So Much Love Read online

  She and Catherine weren’t so much friends as people who worked a lot of the same shifts and had no beef with each other. But during all that time together, they had absorbed little glimpses of each other’s personalities. Or Daria had. She never knew what their relationship amounted to in Catherine’s eyes, but when she skipped her period the second month in a row, it was Catherine she told. She didn’t know why, but it was the right thing to do, because Catherine said, “Do you want a baby?” As if all things were possible; as if she were offering salads from a tray and Daria could pick whichever one she wanted. Was it really that simple in Catherine’s mind? But if she hadn’t asked her that question, Daria might not have that firm yes she said in response to fall back on when Stevie is shrieking or puking on himself and she thinks she hates him.

  Daria is startled to see the message icon on her phone when she’s on break, but it’s just a text, not a missed call. Elliot has a pretty good sense of what’s a real emergency.

  She waits until she can lock herself in a washroom stall to read the message.

  Ell: Did u put kermit doll in the bag

  DariA: No sorry 4got hows it going?

  Ell: Gud hes asleep now

  DariA: Great!!! Wat r u doing?

  Ell: DVR UFC

  DariA: O right. Back to work.

  She puts the phone away, disgusted with herself. Why does she even like this douche? He doesn’t ask her one question, doesn’t care how her night is going, doesn’t even want to talk about Stevie. He is only barely doing his part, and that’s because his mom makes him. Maybe Elliot loves the baby—she can’t tell. But he probably doesn’t love her. Plus, he’s a loser, so why does she even care?

  She pulls out her phone again.

  DariA: Don Z is dead the news said they found body

  Ell: Gross who?

  Her thumb hovers above the screen for a minute, then another. What can she possibly say? It’s entirely likely that Elliot never noticed the news stories about Donny, that he only ever knew about Catherine because Daria told him. How do you tell someone a life they never knew about is lost?

  Then her break is over and she’s spent the whole of it in the bathroom. Elliot never cares about anything other than what is right in front of his face—he doesn’t deserve a text back. The stupid prickle of tears in her eyes is a surprise—she didn’t think she could be so upset about the death of a stranger. Maybe she isn’t; maybe she’s just upset because she’s in love with a douche. She jams the phone into her pocket and scurries out into the rest of the evening.

  —

  At the end of the night, Daria waits by the restaurant’s back door, peering out the chicken-wire window. The hallway is dim and dirty, and the walk-in fridge and freezer, both of which look like dungeons, are right beside her. She’s waiting for the punch clock to tick over midnight so she can punch out, dreading the cold black parking lot. She’s also waiting for Ashish, one of the busboys, to walk out with her. Outside, the night is dark and thick, cloudy without a moon. Before Stevie was born, Daria could call Elliot for a ride if she didn’t want to wait for the bus or walk in the cold or rain or whatever. He would do it without any questions or complaints because he knew she’d come over and he’d get laid or at least a blow job if she was really tired. Daria didn’t mind the walk all that much, but she didn’t have the energy for both the walk and a fuck—she had to choose. By the time she got knocked up, she was getting a drive home from him after almost every dinner shift.

  Of course, he can’t come get her now—Stevie’s probably conked out in the Pack’n’Play Elliot’s mom bought for him and would cry bloody murder if he were woken. Plus Elliot is bad at getting the car seat strapped in properly. It’ll take her twenty-five minutes to walk to Elliot and his mom’s place to pick up Stevie, and then Elliot will be all affection. Usually she’ll be sort of into it but exhausted, and with the Pack’n’Play just a few feet away in Elliot’s room the sex isn’t that great anymore. But tonight she’s feeling pissed enough at his stupid texts that maybe she’ll be able to resist and just doze in the beanbag until Stevie wakes up.

