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In the three months since her last sighting, a snowstorm in December, Carol’s cell phone had not been paid, her number given to someone else. Her bank account and credit cards had gone unused. Carol didn’t own a car. On the website broadcasting her disappearance, nothing is listed for “Cloth- ing and Accessories,” which is a terrible injustice. Carol was always fashion- ably dressed, and it saddened me that whatever outfit she had pulled together on that day would always go unnoticed. I imagined her stepping out into the snow the way we often did—with nothing but ourselves and the pull of the unknown. What will happen now? we had thought. We didn’t worry about bodily harm. These were local boys who knew how to drive the town’s winding roads. They gripped the wheel of the car or truck, their sleeves rolled up and their forearms ropy with muscle. All through high school, Paul Ruskin was Carol’s boyfriend, and his family lived in Kenwood in a brick colonial, and she was safe, safe, safe. | In the three months since her last sighting, a snowstorm in December, Carol’s cell phone had not been paid, her number given to someone else. Her bank account and credit cards had gone unused. Carol didn’t own a car. On the website broadcasting her disappearance, nothing is listed for “Cloth- ing and Accessories,” which is a terrible injustice. Carol was always fashion- ably dressed, and it saddened me that whatever outfit she had pulled together on that day would always go unnoticed. I imagined her stepping out into the snow the way we often did—with nothing but ourselves and the pull of the unknown. What will happen now? we had thought. We didn’t worry about bodily harm. These were local boys who knew how to drive the town’s winding roads. They gripped the wheel of the car or truck, their sleeves rolled up and their forearms ropy with muscle. All through high school, Paul Ruskin was Carol’s boyfriend, and his family lived in Kenwood in a brick colonial, and she was safe, safe, safe. | ||
The night of my company’s Christmas party I climbed into Paul’s truck and he grinned at me, the grin slightly off. He and Carol had recently bro- ken up. He’d been working at the Mobil station for two years, serving sub- urban women who pulled in and said, “Fill it up, please.” He washed their windshields, hustling around their station wagons with the squeegee, but you could tell he wasn’t suited for the job, that his family expected him to go to college, and in many ways, Carol’s leaving him was just another disap- pointment for his parents, who had spent many nights with her, watching television in the den. I knew I wouldn’t be filling her position. I wasn’t the type at the time, and I sensed that Paul knew it, and understood that maybe this night with me would be his last. Still, I saw he would make the best of things. He leaned over and rubbed his hands up and down my exposed arms. | |||
“Jesus,” he said. “You know it’s like twenty degrees out?” | |||
I settled into the truck’s seat and Paul angled the heating vents toward | |||
me. | |||
“Ice Queen,” he said, putting the truck into gear. A compliment, or not, I | |||
couldn’t tell. | |||
The night was dark and clear, the sky like it had been pricked with a fork, the sparks of light showing through. We drove through town—the Congre- gational Church strung with lights, the roads black and shining, the houses looking like everyone inside sat in front of their televisions with hot cocoa and bowls of popcorn. At my house my mother perched on the edge of her bed watching her little black and white television, drinking sherry. My sis- ters were out somewhere with their friends in the night, loose and as im- mune to the cold as I was. Back then, people said things like “the wrong side of the tracks,” and that was where we’d moved with my mother when she di- vorced my father, when the house we’d grown up in was sold and only the living room’s love seats fit in the rental—a gray house with slipping clap- boards. The winding lane and the maples and the iron lamp post of our old house no longer protected us, and we were suddenly, like a store with it lights flipped on, open for business. “Here we are!” we said. | |||
Paul Ruskin was one of a string of boys who took me out the year we moved, all after my first boyfriend decided to tell his friends about the things we did together. I saw now that he’d been hurt and rejected when I broke up with him. I was probably cruel, though I cannot remember what I said. I only know I wanted to be away from him, that I wanted to be with someone else. Later, he moved on with his life and married a local girl and had children and discovered cancer in his lungs and died. It struck me now how much he may have truly cared for me—taking me to the motels for sex, try- ing to make it nice in various ways. But no matter how nice I didn’t care for him, and there was nothing to be done about that. | |||
Paul drove I- downtown to the Sheraton, into the depths of the park- ing garage, a place as dank and forlorn as any I’d ever seen. We took the el- evator, and inside, in its mirrored walls, I saw how pale my shoulders were, how my nipples poked against my dress. Paul wore a suit. He kept tugging on his tie. | |||
“We don’t have to stay long,” I said, though a plan for after the party had | |||
not been shared. | |||
{{Review}} | {{Review}} | ||
{{DEFAULTSORT:Silent Night}} | {{DEFAULTSORT:Silent Night}} | ||
[[Category:Short Stories (MR)]] | [[Category:Short Stories (MR)]] | ||