Frederick Busch - Girls

“No,” I said. “I’m sorry. Nothing new. I just wanted to say hello, I guess. It’s only a visit.”

She raised her brows and moved her head on the pillow a little, like she was saying she understood.

I said, “And maybe look at Janice’s room. I never did that. Maybe I should do that.”

Her smile was tired but real.

“I hear the real cops do that.”

She nodded.

“So I thought I’d come and get real.”

She said, in more than a whisper, “Did you want to pray?”

I should have said yes, of course. But the thought of her God made me angry. I felt mad enough to wail like a child. I said, “No, thank you, ma’am. I can’t.”

She said, “I would pray on your behalf.”

“Thank you.”

“I have a confession.”

“You already did.”

“You’re easy to want to take care of,” she said.

“That’s what my wife once said.”

“Lucky woman,” she said.

“Isn’t she. I’ll ask your husband to take me to the room.” I leaned over and kissed her temple. She smelled like wood that’s been in pond water too long. She was coming apart inside.

The reverend said, in the hall, outside her closed door, “I didn’t know Mrs. Tanner was praying for you.”

“It’s an arrangement we have.”

“I’d be pleased to pray for you, too.”

“You’re very kind, Reverend Tanner.”

“But you ought to make the effort also.”

I nodded, but I didn’t have anything more to say because we were in the room now. I put my hand up and he looked at it, and then at my face.

“I’d like it if I could be in here by myself a minute.”

“Clues,” he said.

“Clues.”

“Randy told us about the uncertainty principle.”

“I have a lot of that.”

“The observer of a phenomenon changes it through the act of observation,” he said.

I said, “That sounds reasonable.”

“So I’ll leave you to your own uncertainty.” He smiled to be sure I understood the joke.

I nodded. I didn’t.

“I’ll be outside,” he said.

“Thank you.”

“In the hall. If you need me.”

“I’m not going to touch anything, Reverend. I understand it’s precious to you. I’ll keep my hands in my pockets.”

“Less alteration of the phenomenon observed,” he agreed.

He flipped a light switch, and he closed the door. I took my hands out of my pockets, but I did keep them to myself. I couldn’t find her here. I saw paperback books and school notebooks on a cheap maple desk. On the wall I saw pictures of her parents outside her father’s church, and I saw clipped photos in dime-store frames of people I guessed from their hair and clothes were rock singers. There was, of course, a Jesus in a wooden frame. I looked in some plastic-covered albums at pictures of junior high school kids. In the books on the shelves were some postcards. They were scrawled on in round inky writing by kids writing to Janice over a summer. There was a book called Generation X that looked a little difficult for her. There was a book called I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and one titled The Light in the Forest. I learned from them that maybe she felt trapped. But most of anything I’d ever read was about someone who was trapped, so I wasn’t making much progress.

I didn’t think I was going to find stuff taped under drawers or glued inside the covers of hardcover books, and I relied on the state police for that kind of search. I did do the obvious — look between the mattress and the box spring, feel behind the wooden headboard, lie down on the floor and move slowly in a circle, looking for something that might have slid down. Zero. What I’d expected, plus some extra sensations in the ribs. I smelled one of the little bottles of cologne on a painted metal tray on her bureau and it was sweet and sad.

But it could be anyone’s room, I thought. What made it Janice’s?

I looked at her coronet. It seemed to me to be tarnished. I held it in front of my mouth. I smelled her saliva. I put my lips where she put hers. Then I put it back and I sat on the bed. I lay on it. I turned my face to the pillow and sniffed for the smell of her hair and soap and skin. I pressed my face in and down. Then I sat back up because I didn’t want to be found like that. I smoothed away my impression on the pillowcase. I looked across at the little wooden bookcase she used. English books and history books, a book on earth science and one on physics, a clutter of photocopied sheets that I reached for and looked through: math quizzes with bad grades and handouts for English, and no invitation from a psychopath to meet after school. I opened and closed some bureau drawers.

Here’s what the great detective, the interrogator of mysteries, the famous payer of attention, came up with: Janice had been hiding while she lived here. Her parents knew the good little girl and maybe that’s what she was, but she was also someone else. The room was like a set for a high school play called Typical Girl. Of course, Rosalie had already known this. When I came into the hall, the reverend reached around in front of me and turned off her light.

He said, “Clues?”

“Sir, did you change anything in there? Add anything, take anything out? You know, after you became worried? When the police started investigating?”

“That would be Heisenberg on a huge scale!” he said.

“Yes, wouldn’t it. Did you?”

“That’s how she left it. Socks to saxophone.”

We were on the stairs. I said, “I didn’t see a saxophone.”

“My little joke. I liked the alliteration.”

But I did think of socks. They’d most of them been white, though she had some bolder colors. “Could I go back up a minute, Reverend?”

I went to her room, telling him to wait downstairs for me. I got the light on and the door closed, and then I looked through her socks. I found one pair of stockings. The drawer contained the things of a child, not a fourteen-year-old pushing to be grown. I went to the drawer beneath it, which I had already looked through, but very hastily. I wondered why. I thought, You would have been a shy father.

The drawer held little brassieres, sad small things that looked like models of the genuine item. I looked through them and found, on the bottom of the stack, a brown paper bag. In it was a bag from a chain I’d seen in the Syracuse mall. Inside that bag was a little black bra made mostly of lace. Under it was a matching pair of underpants. I looked at her stacked underpants: all white. This pair, in the bag, looked narrow-cut, like they’d come up thin at the crotch, and again very lacy. She had kept the receipt. She must have worked hard baby-sitting to save up for them.

The great payer of attention read the receipt three times before he figured out what worried him. The bill was for “2 pr wmns pnts and 2 brs.”

So now I knew what she was wearing when she left: the other set. She was wearing sexy underwear. Her mother would have been the one to pry in a daughter’s underclothes, and she’d been too sick. Her father would be as frightened of poking as I was. Though, finally, I hadn’t been. Had I? Good of me to find the courage to try to smell her body on her bed, to finger her little sexy disguise.

But maybe she hadn’t been disguised. Maybe the real kid was the one in dramatic lingerie. Why would a child wear clothes like that? Who’d get to see them? I listed on my fingers. One, the girlfriend she has the secret with, and they giggle and they make believe. Two, herself, but maybe not worth it for the money. Three, the boy who takes her clothes off. I found myself moving slowly in a circle in the room, the underpants rolled in my fist.

The door moved, and I barked, “Wait!”