Rachel was bubbly and crystal-eyed with an innocent, if somewhat annoyingly shrill, voice, so kind and confidently affectionate that she even inspired my mom to share a story about the first time she met my dad (unrelated to my dad’s amorous revelation; she told this story all the time) back when she was a grocery store cashier and he saved her from a lewd drunk who followed her into the parking lot and sprawled over the hood of her car begging for a kiss. But what was most surprising about Rachel’s visit was Zach’s reaction to her. Not only did he display a previously unknown amount of manners and genteel formality—despite attempting to cancel the event earlier that afternoon on the grounds that they were still unestablished—but over the course of the meal abandoned his fixation on hiding all evidence of interpersonal affection. For most of the dinner he simply observed her, awestruck by the skill with which she charmed the pants off us. Even as she shared the cutesy details of their time together at T.E.C., and the nervousness she felt calling him after two years out of contact, Zach only beamed brighter and prouder, as though he wished the night would never end. Perhaps in my reverie I go too far, but at the point I caught my brother and Rachel slicing their braised chicken, noticing the parallel synchronicity of each other’s movements, and glancing up and smirking before taking their simultaneous bites, I felt a part of an extraordinarily rare episode when one has the opportunity to witness a man and woman fall instantaneously and determinedly in love.
Meanwhile Emily and I continued operating in the realm of the underground. The next morning I received a phone alert informing me that her parents had just left for the company Christmas party and planned to be out the entire day. I raced over, parked at the West End Club, then walked the remaining five or six blocks, as instructed. But my enthusiasm significantly diminished after meandering through a set of festive subdivision streets marbled with melted snow only to confront the Schell home, whose minimalist decor was wholly dependent on a blinking string of white bulbs in the bushes next to the garage. Before I’d even reached the driveway Emily was at the door hurrying me inside.
“Feliz Navidad,”
she said, snapping the door shut behind us and kissing me and pointing at my boots to let me know I’d better get them off pronto. Then she grabbed my hand and dragged me upstairs to her bedroom, immediately drawing the shades closed to avoid being scoped by her neighbors across the street. She sat me down at her desk, then sprung from one side of the room to the other to retrieve a shoe box-sized gift wrapped in the Sunday comics.
“I didn’t know we were exchanging presents,” I said, having special-ordered a sleep therapy sound machine that had yet to arrive. Emily plopped into my lap and handed it to me.
“We’re not. I’m giving
us
a present.”
I ripped it open. It was a set of two-way radios from Radio Shack. “They work like magic,” she said. “Up to ten miles. Go ahead and try.”
I opened the box and loaded the batteries. It was a much better present than I’d bought for her, despite remembering a time when we used to make fun of the uninspired majority for shopping at places like Brookstone and Radio Shack. But I also recognized the rationale behind her present given the amount of time I wasted waiting for her to call me, or being forced to communicate in codes that most of the time I didn’t understand. Emily wandered downstairs to initiate a game of hide-and-seek. While waiting the fixed five minutes before beginning my search I perused Emily’s bookshelf and media rack, which was now slumping with the weight of bizarre foreign film collections and CDs of obscure bands I’d never heard of. On examining the photographic collage over her desk, I noticed an obvious reworking of images in favor of her new friends from Northwestern, most of whom appeared carefree and self-assured, if obnoxiously clean-cut. I identified myself in only one photo, a shot from our senior skip day where I stood half hunched over in laughter, pointing excitedly off camera. I must’ve been staring at myself for several minutes, trying to remember what I was laughing about, when Emily’s voice crackled through the radio.
“Are you coming or what?” she whispered. “You’ll never find me. Over.”
“Look out, look out,” I said, heading to the middle floor and checking the front hall closet at the bottom of the steps. After noticing several parkas and raincoats Emily had worn over the past few years, I flipped the light on, knowing she intended to give me a good challenge and making sure she hadn’t concealed herself behind the suitcases on the top shelf. There was nowhere else to hide in the front hallway, so I moved to the dining room, already raising the radio to my mouth in search of a hint.
“I thought you were a big fan of the Schell’s Shirtworks Christmas party. What happened? Over.”
