“My mom’s hair is red,” I said, cutting her off. “Not as red as yours. Sort of a blondy red, you know? But yours is really beautiful.” Cynthia blinked. “So yeah, maybe I asked a couple of people about you, because I wondered if you were seeing anybody, and they said no, and now I guess I can see why.”
She looked at me.
“So,” I said, making a big thing of stuffing my notes into my backpack and flinging it over my shoulder, “sorry and all.” I stood up and turned to go.
“I’m not,” Cynthia said.
I stopped. “You’re not what?”
“I’m not seeing anybody.” She swallowed.
Now I was feeling my neck. “I didn’t mean to be an asshole there,” I said. “You just seemed a bit, you know, touchy.”
We agreed that she’d been touchy, and that I had been an asshole, and somehow ended up having a coffee at a campus snack bar, and Cynthia told me that she lived with her aunt when she wasn’t attending the university.
“Tess is pretty decent,” Cynthia said. “She didn’t have a husband anymore, didn’t have any kids of her own, so my moving in, after the thing with my family, that kind of turned her world upside down, you know? But she was okay with it. I mean, what the hell was she going to do? And she was sort of going through a tragedy, too, her sister and brother-in-law and nephew just disappearing like that.”
“So what happened to your house? Where you lived with your parents and brother?”
That was me. Mr. Practical. Girl’s family vanishes and I come up with a real estate question.
“I couldn’t live there alone,” Cynthia said. “And like, there was no one to pay the mortgage or anything anyway, so when they couldn’t find my family the bank sort of took it back and these lawyers got involved, and whatever money my parents had put into the house went into this trust thing, but they’d hardly made a dent in the mortgage, you know? And now, it’s been so long, they figure everyone is dead, right? Legally, even if they aren’t.” She rolled her eyes and grimaced.
What could I say?
“So Aunt Tess, she’s putting me through school. Like, I’ve had summer jobs and stuff, but that doesn’t cover much. I don’t know how she’s managed it, really, raising me, paying for my education. She must be in debt up to her eyeballs, but she never complains about it.”
“Boy,” I said. I took a sip of coffee.
And Cynthia, for the first time, smiled. “‘Boy,’” she said. “That’s all you have to say, Terry? ‘Boy’?” As quickly as it had appeared, the smile vanished. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what I expect people to say. I don’t know what the fuck I’d say if I was sitting across from me.”
“I don’t know how you handle it,” I said.
Cynthia took a sip of her tea. “Some days, I just want to kill myself, you know? And then I think, what if they showed up the day after?” She smiled again. “Wouldn’t that be a kick in the head?”
Again, the smile drifted away as though carried off by a gentle breeze.
A lock of her red hair fell forward across her eyes, and she tucked it back behind her ear. “The thing is,” she said, “they could be dead, and they never had a chance to say goodbye to me. Or they could still be alive, and couldn’t be bothered.” She looked out the window. “I can’t decide which is worse.”
We didn’t say anything for another minute or so. Finally, Cynthia said, “You’re nice. If I did go out with someone, I might go out with someone like you.”
“If you get desperate,” I said, “you know where to find me.”
She looked out the window, at other students strolling past, and for a moment, it was like she had slipped away.
“Sometimes,” she said, “I think I see one of them.”
“What do you mean?” I asked. “Like a ghost or something?”
“No no,” she said, still looking outside. “Like, I’ll see someone I think is my father, or my mother. From behind, say. There’s just something about them, the way they hold their head, the way they walk, it seems familiar somehow, and I’ll think it’s them. Or, you know, I’ll see a boy, maybe a year older than me, who looks like he could be my brother, seven years later. My parents, they’d still look pretty much the same, right? But my brother, he could look totally different, but there’d still be something about him that would be the same, wouldn’t there?”
“I guess,” I said.
“And I’ll see someone like that, and I’ll run after them, cut in front of them, maybe grab their arm or something and they turn around and I get a good look.” She turned away from the window, gazed down into her tea, as though searching for an answer there. “But it’s never them.”
“I guess, someday, you’ll stop doing that,” I said.
“If it’s them,” Cynthia said.
We started hanging out. We went to movies, we worked together in the library. She tried to interest me in playing tennis. It had never been my game, but I gave it my best shot. Cynthia was the first to admit she wasn’t a great player, just a fair player with a magnificent backhand. But it was enough of an advantage to make mincemeat out of me. When I served and saw that right arm of hers swing back over her left shoulder, I knew I had little hope of sending that ball back across the net to her. If I even saw it.
One day, I was hunched over my Royal typewriter, even then approaching antique status, a hulking machine forged out of steel and painted black, heavy as a Volkswagen, the “e” key looking more like a “c” even with a fresh ribbon. I was trying to finish an essay on Thoreau I honestly didn’t give a flying fuck about. It didn’t help any that Cynthia was under the blanket, fully clothed, on the single bed in my dorm room, having fallen asleep reading a tattered paperback copy of Misery by Stephen King. Cynthia wasn’t an English major and could read whatever the hell she wanted, and found comfort sometimes in reading about people who had gone through worse things than her.
