“No, I said.”
We were in tantrum mode. Standing in the C Terminal of Logan, Bubba and Gabby with their tickets in hand, a surprisingly light security check-in line awaiting them, and Gabby pissed off at me like only a four-year-old can get pissed off. The arm-folding, the foot-stomping, the whole deal.
I knelt by her and she turned her head. “Sweetie, we talked about this. Throwing a tantrum in the house is what?”
“Our problem,” she said eventually.
“And what’s throwing a tantrum outside our house?”
She shook her head.
“Gabriella,” I said.
“Our embarrassment,” she said.
“Exactly. So give your old man a hug. You can be mad at me, but you still have to give me a hug. That’s our rule. Right?”
She dropped Mr. Lubble and jumped on me. She held on so tight her thumb knuckles dug into my spine and her chin dug into the side of my neck.
“We’ll see you real soon,” I said.
“Tonight?”
I looked at Angie. Christ.
“Not tonight. But real soon.”
“You’re always going away.”
“No suh.”
“Yes suh. You go away at night and you’re gone when I get up in the morning times, too. And you’re taking Mommy away, too.”
“Daddy works.”
“Too
much
.” She had a catch in her voice that suggested another meltdown was imminent.
I propped her in front of me. She looked in my eyes, a tiny-doll version of her mother. “This is the last time, honey. Okay? Last time I go away. Last time I send you away.”
She stared at me, eyes and lips bubbling. “Swear.”
I held up my right hand. “I swear.”
Angie knelt beside us and kissed our daughter. I stepped back and let them have their own moment, which was even more emotionally fraught than mine.
Bubba stepped in close. “She going to cry on the plane, make a scene, shit like that?”
“I doubt it,” I said. “But if she does and anyone gives you a dirty look, you have my permission to bite them. Or at least growl at them. And if you see any Russians giving her funny looks—”
“Man,” he said, “anyone gives that kid a funny look? Their eyes will end up on the ground looking back up at their head as I cut it off their fucking neck.”
• • •
On the other side of security, they looked back at us, Bubba holding Gabby up by his shoulder as he lifted their bags off the conveyor belt. They waved.
We waved back, and then they were gone.
The Belarus Cross
T
he clouds hung low under a pale sky as we exited the Mass Pike and followed the line on the map toward Becket. The town lay twenty-five miles south of the New York border in the heart of the Berkshires. This time of year, the hills were sprinkled with snow and the damp roads were black and slick. Becket had a main road but no Main Street. It had no town center we could find, no one-block strip containing a general store, a hairdresser, a Laundromat, and the local Realtor. Neither, as Angie had noted, did it have a coffee shop. For any of that, you had to go to Stockbridge or Lenox. Becket had houses and hills and trees and more trees. An amoeba-shaped pond the color of cream soda. More trees, the tops of some half-hidden in the low clouds.
We drove around Becket and West Becket all morning—up, down, all four points of the compass, and back again. Most of the roads in the hills dead-ended, so we got several curious or hostile looks as we pulled up to someone’s property and then had to back out the way we’d come, wheels crunching gravel. But none of those curious or hostile faces belonged to Amanda.
After three hours of this, we broke for lunch. We found a diner a few miles away in Chester. I ordered a turkey club, no mayo. Angie ordered a cheeseburger and a Coke. I sipped my bottled water and pretended I didn’t really want her meal. Angie rarely watches what she eats and has the cholesterol issues of a newborn. I eat fish and chicken ninety percent of the time and have the high LDL levels of a retired sumo wrestler. Life, it’s so fair that way. There were eight other patrons in the place. We were the only people not wearing boots. Or plaid. The men all wore ball caps and jeans. A couple of the women wore the kind of sweaters you get at Christmas from elderly aunts. Parka vests were popular.
“How else to get the lay of the land?” I asked Angie.
“Local newspaper.”
I looked around for a newspaper but didn’t spy one, so I did my best to catch the counter girl’s attention.
She was about nineteen. A pretty face had been damaged by acne scars and she wore an extra forty pounds on her frame like a threat. Her eyes were dull with anger disguised as apathy. If she kept on her current path, she’d grow into the type of person who fed her kids Doritos for breakfast and purchased angry bumper stickers with lots of exclamation points. But right now, she was just another in a long line of pissed-off small-town girls with a shitty outlook. When I finally flagged her down and asked if there was a newspaper behind the counter, she said, “A what?”
“A newspaper.”
Blank stare.
“A newspaper,” I said. “It’s like a home page without a scroll button?”
Stone face.
“The front page usually has pictures on it and, you know, words below those pictures. And sometimes? Pie charts in the lower left corner.”
