If I Had You Page 20

  Ben wasn’t nearly as cool anymore about this as he had been when he’d started. He paced the width of the three front windows, back and forth, over and over again.

  “Anybody report any suspicious vehicles in the neighborhood? We can’t go out with an AMBER Alert unless we’ve got a make/model and a color.”

  “Claude might have seen something. You know how he’s always out after those birds.”

  “We’ll start with that.”

  “I know this is tedious, Nora.” Gene held up his pen, spoke with a tone of true apology. “But we’ve all gathered here. Even if she walks in the door this second, I’ve got to file some report.”

  “She has a small scar in the middle of her left eyebrow.”

  And suddenly Nora began to babble on and on. It was either that or give in to her stomach, which was threatening nausea.

  “She was running in her nightgown one morning; I don’t know what happened. Maybe she’d been in the bathroom and the floor was wet. Anyway, she hit the molding in the corner when she fell. Seven stitches. They put a square of white paper over her face in the emergency room so she couldn’t see the needle.”

  “Pierced ears? Does she have pierced ears?”

  “Yes.”

  “Was she wearing earrings?”

  “Yes.” Nora pictured them. “Little blue stars.”

  “Anything else? Her birthday—?”

  “She’s seven.” And it poured out, everything she could think to say about Tansy, everything she could force herself to remember about this morning. “Her hair was braided, one long braid down the back. She wanted her favorite purple hair ribbon this morning. I remember that. A white T-shirt with a number on it—number 34 in light blue. Pink-and-white tennis shoes. No brand name. Those you get at Payless with pictures of flowers on the sides. And a Rangers hat.” This stopped her, finally. She thought about that. It terrified her that she couldn’t remember. “I don’t know if she wore her hat.”

  They say there are times a broken heart can be felt, coming on as physical pain. Thinking of that hat, those crumpled seams and folded brim, Nora’s heart knotted and burned.

  Oh, Father. I’ll do anything. Anything. Why are You doing this? If there’s something You want me to sacrifice, please let me see.

  Two hours later, they still had no vehicle description. The police had a command post set up, and a case number ten digits long.

  “Case type?”

  And here it seemed like every officer stopped and held his breath, watching them.

  “Are we talking a family abduction, Ben? Do you think it could be that?” Bill Mott gave Nora a reassuring squeeze on the hand.

  “We don’t know.” Ben started pacing again. “We think it could be. We hope it could be. There is a slight possibility that her mother might have come to take her back. Or maybe not. We don’t know.”

  “Non-family abduction?”

  Everyone waited for Gene.

  “Well, do we know it was an abduction?”

  Nora stood, her voice firm. “We don’t know anything, Gene.”

  Gene scrawled in the blank: Lost, Injured, Missing, then braided his fingers in a tight knot on his desk. “Ben, you could help us with this if you could give us any other leads about your daughter.”

  “Look. You’ve got to understand,” Nora said. “She walked out of our house and left us responsible for her newborn.”

  “And now?”

  “Tess has no claim.”

  “You’re the legal guardians?”

  Nora nodded. Ben said, “We took care of that just as soon as we could.”

  THERE IS NO NIGHT darker than the night of a missing child. The phone had stopped ringing hours before. The last person to bring food and sit with them had departed just before midnight.

  As Nora stood in Tansy’s room, breathless in its emptiness, she remembered that it had been Tess who taught her the enormity of that. A place full of someone’s belongings is much emptier than a place full of nothing at all.

  The yellow coverlet on the bed hung like a ruffled skirt. A tube of Little Kitty lip gloss lay open where it had rolled the last time Tansy had played dress-up. The porcelain tea set, much treasured since Tansy knew it had been her mother’s, was set out as if for a party.

  With Tansy missing all these hours, Nora couldn’t function enough to even keep things in her hands. Money got misplaced. Keys couldn’t be found. A jar of Lavinia’s fig preserves dashed to the ground and the Ball jar shattered into pieces.

