Losing Charlotte

by Heather Clay

  BRUCE

  BRUCE TAVERT HAD LEARNED early that mothers can leave. In fact, if he’d been asked to identify a major theme in his life—and there was a party game to this effect, he thought—then that particular theme might have been it. Mothers can leave. Can and do.

  Two events in his childhood taught him as much. The first occurred when he was eleven, a fifth grader at the Bancroft School in Manhattan.

  His best friend, Toby Van Wyck, lived in a suburb just north of the city. Toby commuted in with his father, the two of them rising early, breakfasting together, then taking the thirty-five-minute train ride to Grand Central. On the train, Mr. Van Wyck skimmed the Times and the Journal, while Toby listened to tapes on his Walkman (Squeeze, the Hooters, New Order, old Who) and penned designs and characters onto the outside of his plastic organizer, which he would show to Bruce once he arrived at school, having taken the subway from Forty-second Street to the Upper East Side with his father. Toby’s mother usually drove in to pick him up at the end of the school day, his baby sister strapped into her car seat in the back. Some days, his mother took the train in, and left Lisa with the au pair.

  One day, Toby’s mother didn’t come at all. Bruce stood with Toby in the school lobby, fingering the Hacky Sack that he kept in the pants pocket of his uniform. It had been at least an hour since the headmistress had called Toby’s father at work in an effort to find Mrs. Van Wyck after she saw Toby and Bruce together at the end of pickup, sitting against a wall with their knees drawn up to their chests, their backpacks pressed like carapaces behind them. Bruce’s mother was out front, reading her newspaper in the sun, waiting in case Toby needed to come home with them for the rest of the afternoon. Now, Bruce flipped the sack onto the back of his hand, where it rested.

  “Sure you don’t want to play?”

  Toby looked at him. Bruce noticed red points on his cheeks that made it look like he had a fever. “Yeah,” Toby said. “Okay.”

  They turned to face each other. Bruce dropped the sack onto his right ankle, angling his foot just so for a light, easy catch. He popped it to Toby, who caught it, sailed it into the air, turned a 180, and caught it again on the bottom of his shoe before lofting it back to Bruce. They had been hacking like this for a few minutes when Toby stopped a toss from Bruce with a listless motion and began to dribble the sack on his toe, watching it as it bounced up and down, collapsing flat when it landed and thrusting itself slightly taller, looser, in the moments in between. They could hear the soft thunk of it against Toby’s sneaker in the emptied-out lobby. Toby said, “I think my mom’s with her boyfriend.”

  Bruce kept his face still. He knew to do that much. He wished he had the sack himself so he could concentrate on it instead of on Toby’s foot. His heart was beating with sudden excitement and sorrow. Divorced mothers had boyfriends. Toby’s mom was married.

  “Dude,” he said finally. “She has a boyfriend?”

  “He’s a dick,” Toby said. “My dad’s met him.”

  Because breathing seemed like it might hold the power to hurt, to offend, Bruce held his breath. He folded his hands in on each other, making fists, and scratched at layers of palmy sweat with his fingernails. He was glad when Toby kicked the sack over, though he hesitated to do anything but hold it still in the hollow of his ankle and stare at it, as Toby had.

  “Have you?” he said finally.

  “Met him? No. But I know he’s a dick. He builds houses in my town,” Toby said. “I guess he built one on our street.”

  It looked like Toby was going to cry, which caused Bruce’s excitement to constrict and go colder inside his chest. Just then the headmistress came out of her office and told them that Mr. Van Wyck had agreed to pick Toby up at Bruce’s apartment at six o’clock. They were free to leave.

  “Yes!” Bruce said, exhaling held air with the word, listening as it went more whispery than he’d meant it to. He pocketed the sack and followed Toby out into the too-bright sunshine.

