Among the Missing (15 page)

He glanced in and there were some old
Playboy
and
Penthouse
magazines on the table next to the toilet. He nodded, not meeting her eyes. What was there to say? The nurse was trying to be professional about it, but he could see she was secretly mortified behind her nurse facade, and when he tried to smile ironically she just cleared her throat again and left in a hurry. Poor girl, he thought.

It was strange, because it was she, the nurse, whom he ended up thinking of rather than the centerfolds with their tawny unreal shapes and unmarked expressions. When he brought his test tube out and gave it to her he felt a sort of regret shudder through him. Her eyes were so sad that he was sure for a moment that she knew he’d been thinking of her. He sometimes thought that any baby that came out of it must be as much that nurse’s as it was his own.

He finds it difficult to truly believe that there is a baby, but it’s something he thinks about sometimes. It’s interesting imagining someone—maybe an infertile couple or perhaps a single woman who has some money—someone going through pages of descriptions and deciding on him. Maybe he has the nationality they are looking for, the color of hair or eyes, or one of the accomplishments he’s written down—his winning the state spelling bee in high school, his abilities in baseball, his college major—attracts them in some way, and they say, “This is the one.” He wonders if that’s how it works. He likes to imagine that there is the possibility of a person out there. The person might have a
certain shape of face or fingers, or a certain way of smiling. He or she might even eventually have certain moods—a particularly vague and watery melancholy feeling sometimes—because of him. He doesn’t know why he wants so badly for this to be true.

It’s summer. Cicadas fill the air with an intermittent static, and in the weeks that follow he often sees them in the morning, in the tiny backyard out behind their apartment house, his upstairs neighbor and her son, who must be about four, a thin, deep-eyed kid with a head like a baby bird. Dennis gazes down at them, watching as the boy builds something with mud and sticks in the corner by the fence; watching as the boy reads his books:
The Illustrated Encyclopedia of the Animal Kingdom
. On the cover, there are drawings of a snake, a zebra, a parrot, a beetle, all the same size.

The woman sits quietly, smoking. She runs her fingers thoughtfully along the side of her bare foot, her curling-iron hair, crushed flat in the back where she’s slept on it. When he thinks of her face in his mind, it looks hard and melancholy and almost cruel because of the traces of makeup that remain around her lips and eyes. She exhales smoke.

On the day he made his phone call to the hospital, he happened to be walking home from work and he found a box of books. The box had been put out by the curb for the trash man to pick up, right outside a big old house that looked something like his except it hadn’t been split up into apartments. There was nothing wrong with the books that he could see—an old set of children’s encyclopedias, not a complete set but nice nonetheless,
with beautiful photographs. It didn’t even look like they’d been read! He glanced around to see that no one was looking and then he lifted the box and carried it home.

After dinner that evening, he had gone up the stairs with the box and knocked on the woman’s door.

“I found this,” he said, showing her the books and smiling sheepishly. “I’ve heard you reading to your son and I thought it would be something he would enjoy.”

He’d practiced this short speech several times, but after it left his mouth he realized that it was a mistake to say that he’d heard her reading. Her eyes narrowed a bit, suspiciously, and when she leaned down to look at the titles of the books, she wrinkled her nose. He was aware that they smelled a little like a basement.

“He’s a little young for encyclopedias,” she said, and Dennis shifted his weight. The books were heavy.

“Well,” he said. “They’ve got nice pictures.”

“Hmm,” she said. She looked him over again, and he saw her eyes come to a decision. If they were to fall in love, Dennis thought, it would never work out. She saw something essential about him that she could never learn to like. He didn’t know what it was, exactly, but he could feel it in the air around him, like a smell—a particular trigger which he lacked—a winking type of confidence, or body hair, or a temper. Whatever it was.

“If you want to leave them,” she said, “that’s okay. I mean, he’ll probably just wreck them. Color in them and stuff. You could sell them,” she said. She shrugged, and put a hand against her hair. “You don’t have kids of your own,” she said.

“No.” He smiled, hesitating because she made no move to take the box. He braced it against his hip. “No, not really,” he said thoughtfully. And then, after a second he realized that this
was an odd thing to say. “I guess I might have kids,” he said, “but none that I know of.”

“Oh,” she said, and then she laughed shortly. “You’re one of those, huh?” She looked at him for a moment with something like, what? Flirtation? Sarcasm? Something familiar but not quite friendly. He couldn’t tell, but it made him blush. He set the box down.

“No,” he said. “No, it’s …” and for a moment he actually considered telling her about the hospital and the rest, though he knew that would be worse, at that point, than just letting her think what she wanted.

“It’s complicated,” he said.

“Uh-huh,” she said. She gave him that same look again, and he watched her thinking; a whole complex set of things were passing through her mind. She did not believe that he was the type, and she wondered, briefly, why he would say such a strange thing, what he really meant. She thought of her son’s father, or maybe she didn’t. She opened the door a little more, and Dennis could see the boy inside, sitting cross-legged in front of the television, his face lit unnaturally as he trotted a plastic elephant along the carpet. It would have been neat if the boy suddenly turned to look at him, but he did not.

“Well,” the woman said. “Thanks.”

When Dennis first moved into the apartment, the little boy upstairs was going through a period of having bad nightmares. The child would wake up screaming, and of course Dennis would awaken as well. “Help me!” Dennis thought he could hear the child crying. “Help me!” At last, Dennis would hear
the woman’s footsteps, and then her voice, gentle and tired. “Hush,” she was probably saying. “It’s okay. It’s okay. Be still now.” And then, after a time, she would begin to sing.