  With Tansy gone, Nora had to stop and think where the coffee belonged in the pantry. When Nora went to the Internet and tried to look up any AMBER Alert information, she struck the wrong letters when she tried to type in Tansy’s name.

  Now, as she stood in Tansy’s room, the fan throbbed. Mimosa branches swept the window. For a moment Nora imagined she had heard something. Her chin lifted. Even her heart seemed to wait. She shoved aside the curtains.

  “Tansy?”

  She could see nothing out the window, only the reflection of her own nose.

  Back outside again just to make sure. How many times would this happen? Hearing a sound, stopping, letting herself look and be disappointed?

  Out in the yard, limbs rustled like water. The whole world moved, wheeling out of control.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Jimmy Ray had gone outside to smoke. Tess could see him beyond the smeared window of the café, standing with his shoulders hunched, one hand shoved inside his pocket, the other clinging to the Marlboro.

  She imagined she could hear the soft pop when he pulled the cigarette away from his lips. He followed with an impressive puff of smoke, streaming from his nose.

  This world had so many different ways of hurting people.

  Each time the waitress walked by, her tennis shoe snapped. She wore a nametag that said she was “Laneer.” She kept flirting with the man in the booth across the aisle. “Well, you’ve been here for a long time, haven’t you?” the customer asked.

  “Nine years.”

  “What you need is a boyfriend. Somebody to get you out of this place.”

  A flip of her ponytail. “Nope. I got too many kids for that.”

  Too many kids. Tess tightened her grip on Tansy’s arm and felt a pleasant kind of sorrow soaking into her. I’ve got a kid, too. And I almost gave mine away.

  “I don’t like my hair short.” Tansy kept scraping it aside to get it out of her eyes. “Now I can never have a braid.”

  “But I saved your braid. It’s in the car on the floor.”

  “I didn’t want it in the car on the floor. I wanted it on my head.”

  Tess sighed. “It’ll grow back.”

  “You don’t know that,” Tansy pouted. “You haven’t ever watched my hair grow.” She stared at the luncheon plate of fish sticks and mashed potatoes.

  “Don’t you have to eat something? What’s going to happen to you if you don’t eat something?”

  “I’ll shrivel up and die.”

  “What if I ordered you a cinnamon bun? What about that?”

  Silence.

  “We’ll try that. I’ll see if they’ve got one.”

  Soon, Tansy was staring down at a sugary pastry as big around as a stewpot lid. Tess sighed. This after Tansy had been in the women’s room so long that she’d had to knock on the door three times and ask, What’s taking so long? Did you fall in?

  “Come on, baby. Just eat a little bit, okay? Do it for Mama.”

  “I don’t want to do it for you. I don’t think I like you.”

  “Well, you could try.”

  “I want Nana.”

  After a good while, the sugar did win out. Tansy unwound the outermost layer of gooey roll and started shoveling it in. Tess couldn’t stop staring at Tansy’s short, full curls and remembering Cootie’s hair, how it had looked laying across her lap. She closed her eyes and tried to make the sight go away.

  Jimmy Ray had come back inside and was staring at the television bl
aring from a high corner beside the cash register. He stood there for a long time watching, shoving his sleeves up and down. When he slid into the booth next to Tess he said, “It’s all over the news.”

  “What? That we’ve taken her?”

  “Oh, no. Not that. Not yet.”

  “What is?”

  “Everything that happened at the house. Everything about Cootie dying.”

  It was the first time Tess had heard Cootie’s name out loud in the past day. Her shoulders lifted and fell. When Tess lifted her eyes to his, tears started to stream although she didn’t make a sound.

  “Hey,” Tansy interruped. That’s all Tansy would call her. “Hey, I need to go to the bathroom.” “Hey, I can’t go to sleep.” “Hey, I’m full.” “Hey,” she said now. “I don’t want any more of this cinnamon roll.”

  “We’ll wrap it up and you can eat it later.”

  Jimmy Ray pulled at his shirt pocket, poking around for a cigarette. He didn’t have another.