  He and Toby didn’t speak about the boyfriend for the rest of the afternoon. They did what they sometimes did on weekends: hung out behind the doorman’s podium in Bruce’s building, watching the live footage of people going up and down in the elevators and passing by outside. They hooted when someone picked his nose or, better, grabbed or scratched anywhere near the vicinity of his balls. They made a few crank calls from the extension in Bruce’s room. They hacked in the living room, the largest space in the apartment, and yelled monosyllabic answers to the questions Bruce’s mother called from the kitchen, where she was making dinner. The questions went like this: Tob, would you like to spend the weekend with us? And: Bruce, wouldn’t that be great? Bruce could tell that his mother was trying to make the best of the situation, so that Toby wouldn’t feel worse. He was grateful for his mother’s good manners. He was grateful and, under the circumstances, vaguely ashamed that she loved his father. Toby’s mother never called. At six o’clock sharp, Mr. Van Wyck buzzed from downstairs. No, he crackled over the intercom, thanks, but he couldn’t come up for a drink. He and Toby had better get on home.

  Toby said goodbye. Bruce held the door out for him, handling the knob carefully, as if it could break up, an eggshell in his hand.

  At dinner Bruce brought it up. He took a breath and said, “Toby thinks his mom …”

  “What?” said his mother, peering at him.

  Bruce felt the same mix of excitement and dread that he’d felt in the school lobby when Toby had told him. He almost laughed, for some reason. “Has a boyfriend,” he said.

  From the way his mother looked quickly at his father, Bruce knew that it could be true.

  “Well,” his mother said. “Maybe Toby’s confused. Do you think that could be?”

  “I don’t know,” Bruce said.

  “Did he talk to you about it very much?”

  “Not really.”

  “Here’s the thing,” his mother said, turning her unused spoon over on the tablecloth. “Sometimes things go on in families that are tough to understand, and all we can do is be there for our friends.”

  Bruce looked at his father. His father was nodding. Bruce nodded, too.

  LATER HE LAY in his bed, thinking of Mrs. Van Wyck with a man who was not Toby’s father. In his mind the man asked her to undress, and Mrs. Van Wyck just smiled and stood where he imagined her standing, behind the butcher-block island in Toby’s kitchen, her hands encased in the oven mitts that were worn and burnt in places, with metallic thread shining through. In front of her, resting on the island, was a cookie sheet with rows of warm rolls arranged and rising and browning upon it, the kind of rolls that came out of the refrigerator in a cardboard tube, which Mrs. Van Wyck always let Bruce twist open until it popped thrillingly and gooed cold, colorless dough. She let him do this on those nights when he had come to sleep over, come in anticipation of Tang and Stouffer’s spinach soufflé and Kraft macaroni and cheese—and the kind of rolls that Bruce’s mother would never have allowed at her table, choosing instead to serve stale seven grain, or toasted pita, or nothing at all. The rolls bloomed between Mrs. Van Wyck and the boyfriend, who approached her, unzipping his pants. He was faceless. Bruce let himself stroke the smooth tip of his penis as he thought of this. Just for a couple of seconds—a light, electric touch. The next morning, he allowed himself to forget that he’d done it.

  THAT WINTER, Toby’s mother went missing for good. She had become prone to skipping appointments and relying on the au pair for long stretches during the afternoons; but when she wasn’t home by dinnertime one January evening, Mr. Van Wyck waited until almost midnight and then called the police. Two days after the call—days during which Bruce remembered wondering why Toby wasn’t in school—an investigation was begun. After a couple of weeks it yielded only this: Mrs. Van Wyck’s unlocked bottle-green Volvo wagon, found in the long-term lot at Kennedy, the keys still in the ignition.

  Everyone talked. There was nothing else to do. Bruce’s mother said that the talk went on for even longer t
han it otherwise might have, because the Van Wycks had money. There were a couple of news cameras outside of school at 3:00 p.m. every day for a week. The papers ran pictures of the car and interviews with the few neighbors and acquaintances who were willing to go on record with their suspicions about the boyfriend, whose name was Viri Minetti. He was a man of violence, several of them said. He had walked out on jobs, had threatened to sue certain clients when they’d tried to replace him with another contractor. He had been overheard screaming at Sis Van Wyck on the back patio of the Van Wyck house, on a late autumn afternoon, screaming unprintable things, things only a lover could scream. It wasn’t difficult to imagine: the residents of nearby houses creeping toward their windows, pulling curtains aside an inch, and seeing only the barren Van Wyck yard, the leaves at the bottom of the drained pool, the small frost-repellent tarps stretched neatly over the shrubbery. Perhaps they saw Sis’s legs stretched out on the divan that protruded from underneath the patio awning, her feet, in their beige Pappagallo flats, flexed against Viri’s rage. She called that area of the house, with its adjacent changing rooms and warm shed full of floats, towels, and skimmers, “the swimmery,” which had made Bruce’s mother laugh the first time she’d heard it. “Manischewitz,” she’d said, half to herself, on the train ride home from Toby’s swimming party the previous summer, “I’m glad we live in the city.”

