The Best Contemporary Women's Fiction: Six Novels

by Jenna Blum

  "There's no parking here after sunset." The red and yellow lights on his roof were twirling as if this were a crime scene. He had leaned into the driver's window, seen me on the other seat, and come around to my side, a large guy with a modified gut and a twangy, slightly nasal Boston accent at odds with his girth: No pahking heah, my deah.

  "I didn't know that."

  "Says so on the sign."

  "I'm sorry. I'll—"

  "What are you doing here?" Heah.

  "Nothing illegal. Fooling around with my computer." I was trying to close the file and shut the thing down and sober up, with his circus lights bathing everything in surreal colors. My hand was shaky against the tracking pad, and I was trying to keep my eyes from darting down suspiciously to the purse between my feet.

  "We don't see too much of this heah. In the pahking lot. On a Friday night. Computers, I mean." More wonder than condemnation in his voice. For an oversized cop, it sounded almost friendly.

  When I said what I said next, I meant to sound friendly, too. "Who knows? Maybe I'll start a trend."

  The screen went black and I shut the tangerine lid and moved to put it on the backseat when he asked the question that made me wish I had kept my mouth shut: "Can I see your driver's license and registration?"

  I carefully fished my wallet from the purse, handed him my license, and tried not to look as if I had no idea where to find the registration. I checked the ashtray, the glove compartment. There was nothing in the stacks of papers and maps and brochures, nothing.

  "Problem?"

  "I borrowed this car from a friend. I'm not sure where the papers are. The circumstances are somewhat ... The car belongs to Evan Lambert. You know, the lawyer? The guy who's always on TV defending the girl who—"

  "It's a hundred-and-fifty-dollar ticket and three points on your record for driving with no registration, I don't care who the car belongs to."

  I went through the glove compartment again and looked up at him through the window, wondering how much more it would cost if he found the bottle. Could he throw me in jail? Could I convince him that I wasn't driving while intoxicated—I was just sitting? He had jet-black hair slicked back with something shiny and a slightly squashed nose that may once have been broken. I knew that the awful truth might be my best defense. "It must have been someone in your office who called me yesterday."

  "What about?"

  "My husband's death. William O'Rourke, in Cummington."

  There was a pause of two or three seconds while he squinted at me, very unpolice-like, and I could tell he was connecting the dots: the dead man, the wife off-island, the Englishman who grabs the phone when she collapses, and now she's in a parking lot in the dark playing with a laptop? "So you're the wife in New York?"

  "I am," I said, more solemnly than I had ever said anything, including "I do." I wasn't faking the solemnity, but I was aware of the effect I hoped it would have.

  "I'll be right back."

  He returned a long moment later and handed me my license and something that looked like a ticket, which I could see was called FORMAL NOTICE OF WARNING, as if they had to add a few extra words to "warning" to flesh it out, make it less naked, less flimsy as a punishment on the page.

  "Thanks," I said. "Thanks very much."

  "I'd get your friend's registration into the car"—the ka— "as soon as possible."

  "I will."

  It did not take me long to decide that the FORMAL NOTICE OF WARNING was a message I would be wise to read as broadly as possible. On my way back to the Winstons' end of the island, I did what I should have done earlier in the day. I drove to the Congregational church in the village of Twin Oaks, where I knew there were meetings three or four nights a week. It is a quaint little village, as perfect as something you'd see in miniature, in Lord & Taylor's Christmas window. An austere white clapboard church and a one-room schoolhouse, weathered shingles with lovely baby-blue shutters that often match the sky, both buildings set back from the sidewalk, their lawns framed with freshly painted white picket fences. Across the street, a one-pump filling station with a white clapboard cashier's booth. After dark, there is rarely anyone about, and driving through it, the place always seems—though this cannot be the case—bathed in moonlight, frozen in a time long before now.

  There were no signs of life in the church or the parish hall; just this perfect tableau and my imperfect self.

