The missing, p.9
The Missing, page 9
“When was the last time you spoke to Dorinda?”
“A few days, not long ago. And I know Alexandra’s been in touch.”
“But she’s gone, you know. Last week. She took off and I’m stuck with the rent. It’s a lot more than I can afford. On top of everything else, I need to advertise for a roommate.
The woman across the aisle said, “Next stop, please,” and a dark plume of smoke rose from the roof of the K-Mart building. Lucas’s head twisted to follow the gaze of the people on the sidewalk and the other people on the bus.
“What do you know,” Emily remarked, and the bus stopped in the middle of Grant Street. No one got off.
“You must have a forwarding address. You can give it to me.”
Emily nodded. “I’ll think about it,” she said, “but now I’ve got to go to the library before they blow up the books on Peruvian artifacts.”
“I wouldn’t worry about it yet,” Lucas said. “They seem to be concentrating on schools and department stores.”
At the end of the month Emily purchased an umbrella. She had never owned one before. She set the umbrella carefully behind the rocking chair in her room. She was afraid, if she carried it, she would leave it on the bus.
Stranger
Diana did not speak until she finished her orange juice. She ran her finger around the inside edge of the glass and licked it. “My sister left,” Diana said, “and when she did, she left her hands behind. I hid them in the fruit bowl beneath the oranges. I was ready to leave as well, but there was no one then to leave with me.”
The sunlight hit the hood of Timothy’s pickup and came through the diner window to land beside his napkin.
“I didn’t know you had a sister,” he said.
“Why should you know? Two days ago you were a stranger in Salina, walking across the room, a little slower than the rest, a little darker than the rest.”
Diana could not see his face well now because it was in shadow before the bright window. She found it difficult to look at his face anyway, so she looked at his hands.
“Is your tea sweet enough?” he asked.
She nodded. She thought, maybe because his head moved, that he smiled. His questions continued.
“Do you often take so well to strangers?”
“You get used to them after a while. All of my family are frequently strangers; they show up among those you know and those you don’t. You get used to it after a while. I always swore I’d never leave with a dark man who reminds me of my father, but here we are.”
“Yes.” Timothy leaned forward and this time she knew he was smiling. She saw, above his smile, the slight widow’s peak she had traced the night before.
“Here we are,” he said. She leaned back slightly and frowned.
“Well,” he said, “we won’t be here much longer. It shouldn’t take them long to fix the pickup. Do you need more lemon for your tea?”
“I get tired, you know, of talking about my tea.”
The shadow of the waitress fell on Diana’s eggs. She looked up for a moment, confused, wondering whether it had been the waitress who had asked her about the tea. She hadn’t meant to be rude.
“No thank you,” she said, in case the waitress had asked.
“What happened,” he asked, “after your sister left?”
“We went to Florida for two weeks, and when we returned to the dining room, we were assaulted by the smell of sweet oranges quietly rotting in the monkey-pod bowl. I stared at the wallpaper, but I couldn’t see my sister among the vines, and we never saw her name in the headlines. In the late afternoons my mother dusted picture frames and put out sunflower seeds for the chickadees. My father sat silently, heavily in the armchair until it pressed dents into the floor. I began to wish it would press holes in the floor, collapse the floor, and carry him down to the wet boxes and cobwebs of the basement.
“In the evenings I listened to the violins, but they were interrupted by the piano. My father would stand, blocking the speakers and mumble about the grave deficiencies of the stock market. My mother would try to answer reasonably, but the iron’s steam would get in her eyes. The weeks went on in this way. I can’t remember for sure. At times I thought maybe years went on in this way. They do sometimes, you know.”
Timothy nodded and handed her the salt.
“Some evenings I sat on my bed and stared at the window. There was nothing in the sky. Maybe a moon, but I didn’t notice. I thought about meeting you and wondered whether, when you walked slowly across the room, I’d even notice you. I knew that my sister would have noticed. Jessica would have laughed. She laughed at night, frequently. Once I did, but a long time ago. You wouldn’t remember, even my mother doesn’t remember. She remembers when I screamed at night. In those days things came in the window—an old black woman, a staring man, coins on my sheet. In the morning my throat was always sore.”
Diana put down the salt.
“Things behave more properly now. Cats drop from the trees, runners run in the street, stars remain on the outside of the window, and you sit patiently on the other side of the table, asking about my tea.”
He smiled at her, head tilted, as if expecting her to smile back, but she looked down at her tea. When she tasted it, it was sweeter than before, and the shadow of the window frame moved away from the saltshaker and fell off the edge of the table. She could feel Timothy’s gaze on her right shoulder. When she rested her hand there, she noticed the skin of her hand.
“Things will go easier when we can get moving again,” he said. “For now, at least, we can get out of here; we can go on outside.”
After he paid the bill, they sat on the curb in front of the diner and watched the mechanic knock different-sized wrenches against the orange pickup. At first Diana tried to pay attention to the stories Timothy told her; then she kicked off a sandal to feel the dirt pushed up against the edge of the curb. Flies crawled up her leg.
