Lisa sensed this and more.
“I like her,” she said, stopping when Darren blocked the way to his bedroom.
She gave him a small shrug and a wan smile, understanding that she had no real right to say anything in the matter. Darren took the gesture as an expression of her discomfort over having gotten a call from the woman he wanted to make his new wife.
“She shouldn’t have bothered you.”
“I’m glad she did,” Lisa said. “Because now I know.”
“Know what?”
“She really loves you… unconditionally.” She looked around the dim hallway, the peeling-in-places wallpaper that had been there since he was a kid. Red roses on a cream background that was now the color of butcher paper. He’d counted the roses as a boy. There were one hundred and sixty-seven between the bedrooms. “I wasn’t always good at that part,” Lisa said. “I was hard on you, Darren, demanding you fit the image I had of you when we first got together, the life I thought we’d have.”
“We were just kids.”
Lisa smiled at the memory of them as high-school kids.
“I loved you, though, I did,” she said. “Just not as good as she can.”
This hit Darren at the knees, proving gravity was no match for matters of the heart. Her words washed clean the air between them, and Darren had an impulse to embrace his ex-wife, to thank her for the truth. But lifting his arm would drop the towel, and he liked the idea that he’d been naked in front of Lisa for the last time. She must have also felt the moment was growing more awkward the longer they stood there.
“Don’t fuck this up, Darren.”
She took a few steps back and glanced again at the rose wallpaper. He noticed she’d stopped coloring her hair. There were strands of gray at her temples, a growing streak of it on the left side. The look suited her. It made her seem regal and wise.
“You’re not as easy as you think you are,” she said. “Give her the key to the lockbox, the parts of you I never even got close to. It won’t work any other way.” She lifted her chin to him as a question: You understand me, Darren?
He nodded.
She gave him a tight smile and said, “You gonna be okay? I’ll leave the salmon in the fridge. You seem pretty stocked up otherwise.”
“I’ll be fine.”
“Okay.” She backed toward the living room. “Hydrate and get some rest.”
Lisa turned for the door, then stopped herself. “And call your people, Darren. Call Clayton…” she said. “And call Greg. You know he thinks this is his fault.”
She gestured between the two of them, meaning the divorce. Darren had been avoiding calls from Greg, his oldest friend and one of the few people besides Lisa he’d known his entire adult life. The three of them had been close once, Darren and Greg like brothers. Which had made the affair sting more. If you could even call it that.
It had happened after he’d left Texas for Chicago, when he’d transferred out of UT to the University of Chicago law school to prove, maybe, that he could excel outside the shadow of his uncle, a professor at the law school in Austin. He’d been sharing a two-room apartment with Greg, Lisa spending every night there with them. The three grew even closer than they’d been in high school, a family of sorts — Lisa and Darren glued together, mom and dad to Greg’s unruly teenager. Other times, Darren and Greg were like brothers with an impatient, unamused mom in Lisa, who studied constantly and didn’t like, back then, the taste of alcohol unless it was wine coolers.
When Darren transferred, Greg kept the lease because, even then, housing in Austin was a hassle, and Lisa moved in. Darren approved of it at the time, felt good about Greg, who was by any measure one of the most decent men he knew, being around if Lisa ever needed anything. The affair — sex was all it was, Lisa insisted — happened the fall semester of their second year of law school, and they were both mortified. Not just because of what they’d done but because of how certain it was that they would do it again. They were studying or in class sixty hours a week, deciphering a lens on the world that was both cynical and hardwired in hope. Law students could be dizzy with it some days, the promise and protection of the Constitution, if you aired that thing out, let it breathe a little and grow. They were high from the exhaustion of marrying ideals to the nuts-and-bolts work of practicing law with other fallible human beings, and they had impulsively reached in the dark for each other as a way both to cope and to bear witness. Yes, they were alive. Yes, it was heady to arm themselves with words that had the power to shape people’s lives, to shape their country. Yes, they wanted to quit. And, yes, they both knew they couldn’t. If Darren hadn’t been going through his own version of that, alone in Chicago, he might have raged at Lisa when she finally confessed that she and Greg had had sex years ago.
Instead, he just felt sad. For his marriage, and for the young, bullishly optimistic people they’d once been. Lisa was now a contracts lawyer at a big firm. Greg had left the FBI, disillusioned. And Darren was a badge-less lawman whose spirit had been broken by the mess of his own morality. Yes, it hurt to think of Greg touching his then girlfriend, and it kept him up some nights wondering if she moaned the same way or bit his neck when she came, the tiny intimacies he always believed were his alone. He had been her first and she his.
He remembered feeling grateful for the confession, for the way it softened his telling Lisa that Randie was back in his life. She had always suspected something between them, ever since Randie’s husband’s murder case in Lark all those years ago. And it mildly pleased her to have a bit of righteous anger to hold on to. She never explicitly said, I knew it. Just rolled her eyes and began making recommendations for divorce attorneys for Darren. He and Lisa were not meant to go the distance. It had taken a very long time for both of them to admit that. The story of high-school sweethearts who stay together and marry after law school was just too good. It had romanced even them.
Lisa was dating now. And he wanted Randie to be his future.
Lisa stood by the door and watched him for a while, as if she might say something more. About his drinking. About their marriage ending. About when or whether they would ever see each other again. But then she changed her mind and left without a word.
6.
