“Me? Why would I?’
“She isn’t here. I thought maybe she might have told you where she’d be.”
“Why would I know anything about that? Why’d I know anything at all about her? I’m not like a truant officer.” His T-shirt looked as if it had been custom-fitted to highlight his pecs, and, like his friends at the door, he now crossed his arms, accentuating their every muscle. The official thug pose.
“But…I…I thought the two of you…”
“Me and a gook?” he demanded loudly.
“Really, Woody—please don’t use words like that.”
“Are you crazy? Me and her?”
Outside the doorway, Tony elbowed Guy in glee, then licked his forefinger and chalked one up in the air for their team. Woody wasn’t taking flak from the teacher. Woody was giving back in kind.
“Didn’t I see the two of you…yester—”
“I don’t know what you saw ever,” he said, “but it wasn’t me and her. Not me and her.”
I gave it up. What was the point? I wished I could close the door, wondered if it would make any difference. I felt as if he were performing for his pals, but on the other hand, maybe I had misinterpreted the scene outside yesterday afternoon. Maybe their encounter had been accidental. Maybe April had cried because he’d called her names.
“My mistake,” I said. “I’m sorry to have bothered you. Hope I didn’t delay your lunch too long.”
“No problem,” he said, already loping toward the door. But just at it, he turned his back to his friends and gave me a small salute. “Thanks,” he whispered, so softly that it was more a shaping of his lips than sound.
As soon as my shock ebbed, I understood just how grateful he must have been that I hadn’t persisted with questions. But why?
Meanwhile, he’d turned with almost military briskness and, surrounded by back-slapping allies, the smile, the friends, and Woody were gone.
But, of course, so was April Truong.
*
Philly Prep was originally built as a turn-of-the-century beer baron’s statement of his net worth, which made for quirky, not always logical school architecture. This included anachronistic, politically incorrect conceits like a narrow back staircase that was off-limits to students, for reasons of liability. However, nobody worried about the odds of servants or teachers—if anyone distinguished between the two—tripping on its dark and narrow treads and breaking their necks, so I used the back stairs regularly.
En route, I passed Five’s room. At least half a dozen students—including, to my surprise, Woody and his pals—milled around inside, some holding soda cans, others settling in with sandwiches. At the moment I passed, Five was sitting on the edge of his desk saying something I couldn’t hear. The robber baron’s house had solid-core doors.
I could see the boy nearest him laugh in response, however, and I was suffused with envy. Summer in the city, and the hardcore mob suspended its contempt for school and all things related and hung out with their teacher. How did Five inspire such devotion, and why couldn’t I manage even a shadow of its intensity? Was it a guy thing? Or a gender-free failing on my part?
Farther down the hallway, I passed Flora Jones’s room. She was reading at her desk again, oversized tortoiseshell glasses perched on her nose.
I walked on, then doubled back. Her reading matter had looked unbusinesslike. Aura of mass-market paperback.
I knocked on her door. She looked up, smiled—a little tensely, I thought—waved me in with one hand and opened a desk drawer with the other and dropped the paperback into it. My suspicions had been correct, and I wasn’t interrupting a serious study session.
“I hope I’m not—” I began.
“Not at all.”
“Just that I miss you. Can I tempt you outside?”
“Sorry. Not today. So busy. Besides, it’s cooler in my room than anywhere else.”
“How come you get special treatment?” An enormous unit blocked one entire window.
“Don’t get jealous,” she said dryly. “The climate control’s for their computers, not me.”
“Listen,” I asked. “Are you… I mean last time we talked… Is everything okay? You aren’t staying up here because you’re angry, are you?”
“About what?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe something I said? Or didn’t say?”
Flora shook her head. “Don’t take it personally just because I prefer a quiet lunch hour. Besides, I never thought it was you.”
“You can’t think that anybody here, that somebody at Philly Prep, a teacher, made those calls. That’s the only thing that happened, right?”
