Marilou Is Everywhere Read online

  And that is the story of Virgil.

  Clinton’s daddy was another man. He had been in jail for cracking a parking garage attendant over the head with a bag of sugar. My mom was cleaning hotel rooms at the time, and they met because he was refilling the vending machines. They saw each other at the same time every week, and then that day became the best day of the week, they both looked nicest that day although they could hardly talk because they were both already laughing at what the other one was saying. He drove her everywhere. She had never been so in motion in her life. He had a jack parakeet that lived in his truck. It was a whole world in there. They took Virgil to Lake Erie and went out to dinner in places where they brought around a silver barge of desserts at the end, and it turned out that his money was all from life insurance scams and he left in the middle of the night, in the middle of one of their trips, and my mother hitchhiked back from the Smoky Mountains with Virgil crying on her hip. She got carsick all over some nun’s LeBaron. When she got home, she kept getting carsick, even when she wasn’t going anywhere.

  And that is the story of Clinton.

  She was drinking then. She got herself a parakeet. Its name was Bandit, and it was no help. Its favorite thing to do was to sit in a paper bag inside its cage. Virgil remembers how she’d slam the furniture if they were crying. She never touched them. But if they were crying while all of whatever was going on, she would pick up the nearest piece of furniture and let it crash back in place. That was about when she stopped drinking, too. She was going to find it in the church, the don’t-kill-yourself. That’s when she was putting Virgil in the pageants. She was taking GED class and had all kinds of pamphlets for learning how to take blood out of people’s bodies, which was a good job, and she was trying and praying, and the most incredible thing happened. The boy from the amusement park came back. Virgil’s daddy. Not back, maybe: He was a missionary visiting her church to talk about praying into a positive attitude, teaching a six-week course about the science of the Christian mind. They weren’t even sure how they knew each other at first. Of course a lot of things had happened to him. He had been in the navy. He had found the church because of his wife, but she had died in a complicated birth and so he found more church from the grief of it. That my mother was there in front of him, and that she had already survived the delivery of their son, was nothing but miracle. He came over for dinner the next day with a football for Virgil, gave the boys that one required spiral lesson: fingers on the stitches, watch how it spins in the blue. He came over for dinner the next day again. One of those gruff blond men, he must have a heart in there somewhere. He brought her flowers. She made steaks and peach cobbler, paid elaborate attention to her hair.

  I guess it was the miracle talk that got to her, because what a miracle meant to my mother was: the end of suffering. Finally the world could be forgiven, now that it made sense. It had shown itself a bully but who didn’t know about that? Defeated, it spread its plush belly before her. Here it was: the true pure gold. This man’s love would save her forever. She wasn’t cleaning hotel rooms anymore. She worked at the coffee shop in the hospital. Everything in the air had a taste. Eternity, French fries, leatherette, bleach. She was drinking again. It was fine now. World of Motion. Universe of Energy.

  I don’t know what happened. Something changed in the weather between them and he decided to leave when the six weeks were over. I’ve cut it every way I could think to: She drank too much, Clinton was a brat, he never meant it, he was afraid. Maybe it was too much to go from no family to family fully assembled overnight. Maybe he was just one of those who can’t like any one thing for very long. Maybe he and my mother had simply never discussed what they meant to each other. Maybe he never meant to stay. But he went off on another mission trip. She felt she couldn’t show her face again, so that was the end of church. She sued for child support.

  One day, she was in line behind Bernadette Satterwhite at the Giant Eagle. Bernadette always looked like an actress, or someone who had ideas of herself. She wore a belly shirt and a black skirt with little round mirrors sewn around the hem. She had Jude on her hip and a big leather purse and tortoise sunglasses. She paid for her food and asked the bagger to take her things out to the truck, a thing which nobody else ever did. She gave her girl a quarter for the magic egg machine. And then she turned around to my mother and said, “I’m one of the indigo children. I’m blessed with second sight, and honey, that baby inside you is already dead.”

