The Missing Read online

  That was the tragedy. Albert was no dope. He was thirty-three years old, but his breakdown happened when he left for college at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to become a city planning engineer. He was eerily quick with numbers, but the separation from his family, and the pressure of classes and making new friends, had overwhelmed him. He became delusional and insisted that something was calling him back to Maine. He dropped out of MIT and moved home with his parents. Fifteen years later he still hadn’t recovered. He refused to medicate the problem with antipsychotics, and instead drank booze until he passed out practically every night. Years of hard living had turned him into an old man. He was missing his eyeteeth, and the sparse tufts of hair on his head were white. He couldn’t afford real booze, so he made home brew instead. He filtered Scope through white bread, and kept it in jars under his bed while it continued to ferment. Then he drank the juice, which he called bread pudding. She knew this because the smell was noxious and his landlord had cited him for six sanitation violations, which his aging parents who lived across town, at a loss, had paid.

  She’d always thought of him as a gentle and tragic giant, but during a recent fit of delirium tremens at the hospital, he punched a fourteen-year-old candy striper in the throat. The candy striper happened to be a bulimic, so the muscles in her throat were paper-thin. Albert tore a hole in her esophagus. After three hours of surgery, she recovered, though her interest in medicine was, understandably, dampened. The act was Albert’s first display of violence, but for Fenstad once was enough. He told Meg not to let Albert visit the library anymore. Told as in ordered.

  Her husband was right, of course. Albert was worse with every passing day. A few weeks ago he’d confessed to her that he’d trapped a rat in his apartment, and after skinning and then roasting its body over the flame of a Bic cigarette lighter, he’d eaten it. Years of bread pudding had taken their toll. His Tourette’s-like eruptions were intensifying, and he certainly didn’t belong near children. But Meg liked Albert, and she didn’t like being ordered around. So for now, until he proved himself dangerous, he stayed. With mental hospitals closing their doors all over the country, where else were people like Albert supposed to go?

  “Aaaheeem!” Albert suddenly ticked loud enough to clear a gorilla out of his throat.

  Meg tapped her plastic pen against the Plexiglas a few times, but Albert didn’t notice. He took a deep breath that looked like it was going to erupt into a howl. Not now, Albert, she thought. I’m in no damn mood for somebody else’s crazy. She banged her fist until the office wall shivered. From the other side, Albert stopped mid-breath. Now they were both standing, the Plexiglas between them.

  He was six-foot-five, and about 180 pounds. She was five-foot-nothing in three-inch heels. She knit her brows and slowly shook her head. On the other side of the plastic wall, Albert blushed. “Sorry, Ms. Wintrob,” he mouthed, and sulked back into his chair.

  Meg sat back down. Usually she shared her office with the business officer and deputy librarian, but they quit when the city cut their salaries last month. The town was still trying to hire their replacements. The rest of her staff was all volunteer, and they tended to gather at the reception desk, where they could drink coffee and read books in peace without Meg Wintrob’s probing eye.

  Meg lifted her Publishers Weekly and took a bite out of her soggy sandwich. Fenstad, she was thinking. There was a time that she’d loved him, but she couldn’t remember it right now. These days when she saw him, she wanted to kick him. This made her think of the bird this morning, which in turn made her eyes watery. The brainless bird.

  Five minutes later she looked at the clock. It was edging toward two P.M., and she had to get ready for story hour. She tossed her mostly untouched sandwich into the trash, and stood. Outside, Albert was quiet. All she could hear was the clickety-clack of his fingers typing against the keyboard, searching, no doubt, for photos of Andersonville. She tapped on the Plexiglas and nodded at him, hoping he’d behave while she was gone. Then she opened the door to the children’s library.

  The walls of the children’s library were painted like a cloudy sky, and at the room’s center was a circle of interconnected orange plastic chairs designed to look like the Barbapapas. This children’s room was Meg’s pride. All day it hummed with life. Right now toddlers were wobbling across the rainbow-patterned carpet while seven mothers and two fathers jabbered about their part-time jobs, the Farmer’s Almanac predictions for the coming winter, and the good old days before babies, when six P.M. had meant cocktail hour.

