“You want me to take the booth for you?”
Yes. “No.”
She pats my shoulder and heads outside. I watch Leon work.
“Order’s ready,” he tells me.
I take it out. The man rubs his hands together eagerly while I set the food in front of him.
“Thanks a lot,” he says. I wait for something gross to come out of his mouth, because that’s what my gut tells me should happen—but it doesn’t. I take another booth’s order and head back to the kitchen feeling like I should have lightened up because he didn’t meet the worst of my expectations, like somehow I’m the villain in his story.
“You okay?” Leon asks.
It’s one of those rare, quiet moments when Tracey’s in her office and most of the other girls are on the floor or on break and there’s hardly anyone around.
“Break later?” I ask, because it feels like the easiest way I can be sure of his forgiveness.
He makes me wait a long minute before he wipes his hands on his apron and crosses the room to give me a hug. It makes me want to cry. I forget everything and the forgetting is so nice.
“Sure,” he says.
Leon reminds me of a time before the move across town. When Todd was over a lot, trying to convince my mom we all needed to live together. I came home from school and the house was quiet until a low moan drifted from upstairs and I followed it to her closed bedroom door. I couldn’t keep myself from listening. I’d heard my mom and dad having sex a handful of times in my life. When he was drunk, when he was sober, when she was sad or so angry she couldn’t talk to him, but she was still willing to kiss. It always sounded desperate, like the two of them were clinging to the last way they knew how to understand each other. The way my mom sounded with Todd—it wasn’t like that. It seemed tender, beyond anything I’d ever experienced with someone else. This is tender. I press my fingers into Leon’s shirt and try to memorize it but he pulls away. I want to forget myself in him again.
I get back to work instead. I send out another order and by then, the guy is finished with his. I get him his check. He palms it off the table and says, “Hey, you know you can be professional and friendly.” Then he grabs a napkin and scribbles down some numbers on it, slides it over to me. “Give me a call, you want some advice.”
I don’t know why I take the napkin. It’s something my body does without checking with my head first, like the obligation to be nice to him is greater than myself.
I go back to the kitchen, replaying that moment in my head, hating that I did it, hating that it’s done and that I can’t take it back. I slip into the bathroom and my lipstick is faded out. The rain? I don’t know. All I know is it was mostly gone when that man forced his number on me. I fix it and step out of the bathroom and Leon’s phone is blaring music from his back pocket. He steps away from the grill to answer it.
“What’s up?” He listens for a moment. “What? How long? You—why didn’t you call earlier? Really? Yeah, no—yeah, if I leave now I might—yeah. I can do that—okay, tell her I love her. I’ll be there. I’ll see you both soon.” He hangs up in disbelief. “Uh … Caro’s going to have her kid—like now.”
“What?” I feel my expression mirroring his, that same weird shock. I don’t know where it comes from. It’s not like we didn’t know she was pregnant.
“I know.” He shakes his head and then strides over to Tracey’s office, opens the door. “Tracey, you got to get someone to take the grill for me. I have to go. My sister’s in labor. She’s going to have her baby—”
“What!” Tracey hurries out and throws her arms around Leon. “Oh, congratulations! This is wonderful. How close is she?”
“They’ve been in there since this morning. Like … any minute now, the baby’s going to be here, so I have to go…” He pulls away, laughing a little. “Wow. I have to go.”
“Tell them I said congratulations,” I say.
He smiles. “I’ll let you know how it turns out.”
I watch from the back door as he cuts through the rain in his Pontiac and makes his way out of the parking lot. I stick my hands into my pockets, my left closing over the balled-up paper napkin and that old thought comes, but stronger now.
Maybe it’s a prayer.
I hope it’s not a girl.
I hope it’s not a girl, but later, after my shift, when I’m undressing for bed, Leon texts me to tell me it is.
the ground turns soft.
The lake fills to brimming and the river has more water than it knows what to do with. At times the rainfall is so light, it tricks us into believing it’s stopped until we step outside and find it’s misting. Other times, it seems angry, trapping walkers under store awnings, sending cars hydroplaning.
Most of all it’s constant.
I ask Mom to drive me to school and to pick me up. It’s amazing how easy it is to stay inside if it means not risking seeing a face you don’t want to see, hearing a name you don’t want to hear. Leon takes the week off work to help Caro and Adam adjust. I miss him.
On Saturday, he calls and tells me about Ava, his niece.
“She’s amazing. Ugly-cute.”
“Ugly-cute?”
“Yeah. She’s all squished, looks like an old man,” he says and I laugh. “What, don’t you think babies are kind of tiny little ugly freaks until they’re six months old or so? I do.”
“I don’t see enough babies to have an opinion. How are the new parents?”
“Blissed out on hormones, as predicted. Both of them. Nature at work.”
“That’s nice.”
“It’s weird. Caro would love to see you. Told me to invite you down.” He pauses. “How about you come to Ibis tomorrow? Have lunch and meet Ava? I’ll pick you up.”
Oh. I’m glad he can’t see my face because the idea repulses me in a way I don’t know how to put to words. But that’s probably a good thing because I have a feeling it wouldn’t go over all that well if I could. I don’t want to meet the baby.
