The Burgess Boys (29 page)

“That’s not your fault,” Helen said. “And it’s not my fault either.”

Jim stood up, slipped his loafers on. He patted his pockets for the car keys. “If you don’t want to be here, Helen, go home. Get a flight out tonight. Susan won’t care. She won’t even notice.” He zipped up his coat. “I mean it. It’s okay.”

“I’m not going to go and just leave you here.”

She spent the afternoon bundled up, walking along the pathway by the river. The sun was still bright on the snow and also on the water. She stopped when she saw what appeared to be a war memorial. She had never noticed it before, but she had not been to Shirley Falls in more years than she could remember. There were large slabs of granite, upright, in a large circle. Peering closely she was dismayed to see that one was for a young woman recently killed in Iraq. Alice Rioux. Twenty-one years old. Emily’s age. “Oh, little sweetie pie,” Helen whispered. Sorrow expanded around her in the sunshine. She turned and headed back to the hotel.

The chambermaid startled Helen, standing outside their room with her cart of towels: She wore a robe that went from head to toe and only her face showed, round brown cheeks and bright dark eyes, which meant she must be a Somali, because Helen could think of no other black Muslims up here in Shirley Falls, Maine. “Hello!” Helen said this brightly.

“Hello.” The girl—or she could be a middle-aged woman, how was Helen to know, the face was unreadable to her—stepped back with a gesture of shyness, and when Helen entered her room it had already been made up. She’d remember to leave a nice tip.

Bob showed up around five—probably, Helen thought, in order to drink and take a break from his sister’s despair. “Come in, come in,” she said. “How’s your sister?”

“The same.” Bob took a tiny bottle of scotch from the minibar.

“I’ll join you,” Helen said. “Don’t let Susan come to the hotel. The chambermaid is a Somalian person, I think. Somali. Sorry.” Helen gestured to indicate the top-to-bottom covering she had seen the person wearing.

Bob glanced at her with a slightly quizzical look. “I don’t think Susan’s mad at them.”

“She’s not?”

“She’s mad at the district attorney and the assistant U.S. attorney and the AG’s office, the press—you know, the whole nine yards. Look, do you mind if I turn on the news?”

“Of course not.” But she did mind. She felt self-conscious sitting there with her hotel-room glass of whiskey, startled to hear that the market yesterday had dropped four hundred and sixteen points and she not able to say anything about it because it would be disrespectful to the Burgesses’ crisis with Zach, and sad too, that a blast in Iraq had killed eight U.S. troops and nine civilians, for she now connected this to the marker she had seen by the river, oh, there were so many dying everywhere, what was to be done, nothing! She was ripped away from all that was familiar (her children, she wanted them small again, moist from their baths)— “I think I may go home tomorrow,” she said.

Bob nodded, and kept looking at the television set.

Afternoon light over the river had become muted behind a layer of light clouds, and the gray carpet of the hotel room seemed a deeper shade of the pale gray sky, the railing of the little balcony seen through the window a sturdy fine line of a deeper shade still. Jim looked exhausted. That morning he had driven Helen to the airport in Portland, and by the time he’d returned Susan had made the decision to file a missing person report with the police. “There’s no warrant for his arrest yet with the Feds,” she argued, and this was true. “And his bail conditions and the civil rights injunction only require that he stay away from the Somali community,” she insisted.

“Still,” Bob said patiently, “I don’t know that we want to put him in the system as a missing person right now.”

“But he
is
missing,” Susan cried, and so they went with her to the police station and filed the report. The description of Zach’s car—his license plate number appearing on a computer screen—went into the report, of course, and knowing that the police were now on the lookout for it squeezed Bob with an added layer of fear, and also hope. He pictured Zach in some tiny motel room, his duffel bag of clothes on the floor, Zach lying on the bed listening to music off his computer. Waiting.

Jim and Bob drove Susan back to her house. Jim stayed behind the wheel of the car in the driveway. “Suse, you hang on for a little bit. Bob and I’ve got some work calls to make at the hotel. We’ll be back soon, in time for dinner.”

“Mrs. Drinkwater is making dinner. But I can’t eat,” Susan said as she got out of the car.

“Then don’t eat. We’ll see you really soon.”

Bob said, “He took his clothes, Susie. It’s going to be all right.” Susan nodded, and the brothers watched while she went up the porch steps.

Back in the hotel room, Bob flung his coat on the floor beside the bed. Jim still had his coat on, and now he reached into his pocket and tossed a cell phone onto the bed. He looked at Bob and nodded toward the phone.

“What?” said Bob.

“It’s Zach’s.”

Bob picked up the phone, looked at it. “Susan said his cell phone and computer were gone.”

“The computer’s gone. I found the cell phone in his room, in a drawer next to his bed. Under some socks. I didn’t tell Susan.”

Bob felt pinpricks beneath his arms. He sat down slowly on the other bed. “Maybe it’s an old phone,” he finally said.

“It’s not. The calls on it are recent, made in the last week. Mostly to Susan at work. The last call on it was to me the morning he disappeared.”

“You? At your office?”

