Picture Me Gone (7 page)

I leaf through it for a minute and then go back to watching the road. How about there, I say, pointing at a white wooden house with green shutters and a wide porch. It has a hand-painted sign that says
LENA’S CURIOSITIES AND CAFE
.

At the same pace that he drives, Gil pulls off the road and glides to a stop.

The menu is nailed to a post on the big wide porch.
Try some soup and sandwiches on Lena’s homemade bread
reads the line across the top. But it’s the curiosities that I’m curious about. And when we push through the door, it’s clear that they’re the main act.

All over the walls are stuffed heads, about fifty of them. There’s a large carved eagle painted black, a stuffed fish, an etching of a herd of buffalo, an entire snake skeleton in a glass display box and a faded Japanese kimono hung on the wall. There’s a big turtle shell made into a bowl and a fish tank full of crab shells. Also a pair of wooden skis with leather bindings nailed to the wall and beside them some snowshoes.

They look very old. A painting in a big gold frame of an Indian squaw kneeling by a fire needs dusting. There are candles in wine bottles on every table. A pigeon I think might be stuffed turns out to be real. Behind the register is a weasel with a rat in its mouth. It’s missing one glass eye. Not everyone would want to eat in these surroundings.

Can our dog come in?

It’s against the law, says the woman, but she looks at Honey and nods. As long as she’s quiet and doesn’t mind cats.

Well, she’s quiet, obviously, but I don’t know what she thinks of cats. Not much, it seems, because she ignores the big gray one staring at us from her perch on the windowsill and lies down under the table. For a big dog, she’s good at slipping into a small space.

You folks from England? the woman asks, and Gil says, Yes.

I like your accent, she says, looking at me, and I don’t know whether to say thank you.

We order bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwiches. I ask for root beer because I’ve never tried it. The person we guess is Lena brings Gil coffee without him asking. When he looks surprised, she frowns.

You don’t want it?

No, he says, flustered, I mean, yes. I do.

So, what’s the problem? Her face is stern.

Gil accepts the coffee.

You staying in Saratoga Springs? Racing fans?

Not really, I tell her. Not at all, in fact.

Well, that’s good cause it’s the wrong season, she says. You’re either much too late or much too early. I went there once with my husband. Long time ago. She cackles a little and then goes off to the kitchen and comes out again with our sandwiches and sits herself down in a big comfortable chair by the door, adding up receipts while we eat. She’s a genuine one-man band, is Lena.

When we come up to pay, she and Gil chat about racing. It’s a short chat. As far as I know, the sum total of Gil’s knowledge about racing is Red Rum and maybe Frankie Dettori, the jockey who dismounts by leaping up in the air.

Where’d you say you folks are off to? asks Lena when the conversation fades. Gil tells her the name of the town that’s closest to Matthew’s camp and she says, Still a long way to go.

And I think, You can say that again.

H
ave you ever seen a terrier at work? It stands stock-still, quivering all over with anticipation, waiting for the moment the slip collar comes off. Then there’s a fraction of a second where it seems to explode, launching itself forward at its prey. And a terrible snarling and growling and shaking and squeaking as it gets to grips, quite literally, with the rat. It’s not nice, but it is impressive. And quick.

It is not a sense of responsibility or a desire to please that makes a dog do this. It’s what they’re bred to do. They can’t help it. If I were a dog, I’d be part terrier.

The rational part of me makes a flow chart with two columns, headed
MATTHEW IS DEAD
and
MATTHEW IS ALIVE
.

If Matthew is dead, there are four possibilities:

(A) Murder

(B) Suicide

(C) Accidental death

(D) Illness—stroke or heart attack?

At Suzanne’s, I Googled cases of people who suddenly walk away from their homes and families. Some of the reasons are:

(A) Madness

(B) Amnesia

(C) Money problems

(D) Marital woes

(E) Secret second family

(F) Depression

(G) Fired from job but hasn’t told wife

(H) Crisis of religious faith or near-death experience

(I) Terrible secret

(J) Kidnapping

(K) Mental illness

(L) Doesn’t know why

Many of these reasons are confusing. Why wouldn’t you tell your wife if you lost your job? What’s so bad about a crisis of faith? What sort of secret? Someday I’ll understand more of these things. At the moment I just have to think them through. Not everything you want to know is explained properly on Google.

