He held tight to the idea through the rest of the afternoon and then dinner in the ballroom-like dining hall, using it to soothe his impatience to get back to Kingsville and Kim. Visiting his mother wasn’t an inconvenience, it was a privilege, and he needed to be grateful. After dessert Fran and Lindsay were ready to go, but followed along as he took her outside a last time to watch the fireflies rise from the garden.
“Are there many of them?” she asked, peering into the twilight.
“Lots.”
“All we can do is hope,” she said. “Isn’t that right?”
They said good-bye in her room. He was the last, bending down so she could kiss him, her wrinkled palm soft on his cheek.
“Bless you, dear,” she said.
“I’ll talk to you this week,” he promised.
In the car, headed down the drive, he thought this was the one unpardonable thing—leaving her there, the same way J.P. and Nina and Elise had abandoned Kim. He imagined bringing her home to live with them. They could convert the den. Fran could recommend a nurse.
They turned onto the highway, swooped around the first curve, and the home vanished. It was dark in the hollows, and the longer they drove the more far-fetched his plan seemed.
“Thanks for coming,” he told the car at-large.
“You’re welcome,” Fran said.
Lindsay was already lost in her iPod, and he took advantage of the privacy.
“How did she seem to you?”
“Okay,” Fran said. “A little hazy, but that’s normal.”
“Is it?”
“For what she’s been through.”
“I don’t remember her being that bad.”
“Maybe she was having a bad day.”
“Maybe,” he said vaguely, as if he didn’t believe it. He tried to picture a world without her, and without Kim. It didn’t seem possible.
They passed the entrance for Devonwood and he flicked on his high-beams. The hills were black on both sides, the sky deepening. He wondered when the fireworks were starting.
“When are the fireworks supposed to start?” Fran asked.
“Don’t do that!” he said, laughing. “I was just thinking that.”
“Great minds.”
“Freaky minds is more like it.”
It was fully night by the time they reached the CVS and got on 90. The high lights threw shadows over Fran—silent beside him, absorbed in thought. They’d driven the route too many times with the girls in back, coming home from the old place or a Sea Wolves game, the two of them fighting, or when they were small, slumped against each other, snoring. At home he would carry Kim inside while Fran shouldered Lindsay, waiting until they were safely asleep to go out and close the doors.
A local unit must have just gotten back from Iraq—the overpasses were lined with signs. They crossed into Ohio (THE HEART OF IT ALL, the billboard said) and took the first exit, stopping at the top of the ramp, facing the Conoco. A truck was coming so they had to wait, the turn signal tinking. In the bright strip of the window, half-obscured by signs, a heavy guy in a red shirt was working the register—Kevin.
Minutes later as they sped along the dark flats of Route 7, headed north toward the lake, a green spider of light blossomed just above the horizon, then faded, followed by a burst of silver half lost in the trees.
“Look,” Fran encouraged Lindsay, though from this distance they were no more than blotches of color.
He imagined the crowd down by the harbor, their faces tipped toward the sky, mouths open in anticipation, each new explosion tinting the surface of the water, and he wished they were there and part of it. Impossible. That belonged to the past too, when their greatest cares had been braces and grades and makeup. They dipped down to cross the bridge and all they could see were faint traces of color edging the clouds like heat lightning, but as they crested the hill a single shell corkscrewed up, leaving a skimpy trail of sparks, and a huge orange chrysanthemum bloomed at eye level right in front of them, glittering, its center a delayed white flash that reached them seconds later as a muffled thump. Along Harbor families had turned off their porch lights and set up lawn chairs on their walks. There were no other cars, and cruising through with the rockets floating up beyond the end of the street, flaring and resolving into separate embers and then just smoke drifting on the wind, he thought he should be enjoying the show more. It was something they’d remember.
“Anyone want to stop?” he asked before the turn onto State.
Lindsay didn’t answer.
“I think we’ve had enough excitement for one day,” Fran said.
At home Lindsay put Cooper out, then disappeared upstairs. It wasn’t that late, but Fran was tired.
“You must be too.”
“A little,” he admitted.
Like every night, she offered him a pill. This time he surprised her by accepting it. As he washed it down at the sink, he silently apologized to Kim. In bed, in the dark, with Fran asleep beside him, he thought it wasn’t working and wondered if he needed another. He replayed the day from the beginning, a reflexive form of torture, sinking into his newest memories as if they were a dream. Now that it was over and he was alone, the whole thing seemed strange. The morning came back vividly, minute by minute, like scenes from an unsettling film. Coffee on the deck, the woman at the CVS, the geraniums by the flagpole. He was just bending down to kiss his mother’s sunken cheek when, mercifully, he was gone.
Head Check
The first day of school, everyone stared at her like she was an alien. She verified it with Micah to make sure she wasn’t being paranoid.
“What did you expect?” Micah said. “You’re like a celebrity.”
In the halls faces turned to follow her. People seemed surprised to see her, as if she should have stayed home—as if she should still be out looking. Mrs. Buterbaugh, her guidance counselor, caught her on the stairs and said she could come by her office anytime, never once mentioning Kim. Mr. Czepiel, her chemistry teacher, wore a ribbon on his pocket. In her new homeroom more than half of the girls had pink bracelets. She knew maybe four of them.
