“Well,” his mother said. “Maybe Toby’s confused. Do you think that could be?”
“I don’t know,” Bruce said.
“Did he talk to you about it very much?”
“Not really.”
“Here’s the thing,” his mother said, turning her unused spoon over on the tablecloth. “Sometimes things go on in families that are tough to understand, and all we can do is be there for our friends.”
Bruce looked at his father. His father was nodding. Bruce nodded, too.
LATER HE LAY in his bed, thinking of Mrs. Van Wyck with a man who was not Toby’s father. In his mind the man asked her to undress, and Mrs. Van Wyck just smiled and stood where he imagined her standing, behind the butcher-block island in Toby’s kitchen, her hands encased in the oven mitts that were worn and burnt in places, with metallic thread shining through. In front of her, resting on the island, was a cookie sheet with rows of warm rolls arranged and rising and browning upon it, the kind of rolls that came out of the refrigerator in a cardboard tube, which Mrs. Van Wyck always let Bruce twist open until it popped thrillingly and gooed cold, colorless dough. She let him do this on those nights when he had come to sleep over, come in anticipation of Tang and Stouffer’s spinach soufflé and Kraft macaroni and cheese—and the kind of rolls that Bruce’s mother would never have allowed at her table, choosing instead to serve stale seven grain, or toasted pita, or nothing at all. The rolls bloomed between Mrs. Van Wyck and the boyfriend, who approached her, unzipping his pants. He was faceless. Bruce let himself stroke the smooth tip of his penis as he thought of this. Just for a couple of seconds—a light, electric touch. The next morning, he allowed himself to forget that he’d done it.
THAT WINTER, Toby’s mother went missing for good. She had become prone to skipping appointments and relying on the au pair for long stretches during the afternoons; but when she wasn’t home by dinnertime one January evening, Mr. Van Wyck waited until almost midnight and then called the police. Two days after the call—days during which Bruce remembered wondering why Toby wasn’t in school—an investigation was begun. After a couple of weeks it yielded only this: Mrs. Van Wyck’s unlocked bottle-green Volvo wagon, found in the long-term lot at Kennedy, the keys still in the ignition.
Everyone talked. There was nothing else to do. Bruce’s mother said that the talk went on for even longer than it otherwise might have, because the Van Wycks had money. There were a couple of news cameras outside of school at 3:00 p.m. every day for a week. The papers ran pictures of the car and interviews with the few neighbors and acquaintances who were willing to go on record with their suspicions about the boyfriend, whose name was Viri Minetti. He was a man of violence, several of them said. He had walked out on jobs, had threatened to sue certain clients when they’d tried to replace him with another contractor. He had been overheard screaming at Sis Van Wyck on the back patio of the Van Wyck house, on a late autumn afternoon, screaming unprintable things, things only a lover could scream. It wasn’t difficult to imagine: the residents of nearby houses creeping toward their windows, pulling curtains aside an inch, and seeing only the barren Van Wyck yard, the leaves at the bottom of the drained pool, the small frost-repellent tarps stretched neatly over the shrubbery. Perhaps they saw Sis’s legs stretched out on the divan that protruded from underneath the patio awning, her feet, in their beige Pappagallo flats, flexed against Viri’s rage. She called that area of the house, with its adjacent changing rooms and warm shed full of floats, towels, and skimmers, “the swimmery,” which had made Bruce’s mother laugh the first time she’d heard it. “Manischewitz,” she’d said, half to herself, on the train ride home from Toby’s swimming party the previous summer, “I’m glad we live in the city.”
“Why?” Bruce had asked her. At that age he had still loved to hear his mother expound on her convictions, make the little speeches that grew more passionate as they wore on until they consisted mainly of the fake swearwords she concocted for use in front of children, the words that could still break his heart when he remembered them.
She’d only muttered distractedly: “Poor Sis. Swimmery. That’s some Stepford stuff, sweetie.