Precious (2 page)

“Well?” Ginny asks again. Her face is pinched and sharp, etched with worry. She remains, to all who see her, a lonely but attractive woman, someone once pretty in those years before her husband’s death, in that time before gin in the afternoon and cigarettes that have dulled her skin. She wears black shorts and sandals, a red tank top with loopy ties at the shoulders that show off her arms.

Josh ambles over to the side of the court, lifts his thermos, and takes a long drink of Gatorade before approaching her. When he does, he notices her glassy, bloodshot eyes, the thin lines that spread like small fingers around her mouth, the faint sourness on her breath. He laces his fingers through the fence, determined to look Mrs. Anderson in the eye and not be ashamed for her.

“It’s time for dinner,” Ginny explains carefully. She leans forward, as if she is going to whisper a secret, but Josh rights himself. Gradually, so she won’t notice, he inches back. She tries to stay calm but is aware of a frantic quality in her speech, a slur, a certain pointedness that cuts forth, accusing, though she knows these boys would do her daughter no harm.

Josh runs a hand through his hair. “Haven’t seen her all day.” He squints from the sun. He adds, “Mrs. Anderson, are you okay?”

“Of course I’m okay,” she says. “It’s just that she’s late, and you know Vicki. My God, that girl, if you don’t have an eye on her, she just does what she wants, all the time.”

“I’m sorry,” he says, and he is. “But I haven’t seen her.”

She lets Josh’s statement register. Does this mean the boys have been here all day and Vicki hasn’t walked by the tennis court? Or that she might have walked by, and the boys, engrossed in their game, didn’t notice? But Vicki, seeing Josh, would have surely stopped and lingered; she surely would have sought this boy out. Still, both boys have been here all day and have not seen Vicki. And yet, the Desert Rose lies on its side, the red tassels fanned out against the ground.

Her thoughts run as dry as the baked pavement. Brian looks at her strangely, and she feels suddenly ashamed by her inattentiveness. Ginny’s gaze moves beyond him, beyond the tennis court to the woods, to the rows of cypress and Scotch pine, slippery elm and black oak. “Thanks,” she says. She walks and then sprints across the scorched grass, the sharp blades scratching against her sandals. The air presses down on her skin, thick like metal. Beads of sweat form on the nape of her neck and brow. When she reaches the ridgeline, blackbirds scatter from the canopy of branches, and, panting, Ginny peers into the dense underlay where mountain laurel grows. She smells earth and pine. She bends for a moment. She places her hands on her knees.

Ginny threads through the maze of trees. At the place where the cypresses give way to oaks, at the place of the brambly bushes and the swimming hole that children have dammed over the past decade, she stops. There the current swirls, and dense trees rise up on the other side of the creek, the brush and ferns more difficult to navigate. She scans the woods. There on the banks, wet leaves smell of rot and mud. The sound of trickling water floods her ears, washing over everything. The cicadas hum—shrill, resolute.

She did not want this to happen. She did not want to come out this evening. She did not want to leave her home already snookered, nor did
she wish to face the boys and see in them that dread that made her ashamed.

What those boys must think, what they must tell their mother. They must have so many stories, so many lies, passed from house to house.

She did not want to be out searching for Vicki. She wanted nothing more than to feed her daughter dinner and feign interest as Vicki showed her the treasures of the day: the rock, the twig, the flowers already wilting from the heat. “Guess, Mom,” Vicki might say, turning her head, pushing a stray curl behind her ear. “Guess what each means.”

“I don’t know,” Ginny might respond. “You tell me.”

And Vicki would smile wryly, keeping from her mother the significance she placed on each, turning over each item in her hands as if they held magic. Ginny might have felt good then as she settled back and flicked on the news, the voice of the anchorman spilling out into the room: the threat of layoffs at the steel plant, the union workers picketing; a lawsuit filed against the company for pollution; the plumes of smoke rising above the south side. The world would all be so distant then, with her daughter sitting on the floor, Indian-style, happy enough despite everything. She did not want any problems at home, and now even her stomach betrays her. The world spins. Light-headed and dizzy Ginny feels the weight in her legs like stones. She sinks to earth, falling upon it on bended knees. She grips at leaves that break apart in her fingers. The light filters through the branches overhead and then down through the water. The algae-covered rocks catch a floating leaf. A dragonfly touches down on half-submerged debris. It flutters to the creek’s edge, a buzz of translucent wings.

