. “I know. I thought I’d always know where he was sleeping. That’s silly, I guess, eventually I knew he’d grow up, but . . . And actually for me it’s been over two years since I tucked him in every night. I never would have guessed that at twelve years old he’d be living somewhere else.”

“Not now.”

“No, I know. I made that bed, didn’t I?”

My second shock in the past few minutes. I look up to see if it’s still really Mallory standing there. She’s holding her own arms like she’s cold. She might be; she’s only wearing a thin cotton shirt, and this place is drafty, especially upstairs.

“You look like you’re freezing. Let me grab you a sweater.” I stand up and go to my closet, selecting a navy blue wool sweater my dad bought me for Christmas that I rarely wear. I hand it to Mallory and she slips it over her head, stretching up as she does so, arching her back so that her breasts push against her shirt before pulling down the sweater. I wonder if that was for me, or if it’s just part of her general habit of pulling attention her way, like a planet pulls its moon.

She looks out the window at the dark evening. She bites her lip. She walks over to me and stands close, meeting my eyes. “Why won’t he call?”

Tears well up in her lashes, and I pull her to me. She turns her head to the side and rests her face on my shirt, her nose against my neck. We fit like puzzle pieces this way.

The door is still open, and when I hear a noise I look up to see Casey, holding on to a notebook. Her face is pale except for two dots of pink on her cheeks. She, too, looks cold, because her hands seem to be shaking.

“I found something,” she says.

Chapter 10
Casey

I
t took time to sort through all the e-mail this house generates: between my job and Michael’s, the older kids, it’s quite a soup.

Until I found a name I didn’t recognize, responding to Dylan. A girl we’ve never heard of.

I’d shut myself down, as soon as Michael shouted at me. I was leaving anyway, as of just this morning. For all I know Dylan ran away because he hates me now.

And I thought it had worked. I thought I’d turned my feelings off like a spigot, and I was something like proud because this was an effect I used to only achieve with the aid of Jack on the rocks, or in desperate times, Jack straight out of the bottle.

But when I walked up the stairs to Michael’s room—what just last night was
our
room—and saw him embracing Mallory through the open door, saw her wearing his sweater . . .

I won’t be right until I get out of here.

My voice quavers despite my best efforts. “I found something.”

Mallory steps away from Michael, adjusts his sweater, plays with the sleeves. Michael says, “What is it?”

“There are e-mails. Several of them, from a girl named Tiffany Harper. I’ve never heard of her.”

“Me, neither. What did they say?”

“I didn’t read them. But I brought them up on-screen so that you could.”

Mallory brushes past me and is halfway down the stairs before she calls out, “Where is the computer?”

“To the right once you get to the bottom of the basement steps,” I tell her.

Michael starts to walk past, too, but he stops just before me. I study the divots in the old, scarred floorboards.

“Thank you,” he says. “Casey, look at me.”

I turn farther away and notice an open beer sweating on the nightstand and wonder what it’s doing there.

Michael continues. “I’m under stress here. I didn’t mean to shout.”

Swallowing hard, I say, “Go read the e-mails. See what you can find out.”

I feel him standing in front of me for another long moment.
Just go!
I want to scream. I also want to step into his arms and let him hold me, too, but it’s time to find Dylan.

And anyway, my time has clearly passed.

He finally turns to go, and it’s like something’s been snapped away. I hear his feet hurrying down the stairs.

I walk over to the bed and sit down on the edge. The bottle sweats invitingly just like in a commercial full of mountains and rushing rivers and people having fun. People relaxed and unwinding.

I brush my fingers over the cold glass. It comes back in a rush, how the happy hours always started with beer, that good-time end-of-day drink, a round purchased by someone and then by someone else, until we were all throwing money into a pile at the center and bottles kept coming.

It feels as natural in my hand as a pencil, a toothbrush.

I nearly run down the stairs, stepping lightly as I can in the rickety old house, until I reach the kitchen, where I turn the beer upside down and watch it glug out in explosions of amber foam.

The smell of it nearly does me in and I almost tip the bottle right up again to save some, but the last drips come out and I sigh, shaking it briefly before setting it on the counter where we always put empty pop cans and such.

The girls are still watching TV, numbing themselves to the absence of their brother with insipid shows, but at least this vice won’t kill brain cells. Not literally. Anyway, they’re smart enough, and today is a rough day.

I shrug into my parka and step onto the front porch for a smoke. I sit down in the porch swing and prop my feet up on the railing. The cigarette flickers to life, and I sigh deeply after the first lightly dizzying puff. This causes me to cough.

