The Corn Maiden: And Other Nightmares Read online

  Already in fifth grade it had begun, a perplexing girl-meanness.

  In sixth grade, it had become worse.

  “Why don’t they like me, Mommy?”

  “Why do they make fun of me, Mommy?”

  For in Skatskill if you lived down the hill from Highgate Avenue and/or east of Summit Street you were known to be working class. Marissa had asked what it meant? Didn’t everybody work? And what was a class was it like . . . a class in school? A classroom?

  But Leah had to concede: even if Marissa had been invited home by an unknown school friend, she wouldn’t have stayed away so long.

  Not past 5 P.M. Not past dark.

  Not without calling Leah.

  “She isn’t the type of child to . . .”

  Leah checked the kitchen again. The sink was empty. No package of chicken cutlets defrosting.

  Tuesdays/Thursdays were Marissa’s evenings to start supper. Marissa loved to cook, Mommy and Marissa loved to cook together. Tonight they were having chicken jambalaya which was their favorite fun meal to prepare together. “Tomatoes, onions, peppers, cajun powder. Rice . . .”

  Leah spoke aloud. The silence was unnerving.

  If I’d come home directly. Tonight.

  The 7-Eleven out on the highway. That’s where she had stopped on the way home.

  Behind the counter, the middle-aged Indian gentleman with the wise sorrowful eyes would vouch for her. Leah was a frequent customer, he didn’t know her name but he seemed to like her.

  Dairy products, a box of tissue. Canned tomatoes. Two six-packs of beer, cold. For all he knew, Leah had a husband. He was the beer drinker, the husband.

  Leah saw that her hands were trembling. She needed a drink, to steady her hands,

  “Marissa!”

  She was thirty-four years old. Her daughter was eleven. So far as anyone in Leah’s family knew, including her parents, she had been “amicably divorced” for seven years. Her former husband, a medical school dropout, had disappeared somewhere in northern California; they had lived together in Berkeley, having met at the university in the early 1990s.

  Impossible to locate the former husband/father whose name was not Bantry.

  She would be asked about him, she knew. She would be asked about numerous things.

  She would explain: eleven is too old for day care. Eleven is fully capable of coming home alone . . . Eleven can be responsible for . . .

  At the refrigerator she fumbled for a can of beer. She opened it and drank thirstily. The liquid was freezing cold, her head began to ache immediately: an icy spot like a coin between her eyes. How can you! At a time like this! She didn’t want to panic and call 911 before she’d thought this through. Something was staring her in the face, some explanation, maybe?

  Distraught Single Mom. Modest Apartment.

  Missing Eleven-Year-Old. “Learning Disabilities.”

  Clumsily Leah retraced her steps through the apartment another time. She was looking for . . . Throwing more widely open those doors she’d already opened. Kneeling beside Marissa’s bed to peer beneath in a burst of desperate energy.

  And finding—what? A lone sock.

  As if Marissa would be hiding beneath a bed!

  Marissa who loved her mother, would never never wish to worry or upset or hurt her mother. Marissa who was young for her age, never rebellious, sulky. Marissa whose idea of badness was forgetting to make her bed in the morning. Leaving the bathroom mirror above the sink splattered with water.

  Marissa who’d asked Mommy, “Do I have a daddy somewhere like other girls, and he knows about me?”

  Marissa who’d asked, blinking back tears, “Why do they make fun of me, Mommy? Am I slow?”

  In public school classes had been too large, her teacher hadn’t had time or patience for Marissa. So Leah had enrolled her at Skatskill Day where classes were limited to fifteen students and Marissa would have special attention from her teacher and yet: still she was having trouble with arithmetic, she was teased, called “slow” . . . Laughed at even by girls she’d thought were her friends.

  “Maybe she’s run away.”

  Out of nowhere this thought struck Leah.

  Marissa had run away from Skatskill. From the life Mommy had worked so hard to provide for her.

  “That can’t be! Never.”

  Leah swallowed another mouthful of beer. Self-medicating, it was. Still her heart was beating in rapid thumps, then missing a beat. Hoped to God she would not faint . . .