To be thorough, I have to take into account the possibility that Matthew was kidnapped. But why would someone kidnap a middle-aged professor of British history? I have no idea. For all I know he has links to the Chinese underworld, about which I know less than nothing, except what I once saw in a TV movie.

Despite the fact that I can sweep a crime scene for rats like a terrier, I frequently have trouble putting clues together due to gaps in my knowledge of the world. I could do with a middle-aged accomplice. Gil is not the person for this job. Miss Marple would be better.

Take marriage. Marieka and Gil have been together for twenty years but have never married. Marieka says it’s because where she grew up, women were independent and didn’t want to have some man put a ring on their finger and tell them to do the washing-up.

This makes me laugh. I can’t imagine either of my parents acting like that. When I asked Gil why he and Marieka never married, he said, I wouldn’t dream of presuming.

Presuming what? I asked.

I don’t remember if he answered.

Matthew had lots of girlfriends but didn’t get married till he met Suzanne. He was forty-two. This tells me something too, but I’m not sure what. Whenever I imagine him, it’s on a mountain with a frozen beard. Not the sort of person you imagine getting married.

Most of my friends at school have parents who look like married people are supposed to look—women in dresses, men in ties. Catlin’s mum trained as a teacher but stays home each day while Catlin’s dad goes to work for a software company. Every time I see her, I think she looks out of place in her house as if she doesn’t know where to sit.

Gil glances away from the road for the briefest of seconds and asks what I’m doing and I tell him I’m thinking as hard as I can, in circles and retrogrades and whatever else I can drum up. I ask him the same question and he says he’s driving Matthew’s wife’s car up toward Canada.

I know that, I answer. But what else?

I’m thinking too, he says. I’m thinking about my fool of a friend.

What have you concluded? I ask, ignoring the comment about the fool.

Nothing, Gil says. What about you?

I’m trying to be methodical, I say—slightly pointedly, because he never is. I’m trying to organize the possibilities. Once we’ve done that, it will make our job a little easier.

Oh, you think so?

Yes, I do. I look over at him. He’s facing forward because he’s driving, but he swivels an eye on me.

Look, I say. You can’t just let your thoughts float around in the ether and hope eventually they’ll connect with something. It’s absurd.

No, it’s not, Gil says. Lots of good things happen that way. Penicillin. Teflon. Smart dust. Something happens that you weren’t expecting and it shifts the outcome completely. You have to be open to it.

When I open my brain, I tell him, things bounce around and fall out. They don’t connect with anything. Maybe I haven’t got enough points of reference stored up yet.

You’re young, he says, that’s probably it. When I let
my
thoughts float around, I trust that they’ll latch on to something useful in the end or make an association I wouldn’t necessarily have predicted. I’m trusting that they’ll find the right thought to complete, all by themselves. The right bit of fact to go
ping.
You have to trust your brain sometimes.

Maybe, I’m thinking. But so far I only trust my brain up to a point. Without guidance it could skew off in any crazy direction or just wander into a cul-de-sac for a snooze. That’s why I make charts. Anyway, I say to Gil, I hope it happens. I really do. Because my flow chart hasn’t got me anywhere useful.

Gil smiles without taking his eyes off the road. We’ll get there.

You think so? Privately I’m feeling doubtful, but I don’t say so.

Yes. One way or another, we will.

OK, I say, and then I stop making a flow chart, reach back and pat Honey, who’s dozing, and look out of the window for a while. But it’s hard to stop my brain from thinking.

Tell me everything you know about the accident, I say to Gil.

Which accident?

The one that killed Owen.

He glances at me. Is that relevant?

Of course it’s relevant. How can I understand Matthew without all the facts? You never know which ones will turn out to be important.

OK, Gil says. OK. But I’m not sure I remember everything.

I sit very still and wait.

So . . . Matt picked Owen up after a swimming practice, says Gil. It was evening. Winter. Dark. They had to take the highway for a short distance, just long enough for one of those big articulated tractor-trailers to skid and crash into the back of their car. It was crushed.

The whole car?

The back of the car.

And what about Matthew?

He was uninjured. Bruised a bit.

Wait . . . Owen was sitting in the back?

Yes.

That’s strange.

I don’t know, Perguntador. Maybe American kids have to sit in the back because it’s safer?

Little kids. He was taller than Suzanne.

Maybe they’d just dropped someone off or he wanted to stretch out. Maybe there was shopping in the front. Sports kit.

