Gristle & Bone

by Duncan Ralston

  "Don't ruin it by talking," she said, and bit a chunk off the drumstick.

  THE SNODGRASSES WERE asleep when she and CC&C crept upstairs to her room. He tripped over a chair on which Mr. or Mrs. Snodgrass had seated a large doll, and the doll fell. CC&C caught it in mid-air and set it back on the chair, lopsided. Nice reflexes, Tara thought. Let's hope he knows how to use them.

  The sex was okay but brief. He balked at having to wear a condom, squeezed her tits a little too much and wanted to kiss her more than she felt comfortable with, especially since his mouth tasted like cigarettes. She bit him on the lower lip, hard enough to bring blood, and he winced and pulled back, sulking like a little boy, yet he still plunged in for more. Unable to take any more, she pushed him off her and rolled over onto her hands and knees. At least with doggie he couldn't smear his mouth all over hers.

  "You're beautiful," he said, now that he could no longer see her face.

  "You're crazy."

  He didn't attempt any more small talk or compliments after that, and he came before she could, groaning enormously and shuddering inside her before falling back against the pillow. Then he rummaged on the floor for his pants, his belt buckle and a pocketful of change jingling in the post-fuck silence. He came up again with a pack of cigarettes.

  "You can't smoke those in here," she said in a whisper. Tara didn't know either way, she just didn't want him tempting her. She hadn't had a single puff since the motel in Sudbury.

  He tossed them back on the floor with a hefty sigh and lay back on his pillow, crossing his hands behind his head. "So," he said, after a period of silence, breathing heavily through his nose in the half light. "What's your deal?"

  She turned to him, regarded his saggy man-tits and the sparse hair under his arms. "Make me come," she said, "then ask me again."

  He did both, but she still wouldn't answer, drifting off to sleep instead.

  THE NEXT MORNING, Tara came downstairs to find Mr. and Mrs. Snodgrass standing in the kitchen, wearing identical expressions of disappointment. The sight of them standing there confrontationally surprised her enough to get the adrenaline pumping, the slight hangover making her head ache. "We'd like you to leave as soon as possible," Mr. Snodgrass told her, his eyes on the tiles in front of him. "Pack your things and go. Please."

  "Why? Is this a joke?"

  "We don't make jokes," Mrs. Snodgrass sneered. "We heard—" She pursed her lips in disgust, lowering her voice to a harsh whisper, as if it weren't just the three of them in the house. "In your room, after hours. With a man."

  "Well, Mildred, I didn't realize you had rules against gentleman callers."

  "We don't," Mr. Snodgrass said. "It's just common sense, isn't it?"

  "I don't think so. I've paid to stay here—for three nights, I should add."

  Mildred Snodgrass nudged her husband sharply. He stepped forward in a military-like movement, thrusting a handful of cash toward Tara. She refused to look at it.

  "Oh for Pete's sake, take the money!" Mrs. Snodgrass snapped.

  Tara snatched it from the old man. She packed her things and was on the road fifteen minutes later.

  THE O.P.P. STATION, her last stop before the Walker house, wasn't far outside of town. In little communities like Pleasant Valley, too small to support their own police forces, the Ontario Provincial Police provided law enforcement services. Constable Daniels of the Toronto Police had hooked her up with Detective Constable Collette Nadeau of the O.P.P., a severe-looking woman with dark hair, tanned, muscular and small-breasted, with thin, bloodless lips.

  Compared to her, I'm a stunner, Tara thought as she introduced herself. She'd always had problems with her own looks, and had found herself judging others against her. Her eyes were slightly off-kilter, her nose too bumpy in the bridge, lips too small, childlike, and her jaw mannishly square. Psychiatrists had a clinical term for it: body dysmorphia. Knowing it had a name hadn't helped; she still felt uncomfortable in her own skin, as if the face she wore were only a mask. Most days she didn't let it bother her. Today, after CC&C had called her "beautiful," was not one of those days.

  "You are looking into the Walker disappearance, is that correct?" Constable Nadeau dropped into the chair behind her desk with a squeak. She spoke with a heavy Quebecois accent, the English slightly stilted; th becoming t or d, depending; lone hs dropped; emphases in all the wrong places.

  "Yes, that's right," Tara said. "Do you mind if I record this?"

  Nadeau waved the question away.

  "How long has she been missing?"