  Meg opened Sarah Shey’s picture book about Iowa called Sky All Around, and began to read. Every time the book mentioned the sky, Meg pointed at the white cumulus clouds painted against the blue ceiling. All except Isabelle Nero pointed, too. Isabelle contentedly gummed her index finger like it was a chew toy.

  Isabelle’s mother, Caitlin, was young, blond, and button-cute. She sewed Isabelle’s pretty dresses, worked mornings selling advertising space for the Corpus Christi Sentinel, and gave her husband nightly back rubs. Meg knew this because Caitlin’s husband was Graham Nero.

  Graham brokered long distance for a Boston-based investment firm, and in his spare time ogled cocktail waitresses. As their rendezvous he’d chosen room 69 at the Motel 6. Meg had done it partly for the thrill, but mostly for a reaction from Fenstad. Sex the first few times had been fantastic, most likely because she hadn’t liked the guy enough to hold back. Still, if you’re sleeping with a man, eventually you have to look him in the eye, and respect him. With Graham, that hadn’t been possible. She’d looked at him, and cringed.

  Fenstad found out within a month of their first visit to room 69. He never confronted her, or even explained how he found out. One night, instead of turning on the tube and watching the evening news, he sat at the kitchen table after she cleared it. Immediately she’d known that something was wrong. “I think you have a new friend,” he’d said.

  “Yes,” she’d said. “I’m sorry.” She’d waited for him to shout, to hit a counter, to cry, to announce that one of them had to move out. She’d been looking forward to it. But he didn’t say anything. He just nodded, like he’d weather this storm of her temporary insanity, because even if she didn’t know it herself, he trusted that she’d return to her senses.

  What galled her most was that he was right. She called Graham that very night. Fenstad was listening at the table when she told him, “I can’t see you anymore. My husband knows.”

  “Tough break, babe,” Graham had said, which pretty much summed up Graham Nero. And Fenstad, sitting at that table, kept reading the paper, which pretty much summed up Fenstad Wintrob.

  When Meg finished reading Sky All Around, she directed parents and children alike to the stack of books she’d selected on the subjects of Iowa and clouds. “Thank you, Meg. You’re so good at story hour,” Caitlin said with a blushing smile when it was over, and Meg nodded: “Anytime.”

  Meg pitied Caitlin. Graham wasn’t inherently bad, but he was selfish. He’d ride her until her health gave out and her looks were gone. Caitlin was such a chump, she’d let it happen. Then Meg felt guilty, because she could quibble with the man’s bedside manner, but at least Fenstad was a decent person.

  Just then, someone started shouting in the reference department: “Hey. Hey-o! Heyoooh!!!” The voice, unmistakably, was Albert’s. She frowned. He was never this loud.

  “I’ll be right back,” Meg announced. She found Albert slapping his hands against either side of the used iMac he’d been working on, while the Plexiglas partition quivered. “Heyoooh!” he shouted, which meant, what, hello? Beads of spit hung in gooey strands between his mouth and the keyboard. Not surprisingly, but nevertheless infuriatingly, the three old ladies that made up the volunteer staff were hiding behind the reception desk. From a distance, Meg could see the top inch of Molly Popek’s white bird’s nest of hair.

  “Albert?” she asked.

  “Heyoooh—Stoopit!” he said. He was slamming so hard
against the machine that for once his tremors weren’t noticeable. She translated his babble: Hey, you! Stop it.

  “Shut up!” Sheila Haggerty, the local bag lady, shrilled. On the table in front of her was the steel chain-link lock that she brought with her to the library every day, but never remembered to use to attach her grocery cart to the library’s bike rack. “I hate a whiny whiner! My husband could shoot you!” she hollered.

  “He’s digging,” Albert cried. “Oh, God. He’s digging up my pretty bones.” Drool flung in wild reams across his cheeks: “Heyooostooopit!” he shouted again as he slammed his hands against the monitor. Then she heard a loud click. He kept pounding, and as he did, his left wrist flexed parallel to his hand in a way that could only mean it was broken. What scared her most was that the break didn’t slow him down.

