by Ann Beattie
The light went on above the desk, indicating a patient was calling. Usually, between getting them in bed for the night and the beginning of bad dreams, there was a longer lull. It had been a busy night.
“Yes?” she said, entering the room. It was Mrs. Bell, whose covers were on the floor. “Your covers,” she said, answering her own question.
“Don’t go,” Mrs. Bell said, raising a shaky hand. “You haven’t told me when we’ll leave.”
“It’s midnight, and you’re in your bed. You don’t have to go anywhere, Mrs. Bell.”
“I have to go to my son’s,” she said. Her hand moved restlessly across the newly replaced covers. Nancy stepped forward and grasped Mrs. Bell’s hand. “Your son and his family are in Richmond,” she said. “You’re in your bed, and it’s almost midnight.”
“Richmond?” the old lady said. It was always a calculated risk: give a detail, and it might soothe; give a detail, and it might perplex them further.
“You know,” she said, trying to distract her, “I met a boy who used to be your neighbor, not too long ago. Do you remember a blond boy who works at a plant nursery?” Plant nursery, not baby nursery. Words were endlessly misleading.
“I fell and he called the ambulance,” she said.
“Is that right? Well, he said he’d delivered flowers here.”
“He’s an angel,” Mrs. Bell said.
He hadn’t seemed very nice to her, but that was not something she’d mention. “Well, he was very nice to carry my bush to my car,” she said.
“His sister was so bright. She won a spelling contest for all the state. She’s no longer with us, though, bless her heart.”
A mistake: any nighttime conversation could elicit unhappy memories.
“Oh,” she said, trying to speak as if that settled the matter, and was not a question.
“Yes. She died on Afton Mountain, in a car none of them were supposed to be in. The car fell all the way down, and it was the headlights pointed at the sky that made them find them.”
“How awful,” she said. “I’m sorry to have brought up—”
“Her father never worked another day. He bought groceries, after that. His wife made him. Sitting in his chair, never again working another day. Her son had to be everything to her. He was his mother’s own angel boy.”
“At least she has her son,” Nancy said, unthinkingly. As soon as she’d spoken, she bit her lip, but the old lady didn’t seem disturbed.
“Richmond,” Mrs. Bell said. “Of course they’re in Richmond. What time did you say it was?”
“Ten after twelve,” Nancy said, looking at the clock.
“In the afternoon?”
“No. At night.”
“Richmond,” the woman repeated, and Nancy let go of her hand.
No response came to the letter she wrote the girl in London, sitting at the nurses’ station later that night, and no word from George Wissone, though in another week’s time a letter arrived, postmarked Washington, D.C., from someone named Rich O’Malley. He said he was trying to track down a friend whom he thought she knew, George Wissone. He gave her his telephone number and asked her to call him collect; he had tried her number many times and not reached her. So: George had told someone about her, and about the trip. She wondered if Rich O’Malley might also be a spook, because she had understood when George sat in her living room and joked that he was a spook that he was. Because of his age, he had probably retired.