Victoria, her girl with a sweet face and a grizzly bear’s courageous heart, is gone.

By the end of the evening, Ginny will call her neighbors: Milly Morris, Edna Stone, Matt Brandt, Ellie Green, and Jenny Schultz, despite the rumors she knows this will instigate. “Have you seen Vicki?” she will ask dumbly. “Did she stop by your house, any chance? No, I
don’t know where she is; that’s why I’m calling.” Within days, police cars will frequent her driveway. A sturdy-looking officer with a crew cut and glasses that pinch his temples will file the official report. When they see flashing lights, neighbors will emerge from their homes to check on mail that has already been retrieved. They will linger on their sidewalks. Concerned, Frank Kisch will call late at night, after work. “Are you okay, Ginny?” he’ll ask. “My God,” he’ll say, “is there anything I can do for you, anything at all?” Police will search the park and will find a lone clog in the dirt, a piece of rope, a strap that might belong to the Desert Rose. They will scour the woods, search the old stone house at the corner of the park property, the one built during the Revolutionary War. Eventually neighbors will organize a community search, Matt Brandt and Edward Morris deciding to take matters into their own hands. The children will mimic with their own search, a game, flashlights in the bushes, tales of woe. “Vicki,” they’ll say in a whisper, “are you there? We’re coming for you!” Canines will track scents. There will be rumors of a bark, an alarm call, a half-mile trek through the woods, the dogs alert to a smell, and then—suddenly—nothing.

This will mark the first disappearance, in a town in Pennsylvania where nothing ever really happens. This will mark the beginning of fear.

But now, with the Desert Rose piled in the back of her station wagon, Ginny speeds along her street.

The Morrises, who own a purple house—”that eyesore,” people say behind their backs—are sitting on their front porch tonight. Milly notes Ginny’s speed and glances over at her husband in a knowing way. She leans forward, causing two rolls of flesh to appear in her midriff. A mass of short gray curls hugs her broad face. She tells Edward, “That woman could kill someone, driving like that.”

“We’ve no need for gossip, Missus.” Edward feels as easy and calm as the night itself and loves the stillness of evening, the stars that form a wide canopy above them—Orion, lazy on its daggered side. “Does the gossip really matter?”

“Oh, I’ll say it does.” But even so, Milly laughs a little foolishly.

They look out to the street. For the first time in the town’s nearly two-hundred-year history local officials have issued water restrictions; hoses lie coiled like green snakes against the houses, limp and useless. The lawns have turned gold and then brown. No one is to wash their car, but Edward snuck out in the middle of the night, bucket and sponge in hand, laughing like a teenager. Even in the near dark, his Ford gleams, the gray smokiness catching the moonlight. He stands up and checks on the potted marigolds that he bought as a gift for Milly “Dry,” he says, and heads into the house.

She calls in, “I’m just saying that maybe that woman should lay off the liquor.”

“As if the poor woman hasn’t been through enough,” he calls back.

Milly shakes her head. “I’m just saying that if she doesn’t watch it, she’ll have a death on her hands.”

Three days after the disappearance of Vicki Anderson, and the June heat settles over everything—the tree in the Kisches’ backyard, the stifled song of the ice-cream truck as it passes down the street, cranking out a jaunty melody. Children flock around, money in their fists; they purchase Creamsicles and Nutty Buddies that melt as soon as the paper is torn off. They laugh and drop sticky napkins onto the sidewalk, pitch some into a nearby yard. The heat resonates and throbs, creating a yellow glare, a pulsating tenor.

Three days, and life pushes on, despite. In the afternoon, Eva and Sissy are left alone while Frank Kisch goes off to work the three-to-eleven shift, first gathering his lunch pail and then making his way out the back door. Today he tells Eva to make sure the dishes are washed and dried and put away. He tells her to pick up her clothes and to vacuum the rug. Standing in the kitchen, he delivers these instructions in a voice that is perhaps sterner than he intends. At the doorway, Eva lingers, her dark hair falling over her shoulders. She’s seventeen and almost always ignores him, and there is, between them, a tension he cannot bridge or
fix. Frank regards her and thinks again how Eva is like her mother, right down to her temperament, her slight frame and hair. And that look she gives him now—her expression crestfallen, a crease forming between her eyes—is so much like Natalia’s. He doesn’t know when Eva managed to grow up, when his once ungainly child stretched in the arms and legs.