Maybe. And then?

They were in the fast lane. An ambulance came. Police. I remember Suzanne telling Marieka at the time that Matthew was completely exonerated by the police.

Exonerated? I’m frowning, confused.

Found not guilty.

Not guilty of what? Was he a suspect?

I don’t think so. It’s just normal, I guess. Make sure he didn’t fall asleep at the wheel or wasn’t on drugs or anything.

I think about this. Exonerated? The grieving father? I try to picture the scene. Once more I look at Gil. What about the truck? I ask.

It was coming up behind them. The driver tried to swerve and flipped over the center strip. The back of it must have swung round and smashed Matt’s car.

And the driver?

I guess he died too.

You
guess
he died?

He died.

A moving picture takes shape in my brain. Matthew and Owen in the fast lane, far left. The truck coming up behind them. Not in the same lane, presumably, not in the fast lane. One lane to the right. What causes a huge truck to skid?

Are you sure he tried to swerve, or are you just making that up?

Gil thinks. Pretty sure. Most of my information came from Marieka, he says. I never had the heart to ask for more details. Why?

Well, if you’re going to crash into someone, especially when you’re coming up from behind, you don’t skid first. Do you?

Maybe it was icy. Maybe he was pulling over into Matt’s lane and didn’t see him.

Those guys drive for a living. Would they make a mistake like that? And how often have you seen one of those huge tractor-trailers in the fast lane? And even if he
did
pull into Matthew’s lane, the truck driver would have been fine. Matt would have spun and crashed, not the truck. Can’t you see it in your head?

Despite a thorough understanding of my father’s limitations, I feel impatient.

Not really, he says. What about ice?

Maybe.

Or maybe he was tired.

Tired or not, I can’t see how it was the truck driver’s fault. The picture in my head is clear now. I can see Matthew’s car brake or drift out of lane or do something that causes the guy behind him to brake so hard, he skids and flips over the central reservation, crushing the back of Matthew’s car with the fishtail. If Owen had been sitting in the front, he’d have survived.

Strictly speaking, there’s nothing so strange about sitting in the backseat of a car when it’s just you and your father. But if you were having a fight, would you sit in the back? Wouldn’t you just hunch in the corner of the front seat staring out of the window, feeling wronged? And if you were tired, wouldn’t you also just slouch down in the front? Maybe Owen liked sitting in the back, or he’d hurt his leg in practice and wanted to stretch out, or there was a big bag of shopping in the front seat.

I store the question in a file in my head marked
M
for
maybe.

T
he sign reads
SCENIC DRIVE
and points off to the right. Gil turns. I guess we may as well enjoy the view, he says, having come this far.

I thought we were on a mission. Life or death.

We are, Gil says. But Suzanne said it’s really beautiful.

Am I imagining things or is everyone treating this trip like some kind of halfhearted holiday thing, like a treasure hunt to keep us occupied as long as we just happen to be in America anyway?

I look at Gil. Seriously? The scenic route?

He looks back. Would you rather stick to the motorway?

OK. OK. I check the map. There appears to be a big long lake coming up on the right and lo and behold, the dense trees all at once give way to long views across a narrow bright-blue stretch of water with mountains beyond.

Look! I say, and then regret it as Gil slows even more and in the mirror I can see the driver behind us, fuming. On the next clear stretch the guy passes us with a huge roar of his engine. From the cab of his insanely large pickup, he shoots us a contemptuous look. There are guns on a rack in the back window.
Guns?

Did you see that?

Gil nods. They must be for decoration, he says. Hunting season’s October.

I stare at him. Did you memorize the guidebook or what?

You can’t shoot animals who’ve just given birth or are pregnant. Even in America. So, it’s autumn/winter for slaughter, just like at home.

Great. Now I’m scanning the edges of the woods for bears and deer with offspring. Doomed, yes. But not right away.

A couple of miles later, the view breaks off and we’re driving through a pretty little town balanced on the edge of the lake and the sun makes hard reflections on the water. We drive past a boatbuilder and a couple of big elegant old Victorian houses. Gil pulls in at an ice cream place.

Without asking, he orders tall spirals of ice creams for us both, vanilla and chocolate mixed, and a cup of coffee for himself. We sit outside at a wooden picnic table. The air is cool and the sun warm enough to induce sleep. Neither of us feels any rush to get back on the road.

