Songs for the Missing (2 page)

Her new curfew was two o’clock, a compromise neither side liked. Her mother worked in the emergency room and thought everyone was going to die in a car crash. Her father was calmer, framing his argument in terms of insurance premiums. She needed to remember (as if she could forget), she was still living under their roof.

Part of it was J.P., who was new, and laid-back, into frisbee and hanging out, not her usual confident jock. His mother had raised him by herself, another mark against him. It didn’t help that they lived back behind the harbor in the same neighborhood her parents had fled a dozen years ago, and that he drove a crappy Cavalier and had hair down to his shoulders. Her mother blamed J.P. for Kim’s tattoo, even though he was the one squeamish about needles. Her parents didn’t believe her when she said he was harmless, and actually very sweet. If anything, she was a bad influence on him, but all they saw was the loser who might ruin her future.

“Just let us know where you’re going to be,” her mother said, as if that was the least she could do. What she meant was, stay out of the police log in the
Star-Beacon
so you don’t hurt your father’s business. It could have been the family motto: All a realtor has is his good name.

“We’ll probably go to the beach if it’s nice,” Kim said, and it wasn’t a lie. They might hit a couple of dives on the way, but by the end of the night they would be sitting in the cold sand around a driftwood fire, listening to the soft wash of the waves. If it rained they’d probably go to Elise’s and play pool in her basement.

“Let us know if you go anywhere else. You’ve got your phone.”

Her mother didn’t really mean this. She needed to be in bed by ten at the latest to get up for work. Her father was the one who waited up for Kim, though that had changed since graduation. Weekends she used to find him asleep on the couch with the TV on mute and the clicker in his lap; now that she was out every night he turned off all the lights but the ones in the back hall and the stairwell, making a path to her room.

Her parents’ door was closed. So was Lindsay’s. Closing hers just completed the set.

Alone in bed she read Madeleine L’Engle and Lloyd Alexander—otherworldly fantasies she’d loved as a girl, as if trying to call back that lost time. Even if J.P. and Nina had had to drive her home, she could convince herself she wasn’t tired. There was nothing to get up for, and in the quiet warmth of the covers she fought the spins by concentrating on the sentences snaking down the page and in the morning woke up with a killer headache, the room too bright. She pulled her pillow over her head and made it all go away.

That day she got up around eleven, to Cooper licking. He’d butted the door open and was beached with his head under her dresser. “Stop,” she said, “Cooper, stop,” and then couldn’t get back to sleep. To make up for it she took a leisurely shower, closing her eyes beneath the spray.

On her dry-erase board her mother had left a message to please take Lindsay out driving, and a little cartoon car with two heads in it. Lindsay had her permit but needed someone with a license to go with her, and her mother conveniently didn’t have time.

“Fuck me,” Kim said, because everyone was going swimming at the river. If she’d known she would have gotten up earlier.

Lindsay was downstairs, lying on the couch, watching
Bubble Boy
for the millionth time, laughing before the actors could deliver their lines. They were three years apart, just close enough so they overlapped her last year at the high school. Lindsay was the baby, and the brain. She still had braces, and painful-looking zits she tried to cover with foundation. She hung around with the other nerdy girls in the wind ensemble and the robotics club. Last spring she and her friends had camped out overnight to be first in line for the new
Star Wars.
Since then Nina called her Obi Wan Ke-No-Boobs. Kim didn’t like to think of her alone here with their parents, as if she was abandoning her to an infinite limbo.

Today, though, she was a pain. Kim knew she was being selfish—exactly what her mother had trumped her with in their most recent battle—but that only made it worse.

“Let’s go,” she told her. “Put your shoes on.”

“It’s almost over.”

“Just pause it. I’ve got shit to do.”

“Okay, you don’t have to be a jerk about it.”

“I’m not the one crying to Mom every five seconds.”

“I didn’t!” Lindsay said. “It was Dad who said—”

“Whatever, just come on. I need to be back by one.”

Lindsay brushed past her and ran upstairs.

“Where are you going?”

“I need my glasses.”

Her answer made Kim shake her head. Who wore glasses anymore?