It’s interesting how a whole passel of needs can shape a sentence. Instead of asking Flora whether anything else had happened, which was my real question, I virtually answered myself with what I wanted to hear. Nothing more had happened. Flora had suffered a one-shot of ugliness. Over and done. A fluke.
“No,” she said softly.
Unfortunately, juggling syntax does not alter reality.
“It’s still going on. I just didn’t want to talk about it.”
“With me?”
“With anybody except the police. And they said not to. But two days ago, there was a letter, like a ransom note—words and letters cut out of newspapers and magazines. It said: ‘Stay where you belong or else, Nigger.’” She took a deep breath and was silent, then she spoke again with her normal, brisk delivery. “Or else what? And where is it I belong? What makes me not there now?”
“Flora, I don’t know what to say.”
She stood up and stretched. “And then, yesterday, last night, painting, graffiti. All over the brickwork in front. Letters, zeroes, swastika. It’s making me crazy.”
“It’d make anybody crazy. But maybe you’d feel better if you didn’t isolate yourself. Maybe if you’d be with other people at lunchtime—or take a walk. Want to?”
“I don’t want to be with the other people here,” she said softly. “There’s one thing I didn’t mention,” she said. “I’ll tell you, but you’re not to tell anybody else, understand?”
I nodded.
“That note made out of clippings? The word belong was made up of a few words, and the second half, the long part, was set in type so that it was long, all stretched out. It looked familiar. Not like the daily newspaper or any magazine I read in particular. And then I figured it out. Those words were cut out of this school’s paper. A headline from the last edition in spring. Remember the ‘So Long, See You in September!’ banner? How the word long was stretched out? It was a perfect match.”
I am the faculty sponsor of the paper. The journalists are my kids. I felt irrationally responsible for whatever became of our words.
“Maybe terrorism is the way Philly Preppers fill those lazy days of summer,” Flora said. “When they’re too old for summer camp.”
“Somebody could have picked the paper out of the trash, or found it.” It sounded unlikely—a terrorist who collected and saved high school newspapers just in case he needed that typeface? “Or,” I said, being more honest, “a person who knew the school could go downstairs to the files and help himself. But I hate thinking that.”
“Until I know for sure,” she said, “I seem to have lost my appetite—both for lunch and socializing. At least around this place.” She sat back down. I wondered when she’d had her last good night’s sleep. “Present company excepted, of course,” she said. “I didn’t mean to include you.”
“What do the police think?”
“Not much. There’s been a rise in hate crimes, and they’re concerned, but this is considered something less than a crime. Harassment, I guess. Low priority in today’s world. The police are overworked, busy folk. They’re sympathetic, want to be kept informed, but aren’t overly involved. Of course,” she said drolly, “if I’m killed, that’d be a different story. That’d be an authentic hate crime. They’re interested in the sticks and stones that can break my bones, not in the
names they think can never hurt me.”
Eight
AS I ENTERED MACKENZIE’S LOFT, A DELIGHTFULLY Mediterranean fragrance greeted me: essence of peppers, olives, and tomatoes that still seemed hot from the sun.
I could get used to coming home to a lovingly prepared repast. I could get used to having a good old-fashioned wife.
I’d spent a few hours taking care of scut work—retrieving a silk blouse from the cleaners, drudge shopping for kitty litter and lightbulbs, restocking Macavity’s bowl so that the oval kitty didn’t starve to death in my absence, and returning a phone message from my mother. Normally, I’d have let that last item slide, particularly since I was still miffed about her tossing Lowell at me. But her message was too bizarre to ignore, even considering the source.
“This is your mother,” she’d said although I’m such a quick study that I can, at age thirty-one, recognize my mom’s voice. “With such a good idea! Mandy—join AA.” End of message.
I was sufficiently worried to dial her back. “Mom,” I said when I reached her, “I must have misunderstood. It sounded like you wanted me to join Alcoholics Anonymous.”