When she didn’t answer right away I checked behind the thick curtains and strolled around the table, soon regretting the decision on noticing the tracks I’d left in the pristine carpet.
“I
was
a fan,” she finally said. “Back when Santa came and there were presents for all the kids. This year it’s adults only. Over.”
“What time did the party start?” I asked as I approached the living room. Emily waited even longer to answer than the first time, which made me think she was hiding nearby, under one of the couches or behind the antique filing cabinet in the corner. All the furniture had been rearranged and now faced the cedar trees in the backyard. The TV was gone, likely moved to the basement, which I remembered Mr. Schell had planned to redesign as his entertainment headquarters. As usual the house was spotless, everything in its proper place, including ornate candles with fresh wicks over the mantel and a Versailles photo book on the coffee table casually opened to invite a view of its symmetric gardens.
Gathering no evidence of Emily, I progressed along to the kitchen. On opening the door to the pantry I discovered its cereal and snack boxes lined up by height, its hundred or more canned goods grouped by category, all facing forward. (There was probably enough food to wait out the next five floods.) The radio sparked up.
“Where the heck are you? Over.”
“I’m helping myself to a few snacks,” I said.
“Clear out of there. It’s not real food, just part of the set design.”
The only detectable trace of Emily’s voice was through the radio. Otherwise the house was completely silent, except for the occasional sound of the automatic heating vents. I thoroughly searched the rest of the kitchen and laundry room, then moved on to the basement, which was entirely remodeled. There was a pool table and a bar, a leather couch facing an in-home theater, a mounted antique pistol with a silver-plated grip—all the props of a man’s quarters with none of the feeling. The bar was decorated with drink coasters in a little rack next to magazines fanned in a semicircle. In a closet near the half bathroom I found a shelf stacked with Emily and Katie’s old children’s books and sing-along records. Below it were two shelves dedicated to every board game ever produced by Milton Bradley, all as neatly arranged as the cans in the kitchen pantry. Next I checked the storage room, which turned up nothing more than a row of metal shelving half stacked with Schell’s Shirtworks boxes. As a matter of course I peeked into the biggest boxes, most of which were filled with sleeping bags, old blankets, and bedding. The exception was the box nearest the doorway, which contained four variegated stacks of T-shirts, one of them displaying the image of an elementary-school-aged Emily in a tuxedo tailcoat and tall black hat on a mock playbill for a show called
Me and My Shadow
. I continued to the shirt on the stack next to it, lifting it by the collar until it fell open to display a photo of Katie as a toddler crying on a neighborhood curb while Emily patted her back, advising by way of a comic strip balloon, “It’s tough being a kid.”
Knowing I didn’t have enough time or skill to refold the shirts correctly, I still continued to work my way through the box, soon discovering an entire family history in stenciled T-shirts, many accentuated by clichéd captions like I’M WITH STUPID, which I discovered beneath a vacation photo of Katie staring dismayed at the camera while in the background Emily—along with her saddle—was sliding halfway off a yawning horse. The most interesting shirts were those printed with collegiate photos of Mrs. Schell sporting long hair and blue eye shadow, displaying such a broad, healthful smile that for the first time she reminded me of Emily. I eventually came upon a series of sexy leg T-shirts that made me more depressed than anything else, imagining Mr. Schell after hours in the back room of Schell’s Shirtworks, slung over an industrial fabric printer next to a box of family photos he’d likely been ordered to ship out of the house. There stood Mrs. Schell performing her own barelegged version of
A Chorus Line
atop a dorm room windowsill during a campus snowstorm. There again with her legs dangling out the passenger window of a 1971 Dodge Challenger on a shirt labeled in hot pink lettering: MY SOUTHERN SWEETIE! I didn’t notice a single photo of Mr. Schell until I reached the bottom of the box, where I found a black long-sleeved shirt depicting a young skin-and-bones Richie in the center of a boxing ring, flexing bare chested with his hair greased back and his taunting fists raised in battle. In the bold type of a newspaper headline the caption read WORLD CHAMPION DAD.