  "Two week," Nadeau said. "The Bamber girl reported she had not seen her the afternoon Daria made her video."

  "Nor her parents."

  Nadeau wore mysterious smile as she shook her head. "Oh no. MacKenzie was supposed to meet Daria to work on a video project for school. I suspect it was this video you see on the internet, which she had uploaded later that day."

  "You think these kids worked on it together. That it's just special effects."

  "Oh, I have no doubt, Ms. Maxwell." She folded her hands over the desk, leaning forward on her elbows, reminding Tara of Hal Waterman. "And you? Surely you don't think it's real?"

  "Of course not." Her indignation seemed forced even to herself. "Why did you smile when I asked about her parents? Did they—?"

  "Greta and Anson Walker are... unique."

  "Unique? How so?"

  Nadeau raised her sharp eyebrows. "Let us just say, it's no wonder to me why Daria Walker disappeared," the detective said, then frowned a little at the unintentional implication, and corrected herself: "Went missing. The girl's father didn't even remember what she was wearing that day, not that it would have helped one way or the other."

  De udder was how it sounded in Nadeau's accent, and Tara couldn't help but grin. "Why not?"

  "The thing is, Daria left a pile of clothes in front of the computer before she slipped out of her bedroom window. The hoodie, her jogging pant, a pair of socks and underwear. All the things she wore in the video. There was even an earring and a little beaded bracelet—"

  Tara seized on it: "A friendship bracelet?" Left her clothes. Left her bracelet, and her jewelry... everything she couldn't take with her to the Great Beyond.

  "Maybe." Nadeau shrugged. "She'd just left it there on the carpet beside her desk chair. Like she want us to believe she literally disappeared."

  TARA SHOWED UP at the Walkers' house just before noon, a nice, neat bungalow with a yellow-brown lawn and a garden full of dried flowers. The shades were drawn, no visibility in or out. She rang the bell, expecting no one to be home. They'd be at work; it was silly for her to have come so early. She rang it again.

  "Oh, for Christ's sake!" a man said from inside. His footfalls stomped toward the door. A latch was pulled, a door chain, the main lock, and the door opened wide enough for the man to peek out. Mr. Walker blinked hard several times behind thick, dandruff-flecked glasses, split across the lenses with clear and shaded areas. He looked as if he hadn't seen the sun in days. Another chain-lock swung gently above his head. "Yes? What is it?"

  "I'm Tara Maxwell," she said, realizing this was a bad idea. She should have waited until they were out and slipped in through a carelessly unlocked window. It was the bedroom she needed, after all—the computer. "I spoke to your wife on the phone?"

  The man glowered back over his shoulder, then squinted at her. "What's this in reference to?"

  "Your daughter."

  It didn't seem to compute. He squinted off, lips moving in thought. "Oh—Daria! Yes, we're all very upset. Beside ourselves, really. You're the reporter, is that right?"

  "Uh huh."

  He closed the door on her, unlatched the last chain, and opened the door again, wide enough for passage. Mr. Walker moved aside, and Tara squeezed past him into the gloomy house. "Honey, that reporter is here!" He shouted it practically in Tara's ear.

  "Who?" came Mrs. Walker's voice, high and slightly squeaky.

  "The reporter!" He rol
led his eyes at Tara. "You talked to her on the phone?"

  "Oh, right. Let her in, would you?"

  "She is in!" Mr. Walker shook his head. He was slender, his shirt practically hanging off his shoulders. If he was any skinnier, Tara thought, he'd disappear himself. "Oh, can I... may I take your coat?" He reached out for it, displaying absolutely no sense of how to behave with strangers.

  "That's okay," she said, shrinking back from his touch. His fingertips were riddled with frayed strips of skin, the nails bitten to jagged stubs, still somehow dirty under what remained of the raw cuticles.

  Mrs. Walker stepped gingerly into the room, plumpish in her sundress and gray cardigan, her eyes, one blue and one green, staring off vaguely. Those things are wonkier than mine, Tara thought. When her slender, arthritic fingers came up to feel the wall, Tara realized Mrs. Walker was blind, and felt bad for her thought.

  "Honey, put your glasses on," Mr. Walker said with a critical edge.

  The woman reached into the pocket of her cardigan and brought out a pair of oversized Jackie O sunglasses. She unfolded them and slid them on. "Better?" she asked.

