The Missing (2 page)

Lois blotted her eyes with a snot-covered tissue. Took a deep breath. Said the words slowly. “Boys and girls, I have thomething called an allergy. Do you know what that is? Ith when you sneeze a lot and your eyes get all watery. For some people, like Johnnie, dogs make them sneeze. For me, ith mold and ragweed. I’m not crying. Do you understand?”

They nodded. Caroline raised her hand and moaned: “
Oh! Oh!
”

“Yeth, Caroline.”

“I have an allergy to penicillin. That’s an antibiotic, for, like, if you get AIDS.”

Lois nodded. “That’s very serious, Caroline, and good to know. Now, ith Kerry here today?”

“Yes.”

“Alex Fullbright? . . . Michael Fullbright?” The list went on.

In fact, Lois was lying. She wasn’t suffering from al- lergies. She was crying. But today was the big class trip, and though she’d wanted to stay home, there hadn’t been time to call in a substitute. So here she was, lisp- ing her way through attendance and praying that some snot-nose like James Walker didn’t raise his hand and finally point out the obvious—she wasn’t wearing her engagement ring.

In hindsight, what happened wasn’t surprising. A part of her had always known that Ronnie and Noreen were no good. When they used to tell her about some heart- breakingly stupid decision they’d made, like spending their paychecks on lottery tickets instead of rent, the evidence had been as plain as the gap between her teeth; these people were useless. But then she’d forget, because Ronnie’s house was a sty that smelled like stale milk, and who else would remember to open the windows so he didn’t get a headache? Because sure, Noreen was mean as Joan Crawford on diet pills, but deep down, she had a huge heart, right? You just had to look with a magnifying glass. Besides, Lois wasn’t perfect, either. She lisped, collected bugs, and snacked on raw ham- burger meat when she was premenstrual, for Christ’s sake.

Besides, it wasn’t their fault her life turned out so

crappy. She should never have moved back to Corpus Christi after college. At the University of New Hamp- shire, she’d been happy. Unlike in high school, where she’d felt like a big-boned giant, college men had asked her on dates. She found friends who shared her love for the Science and Nature category of the Genus edition of Trivial Pursuit. She stopped covering her mouth when she talked, because it turned out that so long as she apologized, people were okay with an occasional ocean spray.

But during the winter of her senior year, her father had been driving down the road that connected Corpus Christi to Bedford. His Nissan hatchback skidded on black ice and flipped once before it landed in the woods. The dashboard crumbled, shattering both his legs. It happened late at night, and his frozen body wasn’t found until the morning. No one could explain why he’d left a warm bed and his slumbering wife, Jodi Larkin. He had no secret girlfriend, and he didn’t smoke or drink. He’d still been belted into the driver’s side of the car when the snowplow driver found him. Even with a set of broken legs, most people would have crawled out the open passenger door and searched for help, but not Rus- sell Larkin. They found his cell phone in his pocket, reception clear as a bell, but he never made a single call. Probably, it wasn’t a suicide. He’d just wanted to go out for a drive, feel the night air, and look at the stars. Yes, she’d reassured herself; it probably wasn’t a suicide.

After the funeral her grades sank like granite quarry stones. She only barely graduated college. Didn’t bother with the applications for PhD programs she’d intended to send out, or make plans for a job that summer. “Don’t you love me anymore?” Roddy Chase, her boy- friend of two years, had asked the night before they

marched in caps and gowns down College Square’s Di- mond Hill. They were sitting on the brick stoop outside her dorm, and she knew she was supposed to tell him that his deep voice turned her knees to putty, but there hadn’t been room in her heart for love right then. There’d only been room for her dad’s gravity-stricken face at the open-casket funeral. Roddy’s shoulders had drooped as he’d walked away, like the top of his spine had turned to Jell-O, and that had reminded her of her dad, too. The next thing she knew, she was living at home again, substitute teaching at the elementary school, and hiding her mother’s empty bottles of Gordon’s Gin in the recycling bin under liters of the Poland Spring they’d started using after the fire.

Corpus Christi was a pretty place, and great for kids, but if you wanted to do something other than work at the hospital or spend your parents’ money, you moved to a big city. Lois got bored after a few months, so one night on her way home from work she ducked into the Dew Drop Inn. She’d planned to sit in a corner and sip an apple cosmo for an hour, and then go home. If things had gone according to that plan, her life might have turned out differently. She might have gone back to school, or at least applied for a job teaching high school biology. But life never happens the way it should.

