The Many Change and Pass

by R.P. Burnham

“You want to go with me tonight to look for Virgie?”

  “Maybe. I’ll have to see what Chris has planned when he gets back.”

  “What is it between you and Chris anyways?”

  The eagerness with which she spoke betrayed Donna’s curiosity and made Patti frown. They were in the L.L. Bean store on Congress Street, not a place to be asking such a personal question. She also did not like the question because she could give it no definite answer even if she wanted to. That he loved her, she knew, just as she had known for years that she loved him. Now even that spark that led to fire between a man and a woman was there, and the love had changed and deepened. They had made love several times, always either at home when the house was empty or on two late-summer weekend getaways in motels. It had been wonderful but at the same time unsatisfactory. There was something that held Chris back, most obviously seen in the way he was always distant and almost cold after making love, as if he resented having bodily needs and depending on others. And she knew he was fanatically dedicated to his ecological work and seemed to feel that she hindered it.

  So she spoke honestly when she said, “It’s hard to say. We’ve always been friends. Now we’re a bit more than friends. Leave it at that.”

  Donna screwed up her face and narrowed her eyes as she looked at Patti askance, but after a moment she shrugged. “Okay, but you can’t blame us for wondering.”

  Patti wondered in turn whom she meant by “us.” Were she and Alex gossiping? Had they seen that she and Chris were meant for one another? Or did they think they were crazy? “This red coat is nice,” she said, emphatically changing the subject. She held it up in front of her. “What do you think?”

  Donna assessed the coat’s suitability with a practiced eye. “It goes well with your sandy hair. It might make you look fat, though. It just hangs down, and it’s too long. I think you should look for one like your old coat—you know, one that has an elastic band at the waist.”

  Patti returned the rejected coat to the rack and went over to where waist-length coats were displayed. They all were shades of brown or tan, though, so she rejected them out of hand. Looking around, she said, “I don’t think there’s anything here for me.”

  Donna suggested they look into the surplus store and then check some of the boutiques in the Old Port section.

  Out on the street where a lot of people were walking about, many of them obviously leaf-peeping tourists come to see the fall foliage on this mid-October day, Donna said, “The best time to buy is in the spring when they’re unloading their winter stock.”

  Patti nodded in response, and they walked a couple of blocks until Donna broke the silence. “So do you think I’m right about Virgie?”

  “Yes. Yes, I do. I guess I knew the moment you described her behavior. It’s just that I didn’t want to believe it.”

  Last night at a rock club Donna had seen Virgie high on cocaine. She had worried that this might happen ever since that slick Lothario, Tim Longo, had met her at the soup kitchen. Virgie was now living with the man, and they hadn’t seen her for a few weeks until she came into the club with Longo. He was high too, but being an experienced user he was much more in control than Virgie.

  Alex and Chris were out of the house on this Saturday, Alex with his boyfriend attending a homosexual commitment ceremony and Chris with his friend Ted Autello having some samples from a dump site tested. After Donna arose at 10:30 they had talked about Virgie all through the day as they cleaned the house and did the laundry. Donna said it wasn’t Virgie she saw—not the real Virgie. Obsessively, she described their friend’s behavior and symptoms over and over. She was euphoric and hyperactive. She talked rapidly, panted more than breathed, had dilated pupils, was subject to sudden mood swings—when the rock music would suddenly become very loud a look of pure terror and panic would pass over her face and then just as suddenly she would be euphoric again. Her cheek twitched, she couldn’t sit still, and apparently she hallucinated because twice she thought she saw the cops coming into the club when there was nothing there. The things she said were even more uncharacteristic. Usually quiet and unassertive, lacking in self-confidence, she kept saying to Donna, “Don’t you know I’m the most beautiful girl in the world?” For a long time she talked about seeing the foliage. At first Donna thought she and Longo had taken a drive in the country, but she was apparently only referring to city trees. She said she was going to paint leaves and become as famous as Georgia O’Keefe for painting flowers.

  Donna’s concern for her friend touched Patti, as did every rare example in the world of people thinking selflessly of others. Asking her here on Congress Street if she believed her interpretation of Virgie’s behavior had to be the fifth or sixth time Donna had asked some variation of the question. It was a sign of deep concern that she needed to feel she had an ally. She did. The trouble was, neither knew how to deal with the problem. They had talked themselves into exhaustion—that’s why Patti had suggested the shopping trip to look for a winter coat.