  “You’re a lying B from H-E-double,” my mother said, because she had a thing against cusses. Of course there was no baby. She’d just put on weight from eating through hangovers. She felt like hell, but who didn’t? Two months later, I was born into the toilet at the Greene County Memorial Hospital, where my mother was hiding out on her break from making coffee for all those bald doctors. Miracle talk, all over again. But my daddy, Virgil’s daddy, didn’t ever write back. It had been too much the first time. Nobody needed more proof.

  And that is the story of me.

  IV

  Somebody who knew somebody at the sheriff’s office told the Pecjak’s crowd that Jude’s car had been towed to Gebe & Skocik Tire in Uniontown. The garage was empty that day on account of a Pirates game. The tow company’s paperwork had been filled out in a rushed and cruddy way, so it was difficult to say who had picked her up. Detective Torboli asked all the drivers if they remembered getting a girl in Gans the middle Sunday of May. It seemed like it should not be so hard to remember, but they claimed they couldn’t even say for sure what they had done just that morning. There were calls all the time, you got the people, the lights changed in the edges of the sky. Such mysteries. Who knows.

  When they searched Jude’s car, they found a JanSport backpack with a bottle of vodka in it, a baggie of stems in the glove box, stepped-on geometry homework, and a notebook of swears in French, but no money or ID.

  It got around that the day bartender at O’Gillie’s had seen on that day a girl matching Jude’s description who wanted to order a gin and tonic in a tall glass but claimed she’d left her ID somewhere when asked for it. He served her an iced tea but later found her sitting with a middle-aged man at a back table drinking a pitcher and feeding French fries to a poodle tied up under the table. He said he’d thrown them both out then. When police showed him the photograph of Jude for comparison, he said it was possibly the same girl he had seen, but he could have sworn she was Brandy someone or other whose father owned the local septic empire and tried to drink on the infamy even though she wasn’t legal. But perhaps he was mistaken. They all look the same to me, he said, although it wasn’t clear if he meant black girls or underage ones. He seemed to recall she had a lot of cash on her. He felt certain she had worn a feather in her hair, one of those dyed chicken feather roach clips you win at the fair.

  At the house across the street from Gebe & Skocik, the fentanyl addicts were sitting out in yellow sweatshirts bought bulk that advertised the Mountaineers winning the Sugar Bowl in ’94, which they had not. All of them were saying they had seen Jude. They had seen a girl. A girl, once, and she wasn’t very nice. Was this Jude? She had headed over to bum a smoke. She had a bruise on her clavicle and kept her sunglasses on. She had a feather in her hair. She had no feather. Her hair was wet. Wet hair looked like a damn piece of ink or seaweed. Her dog didn’t seem to like her. Her dog was a little chow. There was no dog. She was wearing a parka with the tags still on it. She had walked off in the direction of the Dunkin’ Donuts. She had stayed with them, like family. She had died in their arms.

  One of them claimed he knew her from violin camp when they were kids. His name was Dustin Gehoe. He had won first chair in the West Liberty University Children’s Orchestra. Jude was second chair. He had eyes with all the shine shook out of them, but nice manners. They had been pen pals. He had once sent Jude a matryoshka doll. What did it mean? Detective Torboli had taken a statement, hopeless though it must have seemed.

 
But really, I hadn’t been the only one who paid such close attention to Jude. We would all become collectors of Jude minutiae, and trade scraps of the known and the overheard and the fathomed without really caring what any of it meant. Maybe everyone in Greene County believed they would solve the case this way, but wasn’t it more like watching a soap opera? Except better, of course, because if you had known Jude or shared some minor moment with her, you could step into the story yourself, as the wise and now sadder human who must go on living. Everyone from Dustin Gehoe to the lady who drove our school bus made it sound like Jude had tendered a hidden truth of her soul to their confidence, and they held it up to flatter themselves in its sorrowful light. I take a dim view of the practice myself. But I’m also a hypocrite, and fully a part of life on the earth.