Gil picks up a local paper that someone’s left behind and he’s reading it back to front, studying the classifieds. I break the bottom off my cone and feed it to Honey and then she and I head down to the water with my ice cream dripping down my hand. I sit on the grass and stare at the lake and the mountains with the sun on the back of my neck. Honey’s beside me. I give her my ice cream to finish. According to Gil, Native Americans once lived here. You can see why they chose it.

Honey and I circle back to Gil.

Look, he says, we could buy an aboveground swimming pool for just four hundred bucks. Or a Nearly New Weed-Whacker. He flips pages and I look over his shoulder at a picture of a raccoon family caught on someone’s CCTV. They look furtive, like raccoon criminals.

Honey positions herself in the sun and lowers herself down, head across her paws. She is a beautiful creature with a noble head, but I can see that under her thick white coat her body is gaunt. She is old, Gil thinks. My age.

Ninety miles to go. On these roads that’s at least two hours, he says, and I suddenly wish we were making this journey for pleasure. I would prefer to be meandering at no pace at all, stopping and going just on the whim of the moment. But even the scenic route can’t stop me thinking about Matthew and the pieces missing from the jigsaw. Most of the pieces. All I’ve got so far is sky.

Think, I think. Think of the facts: Owen died three years ago. In a collision with a lorry. It wasn’t Matthew’s fault. He was completely exonerated by the police.

When you’re looking for answers, it’s the things that nag at your brain that count.

Exonerated?

Gil flips over to the front page, where there’s a large picture of the winners of the local ten-mile Fun Run. It’s mostly women with their arms around one another, grinning. At the bottom there’s a notice about hunting licenses and a list of regulations, with a big jolly headline that says
HUNTING SEASON’S COMING SOON
.

I read more. The notice says you must be over the age of twelve to apply for a license, and a ten-hour safety course is required for new applicants. It also says that 189,000 deer were shot last year in New York State with only twenty-nine injuries to humans, none fatal. One hundred and eighty-nine thousand deer. And three hundred and eighteen bears. Who would want to kill a bear? You can’t even eat them. The thought of all those dead animals depresses me. A picture that goes with the article shows a happy guy holding up the lolling head of a dead deer. The caption says “
Steve Wilson and a nice ten-pointer.
”

What sort of place is this?

We flop back into the car. It’s hot, and once we get going I turn the air-conditioning on. Honey pants a little in the back. We’ve lingered and dawdled and it’s late afternoon before we finally leave the highway for a smaller road. Gil stops for petrol. He pays and returns to the car, but instead of driving off, he sits back, hands resting on the steering wheel, and turns to me.

What shall we do now? he asks. We can get there tonight if we drive straight through.

Let’s not, I say.

It may just be nerves but I don’t like the idea of confronting anything in the half dark, whether it’s Matthew or not-Matthew. Plus, I don’t want our journey to be over so soon. What if we find Matthew and he’s furious that we’ve chased him all the way up to the Canadian border after he and Suzanne had a fight and decided to be apart for a while? Or what if we find him with a new girlfriend or some kind of contraband? Twenty-eight kilos of cocaine? What if he hates us for coming all this way after him like he’s some sort of criminal? What if he
is
some sort of criminal?

I don’t say all this, but Gil nods anyway. Maybe he’s thinking the same thing.

OK.

I’m staring at the map. We could go to Lake Placid. It looks quite big on the map. What’s there?

The 1980 Winter Olympics, Gil says and passes me the guidebook. Have a look.

I read the entry, which reports that Lake Placid is a charming town with a delightful mix of restaurants, retail facilities (retail
facilities
?), antique shops and sporting goods outlets. “
You’ll find something for everyone in Lake Placid!
” says the book in a grammatically annoying way, and with all that stuff going on and all those retail facilities I’m finding it hard to imagine that Lake Placid is actually very placid.

I read some more and then look at Gil. Could we stay there tonight?

They’ll have plenty of motels, anyway, he says, and pulls off the road to look at the map. Over his shoulder I see a picture of the ski jump built for the old Olympics.

Christ, it’s terrifying, he says, following the direction of my gaze. It’s hard to imagine anyone actually skiing down that thing.

I close my eyes for a few seconds and think what it would feel like to drop onto that near-vertical slope, fly down in the crouch position, then explode off the lip of the jump at two hundred miles an hour. I would land on the ice with a splat like a bag of baked beans.

