“What you said. It was hateful. You’re being hateful.”
“I am not.”
“You’re still pissed with me. About today. About what happened at the mall.”
I didn’t say anything. There was some truth to what she said. We hadn’t said a word on the way home after scooping up Grace in the food court. There were things I wanted to say but felt I could not. That I had had enough. That it was time for Cynthia to move on. That she had to accept the fact that her parents were gone, her brother was gone, that nothing had changed because this was the twenty-fifth anniversary of their disappearance, or because some second-rate news show had shown some interest. That while she might have lost a family long ago, and that it was undeniably tragic, she had another family now, and that if she wasn’t willing to live in the moment for us, instead of in the past for a family that was in all likelihood gone, then-
But I said nothing. I couldn’t bring myself to say those things. But I found myself unable to offer comfort once we got home. I went into the living room, turned on the TV, flipped through the channels, never settling on anything for more than three minutes. Cynthia went into a tidying frenzy. Vacuuming, cleaning the bathroom, rearranging soup cans in the pantry. Anything to keep her too busy to have to talk to me. There wasn’t much good that came from a cold war like this, but at least the house ended up looking ready for a spread in House & Garden. This call from the psychic hotline, by way of Deadline, it just pissed me off even more.
But I said, “I’m not pissed,” riffling my finger through the stack of papers I still had to mark.
“I know you,” she said. “And I know when you’re angry. I’m sorry about what happened. I’m sorry for you, I’m sorry for Grace. I’m sorry for that man, for what I put him through. I embarrassed myself, I embarrassed all of us. What more do you want from me? What more can I say? Aren’t I already going to see Dr. Kinzler? What do you want me to do? Go every week instead of every other week? You want to put me on some sort of drug, something that will numb the pain, make me forget everything that’s ever happened to me? Would that make you happy?”
I threw down my red marking pen. “Jesus Christ,” I said.
“You’d be happier if I just left, wouldn’t you?” Cynthia asked.
“That’s ridiculous.”
“You can’t take any more of this, and you know something? Neither can I. I’ve had enough of it, too. You think I like the idea of meeting with a psychic? You think I don’t know how desperate it looks? How pitiful it makes me look, to go down there and have to listen to what she has to say? But what would you do? What if it was Grace?”
I looked at her. “Don’t even say that.”
“What if we lost her? What if she went missing someday? Suppose she’d been gone for months, for years? And there wasn’t a clue as to whatever happened to her.”
“I don’t want you talking like this,” I said.
“And then suppose you got a call, from some person who said she had a vision or something, that she’d seen Grace in a dream, that she knew where she was. Are you telling me you’d refuse to listen?”
I ground my teeth together and looked away.
“Is that what you would do? Because you didn’t want to look like a fool? Because you were afraid of looking embarrassed, of looking desperate? But what if, what if there was just one chance in a million that maybe this person knew something? What if she wasn’t even psychic, but just thought she was, but had actually seen something, some clue that she interpreted as a vision or something? And what if finding out what that was actually led to finding her?”
I put my head in my hands, my eyes landing on, “Mr. Whitman’s most famous writing was ‘Leaves of Grass,’ which some people think is probably about marijuana, but it was not, although it’s hard to believe that a guy who wrote something called ‘I Sing the Body Electric’ wasn’t stoned at least some of the time.”
The next day, Lauren Wells wasn’t wearing her traditional tracksuit. She was in a snug black T-shirt and a pair of designer jeans. Cynthia would have known, at twenty paces, what kind they were. We were watching American Idol one night, on our tiny, non-high-definition screen, when she pointed to a contestant screeching out her own version of Bette Midler’s “Wind Beneath My Wings,” and said, “She’s wearing Sevens.”
I didn’t know whether Lauren was wearing Sevens, but she looked nice, and the male students were craning their necks around, getting a peek at her from behind as she made her way up the hall.
I was coming the other way and she stopped me. “How you doing today?” she asked. “Better?”
I couldn’t recall admitting to feeling anything less than perfect the last time we’d spoken, but said, “Yeah, I’m good. You?”
“Okay,” she said. “Although I almost took yesterday off. This girl, who was in my senior class in high school, she was killed in a car accident up in Hartford a couple of days ago, and this other friend I keep in touch with on MSN, she told me, and I just felt so bad about it.”
“She was a close friend, was she?” I asked.
Lauren offered up half a shrug. “Well, she was in my year. It took me a couple of minutes to place her when my friend mentioned the name. We didn’t actually hang out or anything. She sat behind me in a couple of classes. But it’s still a shock, you know, when something like that happens to someone you know. It makes you think, makes you reassess, which is why I almost didn’t come in yesterday.”
“To reassess,” I said, not sure Lauren’s predicament warranted an outpouring of sympathy. “These things happen.” I feel as bad as the next guy when someone dies in a traffic accident, but Lauren was using up my time to discuss a tragedy involving someone that not only did I not know, but it was becoming evident she didn’t know all that well herself.
Kids shuffled past, dodged and weaved around us as we stood in the middle of the hall.
“So,” Lauren said, “what’s she really like?”
“Who?”
“Paula Malloy,” Lauren said. “From Deadline. Is she as nice as she seems on TV? Because she seems very nice.”
“She has wonderful teeth,” I said. I reached up, touched her arm, motioned her toward the wall of lockers so that we weren’t blocking traffic.
“Listen, um, you and Mr. Carruthers, you’re pretty tight, right?” she asked.
“Rolly and I? Yeah, we’ve known each other a long time.”
“This is kind of awkward to ask, but in the staff room the other day, he was there, and, well, I think he might have, what I’m saying is, did he mention seeing me put something in your mailbox and taking it out later?”
“Uh, well, he-”
“Because, okay, I did leave something there, but then I thought about it, and thought maybe it was a bad idea, so I took it back, but then I thought, oh great, Mr. Carruthers, Roland, if he saw me, he’d probably tell you anyway, and then I thought, shit, I might as well have left it there because at least then you’d know what it said instead of wondering what it said-”
“Lauren, don’t worry about it. It’s no big deal.” I wasn’t sure I wanted to know what the note said. I didn’t want any further complications to my life at the moment. And I was certain I didn’t want complications with Lauren Wells, even if the rest of my life was as smooth as glass.
“It was just a note to you and Cynthia, that maybe you’d like to come over sometime. I was thinking of having some friends over, and thought maybe it would be a nice break for the two of you, with all you’ve got to think about. But then I thought, maybe I was being a bit pushy, you know?”
“Well, that’s very thoughtful,” I said. “Maybe sometime.” Thinking to myself, Not a chance.
“Anyway,” Lauren said, her eyebrows bobbing up for a second. “You going to the Post Mall tonight? They’re having some of the stars from the latest Survivor, signing autographs.”