Carthage

  Bye! See you-all later.

  Possibly, they hadn’t heard. Cressida hadn’t troubled to come to the kitchen doorway, to announce that she was going.

  Zeno hadn’t been home. Out at the liquor store, choosing wine with the fussy particularity of a man who doesn’t know anything about wine really but would like to give the impression that he does.

  It shouldn’t have been anything other than an ordinary evening though it was a Saturday night in midsummer.

  In upstate New York in the Adirondack region, the population trebled in summer.

  Summer people. Campers, pickup trucks. Bikers’ gangs. In the night, on even a quiet residential street like Cumberland, you could hear the sneering roar of motorcycles in the distance.

  At the lakes—Wolf’s Head, Echo, Wild Forest—there were “incidents” each summer. Fights, assaults, break-ins, vandalism, arson, rapes, murders. Small local police departments with only a few officers had to call in the New York State Police, at desperate times.

  When Zeno had been mayor of Carthage, several Hells Angels gangs had congregated in Palisade Park. After a day and part of a night of drunken and increasingly destructive festivities local residents had so bitterly complained, Zeno sent in the Carthage City Police to “peaceably” clear the park.

  Just barely, a riot had been averted. Zeno had been credited with having made the right decisions, just in time.

  No one had been arrested. No police officers had been injured. The state troopers hadn’t had to be summoned to Carthage.

  The bikers’ gangs hadn’t returned to Palisade Park. But they congregated, weekends, at the lakes. Still you could sometimes hear, in the distance, at night, a window open, the sneering-defiant motorcycle-whine, mixed with a sound of nighttime insects.

  Arlette left the bedroom. Zeno hadn’t wakened.

  In a thin muslin nightgown in bare feet making her way along the carpeted corridor. Past the shut door of Juliet’s room—for she knew, Juliet was home—Juliet had been in bed for hours, like her parents—unerringly to the room in which she knew there was something wrong.

  By this time, past 4 A.M., Cressida would have returned from Marcy Meyer’s house. Hours ago, she’d have returned. She wouldn’t have wanted to disturb her parents but would have gone upstairs to her room as quietly as possible—it was a peculiarity of their younger daughter, since she’d been a small child, as Zeno noted she could creep like a little mousie and no one knew she was there.

  Even as Arlette was telling herself this, she was pushing open the door, switching on a light, to see: Cressida’s bed still made, undisturbed.

  This was wrong. This was very wrong.

  Arlette stood in the doorway, staring.

  Of course, the room was empty. Cressida was nowhere in sight.

  They’d gone to bed after their guests left and the kitchen was reasonably clean. They’d gone to bed soon after 11 P.M., Arlette and Zeno, without a thought, or not much more than a fleeting thought, about Cressida who was, after all—as they’d been led to believe—only just visiting with her high school friend Marcy Meyer less than a mile away.

  Maybe the girls had had dinner together. Or maybe with Marcy’s parents. Maybe a DVD afterward. Misfit girls together in solidarity Cressida had joked.

  In high school, Cressida and Marcy had been “best friends” by default, as Cressida said. Friendships of girls unpopular together are forged for life.

  (It was Cressida’s way to exaggerate. Neither she nor Marcy Meyer was “unpopular”—Arlette was certain.)

  Slowly Arlette came forward, to touch the comforter on Cressida’s bed.

  With perfect symmetry the comforter had been pulled over the bedclothes. If Arlette were to lift it she knew she would see the sheets beneath neatly smoothed, for Cressida could not tolerate wrinkles or creases in fabrics.

  The sheets would be tightly tucked in between the mattress and the box springs.

  For it was their younger daughter’s way to do things neatly. With an air of fierce disdain, dislike—yet neatly.

  All things that were tasks and chores—“household” things—Cressida resented having to do. Her imagination was loftier, more abstract.

  Yet, though she resented such tasks, she dispatched them swiftly, to get them out of the way.

  Can’t imagine anything more stultifying than the life of a housewife! Poor Mom.

  Arlette was frequently nettled by her younger daughter’s thoughtless remarks. Though she knew that Cressida loved her, at times it seemed clear that Cressida did not respect her.

