Carthage. Joyce Carol Oates

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СКАЧАТЬ rose from bed with surprising agility. In boxer shorts he wore as pajamas, bristly-haired, flabby in the torso and midriff, he padded barefoot to the bureau, to snatch up his cell phone.

      “We’ve tried to call her, Zeno. Juliet and me . . .”

      Zeno paid her no heed. He made the call, listened intently, broke the connection and called immediately again.

      “She doesn’t answer. Maybe she’s lost the phone. I’m just so terribly worried, if she was walking back home . . . It’s Saturday night, someone might have been driving by . . .”

      “I said, Lettie, please—don’t catastrophize. That isn’t helpful.”

      Zeno spoke sharply, irritably. He was stepping into a pair of rumpled khaki shorts he’d thrown onto a chair earlier that day.

      In Zeno, emotion was justified: in others in his family, it was apt to be excessive. Particularly, Zeno countered his wife’s occasional alarm by classifying it as catastrophizing, hysterical.

      Downstairs, the lighted kitchen awaited them like a stage set. Zeno looked up the Meyers’ number in the directory and called it as Arlette and Juliet stood by.

      “Hello? Marcy? This is Zeno—Cressida’s father. Sorry to bother you at this hour, but . . .”

      Arlette listened eagerly and with mounting dread.

      Zeno questioned Marcy for several minutes. Before he hung up, Arlette asked to speak to her. There was little that Arlette could add to what Zeno had said but she needed to hear Marcy’s voice, hoping to be reassured by Marcy’s voice; her daughter’s friend was a sturdy freckle-faced girl enrolled in the nursing school at Plattsburgh, long a fixture in Cressida’s life though no longer the close friend she’d been a few years previously.

      But Marcy could only repeat that at about 10:30 P.M.—after they’d had dinner with her mother and her (elderly, ailing) grandmother—and watched a DVD—Cressida had left to return home as she’d planned, on foot.

      “I offered to drive her, but Cressida said no. I did think that I should drive her because it was late, and she was alone, but—you know Cressida. How stubborn she can be . . .”

      “Do you have any idea where else she might have gone? After visiting with you?”

      “No, Mrs. Mayfield. I guess I don’t.”

      Mrs. Mayfield. As if Marcy were a high school student, still.

      “Did she mention anyone to you? Did she call anyone?”

      “I don’t think so . . .”

      “You’re sure she didn’t call anyone, on her cell phone?”

      “Well, I—I don’t think so. I mean—I know Cressida pretty well, Mrs. Mayfield—who’d she call? If it wasn’t one of you?”

      “But where on earth could she be, at almost five A.M.!”

      Arlette spoke sharply. She was angry with Marcy Meyer for allowing her daughter to walk home on a Saturday night: though the distance was only a few blocks, part of the walk would have been on North Fork Street, which was well traveled after dark, near an intersection with a state highway; and she was angry with Marcy Meyer for protesting, in an aggrieved child’s voice Who’d she call, if it wasn’t one of you?

      THE RAPIDLY SHRINKING REMNANT of the night-before-dawn in the Mayfields’ house had acquired an air of desperation.

      Now dressed, hastily and carelessly, Zeno and Arlette drove in Zeno’s Land Rover to the Meyers’ house on Fremont Street, a half-mile away.

      Freemont was a hillside street, narrow and poorly paved; houses here were crowded together virtually like row houses, of aged brick and loosened mortar. Arlette had remembered being concerned, when Cressida and Marcy Meyer first became friends, in grade school, that her outspoken and often heedless daughter might say something unintentionally wounding about the size of the Meyers’ house, or the attractiveness of its interior; she’d been surprised enough at the blunt, frank, teasing-taunting way in which Cressida spoke to Marcy, who was a reticent, stoic girl lacking Cressida’s quick wit and any instinct to defend herself or tease Cressida in turn. Cressida had drawn comic strips in which a short dark-frizzy-haired girl with a dour face and a tall stocky freckled girl with a cheery face had comical adventures in school—these had seemed innocent enough, meant to amuse and not ridicule.

      Once, Arlette had reprimanded Cressida for saying something rudely witty to Marcy, while Arlette was driving the girls to an event at their school, and Marcy said, laughing, “It’s OK, Mrs. Mayfield. Cressie can’t help it.”

      As if her daughter were a scorpion, or a viper—Can’t help it.

      Yet it had been touching, the girl called Cressida “Cressie.” And Cressida hadn’t objected.

      At the Meyers’ house, Zeno wanted to go inside and speak with Marcy and her mother; Arlette begged him not to.

      “They won’t know anything more than Marcy has told us. It isn’t seven A.M. You’ll just upset them. Please, Zeno.”

      Slowly Zeno drove along Fremont Street, glancing from side to side at the facades of houses. All seemed blind, impassive at this early hour of the morning; many shades were drawn.

      At the foot of Fremont, Zeno turned the Land Rover around in a driveway and drove slowly back uphill. Passing the Meyers’ house, he was now retracing the probable route Cressida had taken, walking home.

      Both Zeno and Arlette were staring hard. How like a film this was, a documentary! Something had happened, but—in which house? And what had happened?

      House after house of no particular distinction except they were houses Cressida had passed, on her way to Marcy Meyer’s, and on her way from Marcy Meyer’s, the night before. There, at a corner, a landmark lightning-scorched oak tree, at the intersection with North Fork; a block farther, at Cumberland Avenue, at the ridge of the hill, the large impressive red-brick Episcopal church and the churchyard beside and behind it. Both the church and the churchyard were “historical landmarks” dating to the 1780s.

      Cressida would have passed by the church, and the churchyard. On which side of the street would she have walked?—Arlette wondered.

      Zeno made a sound—grunt, half-sob—mutter—as he braked the Land Rover and without explanation climbed out.

      Zeno entered the churchyard, walking quickly. He was a tall disheveled man with a stubbly chin who carried himself with an aggressive sort of confidence. He’d thrown on a soiled T-shirt and khaki shorts and on his sockless feet were grubby running shoes. By the time Arlette hurried to join him he’d made his way to the end of the first row of aged markers, worn so thin by weather and time that the names and dates of the dead were unreadable.

      Beyond the churchyard was a no-man’s-land of underbrush and trees, owned by the township.

      The churchyard smelled of mown grass, not fresh, slightly rotted, sour. The air was muggy and dense, in unpredictable places, with gnats.

      “Zeno, what are you looking for? Oh, Zeno.”

      Arlette was frightened now. Zeno remained turned away from СКАЧАТЬ