When She Was Gone (9 page)

She'd been gone only since yesterday, though since she was under eighteen, just barely, a single day was long enough to “start the process,” as the detective said. Mom wouldn't explain anything, except to tell them Linsey would be home soon, about which Toby wasn't entirely convinced. His chest hurt, like when he had asthma. It didn't prevent him from breathing, just from ever feeling full of breath.

This afternoon after camp Toby wished his father would have just stayed home. Mom was pulling out strands of hair, something she hadn't done since the drug thing with Linsey. She was making them a snack, oatmeal cookies from slices of
premade dough that tasted way better raw, all oat and butter. One by one she rested them on the tray, as if they were each very important. She'd forgotten to preheat the oven. His mom slid a forefinger and thumb to her scalp, tugged, then pulled out a single dark brown hair. She looked at it and did it again. Toby watched from the family room floor, where he was picking old stickers off the cover of a Kumon phonics workbook.

“Hey,” said Cody, letting the back door slam as he came in. The grass smell came in with him, and the air conditioner hummed into action.

“If Linsey never comes back, can I have her room?”

Toby watched his mother. It was as if she was letting it take her slowly, like a disease. She pulled out another hair. She glanced at it, then let it drop, horribly, on the cookie sheet. Then she pushed the sheet gently across the counter, and it slid onto the floor. The circles of dough stayed put, but Mom walked out of the room, up the stairs, shutting her bedroom door behind her.

“Stupid,” said Toby.

“You're stupid,” said Cody, trying to grab the book from him.

Toby pulled it to his chest. He thought about following his mother, but he didn't want to see her face now. “You really want your own room?” he asked.

“Nah,” said Cody, but Toby knew he did, he really did, even though it was Cody who made annoying smacking noises in his sleep, and Toby who let his brother leave the light on when he preferred the smooth texture of darkness.

Toby was really worried about Linsey. Of course Mom was worried, but Mom worried about everything, about finishing homework and that it was right, about dinner being hot enough, about when it wouldn't be shorts weather anymore, about the mole on his earlobe—she'd taken him to Dr. Burger, who had frozen it and cut it off right in the office, which was sick, and the mole was just a mole after all that, not one cell of cancer.

He had gone into Linsey's room a lot since she'd disappeared. He wasn't supposed to, of course, but he'd been doing it as long as he could remember. He used to go with Cody before Cody got bigger than him and kind of rude. Of course he loved his brother. Of course his brother was like him in strange ways; they had the same way of holding pens and pencils that wasn't wrong enough for the teachers to complain, but wasn't quite right, either. Their fingers were always stained, thumbs dented. Neither of them liked tomatoes, even though their parents did. They still had some words in their secret language that no one else knew, though Cody had told Banks, the big-headed doofus on the football team who was Cody's kind of best friend, about one word, “Speakey,” which was just the word to mean their language, so it wasn't that secret, but still.

When they were really little, they used to go into Linsey's room all three together when she babysat. She didn't mind them all of a sudden, when she was in charge. They huddled on her lavender-scented bed under the pink-and-blue lily-dotted comforter—the strange country of a girl. They took
Linsey's funny ladybug flashlight into their impromptu tent, and she told them stories, weird stories, not ghost stories exactly, but stories that meandered around and had bad parts and good parts and lots of candy and discovery but no endings. She had stories about visiting the moon, about finding apartment buildings there with elevators—because Toby liked elevators. Linsey gave them tiny candy bars from the stash she kept in her drawer (until one time when Cody went in by himself and ate some and left a wrapper on her bed, because Cody didn't think things through all that well), and they sang the songs they liked the most and also one hundred bottles of beer on the wall, which was funny, because Linsey said one hundred bottles of milk, or one hundred bottles of Yoo-hoo. They'd both loved her then, but Toby loved her more.

When he went in now he only looked in the trunk. He wasn't good at folding, not like Cody who, despite being a total slob, folded everything precisely in his drawers, even his socks, lining up the heels. He respected this about Cody; he knew where that tiny need to fold resided, it was somewhere between the sternum and the belly button—Toby had that place, too, only instead of folding he
needed
to listen. He knew it was the same, just as he knew they both remembered all the words of their secret language, even when they pretended it was forgotten, baby stuff.