  But if you hadn’t been up for it, Jule and I wouldn’t be here, I guess.

  So, thanks!

  Arlette wondered: was it possible that Cressida had planned to stay overnight at Marcy’s? As she’d done sometimes when the girls were in middle school together. It seemed unlikely now, but . . .

  For God’s sake, Mom. What an utterly brainless idea.

  Arlette left Cressida’s room and went downstairs. She was breathing quickly now though her heartbeat was calm.

  From a wall phone in the kitchen downstairs, Arlette called Cressida’s cell phone number.

  There came a faint ringing, but no answer.

  Then, a burst of electronic music, dissonant chords and computer-voice coolly instructing the caller to leave a message after the beep.

  Cressida? It’s Mom. I’m calling at four-ten A.M. Wondering where you are . . . If you can please call back as soon as possible . . .

  Arlette hung up the phone. But immediately, Arlette lifted the receiver and called again.

  The second time, she fumbled leaving a message. Just Mom again. We’re a little worried about you, honey. It’s pretty late . . . Give us a call, OK?

  Now invoking us. For Cressida did respect her father.

  It occurred to Arlette then that Cressida might be home: only just not in her room.

  From earliest childhood she’d been an unpredictable child. You might look for her in all the wrong places as she watched you through a crack in a doorway, bursting into laughter at the worried look in your face.

  Especially, Cressida had thought scrunched-up (adult) faces were funny.

  So Arlette checked the downstairs rooms of the house: the TV room in the basement, which Cressida didn’t often occupy, objecting that it was partially underground and, in very wet weather, wriggly little centipedes appeared on the (Sears, slate-colored, slightly stained) wall-to-wall carpeting to her extreme disgust; Zeno’s cluttered home-office, with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves crammed with far more than just books, and an ancient rolltop desk Zeno liked to boast had been inherited from a Revolutionary War “quasi-ancestor” when in fact he’d bought it at an estate auction: a room in which, when she’d been a moody high school student, Cressida had sometimes holed herself away in when Zeno wasn’t there; and nooks and crannies of the living room which was a long narrow room with a beamed oak ceiling, shadow-splotched even when lighted, with a gleaming black baby-grand Steinway piano which, sadly, to Arlette’s way of thinking, no one played any longer, since Cressida had abruptly quit piano lessons at the age of sixteen.

  But why quit, honey? You play so well . . .

  Sure. For Beechum County.

  No one. Nothing. In none of these rooms.

  But then, Arlette hadn’t really expected to discover Cressida sleeping anywhere except in her bed.

  At the rear sliding-glass door, which opened out onto a flagstone terrace in need of a vigorous weed-trimming, Arlette leaned outside to breathe in the muggy night air. Her eyes lifted to the night sky—a maze of constellations the names of which she could never recall as Cressida could even as a small child brightly reciting the names as if she’d been born knowing them: Andromeda. Gemini. Big Dipper. Little Dipper. Virgo. Pegasus. Orion . . .

  Arlette stepped out onto the redwood deck. Just to check the outdoor furniture—and Zeno’s sagging hammock strung between two sturdy trees—but no Cressida of course.

  Went to the garage, en
tering by a side door. Switched on the garage light—no one inside the garage of course.

  Barefoot, wincing, Arlette went to check each of the household vehicles—Zeno’s Land Rover, Arlette’s Toyota station wagon, Juliet’s Skylark. Of course, there was no one sleeping or hiding in any of these.

  Making her way then out the asphalt driveway which was a lengthy driveway to the street—Cumberland Avenue. Though Cumberland was one of Carthage’s most prestigious residential streets, in the high, hilly northern edge of town abutting the old historic cemetery of the First Episcopal Church of Carthage, Arlette might as well have been facing an abyss—there were no streetlights on and no lights in their neighbors’ houses. Only a smoldering-dull light seemed to descend from the sky as if a bright moon were trapped behind clouds.

  It was possible—so desperation urged the mother to think—that Cressida had made arrangements to meet someone after she’d spent the evening at Marcy’s; they might now be together, in a vehicle parked at the curb, talking together, or . . .