At the Dew Drop Inn, she’d spotted her old high school friend Noreen Castillo. Noreen nursed geriatric patients at the Corpus Christi Medical Center. She was smart and funny and mean. In high school Noreen used to say things like: “Your ass looks fat in that,” or “The stories you tell: They’re funny but they take too long. People stop listening and then you look stupid. I’m only telling you because we’re friends.” So there Noreen was, perched over the bar at the Dew Drop

Inn, and Lois knew she should have smiled and kept walking, because the girl was a nuclear reactor full of trouble. But Lois was lonely, and Noreen was com- pany. They had a few drinks together that night, and the night after that. Pretty soon, it became a regular thing.

Ronnie Koehler and his friends went to the Dew Drop Inn, too. Ronnie’s 1996 season record of twenty-one home runs still stood at Corpus Christi, and because of it TJ Wainright poured him every third Budweiser draft for free. Ronnie wasn’t a jerk about how popular he’d been back in school. He wasn’t bitter about it, either, which Lois thought was pretty admirable since people had expected him to go pro. When Ronnie’s high school sweetheart went loco and left him for an ashram in Woodstock, Noreen chased after him like a horny mon- key. She got drunk and draped herself over his shoulders like the only way she’d let go was if he carried her home. But it was Lois that Ronnie eventually asked on a movie date.

She should have turned Ronnie down. He was Nor- een’s claim. Besides, he’d dropped out of Thermos Com- munity College to work as a cashier at the Citibank. He and Andrew Lynack shared the top floor of a house, and every night before bed they smoked a bowl of Maine’s finest, and every morning before twisting those pin- striped polyester ties into Windsor knots, they waked and baked.

But when he asked her out, Ronnie put his hand on her shoulder. His fingers were meaty, all knuckles and calluses. Not since Roddy Chase had a man touched her like he meant it. A warmth ran through her sweater, under her turtleneck, all the way to her skin. Every- thing inside her jumped and settled in a way that had

felt exactly right. Before thinking about it, before an- ticipating Noreen’s wicked ire, she’d agreed to go see Tom Green’s
Freddy Got Fingered
at the multiplex with him.

Within a week Ronnie gave her crabs. Took seven weeks to get rid of the little devils. Tiny red pinpricks of blood permanently stained her bedsheets from where they’d clenched their sharp jaws along her pubis. He caught them from his ex, and had thought he’d exter- minated them, but a few determined eggs had clung to the fibers of his bath towels, waiting to hatch. When she told him what he’d done, he turned beet red and let her pick every Netflix they rented for a month (French films with subtitles that she didn’t even like, just to punish him). If she hadn’t been a bug person, fascinated by every aspect of their tiny bodies, she probably would have dumped him.

“Ronnie’s a total loser,” Noreen screeched while suck- ing so hard on her Camel Ultra Light that its tip sizzled. They were at the Dew Drop Inn, and over the weeks they’d been dating, Noreen’s jealousy had quietly con- densed under a flame of hot rage until it became a thick, black soup. “Also, I’m pretty sure he’s gay. He and his roommate want you to be their beard.” Lois knew she should have defended Ronnie. But instead she’d nodded like maybe Noreen was right, and then changed the sub- ject. Noreen wasn’t worth fighting with. Half the things she said when she’d been drinking she didn’t remember, and the other half she didn’t mean. Life went on like that for a while. Every Thursday the two of them threw back a few apple cosmos at the Dew Drop Inn, and Noreen crapped all over her, and Lois ate it all up like it tasted good.

Lois and Ronnie kept dating. They got to know each

other, to depend on each other. They fell into it out of boredom, she guessed. But sometimes boredom can turn into love. A lot of times, probably.

Three years later she was accepted into the PhD pro- gram in entomology at the University of Massachusetts, a full ride. When she told Ronnie, he asked her to stay in Corpus Christi, so she did. Not smart. When she mailed the letter declining her admission and the twenty-two- thousand-dollar annual stipend that added up to more than her teaching salary, her gut instincts had shrieked inside her at pitches so high that she hadn’t heard them, she’d only felt them as they’d ruptured her organs. For three days she didn’t eat or sleep, and she knew she’d made a mistake.