  The clock finally hits midnight. She scans her card and then Ashish appears from nowhere and does too. He opens the door, then steps back with his arm still bracing it open, and she scurries out, pulling her hood up, tugging her awkward purse over her shoulder. Ever since Catherine went missing, the management’s been making sure that staff shifts end when someone else’s does, the idea being they’ll buddy up, maybe carpool or walk home together, keep each other safe. Which is bullshit. Four steps into the parking lot, Ashish says, “G’night” and gets into his car. He’s not even a jerk—he’s just sixteen and driving his dad’s car and eager to get on with the good part of the night. If she asked, he would probably drive her to Elliot’s or at least the cross street. But it hurts her pride too much to ask a fucking kid for a ride. At least he beeps at her on his way out of the lot.

  There’s not much light in the parking lot, which is blacktop but gritty—installing some extra lights would be more useful than all the parallel shift nonsense. Donny Zimmerman was grabbed from a parking lot too. He stayed late after a basketball practice to work on his free throws. And then someone took him from right outside his school gym.

  When Catherine disappeared from just outside the restaurant, it started to feel like parking lots were the problem, like they were dangerous, or cursed. The creepiest thing was that one of the articles about Catherine included a wide shot of DiGiovanni’s and its parking lot, taken from the street, and off to the far right was Daria walking to the bus stop.

  “It’s pretty blurry,” Elliot said when she showed him the photo.

  Daria had stabbed at the page with her finger: “Anyone who knows me would know the purple purse and spike heels. Anyway, it doesn’t matter if anyone realizes it’s me. I know, and the picture makes it seem like I’m going to be the next victim.”

  But Elliot had rolled his eyes and said the paper was just trying to show people where something bad had happened, which didn’t make her feel any better since it was a place she had to go most days. Plus, it was still fucking creepy to be in a picture headlined “LOCAL WOMAN TAKEN.” Daria had been nice to the reporters around the restaurant before that; they seemed sort of glamorous to her. After she saw the photo, she avoided them like death.

  Once she’s across the parking lot, the sidewalk is at least a little brighter. Daria still has her three-inch heels on, which is dumb—she should wear sensible shoes to work. Elliot calls these her slutty shoes, but the tips are better when she wears them. Even after scrambling around the restaurant for eight hours, she can walk fine in them—she’s talented that way. But the one thing she can’t do is run.

  The walk to Elliot’s building is scary because she knows what can happen now. The street is deserted and somehow the icy December wind feels ghoulish. None of it is interesting-scary, like in the movies—there’s no echoing footsteps that might be her own, no tricks of the eye or mind, no mysterious strangers just out of view. It’s only a long dark walk on streets that don’t have many policing eyes—there’s almost no one out in this part of town at this hour. It isn’t a bad neighbourhood, which is the trouble in a way. People stay out later in a bad neighbourhood.

  Her heart squeezes thinking of her Stevie someday being old enough to walk on the street alone, to shoot a free throw, to disappear. She picks up the pace, eager to see his sleepy, snotty face.

  She should have taken the bus, she thinks when she’s between stops. Waiting is dull and cold, but at least she is at an assigned spot, waiting for a scheduled and populated bus. Walking alone in the dark, she is a checker without a board—anything could happen.

  And the thing is, she knows the guy who took Catherine is dead. He can’t touch her or anyone anymore, but Daria is still afraid. She did this walk so often while Cat was gone, spent so much time thinking of whoever took her that now an image of a shadowy monster hunts her always. Even though she saw the news report
where a lumpy black bag was wheeled out of that nice beige house, Daria still believes someone evil is waiting behind the next mailbox, lamppost, tree. Even if that one man is dead, he made her see that these things can happen, that nothing keeps a girl walking home alone safe and sound except good luck.

  And Daria isn’t very lucky—not with her parents, who kicked her out when she got pregnant. Not when she fell in stupid love with Elliot, who will always live with his mom and whose hands are always a little dirty. But maybe she got lucky with Stevie, who is perfect and who can clearly pronounce truck and yogurt even though he’s only a year and a half old. Winter is in the wind and her skirt is way too short and she has no plans for what to do with her life when a short skirt no longer makes people want to give her money.

