I’ve never been so happy to say that it’s me, Charles DeBenedictus. She snaps her fingers, Jed come in here. He’s quick on his feet. Put it on speaker, he says.
“You’re on speaker,” she says. “Is that okay?”
These are good people, Yvonne Belziki level of good. “You bet,” I say. “This is gonna sound like it’s outta left field, but I’ve been doing some research, I’m curious if you guys are ever in touch with Jon’s friend?”
“Which friend?” Penny asks, and the defense in her voice is palpable.
“Chloe,” I say, as if there were many friends, as if it needs to be said. “Chloe Sayers. She went to school with Jon.”
You can practically hear Penny’s heart start thumping. “What about her?”
“Well,” I say. “I’m curious if she and Jon…were they close?”
“That’s one word for it,” she says. I hit a nerve.
Jed sighs. “Jon had a bit of a crush on her. When they were kids.”
Penny counters. “And when he was back, you know…after.”
“This sounds like a sore subject,” I say, leading, fishing, all of it. Penny bites. She rails on about that evil little brat who manipulated my son to no end. Jed butts in to soften the blow. She was also the only person Jon really had, she was at every vigil. Penny seethes, Fuck those vigils. She just wanted to see her name in the paper. I can hear Jed putting his arm around his wife, who’s already crying, muffled tears. But then she pushes him away, blows her nose.
“The two of you don’t understand,” she says. “Men are blind to this kind of thing, this kind of bitch. Because she’s pretty and she smiles at you guys, because she walks around batting her eyelashes and lighting candles, you buy it. You think she’s some kind of saint. You defend her and you say what’s so good about her. Well, no. No. Chloe is not a saint. She’s a possessive, controlling, vicious person who used my son’s disappearance to launch her career.”
Jed chimes in again. “Penny, slow down.”
“No,” she says. “It’s true. And now she has the nerve to come home and parade around with that monster who made Jon’s life a living hell. The very reason my son was cutting through the woods in the first place and what’s she gonna do? Marry him.”
Now I know why Jed and Penny sound so morose today. Imagine this girl breaks your kid’s heart and then she comes home and your son’s still missing. Missing. My gut’s rolling pretty good, my heart races because of course there was a girl, a key. People are predictable that way, healthy people, most people, they do a lot, sure, but their life boils down to that one person out there, their person, and that’s what Chloe was, what she is, no matter what’s going on. That never changes.
Jed groans at Penny, begs her to let it go. “You’re making it so melodramatic,” he says, pleading. “Jon was cutting through the woods cuz it was faster and he was…adventurous.”
Penny brings me into it. “Do you hear what I’m up against over here?”
“I feel for you, Penny, both of you,” I say. “Kids can drive you crazy.”
“Well, he drives me crazier,” she says. “Defending her like she’s an angel.”
“I never said she’s an angel.”
“No,” Penny says. “But you won’t say she’s a cunt either.”
I cut in, hard. “Was Chloe in touch with Jon?” I ask. “Recently, I mean.”
“Who knows?” Penny says. “When he came home, we barely saw him because he was holed up in his room texting her, and then you know, one day and poof. He was gone. For all we know, yeah, those kids are talking every day.”
Once again Jed doesn’t agree. His voice is quavering, and now you can hear Penny rubbing his back, It’s okay, Jed. I wish I could make things better for them, and I think maybe I can. For once, time is on my side. Carrig and Chloe’s engagement party is this weekend. This is a call to arms, a call to Jon. If he was talking to her he wouldn’t be papering the walls with her eyes. He left her when he left his parents, when he left all of Nashua. The question is, why?
* * *
—
Lo is almost more fascinated than I am about this watershed of insight into the Beard, this girl he loved, Chloe Sayers. She’s on her computer, captivated by the Facebook obit page I found for Chloe’s friend who died. Right before Jon skipped town.
“Of a heart attack at eighteen,” she says, aghast. “Wow. Eggie…wow.”
