Carthage. Joyce Carol Oates

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 prepare the meal with Arlette. And Cressida had made it a point to explain that she couldn’t come to dinner with them that night because she was seeing her high school friend Marcy Meyer.

      Evvie Estes asked if there’d been anything to lead them to “suspect”—anything? When they’d last seen Cressida?

      “No. It was an ordinary night. Cressida was seeing a friend from high school and she hadn’t had to tell us, we would have known, she’d have been back home by eleven P.M. at the latest. It was just—an ordinary night.”

      Zeno hadn’t liked Evvie Estes pitching that word to them—“suspect.”

      Zeno and Arlette were seated side by side on a sofa. Zeno clasped Arlette’s hand firmly in his as if to secure her. Earlier, Juliet had helped Arlette locate photographs of Cressida to provide to police and media people, to be shown on TV and posted online through the day; Zeno assumed that these photos would be shown on the 6 P.M. news, during the interview. And he hoped that the interview, which was being taped, about fifteen minutes in length, wouldn’t be drastically cut.

      “All we can hope for is that Cressida will contact us soon—if she can. Or, if she’s been injured, or lost—that someone will discover her. We are praying that she is in the Preserve—that is, she hasn’t been—taken”—Zeno paused, blinking at the possibility, a sudden obstacle like an enormous boulder in his path—“taken somewhere else . . .” His old ease at public speaking was leaving him, like air leaking from a balloon. Almost, Zeno was stammering, as the interview ended: “If anyone can help us—help us find her—any information leading to her—her whereabouts—we are offering ten thousand dollars reward—for the recovery of—the return of—our daughter Cressida Mayfield.”

      Arlette turned to stare at him. Ten thousand dollars!

      This was entirely new. This had not been discussed. So far as Arlette knew, Zeno had not thought of a reward before this moment.

      Uttering СКАЧАТЬ