  “Molly!” she shouted, “Call the police.” Molly was standing now. She looked at Meg for a second or two, and then turned her attention back to Albert without picking up the phone. Time was short, but Meg had just enough of it to mentally curse the friggin’ coffee-sucking volunteers. Then she summoned the courage to come closer. On Albert’s computer screen was a photo of an Andersonville burial. In it, Union soldiers were stacked ten men deep in an open grave. Their gaunt, naked bodies were pressed together like fitted puzzle pieces, inhuman and mundane.

  “Albert!” she shouted. His back was to her, and he continued to slam his hands against the plastic machine.

  “Albert!” Sheila mimicked in hysterical singsong: “Al-bert! Al-bert!” Then Bram and Joseph, the other two locals that made up the mental illness quartet she’d been abetting at the Corpus Christi Library, started shouting, too. The reference department was a sudden chorus, and she felt like queen of the loonies.

  Across the library, parents quietly exited with toddlers in their arms. None of them, sadly, would be checking out or returning any books today. “I’m sorry,” she murmured to Christen Fowler, who shook her head while walking out with her son, like it was Meg who was causing the ruckus.

  After a while, Albert got tired and stopped banging. Sheila kept screaming his name until Meg shot her the scariest look she could muster: a knit-eyebrow, pruned-lip combo. Then she turned back to Albert, but was careful to keep her distance. “What’s eating you?” she asked.

  Albert was panting from fright, or exertion, or both. “So itchy. On the inside!” he hissed. “Hey-ohhhh, stop digging!”

  “Let’s go outside, Albert. We’ll take a walk.” She tried to keep her voice calm, but it wavered, and she could hear her own fright. He was, literally, twice her size.

  Albert’s eyes were bloodshot from booze. “In my bones it itches. All my places that count. How could that little boy do something so bad?” He came toward her. She thought of the candy striper and covered her throat.

  “Molly!” she yelled. “Now. Nine-one-one. Now.” Molly blinked but didn’t move. In her peripheral vision she saw Lina Varvaran’s father, Rich, pull a cell phone out of his pocket. He stood in the doorway of the building with his daughter to get better reception.

  There were cuts along the tips of Albert’s fingers. Blood had gathered there with such force that his skin had burst open. He was panting and wet with sweat. Slowly his body eased back into the chair, and she hoped he’d spent himself into exhaustion. She decided it was safe and felt his forehead for a temperature. His skin was clammy and cold, but her touch calmed him, and he visibly relaxed. “Does the itch feel like bugs on your skin?” she asked.

  Albert shook his head. There were tears in his eyes. She felt very sorry for him just then. As if in some other dimension there was a clean-cut Albert Sanguine who was building bridges and raising a family, but in this one, all the cards he’d been dealt were unlucky.

  His pupils got big, so that his eyes looked black instead of brown. “Let me go. Please, Ms. Wintrob,” he muttered so quickly that it could have been one long tick.

  “Have you had a drink today? Some of that bread?” she asked. “Do you need one?”

  He shook his head. “Itches so bad. Like when your foot is rotting, and the moss grows inside where it doesn’t belong. Hurts so bad.” He was crying.

  Meg pulled Albert’s chin between her fingers and looked into his eyes. Even though he was sitting, her body was dwarfed next to his. “Pull yourself together,” she said. “I mean it.”

  “It’s awake,” he whispered, and a chill ran down her spine. What was awake? The demon inside him that drove him to drink? For one frenzied moment she wondered: What if this voice he’s been raving about these fifteen years is real?

  His pupils got even bigger, until no white was left. A seizure? She didn’t know. But suddenly his breath came easy. His posture stiffened. Even his tremors were gone. He was different. She couldn’t explain how she knew this, but it was true. Albert Sanguine had left the building. At first she was too sad to be frightened. The booze had finally gobbled the remains of Albert’s soul, and the last spark of his personality was gone.

  “Albert?” she asked.

  It happened fast. He squeezed her upper arms with bloody hands. She struggled to get away, but he was strong. As he pulled her between his legs, he flexed his thighs. The gesture was sexual. She gasped. Albert. Her Albert: How could he do this?

  She was inside his lap. His arms and legs held her in place like a vise. “Stop!” she shouted. His lips were drawn high over the blackness of missing eyeteeth, and his face was a snarl.

