Pretty Girls: A Novel Page 10

  This time, as with the pretend-time, your mother bailed me out.

  “Sam,” she said, “you can’t keep doing this.”

  When she’s anxious, your mother twists her new wedding ring around her finger, and every time I see this I can’t help but feel she is trying to twist it off.

  Have I ever told you just how much I love your mother? She is the most remarkable woman I have ever known. Your grandmother thought she was a gold-digger, though there was hardly a scrap of silver in my pocket when we first met. Everything she said and did delighted me. I loved the books she read. I loved the way her mind worked. I loved that she looked at me and saw something that I had only ever glimpsed in myself.

  I would’ve given up without her—not on you, never on you, but on myself. I suppose I can tell you this now, but I wasn’t a very good student. I wasn’t smart enough to just get by. I wasn’t focused enough in class. I rarely passed exams. I skipped assignments. I was constantly on academic probation. Not that your grandmother would ever know, but at the time, I was thinking of doing what you were later accused of doing: selling all my belongings, sticking out my thumb, and hitchhiking to California to be with the other hippies who had dropped out and tuned in.

  Everything changed when I met your mother. She made me want things that I had never dreamed of wanting: a steady job, a reliable car, a mortgage, a family. You figured out a long time ago that you got your wanderlust from me. I want you to know that this is what happens when you meet the person you are supposed to spend the rest of your life with: That restless feeling dissolves like butter.

  I think what breaks my heart the most is that you will never learn that for yourself.

  I want you to know that your mother has not forgotten you. Not a morning passes that she does not wake up thinking about you. She marks your birthdays in her own way. Every March 4, the anniversary of your disappearance, she walks the same path you might have walked when you left the Manhattan Cafe that night. She leaves a nightlight burning in your old room. She refuses to sell the house on Boulevard, because, despite her protests, she still holds out the slim hope that one day, you might come walking back up the sidewalk and find your way home.

  “I want to feel normal again,” she once told me. “Maybe if I pretend I am long enough, it might actually happen.”

  Your mother is one of the strongest, smartest women I have ever met, but losing you cleaved her in two. The vibrant, caustic, witty, contrary woman I married splintered off into silence. She would tell you she gave in to mourning you for too long, let the pity and self-hate drag her into that black pit that I still crawl around in. If she did, her stay there was temporary. Somehow, she managed to wrench a piece of her former self out of the ground. She tells me that the other, miserable half, the chipped-off, castoff half, still follows at a respectful distance, ready to take over the second she stumbles.

  Only through sheer strength of will does she manage to never stumble.

  When your mother told me she was marrying another man, she said, “I can’t sacrifice the two daughters I have left for the one that I’ll never see again.”

  She didn’t say that she loved this man. She didn’t say that he moved her, or that she needed him. She said that she needed the things that he could offer: stability, companionship, a glass of wine at night without the drowning sense of sorrow.

  I do not resent this other man for taking my place. I do not hate him because I do not want your sisters to hate him. It is remarkably easy for a divorced parent to make remarriage a smooth transition for his or her children. You just keep your mouth shut and let them know that everything is going to be all right.

  And I really feel that it will be—at least for the remaining part of my family.

  Your mother has always been a good judge of character. This man she chose is kind to your sisters. He goes to Pepper’s riotous, perplexing concerts and pays attention to Claire. I cannot begrudge him attending PTA meetings and carving pumpkins and putting up Christmas trees. They visit your sisters once a month in Auburn (I know, sweetheart, but they couldn’t go to UGA because it reminded them too much of you). I cannot blame your mother for moving on while I stayed rooted in the past. I have widowed her. I would just as soon ask her to stay with me as I would ask her to lay with me in my grave.

  I suppose the sheriff called her to bail me out because left to my own devices, I would’ve stayed in the cell until he was forced to either arraign me or let me go. I was trying to make a point. Your mother agreed, if I meant that the point I was making was that I am a stubborn asshole.

  You of all people will know that this exchange means that she still loves me.

  But she has also made it clear that this is it for her. She no longer wants to hear about my wild goose chases or my crazy searches or my meeting strangers in dark corners and interrogating young women who knew you back then but are now married and gainfully employed and trying to start families of their own.

  Should I fault her for this? Should I blame her for giving up on my windmills?

  Here is why I was arrested:

  There is a man who works at the Taco Stand. He’s the manager now, but he was bussing tables the day you disappeared. The sheriff’s men cleared his alibi, but one of your friends, Kerry Lascala, told me that she’d overheard this man at a party talking about how he saw you on the street the night of March 4, 1991.

  Any father would seek out this man. Any father would follow him down the street, let him know what it felt like to have someone behind you who was stronger and angrier and had an agenda that involved taking you somewhere more private.

  Which sounds like harassment, but feels like investigating a crime.

  Your mother pointed out that the Taco man could hire a lawyer. That the next time the huckleberries come, it could be with a warrant.

  Huckleberries.

