The Missing (15 page)

People in Corpus Christi raised their voices around Enrique because they thought he didn’t speak English. Meanwhile, he wrote poetry and read T. S. Eliot. But when his father’s heart seized up two years ago, he took over the store and delayed college. He had five younger siblings (four girls, one boy), so he’d pretty much been the head of the family ever since.

Now that his dad had started taking shifts at the

store again, Enrique had enlisted in the army. He planned to serve a tour of duty and get his tuition fi- nanced when he came home so he could study poetry at any state school in the country. His orders were sup- posed to arrive within the week. She worried about him a lot. He expected everybody to be like him: decent and honest. That kind of stupid gets a boy shipped home in a bag.

So she’d been thinking about that, too, when she called him this morning. She wanted to have sex with him before he left. That way, even if he got hurt or came back changed or stopped loving her, at least they’d have been each other’s first. But really, she didn’t want him to go away at all. She sort of hoped the world would blow up instead. It would be easier than life without him.

E

nrique’s palms were sweating. He walked in front and held the branches back so they didn’t slap against Maddie’s legs or face. He’d seen a few clearings that might have worked, but he wanted to find a place where the ground was soft and without too many logs or sticks. He was glad he’d skipped lunch, because oth-

erwise he might throw up.

He hoped he wasn’t coming down with the cold ev- eryone who stopped by the shop today seemed to have. They’d all coughed themselves red in the face, and some had even sported rashes on their arms, hands, necks, and faces—all over their exposed skin. He’d meant to ask Maddie about it because her father was a doctor, but now wasn’t the time. He knew it wasn’t allergy sea- son, but he couldn’t figure out how a sickness could spread so fast.

He’d known Maddie since before either of them was tall enough to reach the Puffin Stop counter, but it

wasn’t until his dad got sick and he took over the shop that she became a regular customer. She stopped by on her way home from school a few times a month and sipped black coffee while flipping through the fashion magazines under the counter, or else she puffed her Marlboro Lights on the front curb. She didn’t have any friends. At first he thought it was because she was shy, but after a while he realized it was because she was a kook.

She was also spoiled. Her clothes were new and clean, and the legs of her jeans were always creased in per- fectly ironed pleats, which meant either a Mexican cleaning lady or a mother with too much time on her hands. She didn’t have a job, but she paid for her smokes and
OK!
magazines with crisp twenty-, fifty-, and even hundred-dollar bills. She was pushy, too, and expected things to go her way: “Not the
red
lighter, Enrique. I want the
blue
lighter.” “Hi, Mom. No, I’m at the store right now. I can start dinner, but I’m not heating up your fettuccine. It’s gross. I’m either ordering cheese- less pizza or making stir-fry. Dad likes that better any- way.”

About a year and a half ago she came into the shop and he complimented the forest green of her sweater because it matched her eyes. After that, she wore the sweater every time she visited. That’s when he knew for sure that she liked him. But he didn’t ask her on a date for two reasons. First, he’d never been very comfortable around girls. Second, she looked like a lot of work.

That summer, her parents extended her curfew to ten o’clock, and she started coming to the Puffin Stop at night. Sometimes her brother, David, would drop her off like the store was her destination, and then he’d give Enrique this look, like,
Sorry dude, but she made me do it
. Once, David even plopped a few banana PowerBars

onto the counter and then leaned over and whispered, “You know what an eight-hundred-pound gorilla gets?” Then he’d nodded at skinny Maddie Wintrob: “Any- thing it wants.”

But Enrique liked the company. Maddie was funny. She clomped when she walked, like she expected people to notice when she entered a room. If she wasn’t smok- ing, she was chewing grape Bubblicious so hard it snapped. When closing time came, she’d read celebrity gossip in
OK!
without paying for it while he mopped the floor (she never offered to help, he noticed). Since it was on his way, he’d walk her home, and they’d talk about all the things that were important to her, like whether the guests on Jerry Springer were real, and the melting arctic permafrost that had once been a meth- ane sink. “We’ll all be dead soon,” she’d once said to him without even the hint of a smile. Then she’d skipped a few paces and added, “Thanks for the Fun Dip Sticks. They’re frickin’ awesome!”

