When She Was Gone (11 page)

She embarrassed herself by thinking about Johnny this way, and she embarrassed herself by eating the treats, but she also needed them. It was only once a month or so. She made up for it at the gym, day after day. Sometimes it felt good when she was done, but she never enjoyed the actual doing, the bike, the mountain climber, the rower, the machines, the
Pilates class. There were frightening women in there, women who had been dancers and whose fifty- or sixty-something bodies stretched out obscenely, who worked away at the invisible flab on their upper arms as if evil, as if the devil itself were manifest in the tiniest portion of flesh. She wasn't insane this way. She had her spots of softness, and she didn't hate them, and neither did Charlie, and now, neither did Jordan, whom she allowed to investigate, bit by bit, though often they had sex with most of their clothing on.

After the first time with Jordan, she was sitting across the dinner table from Charlie, and she couldn't hear her own voice when she spoke. All the children were elsewhere, and she felt exposed. If she said anything, lust would fall out of her mouth like a fat slab of tongue at the butcher. It silenced her, what she'd done, it made her subhuman, because she'd done this to her husband. They were having an ordinary conversation—about that babysitter Linsey Hart.

“I can't believe that girl is old enough to apply for college,” she'd started, only now she couldn't tell whether she'd said it, or just thought it. “I can't believe soon Tina will be applying to colleges—before we know it.” At least she thought she'd said it. In her mind, her words whooshed and thudded, like an organ about to cease its relentless work.

“We should plan another college tour,” said Charlie. He was putting too much butter on his dinner roll, a fat pat, a tablespoon at least.
He is thinking of the children while I cheat on him. I am pathetic.

“I can't manage that,” is what she thought she said. Or
else she said she couldn't bear it, either way, her mouth felt cottony and useless.

Charlie didn't notice anything.

“You think? Maybe next summer?” He stuffed the bread into his mouth, butter pat first. He could do this, and yet if he left her he'd still find someone new. His mouth was rich and wet and her mouth was dry, used.

“I don't know,” she said. Or thought she said.

“Okay,” said Charlie. He wasn't even listening. She could open her mouth and birds could spill out onto the table, mockingbirds, crows, raptors, and he'd just get up and leave his dish on the counter and go sit down in his permanently pleated work pants and beige cashmere sweater reading his travel magazine and she'd never know what he was thinking—because he could never know what she was thinking.

Later that evening her ears popped, as if she had been in an elevator, on an airplane, climbing mountains. She could hear her own voice yelling up to Johnny that he needed to take his socks and Cheez Doodles bowl off the couch. She could hear herself telling her husband good night.

•   •   •

Sex with Jordan made her disgusted as much as it thrilled her. It was not unlike eating all the cream horns. It was decadent and she needed it, or at least she told herself she needed it, she told herself she couldn't stop, only now she might stop, she might go cold turkey from Jordan, she might do the right thing after doing the wrong thing for so long. Perhaps she
didn't want to be with Jordan—perhaps she wanted to be him, all inhibition lapsed. Jordan didn't care what the neighbors thought. He paid his rent and parked his car in back. He ate as he wished and called his parents when he felt like it; she didn't know whether Jordan ever felt guilty. She wondered whether cigarette smokers, the heavy regulars, felt like she did. Repulsed and in need. Twice, when he couldn't get off work, she let him take her into his stockroom at Starbucks, locking the door, pushing into her as she leaned against a shelf rich with giant silvery coffee bags. She came out of the store smelling more of smoky coffee than of sex.

•   •   •

It had been two weeks since Linsey, carrying Johnny, had passed by Jordan's windows, looked in at her squalid little affair, and maybe she saw and maybe she didn't. Now Linsey was missing. How long had it been—since she didn't show up yesterday, or longer? Had she simply run away with her boyfriend? Reeva was well past her teens and still experienced the urgencies of the body.

Last night the stepfather had canvassed the neighborhood with flyers,
MISSING GIRL
. It was strange, almost as if they were advertising a play, or a garage sale. Linsey in black and white on bright pink paper, festive paper. Mr. Stein had rung the bell this morning after the boys left and while Reeva was upstairs in the bathroom, checking to be sure she'd taken her birth control pills, sitting on the toilet counting out the little pillows of drug. She'd told Jordan she'd meet him, but
she was having second thoughts. Last night, Charlie had wanted to make love. He'd grunted and put his hand in her hair and laid his arm over her waist like a man claiming an entire territory. It was both touching and horrible, because Reeva's body betrayed her—she became aroused. She'd allowed it, the ordinary sex of a married couple. She'd come, thinking for a minute that Jordan's mouth was on her own, only Charlie was far gentler than Jordan, his teeth never clacked painfully against hers, he never kissed the insides of her thighs, he never pushed against her too hard.