  This was one of your mother’s words. She gave Sheriff Carl Huckabee the nickname during the third week of the investigation, and by the third month, she had extrapolated it to everyone in uniform. You might remember the sheriff from that day at the carnival. He is a clumsy Barney Fife type with a stiff mustache he keeps trimmed in a straight line and sideburns he grooms so often you can see the furrows left by the teeth of his comb.

  This is what Huckleberry believes: The Taco man was with his grandmother at her nursing home the night you went missing.

  There was no sign-in sheet at the front desk. No log. No cameras. No other witnesses but his grandmother and a nurse who checked the old woman’s catheter around eleven that evening.

  You were last seen at 10:38 p.m.

  The nurse claims that the Taco man was asleep in the chair beside his grandmother’s bed when you were taken.

  And yet, Kerry Lascala says that she heard him say otherwise.

  Your mother would call this kind of thinking crazy-making, and maybe she’s right. I no longer tell your sisters about my leads. The Taco man, the garbage man who was arrested for flashing a grade-schooler, the gardener peeping Tom, the night manager at the 7-Eleven who was caught molesting his niece, are all strangers to them. I have moved my collection of clues into the bedroom so they won’t see it when they visit.

  Not that they visit much, though I cannot blame them. They are young women now. They are building their lives. Claire is around the same age as you were when we lost you. Pepper is older, though not wiser. I see her making so many mistakes (the drugs, the uncaring and unavailable boyfriends, the anger that burns so hot she could light an entire city), but I feel like I don’t have the authority to stop her.

  Your mother says that all we can do is be there for Pepper when she falls. Maybe she’s right. And maybe she’s right to be worried about this new man in Claire’s life. He tries too hard. He pleases too much. Is it our place to tell her? Or will she figure it out on her own? (Or will he? She has your Grandma Ginny’s wandering eye.)

  It’s strange that your mother and I are only ever whole when we talk about your sisters’ lives.
We are both of us too wounded to talk about our own. The open sores of our hearts fester if we are together too long. I know your mother looks at me and sees playhouses I built and touch-football games I played and homework I helped with and the millions of times I lifted you in my arms and swung you around like a doll.

  Just as when I look at her I see the growing swell of her belly, the gentle look on her face when she rocked you to sleep, the panic in her eyes when your fever spiked and you had to have your tonsils out, and the vexed expression she would get when she realized that you had out-argued her.

  I know that your mother belongs to another man now, that she has created a stable life for my children, that she has managed to move on, but when I kiss her, she never resists. And when I hold her, she holds me back. And when we make love, it is my name she whispers.

  In that moment, we are finally able to remember all of the good things we had together instead of everything that we have lost.

  FIVE

  Claire was still soaking wet from her graveside confrontation with Lydia. She sat shivering in the middle of the garage holding a broken tennis racket in her hand. Her weapon of choice. It was the fourth tennis racket she had broken in as many minutes. There wasn’t a cabinet or a tool or a car in the garage that hadn’t met the hard edge of a graphite tennis racket. Bosworth Tennis Tour 96s, custom designed to Claire’s stroke. Four hundred bucks a pop.

  She rolled her wrist, which was going to need ice. The hand was already showing a bruise. Her throat was raw from screaming. She stared at her reflection in the side mirror dangling from Paul’s Porsche. Her wet hair was plastered to the shape of her skull. She was wearing the same dress she’d worn to the funeral yesterday afternoon. Her waterproof mascara had finally given up the ghost. Her lipstick had long been chewed off. Her skin was sallow.

  She could not remember the last time she had lost her shit like this. Even on the day she’d ended up in jail, Claire had not lost this volume of shit.

  She closed her eyes and breathed in the silence of the large room. The BMW’s engine was cooling. She could hear it clicking. Her heart was giving six beats for every one click. She put her hand to her chest and wondered if it was possible for your heart to explode.

  Last night, Claire had gone to bed expecting nightmares, but instead of dreaming about being chained to a concrete wall, the masked man coming for her, Claire’s brain had given her something far worse: a highlight reel of some of her most tender moments with Paul.

  The time she’d twisted her ankle in St. Martin and he’d driven all over the island looking for a doctor. The time he’d scooped her up with the intention of carrying her upstairs, but because of his bad back ended up making love to her on the landing. The time she’d woken up from knee surgery to find a smiley face drawn on the bandage around her leg.

  Could the man who still, almost twenty years into their marriage, left notes on her coffee cup with an actual heart with their initials inside really be the same man who’d downloaded that movie onto his computer?

  Claire looked down at the broken racket. So much money, and the sad truth was that she really preferred a sixty-dollar Wilson.

  Back when she and Paul were students, they always made lists when they couldn’t figure out what to do. Paul would get a ruler and draw a line down the center of the page. On one side they would list reasons they should do something, buy something, try something, and on the other side they would write the reasons not to.

  Claire pulled herself up to standing. She tossed the racket onto the Porsche’s hood. Paul kept a notepad and pen on his workbench. She drew a line down the center of a blank page. Paul would’ve broken out into a sweat over that line. It veered to the left toward the bottom. The pen had skipped off the page, curling up the edge.

