Missing Mr. Wingfield Read online

  “But I do,” he said, his voice echoing through the empty station. “I’ve known you for longer than anyone else in the world, except perhaps your mother and the doctor who delivered you. Veronica,” he said. “Look at me. It’s me. It’s—”

  “Shut up,” she said, frightened by the sound of her own voice, the authority it had as it bounced back at her. She looked around, disoriented. Where was everyone? Had the city shut this place down after the piano fell? But, if they had, why hadn’t she and the Salesman been evacuated, too? Something was going on here. “Where am I?” she said. “What is this place?”

  “It’s a subway platform,” he said.

  “Yes, I get that,” she said, crossing to the map of the subway system, which showed not the Red and Green and Blue lines she was expecting, nor the Orange or the Silver, but instead a Purple line and a Yellow and a Black. She set a finger upon the Yellow Line and followed it to its terminus, a station named Oz. She shook her head. “I get that it’s a subway platform,” she said. “But is this real, or is it all happening inside my head?”

  “Ah,” he said. “Well, to quote one of your daughter’s favorite books, ‘Of course it is happening inside your head, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?’”

  She turned and faced him again. “Are you messing with me?” she asked.

  He held a hand to his heart, trying to look affronted. “Would I ever?” he said.

  “Yes,” she said. “Yes, you would.”

  “I am not messing with you,” said the Salesman.

  Veronica tried to place the quote, but couldn’t. And this surprised her. There were only so many books on their shelf at home, and she had read each of them to her daughter so many times. “What book is that from?” she said. “I don’t recognize it.”

  “Of course not,” he said. “It’s what—when did you go to sleep? 1999?—That book hasn’t even been published yet. But once you bring that one home, you’re going to read it to her. Again and again.”

  Veronica scoffed. “You’re from the future now, too?” She shook her head, paced. “It’s that Chinese food that I ate that’s causing this, isn’t it? I have a friend who has this theory about crab rangoon being laced with marijuana. I never believed her, but—”

  “Oh, be quiet Veronica, and I’ll explain.”

  “Please do,” she said.

  He pulled his book out of his jacket pocket and began to thumb through it. “I can’t remember the damned quotation,” he said. “I nearly flunked out of school because of my English grades. I’m sure I told you that once.”

  She sighed, exasperated. “You never told us anything just once, Dad.”

  He smiled at the sound of the word, slapping his knee with the book as he did—slapping his knee! who still did that?—and then he let out a laugh. “You said it,” he said. “You called me—”

  “The quotation!” said Veronica. “Get on with it.”

  He returned to the book, put on his rough approximation of a British accent, and spoke: “I am here tonight to warn you that you have yet a chance and hope of escaping my fate.”

  She sighed. “A Christmas Carol?” she said. “So, who are you supposed to be? Marley? My father’s not dead yet.”

  He slipped the book back into his jacket pocket. “Allow me some artistic license, if you please.”

  “As if I have a choice,” she said.

  “I am all of the ghosts in one,” he said. “So many of you have asked, over the years, to have all of us at once, that we figured we might as well acquiesce.”

  “That’s kind of you,” she said, stepping again toward the edge of the platform, looking in both directions for a train out of there. “Now, can we get on with it?” she asked. “I’d like to get some actual rest before Tracy wakes up to bitch at me about the latest wrongs I’ve done her.”

  The Salesman slipped up beside her and asked, in almost a whisper, “Do you regret having her, Veronica? Do you often wonder what life would be like if—”

  “Hey,” she said. “Wait. Is this A Christmas Carol or It’s a Wonderful Life that I’m dreaming here? It’s not some mashup, is it?”

  He strolled down the yellow line, heading toward the far side of the platform. “I was just asking a question,” he called out, over his shoulder.

  She stomped after him. “Yeah, a question no parent is allowed to answer out loud,” she said.

  He paused at the place where the platform ended and the tunnel began, unlatching a metal gate that locked up a ladder to the tracks below. “Well, you’re not answering it out loud now,” he said. “Are you? This is, as you say, all in your head.”

