No One Tells Everything (2 page)

But she can’t even get to the point of his hand up her skirt because the image of Sarah Shafer filters in, asserting itself into her consciousness. Her glistening eyes and expectant smile. What is she haunted by? Who does she think of when it starts to rain? What does she want to be?

She was last seen leaving her dorm alone, past midnight, her ghostly image caught in four stilted, washed-out frames of security camera film. What did she do? Grace is more intrigued by the girl’s possibilities than her own. She falls asleep thinking of her.

G
race waves to people as she makes her way through the fluorescent-lit halls of the office, but she doesn’t stop to chat. The others in her department are amiable but she prefers not to join them on their daily excursions to the cafeteria or out for drinks at the bar next door. Pleasant but peripheral is how they’d describe her. Without her shell of detachment she fears she risks wandering the barren plains of ordinariness.

Safely at her desk, she drinks coffee and scans the paper for any news on Sarah Shafer. There’s a small mention of her disappearance, noting that the police are investigating a promising lead. Alongside the article is the same photo that was shown on TV the night before. Grace wonders whose arm it is that mantles the girl’s shoulders a little too tightly. She pictures a boy in a Greek-lettered sweatshirt who picked Sarah out of the freshmen facebook and then got her drunk so he could get in her pants.

“Hey, Grace.”

Brian rests his arms on the top ledge of her cube and drums his thumbs. He is her boss, eight years her junior, and when it’s just the two of them, his confidence tends to slip into adolescent uncertainty. He’s always after something he can’t ask for. Grace thinks he’s intrigued by her aloofness. He thinks she is hiding someone interesting.

“Hi,” she says.

“Hey. Hi. Can I come in?”

He slouches in her rarely used guest chair. His sneakers are big and purple. In his quest to be cool he often miscalculates with endearing fashion mishaps. He flips his shaggy bangs from his eyes and leans back, crossing his ankle on his knee. Not long ago he and Grace shared a drunken make-out session on a team-building cruise around the Statue of Liberty. They have never spoken of it.

“So we have to kick ass on getting the cover story cleaned up and turned in before close,” he says.

Brian admitted to her once that he never imagined he would be a glorified proofreader, but he takes his job seriously because in no other areas of life are the rules so clearly defined, the satisfaction so dependable. Sometimes she wishes she shared his outlook. What she would never tell Brian is that she feels her job is a slow death, even though she’s never demonstrated a particular drive to do something different.

“Come on. It’s important for this department to show off a little,” he says. He playfully punches her arm but then lets his hand drop.

“Hmm,” she says, granting him a small smile. She shifts in her seat and pulls her skirt down over her knees.

“You might try showing a little enthusiasm, Grace,” he says, deflating.

She has an urge to pat his head.

Grace imagines the thrill of quitting when she gets a new job. No two-week notice, no send-off party. Snip, snip. The joy of disengaging from this sameness.

“Okay,” she says, suddenly feeling a tiny pang of remorse at the prospect of never seeing him again.

She likes Brian, and sometimes she wonders if she could really like him. His efforts are like little life preservers tossed in her direction, ready to pull her to normalcy. For now she prefers to watch them float by.

He jumps up from the chair and rubs his hands together.

“Strategy meeting at noon,” he says.

Brian shuffles out, the cuffs of his jeans dragging on the floor.

She quickly finishes the day’s assignments so she can search for Sarah Shafer online. There is a little piece in the Nutley Journal, Sarah’s New Jersey hometown paper, an interview with her once happy family: dad an accountant, mom an elementary school teacher, younger brother a high school basketball star, younger sister on the seventh-grade honor roll. Vacations to Rehoboth Beach. Two cocker spaniels named Scout and Atticus. Sarah was supposed to have gone home to visit this past weekend. And no, there is no chance that she ran away. The family, the article says, has been doing a lot of praying. They have plastered the Long Island campus with fliers of Sarah’s face, hoping for any information as to her whereabouts.

“Our daughter is a good girl,” the mother says. “She didn’t deserve this.”

Grace clucks at this naiveté, as if goodness is any kind of deterrent.