He hadn’t known for sure that he cared for her until she stopped visiting. The first week, he hardly noticed. The second week, he decided she’d found a boyfriend. Some other guy got to watch her act like a screwball. Some other guy got to hear all about envi- ronmental disaster, and the poor chimps kept in cages for animal testing. Some other guy had found the only girl in the world who had read, and liked, Octavio Paz.

Turned out, she’d been on a family vacation in Get- tysburg. When school started again, he resolved to ask her out. But every time he saw her, the words sealed his mouth shut like a lump of dry oatmeal. He had no money, not even for a movie. Where would they go? Besides, she was fair-skinned and tall and smart, and he was the guy behind the convenience store counter

with five kid siblings like he came from the third world. And then he got angry at her for making him feel second-rate, and he promised himself that after the army funded his college, he’d win the Nobel Prize in Poetry. In fifteen years he’d come back to Corpus Christi with a wife even whiter and better-looking than Maddie Wintrob, and boy, would she be sorry.

So he was thinking these things one crisp September night, when she leaned over the register and kissed him. Sloppy and untrained, like a pair of nicotine-flavored fish lips. And that was all it took. He was a goner. They’d been dating for almost a year now, and the only thing he regretted was that he hadn’t been the one to make the first move.

And now they were in the woods. His armpits were wet even though he’d sprayed them with half a bottle of Right Guard. Behind him, Maddie muttered something. Probably a complaint. They’d been walking for a while. It was quiet out here. The closer they got to Bedford, the less the birds chirped and the gnats swarmed. Peo- ple said the air was fine here, but he didn’t believe them. Since the fire, it smelled like sulfur, and even in Corpus Christi, birds had begun to twitter on the ground be- fore dying, as if they’d forgotten how to fly. James Walker got lost here the other day, and he’d heard from his mother that overnight more kids James’s age had gone missing. He was worried it wasn’t a safe place to take Madeline, but with no car and no apartment, where else could they go?

Up ahead was a grassy clearing. His heart started to pound, and he thought about turning back before Mad- die spotted it, too. This thing they were about to do was irrevocable. But he kept walking until they both stood on its periphery. They were panting a little, but

not from exertion. From nerves. She smelled like grape- fruits and rose-scented lotion.

The grass was mostly dead. He could see the rem- nants of a campfire and some beer cans that had been sitting around for so long that their painted labels had worn away. “What a dump,” she said.

She was tall for a woman, and he didn’t like to let her see his naked body because he was scrawny by com- parison. She nudged him, and he kicked his foot behind her knee and caught her off balance. She fell on her bottom with a thud. The girls he’d dated before her (all two of them), would have sneered right now and feigned some kind of injury, but not Maddie. She started laugh- ing with her hand over her mouth while shouting, “Shhh, shhh,” as if it was he, not she, who was making all the noise.

He lowered his hand to help her up. She tugged hard, and pulled him down with her. She was laughing so hard that she was crying, and it occurred to him that she was nervous, too. They sat like that for a little while, and then she took a blanket out of her bag. She opened it in the wind like a sail and set it down.

They sat. She unbuttoned her cotton blouse so that it hung open and he could see her red lace bra. He rubbed his hands on the legs of his jeans and tried to warm them for her. Everyone assumed they were do- ing it. The people who stopped by the shop, their families, even his brother joked about making sure there were no babies.

But she was his girl, and he wanted to do right by her. Show her that he was good enough. He’d enlisted for the same reason. He was sick of people asking whether he missed his home country when he’d been born in Bangor. No one would be able to take the army away

from him. So maybe Maddie didn’t know about wait- ing for the perfect moment, but he did. You only had one chance to get things right.

When his hands were warm, he touched her. Reached under her felt skirt. She’d shaved her hair down below in the shape of a heart. He traced the curve with his fingers. He knew she liked it. He had learned, day by day, the things that made her squirm with delight.

She touched him, too. He closed his eyes. Now, to- day? Was this right? One of her eyes was bigger than the other, but you had to look very closely to notice. He unbuttoned his jeans.