  “I’m still not answering it,” she said.

  He started down the ladder. “Oh, you will,” he said. “By the end, you will.”

  She watched him climb down, stepping over the tracks, careful to avoid the third rail, and though she knew that she would follow him—that she must—she stood still, holding her ground. She shook her shoulders hard in protest, not wanting to give in, and felt the weight of her guitar case bouncing against her hip for the first time since she’d stepped onto the platform. Had it been there the whole time? She set it down. No use bringing it with her. Serenading him wasn’t going to get her out of this.

  “Wait up,” she said, descending the ladder herself and then following him into the darkness.

  3

  Hetfield, Roberts & Peacock

  When she saw the light at the end of the tunnel, she did not flinch. The worst that could happen, she figured, was that a train would run her over and send her back to the waking world. And though that would leave her without an answer to the question of what the Salesman was up to, she was sure she’d see him again, that the epiphany he sought to bring her to could be dealt with at a later time.

  And so, the train came. But it was riding the track opposite them, so no escape was forthcoming. It hurtled by, faster than any subway car she had ever seen, but that wasn’t what stunned her most. What really got her attention was what she saw in the darkness just after it passed by, a fleeting image sprung from the shadows by the train’s fading tail lights. She squinted and, almost as if the tunnel could sense what she was doing, overhead lights began to flicker to life. There was a table there, on the other side of the tracks, and chairs, a whole kitchen. She knew this place. And she knew the girl sitting at the table, the girl with the slap bracelets and the Ride the Lightning t-shirt, the girl staring at the overturned glass bottle that lay in front of her.

  Veronica stumbled backward in disbelief, tripping over a rail as she did and then realizing, as she fell, that the third rail was behind her, that the end was coming now, just as she’d seen something worth seeing, worth exploring. But when she landed, it was not on the hard metal of subway tracks, nor on gravel or wood chips or whatever it was that lay beneath those things, but on the cold linoleum of her parents’ kitchen floor.

  The Salesman hovered by her side, offering a hand to help her up, a hand that she did not take. “What do you see here?” he asked. “Which night is this?”

  She pushed herself up from the floor, her gaze locked on the young girl, the girl she had once been. “Fuck,” she said. “This is the night I got pregnant.” She looked out the kitchen window, just to make sure, and there was the snow, just as she remembered it.

  Not able to bear the sight of the flakes falling, she stared back at the bottle. It was a wine cooler, the brand her mother drank, and that night it was one of only four bottles sitting amidst a castle of empty cans. The boy who had plucked it from the countertop laughed at her as he’d set it down on the table. And then he had stopped laughing, and he had said, “Silver, you are a total lightweight.”

  It was the first time that alcohol had ever passed between her puckered teenage lips, the first time that any of the girls at the table had been liquored up. Veronica watched her younger self duck her head and avert her eyes. This wasn’t Vern’s fault—Vern, that’s what they’d called her then—but she
didn’t know enough not to feel guilty. Aside from the blizzard, which had stranded her parents somewhere in the wilds of Maine, this was all the boys’ fault. They were the ones who had crashed the party, who had broken the tradition.

  Veronica looked around the table, at the bodies that had filled the once-empty room. Then she looked at the Salesman, who was still standing beside her, his gaze shifting between Veronica and the scene playing out before them.

  “What was the tradition?” he asked her, reading her mind.

  Since middle school, when Vern had finally been allowed to stay up and watch the ball drop, her New Year’s Eve sleepover had become something of an institution. Vern and her two best friends would crowd around the kitchen table, binge on Chinese food with her parents, and then pile into the four-poster upstairs with a bowl of popcorn, a box of tissues, and a stack of Julia Roberts tapes from the rental place down the street. That was how things were supposed to go. Amy’s hands were not supposed to be massaging the crotch of some flat-topped Neanderthal—one was supposed to be entwined with Vern’s hand, the other with Desiree’s. And Desiree wasn’t supposed to be wearing some random guy’s letterman’s jacket to keep warm; she was supposed to be curled up under the covers, her body balled up against Vern’s. They were supposed to watch movies until the bowl of popcorn was empty, or their tear ducts were dry, whichever came first. And then they were supposed to fall asleep beside each other under the heavy down comforter, under the soft cotton sheets. They were supposed to be drinking Diet Coke, not Coors Light. They were supposed to be playing a board game, not Spin the Bottle.