Callie’s death was the first domino and the rest of the family fell with unresisting ease. Sometimes Grace tries to remember the time before loss was a possibility, when they were four and not three, when she and Callie wrestled with every muscle in their girl bodies, each believing in her own justice, her own entitlement to more space in the backseat, more attention, more credit for her more perfect front-walkover. Before she knew that having no sister was to be her sentence.

She daydreams a scenario where it turns out that Callie disappeared, ran away, was abducted—anything that allows a chance of her showing up one day, her blond hair now darker, shorter, smartly tied back from her face, her body long and slim. Callie loops her arm around Grace’s waist and they slip back into being girls again. “Gracie-Lacie, let’s play kickball and I’m up first.” For a moment the dream dissolves into memories of the old days, of how it was before it wasn’t.

Her phone rings.

“This is Grace.”

“Hi, honey.”

Her mother’s tone is always a little reserved, polite. Grace’s shoulders droop.

“Hi, Mom.”

“How’s work?” her mother asks, not looking for a real answer.

“Fine,” Grace says automatically. “How’re you?”

Her mother sighs.

“I’m okay,” she says.

“Yeah?”

“Well.”

“What is it?”

“I’m a little worried about your father.”

Lately a sense of frailty has crept into Grace’s conception of her parents. They have been replaced by smaller, quieter, less able versions of themselves. Her father has arthritis and high blood pressure. Her mother broke her hip when she slipped on the driveway last winter. They are shrinking. Grace tries to ignore that they are, by most definitions, old.

“He’s forgetting things,” her mother says.

“What do you mean?”

“Getting disoriented running errands, losing track of what he’s doing. He looked at me the other day and I could tell he didn’t know who I was at first.”

Grace feels the itching, burrowing roots of dread.

“How long has this been happening?”

“A couple months. I was hoping it would go away.”

Her mother is quiet, looking out the kitchen window above the sink at the season’s first lily of the valley, her favorite, coming up through the ivy. Her patrician silhouette and coiffed bob. A pastel yellow cashmere, perhaps. Pearls.

“You know him. He thinks he’s fine. He blames it on retirement, his medications, the weather,” she says. “I was thinking maybe you could talk to him.”

Grace and her father have never discussed personal matters. They trade surface generalities and small talk like new acquaintances who have run into each other at the grocery store, volleying pleasantries.

“I don’t think so.”

“Maybe you could come home for a while? It might be good for him.” It is unlike her mother to ask for help, so now Grace thinks the situation is worse than she’s letting on. “It would be nice to spend some time as a family.”

“I’m pretty busy at work these days.”

Grace organizes a stack of old layouts, fearing her mother can sense her lie.

“It’s been three years,” her mother says, her controlled voice belying her blame. “I just think it would be nice to all be together.”

The guilt nettles even as it makes Grace want to stay away from them for another good stretch.

“Grace, he keeps talking about Callie.”

And now Grace knows that something is very wrong.

Her parents still live in the white and stone colonial house she grew up in. Their upper-middle-class suburb, southeast of Cleveland, is idyllic from the outside, rolling and green with wide lawns, towering oaks, old homes, and a feeling of insular solidity. Kids she grew up with joined their dads’ firms, got married, and moved into houses in the neighborhood. At the country club there are still men wearing pants with whales on them. Her parents never considered leaving, even though Callie died in the street right at the edge of their front lawn.

Her father worked for the same financial management company for almost forty years, from which he retired as a partner. He eats two scrambled eggs, wheat toast, and tomato juice every morning and he plays golf every Saturday, teeing off at 7:30 a.m. Her mother used to say she could set her watch by when she heard the garage door rise on Saturday morning.

A few months after Callie died, he decided that none of them would talk about her anymore, that it was time—and best for all of them—to soldier on. Pretend it was fine and it would be, he seemed to believe. Grace and her mother went along with it for years, even when it was just the two of them. Her father slapped Grace once when she was twelve for saying that Callie had ruined her chance of ever having a pet by letting her goldfish starve to death.

