Frederick Busch - Girls

“It’s small?”

“If I had a pet, say a gerbil or a parakeet, we’d have to take turns sleeping there.”

“Good thing you don’t have a pet, then.”

“Yeah,” she said, “it worked out. I see you’re driving with a partner these days.”

“Jesus, Fanny, I got so screwed up on campus what with one thing and another, I didn’t get home until so late last night, he must have thought he was abandoned.”

“One thing and another,” she said. “You’re still keeping the peace and finding the child.”

“Janice Tanner.”

“I know her name, Jack.” She yawned and folded her arms across her chest and let her eyes close. “She’s what screwed you up on campus? The kid who never set foot there? God. You’re so fucking transparent. You do something you feel bad about, and you tell me inside of hours. I mean, it’s twenty years, Jack. I know you. What’d you do that you had to come and confess about?”

The dog, I think, took this line of questioning as an example of interrogator’s art, and he banged his tail against the backseat, where he sat watching Fanny.

I said, “I wanted to see you, that’s all.”

She stared ahead, as though we were moving.

“There’s plenty of space at the house, Fanny. I don’t have any boarders or anything.”

I was thinking of Fanny alone in a room and me coming up the stairs in my socks. I was thinking of the echo of her cry in my head as I ran. I was so late getting there. I knew it on the way. I was running underwater, like somebody was dreaming it and I was in their dream. And then I got down the hall and to the door and pulled myself around and through the doorway to find them.

I said, “What?”

Fanny, beside me in the car, sat looking at me. She seemed very tired, and her face was defenseless.

“I didn’t say anything,” she said.

“I thought I heard you say something.”

“You were over the left-field wall,” she said. “You were far away. Where was that?”

I shook my head. Then I said, “Couldn’t you come home? I don’t think we’ll get it done this way.”

“You don’t believe there’s any it to get done.”

I wanted to shake my head again. I didn’t. I said, “I have this really terrible thought. I have this idea I can’t even say about the missing kid.”

“Why can’t you say it? No, that’s a ridiculous question! What can you say?”

I love your long, narrow face. It makes me sad. I’ve watched the skin loosen from its bones for twenty years. You were the girl I made love to in the Hotel Albert in Greenwich Village and in Hawaii twice, on the big island in the borrowed beach house with the roof of galvanized tin, and in cars too small for all our thrashing around. You told me you were going to teach me how to shout and cry and you did. I read a terrible poem to you over a telephone wire running under the Pacific Ocean. You and I said Ralph the Duck to our baby and then we couldn’t anymore, and then we couldn’t talk about rubber ducks or children or say our daughter’s name for so long. Your hair used to shine with the life in us and now the light rolls away from it. I could make you smile then, and now I can’t.

I said, “Fanny. Listen to me.”

She grew so still.

I said, “When you think about Hannah. When you think about the worst of it.”

“What?”

“Can I keep talking? Is it okay?”

“How can it be okay? Yes, though. Go ahead.”

“What do you remember?”

“Oh,” she said. She sounded disappointed. “We’ve done this before. I thought we could maybe get someplace new.”

“But can you tell me? What you see?”

“I don’t want to, Jack.”

“No, it’s all right to. Really.”

She had her tissues out, and the dog was slapping his tail against the seat. “You,” she said, “and the baby. You holding the baby against your chest.”

“You don’t see anything behind me.”

“What?”

“You know, any special furniture or part of the room or direction or anything. You just see me.”

“And — the baby.”

“Hannah.”

“Hannah.”

“And I’m holding her against my chest.”

“Too hard, Jack,” she said. She covered her face with tissues and fingers. “Too hard. Poor Jack,” she said. “Poor Jack.”

“No,” I said, reaching and refusing to wince. I got my arm around her partway and I pulled her over. She let herself lie against me with my right arm over her shoulder. I got my left around a little, and I covered her cheek with my hand. I tried to hide her from it. I was afraid to go after more. I wanted to be sure she didn’t know. I was the cunning interrogator of bashed-up whores and bad-boy soldiers, knife fighters and sexual deviants. I wasn’t very good with wounded people brighter and braver than I was. “I’m sorry, Fanny,” I said.

“I know, Jack.”

“Come home.”

She sat back away from me. It felt, as my arm came down again, like I’d torn the cartilage a little more.

“So you can nurse me and I can nurse you?”

“Christ, Fanny, what in hell do married people do? Isn’t comfort any of it?”

“Sure.”

“So?”

“So is getting better.”

I shouted, “How in the fucking fuck do we do that? By saying it over and over? By staying away from the people we need? You do need me, I guess. Don’t you? Or is that where I’m wrong?”

“I need you,” she said, low and with no expression, looking straight ahead. I saw in the rearview mirror how the dog lay flat beneath the storm.

I said, “I’m sorry I shouted.”

“I’m sorry I’m giving you such a hard time.”

“We’re so sorry for each other, maybe we should be having breakfast together in bed or something.”

She nodded. “Probably we should,” she said. “Why did you make me remember that?”

“You remembered it without me.”

“Why did you need me to say it? Do you think we can get past it? You know, learn something beyond the standing there, all three of us, dead and everything?”

I said, “You want me to drive you home? We can come back and get your car later on. I’ll call in sick.”

“You just got back. You can’t be sick so soon. Anyway, I’m going to Virginia’s house. I’ll drive my car there. I’m going to sleep, Jack. I’m really tired now.”

I let my breath out so long, the window of the car fogged up. I started the engine to work the heater.

She leaned over and kissed the side of my face. She said good-bye to the dog. She got out and closed the door so softly, the lock didn’t catch. I didn’t want to reach anymore, so I left it that way.

I told the dog, “Either stay in the back or close the front door better.” Stay kept him back there. I got into reverse as Fanny sat in her car. She drove away and then I went in the same direction until I came to the campus, where I turned.

What I had seen on a rear window of her car and what I saw now on doors and campus utility vehicles were the new posters. They were larger, bright white, with the same picture of the girl with sad eyes who wanted to please people. They offered a bigger reward. I knew she was going to be everywhere today.

Irene Horstmuller was back on campus. They couldn’t keep her in jail to make her give up the information she withheld because the information didn’t exist anymore. That was the difference between us, I thought. The Secret Service wanted to cancel the speech unless Horstmuller remembered the name of the last person to use the book the threat was written in. My terrible poem to Fanny that I’d read from Tokyo, where I was very drunk and very lonely, had been better than the poem that Rosalie found. At what the Secret Service cutie with the long hair threatened would be our last meeting, Rosalie looked dangerous. She sat across the seminar table and put her finger in her mouth and sucked the end. I didn’t know if she looked twelve or a thousand years old, but I knew how dangerous she looked. What I felt when I saw her smart face go clever, then naughty, then brilliant about making me dance in place where I sat was telling me a truth I didn’t want to know.