  “Supposed to, supposed to, supposed to,” said Amy.

  “Was I mumbling out loud again?” asked Vern.

  Amy extricated one of her hands and set it atop the overturned wine cooler. “Rules were meant to be broken,” she said, giving the bottle a spin.

  “We can leave,” said Desiree’s Letterman.

  Amy’s Neanderthal nodded. “Buncha other parties’d be glad to have us.”

  Vern ignored them and stared at the spinning bottle. She watched it as a kitten might watch a game of tennis, her eyes moving in circles as its spin grew slower and slower. If Amy wanted to break the rules, that was fine. Vern just wished that the girl would take these interlopers and make trouble somewhere else.

  The truth, Veronica remembered, as the sound of the glass vibrating against the hardwood grew louder and louder, was that this was the night she’d finally had enough of Amy’s shenanigans. Ever since her first encounter with the generous johnson of her barbarous Neanderthal, Amy had become singularly obsessed with sex, and not with having it as much as possible—she’d only ‘done it’ once—but with talking about it as much as she could. She asked which kind of dick Vern and Des liked best, knowing full-well that Vern, at least, had never even seen a penis, let alone handled one. She talked constantly about orgasms, about how the one she’d had with the Neanderthal (or, well, the one she thought she’d had) hadn’t been quite like the little earthquakes she could muster with her own finger, and about how she’d been plotting and planning to make sure that the next one was much better, how she’d stolen The Joy of Sex out of the public library to make sure of it, and how she was leafing through the pages of that old tome every goddamned night. And, worst of all, Amy didn’t seem to think she had a problem. But she did have a problem, and the night was being ruined by it.

  The long neck of the empty wine cooler swung round to a stop, pointing into the small space between the Neanderthal and his runty cousin, the third wheel that they’d brought along, ostensibly, for Vern’s sake. Vern gave Desiree a look. Desiree smiled and shrugged. And then, Amy clapped her hands. “Two for one!” she shouted. “Who’s first?”

  The Neanderthal punched his cousin in the arm, and the Runt offered up his cheek.

  “Go easy on him, Ames,” said the Letterman. “Dude’s a virgin.”

  The Runt scoffed. “Am not.”

  “He ain’t no more,” said the Neanderthal with a chuckle. “Didn’t your mom tell you she took care of that?”

  “Good one,” said the Letterman, hurling an empty across the table at his friend.

  In the shadows, still watching, Veronica shook her head. She turned to the Salesman and asked him, “Were you this much of an idiot when you played football?”

  He smirked. “I made these kids look like Road Scholars.”

  “That’s Rhodes,” she told him. “Not ‘road.’”

  “See,” he said, still smirking.

  At the table, the Runt asked, “Can we get this over with?”

  “Absolutely,” said Amy, leaning across the table. “You ready?”

  The Runt nodded.

  “Okay then,” said Amy, taking hold of his head and latching onto his cheek with her barracuda’s mouth.

  The Runt went pink, the Letterman screamed “Get a room,” and Desiree said, “Quit it,” but it was only when the Neanderthal gave her a sharp smack on the ass that Amy let go.

  “My turn,” said the Neanderthal.

  Amy turned around and grabbed hold of the brute by the back of his neck, then buried his face in her bosom. She straddled him, pulled his face out of her cleavage, and then laid on him the sloppiest French kiss that Vern had ever seen, tongues going everywhere, saliva spreading across cheeks and dripping off of chins, the tip of someone’s tongue penetrating the cavern of someone’s nostril.