“We’re a restaurant,” she said, as if that explained everything. Then she went over and leaned against the counter by the coffeemaker and began texting on her cell.
I looked over at the guy nearest to me, but he was engrossed in his meat loaf. I looked at Angie. She shrugged. I swiveled my stool and spotted a wire rack by the door that held some kind of printed matter. I crossed to it and discovered the top rack offered a real estate monthly while the lower rack held brochures of the region. Nothing fancy on the outside—local ads mostly. When I opened it, though, we were greeted with a color map. The gas stations were labeled, as were the summer stock theaters and antique shops, the outlet mall in Lee and the glassworks in Lenox, places that sold Adirondack chairs and others that sold quilts and spools of yarn.
We found Becket and West Becket on the map easily enough. A school we’d passed on a hill this morning was, I learned, the Jacob’s Pillow Dance School, the pond we’d passed a few dozen times was apparently unnamed. Otherwise, the only attractions labeled in Becket were the Middlefield State Forest and McMillan Park, which contained, within its environs, Paw Prints Pet Park.
“Dog park,” Angie said just as I was noticing it. “Worth a stab in the dark.”
The counter girl plopped Angie’s cheeseburger on the counter and then placed the turkey club in front of me with a weary drop of her hand and disappeared into the back before I could mention that I’d asked for no mayo. While we’d been looking at the map, most of the patrons had cleared out. We were alone except for a middle-aged couple who sat by the window and stared out at the road rather than at each other. I walked two stools over and found myself a knife and fork wrapped in a paper napkin and I used the knife to scrape most of the mayo off my bread. Angie watched me, bemused, and then went back to her cheeseburger. As I bit into my sandwich, the short-order cook disappeared from behind the kitchen cut-in. A door opened somewhere out back and shortly thereafter I could smell cigarette smoke and hear him talking in low tones to the counter girl.
My sandwich sucked. Turkey so dry it was chalky. Rubbery bacon. Lettuce that browned as I watched. I dropped it on my plate.
“How’s your burger?”
Angie said, “Awful.”
“Why you still eating it?”
“Boredom.”
I looked at the check left behind by Miss Charm School Graduate—sixteen bucks for two crap lunches delivered by a crappier personality. I left a twenty under the plate.
“You are
not
tipping her,” Angie said.
“Of course I am.”
“But she doesn’t deserve it.”
“No, she doesn’t.”
“So . . . ?”
“All the years I waited tables before becoming a PI?” I said. “I’d tip Stalin.”
“Or his granddaughter, apparently.”
We left the money, took the map, and walked out.
• • •
McMillan Park contained a baseball field, three tennis courts, a large playground for school-age kids and a smaller, more brightly painted one for toddlers. Just past that were the two dog parks—the one for small dogs formed a fenced-in oval within the park for larger dogs. Someone had put a lot of thought into the park—it was strewn with tennis balls and had four water fountains that also fed large metal dog bowls at their bases. Several lengths of thick rope, the kind you’d use to tie off a boat, lay on the ground. It was good to be a dog in Becket.
It was the middle of the afternoon, so it wasn’t terribly populous. Two guys, one middle-aged woman, and an elderly couple tended to two Weimaraners, a Labradoodle, and a pretty yippy corgi who bossed the other three dogs around.
No one recognized Amanda from the photo we passed around. Or maybe no one wanted to recognize her in front of us. Private investigators don’t get much benefit of the doubt anymore. People often consider us just one more symbol of the End of All Privacy Age. And it’s hard to argue the point.
The two guys with the Weimaraners did note that Amanda looked a little like the girl in the
Twilight
movies, if not in the hair and the cheekbones, then in the nose and the forehead and the close-set eyes, but then they got into an argument over whether said actress was a Kristen or a Kirsten, and I wandered over to the middle-aged woman before it devolved into a Team Edward vs. Team Jacob imbroglio.
The middle-aged woman was smartly dressed but you could have stored loose change in the pockets under her eyes. The top third of the index and middle fingers of her right hand were yellowed by nicotine and she was the only one in the park who kept her dog, the Labradoodle, on a leash. Her teeth gritted every time he jerked against her hold, and the other three dogs taunted him.
“Even if I knew her,” the woman said, “why would I tell you? I don’t know you.”
“But if you did,” I assured her, “you’d think I was the cat’s pajamas.”
She gave me an unblinking stare that felt twice as hostile if only because there was nothing overtly hostile about it. “What’d this girl do?”
“Nothing,” Angie said. “She’s just missing from home. And she’s only sixteen.”
“I ran away at sixteen,” the woman said. “I came back after a month. To this day, I don’t know why I did. I could’ve stayed out there.”
