by Belva Plain
“What about food?” she demanded. “I know you don’t feel hungry, but we have to keep our wits about us, and that’s impossible when the stomach’s empty.”
“I can’t swallow,” Lara said. “But there’s plenty in the refrigerator. Help yourself. There’s a whole roast that the Burkes sent over.”
Connie opened the refrigerator. “I don’t see it,” she said.
“It’s right there.”
“It’s not.”
Lara got up and looked. “That’s strange. It was there this morning.”
“Perhaps it’s not so strange. Look and see whether any other food is missing.”
Bewildered, Lara moved her gaze slowly around the kitchen, and then, as if in a daze, reported, “I’m sure I left the fruit bowl filled with apples and pears. And there was a pie that somebody gave us in the cake box.”
Connie’s thoughts took swift shape. “How has she been acting lately?”
Lara raised her weary eyes. “Upset, of course, like the rest of us.”
Davey spoke. “She’s been very quiet.” And then he added, “But I guess I don’t really know, Connie. We haven’t been paying much attention to anything except—”
Connie interrupted. “I want to see her room.”
“Oh! You’re thinking she’s run away! But why should she run away?” implored Lara.
Connie was already halfway up the stairs while the others followed her into Sue’s room. Her immediate impression was of abandonment; it was as if these inanimate things, the four flowered walls and the bed where lay no carelessly dumped sweaters, jackets, or school-books, were giving a message. Opening the closet door, she saw an even row of pretty clothes, some of which she recognized because they were her own gifts.
“Is anything missing?” she asked Lara.
“The doll. The one we gave her on the day we met. It always sits on the bed,” said Lara, choking.
Davey pointed to the piggybank, whose china head had been broken open.
The pattern of Connie’s thought, growing clearer, filled her with an urgent sense of haste. And she demanded, “Tell me quickly what clothes are missing and how much money was in the bank.”
“Maybe seventy-five dollars. Her warm jacket’s missing, and her boots.” Lara opened drawers. “I think some sweaters are gone. But I don’t know, I can’t tell—” And she collapsed on the edge of the bed with her face in her hands.
“Darling,” Connie said, “I know it’s hell, but we’ve got to face it. So far it’s plain that Sue’s run away. She hasn’t been waylaid and murdered on her way to school, we know that, and she hasn’t been kidnapped for ransom, thank God. The job now is just to go after her.”
Davey was pacing back and forth. At the end of the room, each time he turned, a loose floorboard made a maddening squeak. More to himself than to anyone he groaned, “And how am I to do that? Go after her? Where? And we have Peggy, neither dead nor alive, and the doctor wants a consultation in the morning.”
The telephone rang. As if instant hope had been injected into them, all three ran to where it jangled in the bedroom across the hall. Davey picked it up. In the next instant hope receded.
“It’s Martin for you,” he said, handing the receiver to Connie.
“I suppose,” Martin said, “that there’s been no change, or you’d have let me know. So in that case you’d better come home.”
“I can’t.” Davey and Lara had politely left her alone, so she spared no words. “Martin, there’s total disaster here.” And she told him about the missing child.
His low whistle carried into Connie’s ear. “My God! What next? The police have been notified, of course?”
“Davey’ll do that now. But there are thousands of missing children, and I personally wouldn’t leave it to the police. I believe in some self-help. A little private-detective, thinking for oneself.”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning that I’m going to stay here for a while and have a try at it. These two people are in no condition to handle any more trouble.”
“Listen to me,” Martin said, “this is ridiculous. You are not a private detective. You’re not to go playing games, Connie.”
She was offended. “Games! As if this weren’t deadly serious!”
“Yes, deadly. A deadly game. You don’t know the whole story. The child could have been lured away by God knows whom, and you could end up— Listen to me, you have a child of your own back home here, and you can’t afford to take chances with your own safety. I want you to come home tomorrow, and I’m sending the plane for you.”
