Frederick Busch - Girls

I shook my head.

“Would you like to come in?”

I nodded.

“Can you speak?”

“I haven’t figured out what to say yet.”

She wore big men’s boxer shorts in a yellow plaid design and a flannel shirt of green and orange that clashed horribly with the shorts. The shirt looked big enough to belong to the big brother of whoever used to own the very big shorts, and its tails hung halfway down her thighs.

“I know,” she said, closing the door, “I’m a symphony of bad taste. This is what I wear when I do homework.”

“You’re taking courses?”

“Reading for class. If they have to do it, I have to do it. Would you like a beer? A glass of wine? Juice? Buttermilk?”

I shook my head. It was not only that I didn’t know what to say but that she made me smile so hard. My face felt stretched. She was smiling, too.

She put her hand out tentatively, and she touched the side of my coat.

“It’s the other side,” I said.

She helped me take my coat off and she hung it on a hook in a little closet and came back to stand before me. She reached up and began to unbutton my woolen shirt. She saw the wrapping. She made a sound and put her lips together hard. She insisted on touching the ribs, very lightly, and I winced.

“No,” I said as she flinched. “You didn’t hurt me. I expected hurt, so I acted like a baby. It doesn’t hurt.”

“It has to.” She had moved her hand, and the fingers lay gently on my chest, above the bandages. She moved them back and forth, lightly, watching my expression. I didn’t know what to do except close my eyes and put my left hand on her shoulder.

I moved my hand to where her shirt was opened several buttons, and I touched her throat. She made a sound. “Has to,” she said, flushing down her face and under my hand.

“Has to what?”

“I forget. No. I remember: hurt. You couldn’t hug or kiss anyone or lie down with them.”

“Could we stay like this awhile? Would you be willing to?”

“Willing?” she said. She moved closer and leaned in and kissed my chest. She kept her face against me and I felt her breath go over my skin as she said, “Yes, I guess I’d be willing.”

I didn’t know what to do with my hand. I put it loosely around her throat in a choking motion, but we knew I wasn’t going to shut the fingers. They lay against her, and I could feel her swallow. Then she stepped back and took my hand in both of hers and kissed my palm.

“I felt that in my ribs,” I said.

“Your poor ribs,” she said. “Why did this happen to you?” She buttoned my shirt and then her own. Then she picked up my hand again, and she led me to the living room. I sat by kneeling my way onto the seat of the chair. She brought us coffee, and I almost slept, in spite of my confusion and excitement, while she made it. Then she asked me again, “What happened?”

“Payback,” I said. “I beat up a kid who runs the campus pharmaceuticals supply. They sent some people, not because of him, really, so much as because of the business. Free trade, kind of.”

“Couldn’t you have arrested him instead of beating him?”

I liked the way she accepted the option of the beating. But of course she was a policeman’s daughter. She would know.

“I hate those drug bastards. But what it was about was something else. You see the posters all over?”

“Those poor children.”

“One of them, the one whose picture went up first, I’m, I don’t know, I’m helping her parents.”

She nodded. “Of course you are,” she said.

“I felt that in my ribs,” I said. “You do that to me.”

“I want to,” she said. “But you’re helping her parents—”

“Janice Tanner’s parents. Her mother is supposed to’ve died from cancer, but she keeps waiting until Janice comes home. You really end up having to do it for her. Do something, anyway. I don’t think we’ll get her back. But, you know. Professor Strodemaster’s their neighbor. He got me into it, and I guess I got involved. I went after the kid. Jesus, I just jump around and get myself confused and end up suspecting anyone and then bagging it all and figuring no one did it, that she took off for New York or Saint Paul, Minnesota.… You know. I’m not doing much.”

“Was she unhappy?”

“She was the perfect Christian child. She played— plays. I can’t keep talking like she’s dead. Even if she probably is. She plays an instrument. She loves Jesus. She volunteers to roll bandages and feed the hungry. You know? She’s wonderful.”

“So she isn’t,” Rosalie said. She was sitting on the footstool of my chair and she had her fingers on my calf above my boot. Her hand felt warm, and I felt warm, the coffee was filled with frothy milk, and I would have given a great deal to be lying with my head on her chest and asleep.

“Why not?”

“Because nobody is. No young girl — fourteen, right? No adolescent girl is wonderful. Her life is shit, her parents are shit, school is a trial, minute by minute, her hormones are nuts, her skin drives her crazy, and she gets cramps all the time, or she doesn’t bleed on time, or she hasn’t got breasts, or all of that. She’s nice , she wants to be nice, she’s a good kid, but she’s in trouble. She comes up missing, it’s because she was in trouble a long time before that.”

“So why didn’t anybody tell me this a long time ago?”

“Your wife could have.”

“Sure. I mean, a nurse would know.”

“A woman would know; a nurse would know; your friend Halpern would know. I’ve seen you in the Blue Bird, you sitting there all pale and straight and sad and him all over the pastries. He gets so worried about you.”

“How do you know? He’s talking to you about me, too?”

“His face, Jack. He feels like me, I think.”

“How’s that, Rosalie?”

“Nice. I don’t know how far his affections go, but I have in mind something like taking off your clothes and doing things, Jack.” She didn’t cover her face, but her eyes were closed.

“Oh.”

She spat her coffee onto my jeans and the rug. “I’m sorry,” she said when she got herself under control. “It was the way you said that.”

“You get me wordless a lot.”

“And you don’t have that many words to begin with.”

I shook my head. She leaned over and touched her forehead to my knee. I put my hand on her dark hair and held a handful and then let go.

When she sat up, we were quiet for a couple of minutes. I loved it, sitting like that with her. Then she said, “What’s her room like?”

“Haven’t been there,” I said.

“But why? ”

“I think I’m scared to. I don’t know. I do know. And I am scared. I don’t want to know her that well. I don’t want to touch her things. She went into the worst kinds of nightmares you can have. I don’t want to go there.”

Her face was serious now, and it looked longer, older. Her dark eyes looked different, and I saw a little of how much there was to her. I figured her father, the cop, had scary eyes like hers. She nodded. “Makes sense,” she said, “but you have to look at her room. Really, it’s where you have to start. What you’ve been doing, whatever you’ve been doing, that comes later. First you get yourself in her room. It’s where they live , girls that age. It’s their brains. If you’re lucky. If they aren’t so good at hiding that even their rooms are camouflaged.”

“You’re tougher than I am, aren’t you?”

“Maybe. I don’t know. But I’m tough. Is your wife tough?”

“She has been for a long time. She’s had to be. You marry me, you’re in trouble automatically.”