When Bonnie opened her eyes the next morning, the first thing that struck her was the silence. She lay in bed looking up at the ceiling. There was a hairline crack in the plaster which had always reminded her of a witch, with a pointed nose and a pointed chin. The sun shivered across her face and made her look as if she were winking her eye. After a little while she sat up and checked the bedside clock. It was 8:23 A.M.
She sat up, horrified. Duke was going to be late for work and Ray was going to be late for school and she was going to be late for—
Then she suddenly realized. None of them was going to be late for anything. Duke didn’t really have a job and Ray wasn’t going to school and she didn’t have a job to go to, either—not unless Ralph changed his mind about Phil Cafagna.
She prodded the bundle of sheets next to her. “Duke—it’s almost eight-thirty. You want some coffee?”
He didn’t answer, but then, she didn’t expect him to. You could have crashed a 747 right outside the house and he wouldn’t have woken up. She prodded him again. “Do you want some coffee? I’m not cooking you anything this morning. I wouldn’t want you to accuse me of murdering you.”
Still he didn’t answer. Exasperated, she said, “Come on, Duke, you’re not lying in bed all day. You’re going out to find yourself a job.”
She took hold of the sheets and dragged them off him. Except that he wasn’t there. The shape that she had thought was Duke was simply the extra pillows that she must have discarded in the heat of the night.
She frowned, and stood up, and padded across the pale blue nylon-carpeted floor. “Duke?” she called, opening the bathroom door. No Duke—and for the first time ever in the history of the Winter marriage, the toilet seat was down.
She went through to the living room. Sometimes Duke got so drunk that he fell asleep on the couch in front of the television. But the television was switched off, there was nobody lying on the couch, and the cushions were all straightened. This was very weird.
“Duke?” she said, but this time she spoke so softly that he wouldn’t have been able to hear her.
He wasn’t in the kitchen. She even opened the larder. He wasn’t in the yard, either—and thank God, his body wasn’t floating in the pool. She saw herself frowning in the gilt-framed mirror in the hallway as she went back to see if he had dropped off in Ray’s room—although why he should do that, she couldn’t think. He always called it The Funkatorium. She could almost hear him now. “Kids today, you know why they fart so much? It’s the food. All those goddamned vegetables. How can they call that health food when it practically asphyxiates you?”
She knocked on Ray’s door and said, “Ray? Is your father in with you?”
There was no answer, so she knocked again and looked around the door. There was no Duke lying on the carpet, but then, there was no Ray lying in the bed, either. The bed was tidy, and the drapes weren’t even drawn.
Bonnie was becoming seriously worried now. She remembered going to bed last night. She remembered taking a long shower and putting on her nightgown and climbing into bed. She remembered wondering how long it would take for Duke to come to bed, because when he did he almost always woke her up, cursing and burping and falling over his feet. But that was all. She couldn’t remember kissing Ray good night, the way she usually did.
She went to the front door. It was locked and bolted from the inside and the chain was on. The patio door at the back was safety-bolted, too. None of the windows were open, and they all had locks. So Duke and Ray must have left the house before she went to bed, and she must have locked all the doors after them. Yet she couldn’t remember doing it, and she couldn’t think why Duke and Ray would have gone. Duke had hardly any money, so it was doubtful that they would have gone to a hotel; and Duke had hardly any friends, either. Maybe they had spent the night with one of Ray’s buddies.
But why? She could remember arguing with Duke because he had lied to her about finding a job. She remembered Ray saying something about cheap Mexican labor ruining their lives, and Mexican drug traffickers killing one of his friends. But that had been early in the afternoon. She simply couldn’t remember what had happened next.
Oh, yes. She had called Esmeralda at three o’clock, and showered, and changed, and gone down to Sixteenth Street to see her. And talked to Juan Maderas. And then come home again. But had Duke and Ray been at home when she got back? They couldn’t have gone far, because she had borrowed Duke’s car—which was still parked next to her truck in the driveway outside.
She felt as if she had been to a very drunken party the night before and simply couldn’t piece things together.
She went into the kitchen again and poured herself a glass of orange juice. When she had finished it, she drank some more straight out of the carton. There was no sign of a serious fight. Nothing broken, so far as she could see. In fact, the house was immaculate. Even the carpets had been vacuum cleaned and the pile raked up with a carpet rake.
She went back to Ray’s room and found his Bart Simpson phone book. Most of the pages were crowded with scribbles and cartoons and exclamation points, but she managed to find the number of his closest friend, Kendal.
“Mrs. Rakusen? It’s Bonnie Winter. I’m sorry if I’ve disturbed you, but I was wondering if you’d seen anything of Ray. No? He didn’t ask to stay with you last night or anything? I see. Well, could you ask Kendal? Okay. Well, if you do hear from him, can you ask him to call his mother? He didn’t come home last night, and I’m a little worried about him. Well, yes, after that last business. Thanks.”
She called two more friends she could think of, and a girl he used to go out with called Cherry-Jo. None of them had seen him or heard from Ray.
She sat in the living room biting her lip and wondering what to do. She took another look all around the house, even bending down and looking under the beds.
At last she called Ruth.
“Ruth … something weird has happened.”
“Don’t tell me that you and Duke have actually—you know—”
“I’m not kidding, Ruth. Duke and Ray have both disappeared.”
“Hey, congratulations! How did you manage it?”
“They’ve gone, Ruth, and I don’t know how and I don’t know where.”
“Hey, you’re serious, aren’t you? What do you mean, they’ve disappeared?”
Bonnie told her everything about her argument with Duke, and all about the empty beds and the toilet seat down and the doors locked on the inside. “They must have gone, but I don’t remember them going. It’s like a blank. It’s like they never even existed.”
“Nah,” said Ruth, dismissively. “I think they’re pulling some kind of stupid stunt. Duke’s the kind of guy who hates it when a woman tells him what to do, especially when it comes to getting his butt off the couch and earning himself a living. They’ll show up, believe me, as soon as their guts start growling.”
Bonnie was about to tell Ruth about her visit to Esmeralda’s house yesterday evening, and Juan Maderas, and Itzpapalotl, but then she decided against it. She didn’t want her to think that she was totally bananas.