Looking in the trunk, Toby was careful with Linsey's things: her sweater that was new and smelled like the store; her little cloth-covered poetry books, e.e. cummings she'd
shown him and she'd tried to explain; her letter from her ex-boyfriend, not really ex, really still her boyfriend, Timmy, which she'd slipped into a little gap between the trunk lining and the lid. He knew it would be in there. He liked reading it and felt awful for it, the way scratching a mosquito bite until all the skin around it comes off in a satisfying wad and it bleeds and stings like mad but doesn't itch so much anymore feels good.
Linny,
it started.
My Linny, you know I love you. You know I have to talk to the other girls at school and I have to be friends with them and you know sometimes I might even go out with one of them just like I know you might even go out with that bean-head Markos Hubbard because he's been after you for, like, the entire duration of your glorious life, but, Linny, we're going to be together, you know that, I know that . . .
Sometimes Toby stopped here. Sometimes he read the whole thing, and tried not to imagine the things Timmy said he wanted to do with her, sex things they had planned in explicit detail—he'd heard some of this on the phone, too—and it made him hard and embarrassed and now he got a little hard just reading the first part so he stopped before it hurt.

Yesterday when he came to the house, right after camp, the detective had said, “Talk to everyone you know.” Toby had been listening from the top step. Cody had been playing the hijacking game on Xbox that was too violent for them to own, but which he'd borrowed from stupid Banks, whose parents bought him anything he ever wanted just because he was good at football. Toby felt sick when he watched the boxing game, too much blood everywhere, too much hitting.
There was such a thing as too much violence, he knew that; he didn't understand why Cody thought things that were really really repulsive were cool at the same time. It wasn't like the maggots they'd seen in a dead squirrel on Cedar Court. That kid next door—Geo—the one Cody called weird—Geo was always taking pictures and he was there just six inches from the awful swarming mass. They were doing their job, even if their numerousness and motion seemed repulsive; they were of the world, they were science, they were decomposition. The beating up didn't seem to have a reason.

He worried that something like that might have happened to Linsey. He imagined it, he imagined her being hit. He hated how it made him feel, tight chest, head hot, but he still imagined it. Her face bruised, her arms pinned, Linsey crying. And he hated that it was kind of exciting to think about the things that could have happened to her. He loved Linsey. He wanted her home. He was angry in the first place that she was going to college, and he was annoyed that he was supposed to keep secret the fact that she'd sneaked out to see Timmy at least five times this summer, even though they were supposed to be broken up, but he kept it a secret, because even though it might be important, if it wasn't, and he squealed, she might stop telling him things when she found out.

Linsey told him things she didn't tell anyone else, certainly not Cody, and not Mom, and even things she didn't tell Timmy. Sitting on his bed one afternoon—right after the breakup—Linsey pretended to help with his homework.

“Right,” she said, bouncing on the bed with that look that said she would like to test the rules. “Imperfect fractions!”

“No, irregular verbs.”

He liked it when she was silly. He didn't need help; they just liked their own occasional private world.

“Improper vowels!” she said, rising to her knees and bouncing more.

“No, immeasurable cookies.”

“Cookies! Ooo!” Linsey bounded out his door. He could hear her taking the stairs, so much louder than her frame suggested. She returned with packets of chocolate chip cookies, the kind they gave out at games when it was their turn for snacks. Usually reserved for Cody's events.

“Cookies,” she said. “I am very, very, very sad.” She pouted at him, imp-like.

“Really?” Toby didn't like eating on the bed, crumbs would wake him later, so he sat on Cody's bed and opened the packet.

“No, yes,” said Linsey. “I think Mom is crazy for breaking us up—you know, it's only because she and Dad couldn't manage, and she thinks we're like them, but we're nothing like them.” She shook her cookie bag.

“Don't crush them,” said Toby, thinking of the crumbs. He patted Cody's bed, a suggestion.

Linsey didn't get up. She tossed the bag to him as he finished his.

“Mom and Dad broke up, like, three times, and got back together before she met Frank.”

He didn't like it when she called Dad Frank, but she always did. It was Mom and Frank, which made them sound unmatched. He didn't like the idea that Mom could have ever taken Joe back—that his dad, and he and Cody, weren't inevitable. He tore open the second cookie bag and let her continue.

“Dad was always meeting girls on shoots.” Toby didn't like Joe—his hair was long and goopy and he spoke slowly to Toby and Cody, as if they were slightly stupid.

