Sister (20 page)

One night, just as my father and I were finishing our supper, the phone rang, a sudden, violent trill. My father leapt up. “Stay right where you are!” he said, pacing circles around the table as the answering machine kicked on, his own disembodied voice stating that no one could come to the phone. After the tone, there was a pause before the click of the receiver. “Who the hell was that?”

“How should I know?” I said, but I thought I'd recognized my mother's sigh. I could see her sitting at the kitchen table, her decaffeinated coffee chilling in its cup, her work pushed to one side. She was looking out the window toward the highway, the old pear trees lost in the fiery lace of autumn, the sunset a crimson line. She was wondering how to find out if I was OK, without my father discovering she had been involved in my visit. And as my father checked the locks on the doors, mumbling about thieves, I realized that even though the material things in his life had grown spare, he was still as large as he'd ever been. My week in Florida was almost up. Tomorrow would be my last full day, and I promised myself it would not go to waste.

In the morning, I got up early and went out to the carport. The Fords' keys were under the driver's-side floor mat,
which was where my father had always kept them. I was surprised to see a quarter-size starburst on the windshield, a scratch that ran the length of one fender. In Horton, he'd babied his cars, purring to them in cold weather, oiling their dark, mysterious coils. He'd spent one summer working on an old Mustang, going from junkyard to junkyard like a crow, scavenging for that perfect piece of shining metal. He enlisted Sam's help, but Sam's aptitudes, much to my father's disappointment, were not mechanical ones. His scold—“Goddamnit, son!”—rang through the apple trees on hot summer nights when Sam misunderstood an instruction or dropped one of my father's pristine heirloom tools. By the time Sam started high school, the Mustang had become the hub of an argument that had circled for so long its track was worn permanent, private, deep. They never did get it running.

“What were you up to out there?” my father said when I came in for our breakfast of peanut-butter toast, which, according to my father, would boost our energy.

“I was thinking about spending a day at the beach,” I lied. “Would it be OK if I borrowed the car? I could stop at a grocery store, get you some things they don't have at the center. I'll be going home tomorrow,” I said. “So if there's any other errand you want me to—”

“The beach!” my father exploded, his shock catapulting us over the issue of the car, my departure, his possible grocery store needs, and into new, dangerous territory. “No, definitely no.” His chin shook faintly; a diamond of saliva was caught near the corner of his mouth. Didn't I know there were dirty needles in the ocean off the coast of Virginia, Massachusetts, New Jersey? “You could get hurt. Something could happen.”

After we'd finished eating, he scraped the crumbs from our plates, scrubbed the table and countertops vigorously with ammonia. I waited until he had gone into the bathroom for his shower, which I knew by now would last precisely ten minutes,
and then I got the flyers from my duffel bag.
Back by dark
, I scrawled on a paper towel, and I left it on the table for my father to see. I eased myself out the front door and locked up the way he had shown me.

The Ford was like my father, suspicious, unwilling to move beyond its daily routine. When the engine caught, a thick black cloud drifted over the other driveways and lawns. I backed out and eased along the narrow lane toward the highway, expecting to see my father burst from the trailer, partially clothed, foaming cinnamon Crest. But he had three more minutes left to shower as I spread the map across the seat. The first town on my mother's list was Matlache; it was on the way to Pine Island, where there were two more circled cities. Away from my father and the close, chilled air of the trailer, I became aware that my cold was finally gone.

Matlache was unincorporated, the small green sign like a chewed leaf, rough with bullet holes. The town was a parallel chain of stilt houses caught between Highway 78 on one side and the bay on the other. The bay bisected the east and west sides of the town briefly; they were tenuously connected by a long, narrow bridge, where people gathered to fish and smoke, staying close to Styrofoam coolers of beer. There was an ice cream shop, a turquoise store, a marina and fish market, surrounded by pickup trucks. There was also a small, tired-looking bar and grill, called The Mullet. The sign in the window said it opened at eleven.

I parked at the marina and walked down to the waterfront, where shrimp boats were docked. A group of fishermen had gathered around a giant stingray that hung from a winch, suffocating under the weight of its own body. Gulls squawked on the pilings, hissing at one another along the rotting docks. A great blue heron stood in their midst, evil-eyed, its long bill an eager spear. The birds, like the men, kept their eyes on the ray. Its beautiful body bucked once and was still. I shivered and crossed the street to the
gas station, where I bought gas and then a Coke, craving caffeine. “You mind if I post a flyer?” I asked the teenage girl working the cash register.

“I don't care what you do.”

“Have you seen this person?” I said. My voice didn't sound like my own; it was pleading, the voice of someone who needs a favor. I struggled to lower it. “He's my brother.” Now it sounded like a lie.

“I seen nobody,” the girl said, not looking, staring into her hands. Her nails were long and polished red, with a clear decal of a sunflower pressed to each tip. I posted the flyer and went back outside. The Mullet seemed like a more visible place, but it wouldn't open for another hour. To pass time, I walked up the street to the group of little shops, each tended by a middle-aged woman in a similar floral smock. I explained that my missing brother might be in the area, and the women nodded, their lips narrowing sympathetically. One refused to let me post the sign; the owner might not approve: They catered to tourists who came to Florida to look at beautiful things, not the faces of missing people. But she took a flyer for herself, promising to post it at her church in Saint James City. Looking at it closely, she said, “I haven't seen this man before, but I think I've seen this picture.”

“On TV?” I asked.

“At The Mullet!” she said suddenly. “You know the bar by the water? It's up on the wall there as you walk in. They should be opening pretty soon.”

I thanked her and left, figuring she'd mistaken Sam for another missing person on another flyer. I often read the bulletin boards in laundromats, at bus stops, in grocery stores and libraries, scanning the litany of lost names, deliberate facts. Four feet tall. Brown hair; red hair. