The Missing

was wrong with her. “Look at that mark. It’s an F. Can you find F on the piano?”

She pressed down middle F, the single note buzzing out over the hardwood.

“When the mark is in the blank line above, it’s an A, and then a C.” He went on, and she touched the notes. He looked into her corn-flower eyes. “Is a sharp up or down?”

“Up.”

“How much did your father teach you?”

“Those notes. F-A-C-E and E-G-B-D-F. He’s going to teach me to count.”

He was sick to his stomach and dizzy, and the bandage on the back of his head felt hot, but when Lily said this, he spiraled down into a new dimension of pain-of darkness, even. “Who is?” he whispered, putting an arm around her.

She looked at her shoes. “Nobody.”

He felt in her posture some notion that had not occurred to her before, that people disappear in a manner she might never understand. She began to cry gently, but he knew she didn’t really comprehend why she was sad. Someone had told her that her father had gone to heaven, then someone told her that her mother had gone to the same place, and none of it made the least sense to her because she was in the eternal present tense of childhood where the motion of life keeps your mind busy, and the future and the past don’t even exist. He felt sick for her, but terrible for himself as well, for the thin shoulder he cupped in his right hand might have been his own sister’s or brother’s, and then he was crushed by a deeper understanding of what he had lost back before he knew what loss was. He didn’t know such a feeling could come so late, and to keep from crying in front of her, he grabbed a music book and started playing the first piece that opened up, a waltz called “Falling Waters,” and he began explaining the three-four rhythm. Lily’s head raised up and scanned the page. It was a simple piece with single bass notes, and she crossed behind him and stood on his left, poking out G and C more or less in time, watching his fingers complete the chords. He began to have the strange feeling that they were playing into the future, a place where there was no baggage to carry.

They’d spent an hour at the piano when August came through the starboard door covered with coal dust. “I had to help load. I’ll take Lily now.”

Sam looked him up and down. “It’s all right. You get cleaned up, then we’ll go and pull the clothes off the line and iron them.”

“Hot time of day to iron next to a stove. How’d you get banged up?”

“I don’t even know.”

August looked at his bandage closely. “We’ve got some aspirin in our room.”

“I’ll get them when I bring down the clothes.”

***

THE BOAT PLOWED NORTH all the way to St. Paul, where the New Orleans music packed the dance floor every night. During the day, patrons desperate to escape the shore-bound heat loaded on board and sat under the cloth awnings, staring at their houses drifting by as travelers from some foreign land might, relishing the illusion that their town was exotic, special, or at least worth a look.

The crowds were mannered but large, the weather rainy and windy. The pilots fought the shallow channel of the upper river, and one time Mr. Brandywine was flanking a bend when he saddle-bagged the steamer on a sandbar. A ferryboat had to be hired to take fifteen hundred people back to the landing, and the Ambassador was stranded until a rise came down to float her off three days later. Sam was thankful for the idle time. The child began to soak up her piano lessons as well as her short fingers allowed, and he was teaching her limits. Do not stand at the head of stairways. Stay away from the smokestacks. Never go down to the main deck, where the guard rails were sometimes open to the water. At night he read to her, seated in an armless deck chair next to her bed, until she grew tired of the same ten baby books, so he began to make up stories. She stopped him in the middle of one and said she didn’t like it.

He’d just finished playing with the night band because the pianist had jumped to a hotel orchestra, and his head felt as wooden as the wall behind it. “What kind of story do you want?”

“One about a bathtub.” She climbed out of the bunk onto his lap.

He looked at her. “A bathtub?”

“A house with a sidewalk in front.”

He frowned. “Okay. There was this little boy named Fritz who lived in a house with a huge bathtub.”

“Could he play the piano?”

“Uh, sure, he was a crackerjack pianist. Now Fritz fell in a mud puddle in the backyard…”

“Was there grass in the yard?”

“Grass? Yeah. Lots of nice grass. Well, Fritz began to cry and…”

“Did his mother come out and tell him it was okay he got muddy?” She put a hand in his shirt pocket and hung on.

“Of course she did, baby. It was an accident.”

“Did she take him inside a house? The house with the big bathtub?”

He sensed the soaring hope behind the question and understood at once what he had to do.

Chapter Thirty-six

ON A BLUSTERY JULY MORNING a west wind drove the Ambassador into a landing barge. There was no denying that it would have to limp down to Davenport for hull repair. Sam had been calling Linda and giving reports of how he was managing the children. He had discussed certain things with August. When told that the boat would be out of business for ten days, he loaded up August and Lily and took the train south, changing in Memphis and riding through the cinder-strewn heat and humidity down to New Orleans. The three of them showed up at his house sooty from two days on the rails, and his wife met them at the front door with a frown, the baby in her arms.

She thrust Christopher at Sam and examined August and Lily. “Are y’all Catholic?”

“Yes, ma’am.” August put down his suitcase. “But would it make a difference?”

She waved them into the house. “It sure makes it easier if we all go to the same place on Sundays.” She fixed everybody glasses of iced tea, then sat Lily next to her on the sofa and asked all of them questions for an hour, paying particular attention to her. Sam could tell she was trying to get a feel for how things might be.

That night, after the children were asleep, Linda crawled in next to him, and he could feel her whole body decompress toward rest.

“Well, what you think?” He hoped he knew, but with Linda, he could never say for sure.

“I never saw a four-year-old so glad to get into a bathtub.”

“I know we can’t afford another child.”

She laughed curtly. “Baby, we can hardly afford ourselves.”

“August will stay on the boat with me. He’s a real worker.”

“You know as well as me he can only work till September. He’s got to finish school.”

“But I’ll be back right after that at the end of the season. He can get pickup work in his spare time.”

“We’ll talk about this later. Just let me try to get used to them.” She put an arm around his neck. “Come here and let’s not talk about workin’ at something.”

***

HE SAW HER watch August during the week, how he practiced on the back porch and wrote in the margins of sheet music while tapping his foot to some rhythm winding inside his imagination. She took him along to the market and reported that he’d asked for things Lily liked to eat. Little potatoes, he said. She liked little red potatoes. At the house, August pulled grass along the walk, went after the weeds next to the street with a sling blade. He complained about the heat, the mosquitoes, but Linda didn’t hold that against him because she did the