The girl should have leaned over him to kiss him. Brush his cheek with her cool lips. This should have happened.
“Be right down, honey. Tell your mother.”
She was deeply wounded, Zeno knew. What had passed between her sister and her former fiancé was a matter of the most lurid public speculation. Inevitably her name would appear in the media. Inevitably reporters would approach her.
It was 5:20 P.M. Good Christ he’d slept two and a half hours. The shame of it washed over him.
His daughter missing, and Mayfield asleep.
He hoped McManus and the others didn’t know. If for instance they’d tried to call him back, return his many calls, and Arlette had had to tell them her husband was sleeping in the middle of the day, exhausted. Her husband could not speak with them just now thank you.
This was ridiculous. Of course they hadn’t called.
He swung his legs off the bed. He pulled off his sweat-soaked T-shirt, underwear. Folds of clammy-pale flesh at his belly, thighs like hams. Steely-coppery hairs bristled on his chest and beneath his arms dense as underbrush in the Preserve.
He was a big man, not fat. Not fat yet.
Mischievous Cressida had had a habit of pinching her father at the waist. Uh-oh Dad-dy! What’s this.
It was a running joke in the Mayfield family, among the Mayfield relatives and Zeno’s close friends, that he was vain about his appearance. That he could be embarrassed, if it were pointed out that he’d put on weight.
Dad-dy better go on that Atkins diet. Raw steak and whiskey.
Cressida was petite, child-sized. Except for her frizzed hair like a dark aureole about her head you might mistake her for a twelve-year-old boy.
Arlette said disapprovingly: “Cressida won’t eat, because she ‘refuses’ to menstruate.”
The father was so shocked hearing this, he pretended he hadn’t heard.
A couple of months ago when Brett Kincaid had come to the house in loose-fitting khaki cutoffs Zeno had had a glimpse of the boy’s wasted thighs, flat stringy muscles atrophied from weeks of hospitalization. Remembering how Brett had looked a year before. It was shocking to see a young man no longer young.
Therapy was rebuilding the muscles but it was a slow and painful process.
Juliet helped him walk: had helped him walk.
Walk, walk, walk—for miles. Juliet’s slender arm around the corporal’s waist walking in Palisade Park where there were few hills. For hills left the corporal short of breath.
His arm- and shoulder-muscles were as they’d been before the injuries. When he’d been in a wheelchair at the VA hospital he’d wheeled himself everywhere he could, for exercise.
His skull had not been fractured in the explosion but his brain had been traumatized—“concussed.”
A hurt brain can heal. A hurt brain will heal.
It will take time. And love.
Juliet had said this. She was gripping her fiancé’s hand and her smile was fine and brave and without irony.
And so it had been a shock—a shock, and a relief—when only a few weeks later Juliet told them the engagement had ended.
Except, things don’t end so easily. The father knew.
Between men and women, not so easily.
Christ! Zeno smelled of his body. The sweat of anxiety, despair.
Before bed that night he would change the bedclothes himself, before Arlette came into the room—Zeno had a flamboyant way with bed-changing, whipping sheets into the air so that they floated, as a magician might; tucking in the corners, tight; smoothing out the wrinkles, deft, fast, zip-zip-zip he’d made his little daughters laugh, like a cartoon character. In Boy Scout camp he’d learned all sorts of handy tasks.
He’d been an Eagle Scout, of course. Zeno Mayfield at age fourteen, youngest Eagle Scout in the Adirondack region, ever.
He smiled, thinking of this. Then, ceased smiling.
He staggered into the bathroom. Flung on the shower, both faucets blasting. Leaning his head into the spraying water hoping to wake himself. Losing his balance and grabbing at the shower curtain but (thank God) not bringing it down.
The sheer pleasure of hot, stinging water cascading down his face, his body. For a moment Zeno was almost happy.
In the bathroom doorway Arlette stood—beyond the noise of the shower she was speaking to him, urgently—She’s been found! It’s over, our daughter has been found!—but when Zeno asked his wife to repeat her words she said, anxiously, “They’re here. The TV people. Come downstairs when you can.”
“Do I have time to shave?”