  My exact state of mind as I drove west, not sure of my destination? The word that comes up repeatedly is "beyond." I was beyond anger, fear, disappointment, humiliation, somewhere close to feeling beyond feeling, which resembles numbness but also craves it. By which I mean that I felt enough to know that I wanted to feel even less.

  That's the closest I can come to a reason for doing what I did next, though a countervailing theory says that neither psychology nor free will has anything to do with it: if this is your affliction, once you begin, your body chemistry does not permit you to stop. You are in the thrall of something akin, say, to the force of gravity. You are, say, a brick sitting on the table. If the table disappears from under you, or you're pushed off the edge, you—the brick—have no choice but to fall.

  So I went back to the Winstons' party and had a few more. I'd had only the two beers and a few swills of the Jack Daniels, but because I was out of practice, I stumbled in the dark going from the Winstons' dirt road to the Winstons' beach for what remained of the clambake.

  The catering company had left; there were a dozen people milling around, some sitting on blankets, and a help-yourself cooler stocked with beer and a few open magnums of wine. I helped myself. I drank fast. It was easy to do in the dark. I guess I had two or three like that, glug glug by the cooler, and by the time I went looking for the people I'd come with, I was a lot worse off than when I had parked Evan's car. There was no way I could drive.

  I wobbled over the sand, stopping deliberately at each clump of people, looking from one face to the other, staring as if I were painfully near-sighted and had lost my glasses. I could have asked whether anyone had seen Evan or Mavis, but I was feeling rude and combative, and I wanted these people to know how much I didn't like them, so I drifted from one group of strangers to another, as if the beach were a giant aquarium and I a spectator on the other side of the glass. Conversations floated past me, or I floated past them, and the wind picked up. I bent down to take off my sandals, and when I stood up, I was face to face with a shark. "If it isn't Betsy Schmidt," I said, and I must have said it too loudly, because she lurched backward, and another familiar face swam toward me. "And Hunter'S. Thompson. Swansea's Gonzo journalist. How are things in Hanoi these days, or do you call it Ho Chi Minh City?"

  "I think you've got your geography a little screwed up tonight, my dear," Hunter Abbott said. "And your cast of characters. I heard about your husband only an hour ago. I'm sincerely sorry. Good man, Will was, despite that business with the CIA."

  "You mean his career?"

  "Approximately."

  "So you don't think it's good news that he's dead? Because that was Betsy's first question, wasn't it, Bets? From now on we'll call you Good News or Bad News Betsy. Maybe you should rename the bookstore, Good News or Bad News Books. What would be the good news books? Maybe all the ones about massacres and cancer and suicide. And the bad news books would be, um, gardening. Cookbooks. Natural childbirth in your own home. What to name your pet. Hunter, do you know anything about what Will did with our dog? We had the sorriest little mutt. Will gave him to me as a consolation prize because I couldn't have a baby, and after he died—"

  I stopped talking because a large arm clamped around my back and its fingers gripped my upper arm so hard it hurt. "For Christ's sake, Sophy," Evan said softly, but not kindly, in my ear.

  "Let go, will you?"

  Again in my ear, and not kindly: "I'm taking you home." The arm tighter around my shoulder, pushing me across the sand. "Come on."

  "Don't push. Where were you? I was looking everywhere. Don't ho
ld my arm like that, it hurts. What happened to Ginny?"

  "Mavis and I were watching you make a spectacle of yourself. Our kids had fallen asleep on our quilt, and we were packing up, when your voice rang out across the beach. Sue Winston heard every word. It was quite a display."

  He maneuvered me to the dunes, and we sank into sand with every step. "It was quite a clambake. I can't remember. Did you tell me where Ginny is?"

  "She ran into a family she used to babysit for, and they invited her to their house. Any idea where you parked the car? Or if you parked the car?"

  We were on solid ground by then, the dirt cul-de-sac at the Winstons' house. "Right behind that SUV. And though it may be hard to believe, I was not driving around the island in your car sloshed like this. This is of very recent vintage. I know I seem extremely potted, but I'm not."

