She pulled over in front of a small, brick office building and led him around to a side entrance. “I work part-time for this guy,” she said.
First, she showed him the back room, where there were various molds and casts out on a table, dentures that reminded Landis of joke-shop chattering teeth. There was an antiseptic smell to the place, vaguely sweet. She took him to the examination room and switched on the lights. “Go on, have a seat,” she said.
He did, leaned back, stared up at a video monitor. “You sure this is OK?”
“Oh, yeah,” she said. “It’s fine.” She was fumbling around in a cabinet. “There,” she said. Music began to pump out of speakers hidden in the walls.
“I hate the Grateful Dead,” said Landis. “And for some reason, I can’t seem to get away from them.”
“Resistance is futile,” she said. “Anyway, different music for different activities.” She had something in her hands.
He hopped up out of the chair. “How did you say you know this guy?”
“I work for him.”
“Work how?”
“Office stuff, phones. He’s a drummer, and we dated for a while.”
“So you can be friends with someone you used to . . . you know.”
“What makes you say ‘used to’?” Her eyes seemed lit—it was a quality he recognized. He wondered why he kept finding himself with chemically unbalanced women. She turned around and adjusted a couple of dials on a little panel below the counter. Then she put a mask over her face and drew three deep breaths. She took it off. “That’s the stuff.”
“Whoa,” said Landis. “You sure that’s safe?”
“Come here.” She stepped behind him, put the mask over his mouth and held it there with one hand, her other moving lightly over the front of his pants. “Feel anything?”
“I don’t know,” Landis said into the mask, his voice muffled. “You?”
“I think so. Yes, definitely.”
Tentatively, he inhaled the sweet gas. He’d never had it before. Dentists had always just shot him up with Novocaine or used nothing.
She stepped away from him, settling herself into the chair and putting on the mask. Her expression had turned dreamy. She was old enough to be a mom, he thought, and then he realized he had no evidence she wasn’t one. There were hollows around her eyes, and he wondered what she thought of them, or if she thought of them. He felt dizzy from the gas, although not particularly like laughing.
“You know what’s sexy?” Robin said, leaning back, holding out the mask for him to have another whiff. “Dentists’ chairs.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Imagine if I were passed out in this one, for example. You could pretty much do anything you wanted to me and I wouldn’t know. Have some more.”
“What if someone comes? The police, for instance. Why would the lights be on in a dental clinic on a Saturday night?”
“Oh, he’s in here working late all the time. Weekends, too. Here, have more.”
He did. A lightness moved through his brain, circles and stars dancing in Hollywood musical choreography. He noticed she’d unbuttoned her jeans, the top two buttons, exposing the upper part of her purple satin underwear.
“But he’s not coming tonight?”
“Who?”
“Your boss.”
“These are the rules,” she said, ignoring the question. “You can watch, but you can’t touch.” Taking another long hit from the mask, she let it dangle by her chin, reached down with both hands and pushed her pants and underwear down to her knees, revealing a shaved pubic area with labia that effloresced like the edges of an exotic mushroom. She licked her fingers and began to masturbate, slowly, eyes closed.
Landis wasn’t sure what to do. He’d heard of things like this happening, but had never quite believed in them.
“Oh,” she said. “Mmmm.”
“Um,” he said.
“Shhhh,” she said, peering out at him through one eye, just for a moment, then closing it again.
The “Ode to Joy” beeped out in asynchronous contrast to “Friend of the Devil,” and without any noticeable shift in rhythm, Robin reached into her pocket and removed a phone, which she flipped open with one hand, the other continuing to massage herself. “Hey,” she said.
Landis helpfully went to the stereo and turned down the volume, then began to make leaving movements.
“No.” She waved at him to stay. “It’s all right. I’m with him now.” She smiled, listening, her left hand paused for a moment. “That’s right. No. At the office. I’m in the chair.” She winked at Landis. “Uh-huh.” She began to move her hand again, this time quite dramatically, and she groaned a bit into the phone. Then she held the phone out for Landis to take, which he did. He held it up to his ear as she worked herself with a new intensity, one hand holding her lips apart, the other rubbing up and down vigorously.
“Buddy?” said a voice.
“Yeah?” Landis answered.
“Tell me what’s going on over there, really.”
“Well, I can’t say. Nothing for you to be concerned about, at any rate.”
“What did she tell you about us? Never mind. It’s probably not important.” Landis heard the sound on the other end go muffled, as if the guy had his hand over the receiver. He’d turned away from Robin, who was now making sounds like a singer warming up for choir practice. The guy’s voice came back, clear, deep, and nasal. Landis was glad for having something, anything, to occupy himself. “Tell me what she’s doing.”
“Nah,” said Landis.
“Why not?”
“Wouldn’t be right.”
“I can hear her.”
Robin’s legs were spread out over the arms of the dentist’s chair now, her pants kicked off and on the floor.
“OK, then, if you won’t tell me what she’s doing, will you at least tell her something for me?”
Landis retrieved his beer from the counter where he’d left it next to a poster about gum disease. “What?”
“Tell her Summer Adelman is giving me head, right now.”