  After receiving Patti’s reassurance, Donna became lost in thought until she looked up at someone yelling her name from a car that went by. She waved back. “That was Les Condella,” she said. “One of the guys in Leon’s band. But we’ve got to do something. I feel responsible. It was me who introduced that snake Tim Longo into her life. She’s such a lost soul, you know. No ambition. No self-confidence. No sense of direction in her life. Really, she’s on her way to perdition.”

  Patti didn’t answer her. She thought Donna was overstating the case and being histrionic, but she didn’t want to say that.

  Then Donna’s tone changed. “You don’t think it’s that bad, do you?”

  “Well, it’s bad, maybe just not that bad.”

  Donna stopped and faced her. “There’s something you should know, something she told me the day she first went to the soup kitchen with me and met Tim Longo.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Donna chewed her lip nervously, then suddenly looked resolute. “She’s in love with Chris, that’s what.”

  “In love? I know they’ve had a few trysts, but love? Are you sure?”

  “That’s what she told me. We were talking about life, and she said that the way to find fulfillment was love. She was talking about Chris. She even started crying because he seemed indifferent to her. And I know what you’re thinking. Virgie’s problems are a lot deeper than that and have nothing to do with Chris. But in her mind that’s the way out.”

  Patti started walking again. “So what are you saying? Tim Longo is her rebound?”

  “Or her dead end—as if she doesn’t care anymore. That’s what scares me about the drug use.”

  “I think she’s always tried to find something exterior to herself to save her when—”

  “—When the problem is herself. Yes, I agree.”

  Suddenly a voice shocked them into awareness of their surroundings. “You going to walk right by me without speaking?”

  They were in front of the Starbuck’s and about to turn down Exchange Street. Patti’s first thought was that they had walked past the surplus store, their supposed goal, without even seeing it. Her second thought occurred almost simultaneously—she recognized the speaker, Lexi Kovac, a fellow student in the nursing program. She was a dark-haired and dark-eyed woman of about thirty, heavyset and rather plain, though Patti always thought she could be attractive but had let herself go. When not in her nurse’s uniform she tended to wear plain, formless clothes (today it was a large blue sweater and baggy slacks) and always wore her hair parted in the middle and just covering her ears. She was a single mother of a six-year-old daughter, a fact that made her bitter and often acerbic. Her husband had run off to California four years ago and disappeared without a trace. Whenever Lexi mentioned him she never called him her husband; rather she referred to him as “the poster boy for deadbeat dads.” She was an experienced practical nurse who had worked in hospitals since she was a teenager and knew a great deal about all kinds of
medical procedures. With patients she hid her bitterness so well that they all regarded her as a cheerful and friendly nurse.

  “Oh, Lexi, sorry. We were talking.”

  “So I could see.” She eyed Donna.

  “This is my friend Donna McClellan.”

  “Pleased to meet you. I’ve heard Patti mention your name many times. You volunteer at the soup kitchen, don’t you.”

  Donna nodded and said, “I’ve also heard of you.”

  “Good things, of course.”

  Donna smiled. “Of course.”

  Lexi was shopping for a birthday gift for her daughter, who was with her grandmother for the weekend. She suggested they walk down the hill and have a beer at Gritty McDuff’s. On the way they stopped at a store where she bought a large stuffed panda, and in a good mood from getting what she was sure was a gift her daughter would like (and perhaps from anticipation of having a good talk and pleasant society, Patti thought), she displayed her sense of humor by saying to the salesclerk who asked if she wanted it wrapped, “I’d rather have a leash and walk it home.”

  It pleased Patti to see Lexi happy. She thought she often felt lonely and trapped. Her husband had left with only a note taped to the kitchen table: “I can’t take it or you anymore. Don’t try to find me.” Patti knew that after that her life had been a struggle. She was only able to get into the nursing program because she got scholarship money. She was always one paycheck away from disaster. When her daughter became ill and she had to pay a doctor or miss work to nurse her herself, she would have to give something up that week to get by. Sometimes the choices were stark—food or rent money, clothes for her growing child or medicine.

  They found the bar crowded and were about to leave, but Lexi talked them into waiting. She seemed anxious, afraid to miss a chance to talk. So they waited at the end of the bar where they had a view of the small inner room and close to the second, larger room. Twice Lexi poked her head into the larger room, and on the second reconnaissance she turned to them with a bright face: two couples were getting ready to leave. They waited for a waitress to clean the table and then ordered beers. Lexi had put the panda on the fourth chair, and to the amusement of people at nearby tables told the waitress he would not be having anything because he wasn’t of drinking age.