HE HAD no job, no woman, and nothing to do with the days he had planned to spend with Randie. He’d thought this trip he could convince her to take a drive out to Lake Livingston; it had tickled and excited him to think of her in one of his baseball caps as he showed her how to bait a line. She sometimes liked to get in the garden with him. They’d play the music so loud in the house, Gary Clark Jr.’s “The Story of Sonny Boy Slim” would roll out over the sweet peppers and collards in the yard like a benediction, preaching to them to grow strong. And there was the ring, of course. The fact that he had planned to ask Randie to marry him. It cut him in places he didn’t know could still bleed. He was ashamed of how he’d acted and terrified that he might lose her.
It was because of her that he decided to “look into it,” as she’d suggested. It felt like step one in possibly getting her back, the woman whose love and favor were the only future that mattered to him. He wanted to be worthy of her respect.
And he had nothing else to do.
Just blank hours to fill.
What would a few Google searches hurt? Early in the afternoon after Lisa left, Darren sat at the Formica table in the kitchen, eating the salmon she’d done up in a balsamic glaze he didn’t care for, and started with the most basic: Missing and SFA student and black. Which initially yielded nothing more sinister than a black student winning the title of Miss SFA announced at halftime at a school basketball game in March. There was a picture of her standing arm in arm with the white Mr. SFA winner in front of a statue of the university’s namesake, Stephen F. Austin, who, as one of the first white men to colonize what was then still Mexico, was widely considered the “Father of Texas.” The image of the interracial couple told a story of racial harmony that Austin, an enthusiastic slaveholder, wouldn’t have dreamed of.
Darren tried SFA and missing sorority student, which led to a rain of stories about missing women across the country and included TV listings for two Dateline episodes. All missing young white women. He had found nothing about a missing black girl. This had barely killed fifteen minutes, and he was already feeling thirsty.
He’d told himself he wouldn’t even think of drinking until the sun went down and that if he could make that goal, maybe he could even go a whole day. And maybe a day could stretch to two, and then even a week. The idea of his mother sober both goaded him and disrupted something fundamental to him. He knew he was a “drinker,” but he put that down to forces beyond his control that were both senseless and exhausting to fight; his mother had ruined him, had consistently shown herself to be a malignant force in his life. But if Bell was truly no longer a drunk — and three days into this knowledge, something about the idea was taking solid shape in his mind — then in whom might he bury any impulse to confront his drinking? It was the one gift he’d imagined she’d given him. He felt a thirst coming for him, a bottomless want, and he was saved only by the fact that he’d already drunk every drop in the house.
He took a deep breath and looked up the sorority, Rho Beta Zeta.
They called themselves Robees on their website, their home page a photo of rows of smiling girls. Four in the front row, two with hair as white as their teeth flanking a pale strawberry blonde and another, slightly taller girl whose hair was the color of orange blossom honey. They stared out at Darren from his computer screen. Behind them were four more rows of Rho Beta girls. Their hair ranged in color from wheat to sand, with textures from flat-iron straight to the limp, slightly frizzy curls frequently unleashed by Texas humidity. The young women’s smiles were as wide as truck grilles, their eyes bright beneath fake lashes and pale pink eyeshadow. Coral blush, Darren learned on the About page, was one of the sorority’s official colors. They were all in pearls. And pale blue sweater sets. Cornflower blue was the sorority’s other official color, to be worn with either violet or pear green, both allowed as wardrobe accents, “but never at the same time,” the website’s Fashion Guidelines page advised. He spent enough time visiting each of the pages on the sorority chapter’s website that he saw photos of Robee girls at formal dances, at pledge lunches, in casual clothes studying in the living room of what appeared to be a well-cared-for sorority house, and in bikinis at a charity car wash. What he did not see was one black face. The sorority did not appear to have any black members, or any Asians either. There was one girl who might have been Latina, but it was a crowded photograph and hard to tell. How could a black sorority member go missing if she’d never existed? This whole thing was starting to feel like a silly, useless exercise.
He rose to pour himself a glass of water and put his dishes in the sink. Then he reopened the doors that led to the back porch and let in a slow breeze moving through the property out back, rustling pine needles that sounded like a thousand whispers at this distance. Sometimes he liked to imagine it was his people talking to him, the ones who were gone, who lived in what the air could hold. His grandparents and William, and his father, he supposed. Darren “Duke” Mathews Sr.
He still had a lot more hours to fill before his reckoning at sundown.
He sent an email to his friend Roland Carroll, a Ranger stationed out of Company A, which handled Houston and a good swath of East Texas. He hadn’t told him he’d quit, even though, as one of the few other black or brown Rangers in the entire department, he and Roland were brothers-in-arms. In the email, Darren went about the usual niceties as if nothing was wrong. He asked after Roland’s family, wishing them well, and made a special point to inquire about a woman with whom their friend Buddy Watson was getting serious. He suggested they grab a meal sometime, and then he got down to it. Did Roland know of any reports of a missing student from Stephen F. Austin State? Could he find out? Black, he wrote, because it mattered. He told him she was a member of a sorority. A white sorority, he felt he should add. Rho Beta Zeta.
He clicked over to the official SFA University website and scrolled through the photos and followed the links to dozens of student organizations, lingering especially on ones about Greek life at the school. He noted the presence of a few of the Divine Nine, the historically black fraternities and sororities that included such distinguished members as MLK Jr., Toni Morrison, Zora Neale Hurston, and Wilma Rudolph. That a black girl would choose Rho Beta Zeta over this rich African American tradition made little sense and only furthered his feeling that maybe he was chasing a story that wasn’t even real.
