The missing, p.1
The Missing, page 1
The Missing
Seven Stories
Tory Tuttle
Contingency Street Press
Copyright © 2023 by Tory Tuttle
All rights reserved.
No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher or author, except as permitted by U.S. copyright law.
All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Library of Congree Control Number: 2023904153
ISBN: 978-1-958015-02-5 (pb)
ISBN; 978-1-958015-03-2 (eb)
Logo art: Janet Glovinsky
Cover design: Suzanne Hudson
Contents
Dedication
1. I Saw Him Sleeping
2. Horizontal Hold
3. 112 Months
4. Next Stop
5. Stranger
6. The Bridge
7. Stray Socks
8. Chapter 8
About Author
Dedication: For Paul, Miranda, Daniel, and Thomas Dominic
I Saw Him Sleeping
We took the D bus to Denver, Carlos and I did, and then we waited at Market Street, waited and waited till the bus to Salt Lake arrived, sometime before midnight. We were sitting on a bench and his head drooped toward me, then straightened up, as if he was determined not to fall asleep. Did it matter? Was he keeping guard for me? Was he was scared I’d see him asleep and helpless? There were, standing around us, transfers from the Omaha bus, waiting, sleeping on their feet, stumbling like statues on the move. Carlos knew, didn’t he, that I’d seen him asleep at his sister’s, once or maybe twice. Maybe he didn’t know, since he was asleep, those afternoons. At the bus station, the homeless had settled on the benches farthest from the bus lanes. Small mountains of men trying to pretend they were sitting, not lying, on the benches. They were men, I was thinking, but you couldn’t tell, could you, whether the bundles were men or women, whether the blankets were black or gray. When we first sat on the bench, waiting, Carlos put his arm—like a blanket—around me. I was huddled, was I homeless? When you’re on the run, you don’t know. Don’t think about it—not about your brother, not about your mom. Think about hiding, about not getting caught. Or don’t think—just move.
The first time I saw him sleeping under the window, we were at his sister’s, and I thought of Manuel. That time, the first time, Carlos lay on his stomach, his mouth slightly open, maybe he was drooling, and his lashes looked longer than they really were. Manuel’s lashes are quite as long as they seem. When you think about it, Carlos, asleep, was not much like Manuel. He was probably younger than Manuel, maybe fifteen, and not as pretty. Sunlight on the pillow touched the end of Carlos’s nose.
I don’t want to think of Manuel. Not now, not anymore.
Carlos had said we were going to his cousin’s place outside Salt Lake, but we weren’t there yet. We were just sitting on a bench, and all the same we were on the run. Those cousins—did they know we were coming, did they even know? I wouldn’t ask, not me. It’s not as if I knew Carlos all that well. It had been a month, maybe less, since the first time he followed me. Carlos had been hiding behind a thick tree I passed on my way back to the Residential Treatment Center. They let me walk the fourteen blocks from the high school. “Hey, Marcella,” Carlos had called the first time, “I’ve been waiting for you, you know.” I couldn’t let him come to the RTC, and I was just as glad. I was fourteen, almost fifteen, and it had been a while since I could go to my home, to my mom’s. It wasn’t very long before I was visiting him at his sister’s. Not long before I watched him asleep.
The first time was late one afternoon at his sister’s. His sister’s name was Lola, is Lola, and she has a small apartment in north Hamilton. Scrunched up beside Carlos, I closed my eyes, but the cars going by on High Street kept me awake, the rush of one car after another, the car’s sound gathering and releasing, gathering and releasing. Carlos said the sounds of those cars put him to sleep. He slept in the day because of the men who came to Lola’s place in the evening, and in the night. The men stumbled around the apartment, Carlos said, mumbled along with the music, smoking dope, arguing about the price of weed and Cheerios and coke. Carlos didn’t smoke, not at all, and he didn’t like it when I did. Why should he care? I thought, but I didn’t say anything. Most of the time, it’s easier to say nothing. Carlos couldn’t sleep at night, and in the afternoon I could never sleep, so I watched him for a little while, then I climbed off the couch, stepping around Carlos carefully, awkwardly, so I wouldn’t wake him, moving over to the front window where I pulled back the curtain, trying to decide whether to leave or not to leave, and the cars went on by. Trees line High Street, all along High Street, and that afternoon tiny leaves let the light through. This was the season of tiny leaves, pale green, jewel green, grass green. Back at home there would be small leaves on a tree right outside Manuel’s window. These High Street leaves danced and rustled when the big bus lumbered on by. One tree had tiny buds that resembled red beads. I left Carlos sleeping and went down into the street on my way back—not to my mom’s, but to the RTC where I’d been placed back in March. I looked up at the buds and stretched my hand up toward them, but I couldn’t reach. I left the buds and kept walking. I had to be in by 6:00. On the way, I saw more than one tree with the same red buds. The next day, when it snowed, the red buds fell like beads and decorated the snow, and when the snow melted, they lay on the asphalt, dirty-red and flattened by tires.