  “Where? Where would Marissa go? Never.”

  Ridiculous to think that Marissa would run away!

  She was far too shy, passive. Far too uncertain of herself. Other children, particularly older children, intimidated her. Because Marissa was unusually attractive, a beautiful child with silky blond hair to her shoulders, brushed by her proud mother until it shone, sometimes braided by her mother into elaborate plaits, Marissa often drew unwanted attention; but Marissa had very little sense of herself and of how others regarded her.

  She had never ridden a bus alone. Never gone to a movie alone. Rarely entered any store alone, without Leah close by.

  Yet it was the first thing police would suspect, probably: Marissa had run away.

  “Maybe she’s next door. Visiting the neighbors.”

  Leah knew this was not likely. She and Marissa were on friendly terms with their neighbors but they never visited one another. It wasn’t that kind of apartment complex, there were few other children.

  Still, Leah would have to see. It was expected of a mother looking for her daughter, to check with neighbors.

  She spent some time then, ten or fifteen minutes, knocking on doors in the Briarcliff Apts. Smiling anxiously into strangers’ startled faces. Trying not to sound desperate, hysterical.

  “Excuse me . . .”

  A nightmare memory came to her, of a distraught young mother knocking on their door, years ago in Berkeley when she’d first moved in with her lover who would become Marissa’s father. They’d been interrupted at a meal, and Leah’s lover had answered the door, an edge of annoyance in his voice; and Leah had come up behind him, very young at the time, very blond and privileged, and she’d stared at a young Filipino woman blinking back tears as she’d asked them Have you seen my daughter . . . Leah could not remember anything more.

  Now it was Leah Bantry who was knocking on doors. Interrupting strangers at mealtime. Apologizing for disturbing them, asking in a tremulous voice Have you seen my daughter . . .

  In the barracks-like apartment complex into which Leah had moved for economy’s sake two years before, each apartment opened directly out onto the rear of the building, into the parking area. This was a brightly lit paved area, purely functional, ugly. In the apartment complex there were no hallways. There were no interior stairs, no foyers. There were no meeting places for even casual exchanges. This was not an attractive condominium village overlooking the Hudson River but Briarcliff Apts., South Skatskill.

  Leah’s immediate neighbors were sympathetic and concerned, but could offer no help. They had not seen Marissa, and of course she hadn’t come to visit them. They promised Leah they would “keep an eye out” and suggested she call 911.

  Leah continued to knock on doors. A mechanism had been triggered in her brain, she could not stop until she had knocked on every door in the apartment complex. As she moved farther from her own first-floor apartment, she was met with less sympathy. One tenant shouted through the door to ask what she wanted. Another, a middle-aged man with a drinker’s flushed indignant face, interrupted her faltering query to say he hadn’t seen any children, he didn’t know any children, and he didn’t have time for any children.

  Leah returned to her apartment staggering, dazed. Saw with a thrill of alarm she’d left the door ajar. Every light in the apartment appeared to be on. Almost, she thought Marissa must be home now, in the kitchen.

  She hurried inside. “Marissa . . . ?”

  Her voice was eager, piteous.

&n
bsp; The kitchen was empty of course. The apartment was empty.

  A new, wild idea: Leah returned outside, to the parking lot, to check her car which was parked a short distance away. She peered inside, though knowing it was locked and empty. Peered into the backseat.

  Am I going mad? What is happening to me . . .

  Still, she’d had to look. She had a powerful urge, too, to get into the car and drive along Fifteenth Street to Skatskill Day School, and check out the building. Of course, it would be locked. The parking lot to the rear . . .

  She would drive on Van Buren. She would drive on Summit. She would drive along Skatskill’s small downtown of boutiques, novelty restaurants, high-priced antique and clothing stores. Out to the highway past gas stations, fast-food restaurants, mini-malls.

  Expecting to see—what? Her daughter walking in the rain?

  Leah returned to the apartment, thinking she’d heard the phone ring but the phone was not ringing. Another time, unable to stop herself she checked the rooms. This time looking more carefully through Marissa’s small closet, pushing aside Marissa’s neatly hung clothes. (Marissa had always been obsessively neat. Leah had not wished to wonder why.) Stared at Marissa’s shoes. Such small shoes! Trying to remember what Marissa had worn that morning . . . So many hours ago.