“And he's cute enough to get it on with some of the pro soccer women—the straight ones—even though he's so much older.”

Toby wondered whether
get it on
meant sex, but he just nodded. Linsey flopped back on his bed.

“I would have done it with Timmy. I love Timmy.” She coughed a little, like a fake cry. She was making it all sound so light, when he knew she really meant it, about the sadness.
Get it on
meant sex, then.

Last year, Linsey had told him it hurt to get her period. She told him what girls liked when they were kissed; she even kissed him once, because he'd begged, called it practice, but then made him swear they'd never do it again because it was too weird and he was her sister. Half sister, he said. Still, she'd said, her mouth purple inside and too sweet from the grape gum they'd both been chewing. “But don't let your mouth get quite that soft, it's too soggy.” They never did that again, and they never talked about it, either, and sometimes Toby wasn't sure it had actually happened.

He called Linsey's cell phone. She'd promised she'd always answer for him, unless she was at a concert or in a class or something. He'd called her once when he stayed home sick from soccer camp and Mom had gone into the city for the morning and the house had been too weird, all empty. He'd called her once when he lost his key and Cody had gone over to the Banks's house and she came home from school to let him in, even though she missed chemistry and it was AP. Now she was going away, and if he needed her and called, she might be in a more important class, like something premed, which she was thinking about even though everyone thought she was going to be a special-education teacher. Cornell was far away, too far for him to take a bus to visit her. He'd wanted her to go to NYU like she'd always said she would, but when she finally visited, she didn't like it. Or maybe she wanted to get away from them.

He'd called her four times since yesterday, since they knew she was missing; the voice mail picked up right away. The second time he left a message, “Lins, dude, where are you? I know you're probably busy or something but call home, okay? Mom's kind of going nuts.”

After Cody said that stupid thing about Linsey and the room, Mom came downstairs and didn't even yell at Cody for eating cookie dough off the sheet on the floor. She had a red spot on her arm, as if someone had given her an Indian burn. She dialed Dad's number and talked to him with her hand held over her mouth, though the boys could hear her if they tried. Cody didn't; he was watching a rerun of
The Simpsons
.
Toby tuned out the comforting, ridiculous voices and heard his mother say, “Let's hire someone, anyone.” He knew she must mean private detective, but he also imagined a new babysitter, a sort of Mary Poppins character who would sweep him off his feet, out to the roof. They'd sing. Cody didn't like Mary Poppins, said she was boring.

“Myself,” said his mother, her hand obscuring her mouth but not Toby's ears. “I hurt myself. Not them. Never them.”

Both times the detective had come, yesterday and again this afternoon, Toby listened to everything he said, everything he could hear. He listened a lot; it was almost like a hobby. He listened in sometimes when Linsey, or Mom, or even Cody talked on the phone. He had this cool radio thing that could intercept a phone conversation—cell phones, portables. He said he used it for walkie-talkie stuff with his brother, but it was mostly for listening. It wasn't that he was a snoop, it was more that he was greedy for information about the world. And about Linsey, whom he loved, perhaps a little more than he ought to.

The detective's nose was disgusting. He was a youngish guy, younger than Toby's mom for sure, maybe younger than Miss Elephanten, the teacher he would have this year, fifth grade, who had black hair and teeth that were too white, everyone said she used Whitestrips, but they still liked her because she had a gentle voice and let them leave for recess early if they finished their math. The detective said Linsey had probably just run away, but she was going to Cornell so soon, it seemed ridiculous. Besides, Toby knew Linsey
wouldn't want to do that to their mother; she wouldn't do that to him, either. Linsey let him sleep in her bed sometimes; she sang to him at the doctor's office when he had to get the allergy injections, lots of them, and he kept thinking about the needle coming into his skin, breaking it, pushing in past the layers and too close to the bone, and he wanted to throw up or wanted to run, but Linsey sang to him, silly kids' songs, “Kumbaya,” some Beatles songs he liked even though the Beatles were cool for Linsey but not for him; she sang the alphabet song when she ran out, and “Alligators All Around,” which she'd sung in his preschool as a visitor. Linsey had a great voice, Linsey could've gone into music if she wanted, but she didn't. The detective asked about boyfriends and his mom told him everything, even about the drugs, and the detective made little grunting noises and Toby imagined the sweat on his nose cumulating, coming together into a giant droplet, splattering on the notes he took with a leaky ballpoint on a metal clipboard.