Amy and Isabelle (18 page)

He did not believe it. He knew if some patient in his office tried to pass off an angry daughter as the result of a difficult birth he would not believe it. He would wonder instead what was going on in the home, what was going on in the family’s present-day life.

Here Dr. Burrows moved slightly in his chair. He was not going to pretend everything was jolly in their everyday life, but his other children, the twins, were fine—healthy little boys, racing around the house, always glad to see him. (So explain that, he thought belligerently, to no one in particular.) He gazed at the man before him and nodded slightly to make up for the lack of attention. The man had finished his story and was giving Dr. Burrows a look both apologetic and plaintive. “All right,” Dr. Burrows said. “This gives us a great deal to think about. We’ll pick up on this next time.”

The man’s face, naked in its hunger for a smile of approbation, hung in Dr. Burrows’s mind long after the man had left and closed the door. It bothered him to think how he, too, plaintively wanted more.

•   •   •

ISABELLE’S MOODS BEGAN to vary with alarming speed. She wondered if she had always been this way and simply failed to notice. No. Good heavens, you noticed something like this: driving to the A&P feeling collected and cozy, as though your clothes fit around you exactly right, and then by the time you drove home feeling completely undone, because as you walked across the parking lot the smell of the grocery bag you held in your arms had mingled with the smell of spring and produced some scrape of longing in your heart. Frankly, it was exhausting. Because for all those moments of hope that God was near, of some bursting, some widening seeming to take place in her heart, Isabelle had other moments that could only be described as rage.

The sight of Amy’s dirty laundry waiting to be done, for example, could make Isabelle feel fury, because it suddenly seemed the mere maintenance of the girl was more than she was up to, and Isabelle did not understand this, for weren’t the really difficult years of raising this child behind her? Why did it seem at times that she was losing her footing on this tightrope of
taking care
?

Worry, worry, worry. This is what she was telling Avery Clark one morning as she sat across from his desk, leaning forward slightly as she held the Styrofoam cup of coffee above her knee. “With a child,” she said, “it’s always worry, worry, worry.” But she said this lightly, punctuating it with a self-mocking smile in which the corners of her mouth came down.

“Oh, sure,” said Avery with a chuckle. He leaned back in his swivel chair and told a rambling story then about his son going out boating with a friend one day and not getting back until after dark. Avery took such a long time in telling this (including the brief interruption of a phone call) that Isabelle began to wonder what to do with her face; the look of pleasant expectation was actually beginning to make her face twitch, but Avery eventually reached his conclusion.

“And when he finally walked through that door I didn’t know whether to kill him or hug him.” Avery laughed out loud and shook his head. “Oh boy,” he said, “was I upset.”

“Of course,” Isabelle exclaimed. “Why, there’s nothing like it in the
world.” But Avery was not listening. He was laughing again and shaking his head. “Boy, oh boy,” he repeated, “was I upset.”

AMY COULD THINK of very little other than the open mouth of Mr. Robertson: the shock of his slippery warm tongue tumbling over hers, the light whisper of a groan that had risen from his throat as he pressed the back of her head with his hand, the cracking sound of his jaw at one point as his mouth had opened even further, thrusting his tongue against her inner cheek, a living warm thing let loose inside her mouth. She was partly relieved when he finally said softly, “Amy, you’d better go in.”

She had sat motionless on the living-room couch for many minutes before her mother got home. It was absolutely incredible: Mr. Robertson had French-kissed her. Completely incredible. He had actually done that. So did it mean he loved her? The kiss had not seemed loving. It had seemed, in a way, to have very little to do with her. But that was stupid, because you would only kiss someone that way if you liked them a great deal. Still, sitting in the quiet living room, she felt uneasy, almost sad.

In the morning she didn’t feel that way. She woke up with a sense of calm efficiency, as though something central in her life was figured out. She shampooed, brushing her hair while it was wet, something Isabelle told her never to do, and it dried glossy and silky and wavy, looking perfect with the pink sweater she wore over her light-blue dress.

“Oh my, don’t you look lovely,” Isabelle said, shaking Rice Krispies into a bowl.