  The lights of Elliot’s building are coming into view. She’s nearly there, nearly safe. Maybe she’s been safe the whole way here, but the thing is, you don’t know until something happens or it doesn’t. Catherine probably never realized the parking lot at work wasn’t safe until the worst thing happened. She rescued herself, though—she did what she needed to do to be safe again. Daria can’t process the idea of Catherine hurting anyone because she was so gentle. Daria can remember some awful couple trying to get a rise out of her because they found a mushroom in a salad that wasn’t supposed to have them. They probably just wanted something for free, or just some sort of sign that they were winners in life. But Catherine was so charming and quiet against their tirade, trotting off to the kitchen for a fresh salad, not at all bothered. She guarded herself so carefully, but in the way of a person who has always known what she is worth, who knows that she matters.

  By the time that guy in his SUV noticed Catherine waiting and bleeding beside the road, she had been gone for eight months and who knows what kind of person she had been made to become. The person Daria had known couldn’t have killed anyone. She had cried on the bus after reading a poem about a girl who ran over her tomato plant. The news reports are not very detailed, but the guy who owned that house is dead, and Catherine is alive. She must have killed him. It’s impossible, and yet it must have happened.

  Elliot gave her a fob ages ago so he doesn’t know she’s there until she walks in the front door of his mother’s apartment and smells the sweaty-peaty smell of his weed.

  “Were you smoking with the baby in the house?” she demands.

  “No, Dary, no.” Elliot struggles up from the couch.

  Daria drops her bag and marches over to the Pack’n’Play. She wishes she could trust him, but the truth is that Elliot never pays all that much attention to Stevie, and stoned, he could forget about the baby entirely. But Stevie is just dozing, limbs sprawled like a starfish.

  Elliot leans over the mesh wall of the playpen and pats Stevie’s feathery dark hair. “See, he’s fine, right?” His hand is paw-like and sloppy, sliding off Stevie’s head, bending the top of his ear. His touch makes the baby squirm in his sleep. Daria sinks slowly down to the floor, staring through the beige mesh at her son’s perfect soft triangle of a nose, a whitish-green crispy of snot clinging around the left nostril.

  “Yeah, fine. But weed slows you down. Anything could have happened and you would have been out of it.”

  “I wasn’t…getting stoned or anything. Just a little toke.”

  “Sure.” She stares up at Elliot from the floor—he looks baggy and enormous from down here, like an elephant in a hoodie. Eventually he sits down beside her on the floor. Jimmy Fallon is talking on the flatscreen, but the sound is off.

  “What is even the point of The Tonight Show on mute? The only point is the jokes. It’s not like Jimmy Fallon is pretty.”

  Elliot reaches for a bag of Pop chips. “Well, he’s all right, for a dude.”

  The TV goes to a commercial where a little cat follows a big cat around a beautifully furnished home.

  “You really think I should go see Catherine?”

  Elliot is mainly concentrating on eating chips and watching the cats on screen. “Sure, why not? She’s your friend, isn’t she?”

  “Yeah, but like, we never even went to the movies together. She was just a work friend. Maybe she doesn’t want to see me at the worst time in her life.” Now the TV is showing Futurama. Daria hadn’t realized it was so late. “I never knew her that well and now…she must be a different person by now.”

  Elliot keeps his gaze on the TV. “How do you mean?”

  “She was raped and beat up and kept in a basement. She murdered someone.”

  “Well, she didn’t have a choice. It’s what anyone would have done.”

  “What anyone would have done? Really? You think you would have it in you, Ell? You’d have to feel something, to kill a human. To kill anything, really.”

  “Yeah, I would.”

  She looks for it in his eyes, the moment when he pictures it, what it would take for him to end someone’s life, but it’s all pot smoke and whatever the cartoon characters are doing on TV—he doesn’t really feel it.

  “I hope I don’t have to find out, is all.” He leans in to kiss her, but when she pulls back he just shrugs.

