The Missing Read online

  Caitlin and crying Isabelle stood over the two of them. She noticed, though she hadn’t before, that they were wearing matching pink floral dresses, which even in the moment struck her as asinine.

  Caitlin’s brow was furrowed in a look of pure hatred. It was shocking in its intensity. In its secrecy, because she did not know that Meg was awake. Her eyes rolled across Meg’s small body, and it wasn’t Albert, Meg realized, that she hated. She knows what I did with her husband, Meg thought with the kind of shame that feels like an open wound. So why does she keep coming to the library every week?

  Something warm trickled across her fingers, and she guessed, but didn’t want to know for sure, that it was Albert’s blood. At first she thought Caitlin had begun screaming at her, could have sworn she heard the word “whore!” but then, in the distance, she recognized the sirens.

  FIVE

  Robitussin for What Ails You!

  On the afternoon that his wife swung a steel chain into her good friend’s back, Fenstad Wintrob was listening to Lila Schiffer babble. Her voice was Chinese water torture. Duller than a dinner with Andre, more superficial than a “Free Tibet” rally, more painful than the eyeball-bleeding stage of hemorrhagic fever.

  Lila had been talking nonstop for twenty minutes. Her current topic was the changing of the seasons, and the fact that autumn always seemed like the end of something. “Like you’ll never get it back, because even when next summer comes, it won’t be the same. It’ll be a different summer,” she said.

  Her dazed smile gave her the semblance of someone who’d recently undergone an ice-pick lobotomy. She didn’t know how to talk to men, even her own psychiatrist, without flirting. But despite her late-night calls, low-cut tube tops, and the lingering smears of bright red lipstick that she left on his cheek when she kissed him good-bye, Fenstad wasn’t tempted. Well, that wasn’t true. Her body was round and taut as a 1940s pinup girl’s. But he’d never seriously considered her. First, she was his patient. Second, infidelity was not something Meg would forgive.

  He winced just thinking about this morning. Cold, she’d called him. Then she’d shaken her head like a martyr, and he’d wondered whether all women were fickle, because did she think at forty-eight years of age he was going to change?

  Besides, cold wasn’t so bad. It meant he was practical, dependable. People trusted him. That’s why he was a psychiatrist. He didn’t chew on problems: He solved them.

  His whole life, people had confided in him. Kids on the track team who still wet their bed (well, just the one), teachers who couldn’t get dates, fellow med school students with drug problems—you name it. They had always come to him first.

  Even his mother used to chew his ear. Back in Wilton, Connecticut, her voice had cut through the air like ammonia. “Fennie!” she’d hollered whenever she heard the patter of his little feet along the wooden hallway. Some of his sharpest childhood memories were of standing vigil at her bedside while she itemized her complaints. From underneath her finely woven Egyptian cotton sheets, she’d weep for her long-dead grandfather and the imaginary cancer that she was convinced was scooping the marrow from her bones. For reasons he still didn’t understand, her room had smelled like fermenting cabbage and musky sweat. To this day he associated that scent with her undiagnosed manic depression.

  When Fenstad was old enough to stay away from home, he did. He joined the cross country and track teams, and long after meets were over he’d sit on the gym bleachers and study until a janitor turned out the lights. At night he’d sneak through the back door of his parents’ house, gobble whatever leftovers in sealed Tupperware he could find, and then collapse into bed without taking off his shoes while his stereo headphones hummed the lullabies of Warren Zevon and Lynyrd Skynyrd.

  Still, encounters with Sara Wintrob were unavoidable. “Fennie,” she’d call when she heard him tiptoeing down the stairs in rubber-soled sneakers weekend mornings. He’d dutifully visit her room, where she’d tell him, “You’re father doesn’t love me anymore. He’ll leave me, and we’ll be all alone,” or better yet: “I think I’m dying, Fennie. My heart keeps stopping and starting again.”

  Despite her endless complaints, she managed to get a lot done while Fenstad and his father were out of the house. The meals got cooked, the groceries bought, and the clothing washed. Even the Hustler collection Fenstad hoarded under his mattress got tossed into the garbage bin every month like clockwork.

