Chevy Stevens - Still Missing

“I’m kind of tired to day. If you’d called—” She blew right by, leaving me talking to my doorstep.

Over her shoulder she said, “Oh, please, like you answer your phone.” She had me there. “Quit your whining and get your ass in gear, girl.” She started pushing one end of my couch, and unless I wanted my hardwood floor damaged, I didn’t have much choice but to join in moving all the crap out of my living room. I’d always wanted to paint the beige walls but I’d never gotten around to it. When I saw the gorgeous creamy yellow she’d chosen, I was hooked.

We painted for a couple of hours, then took a break and sat outside on my deck with a glass of red wine. Christina won’t drink anything under twenty dollars a bottle and always brings her own stuff. The sun had just gone down, so I turned all my patio lanterns on. We sat in silence for a few minutes, watching Emma chew her rawhide bone, then Christina looked me straight in the eyes.

“So what happened between us?”

I played with the stem of my glass and shrugged. My face felt hot.

“I don’t know. It’s just…”

“Just what? I think if people are friends, they should be honest with each other. You’re my best friend.”

“I’m trying, I just need—”

“Did you follow up on any of my suggestions or did you block them out too? There’s a book out now by a rape survivor you should read, it talks about how victims had to build up walls to survive, but then afterwards they can’t—”

“It’s that. The pressure. The endless, constant ‘you shoulds.’ I didn’t want to talk about it, but you just couldn’t let it go. When I tried to tell you I didn’t want the clothes, you just steamrolled right over me.” I stopped to take a breath. Christina looked stunned.

“You were trying to help, I get that, but man, Christina, sometimes you just have to back off. ”

We were both quiet for a minute, then Christina said, “Maybe if you explained why you didn’t want the clothes?”

“I can’t explain, that’s the problem, and if you want to help, then you just have to accept me the way I am. Stop trying to make me talk about shit, stop trying to fix me. If you can’t do that, then we can’t hang out.”

I braced for fireworks, but Christina nodded a couple of times and said, “Okay, I’ll try it your way. I need you in my life, Annie.”

“Oh,” I said. “Well, good. I mean, that’s great, because I want you in my life too.”

She smiled, then her face turned serious. “But there’s something I have to tell you. A lot of things happened when you were away…. Everyone was so emotional and nobody knew how to handle it. And—”

I held up a hand. “Stop. We have to keep things light. It’s the only way I can do this.”

“But Annie—”

“No, no buts.” I had a feeling she wanted to tell me she got the project—I drove by her signs in front of it the other day—but the last thing I wanted to do was talk about real estate. Besides, it made sense that she got it, and I was happy for her. Hell, I’d way rather it be her than whoever I was competing against.

She stared at me hard for a few seconds, then shook her head.

“All right, you win. But if you’re not going to let me talk, then I’m going to make you paint some more.”

With a groan I followed her back into the house, and we finished the rest of the living room.

After we said our good-byes on the porch and she was about to step into her BMW, she turned back.

“Annie, before, I was just being the same way with you as I’ve always been.”

“I know. But I’m not the same.”

She said, “None of us are,” and shut her door.

The next afternoon I decided to go through a couple of boxes of my stuff I’d found in my mom’s carport when I was borrowing some gardening tools. The first one was full of my real estate awards and plaques, which I put away in my office without hanging them. The second box, with all my old art supplies, drawings, and paintings, interested me much more. Tucked into the pages of my sketchbook was a brochure for an art school I’d forgotten I wanted to go to. For once, a trip down memory lane wasn’t lined with screaming ghosts, and the smell of charcoal pencils and oil paints made me smile.

I pulled out my sketch pad and the brochure, grabbed my pencils, poured myself a glass of Shiraz, and headed for my deck. For a while I just stared at a blank page. Emma was lying in one of the last rays of the setting sun, which made her coat glow and accentuated the shadows on her. With my pencil I followed the curve of her body on the paper, and then it started coming back to me. Reveling in the sensation of my hand brushing against crisp paper, I watched my simple lines create a form, then smudged some of them with my finger-tips for shading. I kept working at it, changing the balance of light and dark, then stopped to gaze for a few seconds at a bird whistling in a tree near me. When I focused back on my paper I was startled—no, shocked. I’d glanced away from a drawing of a dog, but when I looked back I saw Emma. Right down to the little cowlick at the top of her tail.

I sat there enjoying my sketch for a few minutes, wishing I had someone to show it to, then my attention turned to the brochure. As I flipped through it I smiled at notes I’d made to myself. But my smile faded when I noticed I’d circled the tuition fee and put a big question mark beside it.

Mom got a small inheritance when my grandma died, but when I asked about using some of it for school, she said it was all gone. Whatever was left when she hooked up with Wayne no doubt disappeared before the ink was dry on the marriage license.

I thought about getting a part-time job to put myself through art school, but Mom kept telling me artists don’t make any money, so I wasn’t sure what to do and I just started working. I figured once I’d saved up enough, I’d look into going to school, but it just never happened.

When Luke called last night I told him about my afternoon sketching. “That’s great, Annie, you always liked art.” He didn’t ask about seeing my drawing, and I didn’t ask if he wanted to.

Christina’s come over a couple of times to help me paint the other walls in my house. She keeps it light, like I asked, but it feels strained in a way. Not tense, just odd. But the second I think about sharing anything that happened on the mountain, a massive wave of anxiety presses in on me. Right now all I can handle is gossip about Hollywood stars and people we used to work with. The last time I saw her she told me about this goofy cop who taught her self-defense class.

Took me right back to the ones I had to deal with when I first got off the mountain. Let’s just say, since my expectations were based on TV reruns, I was hoping for Lennie Briscoe but I got Barney Fife.

I was happy to see a woman behind the front desk of the cop shop, but she didn’t even glance up from her crossword. “Who you looking for?”

“A policeman, I guess.”

“You guess?”

“No, I mean, yes, I want to see a policeman.” What I really wanted was to leave, but she waved over some guy who was just coming out of the men’s room and wiping his hands on the legs of his uniform.

“Constable Pepper will help you,” she said.

It’s a good thing his title wasn’t sergeant, the guy already had enough to deal with. He was at least six feet tall and had a really big gut but was skinny everywhere else—his gun belt looked like it was losing the fight to hang on to his narrow hips.

He glanced at me, grabbed some files from the front desk, and said, “Come on.”

He stopped to pour himself a cup of coffee from a beat-up coffeemaker—didn’t offer me any—and dumped sugar and creamer into the mug. He motioned for me to follow him past a glass-walled office and three cops in the main area crowded around a table with a small portable TV, watching a game.