  How many times Arlette had sat with boys in their vehicles, in front of her parents’ house, talking together, kissing and touching . . .

  But Cressida wasn’t that kind of girl. Cressida didn’t “go out” with boys. At least not so far as her family knew.

  I worry that Cressida is lonely. I don’t think she’s very happy.

  Don’t be ridiculous! Cressida is one-of-a-kind. She doesn’t give a damn for what other girls care for, she’s special.

  So Zeno wished to believe. Arlette was less certain.

  She did guess that it was a painful thing, to be the smart one following in the trail of the pretty one.

  In any case there was no vehicle parked at the end of the Mayfields’ long driveway. Cressida was nowhere on the property, it was painfully obvious.

  With less regard for her bare feet, Arlette returned quickly to the house, to the kitchen where the overhead light shone brightly. You would not think it was 4:30 A.M.! The pumpkin-colored Formica counters were freshly wiped and the dishwasher was still warm from having been set into motion at about 10:30 P.M.; with her usual cheery efficiency Juliet had helped Arlette clean up after the dinner party. Together in the kitchen, in the aftermath of a pleasant evening with old friends, an evening that would come to acquire, in Arlette’s memory, the distinction of being the last such evening of her life, Arlette might have spoken with Juliet about Brett Kincaid—but Juliet did not seem to invite such an intimacy.

  Nor did either Arlette or Juliet speak of Cressida—at that time, what was there to say?

  Just going over to Marcy’s, Mom. I can walk.

  Don’t wait up for me OK?

  Arlette lifted the phone receiver another time and called Cressida’s cell phone number even as she prepared herself for no answer.

  “Maybe she lost the phone. Maybe someone stole it.”

  Cressida was careless with cell phones. She’d lost at least two, both gifts from Zeno who wanted his daughters to be within calling-range, if he required them. And he wanted his daughters to have cell phones in case of emergency.

  Was this an emergency? Arlette didn’t want to think so.

  She returned to Cressida’s room—walking more slowly now, as if she were suddenly very tired.

  No one. An empty room.

  And now she saw how neatly—how tightly—books were inserted into the bookcases that, by Cressida’s request, Zeno had had a carpenter build into three of the room’s walls so that it had looked—almost—as if Cressida were imprisoned by books.

  Some were children’s books, outsized, with colorful covers. Cressida had loved these books of her early childhood, that had helped her to read at a very young age.

  And there were Cressida’s notebooks—also large, from an art-supply store in Carthage—in which, as a brightly imaginative young child, she’d drawn fantastical stories with Crayolas of every hue.

  Initially, Cressida hadn’t objected when her parents showed her drawings to relatives, friends and neighbors who were impressed by them—or more than impressed, astonished at the little girl’s “artistic talent”—but then, abruptly at about age nine Cressida became self-conscious, and refused to allow Zeno to boast about her as he’d liked to do.

  It had been years since Cressida’s brightly colored fantastical-animal drawings had been tacked to a wall of her room. Arlette missed these, that revealed a childish whimsy and playfulness not always evident in the precocious little girl with whom she lived—who called her, with a curious stiffness of her mouth, as if the word were utterly incomprehensible to her—“Mom.”

  (No problem with Cressida saying “Daddy”—“Dad-dy”—with a radiant smile.)

  For the past several years there had been, on Cressida’s wall, pen-and-ink drawings on stiff white construction paper in the mode of the twentieth-century Dutch artist M. C. Escher who’d been one of Cressida’s abiding passions in high school. These drawings Arlette tried to admire—they were elaborate, ingenious, finely drawn, resembling more visual riddles than works of art meant to engage a viewer. The largest and most ambitious, titled Descending and Ascending, was mounted on cardboard, measuring about three feet by three feet: an appropriation of Escher’s famous lithograph Ascending and Descending in which monk-like figures ascended and descended never-ending staircases in a surreal structure in which there appeared to be several sources of gravity. Cressida’s drawing was of a subtly distorted family house with walls stripped away, revealing many more staircases than there were in the house, at unnatural—“orthogonal”—angles to one another; on these staircases, human figures walked “up” even as other human figures walked “down” on the underside of the same steps.