  He lurched forward and pressed his wet mouth against her ear. She wriggled, and decided that if necessary, she’d bite off his nose while trying her best not to swallow anything. She could smell the bread alcohol. The smell of vinegar and shit. “Where did I go wrong, Meg?” he whispered, and she stopped struggling. She went still. His voice was low. Reasonable, but not at all kind.

  Impossible. There was no way. And yet, she knew to whom that voice belonged. “Where did I go wrong?” he asked again, and suddenly she was a young woman, dropping out of law school to marry a Jew her father didn’t approve of, and on the morning of the wedding, instead of telling her that he’d always love his little girl, he’d asked: Where did I go wrong?

  “Daddy?” Meg’s voice was halting and childlike.

  He pulled back and she looked at him, this man. A black gap in his mouth, a ruined face, white hair. His bleary eyes were full of resentful affection. The only kind of affection, she realized, that she’d ever understood. But her father was dead, wasn’t he? Long ago she’d made her peace and let go of him, the man for whom nothing she’d ever done was good enough.

  In a quick move he was standing, and she was in his arms. She saw it coming, but there wasn’t time to fight. He tossed her against the Plexiglas like a hollow-boned bird. She heard the whistle of air as she flew, and then a smack, and wiggling plastic like techno music. When she looked up from the ground, it took her a second before she figured out how she’d gotten there, or what that snapping sound had been.

  To her own dismay (wasn’t she supposed to be a fighter?), she didn’t get up off the floor, but instead curled into a ball and played dead. When nothing happened she peeked out and saw Albert opening the door to the children’s room. Then came the sounds around her that she hadn’t noticed before. “Shut up! Shut up!” Sheila was singing. Bram tore his Corpus Christi Sentinel into pieces and flung them in Albert’s direction, as if trying to confetti him to death. The children’s section was ominously quiet.

  Her left ankle hurt like fire, but she hobbled toward her office. She stopped when she realized that the only reason she wanted to get there was to call Fenstad. She wanted to hear his steady, calm voice. She wanted, ridiculously, to tell him that she might not like him, but she definitely loved him.

  Across the way something smashed. Had Albert pushed over a bookcase? Then a small voice cried, “Help,” and adrenaline coursed through her blood so fast she could feel the rush: A kid was in there with Albert. A little kid.

  On a hobbled foot, she started to charge. Bu
t then she stopped. She needed a plan or he’d swat her like a fly. Her ankle hurt so bad that she was biting on her lip to keep from fainting. She scanned the reference room. There was something she was looking for. Something she could use. She looked at the bookcases, the too-big couches, the computers (electrocution?), the Bic pens not nearly sharp enough to poke out an eye, and then she saw it near the newspapers: Sheila’s two-foot chain-link lock. “Shut up!” Sheila sprayed with spit as Meg lifted it off the table and limped into the children’s library.

  Albert was standing on the rainbow carpet with his back to her. He’d cornered Caitlin Nero and her daughter, Isabelle, behind a Barbapapa chair. Everyone else was gone.

  Meg sneaked up behind him. She saw sparks and her peripheral vision went hazy. This pain in her ankle was no sprain: Her leg was turning blue. She bit down harder, until she tasted blood, and it kept her focused. Then she loosened the chain in her hands so that the heavy part hung slack enough to swing.

  A second passed, and then another. She waited. Maybe this wasn’t necessary. Maybe she was the real nut in the room, swinging a bike lock like some kind of modern-day Bernie Goetz. This was how people got killed. Hotheads overreacted. Her grip started to loosen, but then Isabelle coughed, and Albert charged.

  Meg dragged her broken foot behind the good one. She cocked her arms and swung just before he got hold of Caitlin Nero, who’d inserted herself between Albert and little Isabelle. Meg swung so hard that she spun, and then, off balance, fell.

  The lock curved around Albert’s back and struck his pelvis. The sound it made was a soft thud, and at first she thought she hadn’t swung hard enough, but then his upper body teetered over his still feet, and he collapsed. He fell down next to her so that they lay facing each other. The L. L. Bean catalogs from his pocket scattered across the rainbow carpet.

  He didn’t look like Albert. His mouth was drawn into a scowl, and the rotten booze on his breath was rancid. Like star-crossed lovers, their lips were inches apart. “Where did I go wrong?” he mouthed. Then his eyes fluttered shut.