“Yes!”
“But I don’t have a drinking problem. And although Lowell Diggs has not turned out to be Prince Charming, that isn’t going to drive me to drink, either.”
“Do they check? Is there some kind of secret password or salute? Does somebody have to verify that you drank too much?”
“I…well, from what I know, of course not. But what—”
“If they don’t check, then who’s going to know whether or not you belong there?”
“I will. What is this about?”
“Now listen, Amanda, Mrs. Farber’s niece?”
I hated it when she inventoried strangers’ genealogies. It almost always led to a Lowell Diggs. I didn’t know who Mrs. Farber was, let alone her niece. But if I dared to ask, my mother would insist that I did know by default, because I knew ten other people with connections to the Farbers, a delusion she would work to prove by chopping at more and more family trees. To my mother, the fabled six degrees of separation is nothing. She’s willing to go seven, ten, fifty degrees of separation—to find the missing links between all mankind.
I remained silent.
“The girl—Claudette, I think is her name—the blonde with the ankle bracelet, remember?”
I waited.
“She had a problem with liquor, caused her family a lot of grief.”
“Mom, I’m on my way out. I have a date.” That generally stops her, and in fact it worked now, too, but only for a second.
“With the cop? The…Chuck person?”
I admitted that I was, indeed, seeing C.K. Mackenzie again. Déjà Mackenzie. I’d never told her I didn’t know his first or middle names. Actually, she was fond of the man she called Chuck. She used to slow down significantly in her matchmaking when I mentioned him. But she refused to come to a full stop. Her bumper sticker read: I BRAKE ONLY FOR SERIOUS MARITAL CONTENDERS. After a year and more of our dithering, she was beginning to fear there was no future with him.
“Chuck can wait,” she said. “The point is, Claudette went to AA and met the most wonderful man. He was drying out, too. They were married last week.”
“Give the Farbers my congratulations.”
“You’re missing the point.” She sounded almost testy. “They’re there.”
“What’s where?”
“Men! Eligible men. Eligible again, but only for a short window of opportunity. While they were drinking, most of their marriages have been wrecked, they’re—”
“You’re telling me to use AA as a dating service? Scope out the drying out at their meetings?”
“Why wait until they’re all better and set loose to scatter over the face of the earth? Then, who knows where to find them? Then, when they’re all fresh and dried out—”
She made them sound like they’d been to the cleaners for One Hour Martinizing.
“—they’re scooped up by other women!”
Why I continue to be amazed by her skewed approach to love, I don’t know.
“Think about it,” she said.
I thought about the time, instead. Maybe Mackenzie wasn’t as prime a candidate as a semidrunk, otherwise unwanted stranger attempting recovery—but he was what I had, and he cooked, and I didn’t want to keep him waiting. “Sure,” I said. Why not? I would definitely think about what she’d said. In fact, it seemed unforgettable. My dark mood lightened. Not everything was about hate and division. Some things—albeit dizzy and wrongheaded—were about love. Or at least about Bea Pepper’s tireless attempts to fill in for a goof-off Cupid.
“One more thing,” she said as I was hanging up. “Only meetings in good neighborhoods, you understand? Meet a better class.”
*
“So,” I asked Mackenzie, after I had shared my mother’s latest aberrant scheme, “I got to wondering what you’d do at an AA meeting. They don’t use last names and you don’t use a first or second. Who would you be? C.K.M.?”
He grinned. “Have some more wine. Then we’ll go to meetings together and figure out what to call ourselves.”
The ratatouille and sea bass were delicious and the company just about its equal. Mackenzie was becoming a better end-of-day destination because he finally understood that he was on the mend. He was sloughing the pessimism that had weighed him down like so much dead skin.
“Welcome back.” I lifted my wineglass. I wasn’t sure either of us understood where he’d been, but I didn’t care. I was trying to treasure these moments when I had the best of Mackenzie—he had regained his personality, but not his profession.