Half an hour later, we pass the real thing. We pull over and get out to look at it. Gil stares. Never in a million years, he says, and sounds like he means it. But at least it has a lift to the top. Not like a mountain. What about you?

Me? I shake my head. No way. Do you miss those days? I ask, thinking of mountain climbing.

Gil shakes his head. No.

Why did you do it?

I don’t know, Mila. I was young. And Matt was so convincing. If he said climbing was the thing, we climbed.

God knows where they’d have ended up if they’d lived in different times. I’m imagining my father and Matt as highwaymen or in the French resistance, taking terrible risks. As Hitler Youth.

Would Matthew ski down that?

Gil smiles. He’d probably try.

Didn’t you like climbing at all?

I don’t know, Gil says. Of course I did. I don’t think I’d have started on my own, but I got addicted to the kick.

Adrenaline, I suggest and he nods.

We climb back into the car, drive into town and park. It’s pretty and well tended, and though I’ve never been to Switzerland, it looks like my idea of Switzerland—quaint little wooden shops and restaurants facing the lake with the mountains beyond. Minus the guys in lederhosen. And the mountains aren’t very big, not like the Alps.

While Gil looks for a real newspaper, I try texting again.

Matthew. It’s Gil’s daughter Mila again. We need to find you. Pls txt me when you get this message.

After some consideration, I take out the line about needing to find him. And the Gil’s daughter bit too. The world is not filled with people called Mila.

Matthew. It’s Mila. Txt me when you get this.

I wait for some time but there’s no reply, so I text Marieka just to say hi and then Catlin. Neither of them answers either.

We shop around town for a while, looking at things in windows. There’s an old wooden sleigh in the antique shop next to some blue-and-white jugs, and a bookshop with a beautiful view of the lake.

And then, in the window of the deli, I find the Easter egg of my dreams. The pattern on it is cowboys—cowboys with lassos, cowboys riding cow ponies and bucking broncos, cowboys herding cows, cowboys with cowgirls. It’s such an incongruous theme for an Easter egg that I burst out laughing. And to top it off, it’s enormous.

Oh my god, it’s perfect! Catlin will die of happiness, I say and Gil rolls his eyes, no doubt thinking of the price.

But when we go in and ask how much it is, the deli man says it’s not for sale.

I can’t sell it in all good faith, he says. It’s left over from two years ago, so it’ll be stale. Lots of people have asked to buy it, but I’m afraid it’s staying right here. Hi-ho, Silver!

I can understand his point but I want this egg so badly I’m running a whole series of silent scenarios that include breaking into his shop in the dead of night and stealing it.

I don’t suppose there’s another one?

He shakes his head.

Does it bring in more business for the other eggs? I ask, determined to blind him with the logic of getting rid of it.

He shakes his head again, mournfully this time. I have no idea. It’s kind of a folly, he says. But it looks good in the window, don’t you think? Lured you in, anyway.

The other salesperson laughs.

See? he says. They all laugh at me. But everyone loves my cowboy egg. Hi-ho, Silver!

I’m wondering what’s with the Hi-ho, Silver, but what I say is, Please could you at least consider selling it? I have a friend at home whose parents are getting divorced and she’s really upset and depressed and this egg would definitely cheer her up. I sneak a peek at him to see if my story is working. She’s desperate, I say in my saddest lowest voice.

Well, he says slowly, shaking his head. That’s a pretty sad story. But I’m afraid it’s out of the question. It’s not for sale. And besides, it’s two years old. It won’t even taste good.

I think of Catlin. She wouldn’t care what it tasted like. It’s something else she wants, from me. A sign. This egg is a great big blinking sign that says, we are friends forever and we laugh at the same things.

You’d be asking me to disappoint a whole town, says the child-hating deli guy. Maybe next year.

I know it’s only an egg but I feel like crying. Maybe another amazing egg will appear somewhere on our journey. Maybe America is full of them. But in my heart I know it isn’t. And then I try to convince myself that the perfect Easter egg doesn’t matter, especially when Matthew might be dead, and how on earth would I have managed to get it home anyway? But the egg would matter to Catlin. I know it would. It would make her happy, even just for a minute.

Dad buys a bottle of local organic hand-squeezed artisan apple juice and I glare at him because I hate the idea of giving this man any of our money.

A collar of reindeer bells on the door rings as we go out. Hi-ho, Silver! the man calls, but I don’t look back.