Greedy Little Eyes (11 page)

That night and the next, I lay awake listening to the rise and fall of my mother’s and father’s murmur in their bedroom. I couldn’t catch much as far as actual conversation went. It sounded as if he were holding back, never quite raising his voice. As if he were afraid that a harsh tone or sudden movement might cause her to evaporate.

I think now that maybe he was seeing something I wasn’t; he understood that the peace she got from car rides had nothing to do with speed.

Come Saturday morning, I woke up to his rap on the door. He poked his head in. “Oh, I thought your mother might be in here.”

“What time is it?”

It was ten. I felt as if I could sleep into the afternoon. My father looked of the same mind. He’d slept the sleep
of the dead, he said. He had a vague memory of my mother kissing his cheek and saying something about coffee, but that was ages ago, seemed like it was the middle of the night. Maybe she went to the farmers’ market for fruit or something, he said.

Then the phone rang. He ran off to get it.

A minute later he was back in my room. “You don’t know where Nancy is, do you?”

I squinted and sat up, shaking my head. He went back to the phone.

Soon he was leaning in my doorway again. “That was Nancy’s mother. Their car is missing. The old one. Nancy’s not there either.”

“Nancy can’t drive.”

“No kidding,” he said. “They don’t know what to think. Their daughter’s not home and the car is missing.”

We had given it a day before calling the police; maybe the two of them had gone off for a drive in the country. The Donners’ car was a convertible, a fun summer drive, a joyride. But luggage was missing and clothes, Nancy’s and my mother’s. The adults argued amongst themselves as to whether these things were all related: the car, Nancy, Marion. We shouldn’t assume, we shouldn’t jump to conclusions.

The police directed their questions more toward me than to my father: Nancy was my friend. Marion, on the other hand, didn’t seem to have any friends.

My father looked away.

I explained that Nancy and I hadn’t talked much in the last few weeks; she and my mother hung out more, they tap danced. I shrugged. Nancy wanted to dye her hair red too.

The police took notes, leaning back as I spoke. They asked me what I thought my mother’s interest in Nancy was. If I’d noticed anything peculiar in the way she behaved toward her, anything inappropriate.

My father glanced at me and then stared at the cop who’d posed the question with the same sort of expression my mother had worn that afternoon I burst her bubble in the living room, somewhere between pain and mystification.

I looked at my father’s arms poking out from the sleeves of his T-shirt and I thought how peculiar they looked, white and rubbery. It was rare I ever saw his bare arms. To my father, a T-shirt had always been more of an undershirt, the first of two layers.

Finally one of the officers turned to my father and inquired whether he thought my mother might have a friend somewhere. Dad repeated the question as though he were trying to translate from a language he hadn’t heard spoken in years.

The cop looked uncomfortably at me, then back at him.

“Normally,” the cop explained, “that would be the first question, but this”—he cleared his throat—“this situation is a little less usual.”

My father shook his head no and began to cry, head
rocking side to side in his hands, fingers buried in his hair, his chest jerking quietly. My gaze blurred down over his pale arms again. They were bent at the elbows. Like flippers. Fins.

Nancy’s mother called twice after the police left, wanting to know if we’d heard anything.

She called again that night. I watched Dad’s back as he stood at the wall, the receiver not quite at his ear. Nancy’s mother wailed through the phone. I could hear her from my chair.

“What kind of man can’t control his wife?” she demanded to know.

It was less than a week before someone turned my mother in. She and Nancy had taken a leisurely drive to Vegas. When they arrived in town they went to the Tropicana so that Marion could apply for a job as a dancer in one of their shows. She and Nancy, mother and daughter, sat in a lounge talking with the manager, who couldn’t make Marion understand that he wasn’t the entertainment director, he didn’t hire showgirls. That was a whole ’nother department, he told her. The lounge television was tuned to the news, sound off. Marion pulled out her scrapbook, explaining she really could dance if she could just get an audition. He let her go on, jabbering like her freakin’ life depended on it, he said later. He looked away, thinking that maybe he’d offer her a cocktail job, on account of the fact that this
was Vegas and she was too old to start dancing. That’s when he glanced up at the TV screen and saw pictures of my mother with her straight blonde hair and Nancy with hers, bold print stating:
Marion Adler, age 30, grand theft auto and kidnapping of Nancy Donner, age eleven.

Though they were both redheads now, the manager recognized them instantly, aided by the fact that my mother had given Donner as their family name. Apparently she didn’t see the television, or if she did, she didn’t absorb the content. Nancy didn’t notice either. Head down, she was too busy counting the nickels she’d won at slots.

The manager excused himself a moment and called Security and the police. Turned out his own wife had run off with his son the year before, and as much as this Donner broad was a looker, he told police, he didn’t have any kind of sympathy for what she’d done.

Back home, Nancy and the car were handed over to the Donners. The Nevada State Police delivered my mother to the local authorities, who charged her and put her behind bars to await trial. I saw her only on the news; no one would post her bail, they said.

We turned off the TV altogether and didn’t leave the house unless we ran out of food. Not for school or work, not until the trial was over and my mother had been convicted. My father stayed away from work so long they eventually had to let him go. I stayed away
from school so long my father agreed to let me switch, to take the bus to another to avoid the looks and whispers. We lived on unemployment insurance. My father mortgaged the house.

I saw Nancy twice before the Donners moved: once on the news, the back of her head bobbing as she walked down the courthouse steps, her parents ducking away from the press and into their cars. The second time was at the corner store. I had just picked up some milk and bread and canned stuff that my father’d written down on a list.

On her way in, Nancy stopped and faced me with an uncertain “Hi.” She appeared shaken, as though I were a car accident she’d witnessed.

“Hi.”

Then she just stood there, staring, blocking my way out. When I tried to go around her, she reached for my arm, and I flinched like I’d been burned.

“Wanna go play or something?” she asked me. “Like maybe go with my brother and his friends to the waterslides?”

“Go to hell.” I shoved past her out of the store, the bell jingling summer-clear behind me.

It was two years before my father came out of his stupor. My mother was released on parole about the same time. There must have been a correlation. He started to leave the house more regularly again, never walking anywhere,
only driving. He would disappear all day, just driving, he said. I don’t think it calmed him exactly. I think it woke him up, or maybe it would be more accurate to say that it got him breathing. As if continuous motion kept him alive. Soon he applied for a job as a courier, driving packages all over town.

My mother showed up after school one afternoon, a couple of weeks after she was released. She waited outside, scanning the crowd of kids until she caught sight of me. I saw her first and felt a bit sick, as if the school bully were waiting. She took several nervous steps and stopped. Her hair was back to blonde and her skin was thinner, drier, as though she’d aged suddenly.

I walked in the other direction toward the swings and monkey bars and she followed.

Sitting down on a swing, I watched her come closer, her feet delicate in heels, crunching and wobbling on the pebbles, her trench coat flapping in the breeze. She eyed the swing beside me but kept her distance, hands worrying over a gnarled up Kleenex. I wished she would turn and vanish. I sat in the swing, turning myself instead.