  They joked about the panda while waiting for their beers to arrive; when they did and Lexi and Donna had taken a long pull (Patti, never much of a drinker, merely sipped hers), Lexi said, “You two were really out to lunch when I first saw you. What was so interesting that you lost sight of reality?”

  “We were talking about a friend,” Donna said. “We’re very concerned because I saw her high on coke last night. She is not the kind of person who should be fooling around with drugs.”

  Lexi savored her beer. “Has she ever done drugs before?”

  “She used to smoke grass, but once it made her so sick she stopped, Patti said. “After that she’d get drunk on beer and wine. At least that’s not instantaneous. As Donna said, she’s not a strong person. She has a poor self-image and has no sense of direction. She was acting very atypically last night.”

  “Patti told me you’ve worked in admittance and seen a lot of drug abuse and overdoses,” Donna said. “Could you describe the symptoms you’ve seen.”

  Lexi gave out a short, harsh laugh. “I’ve seen noses destroyed by snorting that stuff. I’ve seen cocaine psychosis where a patient is so paranoid he had to be put in a straitjacket. I’ve seen seizures, pounding headaches, bleeding in the brain, strokes, comas, the works. What form of cocaine was your friend using?”

  Donna waited while someone at a nearby table yelled something about meeting later to a person standing at the door. “She was smoking crack cocaine, I’m pretty sure.”

  Lexi asked Donna to describe Virgie’s symptoms. She cited all the physical and behavioral symptoms, emphasizing how uncharacteristic Virgie was in claiming she was the most beautiful girl in the world and soon to be a world-famous painter.

  “She was experiencing the false sense of grandeur that is pretty typical of cocaine,” Lexi said. “Let me guess, some man had got her high.”

  Donna laughed gleefully, almost as if the half a glass of beer she’d drunk had already caused her to get tipsy. “You’re right on it, Lexi. She met this good-looking guy who’s full of himself and swaggers around like a lord, and a known drug dealer too. This was at the soup kitchen. I feel responsible because I talked Virgie into helping out, and he sees her there and uses his glib tongue, telling her she’s the most beautiful girl in the world—”

  “—So that’s where she got the phrase she was using.”

  Donna nodded grimly. “She knew he was bullshitting when he said it, but she lost that perspective.”

  “That’s how men are. In love with themselves first and foremost.”

  Donna smiled sardonically. She seemed to like Lexi’s attitude. “I won’t argue with that. I just broke up with a guy because of that.”

  “Men are such Peter Pans. Do they ever grow up? Do they ever spare a thought for other people? Is there ever a time their egos are not as fragile as an eggshell? They have their manias and impose them on the women in their lives.”

  Patti saw where Lexi was going and tried to deflect the conversation to safer paths. “Some men, yes, but in other ways everyone is lacking compassion and understanding of others.”

  Lexi propped up the panda, which was slumping in his seat. “What do you mean by that?”

  “Well, think of the Iraqi war, which is supported by half the people in this country. When the army bombs a house in civilian neighborhoods where they suspect insurgents are, they kill women, children and innocent people. It shows a total lack of concern for others. Would they order these air strikes if their wife and kids lived nearby? I don’t think so. In the media, though, there is no comment on this evil murdering of innocents.”

  “Macho thinking is to real thinking like rotten eggs to perfume. Men kill; women respect life.”

  Patti sighed impatiently. “But it’s more fundamental than that. The U.S. used to be thought of as the home of the common man, but now our government is never on the side of poor, suffering small people. I think people lose their moral center when they identify with the brutal oppressors like the Israelis and what they do to the Palestinians. The terrorist propaganda makes people dismiss the oppression. Our government and the media are controlled by the greedy and selfish rich who don’t care about human suffering, and they condition the people not to care.”

  “Not only are they rich; they’re also men.”

  “But, Lexi, again I say it’s more than that. It’s why we’re hated throughout the world. We’re always on the side of the evil bullies.”

  “And you count Israel among the bullies? Have a look at reality, sister. What would you do if every Palestinian, even women and kids, could have a bomb strapped around their waist? When you live in a country surrounded by governments that want to destroy you? And don’t tell me those Arab governments don’t oppress women.”

  “Okay, okay. I see your point, but mine was simply that men alone aren’t responsible for all the evil in the world.”

  Lexi took a long gulp of beer. “We should ask the panda. He’s the only male here.”

