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The Next Time You See Me

Page 13

by Holly Goddard Jones


  He shifted. The wooden couch frame dug into his neck.

  “I’d punish you myself if I thought it’d make a difference. But is that going to teach you to feel bad in your heart? Taking away your Nintendo? Moving you back in the house? You’ve made me sick with this, Christopher. I don’t know if I’m ever going to see you the same again.”

  “Mom—” he started, but she made a curt gesture with her chin and he knew to close his mouth.

  “Please go to your room and think about what you’ve done. I’m not coming in to take your computer. I’m not telling you what to do or not to do out there. But spare a thought for that girl you were mean to. Ask yourself how it felt to be her today. Will you do that?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  She made a shooing motion. “Go on, then.”

  He did as she asked. He didn’t turn on the computer or the TV; he didn’t idly spin the knobs on his foosball table, as he sometimes did when he was daydreaming or thinking through one of his English papers. He lay on his bed, pushed his tennis shoes off, and stared at the ceiling.

  Freak!

  He remembered helping Emily in seventh grade with that stupid tadpole project. They had come in one morning to find them all dead, charred black by the UV lamp and floating, and she had started sniffling. “You didn’t do anything wrong,” he’d told her, resting his hand briefly and unthinkingly on her shoulder. It was nothing—empty comfort—but he had set something into motion that day.

  Freak!

  The diamond of pale skin through the chain link, the gray-green eyes wide, the way she’d suddenly jerked back and run as if to go tell.

  Freak!

  Leanna, still crouched in front of him: Oh my God, what was that about?

  His eyes burned with sudden, hot tears, and though there was no one around to see him, he rolled over, hiding his face in a pillow.

  2.

  Sometime later, there was a knock at the door of his room.

  “Come in,” he called, still lying down, expecting his mother. When his father entered heavily, stomping on the front mat as he slid out of his suit coat, Christopher scrambled to wipe his face and right himself, jumping to a stand at the foot of his bed. His father hardly ever came out here. He worked long days, usually a few hours throughout the weekend, too, and he spent a lot of his time at home holed up in what he called his “office,” though there wasn’t much official about it by Christopher’s estimation: a worn-in leather recliner, a small television, his books—he liked true crime stories, Tom Clancy, John Grisham—a dartboard. It was the only room in the house where he smoked, so it smelled of sweet tobacco, perhaps also a little of body odor, or laundry that needed washing. Dad’s Pad. It occurred to Christopher, watching his father survey this room as though he’d never been inside it before (he was rubbing his thumb over a medal, hanging from a thumbtack on the bulletin board, that Christopher had received for placing second in last year’s regional science fair), that he and his parents were like planets orbiting the sun: they were pulled toward the same center, but they lived in isolation from one another, their paths hardly crossing.

  “I won’t stay long,” his father said. He sat at the computer desk, spinning in the chair and crossing his arms. Christopher could tell that he wasn’t angry—and that he wanted Christopher to know that he wasn’t. He was doing that jovial “dad” thing: shifting around, picking random stuff up, lifting his eyebrows occasionally with interest. He did a quick ba dum dum on the tops of his thighs.

  “So,” he continued, “Mom’s pissed. You’ll have to work that out between the two of you. I’m just worried about this suspension business.”

  “I’m sorry, Dad.”

  “Eh. Lot of good that does me. You didn’t throw your fucking green beans in my face, did you?”

  Christopher shook his head.

  “I’m not saying it was a good thing to do, mind you. It wasn’t. I never did stuff like that to little girls when I was your age. But, you know, I get it. Peer pressure, your friends gang up on you, everyone’s working everybody else up. And it washes off, that’s the thing. It’s not like you hurt her.”

  “I think I hurt her,” Christopher said hoarsely.

  “Physically, son. This isn’t Phil Donahue. This isn’t about what the girl’s going to tell her shrink in ten years. It’s about whether or not a group of kids, really good kids, ought to get their records fucked up for doing one shitty prank. I say no. Leanna’s dad says no. We’ll see what happens.”