Landis held the phone away from his ear. “You tell her.” He held it out to Robin, who took it without stopping what she was doing.
“Oh,” she said into the phone. “Oh, God.”
“That’s it,” said Landis. “Thanks for everything.” He pushed his way out of the room and went back through the hallway, letting himself out by the side door, the way they’d come in.
He was outside by the curb trying to figure out how he was going to get back to his truck when Robin emerged from the building, fully dressed.
“Don’t do anything on account of me,” said Landis. “I don’t want to break up a party.”
“I’m sorry.” She poked at him with an outstretched finger. “I didn’t know he was going to call. Well, maybe I did.” They stood in silence for a while, Landis feeling embarrassed and a little perplexed at how the events of the past few days had deposited him here, on this particular patch of concrete, staring at traffic. Finally, she asked, “You want to get coffee?”
At the Waffle Barn, they both had the Big Breakfast. It was 2:00 AM. The old couple opposite them—a scowling woman and her blank-faced husband—reminded him of a painting in a book Bernice had once shown him where all the people in it had distorted features and smeary eyes. That, she had said, was the real world. Our brains and eyes just compensated for it so we wouldn’t be too scared.
“How about telling me what’s up with you?” she asked.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean something’s up. It’s pretty obvious. You rob a bank?”
He was tempted to explain, but thought it would probably be a mistake. He put a third cream into his coffee. “How’s Tate doing, anyway?”
She stared at him hard. “If you know that sonofabitch, you also know that no one who knows him gives a shit how he’s doing.”
“The last gig he called me for was some college kids who didn’t think they
even had to pay—they just figured the sound guy came free. I had to have a long talk with one of them, if you know what I mean.”
“You’re dodging the subject. That’s OK, though. Dodge away. You don’t have to tell me.”
He poked at his eggs. “Say you had a locking mailbox, and you didn’t feel like locking it,” he said. “But the mailman, he won’t deliver to an unlocked box. Regulations, or something. What would you do?”
“Lock the box,” she said. “You thinking about becoming a postman?”
“I’m with this woman.”
“We already established that. I guess that’s why you don’t feel like playing dentist, huh?”
“She’s got a kid. Only she gave it up for adoption. And then she changed her mind. Kid’s five now, lives here in town. Except we sort of boosted her the other morning.”
“You boosted someone else’s kid?”
“Yeah.”
“There’s another word for that.”
“Not someone else’s. My girlfriend’s. I told her this was the wrong way to go about it, but she wouldn’t listen. I think she’d had this plan for a while, but I don’t know if she’d have done it without help.”
“Which has what to do with mailboxes?”
“That’s this chick. She wouldn’t lock her mailbox, and she’d rather not get her mail than lose a stupid fight with the postman. Do you see? I didn’t have much choice. This was going to happen, and I had to either go along or get out. I didn’t want to get out.” He thought about how Bernice would sometimes disappear into her apartment for days at a time, turning out the lights, refusing to answer the phone, spending hours in bed under the covers. He’d attributed this to her not having Emily—to the frustration of being so close to her.
“What happened with the mail?”
“Eventually, the postman gave up and just started sticking it in the box anyway.”
“So, she won. She got her way.”
“She did. She’s all about proving things, and she doesn’t like being told what to do.”
“This is serious,” said Robin, laying down her fork. “Where did you boost the kid to?”
“I can’t say.”
“OK. Do you have someone you can talk to?”
“I just talked to you.”
“I mean, like a friend or something?”
“You think I’m making a mistake?”
“Probably. But it seems like you’ve already made it.”
“I don’t want to go to jail.”
“Yeah.” She put out a hand and touched his briefly, then withdrew it. “I think you’re a nice guy. Maybe too nice. What’s the kid like?”
“Weird,” he said. He thought about how she’d smelled vaguely of talcum powder and chewing gum, how she’d slept quietly most of the trip to Tucson, her mouth partway open. “A little on the religious side.”
She wrote something on a napkin. “Here’s my cell. I’m going to take you back to your car now. We’ve had enough fun for one night. But you can call me, OK? I hope you do. Maybe things won’t work out with this crazy chick, or maybe they will. I like you. And in spite of what you may think after tonight, I’m real normal. Honest. I hope you’ll call me.”
Landis took the napkin. To the o in her name, Robin had added two eyes with a little smile underneath. He folded it and put it in his wallet.
“You know,” said Robin, “that whole mailbox business? You say it was about proving something, but did it ever occur to you she might just have lost her key and didn’t want to admit it?”
SIX
Tessa Harding almost never went into her husband’s home office, but she wanted to see the photos again, and they were on his computer. David was out on his bike—he’d be gone for hours. After calling in sick the past three days, she’d gone downtown today to meet her Saturday students, only allowing herself to cry a little in between lessons—sweet Ashley Jackson, who was working on Mikrokosmos, dead-eyed James McMullen, who robotically pounded his way through the first Invention, falling apart at exactly the place where he always fell apart—and afterward she’d gone for coffee and a cookie because she hadn’t been eating at all lately. She’d gotten through half the cookie before growing nauseated. Then she’d gone out and stood by the playground in the park and watched the children jumping in and out of the fountain, laughing, shouting. She’d never brought Emily here, but she found it calming to stand at the edge of all this hubbub and imagine that she was in fact a part of it, that one of these children in shorts and a T-shirt, or a little pink bathing suit, was hers. She saw a man who looked like the man in the photos cutting through the park. He was big, with an earnest, unremarkable face. He wore jeans and a black T-shirt, and he moved with the sort of lope she associated with stray dogs. What if they were still here? It seemed possible. There was that girl in the news who had been abducted, and it turned out later that she’d been living right in the same town for nearly a year and no one noticed. The man crossed the street and she lost sight of him.