She had planned, when she went part-time, to buy new clothes, but time had passed and she hadn’t done that. At work she wore pants and a matching top, with rubber-soled clogs and a pair of socks or, more often, trouser hose that stopped at the knee. Her only jewelry was the Bulova her ex-husband had left behind when he moved. The younger nurses saved their money to buy gold bracelets and gold earrings. She cared nothing about jewelry. She did not attend any political fund-raisers, or go to lunch at places where people wore subtle, expensive earrings. She certainly did not ever attend formal occasions, though a grateful patient’s son had asked her to join him and his wife when they were invited for drinks at Ash Lawn. She had been invited, a few times, for one occasion or another at someone’s house: a croquet party—that was the South!—or a Christmas party, though she always declined. It was an easy time of year to pretend you had something else to do. This past Christmas, instead of a Christmas tree, she had gone to a greenhouse—not part of the nursery where the strange boy worked—and bought a large white azalea, which she’d decorated with twinkling lights and a few red felt miniature cardinals she’d bought at the fabric store. She had cooked herself a filet mignon and had it with baked artichoke hearts with Parmesan cheese and a half bottle of red wine that did not come from the area. She’d worn her jeans and a comfortable, oversize blouse with unfashionable shoulder pads she kept meaning to cut out. She’d listened to Christmas carols on the radio, then put on Norah Jones—a gift from the director of Dolly Madison, along with a check for one hundred dollars—and sat in her chair, warm and comfortable, wondering how people took on so many obligations. She and her then-husband had bought their tree the week before Christmas, decorated it two or three days before the twenty-fifth, unwrapped gifts on Christmas Eve, then driven to his cousin’s for Christmas Day breakfast, then home to receive visitors in the afternoon, followed by an evening recital of music by the sons of her neighbors, at their house, along with homemade eggnog—then back to their own house to make Christmas night resolutions, which did not cause as much guilt as broken New Year’s Eve promises. Once or twice she had enjoyed the routine. Three times, even. And then the neighbors’ children became awkward teenagers with acne and unpleasant tenor voices, and the resolutions she and Edward made had an edge to them: I’ll give up desserts, but you should think about that, too. When Nicky got older, they couldn’t have a tree in the house because of his allergies. Well, of course she’d assumed his eyes were red, all those years later, because of some other allergic reaction. They stopped going to the cousin’s in Wintergreen. People still came by in the afternoon, but a little apologetically, because they thought she and Edward might be napping, they were both so sleep deprived. Nicky never went to bed before ten o’clock, and he never slept through the night. Nicky was a problem in kindergarten: he bit, he threw things. She was always getting calls. He had trouble reading. He had to repeat second grade. He would scream bloody murder if either of them tried to help him bathe, and sometimes months would pass when his hair was unwashed, and he dug at his scalp but refused to shampoo his head. He begged for a dog, and when neither of them would relent, cut up his toy animals with pinking shears and threw them on their bedroom floor. She called the pediatrician, crying and fingering the once-beloved, decapitated Snoopy in her pocket. He saw her that day and set up an appointment with a psychologist. Nicky went. And then, perhaps even the same week, he had a seizure. Their world seemed to stop. Tests, more tests. Then a reprieve: years in which there was no second seizure, though the medicine he took made him put on weight. With his rounder face, he looked more like her. After three years—the last year with no medicine at all (and there had been no more horrible incidents)—she had been telling her husband the doctor’s cautiously worded but still reassuring good news (a much better drug had been developed, if and when Nicky might need it) when he had stood up from his chair and said, “I need to tell you something.” Just like that, she had heard about his long affair with a woman who had become pregnant. He answered her questions: it was not a woman she had ever met; the woman lived in the county; he was not in love with her, but he was nevertheless asking for a divorce. “You wouldn’t even blink if I had a seizure,” he said. What? It was as if it was neatly woven together in his mind: his unfaithfulness, the woman, the pregnancy, her failure to drive him home after he’d had a root canal; her failure—a nurse’s failure!—to ask the result of his colonoscopy, during which they had removed polyps. It might have been funny, except that he frightened her. For the first time, she noticed the re
dness of his face, which was the same prickly purple blush Nicky had gotten when he became adamant that he would not bathe or wash his hair. She wished she could remember how her ex-husband had segued from his mistress’s pregnancy to the discovery of polyps. In her wildest dreams, she could not imagine the transitional sentence, so perhaps there had not been one. Perhaps he had just begun yelling any grievance he could think of…but what had been wrong with Nicky, years later, when she and he and his father and his father’s wife were all in family therapy, to maintain that never once had his father raised his voice? She asked him whether he didn’t remember that night: the night of the tossed-over lamp, his father clomping out in a rage, and he said he did remember the incident, though he had been chilled by his parents’ silence. It was the small click of the door that meant the family would not be together again that he remembered. The way, in the middle of it all, she had answered the phone and said, “Hello?” According to Nicky, there had been only the softest sounds: a whisper; a click. He thought he might have become so hypersensitive to sound not because he was used to living amid shouting and crying, but because everything that happened happened as gently as something ephemeral, drifting to a stop. And he had turned his own round, blank face to her to see if she would disagree. “My son lies in a very calm tone of voice,” she had said to the therapist. “He wants to provoke the other person into such frustration, she raises her voice.” The man had looked from her to her ex-husband, who did not verify or deny what had been said, and then he had searched Nicky’s face, to no avail. Next he looked at Bernadine, who looked stricken, but said nothing. She, herself, had determined that she would sit there silently, since she had spoken the truth. For the remaining ten minutes of the session, no one had said a thing, as if whoever was the most silent would be the one absolved.