  The incident Fenstad would nominate as most worthy of forgetting took place when he was a sophomore in high school. He’d just come home from track practice after racing three sets of eight hundred-meter time trials. His legs had been weak as wet noodles when Sara called him into her room, and he’d had to hold on to the banister as he’d mounted the stairs. When he got to her bedside, Sara was breathing fast and heavy. Hypochondria, he’d immediately thought, and then, deep down, even though he knew it wasn’t true, heart attack.

  “Mom?” he’d asked. Her white cotton nightgown had been tangled around her waist, and he’d noticed that her legs were still firm despite the apparent disuse. Her dark hair had hung in wet, sweaty rings. She took his hand and placed it over her breast: “Do you think it’s a lump?”

  In those days he’d thought about girls constantly, though he hadn’t touched one yet. In school he got so horny just looking at them that he had to fill his mind with images of Cambodian refugees and his grandfather’s fungus-filled toenails just to keep from exploding. He’d started to wonder whether he was a pervert, because even when his fifty-year-old fat-assed biology teacher stood from behind her desk or even smiled at him, his body had saluted her, and he’d imagined throwing her down against her steel-backed chair and getting it on.

  And so there he had been with his hand on his mother’s breast. Something moved beneath his fingers, and at first he’d thought it was a slithering insect. It wasn’t a bug. It was her hardening nipple. To his shame, he felt himself go hard, too. “Feel that, Fennie? Do you think it’s a lump?” she asked. He looked her in the eye and she winced; they both understood that there was no tumor.

  Sara and Ben still lived in Wilton, Connecticut. Ben never left, and Sara never died. They called once a week, and if Fenstad answered the phone he handed it to Meg, explaining that Meg was better at small talk. Most of the time, Fenstad believed he’d forgiven Sara for that small act of madness. Other times, when he woke from restless dreams and the lingering smell of fermented cabbage, he knew he hadn’t. To this day, whenever someone called him “Fennie,” shivers coursed along his spine like fallen power lines jigging across blacktop.

  Shortly after the episode with Sara and her thin nightgown, something inside Fenstad broke. He’d been wet with his own emotions as a kid, practically leaving puddles of the stuff like slugs’ trails wherever he walked. People were starving in Africa, he cried. His dad raised his voice, he quivered. A kid at school asked him why he didn’t celebrate Christmas, he didn’t come out of his room all weekend. And then something broke, and he got so depressed that he had a hard time getting out of bed. He couldn’t read, sleep, or tie his shoes without choking back tears. Most alarmingly, he started to imagine that the carpeted floor in his parents’ bedroom was wet with blood. Every time he walked across it, in his mind the thick fibers squished under his feet and sucked on his shoes.

  He never recovered from that break. Instead, after a while, a switch flipped inside him, and the depression ended. In its place he turned cold. Life got a lot easier after that. The burning in his stomach that he would later self-diagnose as juvenile ulcers healed. He was one of three Jews in a WASP town, but he stopped worrying that the kids who called him “kosher” meant something worse, like kike. Instead he put his arm around them, shined ’em a toothy grin, and said things like Fuck, yeah. Proud of it. He asked the prettiest girl in American History to the winter formal junior year. Her name was Joanne Streibler, and after the dance she let him lick his index finger and explore her soft, velvety places.

  Sure, he
didn’t feel things with the same intensity that he used to. He wasn’t elated the first time he and Joanne made love in his cousin’s Chevy G20 van. He didn’t jump for joy when he was accepted at Harvard, or when Meg promised to love, honor, and respect him at the Massachusetts State Justice of the Peace. But he was pleased, and that was just fine. Besides, Meg felt things deeply enough for the both of them.

  He knew he exhibited symptoms of an antisocial personality disorder. He never cried for people like Lila, or stayed up nights worrying about them. Under different circumstances he might have become a criminal, a thief, or even a sadist. When he learned of Meg’s affair he’d wanted to murder her, and he suspected that this instinct had lasted longer in him than in a normal person. He’d imagined burying her alive in the crawl space below the house, trapping her in the sixteen-hundred-degree waste incinerator at the hospital, strangling her with her own pearls while she begged for mercy, you name it. But the point was: He didn’t kill her. He forgave her.