In the driveway she watched Lindsay squinting at the idiot lights of the dash, trying to remember the steps in the right order. Her hand paused over the shifter like a novice trying to defuse a bomb. She’d brought her manual, like that might help.

“Emergency brake,” Kim said.

“I know.”

“Then do it.”

She was tentative backing up, leaning to peer in her side mirror, drifting toward the mailbox. Kim turned off the radio so she could concentrate.

“Straighten it out. Good. Now give it some gas.”

They shadowed the railroad tracks, practicing right-hand turns in the rundown blocks off Buffalo. The streets back here were still the original red brick, frost-heaved and dotted with ugly patches of asphalt. The houses were rentals, sagging Italianates and vinyl-sided duplexes with rusty wire fences threatening tetanus. Her father saw them as the enemy in the endless struggle to keep up Kingsville’s property values, blaming the landlords more than the tenants, as if ownership somehow made them more responsible. She and Nina had waited outside late one night before graduation while J.P. and Hinch went in. Everybody knew where to go.

Now, in the middle of the day, husky mothers in shorts sat smoking and drinking sodas on their stoops while their kids chased one another around the sun-browned yards. They marked the Chevette each time it swung wide and then corrected, followed it like cops, and Kim told Lindsay to take the underpass to the high school.

She was surprised to find so many cars in the lot. Like idiots, the football team was out practicing in the heat. One mother had brought a lawn chair to watch them, an umbrella attached to make her own personal shade. Down at the empty end, Lindsay parked and parked. Kim had done the same drills with her father, and imitated his patience, praising her when she fitted the car between the lines (though she’d done it in the company wagon, nearly twice the size of the Chevette), calmly calling for the brake when she seemed headed for the curb.

“You been going out with Dad a lot?”

“Not a lot. Why?”

“You’re doing really good.”

“Thanks.” Lindsay was puzzled, as if this might be a set-up. Kim hadn’t been very nice to her lately. She’d complained about it to her mother, who as usual did nothing.

“Let’s go do the drive-thru at the DQ.” Only after the offer was out did Kim realize what she was saying. The lane that wrapped around the Dairy Queen was narrow, and two cement-filled steel posts guarded the window.

“I thought you had ‘shit’ to do.”

“I do, but it’s lunchtime. My treat.”

It took forever to get there, and then there was a line.

“I can’t do this,” Lindsay said.

“Let the brake off and inch up behind this guy. You’ve got room on my side if you need it.”

Once, when Kim was just beginning, she veered too close to some parked cars and without a word her father grabbed the wheel with one hand and tugged it till they were going straight. She resisted the urge now. Lindsay craned her chin toward the windshield, trying to see over the hood.

“Just follow him,” Kim said. “He’s bigger than you are.”

At the order board she braked too hard, jerking them forward.

“Sorry.”

“You have to roll your window down.”

“What the hell do
you
want?” the speaker blurted—Marnie, pointing at them from the cockpit of the pick-up window. She didn’t see it was Lindsay driving till they pulled up. They were so far away that Lindsay had to open her door to grab the bag.

“Nice job there,” Marnie said.

“Don’t take that shit from her,” Kim said, and stuck out her tongue.

“Don’t die in a terrible fiery accident,” Marnie said.

“You too.”

Eating fries while driving was too advanced, so they found a shady spot at the back of the lot and turned on the radio. The trees inside the spiked iron fence were old, their roots poking through the dry grass like knucklebones. Sparrows hopped among the faded decorations, wreaths on green wire stands and flags left over from Memorial Day. Lindsay squeezed ketchup into the top of her clamshell so they could share. They sat side-by-side, dipping and chewing. They didn’t spend time together like this, and she was self-conscious, not wanting to ruin it.

“Got a game tonight?”

“Yeah,” Lindsay said, downcast, as if she didn’t want to be reminded.

“Who you playing?”

“D’know. We suck anyway.”

“That’s not what Dad says.”

“You’ve never seen us.” Kim had played for him too, enduring his relentless overcoaching as Edgewater Properties sank to its proper spot at the bottom of the league. But Kim could actually play. Lindsay had inherited her cleats but that was it. With her knobby knees and braces she was terrified of the ball, and dreaded every game.

“I thought you were supposed to be going to the playoffs.”

