Blue Angel by Francine Prose Page A

‘This happens all the time.’ They closed off all the exits but one. The guards said, ‘Stand there and look for your child. Look at the shoes, concentrate on the shoes. Everything else will be different.’ So they stand at the exit, and they see the shoes and go, ‘That’s her! That’s my child.’ The kidnappers had dyed the kid’s hair and changed her clothes, but they couldn’t do anything about the shoes. Kids have such different sizes.”
    â€œThat’s ridiculous,” Swenson says. “What do you mean, this happens all the time? Didn’t they catch the kidnappers? Do lots of kidnappers do this? Why bother changing the kid’s clothes and dying her hair—where? in the public bathroom?—when they can just hustle the kid out of the park and split before anyone notices?”
    â€œWhy are you shouting at me ?” Sherrie says. “I told you it was insane. That’s why I brought it up. Forget it, Ted, okay?”
    â€œSorry. It’s just that typical tabloid country bullshit Arlene always talks.”
    Sherrie laughs. “Poor Arlene. She was hyperventilating, the story turned her on so much.”
    â€œHer cousins told her this? They said it happened to them ? Are they pathological liars?”
    â€œGod knows,” says Sherrie. “God knows at what point the fantasy takes over.”
    â€œOr maybe the wishful thinking,” says Swenson.
    â€œDon’t say that.” In the silence that follows, Sherrie plays with a piece of fennel, sawing along one bumpy ridge with surgical precision.
    Finally Swenson says, “Speaking of missing children…this morning I thought about leaving early for class and driving over to Burlington and going by Ruby’s dorm and ringing her buzzer, finding her somewhere, somehow, taking her out for coffee….”
    â€œAnd?”
    â€œI didn’t.”
    â€œMaybe you should have,” says Sherrie. “Maybe it would’ve helped.”
    â€œTime’s what’s going to help,” Swenson says.
    They know that, and neither believes it. Ruby doesn’t forget. Since she was a baby, she’s always been the most stubborn person alive. A passing fright, some toy she had to have, she could keep it going forever. Why did they imagine that would have changed? Because everything else has. Their funny, gangly little girl turned into a chunky teen with dirty hair and the sullen blankness you see on vintage farm-family photos. Ruby retreated further and further. Sherrie said it would pass; girls get lost at a certain age. Sherrie brought him a book about this, which he refused to read. It depressed him that he was married to a person who would think that some self-help piece-of-shit bestseller had something to do with their daughter.
    Eventually, they convinced themselves that really they were lucky. Ruby was fine. She got Bs in school. Half her classmates were pregnant or on drugs, even (or especially) up here in idyllic Euston. And then, at the start of Ruby’s senior year, Arlene Shurley came into the clinic and told Sherrie she’d seen Ruby with a guy driving a red Miata.
    There was only one Miata on campus, a sleek red rose of a car tucked neatly into the buttonhole of Euston’s most troubled student. A southern senator’s youngest son, entitled and alcoholic, Matthew McIlwaine had transferred in as a sophomore after being thrown out of two colleges, in the first case for passing bad checks, in the second for date rape. His presence at Euston was a scandal that died out within weeks, after the announcement of the library’s new McIlwaine wing. The kid looked like a male model: that narcissistic, that pretty. What was he doing with Ruby? Swenson didn’t want to imagine. Sherrie said that transfer students were often very lonely.
    They should have been glad that Ruby had a secret, glad that she had a boyfriend. It used to bother Swenson that her