  It was trite and a little infantile that he blamed his mother for the way he’d turned out, had become a doctor in order to save her, save himself from the nightmares so vivid that in his dreams even now he could smell the fermenting cabbage, feel the bloody rug on his feet, but so be it. You can’t help where you come from, and you certainly can’t help the direction that place points you.

  So he had his complaints, and maybe he was cold, but he was doing his best with what nature had given him. And fortunately, nature had given him a good deal more than it had bequeathed to Lila Schiffer.

  “On TV yesterday,” Lila said, “Dr. Phil’s guest was this guy who was talking about low carbohydrate diets. He said you should only eat red meat. It doesn’t make much sense to me, but if they say it on Dr. Phil it must be true.” With her fingers she traced the folds along the legs of her jeans. Then she continued. “Fall makes me gain weight…” He inwardly moaned. She was back on the changing seasons again. He wondered how she’d been able to rant about this for so many sessions without ever knowing that she was really lamenting her own fading beauty. “The houseflies come in fall. I hate bugs. Sometimes I want them to go away so badly I’m tempted to eat them.”

  Fenstad drooled a little, and then wiped it from the corner of his mouth with his shirt sleeve. He thought about Meg calling him cold. The bitch had spread her legs for the sleaziest sonofabitch in Corpus Christi, and you’d think he was the one who’d done something wrong. He thought about Chinese torture, the water dripping, dripping, dripping until a man went mad. He thought about a sickroom with plush blue carpet soaked in blood, and the sound his shoes might make as he walked across it.

  Lila grinned. He wondered if she was like this at home with her children, a whining hag who woke them from peaceful dreams. Just like Sara Wintrob. For a moment he hated Lila, and his wife, and his mother, and especially Freud.

  He looked up and noticed that Lila had stopped talking. He waited for her to begin again, but she didn’t. It occurred to him that she’d tired herself out.

  Fenstad cleared his throat. It was time to cut the crap. “You’re avoiding something. Tell me what happened this week,” he said.

  She cocked her head, and there was another silence. She was wearing an unprecedented amount of clothing. Usually her dress code was strictly roadhouse fare: tube tops and miniskirts. But today her long-sleeved blouse was buttoned above her bra line, and her jeans were high enough to conceal the butterfly tattoo on her hip.

  The clock ticked. He knew he should be paying attention, but instead he was thinking about Meg. This last year had been going great until now. Sure, she had her bad moods once in a while, but mostly he’d been thinking that their life together was on the mend. And then the fish comment. He hated when she called him a trout. And what was that supposed to mean, anyway: He was bad in the sack? She’d been faking it for, say, twenty years?

  “So,” Lila said, “I goofed, but only a little.” She shrugged her shoulders and grinned, like she’d been caught filling out a questionnaire in pen rather than pencil. “I was brushing my teeth, and I thought I’d just taste it but, well…” she said.

  “You drank Robitussin again?” he asked.

  She nodded. “Chest and cold. Sugar-free, at least.”

  “How much?”

  “Half the bottle. But then I threw it up again.” Robitussin is about 15% alcohol by volume. It’s mostly harmless, although a stiff scotch tastes a lot better.

  “Can you describe what triggered the drinking?” he asked.

  She chewed on her lip like she was thinking about it. Lila was newly divorced from a man who had never let her lift a finger, pay a bill, or even pick out a gown for the Corpus Christi Golf Club cotillion without his say so. She was a ping-pong ball in an ocean, trying to gain purchase. Her kids snickered at her and called her useless. Her contemporaries had never accepted her, this woman of lesser education and trashy good looks whom they viewed as competition. Her husband had remarried a younger trophy. And now she’d taken to drinking cough syrup because she was afraid that the neighbors would gossip if she bought the real stuff at the local liquor store.