  Claire tapped the pen on the side of the bench. She stared at the two empty columns. There were no pros and cons. This list was for questions and answers.

  The first question was: Had Paul really downloaded the movie? Claire had to assume that he had. Accidentally downloading files with viruses and spyware was Claire’s thing. Paul was too careful to accidentally download anything. And if by some off chance he had downloaded the movie by mistake, he would’ve deleted the file rather than storing it in his Work folder. And he would’ve told Claire about it, because that’s the kind of relationship they had.

  Or at least it was the kind of relationship she’d thought they’d had.

  She wrote the word “Accident?” in one column and “No” in the other.

  Claire started tapping the pen again. Could it be that Paul had downloaded the movie for the sado-masochism, then not realized until he got to the end that it was more than that?

  She shook her head. Paul was so straitlaced that he tucked his undershirt into his boxers before he went to bed at night. If someone had told her last week that her husband was into SM, after she choked down her laughter, Claire would have assumed that Paul would be a bottom. Not that he was passive in their sex life. Claire was the one more likely to just lie there. But sexual fantasies were projections of opposites. Paul was in control all of the time, so his fantasy would be to let someone else take over. Claire certainly had daydreams about being tied up and ravished by a stranger, but in the cold light of day, that sort of thing was terrifying.

  And besides that, a few years ago when she’d read Paul several passages from Fifty Shades of Grey, they’d both giggled like teenagers.

  “The biggest fantasy in that book,” Paul had said, “is that he changes for her in the end.”

  Claire had never thought of herself as an expert in male behavior, but Paul had a point, and not just about men. People did not change their basic, core personalities. Their values tended to stay the same. Their personal demeanors. Their world outlook and political beliefs. One need only go to a high school reunion to verify the theory.

  So, going by this, it made no sense that the man who had cried when their cat had to be put down, who refused to watch scary movies, who joked that Claire was on her own if an ax murderer ever broke into the house, would be the same man who derived sexual pleasure from watching horrible, unspeakable acts.

  Claire looked down at the notepad. She wrote, “More files?” Because that was the dark thought lurking in the back of her mind. The file name had been a series of numbers, and all of the files she’d seen in the Work folder were similarly numbered. Had Paul downloaded more of these disgusting movies? Was that how he spent his time when he told Claire he’d be working late in his office?

  She wasn’t a Pollyanna about these things. She knew men watched pornography. Claire herself wasn’t adverse to the soft-core sex of a pay-cable show. The thing was that their sex life had been fairly tame. They’d tried different positions or variations on a theme, but after eighteen years, they knew what worked and they stuck with the old standards. Which was likely why Claire had ended up taking Adam Quinn up on his offer last year at the company Christmas party.

  Claire loved her husband, but sometimes, she craved variety.

  Was Paul the same? She had never considered the possibility that she wasn’t enough for him. He had always been so smitten with her. Paul was the one who reached down to hold her hand in the car. He was the one who sat close to her at dinners and put his arm around her at movies and watched her cross the room at parties. Even in bed, he was never pleased until she was. He rarely asked Claire to use her mouth on him, and he was never an asshole about it. Back when she still had friends, they had jealously teased her about Paul’s devotion.

  Had that been for show? Through all the seemingly happy years of their marriage, had Paul yearned for something more? And did he find that something more in the disgusting contents of that movie?

  Claire wrote down another question: “Is it real?”

  The production had an amateurish feel, but that could’ve been on purpose. Computers were capable of amazing things. If they could make it look like Michael Jackson was dancing on stage, they could make it look lik
e a woman was being murdered.

  The pen was tapping again. Claire watched it bounce between her fingers. The workbench top was bamboo. The damn thing had proven to be indestructible. She’d been half tempted to take a page from Lydia’s book and piss all over it.

  Lydia.

  God, what an unexpected slap in the face to see her sister after all these years. She would not be telling her mother about the meeting, mostly because Helen had enough to fret over between Paul’s murder and the burglary. Besides, the irony was not lost on Claire that less than a year after her family broke ties, Lydia had finally managed to get herself clean. Between looking for Julia and paying bail bondsmen and lawyers and rehab clinics for Lydia’s upkeep, Sam Carroll had been nearly bankrupt when he’d finally taken his life.

  For that sin alone, Claire should’ve cut off her sister, but then she’d accused Paul of trying to rape her, and that had been the final straw.

  Did Paul hurt you? Lydia had asked, standing less than ten yards from Paul’s grave. Is that what this is about?

  Claire knew what the “this” was. It was doubt. She was doubting her husband because of what she’d found on his computer. Her mind had made the leap from Paul watching violence to actually committing it, which was a stupid connection because millions of young men played violent video games but only a handful went on spree killings.

  Then again, Paul had once told her that there was no such thing as coincidence. “The Law of Truly Large Numbers provides that given a large enough sample size, any outrageous thing can happen.”

  Claire looked down at the three items on her list:

  Accident?

  More files?

  Is it real?

  At the moment, only one of those outrageous questions could be answered.