The Missing Girl Page 4

  He makes a chart. Basic, no frills. He notes the date and how many show up each day. That day it was two of them. The next day all five of them came galloping along. He continues through the week, then the next week and the next. Two. Five. Three. Three. Four. One. Five. Three. And so on.

  He is looking for a pattern. Surely there’s a pattern. He dislikes uncertainty, ambiguity. As the weeks go on, he frets over their lack of system. Over the missing pattern. It perplexes him. Why not make up their minds, do one thing or another, be consistent. He plays with the idea of speaking to them about it, but what would he say? Girls, I’ve been watching you…. Young ladies, why do you keep shifting the numbers on me…. Listen, girls, you’re upsetting me with your constantly changing numbers…. He mulls over the possibilities, but eventually discards them all. He’s no fool.

  THE ONE PERSON IN THE WORLD

  SATURDAY MORNING, before you’re even out of bed, Fancy finds the notebook with the blue cover that Mrs. Kalman gave you. Last night, after you wrote in it, you forgot to hide the notebook, and now Fancy’s got it, and she’s opening it. She’s in her nightgown and her feet are bare, and she’s got a bad case of bed hair, which you usually think is so cute on her, but not now.

  “Don’t you read that,” you warn, kicking off your blankets. “That’s mine. Give it back to me right now.”

  Fancy backs away, acting like she didn’t hear you or doesn’t understand or something. “Did you get this cute notebook for me?” she chirps, all innocent. “I love it.” She kisses the notebook, and then she grabs you and lays one of her big, squishy wet kisses on your cheek. “Thank you, thank you, thank you, Autumn my sister. It’s sooo cute. I can draw pictures in this notebook. I’ll draw you a picture.”

  You jump out of bed and say in a really stern voice, “Give me my notebook, Fancy.”

  “Mine,” she says, and she quick swishes it behind her back with that sly look on her face that you just hate, hate, hate. Like she’s putting something over on you, like she’s smarter than you, which she isn’t, and you know it and she knows it. You reach around her for the notebook, but she dodges, giggling. “Hee hee hee hee!”

  “Give it to me, Fancy, give it back to me right now,” you order.

  “Will you two shut up!” Stevie is thrashing around on the top bunk. “I’m trying to sleep here. Autumn, let her have the crummy notebook.”

  Okay, now you’re getting mad, and you want to yell back at Stevie, but you don’t, because what if she has one of her awful fits and everything gets messed up, and Mommy orders you to give Fancy the notebook, which you will have to do, because Fancy is special needs. Ugh! “Fancy,” you say, and you try to make your voice soft and nice like Mim’s. “Mrs. Kalman gave that notebook to me. Personal, to me. Which means she didn’t want anyone else to have it.” You take a big breath and say, “Okay, Fancy? Does that make sense to you?” Which is what Mim says when she explains something to make people stop fighting. You’re being very grown-up and mature about this, and you think Fancy should respect that.

  Instead, her lower lip droops, and she gets all sad and says, “You don’t want me to have this cute notebook. You’re being mean to me. I’m going to tell Mommy you’re being sooo mean to me.”

  Mean? That is just too much. You’re always nice to Fancy, you take care of her all the time, you take her to Lafayette Park, you let her dawdle around looking at the ducks, you tell her stories at night. And now she’s saying you’re mean?

  “I am not being mean!” You can’t help it, you just have to shout. “Give me the notebook! Give it to me now, you stinking brat.”

  “Uh-oh, bad word, bad word,” Fancy cries, her mouth all spitty. “I’m going to tell Mommy, I’m going to tell.”

  On the top bunk Stevie flops around. “Euuu, I hate you both. Shut up! Shut up, you two brats!”

  Fancy makes a scared face and sinks to the floor, and you sink down next to her and cross your legs underneath your nightgown. “Shh,” Fancy says. “Stevie wants to sleep.”

  “I know that,” you whisper back. “And I know Mrs. Kalman will be mad if I give you the notebook. She said it’s for me to write my private thoughts. She made me promise to do that.”