“This dirt resembles the dirt you described in your stories,” she said. “The dirt that lay on the wildflowers and under the cafe signs, that accumulated in the folds and creases of your black leather jackets when you rode motorcycles through the mountain towns on weekends between Memorial Day and the Fourth of July. It makes me think of cinnamon.”
“Doesn’t taste like cinnamon.”
“We used to keep large cans of cinnamon for the fall when we made apple crisp and applesauce. And each year we had to use twice as much cinnamon as the year before. If I knew you then, I’d have spread you like bread dough on the kitchen table, and sprinkled cinnamon and raisins all over.”
She pushed her finger along the inside fold of his elbow, then rubbed the finger clean against the skin of her leg. Timothy began to talk again, and Diana shivered. The curb was now in the shade. He told her he couldn’t understand how she could still be cold, and he led her to the picnic table in the sun.
“Sit here and warm up.” He indicated the picnic bench. “Be sure and watch out for splinters.” He stood behind her and they looked off to the east—toward Missouri or Tennessee.
“Listen,” she said after a while. “Somewhere in the distance, or behind the garage, someone’s imitating the sound of a motorcycle or a chain saw. Do you hear? They’re starting and stalling and starting again. The sound bounces like the light, it rattles. It’s a harsh light, and it goes on diluting color, revealing old toenails, flattening skunks, landing here on the grasshoppers and there on the dry grass; it’s like the light, several summers ago, that struck the towels on the line. They were bright pink in the morning when we hung them out, but they grew pale by afternoon. That August, after a morning watching clothes dry on the line, we spent the afternoon in our neighbor’s compost heap digging, lifting the wilted flowers from the warm ash, burying the birds and small mice the cat left on the porch and under the lawn chairs. We assumed they were dead. I don’t know how to explain this to you, but once, by the trashcan, a dead gray mouse grew thinner in the afternoon sun. The light moved his whiskers like milkweed, and the fly crawling over him was half as big as his head. I watched him, and when the ants started to taste his nostrils, I worried about the night.”
Timothy said she’d been drinking too much tea.
“I’ll get you a beer,” he said. “Stay here.”
He stretched and walked to the restaurant’s screen door. When he emerged with two bottles, he walked toward the garage. Leaning over the mechanic’s shoulder he peered into the insides of the pickup.
“What did you see?” Diana asked when Timothy returned.
“How could I possibly see anything,” he answered with disgust. “It’s dark in there.”
He set down the bottles.
“My eyes can’t possibly adjust, because of this. He swept his hand in front of him with the palm turned up. It was cupped to hold the light or to hold his disgust.
“Your hand is curved,” Diana said. “It’s permanently curved by the years spent gripping black motorcycle handles. If I straightened your fingers, they would creak like stairs at night.”
He looked at her intently. The grass turned brown; fires started in the distance.
“I can’t figure you out,” he said, “or your sister either. Most of the time, you aren’t all here, and when you’re here, it’s as if you’re about to leave.”
“How could I be bothered to leave at this point? What am I going to do—walk out there and stick out my thumb?” Imitating his gesture, she stretched her arm toward the horizon. With her upturned arm she indicated the distance, but her gesture stopped halfway as she watched a scab crawl toward her elbow. A minute crawled along as well, and then a second.
“While you were gone, while you were getting the beer, the motorcycle started again, still with too much treble, but this time it managed to keep its engine running and it moved, like an airplane, off to the west.”
Her finger pointed toward the air above the horizon.
“If I concentrate,” she said, “I can still focus on that gray speck of sound. I concentrate so I’m not startled by the men in the upper left corner of my left eye. I don’t know why they are always blond, and,” she drank from her beer, “I don’t know where I kicked off my sandals.”
She sat calmly, as if the pressure of Timothy’s boot against her instep did not bother her, as if she were not thinking about her sandals. Her little finger made commas on the outside of the bottle.
“In the evenings,” she said, “after our bath, Jessica and I drew pictures on the fogged-over windows. The pictures weren’t much, but we enjoyed the squeak of fingers against the glass. Suddenly we’d be disgusted, and we’d smear over the panes with our whole hands. Our hands would be wet, and the glass would have uneven streaks of water. So we’d slap each other and then we’d get slapped. She could always hit harder than me.”
“When you talk about Jessica,” Timothy said, “I remember a girl I met on the other side of a room in Pueblo. She looks a little like you, but her hair is curly.”
“I guess it was her you were looking for when you walked across the room and ran into me.”
Timothy lay back on the picnic bench and watched her back.
“I wasn’t looking for anyone; I was just walking across the room,” he said. “But it sounds like the same person to me. You know, you’d better drink your beer before it goes flat.”
Instead, Diana stared at the bubbles that rose infinitely from a spot halfway down the bottle. “I already told you my sister is dead,” she thought, but she didn’t remember whether she had told him. She tried the words anyway.
“I already told you my sister is dead.”
Timothy may not have heard her. He sat up, shrugged, and said, “Sounds like the same person to me.”
Diana stood, brushed off her shorts, and walked away from the garage and diner. She walked toward the road where she held out her arm, curving and straightening her thumb. After a while, when no cars came by and the skin on her underarm began to turn pink, she walked back to the picnic table and saw that Timothy was asleep. The motorcycle, after disappearing hours before, thickened on the horizon. Diana thought at first the sound was the red ant that had crawled into her ear as she finished her beer.
