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.But what job wouldn’t have surprised her? Misty had been adept at a great many things—hustling pool, scoring weed, forging signatures—but none of them easily translated into a viable grown-up career.They’d gone through high school getting teenage jobs together, then getting fired together—thieves at worst; insolent, irreverent, and careless, at best.For a single evening, they’d been professional babysitters at the eastside Holiday Inn, called to take care of the children of visiting strangers.Misty hadn’t known how to quiet the infant she’d been handed; her response was to put it screaming in the bathtub, shut the door, and turn up the television.When Catherine came from her own charges—three siblings two floors away—appalled at the scene, Misty had shrugged.She’d grown up without a mother, without a childhood of tenderness or spoiling, without even dolls on which to practice such things.The baby had been rolling side to side in the tub, its large bald head bumping as it shrieked, hot, soiled, red.Damaged, Catherine feared, holding it fearfully to her pounding chest, soothing it, while Misty watched Saturday Night Live.Misty hadn’t understood why Catherine insisted they abandon the babysitting business.Yet it was Misty who’d become an actual mother, finally, not Catherine.Catherine hadn’t even been an adequate stepmother, poor Miriam still a lost soul, sleeping with strangers, taking risks that terrified everyone around her.Sometimes it seemed she did the things she did in order to keep her family on alert.She’d not outgrown that teenage girl’s perverse pleasure.Visiting the real estate company’s Web site, Catherine didn’t at first recognize her old friend smiling there among the others, her eyes skipping right over that coiffed lady in search of the person she knew.Then she repeated the process, seeking to penetrate the camouflage of the ordinary.And there she was: Misty’s hair streaked blond now, kept shorter, buoyed, curled at her temple and ears.Catherine leaned close to the lit computer screen, squinting into the cheerful face with Misty Mueller’s name below it.Her teeth had been repaired, and it was obvious that she was comfortable showing them, as she had never been before; she also wore glasses, frameless things that might have hidden the dark circles Catherine remembered.She’d grown older, had Misty, but it seemed that gravity had worked on her features in reverse, lifting and lightening what had been her previous expression.No one viewing this photograph would have been reminded of a basset hound.Furthermore, she had a long list of citations beneath her photo and had been what her company proudly named a “Harris County top producer” for the last decade.This woman wouldn’t have put an infant in the tub and drowned out her cries with the sound of a television laugh track.So there was that official information, and more like it.Then there was the much briefer résumé of her daughter, young Catherine who quite plausibly had been named for elder Catherine, guardian.The private school in Vermont continued to assure her that they were as concerned as she was about locating the girl, meanwhile never failing to mention that they were in no way responsible for her disappearance, that the code of conduct—contractual, it seemed—at St.Christopher’s strictly outlined the student’s willingness to obey it.They had this in writing, and would be happy to provide Catherine with a copy.“No thanks,” Catherine told the head of school.She conceived of a bias against the woman, merely from her tone of voice.The police in both Texas and Vermont had been notified.The girl was a teenage runaway; it was an epidemic group.Her mother Misty had been one, once upon a time.Catherine had been her accomplice.They had an elaborate code for Misty’s collect phone calls from the road, different names given by Misty to indicate different locations or dilemmas; alternate responses, from Catherine, to signal the mood at home.Ludicrous convolutedness.Catherine had driven Misty to the Greyhound station in Misty’s car, and then parked the Buick back at East High.What had been the reason for her odyssey? Catherine could not recall.Might she have suggested it, herself, an adventure for Misty that would arouse her negligent grandma into action? Catherine had been invited along, and may even have feigned some temptation.But push coming to shove, she would never have gone.She’d have sent Misty, in her stead, to see what such a thing would become, her experimental surrogate, her guinea pig.Her own version of scaring the grown-ups.When the grandmother finally noticed Misty wasn’t home, when the school security patrol had finally tagged Misty’s automobile for the third day, that’s when the alarm was finally sounded.And then everybody suddenly realized that Misty was eighteen, and could not be officially designated as a minor.She became a missing person.And then she rode the Greyhound home, where nothing had changed except that she was further behind than usual in her classes, and there was a giant orange sticker on her windshield that wouldn’t come off.It stayed there for years, fading and shredding and peeling.“Agenda?” Oliver asked Catherine, eyeing her from his bathed and ready position while she lay still rumpled in bed.“Doctors, waiting rooms, bad magazines, insipid conversation.” The annual humiliation, her mother had named the day, long ago.Physical, bloodwork, pap smear, mammogram, colonoscopy: all scheduled in a row, one long day of undressing, probing, stirrups, plates, tubes.Catherine was her chaperone and driver [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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