  "Good thing, because I'd have been worried."

  "See? Just as I said. Here we are."

  We got in and I handed Evan his key, though I can't recall now how much I was aware of hiding from him; how much I remembered at that moment about the rest of the evening. What I was acutely aware of as we turned around in the cul-de-sac and bumped along the rocky road was Evan's anger, which he expressed as silence punctuated with an occasional deep sigh. He glanced over at me. "Put your seatbelt on," he said gruffly, and I fumbled for a bunch of seconds until I got it on. I didn't know what to say to make him less angry, so I didn't say anything for as long as I could stand it. Then I said, "It's hard, being with all of you and your perfect lives. Your perfect houses and your perfect children and your perfect marriages and your perfect dogs."

  A minute later we were on blacktop, on the two-lane road that led back to Evan's house and to the lighthouse at the end of the island, and I was not so drunk that I couldn't hear the self-pity in my voice. But Evan's answer pulled me in another direction, and the shock may have been what sobered me up enough to take part in the conversation that followed. "I have two perfect children and a perfect dog and two beautiful houses, but the rest, I'm afraid, leaves something to be desired."

  "You look awfully picturesque on each other's arms. That's a good start."

  "Or a good finish."

  "Evan, am I slurring?"

  "A little."

  "I'm sorry. Jesus."

  "I'm used to it. Being unhappily married isn't the most original tragedy. Or the most serious."

  "No, I mean, the mess on the beach. Betsy Schmidt."

  "I shouldn't reward you for such bad behavior, but it was funny."

  "Sorry about your marriage, too. Is it blanc?"

  "Is it what?"

  "Marriage blanc. White. Virginal. No sex. I think the French specialize in that."

  "Very blanc."

  "How long?"

  "Two years."

  "So you must have someone else."

  "Until last night. That's why I missed the six o'clock flight and ended up on the ten with you. She told me she was getting married. When I got to the island last night, she called again."

  "So that was all the chaos last night?"

  "That was some of it."

  "And Mavis has a friend too?"

  "She has a number of them. Or did. We don't swap stories like girlfriends."

  "Good sports, the two of you. Will and I didn't do that."

  "It's not something I recommend."

  As he turned onto the dirt road leading to his house, I thought of how often I'd banged over this pocked road in the last twenty-four hours and of all I'd learned between rides. "Was it Heraclitus who said you never drive over the same dirt road twice?"

  "I think so," Evan said.

  "How old is she, the woman who's getting married?"

  "Twenty-five."

  I turned to him in the darkness of the wooded road, the greenish glow of the dash a kind of intimacy between us, as if we were under a blanket with a flashlight. "I am not exactly speaking from the highest moral ground at the moment, but I was hoping you'd be more original than that."

  "That wasn't my intention, Sophy—originality. The heart wants what it wants."

  "Isn't that what Woody Allen said about Soon-Yi?"

  "I'm sorry you disapprove."

  He drove onto the shrubbed path that led to the gardens and the circular drive. It was like coming on a boarding school or a country inn, an impersonal place with a sinister soundtrack, the rhythmic roar and crash of the ocean, the wind rustling acres of leafy trees as hard as the tides drove the water. And this fresh chill between Evan and me. What was I thinking, to criticize his girlfriend's age?

  I started to apologize as we entered the foyer, but Flossie barked and prodded. Evan brushed his hand against a bank of light switches as he slipped away in the direction of his study, and lights all over the first floor came on with the flair of a Broadway musical. Flossie galumphed behind him, and I drifted into the kitchen, wondering—no, it was more acute, more desperate than wondering—if I'd seen an open bottle of white wine in the fridge. You see, when you're in the vortex of it, there is no reason involved or etiquette, and certainly no common sense. It's closer to the tides or the course of a fever or the brick, with nothing under it. I opened the refrigerator, pretending that I wanted juice, in order to see what was there, and as I gripped the handle of a glass pitcher filled with something purple, I heard Evan's voice behind me. "There's a message for you from Daniel Jacobs. Call him even if it's late."