  Tess’s eyes met Jimmy Ray’s, strong in both her conviction and grief. “Cootie is gone. I don’t have anywhere to go home to anymore.”

  “Maybe this isn’t the time,” he said, “but we could go off together. Set ourselves up somewhere faraway from what’s happened. We could start over.”

  “No, Jimmy Ray.” The heaviness in her heart was a mixture of hopelessness and mourning. “No more starting over for me. It never does any good.”

  “What other choice do you have?”

  She scrubbed her face fast, furious with herself that she showed how badly she was hurting. “There’s a certain path I have to take. I want to show her a part of her father before it’s too late.”

  ON THURSDAY, Nora bought new fabric. Ben was always scolding her. “You spend more money at The Stitch than you make working there.” But Nora never could resist. The day before Tansy had disappeared, she had found an entire McCall’s pattern section of mother/daughter dresses—pages of capri pants and camp shirts.

  She had laying out and cutting to be done. She lined up each selvage, making each thread straight. That done, she arranged the pattern pieces with difficulty. It would never do for the thick green lines and the thin blue ones not to come together at every seam.

  She could not see herself as she worked. If she could have, she would have seen a woman who looked older than she ought to, her mouth bristling with pins. She would have seen someone with her eyes surrounded by anxious lines, a worried frown, as faint and tightly knit as the seams she made with her Singer machine.

  Nora did not allow herself to think as her scissors bit into the fabric. She would cut out two patterns today, one large and one small.

  One mother (grandmother) camp shirt.

  One daughter camp shirt.

  These would be ready, she kept herself sane by thinking, when Tansy came home.

  Later that afternoon, while Ben was sorting through bank statements and utility bills that needed to be paid, Nora marched into the room with a stack of Tansy’s handmade baby blankets, folded neatly and stacked in her arms.

  Ben put down the letter that read PAYMENTS MADE AFTER 30TH WILL BE SHOWN ON NEXT BILL and narrowed his eyes at her. “What is that?”

  “I’m taking these blankets down to Dr. Strouth’s office. I’m going to donate them there.”

  “Donate them? What would a doctor’s office want with baby blankets?”

  “I’ve already gotten permission from him on the phone. The nurses will give these blankets out to girls like Tess, who decide to have babies under difficult circumstances. If the babies are adopted, the blankets can go with them.”

  “Well.” He shook his head at her. “You made about two dozen. That ought to last Butlers Bend about twelve years.”

  “There’s nothing better than a soft flannel blanket that’s been made by a grandma,” Nora said pointedly. “These may scarcely be enough. I may need to make more when these run out. Maybe I can get others from the Stitch to help me.”

  Ben stared down at the pile of windowed envelopes and statements of accounts that littered his desktop, looking weary and jostled, as if he’d been on a difficult journey.

  If Nora had thought about it, she would have anticipated these things. She would have understood that the household numbers were swimming in front of his eyes. She might have known he’d been adding columns twice, three times, making sure that he’d figured right before he dared scribble another check and attach a stamp to the envelope. But she saw only her own pain, and could not escape from it.

  “You could wait to do trivial things like this, Nora. Tansy is missing. I don’t know how you can focus on anything else.”

  “We are two different individuals, Ben. I have to deal with this on my own terms.”

  “I don’t understand your terms, Nora.” When he said it, Nora knew exactly what he meant. My grief is more important than yours! Mine is worse than yours. I love Tansy more!

  She was too exhausted and frustrated to check her words. “You don’t care more about Tansy and Tess than I do! I know you think you do, Ben, but you don’t.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “I think you know what I mean, Ben.”

  At her answer, he rose from his chair and took the blankets away from her. He set the stack on top of his desk, and lofted one of them. The blanket caught air and unfolded of its own accord, sailing down.

  “Stop it,” she said. “Please, Ben. Don’t.”

  “Why does this bother you so much?” He lofted another one. And another. And another. “Why did you ever sew all these things? Why did you disapprove of everything our daughter ever did? Why did you chase Tess away?”