  The suspects they brought in for questioning were, down to the dime and penny, compromised and illegally inclined and born out of waves of these wrong ways, iron cross tattoos, bad ideas about women, burned knuckles. They were almost boasting about it at Sissy Pecjak’s gas station. People gave Tanner Fordyce all kinds of shit around the sandwich counter because he seemed like the only grown man who hadn’t been interviewed for the investigation, and was he turning puss on them, or what? Maybe the trouble was that the police did not know anything save for the day when the abduction had occurred, so there was no narrowing of fact. No telling details coincided. Not to mention all the men they brought in were happily confessing to little-bit schemes they could swear to have been in the commission of at the appointed hour, no matter what hour that might be. One willingly acknowledged he had been holed up in an Econo Lodge in little Washington that whole weekend shooting dope into his girlfriend’s neck, and then set a slot machine on fire when he nodded out with his cigarette hand on the MORE button at the Meadows. Plenty reels of closed-circuit footage bore out the truth of this statement.

  The girls had made it home in time for the wedding. They told the whole thing over and over through the night: the blackberry wine. B.D.’s eyes flushed pink like a rabbit’s. They had about them the glamour of the nearly killed, and they would not set it aside for anything. It was not just any day that they had been in such danger. Morgan, the bride, was furious. Everybody in the ersatz beauty parlor of her prefab was talking about whether Jude would make it back in time for the wedding, and here was Morgan in her dress already, with nobody talking about that. During the ceremony, when she appeared at the back of the church, the assembled turned to watch her, it was true, but many of them turned also to see if Jude was there in the back of the room as she had not yet seated herself.

  It was not the best wedding. A few things went wrong. The bride and groom could not get the unity candle to light, even though Morgan had expressly asked that the church’s HVAC be turned off for the duration of the ceremony to address this need. The former footballers got sweat-pinched in the stiff collars of their church clothes. The groom’s mother swilled on blank Chardonnay in the cocktail hour and began to talk loudly about the tribulations of her own marriage, which had been alive only in bickering and back rubs for the last twenty years. At the head table, an extra place setting had been stuffed in to accommodate a second cousin who had not RSVP’d or participated in any of the wedding party activities but showed up, nevertheless, in her own home-sewn version of the bridesmaid gown.

  The guests spoke of nothing but the girls’ near brush with disaster. Some speculated that they knew just which boys had chased them. It was the Whipkey brothers, certainly, or the Polands or the Masons. Everybody, it seemed, knew a clan of bad seeds who hung out in those woods. Were they wearing matching flannels? Did they have stick-poke tattoos of the Eye of Horus? Were they drinking Night Train? Things like this.

  Some thought it might even be Virgil and Clinton Stoat, never mind their more or less permanent sequester up on Wildman Run Road. Never mind that they numbered but two—they lived in one of those ivy-strangled houses cocooned with POW/MIA flags and the spikes of scanner radios along the roof. That’s how people talked about us. I know, because sometimes people forgot I was a Stoat, too. And sometimes they just forgot we might be able to hear them. That night, I was making rounds with a lemonade pitcher and taking plates at the reception—it was a one-time job Virgil had got us because he knew the cater lady, though he got to stay in the kitchen making urns of coffee while I showed around my invisible smile and scraped chicken bones into the big drum of a garbage can, which could have fit my whole body.

  And nobody said so, of course, but the clatter of rented silverware and chimed water glasses hushed every time somebody opened the door to the fellowship hall. Everyone looked to see if it was Jude, showing herself late and maybe dewy, straight from the shower, with her long black dress and her usual tin bracelets zithering around on her wrists. But no.

  The mother of the groom threw up on her plate when the cake was passed. Some uncle was found hiding out in a stall of the ladies’ restroom, claiming he was there to fix a broken toilet bobber. And it had rained, a cold and heavy slapping kind of rain all through the jeweled trees around the church, littering branches over the cars, and the guests arrived at the reception with their hair all upset looking and mascara soot run down their cheeks. Good luck, everybody said. That it must be good luck for rain on such a wedding.