  They sit in silence watching Stevie’s little lungs pull air in and out, his fuzzy yellow sleeper rising and falling. There’s an appliqué duck over the heart and another on the bum that Daria can’t see now but knows is there. She likes this sleeper.

  Elliot is breathing heavily too. She turns and sees he’s asleep tipped against the edge of the couch. She pushes to her feet and when Elliot stirs she pats his head. Pulling Stevie out of the Pack’n’Play will likely wake him and he’ll be cranky. But really, if that’s the worst thing that happens tonight, she’ll be fine.

  Youth Must Have Its Day

  Kyla didn’t know what had been on the news until her parents burst into her room, but she knew there was a problem. She had been up late the night before, waiting for Donny to text her good night like he always did. He didn’t, and he didn’t answer any of her messages, and he wasn’t at school that day, which was weird, since there was no away game and he never got sick. Then her parents threw open her bedroom door without knocking because they never knocked. Kyla was trying to read The Death of Ivan Ilych for English class, which would have been depressing on a normal night, even though she actually liked the book. She wanted to tell them to get out, but Dermott sat heavily on her single bed and said, “We’ve got some sad news for you, sweetie.” A lot of what Dermott said was just for the sake of talking, but just in case, she waited to hear what he had to say.

  “There’s a boy who’s gone missing. A boy from your school. We saw on the news just now. I’m not sure if you would know him. It happened last night, doesn’t look like a good situation.”

  Kyla knew Donny had been at basketball practice the night before, but she only nodded, waiting for someone to say more. Her parents didn’t know she had a boyfriend. They had forbidden her to date until she turned eighteen, though they insisted it wasn’t about repressing her or prizing her virginity or any of that southern U.S. bullcrap (Louise actually said that). It was so she could have time to grow into a thinking, feeling, loving woman without anyone putting pressure on her to be sexual, completely ignoring the fact that they were putting pressure on her to not be sexual. She figured not telling her parents that she had a boyfriend was a logical violation of an illogical rule. And so they didn’t know about the most important person in Kyla’s whole world.

  Louise was clutching Dermott’s shoulder from above, standing angled toward the door, braving it out in Kyla’s room, even though they’d had a terrible argument two days ago about whether Kyla could go to a PG-13 movie with Britt. “We don’t know for sure that something bad happened. But your father and I wanted to start praying right away for his safe return. We thought you could join us, since this boy was—is your schoolmate… ”

  Kyla’s gut was vibrating so hard she thought she might actually vomit there on the daisy-patterned quilt, but she managed to ask, “What’s his name?”
r />   “Donald Zimmerman,” said her mother, her chirpy voice somehow sounding like a box slamming shut. “A Jewish name, I think, but a prayer for a lost child will surely be heard.” She knelt on the floor beside Kyla’s bed, tucking her skirt around her calves.

  Dermott slid off the bed to kneel beside his wife. “Do you know him, Ky?”

  “Yeah… ” She had worked so hard at keeping Donny a secret all fall and winter, but now she had no choice but to tell them the truth. She just couldn’t think of the words. Slowly, almost without realizing it, Kyla sank down to the tan-carpeted floor next to her mother.

  As Kyla opened her mouth, Louise said, “The poor lamb. When I think of a young one like you out there in this heavy snow, his parents terrified—” She shook her head.

  Dermott touched his wife’s shoulder then tucked his chin to his chest and shut his eyes. “Let us pray.”

  And they prayed, truly—even though Kyla hadn’t in a long time. There wasn’t a lot she could do for Donny, but she could press her face to the quilt her grandma made and send her thoughts straight up to God, or whoever was listening, for Donny’s safe return.

  —

  Kyla got up at dawn, uncertain whether she’d slept. She couldn’t think how to explain why she didn’t want to go to school, so she just took the lunch Louise handed her. There was a moment, standing in the kitchen door, when she could have said to her mother’s turned back that she was in love with Donny Zimmerman. But then her mother sighed and faced Kyla to say with bright force, “Have a great day at school, darling,” and how could you say anything honest to that?