Arlette came to the shower, to peer at him. Arlette didn’t reach into the hot stinging water to draw her fingers across his stubbly jaws.
“Yes. I think you’d better.”
Quickly Zeno dried himself, with a massive towel. Tried to run a comb through his hair, took a hairbrush to it, hoping not to confront his reflection in the misty bathroom mirror, the bloodshot frightened eyes.
“Here. Here are fresh clothes. This shirt . . .”
Gratefully Zeno took the clothes from his wife.
Downstairs were uplifted voices. Arlette tried to tell him who was there, who’d just arrived, which relatives, which TV reporters, but Zeno wasn’t able to concentrate. He had an unnerving sense that his front door had been flung open, anyone could now enter.
The door flung open, his little girl had slipped out.
Except she wasn’t a little girl any longer of course. She was nineteen years old: a woman.
“How do I look? OK?”
It wasn’t unusual for Zeno Mayfield—being interviewed. TV cameras just made the interview experience more edgy, the stakes higher.
“Oh, Zeno. You cut yourself shaving. Didn’t you notice?”
Arlette gave a little sob of exasperation. With a wadded tissue she dabbed at Zeno’s jaw.
“Thanks, honey. I love you.”
Bravely they descended the stairs hand in hand. Zeno saw that Arlette had tied back her hair, that seemed to have lost its glossiness overnight; she’d dabbed lipstick on her mouth and had blindly reached into her jewelry box for something to lower around her neck—a strand of inexpensive pearls no one had seen her wear in a decade. Her fingers were icy-cold; her hand was trembling. Another time Zeno said, in a whisper, “I love you,” but Arlette was distracted.
And Zeno was disoriented, seeing so many people in his living room. And furniture had been moved aside in the room. TV lights were blinding. The female reporter for WCTG-TV was a woman whom Zeno knew from his mayoral days when Evvie Estes had worked in City Hall public relations in a cigarette-smoke-filled little cubicle office at the ground-floor rear of the old sandstone building. Evvie was older now, hard-eyed and hard-mouthed, heavily made-up, with an air of sincere-seeming breathless concern: “Mr. and Mrs. Mayfield—Zeno and Arlette—hello! What a terrible day this has been for you!”—thrusting the microphone at them as if her remark called for a response. Arlette was smiling tightly staring at the woman as if she’d been taken totally by surprise and Zeno frowned saying calmly and gravely, “Yes—a terribly anxious day. Our daughter Cressida is missing, we have reason to believe that she is lost in the Nautauga Preserve, or in the vicinity of the Preserve. She may be injured—otherwise she would have contacted us by now. She’s nineteen, unfortunately not an experienced hiker . . . We are hoping that someone may have seen her or have information about her.”
Zeno Mayfield’s public way of addressing interviewers, gazing into TV cameras with a little frowning squint of the brow, returned to him at even this strained moment. If there was a quaver in his voice, no one would detect it.
Evvie Estes, hair bleached a startling brassy-blond, asked several commonsense questions of the Mayfields. In his grave calm voice Zeno prevailed when Arlette showed no inclination to reply. Yes, their daughter had spoken with them on Saturday evening, before she’d gone out; no, they had not known that she was going to Wolf’s Head Lake—“But maybe Cressida hadn’t known
she was going to the lake, when she left home. Maybe it was something that came up later.” Zeno wanted to think this, rather than that Cressida had lied to them.
But he couldn’t shake off the likelihood that Cressida had lied. She’d lied by omitting the truth. Saying she was going to a friend’s house, but not that, after visiting with her friend, she had plans to turn up at Wolf’s Head Lake nine miles away.
It had been established by this time that Cressida had remained with her friend Marcy until 10 P.M. at which time she’d left for “home”—as she’d led Marcy to think.
Cressida hadn’t driven to her friend’s house which was less than a mile from the Mayfields’ house, but walked. It was believed by Marcy that Cressida had then walked back home—having declined an offer of a ride from Marcy.
Or, it might have been that someone else, whose identity wasn’t known to Marcy, had picked Cressida up, when she’d left Marcy’s house on her way home.
Not all of this made sense (yet) to Zeno. None of this Zeno cared to lay bare before a TV audience.