  Had she plaited Marissa’s hair that morning? She didn’t think she’d had time. Instead she had brushed it, lovingly. Maybe she was a little too vain of her beautiful daughter and now she was being punished . . . No, that was absurd. You are not punished for loving your child. She had brushed Marissa’s hair until it shone and she had fastened it with barrettes, mother-of-pearl butterflies.

  “Aren’t you pretty! Mommy’s little angel.”

  “Oh, Mommy. I am not.”

  Leah’s heart caught. She could not understand how the child’s father had abandoned them both. She was sick with guilt, it had to be her fault as a woman and a mother.

  She’d resisted an impulse to hug Marissa, though. At eleven, the girl was getting too old for spontaneous unexplained hugs from Mommy.

  Displays of emotion upset children, Leah had been warned. Of course, Leah hadn’t needed to be warned.

  Leah returned to the kitchen for another beer. Before dialing 911. Just a few swallows, she wouldn’t finish the entire can.

  She kept nothing stronger than beer in the apartment. That was a rule of her mature life.

  No hard liquor. No men overnight. No exposure to her daughter, the emotions Mommy sometimes felt.

  She knew: she would be blamed. For she was blamable.

  Latchkey child. Working mom.

  She’d have had to pay a sitter nearly as much as she made at the clinic as a medical assistant, after taxes. It was unfair, and it was impossible. She could not.

  Marissa was not so quick-witted as other children her age but she was not slow! She was in sixth grade, she had not fallen behind. Her tutor said she was “improving.” And her attitude was so hopeful. Your daughter tries so hard, Mrs. Bantry! Such a sweet, patient child.

  Unlike her mother, Leah thought. Who wasn’t sweet, and who had given up patience long ago.

  “I want to report a child missing . . .”

  She rehearsed the words, struck by their finality. She hoped her voice would not sound slurred.

  Where was Marissa? It was impossible to think she wasn’t somehow in the apartment. If Leah looked again . . .

  Marissa knew: to lock the front door behind her, and to bolt the safety latch when she was home alone. (Mommy and Marissa had practiced this maneuver many times.) Marissa knew: not to answer the door if anyone knocked, if Mommy was not home. Not to answer the telephone immediately but to let the answering machine click on, to hear if it was Mommy calling.

  Marissa knew: never let strangers approach her. No conversations with strangers. Never climb into vehicles with strangers or even with people she knew unless they were women, people Mommy knew or the mothers of classmates for instance.

  Above all Marissa knew: come home directly from school.

  Never enter any building, any house, except possibly the house of a classmate, a school friend . . . Even so, Mommy must be told about this beforehand.

  (Would Marissa remember? Could an eleven-year-old be trusted to remember so much?)

  Leah had totally forgotten; she’d intended to call Marissa’s teacher. From Miss Fletcher, Leah would learn the names of Marissa’s friends. This, the police would expect her to know. Yet she stood by the phone indecisively, wondering if she dared call the woman; for if she did, Miss Fletcher would know that something was wrong.

  The ache between Leah’s eyes had spread, her head was wracked with pain.

  Four-year-old Marissa would climb up onto the sofa beside Leah, and stroke her forehead to smooth out the “worry lines.” Wet kisses on Mommy’s forehead. “Kiss to make go away!”

  Mommy’s vanity had been somewhat wounded, that her child saw worry lines in her face. But she’d laughed, and invited more kisses. “All right, sweetie. Kiss-to-make-go-away.”

  It had become their ritual. A frown, a grimace, a mournful look—either Mommy or Marissa might demand, “Kiss-to-make- go-away.”

  Leah was paging through the telephone directory. Fletcher. There were more than a dozen Fletchers. None of the initials seemed quite right. Marissa’s teacher’s first name was—Eve? Eva?

  Leah dialed one of the numbers. A recording clicked on, a man’s voice.

  Another number, a man answered. Politely telling Leah no: there was no one named “Eve” or “Eva” at that number.