  He was out of the kitchen by the time I turned around, holding the pitcher aloft, and said—to myself, it turned out—"Thought I'd just pour myself a glass of grape juice."

  "Do you realize you're the only person in the world who knows what was really going on when the police called yesterday?" I lay on the bed in the guest room in the back of the second floor, and by the time I called Daniel, I'd had a little more to drink, even brought a glass with me upstairs. I was angry at myself and didn't want to tell him what a mess I'd made of everything; what a mess everything was. So I opened with a distraction, a divertimento.

  "I'm sure I am the only person, but there's something I need to—"

  "You know, yesterday, before that phone call, it was so intense that I don't know what would have become of me if—"

  "You sound rather in your cups, Sophy, though I'm inferring, never having witnessed you that way."

  "A little."

  "I don't bloody believe it," he said. "You're not supposed to—"

  "Of course I'm not, but—"

  "No, I mean you. You're such a good little scout; you're such an advertisement for the whole bloody thing. The slogans and the meetings and the God business; you're such a noble soldier. But Sophy, listen, there's something I must—"

  "I've had a bad day, Daniel. A wretched day. All day. So I had a little something to drink. Are you going to report me to the AA police? Are you going to send me to a rehab?" I'd opened a window, and there was a breeze and the hokey, movie-soundtrack crashing of the ocean, which made me feel sorry for myself. From Here to Eternity, I must have been thinking, or something even cornier. "I just got back from this clambake on the beach. The blinking beach with the blinking aristocracy of Swansea. Everyone is furious with me because—"

  "Sophy, listen to me. My daughter is gone."

  "What?"

  "My daughter is missing. I called you hours ago, right after I spoke to the police. Vicki. No one has seen her since one o'clock this afternoon. She was in her room and then she wasn't."

  I was silent, saying to myself, Concentrate, remember, sit up, what day is it? "But that was yesterday and I took her home. I saw her go in the front door. She was fine."

  "What are you talking about?"

  "She came to see me yesterday, I think it was yesterday. To my apartment. Before you came over. I took her home in a cab. I watched her go through the door."

  "Why didn't you tell me?"

  "I was going to." Why hadn't I? There was a reason, but I couldn't make it come back to me, and that was such a long time ago. "But then the pol
ice called when we were—and then everything got so—"

  "What was she doing there?"

  "She wanted to talk to me."

  "About?"

  I remembered this part. The card. The message. I even remembered the message. The vote. Jesus, the vote. The elaborate story she'd made up. "Her mother," I said. "In Vietnam." Did I have to tell him the truth, the whole truth? Concentrate, Sophy, put the drink down.

  "That's all she said?"

  "That was one of the things. What did the police do?"

  "They've been over every inch of the house. They've issued alerts at every—I don't know where. They're not supposed to do anything until someone's been gone for two days, but I rang the mayor's office. He's a great admirer of Blair's work, and his wife is her friend from college, so he got the police to make an exception, and they've begun a—"

  "If she'd gone back to my apartment to look for me, the doorman would have told her that I'm away. How much money did she have?"

  "Thirty-seven dollars. It's gone."

  "She was reading The Secret Garden yesterday. I wonder if it influenced her. There's a girl about her age—"

  "For God's sake, Sophy, don't read things into every little—"

  "Does she know I'm on Swansea?"

  "I told her the name of the place, though I doubt she knows where it is on the map."

  "Does she know why I'm here?"

  "I told them your husband was sick."

  "She has enough money to take the train to Blair's nursing home on Long Island. Tell the police to check the nursing home and all the transportation that leads to it. And tell them there's a Greyhound bus that leaves the Port Authority twice a day for the ferry that comes to Swansea. If she had enough money, she might have got on that bus."

  "If I don't know about the bloody bus, how would she know?"