All the people who had canvassed, searched with the police dogs, they quit pressing for details. They got tired of Mrs. Clark telling them, “I don't know. I don't know. I don't know . . .”
Cassandra's first year back in school, her grades went up. She didn't try out for cheerleader. She didn't play basketball or soccer. She didn't do anything but read and come home. She watched the birds in the sky. She watched her goldfish swim.
Still, Cassandra wouldn't wear the partial denture even when Mrs. Clark begged and threatened—threatened to hurt herself. Mrs. Clark could burn her arm with cigarettes and her daughter would just sit by and watch. Breathing in the smell.
Cassandra would just listen. While Mrs. Clark begged her and yelled at her, asking Cassandra to please make an effort to be pretty. To be popular. To talk to a counselor. Get back into the swim of life. Anything. All Cassandra did was listen.
“My own daughter,” Mrs. Clark says, “and she was friendly as a houseplant.”
A robot that got straight A's through her senior year but didn't go to the prom. Didn't date. Didn't have any girlfriends. A Nightmare Box that ticked away, high up on some shelf.
“She sat through every day,” Mrs. Clark said, “the way people sit in church.”
Silent. Straight-backed. Bright-eyed. But not singing, never offering any detail about what went on inside her head. Cassandra would just watch and listen. Not the girl her mother had known, but someone else. A statue that looked down from behind an altar. A statue carved in a cathedral a thousand years ago. In Europe. A statue that knew it was carved by Leonardo da Vinci. That's how Cassandra looked to people.
Mrs. Clark says now, “It drove me crazy.”
Other times, it was like living with a robot. Or a bomb. Some days, Mrs. Clark waited for whatever cult or nutcase to call and ask for Cassandra on the phone. Some nights, Mrs. Clark slept with a knife under her pillow and her bedroom door locked.
Nobody knew what this silent girl might become. She'd lived through something the rest of them could never imagine. So much torture and horror that she didn't need to tell people about it. She'd never need drama or joy or pain ever again.
You could walk into a room, turn on the television, eat a bag of popcorn, and only then notice she was sitting beside you on the couch.
Really, she was that kind of spooky. Cassandra was.
One dinner, just the two of them at the kitchen table, Mrs. Clark asked, did Cassandra remember the Nightmare Box? Did that night in the gallery have anything to do with her disappearing?
And Cassandra said, “It made me want to be a writer.”
After that, Mrs. Clark couldn't sleep. She wanted her daughter gone. Into college. In the army. In a convent. Anywhere. Just gone.
And, one day, Mrs. Clark called the police to say Cassandra was missing.
Of course she'd looked all over the house. Mrs. Clark knew the way Cassandra could disappear into the wallpaper or the stripes of the sofa fabric. But she really was gone.
With all the faded yellow ribbons still flapping from everyone's car, those flags of surrender, Cassandra Clark had disappeared, again.
Cassandra
Another Story by Mrs. Clark
If there's any trick to doing a job you hate . . . Mrs. Clark says it's to find a job you hate even more.
After you find a bigger task to dread, the little chores will be a breeze. Here's another reason to have a devil on hand. It does make all the little demons more . . . bearable. Another Mrs. Clark extension to the theories of Mr. Whittier.
We love drama. We love conflict. We need a devil or we'll create one.
None of that is bad. It's just the way human beings operate. Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly.
After her daughter disappeared the second time, Mrs. Clark dipped a cotton swab in a can of mineral oil and sealed the grout between each bathroom tile. It took most of a weekend.
She ran a dust cloth along the narrow length of each miniblind.
All those tedious jobs, for the time being they were made bearable by the telephone call that might come. The police detectives calling to say they'd found the remains. Or, worse, they'd found Cassandra alive.
That girl robot who could sit all day, painting the blue jays that screeched outside her window. Or watching that damned goldfish swim around and around its bowl.
That . . . stranger with her toes and fingers gone.
What Mrs. Clark didn't know is, the police had found Cassandra. A Cub Scout came out of the woods, not talking. Quiet with a secret, the discovery he'd found. Out looking in the woods, following a little stream up a canyon, climbing over rocks where the water pooled behind before it tipped over and dug out a pool there, this Cub Scout was looking for a hole big enough it might hold trout. Green moss crested and ebbed around the rocks, and trees stood with branches holding each other back. In that shade, there was Cassandra Clark stretched out on one side, her hands folded under the side of her thin, pale face as if she were asleep. Cassandra, naked on a bed of this thick, soft moss, under where the leaves from a hawthorn tree hung down in a curtain all around.
The Scout tells someone adult, who calls the sheriff. Before dark, a string of detectives have followed the creek up that canyon. By dark, they've gone home, a crowd of people not talking about what they saw that day at work.
None of them call Mrs. Clark. At home, waiting, she turns each mattress in the house. She washes the