Expecting at any moment to be caught, I quickly stuffed the T-shirts back in the box, saving my folding efforts for those at the top of each stack. I nimbly loped to the top floor, knowing it was unlikely that Emily would hide in Katie’s room, but inspired by my last discovery and struck by a perverse curiosity to know what Mrs. Schell had done with the space. I stepped as lightly as possible along the upstairs hallway—figuring now that Emily was hiding in the kids’ bathroom and might be on to me, but deciding to check Katie’s room anyway—expecting to find it converted into either an office or a small exercise studio. But on turning the door handle and gently pushing my way inside, I found it looking exactly as it did when Katie was still alive. It was as though someone had come in to dust and empty the trash, but hadn’t touched anything else. There were movie and animal posters still covering the walls, a bottle of water half full on the nightstand, a desk cluttered with little notebooks decorated with stickers, CD jewel cases, and a fancy coin bank with a combination lock. Even the bed was still unmade.
Without pausing to think about it, I launched into an immediate hunt for her diary, for common snooping purposes, but also bowing to a resurgent compulsion toward uncovering a hint of the location of her time capsule. I searched drawer after drawer, scanning through notebooks and sketchbooks, pausing on cartoon drawings of Columbus and Magellan, a few indecipherable margin notes, several half-finished haikus. The only real clue I came up with was a telephone book-sized edition of
America’s Best Colleges
whose underlined sentences served to illuminate the subtle hues of Katie’s future plans, her markings highlighting her interest in such campus offerings as “a proud history of political influence,” “tremendous rates of food service satisfaction,” and “options for triple majors.” I was flat on my stomach poking around under the bed when Emily’s voice broke through and I quickly turned the volume down to avoid giving up my position.
“You aren’t in Katie’s room, are you?”
“None of your business,” I whispered.
“I’m not in Katie’s room, okay? Over.”
I crawled out from under the bed and exited as carefully as I’d entered, twisting the handle to mute the sound of the lock clicking against the plate. Next I checked the linen closet, then the bathroom, where I braced myself for a shock if Emily decided to jump out from behind the shower curtain. But she didn’t, so I proceeded down the hallway to her parents’ bedroom, cupping my hand over the receiver and whispering, hoping for a tip-off before my next intrusion.
“I’m on your trail,” I said. I could tell by Emily’s voice that she was cupping the receiver just the same as me.
“How long are you planning on taking to find me?”
“I planned to find you ten minutes ago.”
“I have a feeling you’re really cold, George.”
The Schells’ bedroom looked like a fake set for a furniture catalog. There was a smooth, king-sized canopy bed, a perfectly polished armoire, his and hers reading lamps, and chairs at each window. The whole sense of the room oozed suspicions that someone had just wiped it clean of blood and fingerprints. I started off searching the closet, a long walk-in with cedar panels, rows of suits and oxford cloth shirts along one side, plastic-covered dresses and blouses along the other, all those shoulders swaying lifelike as I reached between them to cover every possible hiding space. Next I crossed over to the bathroom, where I burst through the door fast and brave, immediately switching on the lights to find myself confronted with a dozen reflections in three mirrors, each version of myself assuming the role of the creep in a commercial for burglar alarms. Certain that Emily was somewhere else, but feeling the game ought to last a while longer, I turned back into the bedroom to peruse the armoire, its swinging double doors revealing a wide variety of compartments seemingly designed for distinct secreting purposes. In little time I discovered a treasure trove of items in a drawer that on the surface provided housing for nothing more than baby blue boxer shorts and thin black socks with gold toes (an undergarment that ever since I’ve considered creepily effeminate). With some courage I felt my way beneath the pile, where I soon removed an official Major League baseball encased in a hard plastic cube signed TO MY PAL RICH, BEST WISHES FROM WILLIE MAYS. Other items included a gold watch with a cracked face, a yellowed leaflet missal from midnight Mass at the Vatican Basilica dated December 25, 1943, a laminated wallet-sized copy of the Serenity Prayer, and a battered paperback edition of
Shane
by Jack Schaefer. I replaced the items as I found them, then crept my way from the room, returning ever so quietly to the basement where I immediately spotted Emily’s bare legs dangling over the edge of the leather couch. I stepped around it with one hand out like a pistol, only to find Emily shaking her head, looking bored in a Santa Claus hat, a Jake the Chili King T-shirt, and plain white panties.