  They were silent for a moment, his father still spinning back and forth in the chair, Christopher leaning slightly against his bed frame.

  “You can’t go back tomorrow—the principal’s put his foot down on that. Maybe a second day, too. But two days won’t mean much, and it’s not like this is high school, at least, thank God. That’s when you have to worry about your GPA.”

  His father was already thinking about college, making plans, getting all jacked up when Christopher didn’t score high enough on the PSATs to qualify for the National Merit program. Christopher suppressed the urge to roll his eyes.

  “We’re fighting for you guys to spend the rest of next week in ALC instead of getting suspended. That’s more punishment to kids your age, anyway. You’d just be watching TV if you were home, and at least this way you can keep your mouth shut for a few days and really think about what you’ve done. And it’ll give that girl some time to readjust, too. And everybody can keep up with their studies, and nobody’s education suffers. That’s what Johnny’s working on.”

  Christopher picked at a fingernail and nodded. He wasn’t sure how to feel. This was all good news, right? And no one from school had called about anything that happened at the tennis court, so Emily hadn’t even tattled. He didn’t know why she’d keep her mouth shut after what he and Leanna had done to her this afternoon, but she had. So far.

  “Well? What do you have to say?”

  “Thanks,” Christopher said. And, again, “I’m sorry.”

  “Yeah.” His father stood, leaned over to squeeze his shoulder. “Lesson learned. OK, get some sleep. I think Mom has a bunch of chores planned for you tomorrow.”

  “All right,” he said.

  “We’ll work it out.” He stopped at the door. “You and Leanna still a thing?”

  Christopher shrugged, embarrassed. Then he nodded.

  “She’s pretty, huh?”

  “Yeah.”

  His father cleared his throat. “You’re young to have a girlfriend. You don’t even have a car. You still get an allowance, for God’s sake.”

  “We just hang out,” Christopher said.

  “Yeah, I bet that’s all.” He put his coat over his arm. “Well, you be smart. And stick close to her until this blows over. Her dad’s the last person you want to piss off right now.”

  “OK.”

  “Night, Chris.”

  “Night.” The door snicked closed softly.

  It was cold in the room, so Christopher switched on the heater, almost enjoying the musty smell as the summer’s dust started to burn away. It was a winter smell, a Thanksgiving smell. The end of the year would be here in no time. He slid out of his clothes, considered brushing his teeth—shrugged, for no one’s benefit but his own, and decided not to—then slid between the cool bedclothes, shivering pleasantly. He was glad that his father wasn’t pissed, glad to not be going to school tomorrow. Glad, he had to admit to himself, for the promise of a day away from Leanna.

  Still, he couldn’t help but drift to sleep remembering the tennis court, Leanna’s hot mouth on him, the thrill and shame of it. He moved his feet out of the pocket of sheet he’d warmed, flipped his pillow. The smooth cotton felt good against his neck. He was hard again, and then he was thinking about Emily’s face in the lunchroom, and he swallowed against a sudden rise of nausea. Tennis court, he willed. The slow pull of the zipper, the grasp of cold fingers, Leanna’s hot mouth on him. The pull, the sense that he was being unraveled.

  Freak! Fr
eak! Freak! Emily’s shocked face. Her tears after.

  Leanna was unbuckling his belt, her hot mouth was on him.

  He drifted off, caught for half the night in that restless place between dreaming and wakefulness, caught between his memories of the pleasure of the day and the horror, building toward a climax that ebbed, always, into snapshots from the cafeteria—Emily’s tears, Mrs. Mitchell’s anger—and then, when he felt his conscious self finally intervening, dragging him back to the room, where his groin felt bruised against the faint pressure of the sheet, he thought at last of Emily’s eyes through the chain link, their bright shock, and he tightened his fingers into Leanna’s wavy hair, found his breath again, and slept.

  Chapter Ten

  1.

  It was after ten when Susanna got back from her meeting with Tony Joyce. She came in, dropped her shoulder bag by the coat hook, and observed Dale sitting stiff and neat in his recliner with a glass of milk in his hand. She could see on his face that he had noticed the irony of their reversed roles, that he had tried an evening of being the one waiting, left behind, and hadn’t liked it.