But after a while she got used to the mistake, and things went back to normal, which meant they were okay, but not great. Ronnie’s roommate, Andrew, took up with Noreen, which made Noreen happy. So better late than never, Noreen calmed down and played nice. The four of them started doing things together; seeing movies, going bowling, plunking quarters into the juke- box at the Dew Drop Inn and listening to Johnny Cash, getting high. Turned out Lois liked getting high a whole lot. Pot made everything as easy as swimming the dead man’s float in a heated pool.

And then two months ago, after six years of dating, Ronnie proposed.

They’d just finished their Friday night pasta dinner at Monteleone’s Italian Restaurant, and he plopped a brown garnet ring laced with diamond dust onto her greasy plate. It swiveled a few times before it landed flat. A bubble of joy had filled her stomach, and then got caught like a burp in her throat. This was the mo- ment she’d been waiting for. Yup. This was it.

She’d expected him to get down on one knee, but he didn’t. Instead he shrugged his shoulders, like he couldn’t figure out how they’d gotten there, either. Her mind’s eye had telescoped to a view ten years into the future, and in it she’d seen a dingy plaid couch, a couple of kids, and a guy who couldn’t hold down a job. A nice guy with a lot of good qualities. He had a winning smile. He could make perfect grilled cheese and tomato sandwiches. He was kind, if spineless. Just like her fa- ther. At least she’d always be the boss . . . just like her mother. Did she want to be the boss?
Say no,
an urgent voice inside her had whispered.
Run like he just opened a bag of candied anthrax, and don’t you dare look back
.

She lifted the ring and turned it between her fingers. It was soft, like she could flatten it if she squeezed. “Yeth!” she cried, “I will marry you, Ronnie Koehler.” The next day Noreen agreed to be Lois’s maid of honor. Then she put the screws to her boyfriend, An- drew. She told him that since Ronnie and Lois were getting married, they ought to get hitched, too. Andrew didn’t bother dumping her. He just stopped returning her phone calls. Drunk and crying at the Dew Drop a few days later, Noreen had shouted at Lois. Her cheeks were so red from booze that she looked like she’d started using lye on her face instead of sunscreen. “I’m not go- ing to your wedding,” she’d said. “As your friend I have to tell you, you’re making a mistake. He doesn’t love you, and I happen to know the only reason you ever liked him is because I wanted him first, and you can’t

ever let me be happy.”

Lois should have been relieved to be rid of her, but mostly she was hurt. For the first few weeks without her best friend, she’d felt like a rotten egg had hatched

in her stomach, and its poison yolk was circulating through her blood. Still, there was a wedding to plan, and only Lois to plan it. She auditioned the DJs and re- served the Corpus Christi Motor Lodge Meeting Hall. Ronnie was Episcopalian, and she was Catholic. His parents didn’t want a priest, and her mother didn’t want a minister.
No problem!
She’d told them even though she’d always wanted a church wedding: “Justice of the peace!” Ronnie didn’t have a red cent, and her mother had invested Lois’s $163,000 inheritance from Russell Larkin’s life insurance policy in high-risk tech- nology stocks that bottomed out in 2002 at four grand.
No problem!
Lois had announced: “I’ll use those Dis- cover card checks with the twenty percent interest.” Why bother working hard for perfect credit, when they’d never be able to afford the down payment on a house, anyway?

And then last week Ronnie parked his red Camaro in her driveway and honked the horn. Somehow, from the quick, polite sound of his single beep, she knew. She’d been waiting for it, like she’d been walking around all month with the taste of copper on her tongue.

For the sake of her pride, she should have been the one to say something as they sat in his parked car that had smelled like pot and stale donuts. Instead she’d said a prayer to him in her mind, and hoped he would hear it:
Oh, please, Ronnie, change your mind
.
I love you, I really do. I love you more than anybody else in the world. Change your mind, Ronnie. I can’t live with my mother another day. I can’t sleep one more night in my old bedroom with its eyelet sheets that my mother bought when I was nine. Without you I’m useless, Ronnie. I’m nothing, and everybody knows it.

Ronnie couldn’t look her in the eye when he told her, “I can’t do it.”

“Why?” It was all she could think to ask.

“I’m not sure I love you. I don’t know if I ever did.” She started crying, but then a funny thing happened.

A monster stirred in her stomach and opened its eyes. Suddenly, she wanted to do harm. She imagined tearing him to pieces with her hands like his skin was rotten fruit. Running her fingers through the gore and squeez- ing it. Eating it while the juice ran down her chin. No kidding. Because what kind of crappy thing is that to say? You date a woman for six years, and you tell her you never loved her? Sure, you might not want to marry her, but
you don’t love her?