  “Looks female to me,” Donna giggled. “I don’t see anything down there. Or is it just sexless?”

  “Hmm,” Lexi mused, rubbing her chin. “I always think of stuffed animals as male.”

  “Maybe that’s because dolls are always girls.”

  “But it’s not male or female that causes evil in the world,” Patti said sharply. She was feeling a bit irritated and resenting their making light of her position. “It’s objectifying people. Man or woman, we all have to remember our shared humanity.”

  Lexi ignored her observation. “It isn’t just your basic Yahoo either. Did you hear about Dr. Wu’s little incident yesterday?”

  Patti shook her head.

  “A woman came in wit
h a leg injury, and he wanted her to take her clothes off and put on a johnny.”

  “What’s wrong with that? If she had an accident, she might not be aware of other injuries.”

  “All she did was trip over the hassock in her living room and sprain her ankle.”

  Patti didn’t know Dr. Wu very well. He had a nervous constitution and was always in a hurry. She was quite sure he was competent and conscientious. He had two daughters and a shy young wife. They were obviously a happy family. Lexi was making his nervous conscientiousness into something salacious. “He was just being thorough. He thought she might have sustained another injury in her fall.”

  “Maybe. But I have my doubts. You’ve seen how Dr. Berger stares at women’s breasts. I’m not sure Dr. Wu is any better.”

  Patti had heard tales about Dr. Berger and knew he had a bad reputation among the nurses. But Lexi was generalizing unfairly. “I don’t know,” she said doubtfully. “I—”

  “You heard what Maya Roberts said Berger did to her, didn’t you?”

  “I don’t think so. I have heard people say he’s a lecher, though.”

  “What did he do?” Donna asked.

  “Maya’s very pretty, very shapely,” Lexi explained for Donna’s benefit. “She’s the prettiest nurse at the hospital. She was getting some materials in the supply room. It’s really just a closet, small, you know. Berger comes in supposedly looking for something. He was giving her that stare he has, and when he went behind the table where she was leaning over, he purposely brushed up against her ass.”

  “How do you know it wasn’t an accident?” Donna asked.

  Lexi gave her a my-aren’t-we-naive look. “She felt an erection, that’s how. So even if Dr. Wu is okay, Berger isn’t. And he’s typical of the species. That Longo guy is clearly another one. When they’re not thinking about sex, they’re thinking of money or power or the status of their machismo. All babies are completely self-absorbed when they’re born. Girls grow out of it. Men don’t.”

  For some reason she stared at Donna, expecting a response. Patti could see Donna becoming self-conscious about her bad complexion. Speaking quickly and nervously, she said, “I’ve certainly heard of the shenanigans of doctors. Remember the dentist who raped women when they were gassed for oral surgery? And how many psychiatrists have taken advantage of vulnerable women patients and had sex with them?”

  They continued ragging men and seeming to get a great deal of pleasure from it, but Patti stopped listening. She looked out the window to glimpse beyond the cobblestoned alley lined with boutiques the distant masts of fishing and tourist vessels at the waterfront. A vague and disturbing longing for escape and freedom possessed her, and she began thinking about Chris. He had been hovering in her mind as Lexi described the typical characteristics of the male of the species. She understood Lexi’s bitterness, alone with her responsibilities because her husband had chosen irresponsibilities, but she resented what Lexi was doing to her. Too often her remarks described Chris, and it made her aware of something she kept locked in a corner of her mind—she and Chris did things like take a drive to the seacoast or go to a movie only when it suited his convenience. She thought about the distance she could feel after they made love. She recalled how even in high school he was self-absorbed. She was shocked to realize when Donna told her about Virgie being in love with Chris how shabbily he had been using her. She remembered the day he hoped the little Kimball boy would die because it would help his case. The lines from the Beatles’ Abbey Road floated into her mind, “For in the end the love you take/ Is equal to the love you make,” and wondered as she heard Paul McCartney’s voice as clearly as if a CD was playing in the bar how much Chris was capable of giving. Was he a monomaniac? Was he a Peter Pan? Was he in love with himself first and foremost? He wasn’t greedy. Money didn’t interest him in the least. But neither did human beings. She grew angry—at herself, at him, at Lexi for making her think these thoughts, and then she wondered if she was being fair. If he was monomaniacal, he was also a dedicated soul and the work he did was one way of loving the earth and all its inhabitants. She knew he loved her, but she feared love would never be enough for him.