It wasn’t so hot in Utah when Carlos and I got off the bus. I thought it would be, with the desert and all. There was a lot of bright sky, even in the city with all the trees growing around all the houses. We walked and hitchhiked in the cold under the white bright sky to where Carlos’s cousin, Alberto, lives outside Salt Lake City. I wanted my coat that was, maybe, still huddled on the end of my bed at the RTC. The RTC was hardly a home, but my bed was my bed, and maybe my coat was waiting there now. We had to hitchhike because even though Carlos had saved money from his Safeway job, that money was gone now. “Shit,” Carlos had said at the information window in Denver when they told him the price of the bus tickets. Carlos had his cousin’s address on a piece of paper, but it took us a while to find Peach Tree Court. His cousin, Alberto, had babies and a wife, Renata, who wasn’t so happy to see Carlos and me arrive, but she didn’t complain too much, not out loud. The babies were a little girl and a boy who was littler. Alberto and Renata were afraid another one was on the way. That’s the way, you know, wherever I live—babies and more babies on the way. Back when we lived in Denver, there was that girl across the hall I used to kiss—I can’t remember her name for sure, Emilia? Theresa? I was pretty young then, in the third or fourth grade, we were in my aunt’s apartment, across the hall from Emilia. The boyfriend, Freddy, would come and sing to Emilia (or Theresa) and pull her hair and leave, or he’d hit her cheek so the next day it would be like a peach, and one of her eyes would be an unhappy slit. When he left, she’d cry that she’d never let him in again, but she was pregnant and worried. I’d kiss her cheek or her eye, but I couldn’t say, “Don’t worry.” She was just beginning to show—she still wore her old jeans, but she had to leave the zipper undone. I was never going to let that happen to me. There are ways, lots of ways, to escape that, I thought. I never found out what happened to Emilia or her baby because after two months we moved back to Hamilton. By now, probably, her babies have babies.
That first morning at Alberto’s we sat at the kitchen table with him and with Renata, and their babies kept climbing on her lap and climbing off. I felt cold in my fingers and at the back of my neck. Carlos said he was going to get a job, and I was going to get one, too. I could work at the movie theater, or in the kitchen at the hospital. So—we were on the run, but we’d settled in. Should I really be scared? I could let Manuel know, write his friend Fernando like he said, let Fernando know where I was.
Finally, I was living in a place that was not the RTC. It’s what I wanted, wasn’t it, so shouldn’t I be glad, not scared, not cold? And I was with Carlos—didn’t I want that? I didn’t know—I never seemed to know. When he first followed me at the end of April, he crept along, half-a-block back, then darted ahead and hid behind a tree. It was almost May, then. I’m always so glad when it is finally May, but spring doesn’t help much in the long run, not when it snows, and that May it snowed, day after day. My shoes were always wet. Sometimes it rained when it snowed, and grass would show. Sometimes the snow would pile up on the grass, up to four inches or maybe five. The cars going by were even louder than usual on the snowy wet street, even dirtier.
