The Missing Read online

  He knew what he needed to do. The voice told him so. He picked up a sharp rock and broke the black dirt. The wind picked up a little at first, and then a lot. Branches jingled like music appreciation on caffeine; out of tune and heedless. That’s right, James, the voice said, only the voice wasn’t outside him anymore. It was crawling inside him. Slithering between his ears. Peering at the woods from behind his eyes. He blubbered a little and slapped his face. “Get out!” he shouted, even though a part of him liked it, too.

  Don’t hide from me, James, it said. I know you. The voice was like Gimpy’s tongue, soothing and ticklish. He missed Gimpy. He missed being touched. The thing moved inside him, and nestled in the space between his ears. How long had it been since a friend had come over to play? A month? No, longer. Not since last year. In school they called him the pee eater.

  I know you, James, and I like you anyway, it said. James smiled, because in his mind the thing showed him a picture of Gimpy, twitching, and he knew it was true.

  He stopped slapping and started digging. The dirt was hot and inky between his fingers. It felt wrong, like it had been cooked. He lifted a fistful, and then another. The hole got bigger. He dug for a long time. He dug until everything hurt, and then he dug past that until there were new, worse hurts. In his mind the thing showed him pictures. They were bad pictures, but he liked them.

  He dug past the pain in his back, his aching legs, and his bleeding fingers. Dug past his own heavy breathing, past when he remembered what he was doing, or why. The voice lulled him, like being tucked into a warm bed. It didn’t talk anymore, but he could feel it inside him. He thought about Gimpy, and his family, and Miss Lois, whom he wished on that first day of school hadn’t asked him in front of the whole class: “I see you’re older than the others, James. Does that mean you require special attention?” And then, after a while, he thought about nothing. Everything went dark. He fell asleep even though he was awake, just like that time with Gimpy. Still, he kept digging.

  He woke up in the dark, to someone shouting his name. He was standing in a deep hole, digging. How had it gotten so late so fast? Just five minutes ago the sun had been high in the sky. Now there were stars. His hands were bloody, and his back and legs hurt so bad he couldn’t bend without moaning. For how long had be been digging?

  “James!” a voice cried from far away. Was it his new friend? The voice sounded angry, and too loud. “Can you hear me, James?” it shouted again, and it was terrifying because he recognized it. Miss Lois had come back looking for him. Only this time, she’d brought his father. Miller Walker was calling to him on a megaphone. “Come here right now!”

  James took a deep breath. His chest was so sore that his lungs ached. A vise of muscles in spasm clamped tightly around his back until he hunched over. His bleeding fingers hurt the worst, and he blew on them to take his mind off the pain.

  An eye opened inside him, and winked. Keep digging, James, it told him. I know what you want. I’ll give it to you. Yes, James thought. It knew the truth. He was bad. He was that boy from the water, pale skin and black eyes. He’d killed his own rabbit.

  He lifted another handful of dirt. And another. Maybe Gimpy was down here, waiting for the bad thing to be undone. If James worked hard enough, maybe he could undo it. Sure, he knew it was impossible. But then again, this place was supposed to be magic.

  Something smelled bad in the dirt all the sudden. It was like rotten eggs. It came out in a spray of fog from the hole, and filled the woods. Still, he kept digging. After another handful, he touched something hard and hot. He scraped the dirt from its sides until he could pull it free. Smart boy! the voice said to him, and he smiled, because the voice sounded proud. He was smart, wasn’t he? He’d guessed about the Hulk without anyone’s help.

  The thing was brown and hard. Lighter than a rock. Longer than a ruler. He dropped it on the ground above because it made his hands hurt like frostbite. A bone, he realized. The bone from an animal’s arm. No, not Gimpy. Too big to be Gimpy. It smelled so bad his eyes watered. It’s everything you want, James, the voice said, and James knew he didn’t care about Gimpy anymore. He wanted the thing that was buried. He wanted to see the face behind the voice.

  His dad was still shouting into the megaphone, but it was too late to turn back. Miss Lois would never forgive him, and since he’d become a left-back, Miller Walker stopped looking him in the eye, or calling him “good buddy.” He kept digging, and pulled out another bone.

