The Missing Read online

  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 program 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 jukebox 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 moment 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 father. 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, Andrew. 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 going 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 reserved 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 technology stocks that bottomed out in 2002 at four grand. No problem! Lois had announced: “I’ll use those Discover 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 squeezing 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?

  He asked for his ring back, and she gave it to him. It wasn’t his nature to take back a gift. Shiftless, yes. Mean-spirited, no. She should have guessed that he’d been coached. Instead she’d been wondering: Why me? When everyone else gets being a grown-up exactly right, how have I done it so wrong?

  Sobbing, she walked back into her mother’s house. The land of velour couches, Formica kitchen tables, and fading salmon-colored walls. State-of-the-art in the 1980s, sure. But not exactly modern anymore. The den smelled distinctly human with its windows sealed tight, and her mother reclining under a wool blanket since the sun had peeked through the holes in the brown Levolor blinds that morning.

  A Who Wants to Be a Millionaire rerun was playing on the television. Lois walked into the den, sniffling. In response, Jodi Larkin turned up the volume. Regis was asking how many floors combined used to make up the two towers of the World Trade Center, which even in her sorry state she’d recognized as tasteless. The answer, for eighty thousand dollars, was 220. A buxom young contestant guessed correctly, and her breasts jiggled like she wasn’t wearing a bra when she jumped up and down with manic joy. At the commercial break Lois said, “Mom, Ronnie and I had a fight.”

  Jodi Larkin hesitated for less than a second before her eyes glazed over, and she flipped the channel to a TBS Law & Order: Special Victims Unit marathon. Lois knew what that silence meant. She’d heard the actual words behind it twice. Once when she asked for help making a car insurance payment, and then again when she confided to Jodi that she thought she might be pregnant. The gesture meant: You’re a grown woman. This is my time. Don’t come to me with no problems, ’cause I got ’em, too.

  For the next week, like a record skipping over and over again in her mind, Lois kept wondering: What had she done wrong? Was there someone else in his life? And what the hell was she going to do with her life now?

  The field trip to Bedford wasn’t the best solution. The school board approved of it, mostly because Portland was too far for fourth graders to travel. She’d promised that they’d stay on the bus until they reached the woods, which for the most part hadn’t been affected by the accident. They’d examine some of the indigenous flora, get a mini-lesson on the history of paper mills, have lunch, and head back to Corpus Christi. A cultural expedition. A nature walk.

  Mostly, the reason Lois picked Bedford was that she’
d been dying to see the place since the fire. After the Clott Corporation closed down last spring, some of the locals had vandalized the building. Out of anger or desperation or just plain stupidity, they’d set fire to the chemicals there, and half the town had gone up in a cloud of smoke. About twenty people died from the fumes, and plenty of others got sick in the aftermath. Some of the wildlife and vegetation died, too. The animals lost their instincts. Deer stopped feeding milk to their young. Birds forgot how to fly and fell out of the sky. House cats died by starvation in a strange kind of suicide. Even the spiders, the Environmental Scientist noted, began spinning broken webs.

  She’d studied this stuff at UNH, so she knew that the symptoms closely matched methyl mercury poisoning. Mercury targeted the part of the gray matter that regulated survival instincts. In humans it also compromised speech, and caused Tourette’s. But the EPA tested the air and the ashes of Bedford for neurotoxins along with everything else they could have tested for. They didn’t find anything. They said that the sulfur in the ground from the explosion didn’t reach high enough levels to cause alarm. It was acidic, and might kill some trees, but otherwise benign. They declared Bedford safe. Still, no one could explain the birds that crashed to their deaths in mid-flight, or the trees along the town’s sidewalks that had shriveled up like Shrinky Dinks in an oven. The whole thing was a mystery.

  Despite the EPA’s reassurances, everybody left Bedford after the fire. People like the Fullbrights who could afford it moved to Corpus Christi. Others just scattered. Lois had heard that clothes were still strewn across bedroom floors, sunken pies gathered mold in ovens, and clocks ticked the hour for no one to hear. A real, live ghost town—the kids would love it!

  Only last night had it occurred to her that Bedford might be dangerous. The Sentinel’s photos of scientists collecting samples of the water in the river there had shown them in full space suits and respirators, even after the area was declared clean. But that was months ago. By now, surely, the woods were safe. The rain would have washed any remaining chemicals away. The EPA would never lie about something so important, would they? Besides, everything in life was a little risky. She was living proof that if you spend your whole life avoiding recklessness, your whole life can turn out a wreck.

  When she woke up this morning, a week had gone by since Ronnie had chucked her, and the bright sun had shone across her face just a little less insultingly. She hadn’t died or anything, and the trip to Bedford might be fun. These years in Corpus Christi, she’d forgotten that she liked new places. She liked learning things. Adventures were a blast!

  She’d bounced her way down the stairs, thinking: Okay, I had a failure. A pretty big one. But I’ll get over it. Ronnie was a prick. Mr. Time Waster. Mr. Pothead Black Hole Loser. Mr. Stay-in-Corpus-Christi-Instead-of-Going-to-School-So-Both-Our-Lives-Can-Suck. Mr. I-Never-Loved-You. He can shit up a tree with that garbage. And while I’m on the subject, Noreen can drop dead, too.

  She poured herself some coffee. Her mother was still awake from the night before, watching Regis and Kelly, who were bantering, and she couldn’t tell if it was their shtick or they hated each other. Maybe hating each other was the shtick. Her mother sipped a Gordon’s Gin and orange juice. A final nightcap before sleep. Lois warmed her hands against her coffee mug. She thought about grad school applications. She thought about leaving this house one day; acting like she was going out for a roll of Tums or a stick of Trident, and never coming back. Only she’d get farther than Dad. She chuckled at the thought of their faces when Ronnie, or Noreen, or her mother came knocking on her bedroom door looking for a loan or a punching bag, and nobody was home.