“Martin, I can’t.”
“You have been there a week, and that’s long enough,” he shouted.
“It would be,” she persisted, “if this hadn’t happened today. It would be inhuman to leave them now in this situation. So I’m not leaving. Not, Martin.”
“That’s your final word?” Martin never liked long conversations.
“It is.”
She had never defied him, had never had any reason to. When he slammed the receiver down, she knew he was frustrated and furious. But he would have to get over it.
Davey had been using another telephone line downstairs to appeal to the police.
“She hasn’t been gone long enough,” he reported. “They can’t go searching for every kid who decides to run off to his grandma’s for the night, they told me.”
“The difference is,” observed Connie, “that she has no grandma. And I’ve called all her friends.”
“She’s taken her suitcase,” Lara said.
“She’s got money, food, and clothes, so she has a plan. The question is, where would she be going? Whom does she know?” Connie reflected.
“But why? Why?” Lara cried again.
“We’ll find that out when we find her, Lara.”
“If we find her!”
Or if, Connie thought, if some monster doesn’t find her first. The darkness was black beyond the window, black and forbidding. She mused aloud. “The only people she knows outside of us are Pam and Eddy. So maybe she went there.”
Lara cried out again, “Call Pam!”
“You’re not thinking,” Connie spoke gently. “If Sue had already reached there, they would have telephoned us. So why worry them? But she might be on her way. I’m going down to the bus station.”
Neither Davey nor Lara objecting, she went for her coat and bag. At the door she called out, “What color is her jacket?”
“Navy blue with a red-and-white striped collar,” Lara called back helplessly.
At the local bus station Connie gave a description and asked a question. Did anyone remember seeing such a child alone boarding a bus to the connecting major bus routes? No, no one did.
“She’s probably—or she might be—catching a bus to New York.”
“Our last bus makes the connection to the terminal. We leave in an hour,” the man said.
“No, I’ll drive.”
The old station wagon bucked and rattled over the road. Damn kid! Connie thought in a moment of anger. As if the family hadn’t enough to cope with right now! What could have been in her head? A wonderful home, plenty of love, she muttered. But Sue was an earnest child, not given to caprice. Some terrible trouble must have compelled her. She wasn’t old enough to have gotten herself pregnant, was she?
It was after ten when Connie arrived at the bus station. Light from the ticket window sent a painful yellow glare into the night. A few disconsolate souls with tired faces sat with their bundles and baggage in the waiting room.
“Bus for New York?” she inquired.
“Tomorrow morning.”
She stood there, then, as disconsolate as anyone in the room. What to do? Then something drove her to ask a question that, considering the daily traffic in that place, was probably foolish.
“Do you by any chance remember selling a ticket to a little girl about eleven or twelve years old today, traveling alone?”
“Lady, I’d need a memory like an elephant” wa
s the contemptuous answer.
“Maybe,” Connie persisted, seeing two other people behind the counter, “one of them remembers. Please ask, will you?”
“Hey, seen a little girl about eleven traveling alone?”
A woman came forward. “Come to think of it, I did, and I wondered about it. She bought a ticket for Chicago. Said she wanted to go to Minnesota, and I told her she’d need to make a connection in Chicago. Yes, I wondered. Lots of kids travel alone, but usually not that far. I figured she was going to be met by a relative.”
“Thank you,” Connie said, “thank you very much.”
Now to think. In a place this size there could be a dozen little girls buying tickets every day. But not for that distance, the woman said. And Minnesota, where Sue had come from. Was it possible that she could want to return to another round of dreary foster homes? Not likely. This would most probably end as a wild-goose chase. No, it wasn’t Sue. And yet it might be.
Now it was cold and late, Connie was starved and tired, Martin was angry, and Thérèse missed her.
Yet, she got up and bought a ticket to Chicago. Lara’s car was in the parking lot. To hell with it. If someone steals it, I’ll buy her another, she thought as the bus rolled in.
