Maggie heard the anguish; it was a pitch that any mother would recognize, the acknowledgment that a thousand imagined horrors had shifted into the realm of possibility. Maggie felt the first finger of real fear poke her in the belly.
“What’s going on?” Ricky stood bleary-eyed behind her. Jones walked back in the front door. He towered behind their son, hands on his hips. Jones’s thick build and sunshine blond hair contrasted with Ricky’s inky spikes and his lean, loping frame. Physically, they were opposites. But they both wore the same furrow in their brows.
Melody rose, pushed past Maggie, and ran to Ricky. “Where is she, Rick? Where did she go?”
Ricky shook his head. “Who?” he said. “Char? What do you mean?”
“Is she upstairs?” asked Jones.
Ricky turned to look at his father. When he answered, he sounded petulant and angry. “No.”
“She’s not,” Maggie confirmed. “I checked his room before I came downstairs. She’s not up there.”
Jones seemed to debate a moment, ran a hand over his hair. Then he turned and went upstairs anyway.
“He doesn’t believe me?” Ricky said, looking at Maggie.
“He’s just checking.”
Jones obviously didn’t believe her, either, she thought with a rush of annoyance. They heard him pounding around upstairs. Then, a moment later, he returned with the cordless phone from Ricky’s room in his hand.
“Why did you have the phone off the hook in your room?” he asked. He held it up to his son.
“I don’t know.” Ricky rubbed his eyes. “I was trying to reach Charlene. I must have fallen asleep without hanging it up. I don’t know.”
“Did you see her tonight?” Jones asked. He sounded more like a cop than a father, someone ready to believe the worst before anything had even happened.
“No. She stood me up. I was supposed to meet her at seven at Pop’s.”
“Oh, God,” said Melody.
“Does she have access to a vehicle?” asked Jones. He turned to Melody.
“No,” she said, issuing a sob. She covered her mouth with her hand.
“Then she left on foot.”
Melody nodded, and Maggie led her to the couch.
“Did you follow her out?” Jones asked. He trailed behind them. “When she left, did you see which way she walked?”
Melody shook her head again, sank down into the suede cushions. She grabbed one of the soft throw pillows and clutched it to her middle.
“Okay,” said Maggie. “Let’s all try to be calm a minute, think about this. If she was on foot, would she have gone to a neighbor’s house, a friend nearby?”
“I’ve called everyone. No one’s seen her.”
“Could she have used her cell phone to call someone, to have someone pick her up?” Maggie glanced up at Ricky. He looked at some point above her, his mouth slack and eyes wide. Who else would Charlene call but her boyfriend? She’d called him before when Graham and Melody were going at it. He’d told Maggie as much.
“She doesn’t have a cell phone,” said Melody.
But she did. Maggie had seen it, even had the number programmed into her own phone. She looked over at her son again; now he was staring at the floor. Did he know where Charlene was? She remembered him storming in, locking himself in his room, blasting the music. The phone was off the hook in his room. He looked up to see her watching him, and quickly cast his eyes away.
“She does have a cell phone, Melody,” Maggie said. She walked to the kitchen and took her phone from its charger. She scrolled through the numbers until she found it.
“Ricky,” Maggie said. “Call Charlene from the home phone right now.”
“I’ve been trying all night,” he said.
“Try again,” said Jones. He handed Ricky the cordless unit that he’d been holding, and the boy dialed.
“Put it on speakerphone,” said Jones, and Ricky obliged with a sullen glance at his father. The call went straight to voice mail. “This is Char. Leave a message-or don’t. What do I care?” Then a heavy strain of punk rock blasted out. Ricky looked around self-consciously.
“Uh, Char, it’s me. Where are you? Your mom is here. Everyone’s pretty worried. Call me back.”
He ended the call and kept his eyes on the phone in his hand.
“If you didn’t get that phone for her, Melody, where did she get it? She doesn’t have a job, right?” asked Jones.
Melody seemed distracted; she was staring out the window into the backyard.
“I don’t know,” she said. Her voice sounded weak and small.
They all looked at Ricky.
“How should I know?” he said, lifting his palms. “Everyone has a cell phone. I figured her mom got it for her.”
“You need a credit card to open a mobile account,” said Jones. Maggie waited for him to go on, but he was already walking off, his own cell phone in his hand. He turned back.
“I need that number,” he said to her.
Maggie handed him her phone with Charlene’s number still on the screen. He took it and walked off again. She heard him giving the number to someone on the other end. A few moments later, there was a knock at the door, then male voices in the foyer.
“Who would she have called other than you, Rick?” Maggie asked.
He gave a slow shrug. “I don’t know. Maybe Britney?”
Melody shook her head vigorously. “No. I already called.”
Maggie watched Ricky stare at the ground, shifting from foot to foot. Melody had a shine to her eyes. Jones stood grim-faced in the entrance to the living room, two uniformed officers behind him. Thinking purely as a professional, Maggie thought each of them was off pitch. Melody was too unhinged, considering Charlene had run off in a safe neighborhood after a fight, not for the first time. Ricky was vacant, looking anyplace but into her eyes. Jones was stern and angry, when he should have been helpful and concerned. Even she felt oddly disconnected, floating above the scene. The tightness in her chest was the only sign of the fear and tension she felt.
She was suddenly aware of the ticking of the old grandfather clock in the foyer-a housewarming gift from her mother. She didn’t even like it but found a general inertia when it came to getting rid of it. It had stood in its place, marking time, for more than a decade. As she walked to the closet, prepared to go out and look for Charlene herself, the clock issued a single chime, announcing the half hour. It was 11:30 P.M.
9
The watercolor sky-silver fading to blue fading to black, the high slice of moon and glimmering stars-reminded her that she’d always wanted to paint but didn’t know how, was in some ways afraid of the idea of putting brush to canvas, of making a mark that couldn’t be erased. The idea that she might create something that was laughable, pitiable, or silly had stopped her from ever taking a class or even buying paints. Foolish. It was foolish. If she had a patient tell her such a thing, she’d ask him why he would hold himself back from something that might give him pleasure and peace. Who constituted this imaginary audience of ridiculers and detractors? How might he defend his desire to create something beautiful just for himself? And what, just what exactly, was so horrifying about making such a harmless mistake as a mark on paper that couldn’t be erased? But she didn’t bother asking herself these questions. She just made false promises to herself. Years ago, she would tell herself that she’d have time when Ricky was older. Now it was when Ricky left for school, or when she and Jones retired.
Her father had been an artist. Her mother had an attic full of his oil paintings and watercolors-landscapes, portraits, still lifes. When Maggie was a girl, there had always been a work in progress on the easel he kept in the dining room, where he liked the light, the position of a mirror that gave him a different perspective.
In the evenings and on weekend afternoons, he’d stand there, fussing and musing over this detail and that. Sometimes she’d watch him. More often, she’d just walk past, knowing he saw little and heard less when he was