But nothing moves her as much as the pictures of Jon’s apartment. The eyes cover the walls. She squeezes my hand. “He loves her,” she says. “He’s carrying a torch.”
“I know,” I say, relieved to be in this new place, this comfort zone.
“Gimme your phone,” she says. “I’m gonna set alarms for you to check your bag.”
I throw my arms around her, my forgiving, loving wife.
CHLOE
Alexandra looks around the yard again, the way she’s been doing since we got here and she saw our homes, our manicured lawns, you guys use pesticides? She shakes her head. “It’s like you’re both dudes in a bromance.”
She has a point. Our engagement party is a true meeting of our minds, our tastes, it’s a summah blowout, where’s the Fireball? Our party feels like a real celebration, purposeful, a kickoff to our life together, a bash, the kind of night where people do keg stands and play corn hole. There are little kids twerking, fucking with each other’s heads in ways they don’t realize. My art friends and my home friends sniff each other like dogs in the dog park. I love it. All of it. Care knows this about me, that I like to put people together, that I like the sound of bottle rockets, New Hampshire accents, the ever-present nuisance of mosquitoes.
Our names are everywhere you turn, Chloe and Carrig. In New York, our decision to get married was this thing between us. Now it’s expanding, a balloon that can fit our parents, our friends. My mother, who’s always pooh-poohed marriage—Anyone can have a husband, but not anyone can be an artist—she’s prancing around with pictures of the venue she wants us to use. I expected it to be loud. I expected to feel overwhelmed, but I didn’t anticipate this aura of the expanding balloon, the only word for it that makes sense to me, suspense.
Alexandra is puzzled by my word choice. “What do you mean?” she asks. “I actually can’t think of anything less suspenseful than an engagement party. We all know exactly what comes next. A wedding, a baby shower, blah blah blah…no offense. Literally zero suspense.”
I laugh it off and shrug. “I’m just really jumpy.”
A neighbor grabs at me. Chloe you look so fancy, can we take a picture? People keep seizing parts of my body, telling me how much they cried during Carrig’s speech, how beautiful it was. Everyone likes the same line: Chloe, we were born here in the same town because that’s how destiny works. Maybe he’s right. Maybe this is destiny. We have the weather you bank on when you throw this kind of party, that magic New England air, the right kind of humidity, wind in the trees. There’s a stillness that magnifies our every move, all of us, a blackness in the sky that enhances every firefly, every set of bright white teeth.
Carrig slaps my ass. “It’s your turn,” he says.
We’re playing beer pong, on tables I designed. I drew our initials on everything I could find for tonight. I painted them on the wineglasses, the tables, these balls, the wine labels. I was up all night, I lost track of time, and at four a.m. I indulged. I let myself feel it for a minute, the symmetry of my life, of anyone’s, all the hard work you do to grow up and get over your shit, and there you are, grown up, in your shit, your same old shit, but at least it looks different, cocktail napkins with names instead of legal pads full of eyes. I cried, and then I was fine. I was surprised at how different it felt. I’m changing. Maybe that’s the suspense. Who will we become?
Carrig nudges me again. “C? Your turn.”
His mother is annoyed by my art
. I overheard her whisper to another hen inside, Who needs to draw on every cup? What is she trying so hard to prove? I dip my little pink-and-white-dot ball into the water and take aim. I make my shot. It’s another sign that this is meant to be. Usually I’m terrible at this game but tonight I’m on a roll, I can’t miss. Carrig picks me up, he loves me winning, it’s more proof that I’m his girl, that we’re the same. Alexandra balks, it hits me she’s my substitute for Noelle. I always need a friend who seems smarter than me barking at me, Who are you with the beer pong?
“You go again,” Care says, kissing me.
This time I set my sights on a cup on the edge of the table, a harder shot. People are clapping, hooting. I feel Carrig’s hands on my waist. I squint. I hold my breath. I make it. I’m in Carrig’s arms, in the air, he’s swinging me around and there is hollering, chanting, I could drown like this, and I hold on tight, but then I see something in the woods, a fleck of color, man-made color. Care puts me down.