But by midmorning she no longer looked lovely; in the girls’-room mirror her face was pallid. Her hair, brushed so extensively that morning, now seemed to have no weight and floated foolishly in all directions like the hair of a child just woken from a nap. Adding to this cumulative disarray was the astonishing fact that Mr. Robertson did not look at her once all during class.

She had not expected this. A knowing glance, a quick warm smile, a surreptitious wink? Nothing. He did not look at her at all. He praised Julie LaGuinn, the quiet plain girl in the front row. “Very good,” he said, looking over her shoulder as she worked. “Excellent. Here’s a girl who
knows how to think.” And when the bell rang Mr. Robertson simply walked to his desk while Amy, dazed, moved out into the hall, where a group of boys pushed past her on their way to the gym.

Stacy was absent. She was not in study hall and she was not waiting by Amy’s locker at lunchtime either. Once, when it was Amy who had been home with strep throat, Stacy had called her at lunchtime to report on the “fucking morons” she’d had to eat lunch with, and now Amy, finding a coin in the bottom of her purse, went to the foyer, where the pay phone was.

Stacy answered on the fifth ring. “Hello,” she said sullenly.

“It’s me,” Amy said. She saw Karen Keane walking up and down the foyer, hands clasped behind her back, her face tilted upward like one of those girls in a magazine ad who had just emerged from a swimming pool.

“Hi,” Stacy said, without expression.

“Are you sick?” Amy asked, still eyeing Karen Keane, who, glancing Amy’s way, indicated with a nod of her head that she was waiting to use the phone.

There was a pause, empty space in the phone, then Stacy said, “I have to go to the doctor.” She sniffed, and added dully, “Oh, fuck.”

“Are you all right?” Amy turned toward the wall, holding the phone with both hands. “Karen Keane is waiting to use the phone,” she added softly.

“My mother’s taking me to the doctor’s,” Stacy said.

“Are you sick?” Amy asked again.

“I just have to go to the doctor’s,” Stacy repeated. “Tell Karen Keane to fuck herself on a flagpole. Tell the whole fucking school to go eat shit and die.”

ISABELLE, HAVING FINISHED her coffee, was just bending over to throw the Styrofoam cup into the wastebasket in Avery Clark’s office, smoothing her hand delicately over her hips, when Avery said, “Oh, Isabelle.”

Isabelle turned to face him, feeling ladylike and pretty (their conversations over the worries of parenthood had been a pleasant one, she thought) and raised her eyebrows in inquiry, pressing her lips together in case her lipstick was smudgy.

“I was wondering. I’ve had a thought.” Avery was leaning forward over his desk, and Isabelle realized that what he was saying was not meant to be heard by the others in the office room.

“Yes?” She sat back down on the edge of the chair, leaning forward, letting him know by her expression that of course any secret was safe with her.

“Well, it’s just a thought,” Avery said, “but I might be able to use Amy here this summer.”

Isabelle’s eyebrows went up again; she tilted her head with encouragement.

“It’s not something Dottie Brown wants anyone to know at this stage of the game,” Avery said quietly, still leaning forward, his eyes briefly looking through the large glass at the women sitting at their desks, “but apparently she may need some time off. She’s going to have an operation, it seems.” And he mouthed the words “Female trouble.”

“Oh, I see. Well, goodness, I hope she’s all right.”

Avery nodded quickly. “Nothing serious, I think. But she may be gone for the summer. It seems her doctor told her to take off a number of weeks and simply recover. I’ve told her she needn’t rush right back.”

“That’s awfully nice of you.”

“And the thought did occur to me that I could use someone for a little extra help. Simple things, of course. Filing. Checking invoices. Very simple stuff. Tell me, how old is Amy exactly? If she comes in full time she’ll have to be sixteen.”

“She turns sixteen in three weeks,” Isabelle said. “Although, my word, I can barely believe it.”

“Well,” said Avery, sitting back and looking pleased. “You think about it. But I think if she’d like a summer job here, I can see to it.”

“That’s really very kind of you,” Isabelle responded. “It’s almost too good to be true. Last year she baby-sat at the church a few mornings a week, but of course she’s old enough to take on more. And it would be wonderful for her to start saving money for college.”