“A few more days,” he answered. “Then I’m back.”
More or less. The cast would come off and he’d be on crutches or a cane and would require lots of therapy to restore his muscles and agility. But it was nonetheless a major step forward. Flesh was always preferable to plaster as leg casing.
We were becoming giddy with the possibilities ahead. I decided to keep his mind busy in the meantime. “Tell me,” I said, “how’d the great detective like to do a little consultation for the next few days?” Beneath my mother’s foolishness and Mackenzie’s new buoyancy, I still saw the dejected image of Flora Jones.
“I don’ like the words detective and consultin’ to be in the same sentence, when that sentence is spoken by you.”
“Okay, I’ll split them up. How’d you like to do some detection while you’re recuperating? But not firsthand—or firstfoot. Only as an adviser, or consultant.”
“What I was tryin’ to say, in plain English, is: Are you getting yourself involved again?”
“Me? I’m trying to get you involved again.”
He sighed. “You can be straight with me. I’ve been wonderin’ how long it’d take you to bring her up, is all. I actually thought, for a while, that you were goin’ to let this one lie. Let the police handle it.”
I pushed a dollop of eggplant around my plate as if food rearranging might cure murky thinking. Then I put down my fork. “How do you know about Flora?”
“Who is Flora?”
“I’ve told you about her. She’s that supercompetent computer whiz at school. Can handle anything, I thought, a dynamo, but she’s going through…wait a minute—if you didn’t mean her, then what were we talking about?”
“I know what I was talking about, but I don’t know what you—”
“Who?”
“Shouldn’t it be whom? I’m talking about whom?”
“You’re talking about death if you don’t answer me soon!”
“The girl on the six o’clock news. The Vietnamese girl.”
“Oh, God. Do you remember her name?”
“Not Flora.”
“Not April?” Please not on the six o’clock news. None of their news is good. April had been absent, that was all.
“That was it. April. They said she went to your school, but hadn’t shown up today.”
/> “And that made the news? Jeez, it used to be the truant officer got upset, but not the media! And they say we’ve gotten lax.”
He looked at me oddly.
“I’m sorry. You’re making me so nervous….”
“If you’d get that car radio fixed, you, too, could know what’s goin’ on all on your own.”
“But still and all—she missed a day of school. Big deal. Why broadcast it?” My vital signs accelerated until they broke the speed laws. That damnable belly squish had been on the mark again. Something terrible had happened to April Truong, and I didn’t want to know what. Had to know, but didn’t want to.
He poured himself more red wine. “I’m sorry. Sounds like a whole lot more than truancy. More like abducted.”
“April?’
“Last seen about eleven last night in Chinatown. In front of a massage parlor. As soon as her brother couldn’t find her, he called the police, but April’s eighteen, old enough to decide to cut out, and it wasn’t even twenty-four hours that she was gone yet. Then somebody found her backpack. It had all her ID, plus books and notes. No money, assuming she carried some. They called the number on her ID. Thought there might be a reward. That’s when the parents called the police again. Since then, they’ve found a witness who says he saw a girl being dragged into a white van in the area where they found the backpack.”
“Somebody saw and didn’t do anything?”
“It’s not the best neighborhood, and he said kinky things happen around the massage parlor. He wasn’t about to interfere.”
I stood up, just to have something forward-moving to do, and I cleared our plates. I scraped and rinsed and put the dishes in the dishwasher, then I leaned against the sink and waited for Mackenzie to tell me what to do from now on.
“I thought you knew already,” he said. “I wouldn’t have said anything if…as it was, I waited until you brought it up—or I thought you had. What were you talkin’ about if it wasn’t that girl? What about Flora?”
I shook my head. “She’s being harassed, but it has nothing to do with—this is awful! What was April doing at a massage parlor? She had a job at a restaurant.”
In the Dead of Summer Page 7