“Sure.”
“Great. You know, I can tell you one thing after all this—I definitely don’t want to move in and babysit. I have gotten nothing done with the online stuff. I mean, I’ll help them out when they need it but I feel too … not for this.”
“I know what you mean.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“Anyway, I’ve got to go. Caro and Adam are trying to catch some sleep and Ava’s getting fussy. I’ll pick you up in the morning though, around ten?”
“Sounds good,” I lie. I hang up and stare at the phone and worry how it’s going to end up, visiting Caro a second time. If I’ll make a fool of myself again. I try to think of what I’ll say when I see Ava. And I probably can’t go empty-handed.
I go to the bathroom, and discover a rusty brown stain in my underwear, and on top of it, fresh blood. Not even a warning, this time. I don’t know if it’s a couple days early or late, but I don’t want it, regardless. I put a tampon in and change my underwear and when I’m done, I head downstairs where Mom is curled up with Todd on the couch. They’re watching television and the warm glow of the screen on their faces makes them look so settled. Mom asks me what I need.
“Can you drive me to the Barn? Leon invited me to see the baby tomorrow and I think I should probably bring something. Toys, I don’t know.”
Mom smiles. “That’s sweet, honey, but I don’t think you’re going to find anything worth giving at the Barn.”
I prickle a little, wonder if she’s trying to tell me in so many words it’s too cheap a place to buy something nice. She’d be right, but the last thing I want to do is buy anything in town. God knows what Dan Conway would get going if he saw me with baby stuff.
“Why not?”
“The baby’s how old?”
“Like a week?”
“At this point, the baby probably has everything she needs,” Mom says. “So think about Caro. What does Caro need?”
“I don’t know.”
> Mom carefully unfolds herself from Todd. It’s a slow process; he always seems reluctant to let her go and I think she likes to savor that as much as possible.
“Time. That’s what she needs. Time and one less thing to worry about.”
“Well, tell me where I can buy them and I’m set.”
“Food,” Mom says, giving me a look. “Take her some freezable homemade meals. That’s time Caro won’t have to spend making dinner and it means it’s one less thing she’ll worry about. The first month after you were born, anytime anyone showed up with a casserole, I cried, I was so happy.” She nudges me to the kitchen. “Come on. We’ve got work to do.”
We figure out a menu that demands more food than we have in the fridge. I make a long grocery list and hand it and some money to Todd, who salutes us both on his way out.
“I get a dinner out of this too, right?” he asks.
“If you’re good,” Mom tells him. He leaves and she starts pulling what we do have out of the cupboards and fridge. She gives me a bag of carrots to chop, because we’re starting with her famous carrot soup. We settle in at the kitchen counter, shoulder to shoulder.
“How are you?” she asks after a minute.
“They kept the sex a secret,” I say, which isn’t even an answer. “Caro and her husband. They didn’t want to know what they were having until they had it.”
Mom smashes some garlic with the side of her knife. “Your father and I did that.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“As soon as we found out I was pregnant, I wanted to keep it a secret. Your father didn’t, but since I was the one giving birth, that got to be my call.”
“Did you want a girl?” I ask.
“I wanted a baby.”
“Did Dad want a girl?”
I ask it before realizing it’s nothing I really want to know. She pauses and answers too carefully.
“He was happy when you were born, Romy. It was different then.”
“I didn’t ask if he was sorry he had me. I wanted to know if he wanted a girl.”
“Okay. Well … at first, he wanted a boy because he was nervous about having a girl. He was afraid he wouldn’t be able to understand you or relate to you if you were a girl but when you were born—he cried harder than I did. He was thrilled.”
It’s too hard to picture, so I don’t.
“How often do you talk to him?”
I don’t know why that’s the next question inside me.
“I don’t,” she says. It surprises me. I thought they were still in touch. I always imagined her hiding up in the bedroom, whispering furiously at him over the phone. That’s what they did when I was really young. Stood behind closed doors and whispered, like I would never be able to tell things were bad if they were whispered.
“Even when I was missing?”
She hesitates. “Do you want me to—if there’s ever an emergency—”
“No. I’m just—I just thought you would have.”
“Maybe once,” she says and I know we’re both thinking of a time she made excuse after excuse for him until finally, there were none. “Your father loves you, Romy—”
“Mom, don’t—”
Because I don’t need her to tell me because—
“But it’s not enough.”
I know.
I knew it before she did.
“And you,” she says. “You feel how you want to feel about your dad. It’s not ever going to be wrong, you understand me?”
I don’t know what to say. She continues to prep and I try to do the same but it’s hard to focus. Todd comes home forty minutes later with all the groceries. I keep my eyes on my cutting board, don’t realize there’s anything worth looking up for until Mom asks, “What is it?”
I turn. Todd stands in the kitchen doorway, the handles of the plastic grocery bags twisting slowly in his grip. He looks paler than I’ve ever seen him, paler than he gets when he’s in the worst kind of pain. He sets the groceries down and runs his hands over his mouth a couple of times before he finally speaks and when he does, he says—
He says, “They pulled Penny Young’s body out of Gadwall River last night.”