  His fingers were cramped into loose fists. He was so thirsty that his mouth had dried out and he couldn’t move his tongue. He’d lost a fingernail. It had torn from his pointer finger, and he hadn’t even noticed. There were more bones. He traced their edges until they were free. His bloody fingers dripped as he eased the bones onto the inky soil outside the hole. There was a skull, and toes. He smiled. The skull was human.

  He piled the bones in a red heap. He was bleeding a lot now. There were cuts all over his hands and arms that he didn’t remember having gotten. The wind picked up. Dead trees gnashed against each other until the sound wasn’t music; it was screaming.

  Sweat dripped from his brow, and his face was set as still as a plaster cast. His blood laced the bones. Marked them with color. It didn’t hurt. A part of him, most of him, was sleeping. Something hot was in James’s trousers. Another stiffie? No, not a stiffie; he’d wet his pants.

  He saw, he didn’t know how he’d missed this before, that along the edges of the clearing were dead animals; skunk, squirrels, birds, and deer. Their husks piled the rim of the expanse like stacks of wood. The buried thing had done this. It had gotten inside their minds and told them to attack each other so it could taste their spilled blood from under the ground. It wasn’t ink that had made this dirt black.

  James felt the wrong emotion. He couldn’t help it. He clapped his hands together and laughed.

  Everything you want, the thing promised, and James knew it was true. In his mind’s eye he saw his parents gored bodies. In his mind’s eye his brother, Danny, was the mental cripple, and James sat on the Walker family throne.

  A raccoon from the woods approached. Its teeth were bared, and its eyes were black. More came. Their fattened bodies wobbled toward him. They swayed on small legs like they were sick, and they smelled so bad that he cupped his raw hands over his mouth and stopped breathing.

  They’ve gone mad, he thought, just like me.

  He knew what was going to happen. The thing whispered it in his ear. If he’d been a sane little boy he might have run. The swerving raccoons gnashed their teeth. His blood spilled, and laced the bones, and he thought about Gimpy. He knew then, during the last moments, how his rabbit had felt.

  PART TWO

  INCUBATION

  THREE

  Splitting Atoms

  On the Tuesday morning that James Walker went missing, Meg Wintrob was crawling underneath the foundation of her house. The paper boy had missed his mark with the Corpus Christi Sentinel again, and she got on her hands and knees to retrieve it. Her hips shrieked in protest, and she bit down on her lower lip through the pain. Bursitis. Sure, she kept in shape and dyed her hair jet black with the help of Miss Clairol, but stuff like this made it hard to forget that she was middle-aged.

  The crawl space was about two feet high and ran the width and length of the entire house. The Sentinel wasn’t far out of reach, but as her eyes adjusted to the dark, she could also make out her son David’s lost Sit ’n Spin from fifteen years ago, a cluster of three-leafed plants that looked suspiciously like poison ivy, and a collection of aging Sentinel s from days, months, and years past. Jack Frost had peed on this morning’s paper, and its pages adhered to one another in a soggy clump. She shook her head full of tight black curls and thought: For once, just one frickin’ year, could the town hire a paper boy who didn’t throw like a sissy?

  She’d only been in this crawl space a handful of times. Spiders were down here, she was sure. At this very moment she could feel one of the
ir thick webs flossing her cheek. The wooden beams down here looked sturdy, and there wasn’t a single crack in the concrete base. Everything was in order, which was reassuring, she guessed. But disappointing, too. She wanted a reason for the way she felt.

  Soggy paper in hand, Meg turned onto her stomach and crawled out. As she shimmied toward the steps, poison ivy brushed against her faded terry-cloth robe. Their leaves shone like plastic. She wasn’t allergic, but she knew she should avoid the stuff. Still, it was one of those instincts, like waiting until the last minute before swerving around a beer bottle in the road, that came from a place deep down. She wanted to feel the ivy, rub it on her fingers, taste it on her tongue. Eat the white poison berries, just to see what happened. So she picked a few, and put them in the pocket of her robe.

