The Forgetting Time(48)

“What’s Charlie up to, then?”

“Still nuts about that band of his. Practices all the time.”

“Practicing, hmm? He any good?”

“I don’t know.” She thought about it. “Maybe.”

“God help him, then.”

“Oh, so you’re a religious man, now?”

“Drummer needs all the help he can get.”

They laughed, a tinge of the old complicity that made her throat ache.

“You could call him up, you know. Hear for yourself. I know he misses you. He won’t say it, but he does.”

“Won’t say it, huh.”

She could feel the anger beginning to burn in him.

“He’s just private. A teenager. That’s all. It doesn’t mean anything.”

“Doesn’t it?”

“Henry.”

“Just tell me this. Do you ever say my name in that house? Do you ever think of me at all? Or is it like I’ve never even lived there? Because that’s how it feels to me.”

“Of course we talk about you, all the time,” she lied. “It’s been five years, Henry, I think we both need to—”

“Five years is nothing. Five years is shit.”

She winced. He was speaking that way to provoke her. She must not be provoked.

“All right. Well, on that note, then, I’m going to—”

“Denise? You know what day it is?”

She said nothing.

“That’s why you called me, isn’t it? To talk about Tommy?”

The name caught her. She couldn’t breathe for a moment.

“No,” she said.

“I see him all the time. You know? In my dreams.”

“Listen, Henry, I’m going to get off the phone now.” But she stood there, holding on to it.

“He’s standing at the edge of the bed, looking at me. You know. With that look he had. Like he wants you to help him but he’s never gonna ask.”

She was silent. This was why they hadn’t made it: she moved and kept on moving, as if they could find Tommy that way and only that way, and he stayed stock-still, head bowed, letting it break over him again and again.

“You still think Tommy’s coming back someday? You don’t think that, do you? Denise?”

His voice had an urgency that reached all the way down … a voice that was a hand burrowing inside her, winding her guts around and around like a skein of yarn. She was aware suddenly that the name had never stopped repeating itself since she’d woken up with it that morning. Had been going on in the background all through the day. She was going to be sick. Going to be sick right now if she didn’t get off the phone. Her hands started to shake.

“Denise?”

She readied herself to say something. But there was nothing to say.

She hung up the phone.

She was going to throw up.

No. She wasn’t. (For one thing, she hadn’t eaten anything all day.) Okay, then. She needed a pill.

No. She didn’t.

She closed her eyes and counted to ten.

Then to twenty.

*

She always went the long way home, taking the highway to the exit and then doubling back, but today she got in the car and without telling herself what she was doing she drove out on the main road and turned right at the light. She drove straight through town, past the strip of doctors’ offices, the dollar store and the liquor store and the Taco Bell, past the fire station and the boarded-up department store, heading out toward the cornfields where the turnoff to their house was, and McKinley.

McKinley Elementary was a low, concrete box pierced with vertical slits; it was built in the sixties, when they didn’t believe in windows, and had that grim, prison aspect you found sometimes in churches and schools from that era. Inside had been a different story, the halls plastered with pictures and stories, the rooms vibrating with the bustling life force of young children being educated.

She had avoided this building for years, like a face that you tried to put out of your mind, and yet there it was, there it had always been, a mere five minutes from their house, and she realized now that during her days at the nursing home there was a part of her that knew what was happening, at every moment, at the school: that at 8:45 the bells were ringing and students were lining up for class; and at 12:40 they were eating lunch; and at 1:10 they had recess. Eleven years she’d taught there and its rhythms were ingrained in her bones.

She parked opposite the school, two doors down from the Sawyers’ house, where Tommy used to go after school some days to play video games with Dylan. The video games at the Sawyers’, she remembered now, were more violent than the ones she had let him play, and there had been some disagreements about that. She and Henry had argued about whether they should say something to Brenda Sawyer, or rather, she had gone back and forth, her disgust with the violent games battling with her natural reticence about telling other people how to raise their children, until Henry got sick of the whole issue and vowed to call Brenda up and tell her that there was no way any son of his was shooting anybody, even if it was only a game.

And in the end—in the end they had not needed to resolve this issue. They didn’t get the chance to figure it out, or to discover what kind of parents they would be to Tommy at nine and a half, or eleven, or fifteen. The Sawyers had been part of the crowd in those first few weeks plastering posters of Tommy all over Greene County, delivering doughnuts and coffee to the police officers with a subdued excitement, an intensity of purpose that she was initially grateful for but, as the days passed, couldn’t help but resent. And Brenda and Dylan had been among the few who came calling a month after Tommy had disappeared, toting along a casserole and some flowers, as if they couldn’t decide what to bring. She’d watched them from the bedroom window, the mother and son standing side by side on the doorstep with nervous faces, saw their bodies sag in relief when they realized that no one was going to let them in. They left the casserole and the flowers on the stoop, and when they had gone she tossed the flowers and scraped the disgusting noodley thing the woman had made into the garbage, washed and scrubbed out the glass pan, and had Henry deliver it back to them that very evening so she could be rid of them forever.