“Great.” Avery nodded his head. “You let me know. And meanwhile if you could keep this quiet, please. I think Dottie intends to tell people soon.”

Isabelle held up her hand. “Of course.” She stood to go. “Thank you
again,” she said quietly, feeling inside her a lovely glow, thinking that if the weather was nice tomorrow she might wear her periwinkle-blue linen dress.

THE HOUSE WAS quiet and still. Sitting on the couch Amy did not know what to do. In spite of the vast afternoon sunshine that had poured over her on the way home from school, making the road in places smell tarry and warm, the house was somewhat chilly and dark, built as it was beneath evergreen trees with the front windows facing north.

Entering the unlit rooms—the silent kitchen with its chairs pushed against the table as though they had been standing at attention all day; the living room, which seemed to ache with its own loneliness, the brown afghan folded tidily across the back of the couch, the Boston fern on its spindly black stand—all this added to the heaviness of Amy’s heart. She sat for a long time on the couch, not knowing what to do. She could not imagine, upholstery scratchy on her thighs, how it was that for so many years she had managed to come home every day to this emptiness she saw before her. How she had managed to walk through the kitchen door, flip through the cupboards, make herself tea, sit down at the kitchen table with her homework. If her life was to return to this—and apparently it was, because Mr. Robertson had completely ignored her all day—she did not know what she would do.

In the stillness of the house the telephone rang.

Amy got up from the couch. It would be her mother, and she didn’t want to talk to her mother, but she went quickly into the kitchen and caught the phone in the middle of the ring.

There was nothing. A pause. Blank air.

“Hello?” Amy said again.

“Hi there,” a man whispered.

Amy’s heart began to beat so fast she could hear it through her chest. “Who is this?” And then, “Who is calling, please?”

“Hi there,” the man whispered again. “Do you like vanilla ice cream?” The voice was low and very husky, sounding faintly southern.

“Oh, please,” Amy said, close to tears. “Who is this, please?”

The man whispered slowly, obscenely gentle. “I want to lick vanilla ice cream off your cunt.”

Amy put the phone down as though in her hand it had become a snake. “Oh God,” she whimpered. “Oh please, God.” She dragged a kitchen chair up to the door, tilting its back beneath the doorknob as she had seen her mother do in February after the disappearance of Debby Kay Dorne.

Amy’s arms, her bare legs beneath her dress, broke into a mass of goose bumps, her lips, her mouth, immediately became dry. She picked up the phone and began to dial her mother, because all she wanted was her mother. And yet at the last moment, in that split second right before her mother’s phone in the office room was to begin to ring, Amy hung up. Across her fear, like the thinnest line of silver, came the knowledge that if she called her mother now, her mother would panic. (Amy was panicking. Her arm on the kitchen counter was shaking.) And then her mother from now on would want to know where she was every single second, even more than she did already, and what if Mr. Robertson started to be nice again?

She did not call her mother.

But she was afraid. She forced herself to go upstairs, to look under the beds, to open the closets. The metal hangers in her mother’s closet swung slightly from the motion of the open door, tinging together briefly like a sinister charm.

Oh, she was so frightened! The awful, still, dark house. Running back downstairs, she even checked the cabinets in the kitchen, she even opened the refrigerator door. She was afraid to peer out the window at the driveway or porch, in case some man was standing there. And then she was engorged with terror at the thought of a man peering through the window, trying to find within the shadows of the rooms where Amy might be hiding.

Crying softly, she crept into the front hall closet, sitting down on top of boots, behind the quilted hemline of her mother’s winter coat. She thought of Debby Dorne; every detail she had heard or read came back to her. Little twelve-year-old Debby, dressed in a jumper and bright gold kneesocks, waiting for her mother to come home. She had disappeared sometime between two and five o’clock, waiting for her mother to come home.

Amy was too frightened to stay in the closet. She clambered over the boots and emerged, her eyes darting down the hallway. Once again she went through the house checking everything, and then she sat at the kitchen table and waited. She did not know if she was waiting for her kidnapper or her mother, or which one would arrive first. Or if she should just leave the house altogether. She would be safer, she thought, if she left the house completely. But the barren road, the empty stretch along Route 22 … So she sat, her palms making damp prints on the kitchen table.