  Then she climbed out and sat on the stoop. The town, along with her family, was still sleeping. Red-orange rays of the coming dawn filtered through the dense pine trees in her yard. Not a single car or neighbor was outside yet. Back in the house, coarsely ground coffee was percolating over a gas flame. Eggs needed to be poached. Appointments had to be scheduled. Theoretically, the day was full of promise.

  She’d been feeling blue since her son, David, had left for his sophomore year at UCLA two weeks ago. He bleached his hair and eyebrows now, and wore sparkly coral necklaces that made him look…pretty. He was either going for the surfer look or working up the courage to tell them he was gay. She suspected the latter. Though he’d never said so, she knew Fenstad blamed her. She’d been too affectionate, made her son a mama’s boy. He alluded to it every time she and David went for a long walk, had a tickle fight, or baked cookies together. He’d walk into the kitchen with his eyes open wide like David was her lover and he’d caught them in an affair. Then he’d say something ridiculous like, “A man should stand on his own two feet,” and neither she nor David would have any idea how to respond. Fenstad could be a real dipshit.

  She missed David more than she’d expected, which probably explained why she got involved with Graham Nero last year. Maddie and Fenstad expected hot meals and paid bills, a clean house and smart advice. They appreciated the things she did, certainly; she was no long-suffering martyr. But still, they expected it.

  Take Maddie. Over the summer she’d pierced her belly with a steel ring, using only a swab of alcohol and an ice cube for anesthetic. “I am so hardcore!” she’d shouted as she burst into the kitchen with her thumbs, index fingers, and pinkies saluting the ceiling like a heavy metal vixen. Only the blood never stopped gushing down her blue polka dot bathing-suit bottoms. To get the ring to puncture her skin more smoothly, she’d coated its point with Crisco, unwitting of the fact that grease is an anticoagulant. When it’s applied, blood won’t clot. They almost had to make a trip to the emergency room before Meg’s common sense got the better of her, and she pulled the damn ring out herself so the wound could heal. But that was Maddie. The girl acted first, reasoned later. She didn’t look both ways when she crossed the street, smiled at strangers, and recently had dyed her hair purple before reading the label and realizing that the color was permanent.

  Then there was Fenstad. If left to his own devices he’d limit his diet to beef jerky and wear the laundry from his hamper that smelled least like armpit. Twenty years of marriage, and the man had never learned to cook pasta. Once in a while she’d look at these two rubes sitting across from her at the dinner table and wonder: Where the hell am I?

  Meg swiveled on the stoop now. Her crossed legs were numb. Pins and needles pricked through her feet all the way up to her bottom. Oh, God, she was getting old. Somebody should give her a tube of Ben-Gay and a pair of orthopedic shoes and call it a day.

  Temperatures today were supposed to spike at sixty degrees. Perfect sweater weather. Hooky weather, really. She and Fenstad could call in sick, take a drive to Baxter State Park, hike Katahdin, and gorge themselves on the last of summer’s blueberries along the trail. They always meant to do things like that: take trips, rent rooms in cheap motels and have aerobic sex, go bowling in the afternoon. They talked about these things all the time, but they never did them. Somehow, after all these years, they’d never found the time.

  Funny how that can happen. But no, let’s not be glib. It wasn’t funny at all.

  After the fire in Bedford, Fenstad had suggested that they sell the house and move to Boston. He’d worried that the hazmat signs on Exit 117 spelled disaster. But soon enough the signs came down, and talk of moving was forgotten. Still, it had gotten her thinking. In another year after Maddie finished school, they could sell the house if they wanted. Go their separate ways. Move on while they were both young-ish. Make that middle-aged. Such thoughts felt like hot metal coursing through her blood and turning hard. They were too painful to think, and yet they persisted.

  Not the type for sighing, Meg pursed her lips. A nest of birds that lived in the second-story gutter began to chirp. Bluebirds? Blackbirds? Sparrows? She didn’t know. Hummingbirds were her favorite. They flapped their wings so fast they looked like one big blur, just so they could stand still. Now that’s dedication.