“You okay, babe?”
I move so I can see the woods, the thing in the woods, the person. My heart races. He’s bent over, the person, a man, definitely a man.
Care whistles at Penguin. “Dude, can you get her a water?”
My heart is a bomb and the person who is a man is starting to stand. The branches are in the way and it’s only the back of him but even before he’s fully upright I can tell that it isn’t who I thought it was. It isn’t Jon, come to prove me wrong. It’s an older man and he sees me notice him and he smiles. He holds up one of my ping-pong balls.
I kiss Care on the cheek. “Be right back. I promise I’ll get water.”
The man speaks first, and immediately I can tell he’s not from here. “Thank you for getting this,” I say. “You know, I hate to think of a bird choking on these.”
He smiles. “I’m not such a saint,” he says. “The way things are going with you and your work, you know, I could probably take this over to the MFA department, get them to give me a few thousand bucks for it.”
He’s an easy man, somewhere between father and grandfather, as if he’s stuck. It’s easy to picture him in a train station, delayed. I offer him a drink and he follows me to the bar.
“I didn’t catch your name,” I say.
“Club soda will do,” he says to the bartender. “Eggs,” he says. “You can call me Eggs.”
We shake hands and I make my dumb joke about how uncomfortable I feel in these moments. Do I say my name when it’s clear that the person I’m talking to knows who I am? He laughs, politely, but he doesn’t want small talk. There’s something purposeful in the way he takes his drink, sips slowly, as if testing the water.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “Are you a friend of my dad’s?”
He shakes his head. “I’m from Providence.”
That whole forty-eight-hour breakdown flashes through my mind, Alex Interiors and water fires and Lovecraft and the aloneness of it all, the desperation, the fixation, all the things that ruin a person, that drive her into the ground, into the darkest part of herself.
“Providence,” I say. “It’s so nice there.”
The man must have been reading my face and my face must have been telling a story. I must be crying, I can’t feel anything, but the man offers me a cocktail napkin, Chloe and Carrig. I wipe the tears away.
“So,” he says. “Without meaning to pry, and with respect to this timing, which I realize is not so fair, Chloe, I gotta ask. Have you heard from Jon?”
I crumple up the napkin into a little ball. “Do you want to go out front?”
* * *
—
We sit in the Adirondack chairs in the front yard, the chairs that kill my mother. Eggs hasn’t said he’s the police, but it’s a thing you can feel, the authority. I’m babbling about the chairs, my mother’s pet peeve of what she calls psychological furniture. She says these chairs aren’t practical, they’re just a message to let the neighbors know that they can afford extra chairs.
He laughs. “We all do that though, don’t we?”
“You mean put on a show for the neighbors? Oh this party, this isn’t for the neighbors, this is for our parents. See, we owe them. We live in New York and I’m an only child and I don’t come home enough and Care’s from here too, he has five siblings, but he’s the only one who doesn’t live around here, so you know, we owe them.”
The oldish guy smiles. “You seem like good kids.”
There’s a silence now, an active, transitional silence, the kind where you can hear your intestines, your throat muscles. “So,” I say. “Did you think he would be here? Jon?”
“No,” he says. “I just thought you might have heard from him.”
“I haven’t heard from him in years. Several years.”
He nods, overdoing it, the way they do on TV when they’re digging. “Okay,” he says. “Good to know.”
“Is he okay?” I ask, wishing I didn’t sound so defensive, so emotional.
“Well,” he says. “You seem to know him best.”
“It’s been years though.”
“As for myself,” he says. “I’m married, and you spend that much time with someone, you almost develop a sixth sense about them, you know? I tell you, I know my wife’s mad at me before she knows.”
I can’t tell if it’s a trap or an invitation. I want to tell him that I went through hell for Jon, that I do know he’s in pain but it’s not my pain. I missed him so much that I got lost in it, I hid in the yearning. You can say these things to a stranger you meet randomly at a hotel lobby bar. But you can’t say them to a cop.