  And still, it had taken another week before Jude was even reported missing. The girls, it seemed, presumed she had come home too late to make the reception, too tired or over it to dress herself up in time. Crystal called the house a few times to check on her friend. She left messages with Bernadette, who said Jude would be gone a few days and would call back soon.

  One afternoon, Kayla had apparently stopped by Jude’s house. She was taking her little cousins up to Burns Delite for ice cream and wanted the company, or, more honestly, wanted the help. Trey and Ray and Rita were ice-blond and violent children. Everything was guns and bombs and peeing and toilets and they left nasty red scratches all over each other. Bernadette came to the dark screen door but wouldn’t step out onto the porch with all the hitting and thrashing. Why, Jude was off camping with her friends, she said. Yes, in Coopers Rock. They wouldn’t be home until Sunday, for the wedding.

  Kayla tried to explain, but the conversation halted every time she told Bernadette that she herself had gone on the camping trip and come back a week ago and the wedding was over, that Jude had a car problem and had been stranded in Gans.

  “Gans?” Bernadette said. “No, that’s not right. They were going to Coopers Rock.”

  Kayla hauled her little cousins back home again and called the police. But it was Sunday. The officer she spoke with suggested that the missing girl was more likely off with a new boyfriend or otherwise engaged recreationally. Perhaps she was ruled by a dark planet? Likely she was doing some drugs. He must have sounded like a man who had driven a long way in the dark to end up where he was. Nobody would want to go halfway across the county to scare up a girl likelier engaged in vodka space-time travel. And why wasn’t the mother making the call? Although in some matters, I’m told, the police take measure by what alarms the friends rather than the parents; otherwise they’d just shake up the same thin-skulled junkie kids over and over for chugging cough syrup behind the Giant Eagle, getting lost in the colors of the music that shook from their poorly maintained Pontiacs. Greene County has a heroin problem. It’s as likely to suck up the kids you’d never suspect as the ones who have been imperiled lifelong. Just the week before, the football coach’s grandson had tried to rob Rush’s Grocery & Video in Rogersville. He said he had a gun, but it was just his fingers shaped like one. Ruthie Rush whacked his hand with her bar-code scanner, and he ran out of there so fast he lost his shoes.

  The detective gave Kayla the phone number for his direct line and advised that she call again the next day if a night and a sleep had not settled her mind.

  But still, none of the girls heard from Jude. They must have wondered, but she was like that sometimes. Sh
e had a stormy inner life, according to Kayla. Sometimes she would seem angry at them for reasons they didn’t understand, or fall in love with a boy she’d throw over in three weeks. Her obsessions were flashing but deep: Jack Nicholson in his prime, Romanesque religious art, the movie Network, nineties Nancy Drew books. And Nina Simone. Nina Simone. Nina Simone. Later on, I would know these well. It was hard not to. Even though there was so much to do in the house, I would spend much of my days reading through Jude’s things. Her bedroom was messed with piled-up treasure, vaguely chronological. The top layer was sort of aspirational. I could tell she had been trying to read Tess of the d’Urbervilles for a long time because the first twenty pages had been dog-eared and unfolded, and because it had been arranged on her nightstand with a hurricane candle and a blackened rose. But I could also tell she really loved Valley of the Dolls, hidden under her pillow. The spine was loose, the edges foxed up like velvet, and there were all kinds of bookmarks—a carbon copy of an intake form from the free clinic, a goose feather, a piece of gum foil helixed and flattened. And so her friends didn’t worry at first. It was summer, and in summer Jude almost always tried to become another person, at least for a little while. By August she usually got tired of trying and she’d watch TV again, gossip again, paint her toenails, enjoy whatever skimming silly pleasure she had sworn off. Amber, who was the most jealous, took things strictly sideways and said Jude had probably hooked up with the tow truck driver. Or the old boy from Burchinal’s General Store.