  “I’ve already gotten a phone call,” Dale said. “Michael Sheffield, from the bank. Said he saw a flyer with my sister-in-law’s picture on it. He offered his condolences.”

  Word had traveled fast. She and Tony had gone to the house first, where he listened seriously to her and took copious notes, and then they had gone back to the police department, sat down together at the office’s one shared computer, and designed a MISSING flyer. It had been . . . well, nice. He had shown her how to use CorelDRAW, and it was amazing, this computer world that had not yet interested her or touched her much, aside from the couple of hours a week at school that she had the students spend word-processing some of their writing assignments. She and Tony played with fonts and clip art, settled on bold text only, the oversized word MISSING like a siren call at the top of the page, the other pertinent info also in all caps and centered below a space where they would tape the photograph before making copies. They used the one good recent photo Susanna had been able to find of Ronnie. She had taken it herself the previous Thanksgiving (could that be almost a year ago now?), and Ronnie was not, for once, making a face at the camera or hiding behind her hand. She was smirking, still—Get it over with, Susanna remembered her saying when she brought out the camera—but smirking was a recognizably Ronnie expression. Most anyone who had seen her would have seen her making this look.

  It had been like college again. Not just because Susanna was seated so close to a man who was not her husband, or because that man had once made her light up with joy, but because she was learning, doing something new; she was putting creative energy into something other than her classes and her daughter. That the object of her efforts was a poster advertising her missing sister did not rob the activity of all of its pleasure. She had felt more alive then, and later, driving around town with Tony to post the flyers, than she had in a long time.

  “I guess that was nice of him,” she said finally. “Premature, but nice.”

  “It’s embarrassing.” He crossed his legs. “Go ahead and make me the bad guy. It’s fine. But I don’t believe for a minute that Ronnie’s missing, or no more missing than she wants to be.”

  Susanna threw up her hands. “What’s with you, Dale? Seriously. Say she’s off somewhere, like you believe she is. Say she just took off. What on earth harm is it doing for me to look for her?”

  “The problem’s drawing every person in town’s attention to the fact that your sister’s a cokehead. It wouldn’t surprise me if she was selling herself, too.”

  “You should hear yourself,” Susanna said. “That is beyond the pale.”

  “And now you’ve got the police drawn into it. You’re not doing Ronnie any favors.”

  It hit her then. Standing in the doorway still, not completely out of her coat, arguing with her husband about the value of her sister’s life—she realized that he disgusted her. She had made this man the father of her daughter, and Abby would bind them to one another for the rest of their lives. On the heels of this revelation came another. She was startled by it, shocked that she hadn’t recognized it sooner. She put her coat on the hook in a dazed way, the truth vibrating inside her, making her feel a little drunk.

  “This isn’t about Ronnie,” she said. “It’s about me. You’re punishing me.”

  “Don’t be stupid.”

  “See, there you go.” She looked at their living room full of the things he had chosen and sat on the couch she had chosen. The couch was as good a reminder as any that she was responsible, too. That a woman who could hate a thing that had once, not that long ago, seemed so perfect for her was a woman who didn’t know herself well enough. “If I don’t agree with you I’m stupid.”

  He shook his head. “Don’t be that way.”

  “ ‘Don’t be that way,’ ” Susanna repeated. “That’s our lives together in a nutshell. Don’t be that way, be this other way.”

  “I’m not even going to speak again,” Dale said. “You’re twisting everything I say into this—this feminist bullshit.”

  “Fair enough,” Susanna murmured. And he was right, in a way; it wasn’t fair to express her dismay in ready-made homilies, in someone else’s generic terms for outrage. She wasn’t his victim. She wasn’t without blame. If he had been much older than she, maybe, or smarter—but he wasn’t, and yet here they were, twenty-eight and thirty-one years old, and they were settling into a lifetime of unkindness toward one another. She knew that she would support Dale if his sister went missing, that she would, in some ways, express more care than he himself could muster—but wouldn’t that, too, be a judgment of him, a subtle dig? She couldn’t sit here and sort out the gradations of guilt, what separated good intentions from ill. There were more significant sensations, physical ones, like the fact that if he tried to kiss her cheek or put his hand on her thigh right now, she would shudder.

