Carthage. Joyce Carol Oates
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while his daughter was missing. Not until he’d brought her back safely home.
He’d allowed them to help him. Weak-kneed and dazed by exhaustion he hadn’t any choice. Falling on his knees on sharp rocks—a God-damned stupid thing to have done. He’d been pushing himself in the search, as his wife had begged him not to do, as others, seeing his flushed face and hearing his labored breath, had urged him not to do; for by Sunday afternoon there must have been at least fifty rescue workers and volunteers spread out in the Preserve, fanning in concentric circles from the Nautauga River at Sandhill Point where it was believed the missing girl had been last seen.
It was the father’s pride, he couldn’t bear to think that his daughter might be found by someone else. Cressida’s first glimpse of a rescuer’s face should be his face.
Her first words—Daddy! Thank God.
HE’D HAD SOME “heart pains”—(guessed that was what they were: quick darting pains like electric shocks in his chest and a clammy sensation on his skin)—a few times, nothing serious, he was sure. He hadn’t wanted to worry his wife.
A woman’s love can be a burden. She is desperate to keep you alive, she values your life more than you can possibly.
What he most dreaded: not being able to protect them.
His wife, his daughters.
Strange how when he’d been younger, he hadn’t worried much. He’d taken it for granted that he would live—well, forever! A long time, anyway.
Even when he’d received death threats over the issue of Roger Cassidy—defending the “atheist” high school biology teacher when the school board had fired him.
He’d laughed at the threats. He’d told Arlette it was just to scare him and he certainly wasn’t going to be scared.
Just last month his doctor Rick Llewellyn had examined him pretty thoroughly in his office. And an EKG. No “imminent” problem with his heart but Zeno’s blood pressure was still high even with medication: 150 over 90.
Blood pressure, cholesterol. Fact is, Zeno should lose twenty pounds at least.
On the bed he’d tried to untie and kick off the heavy hiking boots but there came Arlette to pull them off for him.
“Lie still. Try to rest. If you can’t sleep for Christ’s sake, Zeno—shut your eyes at least.”
She was terrified of course. Fussing and fuming over him to deflect her thoughts from the other.
That morning at about 4 A.M. she’d wakened him. When she’d discovered that Cressida hadn’t come home. Since that minute he’d been awake in a way he was rarely awake—all of his senses alert, to the point of pain. Stark-staring awake, as if his eyelids had been removed.
A search. A search for his daughter. A search that was for a missing girl.
These searches of which you hear, occasionally. Often for a lost child.
A kidnapped child. Abducted.
You hear, and you feel a tug of sympathy—but not much more. For your life doesn’t overlap with the lives of strangers and their terror can’t be shared with you.
Was he awake? Or asleep? He saw the steeply hilly forest strewn with enormous boulders as in an ancient cataclysm and from behind one of these a girl’s uplifted hand, arm—a glimpse of a naked shoulder which he knew to be badly bruised . . . Oh Daddy where are you. Dad-dy.
“Lie still. Please. If something happens to you at such a time . . . ”
The voice wasn’t Cressida’s voice. Somehow, Arlette had intervened.
He knew, his wife didn’t trust him. Married for more than a quarter of a century—Arlette trusted Zeno less readily than she’d done at the start.
For now she knew him, to a degree. To know some men is certainly not to trust them.
She was breathless, irritated. Not terrified—not so you’d see—but irritated. The house was crowded with well-intentioned relatives. There were police officers coming and going—their ugly police-radios crackling and squawking like demented geese. There were reporters for local media eager for interviews—they were not to be turned away, for they would be useful. And photos of Cressida had to be supplied, of course.
Coffee? Iced tea? Grapefruit juice, pomegranate juice? With a grim sort of hostess-gaiety Arlette offered her visitors refreshments, for she knew no other way to deal with people in her house.
Somehow, before she’d had a chance to call her sister Katie Hewett, Katie had come to the house. This was by 10 A.M. Katie had taken over the hostess-role and was helping Arlette answer phones—family phone, cell phones—which rang frequently and with each call, despite the evidence of the caller ID, there was the hope that the next voice they heard would be Cressida’s.
Hi there! Gosh! I just saw on TV that I’m “missing”. . .
Wow. Sorry. Oh God you won’t believe what happened but I’m OK now . . .
Except the voice was never Cressida’s. Remarkable, how it was never Cressida’s.
Years ago Arlette would have crawled beside her husband in their bed, in a crisis like this; she would not have minded that her husband had sweated through his clothes, T-shirt and khaki shorts that were now clammy-cool, and smelled of his body; she would have held the anguished man in her arms, to shield him. And Zeno would have gathered his wife in his arms, to shield her. Shivering and shuddering and dazed with exhaustion but together in this terrible time.
Now, Arlette tugged at his hiking boots—so heavy! And the laces needing to be untied. Pulled the boots off his enormous feet seeing that, even in the rush of preparing to leave for the Nautauga Preserve, he’d remembered to put on a double pair of socks—white liner socks, light-woolen socks.
For all his careless-seeming ways, Zeno was a meticulous man. A conscientious man. The only mayor of Carthage in recent decades who’d left office—after eight years, in the 1990s—with a considerable surplus in the city treasury, and not a gaping deficit. (Of course, it was a quasi-secret that Mayor Mayfield had written personal checks for a number of endangered projects—parks and recreation maintenance, Little League softball, the Black River Community Walk-In Clinic.) One of the few mayors in all of upstate New York who, as he’d liked to joke, hadn’t even been investigated, let alone indicted, tried and convicted, for malfeasance in office.
Arlette had asked the young man who’d driven Zeno home in Zeno’s Land Rover what had happened to him in the Preserve, for she knew that Zeno would never tell her the truth.
He’d said, Zeno had gotten overheated. Over-tired. Dehydrated.
He’d said this was why it isn’t a good idea, a family member to be searching for someone in his family who’s been reported lost.
Zeno smiled a ghastly smile. Zeno managed to speak, for Zeno must always have the last word.
OK, he’d try to sleep. A nap for an hour maybe.
Then, he intended to return to the Preserve.
“She can’t be there a second night. We can’t—that can’t—happen.”
He stumbled on the stairs. Didn’t hear Katie speak to him, and didn’t seem to register that WCTG-TV was coming to the house to do an interview with the parents of the missing girl for the Sunday 6 P.M. news, later that afternoon.
Arlette had accompanied Zeno upstairs trying unobtrusively to slip her arm around his waist, but he’d pushed from her with a little snort of indignation.
He’d needed to use the bathroom, he said. Needed some privacy.
“I’m not going to croak in here, hon—I promise.”
This was meant to be humor. Just the word croak.
She’d made a sound like laughter, or the hissing rejoinder