  Donna’s loud giggle brought her attention back to the table. She was describing and imitating the behavior of Leon Margrave, the rock musician with whom she had recently broken up, as he walked by a store window and stole a glance at himself. “Others may think the sun is the center of the solar system,” she said in summation. “Leon knows otherwise.”

  Donna and Lexi had finished their beers, and she could see Lexi searching the crowded bar for their waitress to order another round. Her own beer was only a little more than half drunk, and she certainly did not want another one. “It’s getting close to four o’clock,” she said to Donna. “We need to get home.”

  Donna looked at her watch and seemed surprised. “You’re right. We’d better settle up.”

  Patti could see the disappointment in Lexi’s eyes, but now she didn’t feel bad about it. She wished they hadn’t met her.

  But she shook that unworthy thought from her mind. “Do you have any ideas on how we can help Virgie?”

  Lexi, going through her pocketbook looking for change for the tip, shook her head. “Not really. I think she has to help herself.”

  “But if we could get her away from Tim Longo, that would help?”

  “How can we do that?” Donna asked. “We can’t kidnap her. Besides, we already told her all about him, and it didn’t stop her.”

  “Yeah, but that was before she started doing drugs. She must see it’s a slippery slope.”

  “You could try to find some other guy for her,” Lexi said.

  Patti stared at her. “That’s an interesting remark. You’ve been saying all men are alike.”

  Lexi laughed. “Don’t believe everything I say. But I do believe it will help Virgie to know she has friends she can depend on. Any morning now she is going to wake up and feel awful about what she’s doing to herself.”

  After they said their good-byes to Lexi on the street in front of Gritty McDuff’s and walked up Exchange Street, Donna decided to begin the search for Virgie at the soup kitchen. She’d help the crew set up the meal and then go out to the line and question the guests about Virgie and Tim Longo. There was even an outside chance that the pair would be among those waiting for a meal. One way or another, she said, she would be home before 5:30, and they could either follow up any leads she had gotten or begin searching the night spots for their wayward friend.

  Patti continued alone, walking through Deering Oaks and then past the university, thinking about Chris. With an effort of will she concentrated her thoughts on his positive attributes like his love of the earth and selfless dedication to the cause. For a long time she thought about one of his most appealing characteristics, the shyness that lay behind his often arrogant persona. She had often noticed that with people whom he regarded as enemies he was confident and strong but that when he was among people sympathetic to his cause he was as shy as a kid on his first day of kindergarten. She recalled how he had clung to her and depended on her the night they attended the Green Party gathering in Waska. Feeling needed, she had loved him all the more that night. But she also knew how much mental energy it took for him to do his ecological work. She was quite sure that was the cause of the distance and even resentment she could feel in him on occasion. He was wary of love—not in the mean-spirited way that Lexi described but because he feared it drained him of the energy he needed to fight for the earth.

  As she approached their white cape house thinking of Chris’s positives and negatives and the uncertainty of the boundaries between them, the desire to resolve the ambiguity grew in her. Thinking again of how they only did things together when it suited his convenience, she recalled when she was a little girl playing on swings with two other friends. When another group of children came into the park and wanted to use them, she had compliantly gotten off her seat while her two friends, a boy and
a girl, had stayed put and frowned. “We’ve got the swings so they’re ours,” they said, and when the new kids pointed out that Patti had given up her swing, the boy, whose name was Roger Williams, said, “That’s because Patti is a patsy.” For years the name stuck, for in the world of children, just as in the world of power-lusting politicians, compromise and peacemaking were regarded as signs of weakness. In hindsight she realized it had been the beginning of her leftist worldview, but now with Lexi’s male bashing fresh in her mind, she began to wonder if in fact she was a patsy. She toyed with the idea of testing Chris as she approached the front door, where she paused and found herself looking at one of the juniper bushes with its branches mostly of brown needles. It was dying and would need to be replaced in the spring. Something about the cycle of death and renewal came close to home. What if Chris avoided commitment and made her wait so long that her own renewal in a child became impossible? Suddenly she felt so unutterably sad that tears sprang to her eyes. “I love you,” she whispered. But love, life’s fairest flower, should not be tested, and she rejected the idea of manipulation and calculation, took a deep breath, and opened the door.

  Chris was at the kitchen table reading the morning paper when she came in. Seeing her, he sprang up, and, slapping the newspaper with his open palm, began railing about a story of a moose that the police killed because it was seen lurking near a busy highway. He went on in a fine frenzy about the idiocy of killing a beautiful animal simply because it might run in the road and might cause an accident. “Do you see the twisted ethics of that kind of thinking?” he demanded.