  Mr. Walker didn't even look, just said, "Much," and plopped himself down in front of his computer. On the screen was a videogame, something fantasy by the look, which he took out of Pause before donning a headset.

  It was no wonder Daria felt like nobody could see her. Mrs. Walker was visually impaired or fully blind, and Mr. Walker probably wouldn't have noticed his daughter if she stood right in front of him: a father who wouldn't see her, and a mother who couldn't.

  Talk about on-the-nose, Tara mused. Metaphor alert.

  "Anson's hooked on that ridiculous game," Mrs. Walker explained with shame evident in her voice, as if she'd tried everything to drag him away from it, and considered his childish obsession her own personal failure.

  "They're pretty addictive," Tara said, not that she'd ever been interested in them. Even the words "gaming" and "gamer" annoyed her.

  "No, he's literally an addict. He likes to call himself a completionist, whatever that means. If he was so concerned with completing things, you'd think he could unload the dishwasher every once in a while."

  Tara chuckled. Mrs. Walker stretched out a hand, and Tara took it.

  "Greta Walker," the woman said.

  "Tara. It's good to meet you. I'm sorry about your daughter."

  "So am I," Greta said. "Would you like something to drink?"

  "Don't trouble yourself."

  "Oh, it's no trouble."

  "Coffee would be great then, if you have it. Thank you."

  "One coffee, coming up," Greta Walker said, and shuffled into the kitchen. Tara followed. Photographs lined the walls, some of Mr. Walker, most of Daria, blurry and improperly framed. Anson Walker was obviously not much of a photographer, or didn't care for photographs, which was why Greta must have taken them herself. The frames themselves were neat and hung straight, except one, a professional Christmas photo on a slight angle. Greta reached up and straightened it as she passed, as if she'd seen—or sensed—it was crooked.

  "Daria was always a troubled girl," Mrs. Walker said as she began to take the coffee fixings from their places and gather them on the counter. She felt cupboard edges and lids and touched the outlet to unplug the toaster and plug in the coffeemaker. "When she was very little, she threw tantrums all the time. It didn't matter where we were: the grocery store, church, her grandmother's house—and she adores her grandmother." She held the lip of the filter basket and scooped four heaping spoonfuls of grinds into it. "Sometimes I think she was born in the wrong time, the way they got along."

  "You spilled some coffee on the counter," Tara said.

  "I heard. Thank you, though."

  "Mrs. Walker—"

  "Greta."

  "Greta, did your daughter ever receive any professional help?"

  "You mean a psychiatrist?" Greta, still facing the counter, raised her head without turning. "Once. She said he'd just told her everything she already knew. She's very self-aware. Hyper aware. I often think that's a big part of the problem. Alone with your thoughts all the time..." She trailed off there as the coffeemaker began to gurgle.

  Tara thought she knew what the woman meant. Self-awareness could easily become a prison cell, and its evil stepsister, self-pity, made for a cruel warden. Tara knew this from bitter experience. She'd pulled herself up from depression after college, for the most part, but sometimes she felt like a diver whose rope led down into an abyss. Every so often there'd come a tug, threatening to drag her back under, and she worried someday she might not be able to resist its pull.

  Like Daria.... Like Hope.

  "Have you seen—?" She meant to ask if she'd seen the video, but of course Greta Walker had not seen the video. She hadn't ever seen anything, not unless her blindness had come later in life.

  "Have I seen what, dear?"

  "Sorry," Tara said, unsure of how to proceed.

  "If you mean Daria's video, Anson described it while I listened. He said it looked very convincing. If she ever comes back, he promised to buy her better video software for her computer."

  "Is the computer here?"

  "Oh, yes. That woman detective returned it a few days ago."

  "May I...?"

  "Of course. That's why you came, isn't it?" The coffeemaker quieted. Greta gently removed the carafe and poured it into two cups. "Cream or sugar?"

  "Double-double," Tara said.

  "Two of each?" She shrugged. "The way you carry yourself, I suppose you could stand to put on a few pounds."

  Tara wasn't sure if she meant this as a compliment or an insult, and chose to ignore it. Greta poured the cream and plopped two cubes from a china pot into the cup. She dropped a spoon into it and held it out.

  "Thank you, Greta." Tara stirred it, blew on its rim.