I had invited her to come over and watch me type an essay. “It’s quite interesting,” I said. “I use all ten fingers.”
“At the same time?” she asked.
I nodded.
“That does sound amazing,” she said.
So she brought some work of her own to do, and sat quietly on the bed, her back up against the wall, and there were times when I felt her watching me. Then she lay down to read, and fell asleep. We’d been hanging out but we’d barely touched each other. I’d let my hand brush across her shoulder as I’d moved past her chair in the coffee shop. I’d taken her hand to help her off the bus. Our shoulders had bumped looking up into a night sky.
Nothing more.
I thought I heard the blanket get tossed aside, but I was consumed with setting up a footnote. Then she was standing behind me, her presence somehow electric. She slipped her hands around my chest and leaned down and kissed my cheek. I turned so that she could place her lips on mine. Later, under the blanket, before it happened, Cynthia said, “You can’t hurt me.”
“I don’t want to hurt you,” I said. “I’ll take it slow.”
“Not that,” she whispered. “If you dump me, if you decide you don’t want to be with me, don’t worry. I can’t be hurt any more than what’s already happened.”
She would turn out to be wrong about that.
5
As I got to know her, and as she began to let me into her heart, Cynthia told me more about her family, about Clayton and Patricia and her older brother, Todd, whom she loved and hated, depending on the day.
Actually, when she’d talk about them, she’d often retract her tenses. “My mother’s name was—my mother’s name is Patricia.” She was at odds with the part of herself that had accepted they were all dead. There were still sparks of hope, like embers in an untended campfire.
She was a part of the Bigge family. It was, of course, a kind of constant joke, given that their extended family, at least on her father’s side, was pretty much nonexistent. Clayton Bigge’s parents died when he was young; he had no brothers or sisters, no aunts or uncles to speak
of. There were never any family reunions to attend, no disputes between Clayton and Patricia over which family they’d go see at Christmas, although sometimes work kept Clayton out of town during holidays.
“I’m it,” he liked to say. “The whole family. There are no more.”
He wasn’t much of a sentimentalist, either. No dusty family albums of previous generations to linger over, no snapshots of the past, no old love letters from former flames for Patricia to throw out when she married him. And back when he was fifteen, a kitchen fire got out of control and burned his family house down. A couple generations of mementos went up in smoke. He was a day-at-a-time kind of guy, living for the moment, not interested in looking back.
There wasn’t that much family on Patricia’s side, either, but at least there was a history of it. Lots of pictures—in shoeboxes if not in albums—of her own parents and extended family and friends from her childhood. Her father died of polio when she was young, but her mother was still alive when she met Clayton. Thought he was charming, if a bit quiet. He’d talked Patricia into slipping away to get married, so there was no formal wedding, and that didn’t endear him to Patricia’s limited family.
Her sister, Tess, certainly wasn’t won over. She didn’t think much of the way Clayton’s work took him on the road more than half the time, leaving Patricia to raise her children alone for so many long stretches. But he provided for them, he was decent enough, and his love for Patricia seemed deep and genuine.
Patricia Bigge had a job in a drugstore in Milford, on North Broad Street, looking out on the town green, just down from the old library, where she would take out classical records from the library’s extensive music collection. She stocked shelves, worked the cash register, helped the pharmacist, but only with the most basic things. She didn’t have the proper training, and knew she should have taken more school, learned some sort of trade, something, but mostly she had to get out there and support herself. Same for her sister, Tess, who worked in a factory in Bridgeport that made parts for radios.
Clayton walked into the drugstore one day, looking for a Mars bar.
Patricia liked to say, if her husband hadn’t been hit by a Mars bar craving that day in July 1967, as he passed through Milford on a sales trip, well, things would have turned out very differently.
As far as Patricia was concerned, they turned out fine. It was a speedy courtship, and within a few weeks of getting married she was pregnant with Todd. Clayton found them an affordable house on Hickory, just off Pumpkin Delight Road, a stone’s throw from the beach and Long Island Sound. He wanted his wife and child to have a decent home to live in while he was on the road. He had responsibility for a corridor that ran roughly between New York and Chicago and up to Buffalo, selling industrial lubricants and other supplies to machine shops all along the way. Lots of regulars. Kept him busy.
A couple of years after Todd was born, Cynthia arrived.
I was thinking about all this as I drove to Old Fairfield High School. Whenever I daydreamed, I found it was often about my wife’s past, her upbringing, about the members of her family I never knew, would in all likelihood never be able to know.
Maybe if I could have had the chance to spend any time with them, I’d have more insights into what made Cynthia tick. But the reality was, the woman I knew and loved had been shaped more by what had happened since she’d lost her family—or since her family had lost her—than by what had happened before.
I popped into the doughnut shop for a coffee, resisted the urge to buy a lemon-filled while there, and was carrying my takeout cup with me into the school, a satchel full of student essays slung over my shoulder, when I saw Roland Carruthers, the principal, and probably my best friend here at this institution, in the hall.
“Rolly,” I said.
“Where’s mine?” he said, nodding at the paper cup in my hand.
