I glanced at Angie. We’ve been working together so long, I could sum up the look on Angie’s face in two words:
Screw this.
I met her eyes and nodded. Life was too short to spend another quarter second with either Helene or Dottie.
I looked at Lionel and he shrugged, his body puddled with resignation.
We would have walked out right then—in fact, we were starting to—but Beatrice opened her eyes and blocked our path and said, “Please.”
“No,” Angie said quietly.
“An hour,” Beatrice said. “Just give us an hour. We’ll pay.”
“It’s not the money,” Angie said.
“Please,” Beatrice said. She looked past Angie, locked eyes with me. She shifted her weight from her left foot to her right and her shoulders sagged.
“One more hour,” I said. “That’s it.”
She smiled and nodded.
“Patrick, right?” Helene looked up at me. “That’s your name?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Think you could move a little to your left, Patrick?” Helene said. “You’re blocking the TV.”
Half an hour later, we’d learned nothing new.
Lionel, after a lot of wheedling, had convinced his sister to turn off the TV while we talked, but a lack of TV seemed only to further diminish Helene’s attention span. Several times during our conversation, her eyes darted past me to the blank screen as if hoping it would turn back on through divine intervention.
Dottie, after all her bitching about sticking by her best friend, left the room as soon as we turned off the TV. We heard her knocking around the kitchen, opening the refrigerator for another beer, rattling through the cupboards for an ashtray.
Lionel sat beside his sister on the couch, and Angie and I sat on the floor against the entertainment center. Beatrice took the end of the couch as far away from Helene as possible, stretched one leg out in front of her, held the other by the ankle between both hands.
We asked Helene to tell us everything regarding the day of her daughter’s disappearance, asked if there’d been any sort of argument between the two of them, if Helene had angered anyone who’d have a reason to abduct her daughter as an act of vengeance.
Helene’s voice bore what seemed a constant tone of exasperation as she explained that she never argued with her daughter. How could you argue with someone who smiled all the time? In between the smiling, it seemed, Amanda had only loved her mother and been loved by her, and they’d spent their time loving and smiling and smiling some more. Helene could think of no one she’d angered, and as she’d told the police, even if she had, who would abduct her child to get back at her? Children took work, Helene said. You had to feed them, she assured us. You had to tuck them in. You had to play with them sometimes.
Hence, all that smiling.
In the end, she told us nothing we hadn’t learned already from either news reports or Lionel and Beatrice.
As for Helene herself—the more time I spent with her, the less I wanted to be in the same room. As we discussed her child’s disappearance, she let us in on the fact that she hated her life. She was lonely; there were no good men left; they needed to put a fence up around Mexico to keep out all those Mexicans who were apparently stealing jobs up here in Boston. She was sure there was a liberal agenda to corrupt every decent American but she couldn’t articulate what that agenda was, only that it affected her ability to be happy and it was determined to keep blacks on welfare. Sure, she was on welfare herself, but she’d been trying hard these last seven years to get off.
She spoke of Amanda as one would speak of a stolen car or an errant pet—she seemed more annoyed than anything else. Her child had disappeared and, boy, had that fucked up her life.
God, it appeared, had anointed Helene McCready Life’s Great Victim. The rest of us could step out of line now. The competition was over.
“Helene,” I said, near the end of our conversation, “is there anything you could tell us that you might have forgotten to tell the police?”
Helene looked at the remote control on the coffee table. “What?” she said.
I repeated my question.
“It’s hard,” she said. “You know?”
“What?” I said.
“Raising a kid.” She looked up at me and her dull eyes widened, as if she were about to impart great wisdom. “It’s hard. It’s not like in the commercials.”
When we left the living room, Helene turned on the TV and Dottie swept past us, two beers in hand, as if she’d been given her cue.
“She’s got some emotional problems,” Lionel told us, once we’d settled in the kitchen.
“Yeah,” Beatrice said. “She’s a cunt.” She poured coffee into her mug.
“Don’t say that word,” Lionel said. “For God’s sake.”
Beatrice poured some coffee into Angie’s cup, looked at me.
I held up my can of Coke.
“Lionel,” Angie said, “your sister doesn’t seem too concerned that Amanda’s missing.”
“Oh, she’s concerned,” Lionel said. “Last night? She cried all night. I think she’s just cried out at the moment. Trying to get a handle on her…grief. You know.”
“Lionel,” I said, “with all due respect, I see self-pity. I don’t see grief.”
“It’s there,” Lionel blinked, looked at his wife. “It’s there. Really.”
Angie said, “I know I’ve said this before, but I really don’t see what we can do that the police aren’t already doing.”
“I know.” Lionel sighed. “I know.”
“Maybe later,” I said.
“Sure,” he agreed.
“If the police get completely stumped and pull off the case,” Angie said. “Maybe then.”
“Yeah.” Lionel came off the wall and held out his hand. “Look, thanks for dropping by. Thanks for…everything.”
“Any time.” I went to shake his hand.
Beatrice’s voice, jagged but clear, stopped me. “She’s four.”
I looked at her.
“Four years old,” she said, her eyes on the ceiling. “And she’s out there somewhere. Maybe lost. Maybe worse.”
“Honey,” Lionel said.
Beatrice gave a small shake of her head. She looked at her drink, then tilted her head and slugged it back, her eyes closed. When it was empty, she tossed her mug on the table and bent over, her hands clasped together.