Already in fifth grade it had begun, a perplexing girl-meanness.
In sixth grade, it had become worse.
“Why don’t they like me, Mommy?”
“Why do they make fun of me, Mommy?”
For in Skatskill if you lived down the hill from Highgate Avenue and/or east of Summit Street you were known to be working class. Marissa had asked what it meant? Didn’t everybody work? And what was a class was it like... a class in school? A classroom?)
But Leah had to concede: even if Marissa had been invited home by an unknown school friend, she wouldn’t have stayed away so long.
Not past 5 P.M. Not past dark.
Not without calling Leah.
“She isn’t the type of child to...”
Leah checked the kitchen again. The sink was empty. No package of chicken cutlets defrosting.
Tuesdays/Thursdays were Marissa’s evenings to start supper. Marissa loved to cook, Mommy and Marissa loved to cook together. Tonight they were having chicken jambalaya which was their favorite fun meal to prepare together. “Tomatoes, onions, peppers, cajun powder. Rice...”
Leah spoke aloud. The silence was unnerving.
If I’d come home directly. Tonight.
The 7-Eleven out on the highway. That’s where she had stopped on the way home.
Behind the counter, the middle-aged Indian gentleman with the wise sorrowful eyes would vouch for her. Leah was a frequent customer, he didn’t know her name but he seemed to like her.
Dairy products, a box of tissues. Canned tomatoes. Two six-packs of beer, cold. For all he knew, Leah had a husband. He was the beer drinker, the husband.
Leah saw that her hands were trembling. She needed a drink, to steady her hands.
“Marissa!”
She was thirty-four years old. Her daughter was eleven. So far as anyone in Leah’s family knew, including her parents, she had been “amicably divorced” for seven years. Her former husband, a medical school drop-out, had disappeared somewhere in Northern California; they had lived together in Berkeley, having met at the university in the early 1990s.
Impossible to locate the former husband/father whose name was not Bantry.
She would be asked about him, she knew. She would be asked about numerous things.
She would explain: eleven is too old for day care. Eleven is fully capable of coming home alone... Eleven can be responsible for...
At the refrigerator she fumbled for a can of beer. She opened it and drank thirstily. The liquid was freezing cold, her head began to ache immediately: an icy spot like a coin between her eyes. How can you! At a time like this! She didn’t want to panic and call 911 before she’d thought this through. Something was staring her in the face, some explanation, maybe?
Distraught Single Mom. Modest Apartment.
Missing Eleven-Year-Old. “Learning Disabilities.”
Clumsily Leah retraced her steps through the apartment another time. She was looking for... Throwing more widely open those doors she’d already opened. Kneeling beside Marissa’s bed to peer beneath in a burst of desperate energy.
And finding — what? A lone sock.
As if Marissa would be hiding beneath a bed!
Marissa who loved her mother, would never never wish to worry or upset or hurt her mother. Marissa who was young for her age, never rebellious, sulky. Marissa whose idea of badness was forgetting to make her bed in the morning. Leaving the bathroom mirror above the sink splattered with water.
Marissa who’d asked Mommy, “Do I have a daddy somewhere like other girls, and he knows about me?”
Marissa who’d asked, blinking back tears, “Why do they make fun of me, Mommy? Am I slow?”
In public school classes had been too large, her teacher hadn’t had time or patience for Marissa. So Leah had enrolled her at Skatskill Day where classes were limited to fifteen students and Marissa would have special attention from her teacher and yet: still she was having trouble with arithmetic, she was teased, called “slow”... Laughed at even by girls she’d thought were her friends.
“Maybe she’s run away.”
Out of nowhere this thought struck Leah.
Marissa had run away from Skatskill. From the life Mommy had worked so hard to provide for her.
“That can’t be! Never.”
Leah swallowed another mouthful of beer. Self-medicating, it was. Still her heart was beating in rapid thumps, then missing a beat. Hoped to God she would not faint...
“Where? Where would Marissa go? Never.”
Ridiculous to think that Marissa would run away!
She was far too shy, passive. Far too uncertain of herself. Other children, particularly older children, intimidated her. Because Marissa was unusually attractive, a beautiful child with silky blond hair to her shoulders, brushed by her proud mother until it shone, sometimes braided by her mother into elaborate plaits, Marissa often drew unwanted attention; but Marissa had very little sense of herself and of how others regarded her.
She had never ridden a bus alone. Never gone to a movie alone. Rarely entered any store alone, without Leah close by.
Yet it was the first thing police would suspect, probably: Marissa had run away.
“Maybe she’s next door. Visiting the neighbors.”
Leah knew this was not likely. She and Marissa were on friendly terms with their neighbors but they never visited one another. It wasn’t that kind of apartment complex, there were few other children.
Still, Leah would have to see. It was expected of a mother looking for her daughter, to check with neighbors.
She spent some time then, ten or fifteen minutes, knocking on doors in the Briarcliff Apts. Smiling anxiously into strangers’ startled faces. Trying not to sound desperate, hysterical.
“Excuse me...”
A nightmare memory came to her, of a distraught young mother knocking on their door, years ago in Berkeley when she’d first moved in with her lover who would become Marissa’s father. They’d been interrupted at a meal, and Leah’s lover had answered the door, an edge of annoyance in his voice; and Leah had come up behind him, very young at the time, very blond and privileged, and she’d stared at a young Filipino woman blinking back tears as she’d asked them Have you seen my daughter... Leah could not remember anything more.
Now it was Leah Bantry who was knocking on doors. Interrupting strangers at mealtime. Apologizing for disturbing them, asking in a tremulous voice Have you seen my daughter...
In the barracks-like apartment complex into which Leah had moved for economy’s sake two years before, each apartment opened directly out onto the rear of the building, into the parking area. This was a brightly lit paved area, purely functional, ugly. In the apartment complex there were no hallways. There were no interior stairs, no foyers. There were no meeting places for even casual exchanges. This was not an attractive condominium village overlooking the Hudson River but Briarcliff Apts, South Skatskill.
Leah’s immediate neighbors were sympathetic and concerned, but could offer no help. They had not seen Marissa, and of course she hadn’t come to visit them. They promised Leah they would “keep an eye out” and suggested she call 911.
Leah continued to knock on doors. A mechanism had been triggered in her brain, she could not stop until she had knocked on every door in the apartment complex. As she moved farther from her own first-floor apartment, she was met with less sympathy. One tenant shouted through the door to ask what she wanted. Another, a middle-aged man with a drinker’s flushed indignant face, interrupted her faltering query to say he hadn’t seen any children, he didn’t know any children, and he didn’t have time for any children.