  When she agreed with him, saying she too had been angry when she read the story in the morning, he calmed down, and she told him about Virgie. He listened without interrupting her because, she hoped, he saw how important it was to her and was being polite, or because, she feared, he wasn’t really interested. When she finished, in fact, he said nothing.

  “Well, what do you think?”

  He shrugged. “I’m sorry to hear about it.”

  “And?”

  “And I’ve got work to do. I finally had Ted Autello test the other readings I took from the Waska River below the falls, and Ridlon is not the only polluter in that town. That waste management company that burns refuse has spread junk into the air and soil and then it ends up in the river. I’ve got a lot of work to do.”

  “It’s Saturday night. It’s not the time to work. You can do it later. We really need your help looking for her.”

  He ignored her request. “It wouldn’t be time well spent. There’s no telling where Virgie is, and even if you find her what can you do? She’s an adult. You can’t take her by the ear and march her home.”

  “We can talk to her, show her our love and concern. We can give her our support.”

  The scornful look with which he greeted her statement made her bristle. It was a test. Unplanned, it was happening.

  “Why do you look like that?” She spoke sharply, causing his expression to change.

  Frowning, he stared at her. “What d’ya mean by that?”

  “I mean we’re trying to help Virgie and you don’t seem to care.”

  He shrugged maddeningly. “You can’t save the whole world, Patti.”

  “I’m not trying to save the whole world, just one person. And who are you to put down saving the world? That’s what you’re trying to do.”

  “But I’m dealing with reality.”

  “For Christ’s sake, Chris. Do you realize what you’re saying?”

  He closed his notebook with a loud bang. Starting to gather his materials together, he said, “I guess I don’t.”

  “People suffer, Chris. They feel pain. Life overwhelms them and they can be self-destructive. I’m not talking about an abstraction. I’m talking about Virgie, our friend—your friend. Don’t you care?”

  “Of course I care. It’s just that there’s nothing we can do. She’d just get pissed off if we tried to interfere with her. It’s a waste of time.”

  “Wouldn’t it be good to try and not dismiss the effort before we even do it?”

  “I had a late lunch with Ted, so I won’t be eating,” he said as he turned to go to the basement.

  Patti bristled, but this time she did not repress the anger she felt. “Right now, Chris Andrews, I don’t like you. I don’t like what I’m seeing. You’re being a creep. You disgust me.”

  “That’s your privilege,” he hissed. “I’m going downstairs to work on these figures.” He turned his back on her and began walking to the head of the basement stairs.

  “If you go, Chris, I won’t forgive you.”

  But he went.

  She stood staring at the door and feeling numb for a long time. Then she sat on the couch, still numbly staring blankly at nothing and feeling almost sick from the emptiness inside. At one point her heart rose to her throat as she heard him moving about in the basement. But he was only pacing and thinking—of his plans to expose a polluter, she was sure. Then she cried for a long time, at first silently with tears streaming down her cheeks and then with body-shaking sobs of agony. She knew it was over. It was up to him to make the first move and apologize, and he never would. She tried reading some nursing material but found it impossible to concentrate. Then she flipped on the television and watched the news.

  By the time Donna returned at 5:30 she was composed. She told her only that Chris wasn’t going with them, but she could see by the sharp look in Donna’s eyes that she saw that something had happened. “We had an argument,” Patti explained. “I was very, very angry with him, but I don’t want to talk about it.”

  They heated up a leftover chicken, broccoli and rice dish Alex had cooked on Thursday while Donna reported that she could find out nothing from the guests at the soup kitchen. That bad news fit Patti’s mood. They could hear Chris stirring in the basement during the meal, and she couldn’t eat much, hoping against hope that each time she heard a noise below that he was going to come upstairs, apologize and go with them. But he didn’t.

  They spent over four hours driving and walking the streets of Portland, South Portland, Westbrook and Scarborough. They talked to many people in many places. At a few of the clubs that required a cover charge, they took turns paying to get in and look around. It was a cold, wet night, and later in the evening the season’s first snow started falling. Nobody had seen Virgie or Longo; nobody had any information. It was as if they had left town. Their one moment of hope happened when they talked to a friend of Tim Longo who told them where he lived. But when they drove to the apartment building and parked the car, no lights were on in the apartment. Finally at a little before eleven o’clock, exhausted and frustrated, they gave up and drove home to discover that Chris had gone and taken all his stuff with him.

  The Turning Point