  “Promise? Oooh. O!” Fancy sighs deeply. “Mrs. Sokolow my teacher says promises are, are—”

  You say, “Important?” She shakes her head. “Precious?” She shakes her head. You think, and then you say, “Sacred?” which was a spelling word last week, which you didn’t get right, you put in an extra c, but you know what it means, and guess what, that’s the word Fancy is thinking of.

  “Yes! Sacred. That’s what Mrs. Sokolow my teacher says. Promises are sacred, which means you have to keep them. You must, you must, you must.”

  “Yes,” you say, “Mrs. Sokolow is right,” and you lean closer and you say in your most serious voice, “If you keep that notebook, Fancy, it will be your fault that I break my sacred promise.”

  Slowly, slowly, she brings the notebook out from behind her back. “Good girl,” you say, and you reach for it, but she snatches it back and puts it behind her again.

  “Fancy!” you say in a mean voice. “Give it!”

  “If I give it to you,” she says, “you have to tell me a story tonight.” You nod okay. “You have to promise sacred,” she says, “and no saying you’re too sleepy for stories.” You nod okay again. You’re breathing hard. She’s driving you crazy!

  “I will make you keep your promise,” she says, and she still doesn’t give you the notebook. She’s got that look on her face again, her mouth pursed up tight as if she’s biting a smile, and her eyes jumping all around. You hate that look.

  “I’m your big sister,” she says, “I am bigger than you, I am one and one-half years older than you, and if you don’t keep your promise, I will beat your butt.”

  You would like to beat her butt. You reach around her, shoving her and wrestling for the notebook, and she yells, “Okay, take it, mean sister. See if I care, you mean, mean, mean sister!”

  You leap to your feet. “I am not mean,” you yell. You’ve got the notebook, but your feelings are so hurt, you’re ready to cry. “I am not mean!”

  “Autumn!” Stevie leans over the side of the bunk bed. “For the last time, shut up.” She reaches out and pulls your hair hard, like she wants to pull it right off your head, and you can’t stand it, and you scream, “I hate you, Stevie,” and sink down on the floor, crying.

  And then Mim is there, in her pj’s. You didn’t hear her come down the stairs, you didn’t hear her in the hall, you didn’t hear her pad into the room, she’s just here, standing on her toes to pat Stevie’s head and whispering to her, like Stevie is the one who needs comforting.

  “Mim,” you sob, “Stevie pulled my hair, and it’s not my fault, and Fancy took my notebook, and—”

  “I just borrowed it for one minute.” Fancy doesn’t even let you finish. “And I gave it back. I gave it back, Mim, I was good. I’m good,” Fancy says, “I’m a good girl!” She tilts her head and smiles like she’s looking at herself in a mirror and loving herself.

  “Come here, you two,” Mim says, “let’s have a talk.”

  “Oh, yes, I love a talk,” Fancy says, and she sits right down on the floor near the window next to Mim, who crooks a finger at you.

  After a moment you crawl over and sit down on the other side of Mim, and you say, “What do you want to talk about?” You know you sound sulky, but you can’t help it. Why isn’t anybody on your side?

  “You can each tell me what happened,” Mim says in her soft voice that you practically have to lean forward to hear, “but only one at a time can speak. The other one has to wait for her turn, okay?” She looks at you, and her look isn’t anything like her voice; it’s a hard look.

  So you say, “Okay,” even though you know it’s impossible to keep still when Fancy’s mouth starts going. It is so wicked hard you almost can’t do it, you almost have to say something. It’s like wanting to pee, it has
to come out, doesn’t it? And when Fancy says you gave her the notebook, you almost burst, but Mim gives you another one of those looks you hate, with her lips all pressed tight.

  Finally it’s your turn to talk, and you tell Mim how Fancy took your notebook, without permission, and how it’s private and all that, and now Fancy has to keep quiet and just listen to you, and she keeps wriggling around and raising her hand, but Mim just shakes her head and pats Fancy’s hand. And you talk and talk and tell everything. When you’re done, Mim says, “Hmm” and “I see,” and she doesn’t make Fancy apologize or anything. Instead, she says for you and Fancy to each think of something nice to say about the other.

  “I can’t think of anything,” you say, which isn’t really true, but you are still a little bit mad at Fancy. Then you sigh and say, “Uh, well, okay. Lots of times she makes me laugh and be cheerful.”