  This is hopeless, Leah thought.

  She should be calling ERs, medical centers, where a child might have been brought, struck by a vehicle for instance crossing a busy street . . .

  She fumbled for the can of beer. She would drink hurriedly now. Before the police arrived.

  Self-medicating a therapist had called it. Back in high school she’d begun. It was her secret from her family, they’d never known. Though her sister Avril had guessed. At first Leak had drunk with her friends, then she hadn’t needed her friends. It wasn’t for the elevated sensation, the buzz, it was to calm her nerves. To make her less anxious. Less disgusted with herself.

  I need to be beautiful. More beautiful.

  He’d said she was beautiful, many times. The man who was to be Marissa’s father. Leah was beautiful, he adored her.

  They were going to live in a seaside town somewhere in northern California, Oregon. It had been their fantasy. In the meantime he’d been a medical student, resentful of the pressure. She had taken the easier route, nursing school. But she’d dropped out when she became pregnant.

  Later he would say sure she was beautiful, but he did not love her.

  Love wears out. People move on.

  Still, there was Marissa. Out of their coupling, Marissa.

  Gladly would Leah give up the man, any man, so long as she had her daughter back.

  If she had not stopped on the way home from the clinic! If she had come directly home.

  She knew this: she would have to tell the police where she had been, before returning home. Why she’d been unusually late. She would have to confess that, that she had been late. Her life would be turned inside out like the pockets of an old pair of pants. All that was private, precious, rudely exposed.

  The single evening in weeks, months . . . She’d behaved out of character.

  But she’d stopped at the 7-Eleven, too. It was a busy place in the early evening. This wasn’t out of character, Leah frequently stopped at the convenience store which was two blocks from Briarcliff Apts. The Indian gentleman at the cash register would speak kindly of her to police officers. He would learn that her name was Leah Bantry and that her daughter was missing. He would learn that she lived close by, on Fifteenth Street. He would learn that she was a single mother, she was not married. The numerous six-packs of Coors she bought had not been for a husband but for her.

  He’d seen her with Marissa, cer
tainly. And so he would remember Marissa. Shy blond child whose hair was sometimes in plaits. He would pity Leah as he’d never had reason to pity her in the past, only just to admire her in his guarded way, the blond shining hair, the American-healthy good looks.

  Leah finished the beer, and disposed of the can in the waste basket beneath the sink. She thought of going outside and dumping all the cans into a trash can, for police would possibly search the house, but there was no time, she had delayed long enough waiting for Marissa to return and everything to be again as it had been. Thinking Why didn’t I get a cell phone for Marissa, why did I think the expense wasn’t worth it? She picked up the receiver, and dialed 911.

  Her voice was breathless as if she’d been running.

  “I want—I want—to report a child missing.”

  LONE WOLVES

  I am meant for a special destiny. I am!

  He lived vividly inside his head. She lived vividly inside her head.

  He was a former idealist. She was an unblinking realist.

  He was thirty-one years old. She was thirteen.

  He was tall/lanky/ropey-muscled five feet ten inches (on his New York State driver’s license he’d indicated 5′11″), weighing one hundred fifty-five pounds. She was four feet eleven, eighty-three pounds.

  He thought well of himself, secretly. She thought very well of herself, not so secretly.

  He was a substitute math teacher/“computer consultant” at Skatskill Day School. She was an eighth grader at Skatskill Day School.

  His official status at the school was part-time employee.

  Her official status at the school was full-tuition pupil, no exceptions.

  Part-time employee meant no medical/dental insurance coverage, less pay per hour than full-time employees, and no possibility of tenure. Full-tuition, no exceptions meant no scholarship aid or tuition deferral.

  He was a relatively new resident of Skatskill-on-Hudson, eight miles north of New York City. She was a longtime resident who’d come to live with her widowed grandmother when she was two years old, in 1992.

  To her, to his face, he was Mr. Zallman; otherwise, Mr. Z.

  To him, she had no clear identity. One of those Skatskill Day girls of varying ages (elementary grades through high school) to whom he gave computer instructions and provided personal assistance as requested.