When Timothy woke, the pickup was ready. When they walked toward it, he said, “I bet you never thought we’d get out of here.”
“I never thought,” said Diana, and she climbed up into the passenger seat. It was a long way up. For the first seventeen miles, as they drove toward the sun, the truck’s shadow fell on the freckles of Diana’s right arm, and she refused to look at Timothy. She tried to focus on the horizon, but the motion of the plains carried her gaze back to the hood of the truck.
“Let me know when you want me to drive.”
He nodded, but he did not seem to be listening. His right hand played with the radio knob. After several miles passed quietly and not quickly, he asked her about her sister.
“I don’t see why you want to talk about her.”
“What else can we do? When there’s nothing but static on the radio, you might as well fill me in on the time your sister left.”
“She left, she died, she died, she left.” Diana shook her head and frowned. “I don’t know how to tell that story. Maybe if I heard three notes of music, played in the right order, I could get the words right.” She stared out the window for a while. “There isn’t any music, so I can do no more than watch those markers go by.”
A green mile marker approached the truck—476—and Diana counted carefully the thirteen stakes between it and the next mile marker—475. Timothy’s hand stopped playing with the radio dial; instead, it smoothed the cotton front of his tee shirt. Eventually he reached for her cheek, and she withdrew to the corner by the window. The button pressing against her temple felt like her father’s thumb.
Thirty miles farther west Timothy found a song on the radio. The bass, as usual, was slower than the treble. The sun, as usual, had a hard time pushing through the dirt on the window.
“There’s music now,” Timothy said. “Listen to the notes and you can find the words.”
“In those years,” she said, “our parents were voices in the kitchen at night. My mother’s voice was hard and high, and it came from the space behind her back molars. In our bed, Jessica and I wouldn’t speak, and after she was fourteen Jessica never cried or wet the sheets. When it was hot, in the summer, we’d stretch our toes to the dark corners, and when they met, our toes would tie in knots. I’ll show you tomorrow.”
She thought the song did not contain the right combination of notes; she thought it moved too quickly. Her words could not keep up.
“In the mornings we watched the rose vines turn on the wallpaper. Later there would be thumbprints between the blue roses. In the afternoons we drew with crayons on the wall, and in the early afternoons of the following months we stripped the leaves of the houseplants and piled them on the dining room table.” She paused. “We’ve lost that station, so I can’t tell you anymore. You might as well turn off the radio now.”
Timothy continued to drive, and they continued toward the west. The flat light grew deep. Occasionally the plains turned green and neat and were boxed by white fences in the small towns. As they passed, left-handed women mowed the grass in the cemeteries. Gray cats limped after the truck. Later, the moon knocked against the front windows of the houses, leaving traces of blood.
After midnight they spent what was left of the night in a cornfield. They lay in the back of the pickup, and the ribs of the bed pressed against the ribs of Diana’s back. She used Timothy’s bony arm for a pillow and wondered when the rasp that followed every ninth breath would separate from Timothy’s lips and settle in her throat; she wondered when the grasshoppers would begin to move.
When she began to talk, it had begun to grow light, but Timothy was not yet awake.
“I could tell you a lot if I thought you weren’t listening,” she whispered. “I could tell you that I’ve always been afraid of wide spaces, and although I might explore what I once feared, I’m not particularly fond of bony pillows on the high plains. I could tell you that I didn’t kill my sister, though I longed to. I nearly killed my father, but that hardly counts: I told him why she was gone. I wouldn’t tell you. He sits peacefully now in the blue armchair, with one leg on the footstool, and one foot near the floor. His mouth opens slowly, and when the robin moves across the window his blue eyes may move, but his head doesn’t turn. My mother whistles in the kitchen and rearranges bowls of fruit.
“My sister buried two babies, then cut off her hands. They weren’t her babies anyway. She was just fourteen and I carried her body to the orchard before midnight. In the early morning I spread leaves and apples over her and braided her hair with the orchard grass. In the evening white-faced hornets crawled among the apples.”
Watching from his elbow, Timothy unzipped her sleeping bag and the warm sweat between her legs turned clammy beneath his hand.
“You get nightmares from the heat; you’ve got to be careful,” he said. “In the summer, goose down can be dangerous.” He licked his hand and replaced it. Then, one after the other, he bent her knees so that the toes emerged from orange nylon. Diana opened her mouth and felt Kansas on the back of her tongue.
Timothy said, “You’re the first person I’ve met who has nightmares while they’re awake.”
“I could tell you of others.”
“Tell me.” He separated her knees, and when he held her limp right leg, the calf swung listlessly.
“When your body’s curled around my knees,” she said, “the hairs that grow from your back, toward my face, frighten me. And if I know that it’s too dark to see the hairs on your back, I also know that it’s too early to be accosted by a stranger in the back of a pickup. You lie here, chewing about my kneecap, pressing my skin and your bottom lip between your teeth, and Jessica lies in an old orchard among the rotten apples and the hornets’ husks.