  Nora suddenly felt like she was smothering. The walls seemed to collapse in around her. She hit the door hard, desperate for air.

  She plunged down the steps of the house and scarcely gave a glance toward Donnie Crider, who was taking his shift watching their house. Nora was aware only of the hum in her ears and the motion of her feet; she focused on the sight of one foot after the other appearing in front of her.

  Lord, You died so I could be forgiven for what I did, so why do I keep thinking about it?

  She walked the length of Joplin Street, gasping for breath, and turned the corner beside Lavinia and Claude’s house, her heart pinching when she passed the spot where Lavinia had found Tansy’s backpack in the yard.

  She walked faster, not noticing the pebbles skittering away from her feet on the sidewalk or the pill bugs that were scurrying out of her way. She passed Meriweather Street and knew, from the conversations she’d had with Erin Hamm, that the two girls had been together until Tansy had walked past this intersection. She strode past the bus stop where, ridiculously, the bus still stopped and children still poured out and bounded without much thought toward their homes.

  She hadn’t known Ben was following her. When he caught up with her, he wrenched her wrists and turned her around. “Nora, come here. You mustn’t run away.”

  “I can’t,” she gasped against his chest. “I can’t do anything except run away.”

  “From what?” He grabbed her shoulders but she wrestled away. “What are you trying to run away from? Is it me?”

  A tiny lizard, probably an anole or a chameleon, scurried on tiny, thin legs up the trunk of a tree. Even as Nora watched it, it began to change color, from green to a muted green to grey. A blue jay swooped from the roof and chided her with its sharp, insistent call.

  I had my abortion while I professed to be a Christian. And I forgave myself. And You forgave me, Lord. Why is there a problem now?

  If You don’t look at it anymore, Lord, why do You make me still look at it?

  She let her husband pull her against his chest. And the answer to her question, when it came, seemed to come from the blue jay’s call and the knowing eyes of the lizard and the breeze rustling the leaves in the trees.

  Beloved, you can say you are healed and stay broken, or you can look at it again and bring it to My cross
.

  She leaned her head against her husband’s chest. I don’t know how to do that, she cried to God. I don’t know how to do that.

  “I don’t know how to tell you what I have to tell you,” she said to Ben.

  I am with you, Nora. You are never alone.

  “What is it?” Ben asked. “What do you have to tell me?”

  She had been nineteen when it happened. The very same age that Tess had been when Nora had wanted to encourage her daughter to do it, too.

  “Nora. Look at me.” Ben lifted her face with her hands. “What’s wrong, honey? You look sick.” Nora gazed into her husband’s eyes and the memory played out in her head.

  “I don’t know whether this is good news or bad news,” the university physician had told her after he’d checked her into the college infirmary because she couldn’t even keep fluids down. “You have the flu and you also have something else. You’re going to have a baby.”

  The next morning, free to go to her classes, terrified to say anything to the boy she was dating, Ben Crabtree, Nora headed to the college counseling office instead. When she told them what she needed at the front door, they offered to set an appointment for her so she could talk to someone, and they handed her a green slip of paper with names and addresses of women’s clinics, places she could take care of her problem.

  No one was pressuring her to make this decision. No one knew. Her parents couldn’t have accepted this; they wouldn’t forgive her. Her grandparents wouldn’t understand. She saw everything and she saw it clearly.

  This was legal, so what was there to feel guilty about?

  Nora didn’t feel a need to listen to any counseling. Her mind was made up; this was the solution. To handle this any other way would mean the end of the world.

  That morning, Nora just wanted to get it over with. She had been throwing up for days and she didn’t want to be sick anymore. Although she was scared it would hurt, her college suitemate had told her it wouldn’t be too bad. She ate Twinkies for breakfast, and those made her throw up, too.

  When they directed her to a dressing room, she found a folded, crisp hospital gown and a miniscule pink pill. The pill made Nora think everything was funny. In the corner of this second waiting room, a television blared Bugs Bunny cartoons.