The ride was miserable. On one side a man snored, while on the other a pathetic, uncomfortable infant cried. The bus rolled past bleak, sleeping towns, stopping here and there to discharge or take on passengers. One had to wonder what errands took people jolting across the country through the long, dismal night instead of lying at home under warm blankets. She wondered whether any of these people had ever gone on an errand like hers.
It was raining when they reached Chicago in the early morning. Famished by now, grimy and red-eyed because she had not slept, Connie rushed to inquire about a connection to Minneapolis.
This time there was a pleasant person at the ticket window, pleasant and also surprised.
“Yes, yes! There was a little girl here. She wanted to buy a ticket to Minneapolis, but didn’t have enough money, I remember. She seemed about to cry, and I didn’t know what to do, so I wrote out directions to the railroad station and told her to find Travelers’ Aid there. I figured they’d help her. Afterward I thought I probably should have called the police,” he finished.
Of course you should have, Connie thought with indignation at such well-meaning stupidity. But she thanked him and made her own way to consult Travelers’ Aid. There the woman at the desk had just come on duty and knew nothing about the previous day’s occurrences. Connie would have to wait until afternoon.
It was a long, long day. She bought a frankfurter and coffee, her first food since yesterday’s lunch, and sat eating this odd breakfast within view of the Travelers’ Aid desk, then managed a face and hands’ wash in the rest room and rushed back to the desk. She was so tense, so charged up, that she was hardly aware now of having gone twenty-four hours without sleep.
And yet she fell into a doze, sitting straight up on the hard bench, and was awakened by someone speaking to her.
“You’re the person who’s looking for a little girl on the way to Minneapolis?” a woman asked.
Connie sprang up. “I’m her aunt. What can you tell me?”
“I spoke to her yesterday. She’s a runaway, of course.”
“Yes, yes. Where is she?”
“I don’t know. She wouldn’t tell me her name, and apparently I asked too many questions, because she ran from me, and I lost her in the crowd. I felt terrible. Such a well-spoken child, an attractive little blond—”
Blond? Not Sue, after all! Connie released a long, anguished sigh.
“Oh, I’m sorry, it wasn’t Sue. She has dark hair. Strange, because things seemed to tie together, Minneapolis and—”
“Actually, it was a town not far from there. She was going to her grandmother’s, Elmer, the name was, and she’d lost her money.”
Elmer. Connie had a keen memory. Surely that was the name Lara had mentioned.
“Yes. We called information and even checked with the post office in the town. The woman has either moved away or else the post office people said they thought she’d died. So it was all a puzzle. And when I questioned the child, that’s when she ran off.”
It had to be Sue.…
“You said she was blond.”
“I might be wrong about that. But I’m positively right about the name.”
People hurried by, racing for trains, jostling each other, each intent on his affairs. One felt the world’s indifference, standing there, not knowing where to turn.
Then Connie said aloud, “I just don’t know what to do.”
“You know, I have a hunch that she might come back here. It’s beastly cold on the streets, she can’t just wander aimlessly through the city, and this is a kind of shelter, in a way.”
Connie looked into the vast space, into the crowds.
“Then you think I’d do well to wait a little.”
“I do. If she doesn’t return, then I’d say go home and leave it to the police.”
The thought of bringing this defeat back to Lara and Davey kept Connie going for another hour, and yet another hour or two, until at last, toward evening, she had to give up. Years later, she was to tell of her panic upon finding that in her haste at Lara’s house, she had forgotten to check her wallet, and now found herself in this strange city with no credit cards and not enough money to fly home. There she sat, with a Bulgari watch on her wrist, Martin’s eight-carat diamond on her finger, and an alligator bag that held just about enough cash to pay for the long bus ride back to Ohio and no more.