  Then she opened the morning edition of the Corpus Christi Sentinel and turned pale. She closed her eyes, and in her mind said a hasty Hail Mary (when God closes the door, Mary opens a window). She peered again at the paper. Ronnie and Noreen smiled back at her.

  The photo was black and white. Ronnie’s arms were wrapped around Noreen’s thick waist, and they were both smiling. Matching stars were painted on their cheeks. The photo had been taken at the Memorial Day fair. She knew because she was the person who’d taken it.

  Underneath the photo was a wedding announcement.

  A misprint! It had to be. But the article said otherwise. Over the years, the author reported, Ronnie and Noreen’s friendship had blossomed (blossomed like what, a case of herpes?). This last month, they’d discovered their “eternal and undying love.” Lois glared at that article for so long, holding her breath even though she didn’t know it, that she got dizzy and fell out of her chair.

  She’d felt like somebody had emptied a bottle of Drano into her stomach, and it was burning its way out. It seeped into her throat, her heart, her groin. She could feel it behind her eyes like tears; she could feel it under her fingernails. She could feel it shrinking inside her, taking her organs with it, making her small. Making her bitter. Making her so angry that the only color she could see was red. She wanted blood, suddenly. She wanted to eat Ronnie, or Noreen, or even herself, alive.

  Her mother turned from the Folgers Crystals commercial and glanced at the article. She didn’t flinch or grimace or even smile. “Weird,” she said. Then she plopped her empty glass of gin in the sink and wobbled up the stairs.

  Lois sat there for a few seconds. Then she raced to the bathroom, and threw up. To her credit, it wasn’t until she leaned against the cool porcelain, and realized that her period was six weeks late, that she started bawling.

  There wasn’t time to get a substitute. No time to call in sick. So here Lois was, sniffling in front of her class, trying to figure out how it was that her life got so screwed up when everybody around her with half the brains and twice the meanness was sitting pretty. When she finished roll call, she clapped her hands together and tried her best to smile, because the class mother, Janice Fischer, looked worried, like she thought Lois was about to drown in her own spit-covered attendance book. “Did everyone bring a lunch?” she asked.

  The children nodded.

  “Doeth everyone remember their partnerth?”

  They did not, and so she paired them up by height and told them to stand next to each other as they boarded the bus. Her trouble kid James Walker announced: “I’m too old for a buddy.” It was true; he’d been left back twice.

  James grinned at her. She didn’t like thinking this about an eleven year-old, but he was a bad seed. His wiring wasn’t right, and when the other children fell or got hurt, his eyes lit up like it was Christmas morning and he’d found a puppy under the tree. A dead puppy. Keeping James Walker from having a partner was a public service.

  “Fine,” Lois said. “Don’t have a partner. George, you can ride next to me.”

  They got on the bus and headed for the road that connected Bedford and Corpus Christi. In bad weather it was closed, but on this autumn day without a snowflake on the ground, it was open. She saw the bend in the road where her father’s Nissan had crashed, and blinked until the scenery changed, like she did every time she passed it. The trip was only a few miles, but after they crossed the Messalonski River and entered the town of Bedford, they might as well have entered another country.

  Bedford was a desolate place. There were no cars on the road, no lit-up houses, no mail trucks. Not even a local sheriff’s office. Out her window she saw the heap of rubble and concrete that had once been the Clott Corporation’s paper mill. Heavy black ashes surrounded the charred skeletal frame of the building. There hadn’t been enough state funds for a serious cleanup, and no one lived in Bedford to complain to the feds, so there the pile remained.

  The bus rumbled through Main Street. The ramshackle houses were literally falling apart, and all the front lawns were dead. Signs across abandoned stores were hung askew, or not at all. The sidewalk was broken into pebbles, and front doors were black with soot. The kids got quiet and pressed their noses against the windows. They’d never seen anything like this. They pointed at the old barbershop whose windows were broken, the
sickly fawn foraging for food in a dumpster, and the mountain bike without wheels in the middle of the street. The place was an open-air graveyard.

  As they neared the woods they saw a trailer by the side of the road. What Lois saw obliterated Ronnie from her mind. Attached to the trailer were crude effigies of people. Nylon-covered wads of cotton shaped like pioneer men and women were hung on nooses affixed to the top of the trailer. They wore jeans and work shirts or frumpy dresses. The cotton had lost its edges, so their arms and legs looked like they were unraveling into squids’ appendages. A word in large print was attached to each life-sized doll. All together the words read: “She is always hungry. She is never satisfied.”

  Lois’s stomach sank. Who would do such a thing? A squatter? A local? A lunatic? Maybe this field trip wasn’t the best of her bright ideas. Right up there with, say, giving Ronnie money for pot or buying wine for her mother because she wrote “sparkling pink Zinfandel” on the chalkboard in red capital letters like a scream.

  “What is that?” George asked, and even at the age of nine, he knew it wasn’t a funny thing; it was a bad thing.

  “Modern art,” Lois said, “for crazy people.”

  “Oh! Oh! My dad says only cousins used to live in Bedford. That’s why they burned the mill down. They’re all retarded,” Caroline called out.

  Lois looked back at the girl, and couldn’t think of anything to say.

  The bus let them off at the cemetery, which led to the woods. She taught them how to rub headstone inscriptions on paper. There were about twenty new graves upon which flowers had been left: April Willow, Susan Marley, Paul Martin, Andrea Jorgenson, Donovan McCormack. At the sight of them, Lois’s Catholic upbringing insisted she bend her head and say the Lord’s Prayer for their collective souls.