The doorbell rang and Reeva stood up to look down through the waxy-leafed magnolia in the front yard. She could see the top of a man's head, and then, as she watched without going downstairs, he turned away from her door and walked on to the next neighbor's house.

The flyer stuck in her screen door had a handwritten note on the back, “If you know anything—”

Linsey was only a few years older than Tina, and so much more mature. Better, she thought, feeling disloyal. Gentler—at least she seemed that way with Johnny. But had Reeva been wrong to trust Linsey with her Johnny? What if she had told him things he shouldn't know? What if she was like Reeva herself, a reverse geode, all crystal and value outside, but dun, flat-faced, flawed within? Reeva didn't believe that Linsey would run away—it was probably the mother's fault.

Reeva left the car in the driveway and walked along Sycamore Street, listening to the hissing of cicadas in the trees and sprinklers making wet green paint of the grass. She
walked back through the woods behind the cul-de-sac and arrived early, despite her best intentions, despite her husband's quick, soft “Thank you, beautiful” in the morning before he left the bed, as if that made up for everything. She carried a bottle of wine she'd grabbed from under the wood island in the kitchen—she didn't care what it was or how expensive. Jordan liked drinking with her, and though it was midmorning, she wanted to taste wine on his tongue. She imagined it on the walk, holding the bottle inside her arm like a girl carrying her books to school.

“Hi,” said Jordan, standing at the door. He had chocolate on the corner of his mouth and she reached up to wipe it away, right there, outside, visible.

“Inside,” he said.

“Since when do you care?” Reeva wanted to taste it now, and she licked the corner of his mouth as he shut the door. She pushed him on the bed.

“Hey, you're full of ambition today,” he said.

“What's that supposed to mean?”

Jordan took a pink piece of paper from his pocket, unfolding the leaflet—Linsey Hart's face, the clean lines of her chin, the long hair in black and white.

“I know this girl,” he said. “Or at least, I knew her in middle school. It's weird. She never seemed like the runaway type. She even asked me out once. Brave little thing. I wonder what happened.”

“How could you have been in middle school with her?” Reeva took off his T-shirt. It smelled of crushed grass and
lemony sweat. He'd started running, he told her, he wanted to get into shape. She'd told him she liked his shape, and she did, the lean lines, no worse for a thousand brownies. She pushed her hand into his waistband. She was here for sex, after all, and part of her wanted it over with, part of her wanted her body to stop asking for it, stop aggressing her into this ridiculous situation. She got up and looked for a corkscrew on his counter, the one she'd lent him, one of the six or seven they owned. Dirty socks, candy wrappers. What was she doing here? The kitchen smelled like mildew and old cheese. The girl asked him out in middle school. It didn't make sense.

“Maybe I skipped a grade.”

She found the corkscrew under a doily—she had no idea why Jordan had a doily, maybe his grandmother made them—and poured the wine into the two cleanest paper cups she could find.

“Still, you'd have missed her in middle school by years.”

“Maybe I skipped more than one grade,” said Jordan. The wine spilled down his chest and he rested his cup on a shelf, took a swig from the bottle of pinot noir.

“Excuse me?” Reeva looked at his eyes, so young, so clean, sort of horrible. He put down the bottle and reached for her, sliding his hands inside her jeans, reaching inside her and cupping her ass, always fluid in his sexual motions. Reeva felt it, but she was still calculating.

“Linsey Hart is only seventeen,” she said.

“Almost eighteen,” he said.

“Only
almost
eighteen.” He kissed her hard as she said it, but she pushed him away. “So how old are you, Jordan?”

Jordan didn't stop massaging her, his hands between her legs, his mouth on her breast through her T-shirt, which was really Tina's T-shirt; she'd borrowed it and just an hour ago it had made her feel sexy and now she realized how absurd she looked. It was a tight V-neck. It was pink and girly and she was not a girl.

A girl was missing. Where was Tina right now? At camp, she hoped, worrying about her hair. She couldn't be approaching this same sort of life, this debauchery, this embarrassment. Her daughter wasn't
stained
.

“How old?”

“Fine,” said Jordan. “I'm twenty.” He pushed at her hips, grabbing, maneuvering her onto the bed. The sex scent rose from the sheets. Did he ever wash his sheets? His mouth was on hers but it felt hard and wrong.

