“Hey, honey child.” Unmistakably the voice of Karen-Lucie Toth. “You okay?”
“No,” said Yvonne. Her voice was muffled; she was facing away, pulling things from her suitcase. “It’s creepy here, Karen-Lucie. How’m I ever going to sleep?”
“Take a pill, honey. You know, I think I heard they got all their money from his father, who was in plastics. What’s that mean, I wonder, to be in plastics? The weirdos you’re staying with. They’re in plastics. Can you take a pill, baby doll?”
“Yeah, I will.” As Yvonne spoke, she sat on the bed and rummaged through her bag, and Linda and Jay watched her squint at a pill bottle, which she opened. Then she brought from the same bag two small bottles of wine, the type that could be purchased on an airplane. She unscrewed the top from one and tilted it back. “I know you’re tired,” she said. “I’m really okay.” She added, “That Tom, or Tomasina, his wife doesn’t mind?”
“Not as long as he does it away from home and without the kids around.”
“I’d mind.”
Karen-Lucie said, “But if you really loved him—”
“Maybe I wouldn’t mind, I don’t know. I honestly don’t know. Good night. I love you.”
“Love you too, baby.”
Linda glanced at her husband’s profile. She said, “She didn’t even shower, and she traveled all day.”
Jay put a finger to his lips and nodded. Linda rose then and left the room to sleep across the hall, as she always did. Ever since her daughter moved away, saying those awful things about her, Linda had slept away from her husband.
Seven years earlier a young woman in town had disappeared. She was a sophomore in high school and a cheerleader and also she babysat for the families of the Episcopalian church of which her family was a member. So there were many people to investigate and of course the town was in dreadful distress. A deep resentment of the media—which swarmed the town with an almost biblical descent of cameras and large furry microphones and trucks with huge satellite dishes that scooped at the air—the resentment of this united most people, but then strange alliances formed and ruptured according to what theory was popular that day, for example, when the Driver’s Ed teacher was thought to be a suspect—that really divided people. And then there were a few who said the girl had actually run away, that nobody knew the terrible things that took place in her home, and this added to the dismay and horror that her poor parents and siblings endured. For two years the town lived this way.
During this time Linda Peterson-Cornell existed with a confusing disc of darkness deep inside her chest, and as she watched her husband read the news reports, and follow the case on TV, she often broke out in a sweat. She thought she had to be crazy. She could not imagine why her body was reacting this way, why her mind itself could not stay calm. And then when it was over, finally, finally over, she forgot that she had felt this way. Only occasionally would she remember, but never with the visceral aspect of what she had actually gone through. And each time she remembered she thought: I’m a silly woman, I have nothing to complain about, not really, not like that, Jesus God.
—
The second night of the festival Linda sat reading in the living room with her husband, and Yvonne came through the front door and walked past them down the ramp to the lower floor. She flapped a hand as she went by. “G’night,” she called.
“But how are you?” Jay called back. “How’s the teaching going?”
“Fine!” This was said from downstairs. “Got an early class. Good night,” she called again. They could hear the very faint sound of the shower—not long—and they sat reading in the living room for another two hours.
In the middle of the night—through the shield of her sleeping pill—Linda was aware of her husband in the shower. It was not unusual, particularly, but it gave Linda a sense of unease; it always did, and tonight reminded her of what she had felt seven years before. Just the relief of that time now being over allowed her to fall back into sleep.
Each night Karen-Lucie and Yvonne went to the bar that played live music. Each night they asked Tomasina if he wanted to go with them, and each night Tomasina said no, he was going back to his room to call his wife and his kids and to read over the assignments for the next day. “He’s not a bad photographer,” Karen-Lucie told Yvonne. “If he loved it with his whole heart he might be really good. But he doesn’t love it with his whole heart. He just comes here because…”