That first time Carlos called out to me, we were just two or three blocks away from the RTC, and I wasn’t at all sure I wanted him waiting for me, but he was nice enough then. He’d touch my arm, just a little, look for a long time into my eyes, his mouth just a little bit open. But he couldn’t come in. The RTC has plenty of rules about what time you have to get home and who can come in, when you have to clean the bathroom, and when to change your sheets. I didn’t need any points against me, not then. I didn’t want to go back to detention, that’s where I was before. Manuel was still in detention—I thought he was. They sent us there, after they busted into my mom’s house and found us in Manuel’s room. You have to wonder, each time, how long Manuel will last in detention—he hates it so.
I talked to Carlos under the tree. I watched him watching me, and after just a little while it started to snow. I had to go in, I said. It
That spring the winter weather lasted way too long, the snow and the cold. It makes you old, very quickly, being cold. Very soon, I thought, I’d be as old as the couple that hitchhikes up the canyon in the evening, up to where they lived in Raven City. In the morning they’d come down from Raven and fly their cardboard signs at the exit from the Safeway lot, or on the corner of Shady Gulch and High Street. When they came back up Shady Gulch in the evening, they’d hold hands sometimes, as they walked across Sixth Street with the light. And they were old. Maybe she was pretty once, but she had lines of tiredness and cold all over her face. He had hair flying out in every direction, and he was tall, skinny like an old skeleton ready to crumble. I thought, sooner than you know I’ll be old like that, and Carlos won’t be one to walk up Shady Gulch with me toward Raven City. At any rate, who’d want to live in Raven? Sooner than you think, my mom will be old like that. Next time I go to see her, I don’t want her looking old, not so old.
I always want to see my mom. I’m always missing her; then when I see her, I don’t know why I think it matters. What are we thinking? What is there to say? Maybe she’ll tell me about Leandra who finally kicked her boyfriend out. Or she’ll mention Ramón, how he complained, once again, about that double play in the Panthers’ game, about the daffodils fading in the smoky-glass vase. She’ll never say he’s been skipping school, he’s borrowed Uncle Rick’s car for more than two days, he hasn’t called and he’s been gone almost a week. Ramón’s her favorite, after all. Ramón’s everyone’s favorite—mine as well, but I love Manuel the most. She’ll tell me about Nora and the baby, who still live with my mom. Most likely Mom won’t talk about Manuel who’s maybe in detention, who’s maybe run again. It’s easier to talk about babies and there are always babies—wherever I live—babies and more coming. My oldest sister, Leandra, had little Ricky and Adrianna; they lived with us when I was ten or eleven and my dad would come sometimes then, come shouting and stamping into the living room, and my mom would end up chasing him away with whatever she could grab, a broom, a knife, or even a fork, the one with the bent handle. Every foster home had a baby or more, and Alvaro and Filippa had three babies when I lived with them. At the RTC we’d look around and guess who was pregnant. They gave us birth control pills every morning, but of course the pills didn’t always work. At the RTC, after all, they don’t manage to keep track of who is where on her cycle.
When I’m on the run, when I’m in detention or at the RTC, I think of all those babies born and waiting to be born. I think of my mom talking, think of my sitting sideways on a chair after a bath as she combs out my hair, as she reaches out to push a baby in his swing. Not that she ever combs out my hair anymore. Her own hair she does comb out carefully and makes it look very nice.
At Alberto and Renata’s, I didn’t write Manuel’s friend—not for a long time—and I didn’t find a job, not for a while. Maybe Carlos had a job—he was gone a lot, mostly at night; he had money, once in a while. Once in a while, I watched the babies when Renata went out. Usually, I’d leave in the morning before or soon after Alberto and Renata got up. At first, when I was supposed to look for a job, I wandered around the shopping area close to Peach Tree Court. I saw the movie theater, but I didn’t know where the hospital was. I was scared they’d ask how old I was if I walked into the theater or the hospital, they’d ask to see ID. I was fifteen, almost, but even with a lot of makeup, I didn’t look older than that, maybe I looked younger, and I didn’t have an ID, not one I could show them. Also, I didn’t have to smell the popcorn in the theater to know it would make me feel sick. In the afternoon or evening I’d go back to the little house and sit on the corner of the couch, pretending no one saw me there. I’d go for a walk and another walk. I didn’t want to come back unless Carlos was there; I didn’t want him to be there. I was feeling a little tired, a little strange. All that walking, after all, is bound to make you tired.
