Carthage. Joyce Carol Oates
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eat, because she ‘refuses’ to menstruate.”
The father was so shocked hearing this, he pretended he hadn’t heard.
A couple of months ago when Brett Kincaid had come to the house in loose-fitting khaki cutoffs Zeno had had a glimpse of the boy’s wasted thighs, flat stringy muscles atrophied from weeks of hospitalization. Remembering how Brett had looked a year before. It was shocking to see a young man no longer young.
Therapy was rebuilding the muscles but it was a slow and painful process.
Juliet helped him walk: had helped him walk.
Walk, walk, walk—for miles. Juliet’s slender arm around the corporal’s waist walking in Palisade Park where there were few hills. For hills left the corporal short of breath.
His arm- and shoulder-muscles were as they’d been before the injuries. When he’d been in a wheelchair at the VA hospital he’d wheeled himself everywhere he could, for exercise.
His skull had not been fractured in the explosion but his brain had been traumatized—“concussed.”
A hurt brain can heal. A hurt brain will heal.
It will take time. And love.
Juliet had said this. She was gripping her fiancé’s hand and her smile was fine and brave and without irony.
And so it had been a shock—a shock, and a relief—when only a few weeks later Juliet told them the engagement had ended.
Except, things don’t end so easily. The father knew.
Between men and women, not so easily.
Christ! Zeno smelled of his body. The sweat of anxiety, despair.
Before bed that night he would change the bedclothes himself, before Arlette came into the room—Zeno had a flamboyant way with bed-changing, whipping sheets into the air so that they floated, as a magician might; tucking in the corners, tight; smoothing out the wrinkles, deft, fast, zip-zip-zip he’d made his little daughters laugh, like a cartoon character. In Boy Scout camp he’d learned all sorts of handy tasks.
He’d been an Eagle Scout, of course. Zeno Mayfield at age fourteen, youngest Eagle Scout in the Adirondack region, ever.
He smiled, thinking of this. Then, ceased smiling.
He staggered into the bathroom. Flung on the shower, both faucets blasting. Leaning his head into the spraying water hoping to wake himself. Losing his balance and grabbing at the shower curtain but (thank God) not bringing it down.
The sheer pleasure of hot, stinging water cascading down his face, his body. For a moment Zeno was almost happy.
In the bathroom doorway Arlette stood—beyond the noise of the shower she was speaking to him, urgently—She’s been found! It’s over, our daughter has been found!—but when Zeno asked his wife to repeat her words she said, anxiously, “They’re here. The TV people. Come downstairs when you can.”
“Do I have time to shave?”
Arlette came to the shower, to peer at him. Arlette didn’t reach into the hot stinging water to draw her fingers across his stubbly jaws.
“Yes. I think you’d better.”
Quickly Zeno dried himself, with a massive towel. Tried to run a comb through his hair, took a hairbrush to it, hoping not to confront his reflection in the misty bathroom mirror, the bloodshot frightened eyes.
“Here. Here are fresh clothes. This shirt . . .”
Gratefully Zeno took the clothes from his wife.
Downstairs were uplifted voices. Arlette tried to tell him who was there, who’d just arrived, which relatives, which TV reporters, but Zeno wasn’t able to concentrate. He had an unnerving sense that his front door had been flung open, anyone could now enter.
The door flung open, his little girl had slipped out.
Except she wasn’t a little girl any longer of course. She was nineteen years old: a woman.
“How do I look? OK?”
It wasn’t unusual for Zeno Mayfield—being interviewed. TV cameras just made the interview experience more edgy, the stakes higher.
“Oh, Zeno. You cut yourself shaving. Didn’t you notice?”
Arlette gave a little sob of exasperation. With a wadded tissue she dabbed at Zeno’s jaw.
“Thanks, honey. I love you.”
Bravely they descended the stairs hand in hand. Zeno saw that Arlette had tied back her hair, that seemed to have lost its glossiness overnight; she’d dabbed lipstick on her mouth and had blindly reached into her jewelry box for something to lower around her neck—a strand of inexpensive pearls no one had seen her wear in a decade. Her fingers were icy-cold; her hand was trembling. Another time Zeno said, in a whisper, “I love you,” but Arlette was distracted.
And Zeno was disoriented, seeing so many people in his living room. And furniture had been moved aside in the room. TV lights were blinding. The female reporter for WCTG-TV was a woman whom Zeno knew from his mayoral days when Evvie Estes had worked in City Hall public relations in a cigarette-smoke-filled little cubicle office at the ground-floor rear of the old sandstone building. Evvie was older now, hard-eyed and hard-mouthed, heavily made-up, with an air of sincere-seeming breathless concern: “Mr. and Mrs. Mayfield—Zeno and Arlette—hello! What a terrible day this has been for you!”—thrusting the microphone at them as if her remark called for a response. Arlette was smiling tightly staring at the woman as if she’d been taken totally by surprise and Zeno frowned saying calmly and gravely, “Yes—a terribly anxious day. Our daughter Cressida is missing, we have reason to believe that she is lost in the Nautauga Preserve, or in the vicinity of the Preserve. She may be injured—otherwise she would have contacted us by now. She’s nineteen, unfortunately not an experienced hiker . . . We are hoping that someone may have seen her or have information about her.”
Zeno Mayfield’s public way of addressing interviewers, gazing into TV cameras with a little frowning squint of the brow, returned to him at even this strained moment. If there was a quaver in his voice, no one would detect it.
Evvie Estes, hair bleached a startling brassy-blond, asked several commonsense questions of the Mayfields. In his grave calm voice Zeno prevailed when Arlette showed no inclination to reply. Yes, their daughter had spoken with them on Saturday evening, before she’d gone out; no, they had not known that she was going to Wolf’s Head Lake—“But maybe Cressida hadn’t known she was going to the lake, when she left home. Maybe it was something that came up later.” Zeno wanted to think this, rather than that Cressida had lied to them.
But he couldn’t shake off the likelihood that Cressida had lied. She’d lied by omitting the truth. Saying she was going to a friend’s house, but not that, after visiting with her friend, she had plans to turn up at Wolf’s Head Lake nine miles away.
It had been established by this time that Cressida had remained with her friend Marcy until 10 P.M. at which time she’d left for “home”—as she’d led Marcy to think.
Cressida hadn’t driven to her friend’s house which was less than a mile from the Mayfields’ house, but walked. It was believed by Marcy that Cressida had then walked back home—having declined an offer of a ride from Marcy.
Or, it might have been that someone else, whose identity wasn’t known to Marcy, had picked Cressida up, when she’d left Marcy’s house on her way home.
Not all of this made sense (yet) to Zeno. None of this Zeno cared to lay bare before a TV audience.
Though he’d been thinking how ironic, when Cressida had been, as witnesses claimed, in the company of Brett Kincaid at Wolf’s Head Lake, her sister Juliet had been home with their parents; by then, Juliet had probably been in bed.
That night, the Mayfields had invited old friends for dinner and Juliet had helped