  “Yeah,” Mim says. “So true! Your turn now, Fancy.”

  “I have two funny parts,” she says. “Part One! Autumn tells me the best stories of anybody in the world. Part Two! A funny story came in my head that you”—she giggles and flattens her hand against Mim’s nose—“make your boyfriend be quiet all the time and listen to you talk, talk, talk.”

  “That is funny, except I don’t have a boyfriend,” Mim says.

  “Yes, you do,” Fancy says. “All girls have boyfriends.”

  “No, they don’t,” Mim says. And she laughs.

  “Yes, yes, yes, they do,” Fancy says. “And you have to have a boyfriend, Mim my sister, because you are sooo pretty, and boys like pretty ladies and girls, and someday I will be a pretty lady and have a boyfriend, and he will kiss me like this.” She makes a fat fish mouth and loud, smacky kissing sounds.

  “Fancy, don’t be thinking about boys all the time,” you say. “You have to think about school and learning stuff.”

  Mim gives you that nice look that means, Good for you, Autumn, we all have to watch out for Fancy. Then she says in her soft voice, “I know you want some alone time to write in your notebook, Autumn,” and she tells Fancy to come down to the kitchen with her and she will make hot chocolate. Fancy bounces to her feet and takes Mim’s hand, and they both leave the room.

  You can’t believe it! Mim didn’t even ask if you want hot chocolate, too. Which you do! When you think how much you love hot chocolate and how hot chocolate would be so perfect right now, tears well up in your eyes, and you fling yourself on your bed. You pull the pillow over your face, and you mumble, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

  What are you sorry for? Everything. You’re sorry you called Fancy a stinking brat, you’re sorry that you told Stevie you hated her, and you’re sorry that what you write in the notebook is so stupid, but most of all you’re sorry for yourself, because they—your parents, your sisters—don’t love you. At least not very much, at least not enough, and not the way you want them to love you—as if you’re the one person in the world who really matters.

  BIG MAD BEE

  HELLO, HELLO, HELLO, I’m having The Urge because I’m mad. I am sooo mad. I am mad like a big mad bee, because my mommy makes me stay home and on our street all the time, like right now, I can just stay on our sidewalk, because everyone is busy and it’s Saturday and no school. She says later maybe I can go for candy at Mrs. Wilkins’s nice little store on the corner, and maybe I can go to Lafayette Park with Autumn my sister, but she says probably not the park because she worries I’ll get my feet wet and get sick, like last winter when I got pneumonia and she had to take me to the doctor and give me medicine.

  My mommy worries about everything in the whole world. She worries too much! That’s what I say. Every day in the world, she says, Fancy don’t just run across the street and don’t talk to strangers and don’t go in the woods at the park and get your feet wet and don’t eat too much candy and don’t go out without your boots on and did you remember to brush your teeth and did you do your work in school today. She has a million kazillion worries about me and she says I give her gray hair but she puts stuff on her hair from the drugstore and it isn’t gray it’s black and sometimes it’s red and I laugh when she says gray hair.

  But I forgot to tell her that this cute person Michael came to my class and told about the Special Olympics in Syracuse, which we could go to on the bus because Mrs. Sokolow my teacher said we should think about it, Fancy, you’re such a good runner I bet you could win a medal, and here’s the funny thing, a medal is metal, but it sounds like when people call me mental—

  Whoa, girl! Whoa, girl! I say that to myself when I get mixed up, and then I have to go back to Go, like in Monopoly, which is my favorite game in the whole world because I can be a rich person in Monopoly and have houses and five hundred dollars, but it’s not real money because if it was real money I would give it to Mommy and Poppy and make them happy. I love Mommy and Poppy, and I love my sisters, and I love jokes and funny things. I have a big sense of fun and Mrs. Sokolow my teacher says, Good for you, Fancy, you enjoy life, and she gives me a hug when I make a joke. And that’s all I have Urge right now. Thank you. Good-bye. I love you, I will kiss you. Ha-ha! Kissing a tape recorder! I am sooo funny and I make myself laugh. I love me. I love everybody.