Jim nodded. “Directory assistance right before that. Probably asking for the number to the law firm. Though he could have googled that, I don’t know why he didn’t. Anyway, I didn’t get the call, and he didn’t leave a message with the receptionist. I called her driving back from Portland this morning and she remembered someone had called for me and wouldn’t give his name and hung up when she asked what the call was referring to.” Jim rubbed his face with both hands. “I yelled at her. Which was stupid.” He walked over to the window, his hands in his pockets. He swore quietly.

“Do you think his computer really is gone?” Bob asked.

“Seems to be. And the duffel bag. I guess. Susan would know about the duffel bag, I wouldn’t.” He turned back from the window. “Don’t you have some booze, slob-dog? I’d really go for some sauce right now.”

“At Susan’s. But there’s the minibar.”

Jim opened its fake-wood-paneled door, twisted the caps off two small bottles of vodka, poured them into a glass, and drank it down like it was water.

“Jesus,” Bob said.

Jim grimaced, breathed out loudly. “Yeah.” He opened the minibar again and brought out a can of beer, the small curl of foam appearing as he pulled back the tab.

“Jimmy, take it easy. You should eat something if you’re going to do that.”

“Okay.” Jim said this agreeably, sitting in the chair with his coat still on. He leaned his head back, swallowing. He held out the can as an offer to Bob. Bob shook his head. “Really.” Jim grinned tiredly. “When have you ever rejected booze?”

“Whenever things are seriously bad,” Bob said. “I didn’t touch the stuff for a year after Pam left.” Jim gave no answer, and Bob watched as his brother drank steadily from the beer can. “Don’t leave,” Bob told his brother. “I’m going downstairs to find you something to eat.”

“I’ll be here.” Jim smiled again, drinking down the beer.

Susan sat on the couch watching television. It was the Discovery Channel, and dozens of penguins waddled across a long stretch of ice. Mrs. Drinkwater sat in the wing chair. “Cute little devils, aren’t they?” she said. She picked idly at the pocket of the apron she wore.

After many moments, Susan said, “Thank you.”

“I haven’t done anything, dear.”

“You’re sitting with me,” Susan said. “And cooking,” she added.

One by one the penguins slipped off the ice into the water. From the kitchen came the smell of the chicken Mrs. Drinkwater had put into the oven earlier. Susan said, “Everything feels not real. Like I’m dreaming.”

“I know, dear. Good your brothers are here. Did your sister-in-law go?”

Susan nodded. Moments went by. “I don’t like her,” Susan said. More moments went by. “Are you close to your daughters?” Susan asked this still watching the television. When there was no answer, she looked over at Mrs. Drinkwater. “I’m sorry. It’s not my business.”

“Oh, it’s quite all right.” Mrs. Drinkwater took a balled-up tissue and dabbed at her eyes beneath her huge glasses. “I had some trouble with them, truth be told. The oldest, especially.”

Susan looked back at the television. The penguins’ heads were bobbing around in water. “If you don’t mind talking, it helps me,” Susan said.

“Oh, certainly, dear. Annie smoked those marijuana cigarettes. Hell broke loose over that, I sided with Carl. Annie was seeing a boy who got drafted. Vietnam time, the start of it, you remember. This boy went to Canada to escape the draft, and Annie went with him. When they broke up, she wouldn’t come home. She didn’t want to live in a country as corrupt as our own, this is what she said.” Mrs. Drinkwater paused. She gazed at the tissue in her hand, tried to spread it open on her lap, then balled it up again.

Susan said to the television, “He took clothes. You don’t take clothes if you’re not going to wear them.” She added without expression. “Did you go visit her?”

“She wouldn’t have us.” Mrs. Drinkwater shook her head.

The penguins were slipping back up onto the ice, using their flippers, their flat feet holding them upright, their eyes bright as their little bodies glistened with water.

“Annie had romantic ideas about Canada,” Mrs. Drinkwater said. “Never cared how her great-grandfather came from there, had to leave his farm because he went bankrupt. The creditors were just the devils themselves, you know. Annie thought she knew all about corruption. I told her, ‘Hah!’ ” Mrs. Drinkwater’s foot in its terry-cloth slipper bounced up and down.

Susan said, “I thought you said she lives in California. I thought you said that once.”

“She does now.”

Susan stood up. “I’m going to rest upstairs until my brothers come back. Thank you, though. You’ve been good to me.”

“I’ve been a silly chatterbox.” Mrs. Drinkwater waved a hand in front of her face in a gesture of embarrassment. “I’ll call up to you when they get here.” Mrs. Drinkwater stayed in the chair, plucking at her apron, ripping the tissue into little pieces. The television stopped showing penguins and showed rain forests instead. Mrs. Drinkwater looked at it while her mind went round and round. She thought how crowded her childhood home had been with all her brothers and sisters. She thought how her aunts and uncles would talk of going home to Quebec, but they never did. She thought of Carl and the life they had made. About her girls she did not like to think. She could not have predicted, no one can ever predict anything, that they’d have been raised at a time of protests and drugs and a war they seemed to feel no responsibility for. She pictured a dandelion gone by, the white, almost airless pieces of her family scattered so far. The key to contentment was to never ask why; she had learned that long ago.

The rain forest glittered green. Mrs. Drinkwater rocked her foot and watched.