He doesn’t know why this had affected him so, the sound of her singing, but he can remember shuddering. He had curled up a little more, thinking, “What is it? What’s wrong with me?” and trying to decide that it was simple, that it was ordinary loneliness, being disoriented in a new place, boxes still not unpacked, his family far away, his own father, dead a few years now, buried in a cemetery some thousand miles distant.

But it had felt, at that moment, that there was something wrong with the world itself. He could have sworn he knew in his heart that something terrible had happened to the world, and that everyone knew it but him.

M
y mother owned a lakefront cabin, not far from where the bodies were discovered. She watched from the back porch when the car was pulled out of the water. She could hear the steady clicking of the big tow chain echoing against the still surface of the lake. Brown-gray water gushed from the windows and trunk and hood as the car rose up. The windows were partway open, and my mother’s first thought was that animals were probably in the car also: suckers and carp and catfish and crawdads—scavengers. The white body of the car was streaked with trailing wisps of algae. She turned away as the policemen gathered around.

There was a family in the car: the Morrisons. A mother and father, a seven-year-old girl, a five-year-old boy, and a baby, a little boy, thirteen months old. They had been missing since late May, over six weeks, and the mystery had been in the papers for a while. People around town reported having seen them, but no
one had taken much notice. They were a typical family, apparently, no different from the hundreds that passed through during the summer months. Lake McConaughy was the largest lake in Nebraska, one of the largest man-made lakes in the entire Midwest, and it drew not only locals but also vacationers from Omaha and Denver and even farther. When the police came around with the pictures, people
thought
they had seen them, but they couldn’t be sure. The investigation was bogged down by our town’s uncertain memory. It didn’t occur to anyone to drag the lake, especially since reported sightings continued to come in from as far away as Oklahoma and Canada. Most people believed that they would turn up, and that there would be some rational explanation—despite the claims of the grandmother, who lived in Loveland, Colorado, and who had first reported the family missing. She felt foul play was certainly involved. Why else hadn’t they contacted her? Why else had the father, her son, not returned as scheduled to the real estate office where he’d worked for ten years?

Before the bodies were discovered, my father had a theory. He said that it would eventually come out that the father had embezzled a large sum from that real estate company. Sooner or later, he said, the authorities would catch up with them. They would find them living in a big house under an assumed name in some distant, sunny state. “Or maybe,” said my father, “maybe they’ll never catch them.” He paused, a little taken with this romantic possibility. “Maybe they’ll get away with it,” he said.

When he heard they’d been found, he seemed almost bitter that the idea he had repeated and embellished turned out to be so far
from the truth. “It just doesn’t make any sense,” he said, and glared darkly down at his hands.

The two of us were out at a local bar, a place called The Fishhead that he frequented, and he was already several beers ahead of me. He was slurring a little.

“I just can’t fathom what could’ve happened. How do you drive your car into a God damn lake? And how do you get it out there as deep as they got it? Even if there was a drop-off?”

“It’s freakish,” I agreed. I sipped my beer. “A real tragedy,” I said.

My father shook his head: I had failed to get his point. “Do you know,” he said. “Every one of them was still buckled in. That’s what Buddy Bartling told me, and he was there. The woman was driving, and she was strapped in behind the wheel. It just doesn’t make sense. You know, if the water had been icy cold, it would’ve been just—
bam!
—hypothermia. But it wasn’t that cold.”

“Hmm,” I said. It sounded like he was concocting a new theory, and I waited. The barmaid came over and asked how we were doing and my father tapped his empty glass.

“You know what gets me,” my father said. He cocked his head at me, squinting one eye, and lowered his voice. “What gets me is your God damn mother. Here this happens not five hundred yards from her cabin. But she sees nothing, she hears nothing. That’s just how she is. You know it. I mean, it’s nothing against her really. That’s not what I’m saying. She’s your mother, and she’s not a bad woman.”

“No,” I said. He was drunk, I thought. I felt the alcohol moving thickly through my own body, and I couldn’t follow where he was going. I gave him the same one-eyed squint.

“You would think,” my father said, “a person would think they would’ve hollered. Those kids. They had to have screamed, don’t you think?”

“I don’t know what you’re saying,” I said, and he hunched his shoulders.

“I’m not saying anything,” he said, but his eyes had a strange intensity. “It’s just a shame there wasn’t someone else in that cabin other than your mom. That’s all I’m saying. They would have found those folks a lot sooner.”

My parents had been separated for almost three years by that time, though they’d never officially divorced. They had “parted ways” (as my mother said) sometime during my sophomore year in college, I wasn’t even sure when. No one told me. My mother moved out to the cabin, and my father remained at the house in Ogallala.

I didn’t quite understand the situation. My mother said that it had to do with his drinking—though, to me, he didn’t seem to be an alcoholic, at least not in the way that you read about. He never did anything outrageous or abusive. He just drank beer or an occasional glass of whiskey, the same as he always had, and generally all that meant was that he was a little out-of-it after about nine o’clock at night.

My father felt that it had to do with the difference in their ages. My mother was ten years older than my father, and once I had left home, he said, the differences had become more difficult. It was hard to get a clear answer from him. He hinted that it had something to do with menopause (what he solemnly called “The Change O’ Life”). She’d just—changed, he said.

Nevertheless, my father was out at the cabin regularly. All their finances were still intertwined, and whenever he got a check for work he did (he was a carpenter) he came out and gave it to her, rather than deposit it himself. It didn’t make much sense to me.