  MY BOY

  SINCE THAT AFTERNOON when she almost ran into Ethan Boswell, Beauty had been watching him. Beauty and Ethan: The Movie, Part Two. Beauty Herbert, PI, keen observer of Ethan Boswell. Naturally, it was a covert business, a secret operation. Naturally, it was juvenile, but what was to be done about that? All this stuff had always gone on in her head, and it still did. Replacement for real life.

  Was Ethan shy? He fooled around like the other boys, bumping, crashing, making his presence known, but he also stuttered, and he blushed. He was not the sort of boy on whom, through the years, Beauty had secretly crushed and always privately dubbed My Boy. Ethan didn’t fit the mold. It was a different kind of crush. Hearing Ethan in class stumbling on a word turned Beauty’s heart tender toward him. So this is what happened, this is how it went: she watched him, she listened to him, she yearned for him, and then she wanted him. But so what? Her fate was to be forever unkissed, forever untouched, forever unable to do anything about it.

  That’s what she thought until that day in March when she went for a walk—for once, no work, no sisters, no one needing her, and the woods at the edge of town beckoning.

  THE RAILROAD BRIDGE

  THE MAN WALKS down this scruffy side street often on the weekends. He walks past the faded hardware store, past the video store specializing in “adult movies,” past the tattoo parlor, its green neon sign blinking day and night, and then comes to the Eminent Diner with its red dome and greasy windows.

  He enters the diner. He likes the food here; it’s plain and solid, like his mother’s food. As always, it’s crowded and noisy and he knows no one, and no one knows him. Which is just the way he wants it, and why he puts up with the noise and the crowds.

  He finds an empty booth. A boy wearing jeans and a T-shirt that says DO I LOOK LIKE I CARE? fills the water glass. The waitress appears. “Hi, hon. What can I get you?”

  “Beef stew, please. And an order of mashed potatoes.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Coffee.”

  “Right away, hon.”

  When his order comes, he cuts the meat into small chunks and pushes aside the carrots, the same gestures he always made with his mother’s beef stew.

  When he leaves the diner, he walks a few more blocks to the old railroad bridge over the river. He stands at the entrance to the bridge, gathering his courage. His fear of heights is a deep shame to him. The narrow pedestrian catwalk is little more than two boards loosely laid side by side, and through the gap between the boards, which creak warningly as he steps onto them, he tries not to look at the fast-flowing river below.

  He walks steadily, carefully, one foot before the other. Is that a train whistle he hears? He falters; one foot slips off the walkway. His chest tightens. He imagines himself
running as the train bears down on him, the engineer futilely blowing the whistle, himself running, stumbling, and falling, falling through the wide-open bridge supports into the raging water.

  His heart is whacking away in his chest. Then he says, “Trains don’t come at this time.” He says it out loud, he says it firmly, as befits a rational man. He repeats it. “Trains don’t come at this time.” He looks quickly around to make sure no one is there to hear him talking to himself. His father’s father died of a heart attack, so did two uncles, all of them in their mid-forties. His age. He draws in a deep, faltering breath, then another and another. Finally he continues to walk across the bridge, and he makes it to the other side, untouched. Safe. He makes it, as he has made it every other time he’s walked here, but never without imagining falling to his death on the rocks in the river below.

  That walk puts period to the weekend.

  Monday morning he’s at the usual corner at the usual time. He doesn’t see any of the girls. The next morning he sees all five of them. He should be elated, yet it’s come about that now he doesn’t care for so many of them at once. Five! Too many, too many!

  They rush past him, chattering, their backpacks bouncing. They don’t notice him. He could be a light pole they’re passing. The one who talks too much almost knocked into him one day. She didn’t apologize, just shouted something at the others and raced on. He doesn’t like her. He doesn’t like the awkward way she runs, her feet turning in. There’s something stupid in her face. He wouldn’t choose her. That’s definite.

  He doesn’t like the big one, either, the tall homely one that he’s seen other places. He really doesn’t care for her at all. It isn’t the homeliness, per se. He isn’t prejudiced that way. After all, he knows he’s no prize in the face department, although the mustache he’s grown these past months has definitely done something for him. The big girl, though, is too big, too tall. She has breasts. He doesn’t like breasts. He especially doesn’t like those big puffy ones, the ones that stick out like balloons.