Instead, I just promise to keep an eye out for Jon. “It’s really pretty simple,” I say. “Jon disappeared when we were kids, as you know. He was kidnapped. Then my best friend died senior year after Jon was back. And that’s the last time I ever saw him.”
“She died of a heart attack, right?”
“Yeah,” I say. “It was horrible. And he dropped off the planet the same day. So really, if I knew where he was, believe me, I would tell you. I want to know too.”
He sighs heavily. There’s another silence. “Where do you think he is?” he asks.
“Why are you looking for him? Did he do something?”
“No,” he says. “I just like to follow up with people. You know, you get kidnapped like that, you come out of that a changed person.”
I am blushing now. To remember those teenage nights, the waiting, the wanting, the texting, the way he blew me off over and over again, the way it never felt like he was blowing me off, the reality that it might just be about my ego, my narcissism, my refusal to believe that he walked out on me. I look down at my feet. “I know what you mean,” I say. “He was different when he got out. At one point I think we were talking for twenty hours a day and I’m not exaggerating. But he wouldn’t…we didn’t…he was weird about being around people.” I am trembling when I say the words I’ve never wanted to say. “He didn’t want to see me in person.”
The truth hurts. It doesn’t feel like truth. My mouth is dry and the oldish guy is sighing. “You don’t always know what someone wants,” he says. “You gave your friend his space. And maybe he was giving you your space.”
It never occurred to me that Jon left to let me go, to set me free to have all this. A bottle rocket pops somewhere out back, at my party. I flinch. Eggs does too. And then he gives me a card and we say our goodbyes. I promise to call him if I hear from Jon.
He smiles. “Now you can tell your mother that these chairs, they do serve a purpose.”
* * *
—
At the party, I take a shot of Fireball and I chase it with a shot of grain.
I’m trying to loosen up, to be the girl on the arm of her fiancé. No Jon thoughts, Chloe, not now. There are sloppy kisses, Billy Joel sing-alongs with party crashers we haven’t seen since seni
or year. And then finally it’s late, true late. The music is softer and people are starting to pour into pickup trucks, there’s ambient noise about diners, eggs and legs. My brain is tired. My mouth is dry. I flop onto a wicker sofa and search the woods for Jon with my wobbly eyes, but that’s what everyone does when they come home, you try to find your past.
* * *
—
Now it’s just us, me and Care on the outdoor sofa, flopped, zapped. We break it down, the greatest hits—Penguin throwing up on the trampoline, my mother and his mother trying to play beer pong—and the funniest bits—when Care dragged me onto the patio and started screaming for everyone to gather so that we could do our dance, the one we’re doing at the wedding.
Care laughs. “I guess I was kind of fucked up,” he says.
“It’s a party,” I say. “It’s fine.”
He pours more vodka into his cup and I don’t bother telling him to slow down. “Gonna go take a leak,” he says, and then he’s gone, leaving me alone to think of the moments that we didn’t share, my time with Eggs, what happened when I went inside and overheard his mother talking about me with Carrig’s sister Aerin.
“I’m no fan either,” she said. “She’s always acted like she’s better than us. You know, Dorinda today, she asks her how much she got when Katy Perry got her painting and she acts like it’s so rude, as if it’s not our business when she’s mooching off our Carrig.”
Aerin nodded. “Her mother is the same way. So she’s a lawyer. Get over yourself!”
Care’s mom practically orgasmed. “Yes,” she said. “And she’s so full of herself, so patronizing.”
This is the bad part of marriage, where you have to pretend to be excited about the new people you call family, as if you didn’t always know they’re beady-eyed, cold at heart.
Care comes back from the bathroom with a new drink, which means he finished the other drink, which means he’s drunk again. He stutters and stops at the coffee table. He stares at me. “Do I bore you?”
Providence Page 27