  Gazing at the pen-and-ink drawing, you became disoriented—dizzy. For what was up was also down, simultaneously.

  Cressida had worked at her Escher-drawings obsessively, for at least a year, at the age of sixteen. Mysteriously she’d said that M. C. Escher had held up a mirror to her soul.

  The figures in Descending and Ascending were both valiant and pathetic. Earnestly they walked “up”—earnestly they walked “down.” They appeared to be oblivious of one another, stepping on reverse steps. Cressida’s variant of the Escher drawing was more realistic than the original—the structure containing the inverted staircases was recognizable as the Mayfields’ sprawling old Colonial house, furniture and wall hangings were recognizable, and the figures were clearly the Mayfields—tall sturdy shock-haired Daddy, Mom with a placid smiling vacuous face, gorgeous Juliet with exaggerated eyes and lips and inky-frizzy-haired Cressida a fierce-frowning child with arms and legs like sticks, half the height of the other figures, a gnome in their midst.

  The Mayfield figures were repeated several times, with a comical effect; earnestness, repeated, suggests idiocy. Arlette never looked at Descending and Ascending and Cressida’s other Escher-drawings on the wall without a little shudder of apprehension.

  It was easier for Cressida to mock than to admire. Easier for Cressida to detach herself from others, than to attempt to attach herself.

  For she’d been hurt, Arlette had to suppose. In ninth grade when Cressida had volunteered to teach in a program called Math Literacy—(in fact, this program had been initiated by Zeno’s mayoral administration in the face of state budget cuts to education)—and after several enthusiastic weekly sessions with middle-school students from “deprived” backgrounds she’d returned home saying with a shamefaced little frown that she wasn’t going back.

  Zeno had asked why. Arlette had asked why.

  “It was a stupid idea. That’s why.”

  Zeno had been surprised and disappointed with Cressida when she refused to explain why she was quitting the program. But Arlette knew there had to be a particular reason and that this reason had to do with her daughter’s pride.

  Arlette recalled that something unfortunate had happened in high school, too, related to Cressida’s Escher-fixation. But she’d never known the details.

 
On Cressida’s desk, which consisted of a wide, smooth-sanded plank and aluminum drawers, put together by Cressida herself, was a laptop (closed), a notebook (closed), small stacks of books and papers. All were neatly arranged as if with a ruler.

  Arlette rarely entered her younger daughter’s room except if Cressida was inside, and expressly invited her. She dreaded the accusation of snooping.

  It was 4:36 A.M. Too soon after her last attempt to call Cressida’s cell phone for Arlette to call her again.

  Instead, she went to Juliet’s room which was next-door.

  “Mom?”—Juliet sat up in bed, startled.

  “Oh, honey—I’m sorry to wake you . . .”

  “No, I’ve been awake. Is something wrong?”

  “Cressida isn’t home.”

  “Cressida isn’t home!”

  It was an exclamation of surprise, not alarm. For Cressida had not ever stayed out so late—so far as her family knew.

  “She was at Marcy’s. She should have been home hours ago.”

  “I’ve tried her cell phone. But I haven’t called Marcy—I suppose I should.”

  “What time is it? God.”

  “I didn’t want to disturb them, at such an hour . . .”

  Juliet rose from bed, quickly. Since breaking with Brett Kincaid she was often home and in bed early, like a convalescent; but she slept only intermittently, for a few hours, and spent the rest of the night-hours reading, writing emails, surfing the Internet. On her nightstand beside her laptop were several library books—Arlette saw the title Republic of Fear: The Inside Story of Saddam’s Iraq.

  They tried to recall: what had Cressida called out to them, when she’d left the house? Nothing out of the ordinary, each was sure.

  “She walked to Marcy’s. She must have walked home, then—or . . .”

  Arlette’s voice trailed off. Now that Juliet had been drawn into her concern for Cressida, she was becoming more anxious.

  “Maybe she’s staying over with Marcy . . .”

  “But—she’d have called us, wouldn’t she . . .”