Could Nicky have done something similarly maddening to provoke George Wissone? He would certainly lie when it suited his purposes. She hadn’t thought what might happen if Nicky presented a different version of things—if he convinced George that he was put upon, unfairly characterized, a young man trying to detach from his crazy mother. Maybe George had gone all the way there and come back—that was it: he might have come back!—and just hadn’t known how to tell her that she should butt out, things were fine. How likely was that? Not very. What would be the scenario? Nicky would show the man his paintings, explain that his mother was a smothering woman who wanted him back in Virginia because she was lonely, and couldn’t let go, and she thought he was her property…he was not being supported by her; he was fine, on his own in London, working…. That was, of course, absolutely impossible. More likely, he would be stoned and arrogant and devious. George would try to talk to him, but fail. What evidence did she have that he knew how to talk to someone like Nicky? George, the nonspook spook. Knowing how to maneuver in Vietnam when you were young would give you little preparation for functioning in London when you were old. She had been crazy to contact him. The cost of the plane ticket was nothing, but a failed mission overseas could actually work against her. The next time, Nicky would be more savvy; he’d elude the next person. What next person? Another ineffectual private investigator like the one her husband had hired? Maybe the two men had collided over there, smacked each other with their foreheads as if they were two actors in an English farce.
She dialed the phone and missed a beat, surprised when Rich O’Malley’s wife answered. “Hello?” Linda said. She almost hung up. In part because she was still recovering from her own shock that she had dialed the number. “Is Mr. O’Malley at home?” she said.
“Yes. May I say who’s calling?”
“Nancy Gregerson.”
“Oh, good!” the woman said. “My husband was hoping you’d call.”
“Well, he…wrote me,” Nancy said.
“Oh, we’ve been so concerned. Honey, it’s Nancy on the phone. Nancy Gregerson.”
“Hello?” It was a man’s voice.
“I almost didn’t call,” she said, though what she might have said was that she wished she had not. The second the phone was answered, she’d felt a knot in her stomach. She was more reluctant about this phone call than she had been about asking George Wissone to help her. Calm down, she told herself. Of course the man has friends. Though whoever was on the phone wasn’t the problem; the problem was that she felt even more sure that George must have failed in his mission, if these people also felt he had been out of touch too long.
“Tell me about your son. It’s your son he went after, right?” the man was saying. She could hear the woman whispering.
“I don’t know who I’m speaking to,” she said. “Who are you, and why did you want me to call?”
“I’m his best friend. He’s dropped off the face of the earth. We need to know how to get in touch with him.”
“I don’t know,” she said. There seemed little harm in stating the truth.
“When did you last hear from him?”
“He’s never called.”
“He hasn’t?”
“I can’t help you,” she said. “I should hang up.”
There was a long pause.
“I appreciate your not doing that,” he said. “How long did he tell you he was going to be gone?”
Again, she said, “I don’t know you.”
“Would it help to meet me? Us?” he said. “He’s my best friend. He called and said he was on his way to London to find your son.”
“Maybe he hasn’t called because he doesn’t have anything to report,” she said.
“He calls us all the time,” he said.
She let this register. She wondered if Nicky was capable of hurting someone and knew that he was.
“I would like to hear from him, myself,” she said.