  Meg put her hands in her pockets, and the poison ivy berries squished. Fenstad was probably awake by now. He and Maddie didn’t talk lately. Growing pains—he missed that she wasn’t his little girl anymore, and so did she. So now they ignored each other because they couldn’t figure out how else to act. Unlike Maddie, whose moods swung in a pendulum depending on what she’d eaten, whether she was getting along with her boyfriend, and the time of the month, Fenstad was the voice of reason. Quiet, considered, logical. He rarely laughed and never cried. Cold, really. Her husband was cold.

  Meg dropped the berries down the walk, where they rolled. Goose bumps rose on her arms and legs. She shaved practically every place on her body that grew hair except the top of her head, so her skin was smooth as a waxed peach. Her grandparents on both sides came from northern Italy and most of her family was light-skinned, but she was the dark and swarthy throwback from another generation. Adolescence hit when she was only eleven, and during the summer before she began the seventh grade, she started menstruating. As an added, awkward bonus, a furry black mustache appeared like a lost caterpillar across her upper lip. The teasing in school that fall was relentless. More mean-spirited twelve-year-olds than she cared to count fake-asked her out. (Will you marry me, Dogface? Phil Payne had begged with tears of laughter streaming down his face. I love you, Dogface!) A rumor spread by bathroom wall graffiti and her former friends insisted that she was a hermaphrodite. One girl even claimed to have seen her penis in the girls’ locker room.

  That Christmas break she bought a home wax kit. In no time, she learned to pluck, wax, shave, and diet herself into a polished and shiny version of the former Meg Bonelli. Despite the persistent rumors about the appendage between her legs, by the eighth grade she was dating the captain of the junior varsity wrestling team, and at the end of her senior year in high school she was the third runner-up for prom queen, a position she campaigned bitterly for. After the winner was announced, she’d hidden her tears by squatting in a locked bathroom stall for twenty minutes. Still, when she met Fenstad three years later, he would never have guessed that her nickname had once been Dogface, or that if she skipped waxing her lip and chin for a week, she grew a formidable five o’clock shadow. She took some feminine pride in the fact that he still didn’t know.

  To this day, the threat of those short-lived tauntings remained. She took great pains to iron the creases in her trousers into crisp lines, to dry her hair into a straight, blunt edge that framed her small, angular face. She’d learned to value the cleanness of unbroken lines, the order of a bleached-white smile, the silhouette of her own slender waist in a fitted pleated skirt. She regretted that she had bequeathed this perfectionism onto Maddie, who at breakfast sucked on grapefruit slices, one sliver at a time.

  Meg squinted. The sun was shining higher in the sky now, and the town was beginning to wake. Her house on River Street overl
ooked downtown Corpus Christi, and in the distance she could see its squat hospital and abutting four-tiered parking lot. Farther down was the Episcopalian church adorned with a plain copper cross that had turned green. Along River Street were two-level shops that lined up in a row. On the road, a slow procession of cars carrying doctors, nurses, anesthesiologists, and administrators headed for the hospital.

  All the lawns in this town were neat and green. Her gardening team came once a week and like magic seeded the earth and clipped the hedges. A legion of domestics rode the bus to Corpus Christi from parts west. They worked off the books, cleaning houses, mopping store floors, and sweating bare-chested in the hot sun. She never spoke to her gardener, or her Wednesday afternoon cleaning lady. Instead she left envelopes full of money for them, across which she scripted their first names. It was the way things were done here in Corpus Christi, which didn’t necessarily mean she approved of it.

  Meg’s empty stomach growled, and she thought about coffee, eggs. The paper in her hand was a clump of heavy mush. But still, she watched. Something about this morning, this town in front of her, this house on which she was perched, made her sad. She missed it, even though it was not yet gone. She loved it the way you love something you are about to lose.

  Since the whole Graham Nero disaster, the word was on her mind all the time. It kept her up at night, surfacing as ominously as the unidentifiably bloated Bedford floaters that had risen from the Messalonski River all summer long. She thought about it when fighting with Maddie, while paying bills, while watching late-night television, while kissing her husband good-night. No matter how hard she tried to bury it, the word would not sink. Divorce, she thought at least once during every waking hour of her day. Divorce. Divorce. Divorce.