Harder to deal with were classmates who were almost but not quite friends—people she sat next to or whose lockers were beside hers, old lab partners and fellow flutists from the wind ensemble, kids from middle or even grade school. She knew them and they knew her enough to say hey as they passed in the halls, but now out of pity they felt obliged to stop and say they were sorry, and to prove it, that they’d volunteered at their church or been at the softball game or raised money in the fun run. She thanked them, aware that, like her parents, they were all trying to read her face for the slightest hint of a crack.
In the morning she drove the Subaru, her mother encouraging her from the passenger seat, but after school she took the bus, waiting in line and then sharing a bench with Dana. They got off at the same stop just before Thornwood and walked back toward her house. It wasn’t until the bus pulled around the corner that she felt free, and then only for the minute they were alone together, unobserved, kicking the rotten crabapples into the middle of the street and making fun of the Bonners’ new mailbox shaped like a goose (“That won’t last long,” Dana said). She wanted to hang out with Dana in her basement, watching Maury Povich and avoiding doing their homework while above them Mrs. Hedrick watched her soaps and talked on the phone, except her parents were both at home, waiting for her. If she was a minute late, they’d call out the National Guard.
“You gonna be online later?” Dana asked, peeling off.
“Probably,” she said, and kept walking.
From the street her house looked uninhabited, the sun picking out individual shingles, underlining the white siding. The porch was shadowed, the windows dark. In the drive by itself sat the Subaru, meaning her father was out somewhere. She crossed the lawn at a diagonal so only someone standing at the living room window could see her, then tiptoed up the side of the porch stairs as if she might sneak in undetected.
The screen door squeaked, setting off Cooper. He came charging through the front hall and stopped short, mussing the Oriental rug. He looked right at her, legs braced, and barked a warning.
“Who is it, Goober?” she asked, letting herself in. “Oh, that’s right—it’s me.”
“Hey,” her mother called from the rear of the house, then intercepted her as she dumped her backpack on the couch. “I hope you know that’s not staying there. So? How did it go?”
“Okay.”
“Is Micah in your French class?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s good, right? C’est bon, n’est-ce pas?”
“Oui,” Lindsay said, deadpan.
“Any homework?”
“Just my driving stuff.”
“Want something to eat?”
“No, we had these disgusting quesadillas for lunch.”
“Maybe we can go driving later, if you’re up for it.”
She wasn’t used to her mother being home this time of day. Normally these lazy hours were hers to waste in peace. Even before she disappeared, Kim was never around, though after what the paper said about the drugs, those absences, like the money in her puzzle box, had taken on new meaning. All by herself Lindsay might sing nonsense songs to Cooper the way her father did, or mutter over her homework, or heckle whatever dumb show was on TV, but the demands of actual two-way conversation were too much after dealing with the world, and she was relieved when her mother went back to whatever she was doing.
She dragged her backpack into the den, broke out her driver’s manual and spent a half-hour not watching an awful Deep Space Nine and memorizing the chart of stopping distances. The written test was supposed to be easy, twelve multiple-guess questions. You could get three wrong and still pass. Kim had missed one, and Lindsay wanted to be perfect—or had before everything happened. Now it didn’t matter.
There was no car for her to drive anyway. When Kim left for college the Chevette was supposed to be hers. Now it sat in the garage gathering dust. Whenever she thought of it, she remembered going to the Dairy Queen with her that last day, eating their burgers in the shade of the cemetery and wondering if Kim would really miss her. It seemed so long ago, not just this summer. Even if she could get past the memory, she couldn’t ask her parents. She felt guilty just thinking about it.
She had the couch to herself, and spread out, lying longways with her arms crossed above her head and the clicker balanced on her stomach. After Deep Space Nine Spike showed three straight episodes of The Next Generation. She was in the middle of the second, a holo-deck adventure with Data as Sherlock Holmes, when her mother came in and asked if she was ready to drive.
“Come on, you need the practice.”
Her road test was scheduled for Friday, so there was no excuse. She was planning on using the Subaru since it was smaller than the Taurus, easier to park and make three-point turns.
“Can we leave Cooper out?” she asked.
“Oh please,” her mother said. “He loves his cage.”
As she drove, her mother quizzed her from the manual, trying to trip her up with stopping distances. Lindsay could still picture the chart and rattled them off.
“Okay,” her mother said, “here’s one that’s relevant: What do you do if your vehicle stalls on a railroad track?”
It was one of her favorites. “Get out, get off the tracks and run as far as you can in the direction of the train—because, if you run the other way, you could get hit with debris from your car when the train hits it.”
“I don’t think I’ve ever heard of that happening. What if your hood pops up while you’re driving?”
“Roll down your window and use it to look out of, put on your flashers and pull off as soon as you can.”
As long as her mother was asking her questions, she was safe, but the car was a trap. Eventually her mother would ask how she was feeling—a different kind of test—and she’d say she was okay, just worried about Kim, and her mother would say she was too. Lindsay wished they could stop there, the two of them balanced in agreement, but since the police had found Kim’s car, her mother had changed. Instead of keeping up a front like her father, she would reach over and hold Lindsay and cry, which would make her cry, which wouldn’t help anyone.