The homes are close to each other here, with big picture windows in front rooms. The street is narrow, too, so it’s not hard to look across the road into the duplex across the way, with a Middle Eastern family living downstairs and two college guys upstairs. There’s a miniature porch off an upstairs dormer window, where the guys like to sit on balmy nights, drinking beer and smoking. Sometimes one of them plays his acoustic guitar, and we share a wave across the road as renegade smokers, an endangered breed.

Tonight it’s cold and the porch is quiet. Through the downstairs window I can see the flashing of a television program in the darkness of the room. Maybe the kids watching a movie, or maybe they’re in bed already. Just toddlers, they are. I’ve seen them walking as a family with the little ones in a double stroller.

Quitting smoking was next on my list. I wasn’t about to smell like an ashtray in my wedding finery, and besides, soon after that there would be a baby, and I wouldn’t smoke pregnant. Also, in my daily battle to stay away from the liquor store, I’d have a tiny, unwitting ally growing inside. I wouldn’t need to hold on to any vices anymore. At least, that’s how I imagined it.

I consider a call or a text to Tony. I’d like to tell him about my close call just now. He’d be proud, and I’ll admit it, I need the praise, I need someone to tell me I done good because today I’m finding it harder and harder to remember why I ever gave it up.

I close my eyes to try and conjure up my rock-bottom moment. But it seems hazy, like something you only wished were true.

What does come clearly to mind is happy hour.

Chuck led the parade out the door. “Come one, come all!” he shouted. Our productivity had tailed off through the afternoon. It was a sunny spring day, and had been a helluva week. We were coding a major project for a client and had finally made some headway. When Chuck, even as our boss, started an improvised game of charades in the meeting room at two o’clock, we’d all started to wrap up anything serious.

We’d been shouting bar names all afternoon, trying to come up with a consensus. The patio at the Black Rose won the day, and at four o’clock when Chuck grabbed his bag and his jacket, we all filed out behind him like rats behind the pied piper. He bought the first pitcher.

Pitchers were wonderful. Our glasses just kept filling with so little effort. Our laughter got more raucous. We looked out to the sidewalk with pity on the drones trudging to their cars to drive home on packed highways to things like Little League games and excruciating kiddie band concerts whereas we, all of us, were free as eagles.

There were seven of us at JinxCorp, back before I had to quit, when I threw away my old life to stay home and do contract work. Alone.

We were all single, or at the most coupled. Not a child among the bunch. This was probably by Chuck’s design because no one squawked too loud about overtime, especially when he’d sometimes spring us at four o’clock and buy rounds at the Black Rose.

The sun dropped a little lower and the Michigan April was cool, so we stepped inside to listen to the band belting out classic rock. I danced with my hands in the air, belting out with the band: “
Ride, Sally, ride!
” And when I came back to the table one of the seats had disappeared, so I sat on Kevin’s lap, and he put his hand on the small of my back, then wrapped it over my hipbone, and I didn’t mind a damn bit.

He drove me home—I’d taken the bus to work—and crushed up against me in the apartment building stairwell, kissing and biting my neck and cupping my breasts until I decided, Oh what the hell, I’m on the Pill, and let him in.

It worked out pretty well, because then I had a ride into work the next day.

Everyone smirked over their computer screens as we walked in at the exact same time, Kevin showered but wearing clothes that stank of the bar.

As with many mornings there, I popped an Advil, drank about a gallon of water alternated with mugs of strong bitter coffee, and by 10:00
A.M
. I was right as rain.

Kevin and I never dated. It was a mutually pleasurable arrangement. No one ever frowned at me over it, made me feel guilty, or in any way cared about what I did.

At the time this felt like a good thing.

My cigarette is down to a nub. I grind it out on my shoe and keep the butt in my hand since there’s no can out here and I’m too tired to walk over and flick it into the street.

Now, with the three kids watching every move, and Mallory waiting for me to screw up, and Michael’s disapproving gaze when I so much as smoke a half-pack in a day . . .

“Chuck says fuck it!” was my boss’s favorite saying when he wanted to dismiss something as irrelevant.

If only I could feel that cavalier again. Was being numb really so bad?

My phone rings, and my heart leaps with the hope it might be Dylan before I realize at the same instant I see her number I haven’t talked to my mother in hours.

“Hi, Mom.”

“What’s wrong? You never called back.”

“It’s been crazy here.”

“Are those kids giving you a hard time again?”

If she only knew. “No, Mom. I don’t want to talk about it.”

“You know it makes me nervous when you don’t check in.”

“I know.”

“So I heard from Julie, and she says she hopes you come to the baby’s party.”