Frederick Busch - Girls

“You think it’ll work?”

I shook my head.

His phone buzzed and then rang.

He held his hand up and I sat again. His eyes were focused, and his big face was tight around them.

“You know it won’t work?”

I nodded.

“You have a purpose in all of this. I’ve always thought so. You never told me. Can you tell me?”

I said, “The last thing I can ever do is let her remember what happened.”

“When your baby died.”

“When our baby died.”

“Because you love her,” he said.

“Yes.”

“Fuck, Jack. I mean, did—”

“Absolutely last thing, Archie. I keep testing her every once in a while, and she doesn’t remember it all. She sees me holding her. Hannah. Our daughter. She sees that, and then on from there. She doesn’t remember it, and I don’t want her to.”

Archie picked up an extension of the phone, which was on the floor beside his recliner. He lifted the receiver and hung it up to stop the buzzing. The radio in my back pocket made its static hush and said my name.

I turned my radio down, and he said, “Can you tell me what you’re protecting her from? Or yourself?”

I looked at him. I was trying to think of the best words, and I couldn’t. At times like that, I never could. Finally, I said, “Can you think of any way of convincing her we’re better off together than alone?”

“Saying that,” he said. He wiped his chin with the back of his hand. “If it’s true.”

“You think it’s better for couples to split?”

“Sometimes it is. Will she be happier without you?”

“She never lived without me, except when I was overseas. We lived half our lives together. It must be more than half.”

“A lot of people split in their forties, some in their fifties, their sixties. Later, even. But what you’re saying is she moved out to get you better — in her terms, Jack. I’m not choosing sides. My point is, if she wants you to do something for the two of you, maybe she wants the two of you to go on. It would be good if you told me what you don’t want her to know.”

“To remember.”

“To remember,” he said. He picked up the receiver and said, “In thirty seconds.”

“I can’t, not now.”

“You should try. Maybe it would help with Fanny.”

“Guaranteed: no.”

He said, “I have to throw you out, Jack. Come back. Find me.”

“One question,” I said.

He nodded.

“Do you pray?”

“You think it’ll help?”

“No. I don’t know how. I don’t even want to.”

“Bullshit,” he said.

“But do you?”

He leaned back hard and worked his shoulders and seat into the cushions. He said, “I’m a Jew. I was born a Jew. Definition of Jew: They can come to your door and take you away to a camp and kill you. Do I pray? I argue. I spend a lot of time arguing with whatever you want to call it. Yahweh. Shithead. Father. I don’t know. I argue about bad deaths and terrible diseases. I say, ‘How can you permit it?’ and I don’t get an answer because maybe no one’s there. And if He is, He disgusts me. Or I disgust Him and He doesn’t want to argue. And I keep arguing. Would you call that prayer?”

I knew he didn’t expect an answer. I didn’t have one. I went over to his chair and stuck my hand out. He shook it. His hand was gentle and wet.

I did drive over to the social sciences lot, and I did find her standing next to her car. When she saw me, she shrugged. I left the dog in the car and stood beside her, asking dumb questions and getting laughter back.

“Well,” I said, “we sure can’t leave you here.”

“I’ve got my briefcase with my negligee and vibrator and leather handcuffs inside, so we can go wherever you say, Officer.” I drove us out of the lot while the dog introduced himself to her hair and the nape of her neck. I told him to lie down and Rosalie said, “Why don’t we all?”

We drove up toward the quarry, above the cemetery. The truck skidded a little, and I put it in four-wheel low, and we got through. Halfway toward the quarry, you can cut through some low brush and you’re at the top of the old ski lift the school no longer uses where there is a low wooden equipment hut. I saw how the snowy brush had sprung back behind us.

I said, “We’re invisible.”

“I’m surprised the students don’t come here.”

“They don’t mind using motels. Or classrooms. Storage closets in the administration building.”

I found the right master key on my ring and let us in. There was a small mound of sand, a rack of chain, hose from the old snow machines, a few plastic tarpaulins, and a very excited colony of mice.

Rosalie said, “I thought maybe Chanel No. Five, or Poison, not the smell of cold mouse.” She held her nose with a mittened hand, and she looked about ten.

“It’s the only pretty much hidden place where we can get kind of risky and wild the way you wanted.”

“That’s what I wanted, huh?”

“I think so. Yes.”

“You’re right. I guess it was a bluff.”

“No,” I said, “you were turned on and risky-feeling. It’s possible we might get nuts up here, but I think what we’d get is cold asses and sore skin and smelly.”

“This is the first scripture lesson, then.”

“In what?”

“In taking it easy? I’m not sure. Maybe in just being us and not some idea about us that one of us might have?”

“I didn’t intend that. I’m not sure I could even come up with it.”

“You really wanted to do what I wanted to do.”

I nodded.

She reached under my coat and cupped my ass and squeezed, then patted it. She said, “Let’s do second best.”

“Anything you want,” I said.

“Let’s go back down and I’ll drive my car home and we meet up later and be whoever we are.”

“Could I kiss you first?” I asked.

She said, “I think you have to.”

I said to the dog, when I drove the Ford off campus after work, “You won’t starve. I promise.” I had taken the gun from the Jeep, and it was angled uncomfortably in the pocket of my coat. I put it in the glove compartment of the Gran Torino. “But we need to make a stop.” When I pulled into the Tanners’ driveway, I left windows open halfway down and told him to stay.

She was in bed, the reverend told me.

“Thank God they took her off the chemotherapy,” he said. “It was killing her. This way, she’s in her own house, and when she feels strong, she can putter. And, of course, she’s supervising the search.”

He was probably right. In terms of full-time concentration on Janice Tanner, she was doing more than anyone in the state. Maybe, I thought, the man who took Janice had done more. The reverend went upstairs and I stood in the living room. There were no pictures on the walls except one of Jesus that looked famous and one of Janice that was famous for sure. It was the one with her glad eyes and sad mouth. I saw hooks where other pictures had hung. On the coffee table in front of the thin wooden settle, there were posters and newspapers. The top paper had an article about her parents’ efforts to find her. I had a metal taste in my mouth, and the saliva kept running.

Tanner was back. He gestured to me, and I followed him up the steep, narrow staircase. I could feel the thermal current of the house as cold air rose behind us. I waited for the heating system to kick in. I was worried about how cold Mrs. Tanner felt.

He gestured me to a rush-bottomed ladder-back chair beside the bed. The only light in the room came from a weak bulb in the lamp on the bedside table, which was a cracked cherry stand. The shades in the two windows were drawn and the overhead light was off. She lay on her side, curled up, her fists on the sheets, outside the layers of blanket she was under. In that dim light, even, I saw how sparse her hair was. She licked her chapped lips with her tongue. The skin of her face was the color of old oranges, and it looked like it would split and start bleeding if someone pushed against it. Her eyes, though they weren’t bright, were still smart, and they grew large as she fixed them on me.