“Where in London was he going?”
“If I’d had an address, I could have gone there myself.”
Again, she heard the woman whispering. Her stomach felt sick. She didn’t answer. “I don’t want to get in any deeper,” she said. “It might have been a mistake to talk to George. I’m thinking now that it might have been.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means that you’ve got every right to look for your friend, but I can’t have anything more to do with this.”
“Why would he go in the first place?” the man said. “I never knew him to do anything like this.”
“I don’t like to hang up on people, but I’m not going to help you, and I’m not giving information to a stranger,” she said. It was easier when she pretended that this man was the one causing trouble, and all she had to do was get rid of him. Still, she could not bring herself to put down the phone. After a long pause, the man said, “If there’s a problem, did it even occur to you that you might bear some of the responsibility? In that you suggested this to George. In that you asked him to do you a favor.”
“Don’t lecture me,” she said. “This was a business proposition he agreed to take on.” She took a deep breath and said, “I’m upset there’s no word on my son.”
She could hear him putting his hand over the phone, whispering.
“We’ve got a problem here. We’ve definitely got a problem,” he said, though she could tell that he was speaking to his wife, not to her. Afraid she would cry, she said nothing. She was thinking: Nicky might be hurt; Nicky might have hurt George. How like a seesaw negative thoughts were: one would weigh you down with its certainty, the other become airborne, then the airborne worry would wobble and become heavy with its own possibility, then thud to the ground.
Nicky had always been afraid of seesaws, but had screamed excitedly for her to push him in the swing until it went dangerously high, out of her control, and her hands could no longer control it.
Paula tipped 25 percent. Her hair had never looked better. It felt silky, too, in spite of the chemicals that had been painted on to make it various shades of blonde. She was now highlighted and low-lighted, the darker tones an ash blonde that matched her roots. Her nails had been p
ainted “I’m Not Really a Waitress” red. She had returned her engagement ring but arranged a consolation prize: she’d had a stone taken from one of her rings—a turquoise—and had it set in gold, with two diamond baguettes at either side. She missed her therapist in New York and hadn’t wanted to stay in California. George was the man for her, and ultimately, what had happened had been for the best. She thought, secretly, that her own (sort-of) disappearance had been more of a factor in George’s going away than it would be modest to let on. His friend Rich O’Malley had been delighted to hear from her; she was going to Rich and his wife’s, and they were going to brainstorm and find him. She had met them only once, at a Fourth of July party when Rich’s wife had passed out sparklers and everyone had had a little too much to drink, but both had seemed nice, and they were certainly being helpful now. She made light of her broken engagement to the people who knew about it, omitting mention of it entirely with Rich and Linda, saying only vague things about how the California way of life wasn’t for her. It certainly wasn’t. Imagine a man that age, that accomplished, that horrible, that he’d send his daughter to do his dirty work for him.
She was relieved that her tenant had agreed to vacate the New York apartment early, in exchange for not paying that month’s rent. The lease would have been up in two months, anyway, and then Paula would have to have dealt with finding another tenant, long-distance. Her sister had volunteered to help, but really: she went out of control about everything; she would have interviewed so many people, and then been so confused, she would never have reached a decision. Just imagining the phone call was exhausting.
In New York, she had stopped long enough to be there when a cleaning service came in, and then she had made an appointment uptown and gotten her hair done, her nails, and had a massage and a seaweed wrap…it was as if she already knew the date and place of her reunion with George.
She took the Metroliner. She could have taken the faster train, but the Metroliner was fast enough. She was reading the new biography of Benjamin Franklin and liking it. He reminded her, in odd ways, of George. George’s name wasn’t George, but Larry didn’t seem to suit him, and of course she’d gotten used to calling him George, so…God: she was beginning to dither like her sister, though at least she did it silently. At Union Station, she would be picked up by Rich’s wife, who had errands downtown that day. Then they would drive to someplace called…she consulted her BlackBerry: Bethesda, and then the three of them would put their heads together and figure out how to find George.