  “Why?” Bruce had asked her. At that age he had still loved to hear his mother expound on her convictions, make the little speeches that grew more passionate as they wore on until they consisted mainly of the fake swearwords she concocted for use in front of children, the words that could still break his heart when he remembered them.

  She’d only muttered distractedly: “Poor Sis. Swimmery. That’s some Stepford stuff, sweetie. Some real grade-A bullpie.”

  Bruce had nodded, knowing—a little—what she meant. She meant the way everything matched, the tight smile on Toby’s mother’s face when Toby had made a production of farting in the pool, the way she’d bitten her lip when some of the other mothers, who hadn’t seen the way the dining room table was set with flowers and trays of sandwiches, had begged off lunch and left early.

  “But she’s decent hearted, of course,” his mother said. “Just fitting into that kind of stupid … that paradigm. I told you I knew her a little at Barnard. She had some fun then, you know? She lived on my hall. Obsessed with Lennon. I remember that. God.”

  Bruce had nodded again, unsure of paradigm’s definition but somehow not wanting to mar her reverie by asking, and they had slouched into New York, pausing at each local stop to pick up gropey couples, dazed from the sun and underdressed for the air-conditioning inside the passenger cars, and solitary old men, and vivid coveys of teenagers who yelled and cackled to one another as they swept down the aisle in search of seats. Bruce’s eyes and throat were dry from the chlorine, and when the motion and tiredness overtook him and his head lowered itself onto her shoulder, she reached around and clutched him close to her chest, which smelled like Jergens lotion and coffee and the fact that she’d been sweating, some, under the Van Wycks’ canvas outdoor umbrella.

  When his mother talked about the disappearance, it was obvious, though she didn’t say it, that she knew Mrs. Van Wyck was dead. Think about it, she would say to Bruce’s father, less careful about excluding Bruce from their conversations than she had been during those first days, Sis would never. You’re telling me she’d just get in her car and drive to JFK and vanish on her own, leave those kids! Jesus! Once, Bruce’s father had asked—only after putting his arms around his wife—was Sis, could there be any drugs involved? Could she have been disoriented in some way? And Bruce’s mother had just smiled at him patiently as if he were a sleepy, petulant child, and called for Bruce to get ready for bed using the voice she used when she argued, even though Bruce was right there in the room with them, pretending to watch TV.

  Though no body had been found and no charges had been pressed against Viri Minetti (the Volvo was found to be clean of any prints, hair, clothing fibers, anything that might implicate his involvement, and the day that Mrs. Van Wyck went missing was the day that witnesses assured police they had seen him on site in Larchmont, miles away, inspecting his crew’s progress on a restaurant renovation right on Main Street), Bruce could tell that the most terrible thing had happened, was done with already. He thought his mother was right, but he couldn’t feel it, not really. He looked forward to the day that Toby would come back to school, thought that the sight of his friend might make him feel something real. He practiced what he would say, the brief and unembarrassing comfort speeches he would make as he and Toby walked to classes together, avoiding the eyes of the other boys. Toby would glance at Bruce in gratitude for being his protector, for teaching the others by his example to be cool, to look out for the one who was marked by something so bad that it would always be as bad as it was right now. But Toby was taking a long time. Three weeks since the cameras had first shown up and he still wasn’t back. Bruce’s mother, who had been leaving periodic messages for Mr. Van Wyck and gotten no response, agreed that Bruce could call Toby at home after gaining his assurances that he would keep it quick, not ask Toby a lot of questions, not sound overly tragic, not talk about trivial things like sports or video games. She hovered in the doorway to his room as he dialed.