  “I’m not a bad person,” Dale said. “I’m not punishing you—what would I punish you for? I mean, sure, I don’t like Ronnie. I don’t like the choices she’s made. And whether we want to think it or not, she reflects on us. You, too, Suze. And she reflects on Abby.”

  “Anybody who’d let a grown woman’s actions inform their judgment of a four-year-old child is too foolish for me to give a good goddamn about.” Susanna went to the kitchen, took out a glass, and hunted for the bottle of wine that she hadn’t finished on Friday. Dale had pushed it to the back of the refrigerator, as though he wanted to make it disappear but didn’t have the courage to just pour it out. She emptied it into her glass and sipped. It was still cheap, still sour. But what a delight to flaunt it in front of her husband, and of course there was the entirely singular delight of the drink itself, the ritual of rolling the liquid on her tongue, the little zing of pleasure when she’d consumed enough to feel her face warm. If she were another kind of woman, living a different sort of life, no one would begrudge her this. She would have real wineglasses and friends that she could go out with for drinks after work. She would have friends. She would still be living in her own apartment—she liked to imagine herself in a city—or maybe, by this time, she would have found a man who shared her interests, and perhaps they would not marry at all. How radical that would have seemed to her twenty-two-year-old self. How horrified her mother would have been.

  “What have we here?” Dale said. He had followed her. “It’s nice to see you bringing your argument to a conclusion in the honored Eastman tradition.” He curled his hand around an imaginary glass and tipped it back and forth, wiggling his eyebrows like Groucho Marx.

  Susanna smirked and shook her head. She leaned her hips against the kitchen counter and sipped.

  Dale sighed loudly. “I’d thought we’d be thinking about a second baby by now,” he said matter-of-factly. “Actually, I’d thought we might even have one. Four years apart is good. It makes sense.”

  “Not everything has to make sense.”


  “I realize that, believe it or not.” He pulled a chair out from the dinette set and sat. “I never mentioned it. I never pushed you. I kept thinking you’d say something one day, or that it would just happen, like it did with Abby.” He was looking at her intently, his face almost handsome with the scrutiny. “And then I just knew at some point that Abby was it. I realized that motherhood doesn’t make you happy.”

  She blinked against the pressure in her sinuses. “I am a good mother. I am seventy-five percent or more of the parenting she gets.”

  “I didn’t say you weren’t good at it,” Dale said. His voice was almost kind. “I said you didn’t want to do it.”

  And because he was right—because he had seen the truth she could usually hide from herself, and because she resented that so much intimacy existed still between them, she finished the wine, snapped her bangs out of her eyes, and said, “Maybe I just don’t want to be the mother to any more of your children, Dale. Did you think of that?”

  His face tensed, and his jaw quivered. Otherwise, he was very still. “Do you love me?”

  “Do you love me?” she said sharply.

  “Yes,” he said. Susanna could tell, despite everything, that he meant it. “Do you love me? I want to know.”

  Susanna held her empty glass tightly and broke eye contact.

  “Well,” he said. “Well, that’s that, then.” He rose, scratched the back of his head in a sheepish way. “I’m turning in. Good night.”

  “Dale,” she called after him.

  “Good night,” he repeated. When she came to bed a few moments later, having crept into Abby’s room long enough to plant a soft kiss on the top of her head, he was resting peacefully on his back, hands folded on his stomach, face smooth with calm. He was fully occupying his half of the bed, not hunched away from the center, and Susanna slid in hesitantly beside him.

  “I wonder what’s worse,” he said, just as Susanna was relaxing into the certainty that he wouldn’t speak again. “Being stuck in a marriage to someone you love, who doesn’t love you back? Or being stuck with someone you don’t love.”

 

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