ARE YOU OKAY? he asks.
I CAN’T SEE YOU TOMORROW, I tell him.
He says, I UNDERSTAND.
He says, IF YOU NEED ANYTHING …
But what could I need?
What could I need, that she doesn’t anymore?
MISSING GIRL FOUND
A headline terrible enough to stop hearts and a story to crush them. A story the Ibis Daily isn’t supposed to have yet. They missed the weekend print edition, but put it on their Web site and that’s what Todd shows us, the crumpled printout someone passed to him at the grocery store, like a note in class.
A family friend, who does not want to be identified, says the body of 18-year-old Penny Young was recovered from the Gadwall River early Friday night. The Young family was notified of the discovery earlier this morning.
The Grebe and Ibis Sheriff’s Departments would not confirm this, but said they will hold a news conference Sunday at 1 p.m. to discuss the latest developments in the case.
Young, who divided her time between her mother’s residence in Ibis and her father’s residence in Grebe, was last seen at a party in Grebe. She was reported missing by her mother when she did not arrive at her house the next morning.
I smooth the paper out on my desk and then I press my left hand flat against it. I reach for my nail polish. Before I tore the label off, this color was either called Paradise or Hit and Run. I wonder what it would be named if they had to call it what it really is. The color of your insides. The stuff your heart beats. Nothing you can afford to lose. I lift the brush and watch the red drip unhurriedly back into the bottle.
“Romy,” Mom calls.
I run the brush against the edge of the bottle’s opening, until the bristles are barely coated. I start at my pinkie finger and paint it carefully. My hands don’t shake. Not even a little.
“Romy, it’s starting soon.”
The first coat is dry by the time I’m on the last nail of the first hand. I move onto the next one. And then the second coat. I don’t go outside the lines. If you don’t go outside the lines, not once, you’re even more the person you’re trying to be, maybe.
And then I’m ready.
“Romy, it’s starting now.”
I sit on the couch between Mom and Todd. The sides of my legs touch theirs. I lean forward, my fresh-painted fingernails against my fresh-painted lips.
There’s a table of officials stretched across the length of the television screen, all of them somber. A man I don’t recognize stands at a podium, too tall for its microphone. I want to reach through somehow and adjust it for him. He thanks an audience I can’t see for attending and when he tells us what happened to her, his voice doesn’t shake.
Not even a little.
He says the body of a girl was located in Gadwall River by two campers. He says they noticed something tangled in a tree’s low-hanging branches in the water, upstream from their camping site. The postmortem indicated the body was likely held under by those branches, likely submerged until the rainfall made the river wild and moved what was left of her just enough to be seen. The postmortem indicated that the deceased died from suspicious, nonnatural causes, but no further information regarding that will be released at this time, so as not to jeopardize the ongoing investigation—into the death of Penny Young.
Mom puts her arm around me and holds tight like she wants to be sure it isn’t a mistake, that they are definitely talking about some other girl that’s not me.
I listen as the man runs through every little thing they did to try to make this ending happier. Interviewing every student at the party—which I guess is what they call it when Sheriff Turner sits across from you at a table and tells you that you’re fine—the ground and air searches, following up on two hundred phone tips, volunteer searches. For all the good it did. When the w
orld wants a girl gone, she’s gone.
“Jesus,” Todd says when the news conference ends. He turns the TV off. “Everything they did when the ground was dry and they couldn’t find her. Now all that night is completely washed away. I don’t know what they have to go on.”
I feel Mom looking at me. She moves a strand of hair from my face.
“You okay?” she asks.
I stare at the blank TV screen and everything feels far away.
“If it’s a suspicious death, what does that mean? Someone put her there? In the river?” My voice sounds stupid and my head feels that way too. Someone put her in the river after they—what? “I don’t understand what that means.”
Todd says, “It has to be bad if they don’t want to tell us.”
mom drives me to school.
We pass Leanne Howard, jogging in the rain, and I want a glimpse of her face, to see what all this looks like on her, but there’s not enough light for that. The sky is dark gray and the clouds are hung so low, it doesn’t even feel like it’s day.
Mom pulls up as close to the building as she can get. I stare at the front entrance. The FIND PENNY display is gone. I know it couldn’t stay, but it seems wrong there’s nothing in its place. She’s not here so she was never here.
I get out of the car, hurry through the rain. Inside, everything is so quiet, I have the fleeting thought it’s just me in this space, but I climb the stairs until I reach the mourners crowding the halls. Everyone in clusters, close to their lockers, heads bent together, whispering, bodies humming with grief. It all feels familiar and unfamiliar at once. That moment we discovered she was gone is here again, more real than it was before, and we can’t hope our way through our uselessness this time. She’s never coming back.
I get my books out of my locker, go to homeroom. I’m the first one there and McClelland sits at his desk, sorting through papers. He’s stone-faced, but his breathing gives him away: every breath a gasp, every gasp a failed attempt at regaining control. I sit at the back and try to make myself not hear it but it’s all I can hear. I watch the door, watch students file in one by one. Some of them come in messy and tearful and some of them look like they’ve just managed to stop crying and others are determinedly dry-eyed, just like McClelland.