The Sweet Relief of Missing Children by Sarah Braunstein Page B

warts from him. Down there.”
    Hank never returned with the money.
    Next they went to the police, made their report. “Q-Ball,” she said to the cop, who rubbed his chin, said, “He got a last name?”
    She had never felt smaller in her life.
    The cop said, “Hey, I feel for you. We’ll check it against our lists of known aliases, but I can’t promise much.” He wrote something in his notepad, said, “Kids these days…” It wasn’t clear whether he meant Judith or Q-Ball. “What else? You got a physical description?”
    Hank described the facial hair. Then he said, “He may have a transmittable disease.”
    The cop’s pen hovered above his notepad. “Like the flu?”
    â€œLike—warts,” Hank said.
    â€œWarts?”
    â€œPrivate warts.”
    The cop stared at them. Then he wrote it down.
    She returned to the lawn chair. She was briefly, irrationally hopeful—had a vision of some hulking cop leading the girl up the walkway by her ear, as if she’d been merely loitering behind the bowling alley—but nothing happened. Ants on the lip of her glass. Woodsmoke on a thin breeze. She found herself thinking about her girlhood back in Ringdale, her awful silk shirts, her own desire to flee, to hitchhike to some harbor, to be the stow-away, cold-eyed, witness to everything, a sketchbook in a beat-up saddlebag. Except in Grace’s case there had been no man—no desire for sex. Her own hope had been to flee from the burden of sex, to earn some kind of reprieve. Yet sex, it seemed, was just what the girl was after. What were they supposed to do now? She had the uncanny sensation that the last sixteen years had been a figment, and this was her real life, alone, hers and Hank’s, that she’d gone through with the abortion. She didn’t want to cry but couldn’t help it. From her perch on the hill she could see the roof of the bar. It was still called Floyd’s Well after Hank’s uncle. Down there, men were drinking, elbowing, tossing back rye whiskey and beer chasers, throwing darts. Briny, inebriated, breathing this same spring air, they could not be stopped from anything. Grace was totally and completely sure that Judith was holding the hand of a convicted felon, a man rife with all manner of VD, that they were cruising the country in a wreck and sleeping beneath highway underpasses, sharing warm beer, and she was giving him head on demand.
    Judith!
    Couldn’t she have at least left a note? Something small for her mother to hold? How could they have raised such a heartless thing? No note. No clue. No quick phone call. Was the tiniest reassurance too much to ask for? She was selfish, just as Grace had been selfish. Except Grace had come to her senses! Grace had done what she was supposed to do, which was marry the sanctioned boy and say her vows before a room of credulous people, and assume, mostly in earnest, a steady, ignorant life.

4
    S am had to make sure that no one took this feeling away from him. He had to be sure, too, that no one saw the feeling, for he sensed that its observation by another would spell its loss. So he ate his oatmeal fast and dumped the rest. He wanted to flee, could not bear this kitchen that seemed, in its order and familiarity, to challenge his ardent heart, to threaten to tame the chaos at the core of him. He would not be tamed. He would not allow anything to come between himself and his gluttony. That’s how he felt upon waking: gluttonous. Not for food, not for his aunt’s sticky oatmeal. He stood at the sink, forced himself to swallow a few bites. Helen’s face remained in his mind the way sunlight stays in your eyes when you come into a dark room—it expanded hotly, everything else made vague in its swollen presence. He wished he’d dreamed about her so that he could say, simply, “I dreamed about you.” He wanted badly to say romantic things and