The news that her father has been talking openly about Callie is unsettling. Portentous even. Grace tries to ignore the icy, creeping sensation emanating from the base of her spine. But it won’t go away.

###

After lunch, Brian calls Grace into his office. On his desk is a framed photograph of the department, arms around each other, in front of a race car at an off-site activity. She is on the end, half of her body cut off by the frame. The night she and Brian kissed, she remembers saying that people play at being different versions of themselves at the office. She wonders if the real Brian is even more earnest than he lets on. She doodles a checkered flag on her notepad as he talks, but then he notices, and she hastily flips the page.

He gets up and shuts his office door before sitting back down.

“So,” he says. His eyes are green, speckled with yellow, and crinkled in the corners. He smiles but looks away.

“So,” she says.

“I wanted to talk to you about something,” he says, playing with a paper clip on his desk. He bends the end of the wire back and forth until it breaks off. “It’s not about work stuff. I mean I know you report to me and if it makes you uncomfortable to talk about this, please tell me.”

Heat needles her cheeks.

“I want to make sure we’re okay,” Brian says, flashing his hands out, palms down. “Since the cruise, I sense a little hostility from you or something. And I didn’t want you to feel, in any way, that I took advantage of the situation.”

Grace turns her widened eyes to her lap.

“You’d had a few…”

So had you, she thinks defensively, even though she can’t recall enough of the evening to know for sure.

“And being your superior, I didn’t want anything to be misconstrued…”

She’s annoyed at his presumption of authority, even if he is her boss.

“I’d pretty much forgotten about it,” she says with feigned cheerfulness.

“Oh. Okay. Cool,” he says. “So we’re cool then?”

She actually gives him a thumbs up.

###

Grace is always eager to leave the office but once outside the door, back into the hurrying masses fighting for sidewalk space, disappointment usually sets in. She rushes home to be alone. Tonight, as on most Tuesdays, she picks up sushi at the place near her subway stop and a bottle of Chardonnay on the corner. In the evenings, the super and his wife usually sit on the top step of her building, waiting to ensnare in conversation whomever happens home. Tonight they are in their basement apartment, engaged in a Spanish screaming match, and she ducks into the building unnoticed.

When she opens her mailbox, a sense of crushing failure sets in before she even gets the thin business envelope open. She already knows. No interest, no interview, no job. All the best.

Grace unlocks her door and right inside her apartment plunks to the floor in defeat. She slams the door shut, hiding in the darkness. Her face burns for trying and she looks to the wine to wash it away, a cleansing current through her veins, carrying away the rejection. She is thankful for the corkscrew on her keychain. She takes a swig from the bottle and then another, welcoming the promise of the slightly tart and tepid wine that’s now spilled on the front of her shirt. She opens the little plastic lid of the sushi tray and pours a dash of wine on each little bundle, as if feeding a nest-full of baby birds. For you and for you and for you. And then more for me, she thinks. A fire truck screams by and she drinks to that. A bottle breaks against the sidewalk and she drinks to that, too.

The telltale red light blinks on her answering machine.

“Grace, it’s me. I know you’re probably still upset. I wanted to tell you I’m sorry. For things. It’s just best this way, I think. Well, okay. Good luck with everything.”

How perfect. His message—purposefully left during the day when she wouldn’t be here—is a fitting punctuation to their relationship. She tells herself she didn’t like him that much anyway.

She is a rest stop, an intermission, a pause. At thirty-five, she has never been in love and she often wonders if there is something that has rendered her unable. A crossed chain of synapses in her brain, a genetic flaw. Callie was the sunny, outgoing one. She was light and Grace was dark. Hair color, temperament, outlook. Callie made people smile just by being. Even as a child it was already clear that she had it, that spark that people gravitate toward.

Grace was ten and Callie was eight when old Mr. Jablonski’s wood-sided Dodge Aspen veered around the curve of Woodland Road. On that hot, hot August day when the brood cicadas had come up from the ground en masse and drowned out the other sounds of summer, when the sun-warmed tar was as soft as taffy, her sister’s body bounced up onto the car’s hood like a rag doll, coming to rest in the cradle of a crushed windshield.