“If you’ll take my period one class, I’ll go back and get you one.”
“If I take your period one class, I’m going to need something stronger than coffee.”
“They’re not that bad.”
“They’re savages,” Rolly said, not even cracking a smile.
“You don’t even know what my period one class is or who’s in it,” I said.
“If it’s made up of students from this school, then they’re savages,” Rolly said, staying in deadpan.
“What’s happening with Jane Scavullo?” I asked. She was a student in my creative writing class, a troubled kid with a messed-up family background that was vague at best as far as the office was concerned, who spent nearly as much time down there as the secretaries. She also happened to write like an angel. An angel who’d happily punch your lights out, maybe, but an angel just the same.
“I told her she’s this close to a suspension,” Rolly said, holding his thumb and forefinger a quarter inch apart. Jane and another girl had gotten into an all-out, hair-pulling, cheek-scratching brawl out in front of the school a couple of days earlier. A boy thing, evidently. Was it ever anything else? They’d attracted a sizeable cheering crowd—no one much cared who won as long as the fight kept going—before Rolly ran out and broke it up.
“What’d she say to that?”
Rolly pretended to chew gum in an exaggerated fashion, including “snapping” sound effects.
“Okay,” I said.
“You like her,” he said.
I opened the tab on the top of my takeout cup and took a sip. “There’s something there,” I said.
“You don’t give up on people,” Rolly said. “But you have good qualities, too.”
My friendship with Rolly was what you might call multilayered. He’s a colleague and friend, but because he’s a couple of decades older than I am, he’s something of a father figure, too. I found myself looking for him when I was in need of some wisdom, or, as I liked to say to him, perspective of the ages. I got to know him through Cynthia. If he was an unofficial father figure for me, he was an unofficial uncle to Cynthia. He had been a friend to her father, Clayton, before he went missing, and outside of her aunt Tess, was about the only person she knew with any connection to her past.
His retirement was imminent, and there were times when you could tell he was coasting, counting the days till he was out of there and down in Florida, living in his newly purchased mobile home someplace outside Bradenton, out on the water fishing for marlin or swordfish or whatever it was they pulled out of the water down there.
“You around later?” I asked.
“Yeah, sure. What’s up?”
“Just…stuff.”
He nodded. He knew what that meant. “Drop by, after eleven would probably be good. I’ve got the superintendent in before that.”
I went into the staff room, checked my cubbyhole for any mail or important notices and found none, and as I turned to head back into the hall, bumped shoulders with Lauren Wells, who was also checking her mail.
“Sorry,” I said.
“Hey,” Lauren said before she realized who’d bumped into her, and then when she saw me, smiled with surprise. She was decked out in a red tracksuit and white running shoes, which made sense since she taught phys ed. “Hey, how’s it going?”
Lauren had come to Old Fairfield four years ago, having transferred from a high school in New Haven where her former husband taught. When that marriage fell apart, she didn’t want to work in the same building with him, or so went the gossip. Having garnered a reputation for being an outstanding track and field coach whose students had won several regional competitions, she was able to pick and choose among several schools whose principals were happy to add her to their staffs.
Rolly won. He told me, privately, that he hired her for what she could bring to the school, which also happened to include “an awesome body, flowing auburn hair, and gorgeous brown eyes.”
First I said, “‘Auburn’? Who says ‘auburn’?”
Then I must have given him a look, because he felt obliged to say, “Relax, it’s merely an observat
ion. The only pole I can get up anymore I use to catch bass.”
In all the time Lauren Wells had been at this school, I’d never been on her radar until the show about Cynthia’s family had aired. Now, whenever she saw me, she asked how things were going.
“Any nibbles?” she asked.
“Huh?” I said. For a second, I thought she was asking whether anyone had brought snacks to the staff room. Some days, doughnuts miraculously appeared.
“From the show,” she clarified. “It’s been a couple of weeks, right? Has anyone called in with any tips about what happened to Cynthia’s family?”
It seemed funny, her using Cynthia’s name. Not “your wife’s” family. It was like Lauren felt she knew Cynthia, even though they’d never met, at least as far as I knew. Maybe at some school function in the last four years where teachers brought their spouses.
“No,” I said.
“Cynthia must be so disappointed,” she said, laying a sympathetic hand on my arm.
“Yeah, well, it would be nice if someone came forward. There has to be somebody out there who knows something, even after all these years.”
“I think about you two all the time,” Lauren said. “I was telling my friend about you just the other night. And you, how are you holding up? You doing okay?”
“Me?” I acted surprised. “Yeah, sure, I’m good.”
“Because,” and Lauren’s voice softened, “sometimes you look, I don’t know, maybe it’s not my place to say, but sometimes I see you in the staff room, and you look kind of tired. And sad.”
I wasn’t sure which struck me as more significant. That Lauren thought I’d been looking tired and sad, or that she had been watching me in the staff room.
“I’m okay,” I said. “Really.”
She smiled. “Good, that’s good.” She cleared her throat. “Anyway, I’ve got to get to the gym. We should talk sometime.” She reached out and touched my arm again and held her hand there a moment before taking it away and slipping out of the staff room.