  A woman answered, and for a confused moment Bruce was wild with the possibility that Mrs. Van Wyck had been found. He opened his mouth and looked at his mother, who was staring over his head out the window of his room, her hands visibly outlined in the pockets of her tight jeans, her lips pursed and twisted in what looked like concentration. He was about to say, Hey!—to drop the receiver in his hurry—when the woman said, “Hello?” again in a voice that sounded nothing like Mrs. Van Wyck’s. He was a fool. A stupid idiot. He breathed in through his nose, turned away from his mother to face the wall, said, “Is Toby around?”

  “Who’s calling please?” the woman asked. The speed and efficiency of her response made Bruce wonder how many calls Toby had received since his mother—what was the word for it? Got lost? Pretty positively died? Charlie or Jeb could have been calling Toby all along, laying their claim to his loyalty, gratitude, news. Bruce forced himself to stay on the line and wait for the friend who, he realized now, might already feel betrayed by him for some reason he wasn’t experienced enough to guess. The staticky blast of his own breathing made him think of crank calls, how all it took was breathing to make somebody—an older girl from Spence who babysat in Bruce’s building, Mrs. Sulemain from Science Lab, whose number he and Toby had filched from the faculty directory—nervous and jumpy. Breathing, just by itself, could make someone snap, Stop calling me (1) whoever you are, (2) you fucking prick, (3) please (the responses varied from crank to crank, Mrs. Sulemain’s always being the filthiest and most pee inducing), and then hang up. The soft rhythm of his own exhalations sounded amplified now, like someone—or something—was getting him back. His ear felt hot and itchy. His heart beat the same way it had that day when Toby had told him about the boyfriend. The dick. The killer.

  “Hey,” Toby said, suddenly there.

  “Hey!”

  “What’s going on?”

  “Oh, nothing. You know, school.”

  “Yeah?”

  Bruce thought to himself: So this is how it’s supposed to be. Moving fast. Like everything’s normal, but even faster. Okay.

  “So—when do you think you’ll come back?” Bruce said. He wondered if his mother was willing him to turn back around, so she could give him a go easy look from where she stood. He stayed where he was, fingering the corkboard that covered the wall by his bed. He found that he didn’t care what she wanted him to say. She didn’t know what this was like.

  “Oh—I’m … don’t know. I guess probably next week.”

  Toby’s voice sounded different, but not too different. Just a little soft and scratchy, as if he had just woken up. “That’s good,” Bruce said, “because th
e coach said you could totally play in the tournament, even though you missed some practice.”

  “Yeah, he called me.”

  “Cool.”

  There was a pause. Bruce could hear voices and canned laughter in the background. Television sounds. Toby, unlike Bruce, was allowed to have a TV in his room.

  “You watching Jeannie?”

  “No. Dukes.”

  “Jeannie’s hotter than Daisy.” Bruce usually sang this, but today he just said it plain.

  “Nuh-uh.” It was a routine they had. Next, Bruce was supposed to yell “Boingg!” the way Jeannie did when she crossed her arms and tossed her ponytail to perform a trick, and Toby was supposed to laugh in response, kuh-chee, kuh-chee, kuh-chee, like a leering Roscoe.

  Bruce took a breath. He yelled, “Boingg!”

  He listened. There was nothing, except for the background laughter and what sounded like a sniff from Toby.

  “Kuh-chee, kuh-chee,” he tried, taking Toby’s part. He knew his mother was watching him, could feel her look on his back, but he had to keep moving fast. It was clear that if he didn’t leap over the quiet places both he and Toby would fall into them, be left clawing at air, plunging down. He was a superhero, straddling canyons. He was Road Runner, clicking his feet together, powering on. Meep meep.

  “Yeah,” Toby said, “ha.”

  “Mrs. Sulemain got arrested,” Bruce said without taking a breath. “She stole something from the school. I don’t know what it was.”

  Toby stayed quiet for a moment. “No way,” he murmured. Bruce couldn’t tell if he sounded awed or merely dazed, polite.

  “I think she stole money from another teacher’s desk,” he went on. “She had to go to jail. They put her in handcuffs and everything.”

  “Wow,” Toby said. Bruce’s mother crossed the room and sat down beside him on the bed.