There was a time when, as a child of nine or ten years old, Eva would slip into bed between him and Natalia after having a bad dream. Her small voice would call, tentatively at first, into the darkness, and he would hear Natalia turn and sigh before lifting the covers. “Come here, little one,” she’d say, kissing Eva’s forehead, and Eva would lace her arms around Natalia first, and then crawl over her mother and bury her head under Frank’s neck. She had always smelled to him like honey and milk. There was a time when Eva adored him, times when, in the summer, he’d lift her and toss her into the pool, and she’d swim underwater, darting away from him before she’d reemerge and squeal, “Again, Daddy! Again!” Thinking of this, he grows irritated with Eva even though she has done nothing wrong, even though her only fault is growing up. She watches him, arms folded across her chest, the line of her jaw hard. He turns his attention to the backyard and glances out the screen door, past the empty pool, to the maple tree that he suspects has a fungus—the leaves have wilted and dropped months earlier than they should, the trunk turned black. He adds: “And I thought I told you already to rake up the goddamn tree leaves.”

“I got busy,” Eva says, shrugging. “There’s a lot you want.”

Frank ignores this, though there is something faintly conciliatory in his tone. “I don’t want you two going out today, either. I don’t want you near the park at all. The police have been down there. I don’t want Sissy to get upset. Watch your sister.”

After Frank leaves, Eva calls Sissy down from her bedroom. The girls rake. Or rather, Eva rakes. The blanched afternoon passes over her. There are leaves, so many leaves—they drift and float around Eva. She yells at Sissy to come down from the lip of the aboveground pool and
help. She loves her sister as much as she did when Sissy was a baby and Eva would carry her around, pretending Sissy was hers, but there is bitterness, too, that trumps everything on days like this, a resentment that shadows her love. Eva wants only to be rid of Sissy, rid of responsibility. Today, Eva wants only to see her man.

She rakes. “Personally,” she says now, “I think the Anderson girl had it coming to her because she didn’t listen. Do you hear me, Sissy? I said she never listened, just like you. I told you to get down now. I told you to get down and help.”

“You’re wrong,” Sissy says, “about Vicki. And you can just forget it if you think I’m going to help. Dad told you to do work, not me.”

Eva’s eyes slant. She rakes and gathers, stuffing leaves and pieces of bark into a trash bag, carrying it with an outstretched arm so as not to ruin her skirt. It is her favorite skirt, one that looks good against her sunbaked legs. Catlike, she strides down the walkway, dramatically with a flair she only half believes she possesses. She opens the back gate and walks past the carport to the bins in the alley that smell of rotting fruit—thick, sweet, already drawing flies. She dumps the trash. She smacks her hands together and tosses her hair back over her shoulder. She glances up and down the street, waiting to be noticed.

Back in the yard, she finishes her wicked stories, tales involving knives and torture, and Sissy, if Sissy is not careful. Satisfied by the look of horror spreading across Sissy’s face, she ends with a moral: “That’s what happens to girls who don’t do what they’re told.” She makes a slicing motion across her throat. Then, the dreaded evil eye. It is a game, a lark, though Eva sometimes feels that even if made-up stories were true they wouldn’t surprise her. She’s a bit too world-weary at the age of almost-eighteen and sometimes believes she has seen enough for a lifetime.

All this makes Sissy wince. “I don’t believe you,” she says, indignant. “I don’t believe any of your stupid stories.”

“Would I lie? Have I ever lied to you?”

“Still,” Sissy says. She extends her arms, her body perched on the
metal lip of the pool that her father hasn’t bothered to fill this summer, the hottest of summers. She could fall to her death now with that evil eye, she could live a damned life where no wish earnestly wished for would come true. Over the past months, more so since their mother left, she has begun to think of Eva with dread, a sudden unfamiliarity that disarms even her most tentative attempts at connection. That her sister also has the capacity to be kind—to braid her hair or allow her to eat ice cream or let her sneak into bed at night—only confuses Sissy, only makes the summer stranger.