At night we slept in the living room, on the single mattress kept behind the couch: we’d push the couch into the center of the room and lay the mattress flat. I didn’t tell Carlos how I felt, but I thought maybe he knew. He wasn’t on me as much. During the day we stood the mattress on its side against the wall and pushed the couch back against it. I kept my backpack, flattened, under the couch. You’d never know we were there.
In the early morning, because I woke up way before Carlos, I had time to lie and listen to the birds walking in the gutter, the uneven fall of early morning raindrops. I don’t always like that time of day. Sometimes Carlos turned over, his fingers touching me one at a time, and his cute little penis touching my leg. Sometimes I’d fall back to sleep and dream about lively piano music entering the living room, along with a lot of people with sex on their minds. Sometimes, in the dream, you hardly knew who was singing and who was crying, who was on top of you and who was inside you.
I’d get tired of lying there, bored, and I didn’t want to be the bored person in bed with someone else, so I’d get up, sit on the couch, and watch the sun come up into the living room window. When I was with Manuel, I never woke up in the morning. When I was with him, in his room, it would be afternoon, once in a while, or early night if no one else was at home. I never slept. I was not bored, but sometimes Manuel would fall asleep after we did it and I would watch him. Now, I wanted to watch him again. I needed to hear from him again. He told me in May to write his friend Fernando, and I finally wrote to Fernando on a postcard—you don’t have to put many words on a postcard. I mailed it and immediately counted the days before Manuel would answer. Of course, after five days, after seven, he did not answer. Carlos, each day, slept later and later. He was gone in the afternoon and into the night. Only once in a while would he wake me when he got home, with his fingers not his mouth, not gently; then he’d climb on top. For a small person, he could be heavy. This wasn’t making love. It was being quiet as you could be in that small house, not making noise, not at all.
He had money sometimes. Sometimes he did not, and a lot of the time he was mean. It’s not that he hit me, but I was afraid a lot, and maybe I was homesick, but for what home? I wanted Manuel—when would he come? I wanted my mom, of course. But even if she was not two hundred or four hundred miles away, I couldn’t go see her. Two years ago, or three, I tried to see her when I was on the run. I wanted to see her one time for a little while, for a little while stop being so alone. I went at night and looked in the windows of her apartment. I could see nothing except a decorated comb inside on the window ledge. I ran away, maybe I was crying.
When I was in Hamilton, walking up High Street to Carlos’s place, I thought more than once about turning east on Evergreen and walking on out to my mom’s. That would be quite a long walk. Later, I wished I had gone, but, you see, I was not allowed to go to my mom’s, and, anyways, they might catch me there. She was living in Little San Pedro then, and she had a little house—not an apartment. The house was pale blue with two bedrooms. It was not any bigger than an apartment, with not much of a yard—some dirt in the front, grass in a few clumps, trying hard. Still, it was not a trailer but a house, a manufactured home, standing up by itself alongside the other Little San Pedro houses. I was not allowed to go there: in March, when they released me from detention, they gave me the conditions of my assignment to the RTC. These said where I was not to go—not to the bus station, not to the downtown mall, not to my mom’s. These said where I was to go—to the RTC, to Hamilton West High School. In between, they’d let me walk—it’s about ten blocks if you go west on Apache and up the hill on Ninth or Sixth or one of the little in-between streets. Sometimes, I’d just go back to the RTC from the high school. Sometimes, though, I’d take a long way, sometimes a longer way up to north Hamilton.
Carlos had stopped showing up during my trek back from school. After a little while, I wondered why, and I’d go north on High Street to his sister’s apartment. Each time I came back to the RTC, I thought I wouldn’t go again to Lola’s place. Sometimes Carlos was hard, his face turned hard and flat, like a frying pan that hasn’t been washed in a while. You can’t tell what he is thinking. You don’t always want to know. It would be much better not to go back, not ever again; still, some days you have to see someone outside, and you can’t see your mom, you can’t see Manuel who used to tease you, who’d sent you a letter, just once. You just have to go: you end up cutting sixth and seventh period to visit Carlos while his sister is at work. When you come in, Carlos says he’s just back from work, from Safeway where he’s a bagger.