  In a year or so she’d meet another man just like the one who’d left her, only older, and with luck she’d marry him. With more luck he’d die of old age or a heart attack before he replaced her, too. And the thing was, Fenstad could try to show her that this was no way to live, but she’d never believe him. In the end the best he could do was channel her cough-syrup drinking into a rigorous jogging program until a new man came around and told her she was pretty again.

  Lila grinned winningly, and he wondered: Who is the woman you’re hiding underneath that grin? It was the question that kept him coming to work every morning. The mystery of people. It was the thing underneath the layers of invention that sloughed away over weeks and months and years of therapy until their hypochondria, their neuroses, their self-flagellation all looked the same. What are you? he wondered when he saw these people. It was a question, quite frankly, that he often asked himself.

  “The news set me off,” she said.

  “The news?”

  “Yes. I was watching Entertainment Tonight and they ran this story about a blind man.”

  He nodded.

  “Aran and Alice were supposed to be doing their homework but they weren’t. I knew I should have scolded them, but I was watching the show about the blind man. He lived in Seattle, and the only way he got around was his golden retriever. I like hounds better, but you know where I’m going.”

  He remembered his dream for a moment, a barking dog, and then promptly forgot it. “You’ve caught me. I don’t know where this is going.”

  “The seeing-eye dog. They had to retire him because he got too old to take care of the man. He got fired, just like that, you know? That made me think of my first dog, and how he got put to sleep on account he bit my brother Tom. We grew up in Bedford, did you know that? A trailer park—I don’t usually tell people that. I only moved away when I married Aran Senior.

  “So I was thinking about the dog, and the rain, how it gets all wet in Seattle. And my brother and how much I miss him. He died in the fire in Bedford. He was asthmatic. Anyway, I told the kids I was going to take a bath and they said, ‘Fine, Lila,’ because they only call me by my first name even though I hate that.

  “And I was looking at the razor, you know? The straight one I got for Aran Senior as a gag present because it was an antique and he likes that kind of thing, or he used to. He left everything when he moved out. I guess he only pretended to like the presents I gave him. I guess they weren’t any good, those pretty crystal geodes and that Underwood typewriter from 1917. He treated them like they were nothing. And then I remembered you’re supposed to slice with the grain, like wood. So I did.”

  She rolled back the left sleeve of her white cotton blouse. Her wrist was crudely bandaged with brown masking tape and gauze. The exposed skin surrounding the area was red and inflamed.

  Fenstad’s stomach dropped.
For the first time in a long while he was disappointed in himself. He’d failed her. He’d sat in judgment of her, this redundant woman whose husband had thrown her away like a used condom. He’d forgotten that he was supposed to be her advocate. Screw the wall, he was supposed to be her friend.

  “Just the one arm.” She smiled. “I’m not a fanatic or anything…”

  “Go on,” he said.

  “Anyway, the water got all pink, and I was thinking about what would happen when they found me. The kids, they probably wouldn’t notice until they had to brush their teeth. They’d call him rather than breaking down the door. They’re closer to me, but they trust him. So it would have been a few hours before he found me. The blood would have settled to the bottom of the tub by then. It would have been all sticky like grout. In my hair, too. It would have clotted there. But then again, his new wife’s a redhead…” Her eyes were dull specks of coal, and her voice was without emotion. This was the real Lila, the one he’d been waiting this last year to meet. A breakthrough, at last.

  “I thought he’d find me and I’d look like Grace Kelly or something.” She laughed. The sound echoed eerily. “But you know, my skin would have gotten all pruned and thin. And I’ve packed on about six pounds. It would have scared the devil out of him, seeing me like that. He deserves it, too! The rest of his life he’d feel sorry for what he did to me.

  “I don’t know. I decided not to cut the other wrist. So I tried to stop the blood.” She lifted up her arm, “One of those cotton gauze jobs from a ten-year-old first aid kit. Probably dirtier than toilet paper, but you know me, I don’t know how to take care of myself.” Her fingers were pale, and each long nail was perfectly shellacked with red paint. “And then I saw the Robitussin and I thought, well, at least it’s not permanent, and nobody’ll know. So there was that.”