Henry drank and watched some sports highlights. There wasn’t anyone else in the bar besides the reporter and the waiter and the bartender. Henry kept noticing this and it made him feel lonely. Bars with a lot of people in them always feel alive and happy and like anything could happen but this Sports bar was just the opposite.
The bartender was quiet and cleaned beer mugs. He had on a dark shirt and his black hair down, he was thick, something close to his early fifties, and wore a graying mustache well. He didn’t look particularly entertained by the two at his counter. Henry could never have pictured himself as bartender. Bartenders were always thick and hairy and talked through their teeth, Henry thought, and he didn’t mean physically. They were tough, no doubt about it. Henry didn’t consider himself weak but he was a different kind person. Not a bartender.
Between the soft lighting of the bar Henry saw Melanie enter in a hurry. He downed the rest of his drink.
“I can’t find Vanessa anywhere,” she said.
“What?”
“I don’t know. We were on our way outside.” She put her palm to her forehead. “I thought she was behind me. Now she’s gone.”
“Did you ask anyone else if they had seen her?”
“Nobody else was out there besides a little Mexican man, and he acted like he couldn’t understand me. The prick.”
“Okay, let me get my tab and I’ll help you find her.”
Henry got up from his booth and paid the bartender. The reporter and the waiter and Melanie watched Henry pay for his drinks. They thought as a group that he might do something interesting. What they failed to notice was the look in Henry’s eyes when he realized the drink had made him dizzy. His pupils slid to the right before automatically correcting themselves, it caught him off guard and he appeared vulnerable if only through his eyes. If he was going to find his niece, he thought, dizziness wasn’t something he should have paid for.
#
It didn’t take long for Henry to become tired with the way Melanie was talking. Her mouth churned out complaints and worries, detective observations and all that. Henry peered down a hallway before leaving the building for the parking lot. He thought his niece for sure must be outside. She loved being outside. No matter the type, pavement, forest, desert, whenever Henry and Melanie ended up traveling to some new country and city Vanessa was the first one to slam the car door and take it all in. Henry admired that about her. Her commitment to the amount of joy she got from the smell and feel of the world.
Henry was a little bit dizzy. A mini-van drove by and there were two kids watching a movie on the back of their mother and father’s headrests. They were watching a cartoon; a girl was talking to a boy wearing nothing but a loincloth in a jungle. The two kids in the car were sharing chocolate chip cookies from Tupperware and licking their teeth for chocolate stuck in the nooks. The dad was sitting in the passenger’s seat reading a map and the mom was listening to the radio. This van pulled by Henry and Melanie on the sidewalk outside of the stadium. Henry felt like things were piling up. This quaint little van that drove by, Henry wanted to swap positions for a minute. He’d rather put up with that.
He stood there scanning every Chevy and Corolla and Mazda and whatever other cars fill a parking lot for his niece. The van stopped suddenly. After Henry heard the tires wine he heard the horn blow. His eyes darted towards the van, past the children watching a movie, the radio, and landed on a little girl, on Vanessa, standing in front of the car. Henry and Melanie both rushed towards the van.
“Vanessa!” Melanie said. Her voice shook when she yelled out for her, at the syllables, due to the pace she was running. Henry felt like she really cared. Melanie made it to her a few seconds before Henry could have.
“Where have you been?” Melanie said. Henry knelt down to get on her level and looked at the driver of the van. He realized quickly that they should move by the sternness of an overweight woman’s brow, where you can’t really tell if she’s frowning or smiling or feeling any emotion for that matter because it all struggles to peak out behind extra layers of mush. She looked mean by the way her face weighed her mouth down into a frown stronger than Henry’s, so he pulled Vanessa and Melanie to the side.
Great, Henry thought, I found her. Now that’s taken care of. Vanessa hugged both Melanie and Henry tight as she apologized.
“I’m sorry. I was right behind you.” She pointed at Melanie.
“You were?!”
“Well, for the most part.” Vanessa smiled up at the two adults. She rolled her thumbs like a motor behind her back.
“Tell us what happened.” Henry said.
“I was following you, and I dunno, I saw another kid. He walked up to me and grabbed my headband and pulled it out of my head, so I chased him.”
“You what? Without saying anything to me?”
“Sorry?” Vanessa said. She wasn’t sorry by the way she ended what she said on a high note. It was a question, without a doubt.
“I chased him right before we got to the parking lot. He was fast.”
“And. . .” Melanie interjected as if to really pry some information out of her. Henry again noticed how much she cared by the way she knelt down and shook her right shoulder at the top, like when she held the lid of a blender.
“I followed him into a room. He was looking at me all funny right before he turned a corner and then he was gone.”
“And then you came out here and jumped in front of a van? What were you thinking?”
“I thought I saw the little boy I was chasing in that van and I wanted to stop them. I don’t know,” Vanessa said.
Henry felt sorry for her, Vanessa. She was just a little girl, thrown into the complex equation of a tennis player, not a star or anything, and a small town mooch who are somehow making six digits a year and who consider luxuries a necessity. Their house, cars, it all didn’t have to be that big. And this little girl, who’s orphaned and wouldn’t be put in this mess without the unlikely circumstance of a cardiac arrest, was honest. Henry looked down at her and Melanie and noticed how different his niece, or soon to be just another little girl, looked without the headband, and for a brief second he felt good.