Among the Missing

Read Among the Missing for Free Online

Book: Read Among the Missing for Free Online
Authors: Dan Chaon
now—what? What was it? She didn’t know. She couldn’t tell what was going on in his head.
    Winter was coming. It was late October, and all the forecasts predicted cold, months of ice and darkness. Having grown up in Chicago, she knew that this shouldn’t bother her, but it did. She dreaded it, for it always brought her into a constant state of predepressive gloom, something Scandinavian and lugubrious, which she had never liked about herself. Already, she could feel the edges of it. She sat in her office, in the high school, and she could see the distant mountains out the window, growing paler and less majestic until they looked almost translucent, like oddly shaped thunderheads fading into the colorless sky. A haze settled over the city. College Placement Exam scores were lower than usual. A heavy snow was expected.
    And Tobe was gone more than usual now, working late at night, preparing for Wendell’s appeal. They had hired a new lawyer, one more experienced as a defense attorney, but there were still things Tobe needed to do. He would come home very late at night.
    She hoped that he wasn’t drinking too much, but she suspected that he was. She had been trying not to pay attention, but she smelled alcohol on him nearly every night he came to bed; she saw the progress of the cases of beer in the refrigerator, the way they were depleted and replaced.
    What’s wrong? she thought, waiting up for him, waiting for the sound of his car in the driveway. She was alone in the kitchen, making herself some tea, thinking, when Wild Bill spoke from his cage.
    “Stupid cunt,” he said.
    She turned abruptly. She was certain that she heard the words distinctly. She froze, with the kettle in her hand over the burner, and when she faced him, Wild Bill cocked his head at her, fixing her with his bird eye. The skin around his eye was bare, whitish wrinkled flesh, which reminded her of an old alcoholic. He watched her warily, clicking his claws along the perch. Then he said, thoughtfully: “Hello, sexy.”
    She reached into the cage and extracted Wild Bill’s food bowl. He was watching, and she very slowly walked to the trash can. “Bad bird!” she said. She dumped it out—the peanuts and pumpkin seeds and bits of fruit that she’d prepared for him. “Bad!” she said again. Then she put the empty food bowl back into the cage. “There,” she said. “See how you like that!” And she closed the cage with a snap, aware that she was trembly with anger.
    It was Wendell’s voice, of course: his words. The bird was merely mimicking, merely a conduit. It was Wendell, she thought, and she thought of telling Tobe; she was wide awake when he finally came home and slid into bed, her heart was beating heavily, but she just lay there as he slipped under the covers—he smelled of liquor, whiskey, she thought. He was already asleep when she touched him.
    Maybe it didn’t mean anything: Filthy words didn’t makesomeone a rapist. After all, Tobe was a lawyer, and he believed that Wendell was innocent. Carlin was a policeman, and he believed it, too. Were they so blinded by love that they couldn’t see it?
    Or was she jumping to conclusions? She had always felt that there was something immoral about criticizing someone’s relatives, dividing them from those they loved, asking them to take sides. Such a person was her father’s second wife, a woman of infinite nastiness and suspicion, full of mean, insidious comments about her stepdaughters. Cheryl had seen the evil in this, the damage it could do.
    And so she had chosen to say nothing as Wendell’s possessions were loaded into her house, she had chosen to say nothing about the macaw, even as she grew to loathe it. How would it look, demanding that they get rid of Wendell’s beloved pet, suggesting that the bird somehow implied Wendell’s guilt? No one else seemed to have heard Wild Bill’s foul sayings, and perhaps the bird wouldn’t repeat them, now that she’d punished him. She

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