Beaten and exhausted, she made her way to the bus station, where sat another dejected group with its burdens and baggage, ready for a long ride through the night. There was half an hour to wait, so she bought a paper to fill the time and was too tired to read it. Half dozing, she was jarred awake by a little flurry of talk, and opening her eyes, beheld—a policeman holding Sue by the hand, a bedraggled, dirty-faced, tearstained Sue.
And she would remember Sue’s story, told between sobs on Connie’s shoulder while the curious watched and listened.
“I thought they hated me, they never talked to me, it was my fault about Peggy, I always watched her when we went outside, and if Peggy dies, it’ll be really my fault and I thought maybe Mrs. Elmer would take me back, there isn’t anybody else.…”
“But they love you so much, Sue! And it wasn’t your fault about Peggy. They never thought it was. You had nothing to do with it. It was an accident, just an awful accident. And if anything bad happens—you know what I’m thinking of—all three of you will need to be extra good to each other and help each other. Don’t ever do anything like this again, Sue. Don’t break all our hearts. Will you promise?”
“I wanted to call home and tell them where I was, but I was afraid they’d be angry at me. I knew it was awful, what I did. Besides, I had no money for the telephone. It dropped out of my pocket someplace. It must have dropped out when I went to buy a chocolate bar. The food I took was all gone, and I was hungry.”
“Oh, poor darling!”
The policeman said, “We found her sitting on a step down near the river, and brought her to the station house. Then we called home, and her father said we might put her on the bus, and he would meet it.” He put his hand on Sue’s shoulder. “Listen, little girl, I have a girl just your age, and I know what your father and mother must have been going through. I think you’ve almost given them a heart attack. Now, you promise never to do that again, do you?”
Sue sniffed and nodded. “I slept all night in the waiting room at the station, Aunt Connie. It was awful. Nobody came. Nobody cared.”
I can believe it, Connie thought. People don’t even see the homeless anymore.
“How did you know I was here, Aunt Connie?”
“I didn’t. I came here looking for you, but I didn’t find you until now.”
“I’m glad you found me.”
The bus was just pulli
ng in, and the policeman said, “Well, there’ll surely be a big celebration when you get home.”
Connie smiled. “That’s right. And thank you, Officer.”
Out of exhaustion, in the night that followed Sue’s return, Davey slept. But no sleep came to Lara, lying beside him. Toward dawn she got up and, with no aim, wandered through the house, not knowing what to do with herself in that dark, cold hour. After a while she sat down on the stairs and began soundlessly to weep, making the age-old human promise to God: “If Peggy gets well, I promise, I swear, I’ll never ask for anything again. If we can just be together, the four of us, I’ll never want anything more. I’ll never complain. Oh, please, please.”
At the top of the stairs above her Sue, who must have been awakened by her steps, quiet as they were, stood mute and scared. Then, comprehending and moved by an extraordinarily adult compassion, she came down to sit beside her mother, and laid her dark head on Lara’s shoulder, still without speaking a word.
At the end of the third week Peggy was moved to the subacute floor. The threat of infection was past, the swelling had gone down, and her face looked normal. It was the face of a child asleep.
“In a way it’s worse,” Lara said to Davey. “When she looked so awful, we could blame everything on that and could look forward, as if as soon as she looked like herself, she would also be herself. And now there’s nothing …” The words trailed off.
“I know,” Davey said. And then, perhaps by way of giving to his wife some encouragement that he himself did not feel, he reminded her that “all the doctors say it will take time, darling. Patience.”
Kindness never ceased. “It’s only because you’ve always been like that to everybody else,” a neighbor said when Lara remarked with wonder about all the kindness. “You and Davey are being paid back, that’s all.”
Connie flew in once or twice every week, making, without intending to, a small stir in the hospital every time.
A nurse said, “Your sister’s beautiful,” and then almost apologetically to Lara added, “Well, you do look alike. Her clothes are what I meant. They’re so—well, you know, so New York.”
And another reported, “My boyfriend drives the taxi from the airport. She comes in a private plane, he says. Is that true?”