Though he’d been thinking how ironic, when Cressida had been, as witnesses claimed, in the company of Brett Kincaid at Wolf’s Head Lake, her sister Juliet had been home with their parents; by then, Juliet had probably been in bed.
That night, the Mayfields had invited old friends for dinner and Juliet had helped prepare the meal with Arlette. And Cressida had made it a point to explain that she couldn’t come to dinner with them that night because she was seeing her high school friend Marcy Meyer.
Evvie Estes asked if there’d been anything to lead them to “suspect”—anything? When they’d last seen Cressida?
“No. It was an ordinary night. Cressida was seeing a friend from high school and she hadn’t had to tell us, we would have known, she’d have been back home by eleven P.M. at the latest. It was just—an ordinary night.”
Zeno hadn’t liked Evvie Estes pitching that word to them—“suspect.”
Zeno and Arlette were seated side by side on a sofa. Zeno clasped Arlette’s hand firmly in his as if to secure her. Earlier, Juliet had helped Arlette locate photographs of Cressida to provide to police and media people, to be shown on TV and posted online through the day; Zeno assumed that these photos would be shown on the 6 P.M. news, during the interview. And he hoped that the interview, which was being taped, about fifteen minutes in length, wouldn’t be drastically cut.
“All we can hope for is that Cressida will contact us soon—if she can. Or, if she’s been injured, or lost—that someone will discover her. We are praying that she is in the Preserve—that is, she hasn’t been—taken”—Zeno paused, blinking at the possibility, a sudden obstacle like an enormous boulder in his path—“taken somewhere else . . .” His old ease at public speaking was leaving him, like air leaking from a balloon. Almost, Zeno was stammering, as the interview ended: “If anyone can help us—help us find her—any information leading to her—her whereabouts—we are offering ten thousand dollars reward—for the recovery of—the return of—our daughter Cressida Mayfield.”
Arlette turned to stare at him. Ten thousand dollars!
This was entirely new. This had not been discussed. So far as Arlette knew, Zeno had not thought of a reward before this moment.
Uttering the words “ten thousand dollars” Zeno had spoken in a strangely elated voice. And he’d smiled strangely, squinting in the TV lights.
Soon then the interview ended. Zeno’s white shirt was sticking to his skin—he’d been sweating again. And now he, too, was trembling.
Of course the Mayfields could afford ten thousand dollars. Much more than this, they could afford if it meant bringing their missing daughter home.
“ZENO? WHERE ARE YOU GOING?”
“Back to the Preserve. To the search.”
“You are not! Not now.”
“There’s two hours of daylight, at least. I need to be there.”
“That’s ridiculous. You do not. Stay here with us . . .”
Zeno hesitated. But no no no no. He had no intention of remaining in this house, where he couldn’t breathe, waiting.
FOUR
Descending and Ascending
I KNEW. AS SOON AS I saw her bed wasn’t slept-in.
I knew—something had happened.
AT 4:08 A.M. that Sunday morning Arlette awakened with a start.
The strangest sensation—that something was wrong, altered. Though in the shadowy interior of her bedroom—her and Zeno’s bedroom—here was comfort, ease. Though Zeno’s deep raspy rhythmic breathing was comfort to her, and ease.
Must’ve been a dream that wakened her. A swirl of anxiety like leaves spinning in a wind tunnel. She’d been pulled along—somewhere. Waking dry-mouthed and edgy believing that something was changed in the house or in the life of the house.
Or—one of her limbs was missing. That was the dream.
What was the phenomenon?—“phantom limb”? In that case an actual limb is missing from the body but you feel the (painful) presence of the (absent) limb; in this case, nothing was missing from Arlette’s body, so far as she knew.
It was mysterious to her, this loss. Yet it seemed unmistakable.
After this hour she would not ever feel otherwise.
WITHOUT WAKING ZENO she slipped from their bed.
Sometimes in the night when they awakened—through a single night, each woke several times, if but for a few seconds—Arlette kissed Zeno’s mouth in playful affection, or Zeno kissed hers. These were kisses like casual greetings—they were not kisses meant to wake the other fully.