“Everybody goes to the playoffs now. It’s like the Special Olympics.”

“How many more games you got?”

“Five and then the playoffs. So six.”

“Good luck.”

“Yeah, thanks.”

They ate to Weezer and Franz Ferdinand, pinching the soggy ends of their burgers, trying not to drip on anything. Kim finished first, and though she was afraid it would sound lame and melodramatic, she also knew this might be the perfect opportunity, while Lindsay’s mouth was full.

“You know, dude,” she said, “I’m really going to miss you.”

“No you won’t,” Lindsay said, tipping her chin up so she didn’t spew lettuce everywhere.

“You don’t think so.”

“You’ll be too busy with your new friends and everything.”

She didn’t have to say “Just like now.” Okay, that was fair, but she would miss Linds too. Couldn’t both things be true?

“You can come visit me.”

“I don’t think Mom’ll let me.”

“Maybe not this year but next year. You’re going to have to start looking at schools then anyway. Not that you’ll be looking at Bowling Green.”

“God, I hope not,” Lindsay said—a joke, or it was supposed to be, so she was relieved when Kim laughed. Deep down Lindsay knew Kim was disappointed with Bowling Green—as were her parents, though they never said anything. Case Western had been her first choice, but she didn’t even make the waiting list. Nina was going to Denison, Elise had been early decision at Kenyon. While Lindsay felt bad for Kim, she vowed to herself she would do better than any of them.

They were both finished and it was nearly one. Kim turned off the radio. “Ready?”

Lindsay nodded, serious, sitting upright like a test pilot. She had to use both hands to depress the button of the emergency brake.

“Come on, Muscles,” Kim said.

They drove back past the hospital with its helipad off in the corner of the lot. Her mother’s Subaru was in its usual spot, a fold-out silver reflector protecting the dash from the sun. In the ER, she would be sitting at her window, patiently taking down someone’s information, checking off boxes, the queen of clipboards. By the time she got home Kim would be at work. The only time they saw each other now was on weekends. Lindsay thought it was easier. Since the end of school they’d been fighting over J.P. and her drinking and breaking curfew. Her mother was just freaked out about her leaving.

They all were, maybe Kim more than any of them. Every day she felt strangely charged, knowing that in another month all of this would vanish. She liked driving around, imagining it happening, like now, the stucco doctors’ offices and low, motel-like nursing homes fading behind her, the box factory and the company park with its backstop facing the railroad tracks wavering like a mirage, growing fainter and fainter until it was all just fog taken away by a lake breeze. But underpinning that fantasy was a queasy panic, a fear of the unknown and the confusing realization that by leaving she might be losing everything. She tried to ignore it the same way she blew off her mother. The fact was that she had thirty-nine days to go. Nothing was going to change that.

Lindsay was afraid of the mailbox and turned early, the rear tire on her side four-wheeling over the curb.

“Sorry.”

“It’s okay,” Kim said. “Mom does it all the time. You did good. Plus you got lunch out of it.”

Inside, they split. Lindsay flopped on the couch and unpaused
Bubble Boy
while Kim went upstairs and changed into her swimsuit and some cutoffs, pulling her hair back with a rubber band. Cooper knew what the suit meant and followed her down the stairs like she might take him. She didn’t have time today, and felt bad.

“Call him,” she asked Lindsay, and she did.

Back in the car she was pissed off again. It was almost one thirty, and she’d just noticed she was low on gas. It wasn’t worth going all the way out there when she had to be back to get ready for work in an hour. She wondered if Nina would be mad if she called in sick. Probably, though Nina did it all the time. She rumbled over the train tracks, cut left and flew down the long, empty straightaway beside the old grain elevators instead of dealing with the lights on Main. She was so focused on the road that she almost didn’t see the cop.

“Ah
shit.
”

It was the sheriff, staked out in the dirt turnoff of the substation, waiting for someone like her. Instead of braking she lifted her foot off the gas and let the car float past him, still going way over the limit. She glanced at her mirror hopefully. He was pulling out, turning her way, but so far hadn’t thrown his lights on, and she signaled right for the stop sign ahead, thinking she’d crawl into the side streets and hide.