  Vern went green and Veronica felt her stomach churn in memory. Maybe part of it was the Chinese food, and maybe some other small part of it was the four wine coolers she’d drunk, but a large part of what was making both the young and the old Veronica sick right now was the sheer wrongness of this display, of this show that Amy was putting on. These two, they didn’t belong together, except in the crudest of ways, except in that ‘insert tab A into slot B’ way that all men and women fit together. Before this asshole, Amy had just been another flannel-wearing, clarinet-playing band geek. Before, when she liked a guy, she made him a flower out of tissue paper, doused it in fuzzy peach perfume, and stuck it onto the end of a plastic straw. Now, she did this. Her hormones had convinced her that make-believe roses weren’t good enough anymore. It was time to move faster, her body told her. The clock was ticking.

  Amy dismounted her boy toy and slipped back into her chair. She took off her flannel, a ratty old thing of her dad’s that she never took off nowadays, except for its once-a-week washing, and she asked, “That better?”

  “Much,” said the Neanderthal.

  Amy gulped down the last of her beer, nudged Vern, and said, “Your turn.”

  She resented having to do this, but she knew that there was no way out. With her hand atop the bottle, she wondered which of these idiots she minded kissing the least. She knew who she wanted to kiss most, but boys weren’t kissing boys tonight and that probably meant that girls weren’t kissing girls. Vern went over the physics in her head, trying to figure out how hard she would have to spin it to get the Runt, the lone college boy, the least of all evils, and then she spun the bottle so hard that it nearly spun off of the table.

  She turned to Desiree as it whipped around and around, and Desiree must’ve mistaken the look on her face for panic, because she offered up a bottle of tequila straight away. It wasn’t panic that Vern was feeling, though. It was guilt. This situation, this night, was the latest evidence against her, enough ammunition for any prosecutor to prove that she was just as bad as Amy, just as warped and dishonest with herself. If she were really being true, if she were really being the person she was meant to be, she would have told Desiree why she was so adamant about keeping up the New Year’s Eve tradition. She would have told her just how often she’d wanted to kiss her pouty lips, or else she would have just kissed them, not even bothering to ask. That would have been the most honest thing to do.

  It all went back so far, this lying. Veronica could still recall, clear as day, the moment it became obvious to her who she was. There, in her mind’s eye, she saw De
siree strolling in and out of the surf at Red River Beach, down the Cape, a creature positively transformed in the two weeks since the end of school. There was something about her hair swirling gently in the sea-breeze, and something about her face too, something about the thin eyebrows, the green eyes, the high cheeks, something that seemed different than before. Maybe it was just the bikini, a skimpy string thing that the girl was nearly spilling out of, but Veronica couldn’t help but stare at Desiree’s breasts, which put Veronica’s own endowments to shame. Veronica could still feel the heat building as her friend drew closer, a feeling that had never come from thinking about boys, the way her mother had told her it would. She remembered how she’d pulled her legs tighter together, hoping to stave off the sensation, and how that only seemed to make things worse.

  But then, suddenly, she was back in the moment, back in the cold of her kitchen, drawn back by the hooting and hollering. She watched—and felt, yes felt, because she was no longer watching; she was there, in the seat, inside of the girl she had once been—a soft hand slip over her own.

  “Let’s just get it over with,” said Desiree.

  Every eye was on them. Veronica looked down at the table to see what had happened. She looked down to see, and she saw, but she didn’t believe, could not believe.

  “It ain’t two out of three,” said the Neanderthal.

  “Yeah,” said the Letterman. “In case you were wondering.

  “No,” said Veronica. “Sorry. Just spaced.”

  “You ready then?” said Desiree.

  Veronica nodded. “Sure,” she said.

  Desiree leaned across the corner of the table that sat between them, knocking over the now empty bottle of Pepe Lopez that was in front of her. “You look nervous,” she said, giggling, brushing a strand of fallen hair out of Veronica’s eyes.