How’s my sweet honey Zeno might mutter. But before Arlette could answer, Zeno would sink back into sleep.
Zeno was deeply asleep now. What subtle and irrevocable seismic shifting of the life of the house Arlette had sensed, Zeno was oblivious to. Like one who has fallen onto his back he lay spread-limbed, sprawled, taking up two-thirds of the bed in his warm thrumming sleep.
Arlette had learned to sleep beside her husband without being disturbed by him; whenever possible, her dreams incorporated his audible breathing in the most ingenious of ways.
Zeno’s snoring might be represented, for instance, by zigzag-shapes like metallic insects flying past the dreaming wife’s face. Sometimes, Arlette was awakened by her own surprised laughter.
That night, at dinner with friends, Zeno had consumed a bottle of wine himself, in the interstices of pouring wine for others. He’d been in very good spirits, telling stories, laughing loudly. He’d been tenderly solicitous of Juliet and refrained from teasing her, which was unlike the girls’ Daddy.
Through their long marriage there had been episodes—there had been interludes—of Zeno drinking too much. Arlette understood, Zeno had been drinking tonight because he felt guilty: for the relief he’d expressed when Juliet’s engagement had been broken.
Not to Juliet of course but to Arlette. Thank God. Now we can breathe again.
Except it wasn’t so easy. It would not be so easy. For their daughter’s heart had been broken.
Juliet had spent the evening with them. Instead of with her fiancé.
That is, her ex-fiancé.
Helping her mother prepare an elaborate meal in the kitchen, helping at the table, smiling, cheery. As if she hadn’t a life elsewhere, a life as a woman elsewhere, with a man, a lover from whom she’d been abruptly and mysteriously divided.
It was a small shock, to see the engagement ring (of which Juliet had been so proud) missing from Juliet’s finger.
In fact Juliet’s slender fingers were ring-less, as if in mourning.
At the dinner table, three couples and the daughter. Three middle-aged couples, a twenty-two-year-old daughter.
And the daughter so beautiful. And heartbroken.
Of course, no one had asked Juliet about Brett. No one had brought up the subject of Brett Kincaid at all. As if Corporal Kincaid didn’t exist, and he and Juliet had never been planning to be married.
It’s God-damned sad.
But not our fault for Christ’s sake.
What did we do? Not a fucking thing.
He’d been drunk, muttering. Sitting heavily on the bed so the box springs creaked. Kicking a shoe halfway across the carpet.
Juliet should talk to us about it. We’re her God-damn parents!
When he was in one of his moods Arlette knew to leave him alone. She would not humor him, or placate him. She would leave him to steep in whatever mood rose in him like bile.
It was an asshole decision, to enlist in the army. “Serve his country”—see where it got him.
Anyway he won’t pull our daughter down with him.
Arlette didn’t stoop to retrieve the shoe. But she nudged it out of the way with her foot so that neither of them would stumble over it in the night, should one of them rise to go to the bathroom.
Immediately his head was lowered on the pillow, Zeno fell asleep.
A harsh serrated breathing, as if briars were caught in his throat.
The air-conditioning was on. A thin cool air moved through the bedroom. Arlette pulled a sheet up over her sleeping husband’s shoulders. At such moments she was overcome with a sensation of love for the man, commingled with fear, the sight of his thick-muscled shoulders, his upper arms covered in wiry hairs, the slack flesh of his jaws when he lay on his side. Inside the middle-aged man, the brash youthful Zeno Mayfield with whom Arlette had fallen in love yet resided.
In a man’s sleep, his mortality is most evident.
They were of an age now, and moving into a more emphatic age, when women began to lose their husbands—to become “widows.” Arlette could not allow herself to think in this way.
Remembering later, of that night: their concern had been for Juliet, and for Brett Kincaid whom possibly they would not ever see again.
Their thoughts were almost exclusively of Juliet. As it had been in the Mayfield household since Corporal Kincaid had returned in his disabled state.
Cressida passing like a wraith in their midst. On her way out for the evening to visit with a friend from high school who lived so close, Cressida could walk instead of driving. At about 6 P.M. she must have called out a casual good-bye—in the kitchen Arlette and Juliet would scarcely have taken note.