  "Daria's room is down the basement. It's the only room there, aside from the furnace room and the toilet. If you need any help, just holler up the stairs."

  "I should be fine." She smiled, before realizing the woman couldn't see her face, so the smile was pointless. Daria had likely felt that way sometimes, with a father who seemed not to care, knowing her mother could never see whether she was happy or sad, making it all the more easy for her to hide. "Thanks again, Greta."

  "No trouble at all," the woman said, and sat down at the kitchen table to blow on her own coffee in a thin slat of sunshine from a crack in the drapes.

  HERE SHE STOOD, finally, in the doorway of a room she'd seen a hundred times but still had yet to enter. A small basement bedroom with a squat sliding window at head-height, its posters of bands and hot boys with their shirts off, its frilly bedspread and stuffed animals—which now seemed wholly unlike Daria, although Tara realized she really knew very little about this girl. Perhaps the dolls were her mother's influence, or her grandmother's.

  Standing so close made her nervous. Daria Walker had vanished here. The room itself could have been a portal, a Bermuda Triangle, a wormhole, a magical doorway to some fantasy world or a parallel dimension. Where it lead, if anywhere, nobody quite knew. There'd been plenty of speculation in the comments section. Most commenters believed Daria had been whisked away by an angel, the first of many mortals too good for this world, who would rise to the Heavens during the Rapture; to others, she'd been dragged to the underworld by demons. A handful of theories, marginally more scientifically plausible—albeit still pretty far-out—filled the comments section below the video, along with the usual compendium of End of the World scenarios typed out by paranoid Chicken Littles, their Cheeto fingers smudging the keys.

  Tara didn't buy a word of it. Her pet theory was that—like Daria's scars, an outward projection of internal troubles—the girl hadn't disappeared from the earth at all, but merely from sight. She was a presence in this room, like a haunting, liberated from the burden of her corporeal self. After the initial fear and pain, it would have felt like a weight lifting from Daria's shoulders, a shedding of her s
kin, the caterpillar bursting forth from its cocoon as a butterfly.

  She would be free.

  That was what Tara decided had happened to Daria Walker, and her article would reflect this hopeful slant.

  I could disappear down here myself and no one would care, Tara thought. Hal Waterman and the Herald would find someone else to write her music columns. Her mother would be concerned, but she was old, edging toward senility. In another couple of years, the Alzheimer's would become so bad, she wouldn't remember her daughter anyhow. And Constable Daniels, with his recent passive-aggressive behavior—as opposed to the real aggression Tara prized—would probably be happy to be rid of her, not having to go through the trouble of dumping her himself.

  With an anxious breath, Tara slipped through the doorway. A rush of air met her ears.

  The laptop lay on a small rolltop desk. She crossed to it, thought about sitting down, but didn't. The basement was stuffy, and Daria's bedroom was no exception. She crossed to the window and unlatched it. For a brief moment she hesitated, hand on the frame. But the thought was silly. If Daria was still here and had wanted to slip out of this house, she would have done so already. No window or door could bar her way now.

  With the window opened, she felt like she could breathe again. She sat down in front of the computer and fired it up. The laptop, in Standby mode, didn't require a password. Must've been pretty trusting of her parents to have no security on this thing, Tara thought. I would've had an electric fence around mine at her age, with all the secrets I kept.

  Now that she sat behind Daria's desk, Tara wasn't sure exactly what to do next. She'd simply wanted to sit here, in the chair from which Daria had winked out of existence. To know what it felt like.

  On this side of the video, she saw many of the same photos Kenzie Bamber had posted at her computer desk, but Daria had scratched out her own face from every single one, obliterating it.

  Jesus—just like I used to, Tara thought, suddenly feeling like she was hyperventilating.

  There were small circles on the keyboard where Daria's fingers had worn the surfaces: the G, H, E, S and T. Between the keys crumbs and dust had gathered, the sliver of a nibbled fingernail. Tara plucked a straggly golden hair curled in the fabric of the chair, and let it fall from her fingers. In the garbage can, empty packages of Coffee Crisp and Crunchie bars lay among crushed cans of orange pop. Fresh junk food filled the drawers: candy, chocolate bars and chips. Tara rummaged through them, hoping to find something else in the drawer, some pencils or pens, coins, mementos or keepsakes. Something bit into her finger and she withdrew it with a sucking breath.