When she said “out there,” she chin-gestured past the area where a group of mothers and toddlers gathered around the smaller playground, past the parking lot, and past the hills that rose and were subsumed into the great blue mass of the Berkshires. On the other side of that mountain range, the gesture seemed to say, a better life had waited.
Angie said, “This girl could very much regret running away. Harvard was waiting for her. Yale. Wherever she wanted to go.”
The woman yanked on her dog’s leash. “So she could, what, enter some cubicle at a slightly higher rate of pay? Hang her fucking Harvard diploma on the partition wall? She spends the next thirty-forty years learning how to short stock and steal people’s jobs and houses, their 401(k)s? But that’s okay because
she went to Harvard
. Sleeps like a baby at night, tells herself she’s not to blame, it’s the system. Then one day she finds a lump in her breast. And it’s not okay anymore, but nobody gives a shit, honey, because you made your fucking bed. So do us all a favor and fucking die.”
The woman’s eyes were red by the time she finished and her free hand shook as she reached into her purse and came back with a cigarette. The air in the park felt raw. Angie looked like she was in minor shock. I’d taken one step back from the woman and both the gay couple and the elderly couple were staring at us. The woman had never raised her voice, but the rage she’d expelled into the atmosphere had been so torn and pitiable it rattled us all. And it wasn’t rare. Quite the contrary. You asked a simple question lately or made an innocuous aside and suddenly you were the recipient of a howl of loss and fury. We no longer understood how we’d gotten here. We couldn’t grasp what had happened to us. We woke up one day and all the street signs had been stolen, all the navigation systems had shorted out. The car had no gas, the living room had no furniture, the imprint in the bed beside us had been smoothed over.
“I’m sorry” was all I could think of to say.
She put the shaky cigarette to her lips and lit it with a shaky Bic. “Don’t know what you’re sorry for.”
“I just am,” I said.
She nodded and gave me and then Angie a soft, helpless look. “It just sucks. You know? This whole raw deal they sell us.”
She bit her lower lip and dropped her eyes. Then she and her Labradoodle walked off toward the gate that led out the back of the park.
Angie lit her own cigarette as I approached the elderly couple with the photo of Amanda. The man gave it a glance, but the woman wouldn’t even meet my eyes.
I asked her husband if he recognized Amanda.
He gave the photograph another glance and then shook his head.
“Her name’s Amanda,” I said.
“We’re not much on names here,” he said. “It’s a dog park. That woman who just left? She’s Lucky’s Owner. We don’t know her name beyond that, but we know she had a husband once, a family, but she doesn’t have them anymore. Couldn’t tell you why exactly. Just that it’s sad. My wife and me? We’re Dahlia’s Owners. Those two gentlemen? They’re Linus’s and Schroeder’s Owners. You, though? You’re just the Two Ass-holes Who Made Lucky’s Owner Sadder. Good day to you.”
They all left. They walked out the side entrance to the park and congregated on the sidewalk. They opened their car doors and their dogs hopped in. We stood in the dog park without a dog, feeling ever the fools. There was nothing to say, so we just stood there as Angie smoked her cigarette.
“I guess we should go,” I said.
Angie nodded. “Let’s use that gate, though.”
She indicated the gate on the other side of the dog park and we turned toward it, because we didn’t want to exit past this group who suddenly despised us. The far gate led into the children’s area and then the sidewalk beyond, where we’d parked our car.
A different group congregated here—mothers and their children and their baby carriages and sippy cups and formula bottles and diaper bags. There were half a dozen women and one guy. The guy wore jogging clothes and stood by a jogging stroller slightly away from the group as he drank continuously from a water bottle the length of my leg. He seemed to be modeling for the women and they seemed to be enjoying it.
Except for one. She stood a few feet away, closest to the short fence that separated the children’s park from the dog park. She’d strapped her infant to her chest in a Björn, the baby’s back to her chest so the baby could look out at the world. The baby wasn’t interested in the world, though, she was interested in squalling. She calmed down for a second when the mother put a thumb in her mouth, but then, when she realized it wasn’t the nipple or the pacifier or the bottle she’d been looking for, the howling started again and her body shook like she was being electrocuted. I remembered when Gabby had behaved exactly the same way, how helpless I’d felt, how utterly useless.
The woman kept looking over her shoulder. I assumed she’d sent someone for the bottle or the pacifier and was wondering where the hell they were. She bounced on her feet and the baby bounced with her but not enough to stop screaming.
The mother’s eyes met mine and I was about to tell her it gets better, a lot better, but then her small eyes narrowed and mine did, too, both of our mouths opening. The hair on top of my head grew damp.