Frederick Busch: Girls

Mrs. Tanner seemed to be shivering. She looked up and caught my stare. She gave me a little smile.

Like a kid, and despising myself right away, I blew on my hands to show her it was really the temperature, not the dying.

Strodemaster saw, and he moved out of his chair to the living room. I heard his footsteps and then the furnace coming on. He returned, chafing his hands. He sat, and the silence began.

Finally, I said, “I’m not an investigator.”

The father looked at my pad and my pen. “I’m a campus cop,” I said, “a security person. I have some training, but I got it twenty years ago. I don’t carry a weapon. I don’t have a license to investigate. I have a pistol permit, but I can’t imagine what good it would do us. I did a little investigating in the service — this was years ago. Not too much, not that successfully. What I mostly did was bully drunk soldiers and drug addicts and men who were sad about their marriages. That kind of thing. What I do now is run after college kids who drink too much, mostly. So you shouldn’t expect me to know a lot, or to be able to find out a lot. You need to understand how little I can offer you.”

They stared at me. The father blinked, the mother seemed hardly to move her eyes from me, and Strodemaster ate a jelly doughnut and drank with a lot of noise. His doughnut leaked on his fingers and as he licked them he made a kind of low hum. He seemed very happy in a strange way. It annoyed me. I thought he ought to be sad. But he was enjoying this. I guessed because he wanted it so much. He seemed to have appetites for everything. His bathrobe picked up blots of coffee mixed with milk and crumbs of cake.

“Are you religious?” the father asked.

“Well,” I said. “No.”

“I’m a pastor. That’s my church you passed, driving in. Sunday school is taught in the basement by my wife here. Our daughter came out of God’s house and she disappeared. You wouldn’t see that part of it as meaningful, I take it. Or would you?”

“I don’t know yet. But I wouldn’t take it up with God, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“She’s alive,” the mother said.

I nodded.

“No, she is. I feel her. I felt her after we conceived her, and I feel her stirring now. She’s alive. She’s well. She’s frightened, but she’s coping. She always could.”

“She looks lovely. In the picture. You’ve done a wonderful job of getting the posters out.”

“Everybody’s helping,” the mother said. “How could you not help a child that good?”

I nodded. “And what, exactly, did you think I might be able to help with?”

“Oh,” the father said, “sort of interpreting for us, in a way. I don’t know what the authorities mean when they tell us things. They’re very busy; they’re a little unwilling to talk too much about their work, I think.”

“Habit,” I said. “They don’t mean to be cruel.”

Strodemaster raised his eyebrows. He wanted them to mean to be cruel, because he’d lived a life on the assumption that anyone not sleeping with him might be working against him. He must have been a child of ferocious appetites and pretty basic satisfactions, I thought.

I said, “Look. I can get names from you, investigators on the case, and I can visit them and ask what they know. I can tell you what they tell me, if they tell me. I was wondering. I drew this up in the car.” I turned the pad over and showed them my little note. It asked whomever it might concern to tell me as their agent whatever the Tanners were allowed to know about the search for their child. I asked them to sign and date their signature and they did.

The mother said, “Do we pay you a retainer?”

“No, Mrs. Tanner. I’m not a lawyer or a detective. I’m just a friendly volunteer. I want you to have your daughter back.” My throat tightened up when I said it, and I shut up.

Mrs. Tanner said, “There is a cosmological dimension, you know.”

I said, pretty stupidly, “Like a — something about God?”

She nodded, smiling very tiredly. “A manifestation of His intelligence. A plan. Perhaps a test. It might be a desperate woman who needs a child,” she said. “I feel something like that. Somebody who doesn’t want to hurt anyone. Somebody with a very deep need.”

I had to say it. “No, it’s a man. It nearly always is.”

Mr. Tanner said, “You know that.”

I wanted not to answer that, so I said to her, “A plan, you said. God has a plan? Is that what you mean?”

She said, “I pray for it. If not Janice back, and safe with us, and whole, then God’s design.”

Her husband nodded, but his eyes were closed, and I know he was weeping or working not to.

She took my left hand in both of hers. Her skin felt clammy. Her fingers felt light, powerless. She didn’t seize me; she only held. She said, “You’re very decent to help. It makes you sad, doesn’t it?”

“It’s a sad business,” I said.

“I think you’re dealing with more than that,” she said. Her voice had a tendency to lift, a lightness that I associated with her limbs. She was being cooked from the inside out by the radiation or the chemicals, and now she had to carry this. Three cheers for God’s design, I thought.

They gave me names and telephone numbers and, like an investigator, I wrote them down. When I looked up, I saw that all of them were watching me. The expectation in their eyes reminded me of the wallpaper I should not have taken down.

The Tanner family printed more posters. The amount of the reward was now five thousand dollars, and I wondered where a preacher with a very sick wife finds that kind of money. The new posters were on yellow paper, and some were a foot and a half or two feet high, so there was another crop, a new flowering of her face. It was the same photograph, and the enlargement made it coarser, like she’d aged while I watched. Her mouth looked more vulnerable in the new version, and I found that I couldn’t meet her eyes.

Girls run away, and not only to the Port Authority bus terminal on Forty-second Street in New York, and not only from the country. Boys and girls run away. I knew no statistics, and I hadn’t talked to a cop about it, but I assumed they ran away a lot and were stolen very little. You read about it, of course, but it’s usually an infant taken from a stroller or a carriage. Once in a while, a drunken father or boyfriend punches an infant to death, or burns it, or the mother kills and buries it. If the child is older, I thought, and a girl, and she hasn’t run away, she’s dead. I remembered a few cases of kidnapping and the rest were murder, or rape and then murder. I worked not to think about Janice Tanner in some maniac’s car or trailer or furnished apartment. I tried not to think of her blood on bathroom tiles or her body in a crawl space, moving a little every time he slammed the door going out or coming home, like she still was alive and very badly hurt and frightened. I worked not to imagine her alive. I tried not to observe her fright.

I went to work every day. Sometimes at home, after a while, I slept. One day, I took the dog for a long walk over the hill behind the house, pushing myself through it until the snow, which was the height of my knees a dozen yards from the door, was up to my waist. The dog leapt, tearing himself loose, then sank in, then worked himself free, jumping again. His tongue hung out, stiff and pink, like he’d been running for an hour. I was heaving and blowing, gasping with high sounds.

“We’re a couple of old guys,” I told him.

He breathed in choppy pantings and his winking, friendly, alien eyes stayed on me. He was a dog bred for errands, and he waited for me to find one. The spittle turned to ice around his long, blunt muzzle, and he seemed content to pause before the next episode of our mission. I wanted to be like that. I wanted to know that orders were coming and that I’d soon perform them, and then the job would be done, and I would dive slowly into the curving path made by my flanks while I circled and circled, as if I was clearing away a nest, and lie down and sleep.