For some reason, her mother needed her tears. Sometimes she apologized afterwards, and sometimes, dabbing at her face with a tissue, she said she felt better, but Lindsay always felt used. She never cried by herself, only when her mother provoked her, as if she wanted her to be sad. Lindsay already was. She was sad for Kim and for J.P., for her mother and father, and for herself, but in her own way, unconnected to everyone else. Her sadness was hers, an inner temple where she worshipped alone, untouchable. She did her best to protect it, but each time she fended off one of her mother’s break-in attempts, she felt contaminated and ungrateful.
They drove down through the park to the inlet and the far end of the marina where there was an empty stretch of curb. The only part of the road test she was worried about was parallel parking. She was okay with the Chevette, not great, and the Subaru was almost four feet longer. She had a habit of cutting the wheel too early when she was backing up, leaving the car a yard from the curb. The minimum to pass was eighteen inches.
“Okay,” her mother said, “give me five good ones and we’re done,” as if it was that easy.
Her first two tries she didn’t come close, and then she was up on the curb.
“Crud.”
“It’s okay,” her mother said, pointing for her to go forward.
“I’m never going to get this.”
“Yes you will. It’s just a matter of practice.”
“I only have three more days.”
“Then we’ll be out here for the next three days. Come on—five good ones. So far you’ve got zero.”
She had two—and one sucked—when, offhand, her mother said, “I bet school was tough today, huh?”
She was concentrating on tucking the front of the car in and didn’t respond.
“That’s three,” her mother said. “So, how bad was it? I can’t go anywhere without people looking at me like I have three heads, and you have to deal with the whole school.”
“It wasn’t too bad.”
“What does that mean?”
“It was okay. Everyone was trying to be nice.”
“Don’t you hate that?” her mother said. “You’re angry and confused and everyone wants to be nice.”
Lindsay sensed that she was fishing and just shrugged. “They don’t know what to say. I mean, what do you say?”
“I’m sorry,” her mother said, which was what Lindsay hated the most, since it wasn’t her fault and she didn’t know anything about it anyway, but on the way home, and later, watching TV with her father, Lindsay wondered if her mother was right, and if so, how she knew.
She might be angry. She wasn’t confused.
It was a guess, she decided, another stab at cracking her open. From now on she’d have to be more careful.
She no longer had to worry about deleting her e-mails. Since J.P. had left for college, she’d written him every day. He hadn’t written back. Dana said she could probably find his new address through the school directory, but Lindsay didn’t want him to think she was stalking him. If he wanted to write her, he knew where she was.
Every night, syncing songs onto her iPod, she made herself invisible and IMd with Dana and Micah. Sometimes after they signed off she stayed on, seeing who else on her buddy list was still up. In the beginning, she used to end the day by checking Kim’s website to see how many hits it had gotten. Now with the counter creeping toward a quarter million, she went to bed and imagined the site floating in space like an asteroid.
School didn’t get any better, but her mother and father alternated days taking her out. Her father stood in the marina lot, in her blind spot, pretending to be a parked car, calling “Cut it,” while Lindsay twisted her neck and curled the Subaru around him. “
Don’t think,” he said. “See it and be it.” It was the same advice he gave about hitting, yet here it seemed to work. She forgot about having to turn the wheel the opposite direction from the one she was looking and just followed the rear of the car as it slid into place. At dinner—because the test had become their main topic of conversation—he took credit for her improvement, making her shake her head. Thursday she went out with her mother after her flute lesson and was five-for-seven—so good that there was no time for prying questions.
“I’m impressed,” her mother said.
“So am I,” Lindsay said.
Friday at breakfast they asked if she was nervous. “I’ll be taking you,” her mother announced, as if they’d drawn lots. Her father had a meeting to go to, so Lindsay couldn’t protest.
“You’ll do great,” he said, and squeezed her shoulder like she was up next.
At school she got ten-out-of-ten on her vocabulary in French, and then in Algebra 2 a hundred on her first quiz. She was used to doing well, but still took a neatnik’s satisfaction in getting everything right. She loved the little puzzles her math teachers gave for extra credit, and the chance that they were trick questions. She wasn’t a grub, though Dana was partly right when she called her a show-off. She liked being smart, and for people to think she was. It was her one superpower. When Kim was messing up, Lindsay would leave her homeworks and tests on the kitchen table. Now she stuck them in her folder, but as the day passed, a notion took hold—crazy, maybe impossible, but one that appealed to the crossword lover in her.
So far, through her first week, she hadn’t missed a single question. The written test was a cinch—she knew the manual by heart. If she could just nail the parking she’d be fine. Still she balked at issuing the challenge to herself. A year was a long time, and as her mother said once to soothe her, an A- was a very respectable grade.
It didn’t have to be the whole year. It could be a week, or a month. It could just be tomorrow. All she had to do was work hard every day—and that was what finally convinced her. Until they found Kim, she would be perfect.
Songs for the Missing Page 18