David had wanted to call the police immediately, but Tessa had told him they should wait. “We know who it is, and we know why she did it,” she’d said. “At some point, soon, we’ll hear from her.”
“She’s just a common criminal,” he shouted “I don’t know why you would even want to consider her side.”
She didn’t explain that for five years she’d lived with the certainty that something like this was coming, that the happiness she was supposedly enjoying—she was happy, wasn’t she?—was illusory, the brightly lit, glistening sunscape at the center of a hurricane, and that eventually God would reveal to her the true, darker nature of his plan.
She had her own computer—a laptop—but the cameras were hooked up to David’s. There was one on the front of the house, another around the side. She hadn’t wanted them, originally, but now she was glad he’d put them in.
Taped to the bottom of the monitor was a printed-out strip of paper that read “I believe in the bodily resurrection of the Just, and the everlasting punishment of the Lost.”
Lost. She hated that word.
She went to Pictures and located the folder marked Webcam. In it, she found the images he’d captured of Bernice and the man. They weren’t terribly clear, and the light was poor, but there was no mistaking the girl. The camera only went off at thirty-second intervals, and there was nothing of Emily. But the man was there. Tall, with dark, shoulder-length hair parted in the middle to reveal a high forehead, a nose that seemed just slightly off kilter, possibly even broken. He looked relatively strong. There was no real way to tell if it was the same person she’d seen this afternoon, she realized. Perhaps it was just that she’d wanted to see him so much.
Tessa hadn’t known anything was wrong. David had already left for work, and she’d made herself a new pot of coffee rather than drink the sour-tasting stuff he’d left her. She’d gotten out the cereal for Emily, and also the milk. Usually, Emily came upstairs and they ate together. She’d listened to the radio, waited. It was going to be hot and dry again. The fires up in Pikes National Forest were under control, but not out. KCME was playing Glenn Gould, and she thought how it was probably going to be a reasonably good day. But Emily didn’t come up for breakfast, and the sense that something was wrong began to creep over her, and eventually she walked downstairs—she purposely didn’t hurry, because that would be admitting there was a reason for worry, and she couldn’t see one—and opened the door to the empty bedroom.
In that one moment, her every fear came true. Even as she ran through the house, the alarm in her head giving way to panic, even as she shouted her daughter’s name to the empty rooms, then started shouting nothing coherent at all, just sounds of anguish, like those some wounded animal might make, even then, she knew it was pointless. Returning to Emily’s bedroom, breathing deeply to calm herself, she became aware of a faint scent that was almost pheromonal: Bernice. She realized, too, that she had been smelling it for some time—on the sofa where she watched TV, poss
ibly even in her own bed. And so Tessa did not call the police, had called only David, who hurried home and confirmed, with the photographs, what she already understood to be true. Bernice, who knew the alarm code. Bernice, who might easily have kept a key. Bernice, about whom Tessa had wondered and worried constantly all this time, now come back, prodigal child, thief.
She peered through the blinds out into the sunny landscape of their neighborhood. The garbage men were coming, and she watched them stop at the house below with the noisy dog. Then the truck started up and groaned its way to their driveway, where David had put the cans out before leaving—he was incredibly reliable in this and other domestic ways—and the men emptied them. How could they do these normal things? How could life go on oblivious of what had happened?
Bernice had come to them in the summertime, left in the winter. Tessa had hoped they might be friends, and early on it had seemed possible, but the girl had turned resentful and just grown more so. Tessa tried everything she could think of to get through to her, suggesting shopping trips together, asking her what she would like to eat, trying to draw her out with questions about her family and interests. Almost everything she said was met with narrowed eyes, one-word answers. Tessa watched in envy as Bernice’s body changed, her hair thickening, her stomach filling out. But it was like having a sullen teenager, or perhaps a delinquent under house arrest, living with them. In the seventh month, Tessa took her to the mall to buy new clothes. Afterward, they ate hamburgers at Red Robin, and out of nowhere Bernice broke the silence and said that one strange thing that Tessa still remembered: “You’re better than him.”
She pointed the cursor so it hovered over a folder marked Dental. Business records, probably, and none of her business anyway. Except why would he be keeping records at home when there were computers at the office? She hesitated. She should not look. They both understood what a good family was, and what the hierarchy was within it. David was in charge. Tessa considered herself a liberated woman in all the ways that counted. She thought for herself, she wasn’t afraid of her husband, she had a job. But a marriage was like any other organization—there had to be an acknowledged leader or there would never be a clear direction and the whole enterprise would flounder.
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