“Almost,” he said.

Reeva stared at his forehead. There was still a little chocolate, over by his ear. She shoved him away. He groaned and pressed her down on the bed.

“I like that,” he said.

“You're fucking nineteen years old?”

“No,” he said and grinned. “You're fucking nineteen years old.”

“Very funny,” said Reeva, trying to stand up. “You can't be nineteen years old.”

“Right,” he said. “I can't drink.” He picked the bottle up
from the floor and pressed it obscenely between her legs. This would've excited her just yesterday, she thought. She was that base.

“You can't drink,” she repeated.

“And I can't buy booze, either.”

“Jesus Christ.”

“Jesus good or Jesus bad?”

“You can't buy alcohol,” she said, as if it mattered.

“I have to get older women to bring it to me.” He tried to reach for her breast but she slapped at his hand. “Don't be like that,” he said.

Older women.
She felt it physically, her face melting, the old face beneath the plastic new one; she was an old lady, and he was nineteen years old. She got up and backed toward the door.

“Only old ladies with great tits.” He grabbed at her, suddenly inelegant. Nineteen years old. A prodigy in more ways than one, but still a baby, she was sleeping with a baby, she was a horror. He had referred to her tits. She hated that word. She hated this smelly little room, but he was pulling her back to the bed, his hot hairless hands on hers, thinking she was playing, how could he think that? He was pulling her back to him; his fingers dug into her crotch, pushing her jeans down. Nineteen years old.

“Cellophane,” she said.

He kept going, as if he hadn't heard her, but she knew he'd heard it, and she knew he knew.

“Cellophane,” she said again. “Cell-oh-phane.”

Jordan put his hands up in the air, surrender. He wouldn't look at her. He lay back on the bed and stared at the ceiling. She'd seen that ceiling. Knotty pine beams, gray cobwebs, a jagged crack in the paint over by the door.

He lay there while Reeva gathered her things—the corkscrew; a novel she'd lent him,
Life of Pi,
which Charlie had given her; her underwear from a few days ago, crusty with sex; she took the bottle from between his feet. It would make her weird and conspicuous, walking up Sycamore Street with an open bottle before noon. And she knew it was over and she only hoped he wouldn't tell. He wouldn't tell. He was nineteen. She was ancient. She thought of Charlie's heavy arm and she knew she was going home to him, to their quiet shipwreck, to see what could be salvaged. The captain, her Charlie, didn't even know they were underwater, halfway between the whitecaps and the bottom of the sea.

She walked out of his door without looking around first, without being furtive, with nothing to hide. And maybe he saw her and maybe he didn't, but down the woods path, Mr. Leonard was walking through the oaks and maples, still at the height of their greens, pushing his antique bike with one hand, holding something pink in the other. It wasn't until later that Reeva remembered that silhouette, that strange juxtaposition, old man, pink cloth, and wondered, and filled in the missing puzzle pieces. In the dappled light of her memory, he was holding Linsey Hart's pink sweatshirt as if it belonged to him now.

24 SYCAMORE STREET

H
e hadn't been sleeping; he hadn't been eating; his gut was killing him, the cancer eating him from inside. He had moments of daily respite, and he spent those outside, walking, or on his bike. He felt it spreading exponentially, and it was both a gripping hurt and a fascination. It was as if he could see it in color, hear the cancer cells like notes, piling and growing on each other, a movement, an overture, a finale. He'd been lying in his bed, on his back, brittle as a bone, playing measures over and over, unable to stop. Borodin, Debussy. Handel's
Dixit Dominus,
the soprano soloist answering the violins, a sinuous, winding conversation, lines like the floating of a feather, back and forth and down in soft stair steps, though air. Sometimes he played pieces his hands knew, but more often it wasn't for piano, sometimes it was a bit of the Brahms requiem, the
Zigeunerlieder,
Hungarian gypsy songs. Back on one limb of his family tree, his father's side, there had been Hungarian gypsies—they sang to him through the music, raucous, gorgeous voices. Sometimes it was Prokofiev, Verdi's
Macbeth,
sometimes
Aida
. He hardly ever listened to recordings these days, his old turntable with
the stylus that floated in a viscous mercury sea was off balance, and he didn't want to take it in to the one shop left that repaired turntables in Fair Lawn. They would keep it overnight at least, and he needed it to be home, even if it wasn't working. The music kept him up, effective as the chattering of parrots; for all its lyricism, it broke his thoughts in an unbearable cacophony.