He tore the foil from the Trojan Ultra Pleasure with his teeth. He knew this part, had practiced in the dark on his way home from work, tossing the evidence away so that his family would not find it. A garbage can on Micmac Street full of expectations. He pulled it out. Unrolled it. Put it on. She arched her back so that her stomach pressed against him. But he’d done it wrong. It wasn’t rolling. It was stuck. Hardly covered the tip. The blood rushed from his groin to his face: He’d messed up something really important. He turned to his side so that she couldn’t see.

“Wait!” he cried.

Her silence was like a weight on his chest, and his fingers got clumsy. He knew she was looking. Her eyes were burning the skin on his back.

“Don’t you want to?” she asked.

“I do,” he said. How could he explain this? Men weren’t supposed to mess this up; they were supposed to hold a woman close, and promise to be gentle.

“So what is it?” she asked.

“The timing is not right,” he answered, before he re- alized how she would hear his words. He wished he could stop time and draw them back.

Her voice was cold. Furious. “I’m not a fucking flower.”

He nodded. “I know. You’re Maddie. I know.” He fum- bled through his pockets, looking for another one. Had he brought two? Why hadn’t he brought two? Would this used one still work, if he flipped it to the other side?

He turned around and faced her. Her brow had knit- ted together into a single black line, and her purple hair was a mess of leaves and knots, like a vengeful Shake- spearean wood sprite. “Aren’t I pretty enough?” she asked.

“Of course,” he said. But already, he was going soft. “So what is it?”

He sighed. Didn’t she know? Couldn’t she guess from the way he’d been fumbling?

“Fine!” she cried. “I hate you.” She pulled on her blouse and ran into the brush.

He lay there. What was wrong with him? He’d gotten through this like a pro when it had been only a table for one. Was he dying of prostrate cancer, and this was the first symptom? He frowned. Wishful thinking. It wasn’t cancer. And now he was going to have to explain to Maddie Wintrob that he’d gotten a case of nerves be- fore she convinced herself that he and her brother were having an affair.

Just then he heard a high-pitched, girly scream. His heart pumped fast, because Maddie shouted plenty but she
never
screamed. He charged into the woods. A nox- ious smell of rotten eggs, strong sulfur, preceded him.

He found Maddie kneeling with her back to him over a beige stone. He bent down next to her, and gasped. It wasn’t a stone, but a tiny bone, attached to more tiny bones. Connecting the bones was a thin layer of what looked like corn husk. It took him a while before he figured it out: The husk was dry skin.

Maddie turned to him with wet eyes. Her hands hov- ered over the corpse, almost touching it, and he knew that she wanted to sweep the thing into her arms, and protect it from whatever had happened long ago. Along its skull was a tuft of black hair. It was the hair that convinced him that this was a human infant.

“Who?” she asked, and he knew she wasn’t asking about the child. She was asking:
Who did this terrible thing?

He shook his head. Then he heard the sounds of twigs breaking in the woods. He stood fast, and pulled her up behind him. Together, they peered into the brush. Then he saw it. The figure knelt on all fours. It was watching them, and Enrique instantly took a step closer, to pro- tect both Maddie, and the child’s remains.

“Get out of here!” he yelled. The thing looked at him, and Enrique’s breath caught in his throat. It moaned a sorrowful sound, like a loon whose cry has become mu- sic. He felt sorry for it, even though he knew he should be frightened. It leaped over a fallen log and scrambled away. Enrique held Maddie tightly as he let himself un- derstand what he’d just seen. The figure wasn’t an ani- mal. It was Albert Sanguine in a hospital gown, with a mouth caked in blood.

E L E V E N
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It Was So Sad It Was Funny, or Maybe It Was So Funny It Was Sad

“S

till,” Ronnie Koehler told his second fiancée in four weeks, “I feel pretty bad about this.”

Noreen rolled her eyes. She’d been scheduled for an extra shift at the hospital tonight because so many nurses were laid up with the flu. She hadn’t bothered putting on street clothes this morning, and was instead wearing dumpy pink scrubs. The two of them were smoking a blunt on his plaid couch. He’d rolled it tight, and they’d been burning it for about ten minutes. When he was high, the air felt thick as pea soup, and every- thing mattered just a little bit less. Still, he couldn’t get Lois Larkin off his mind.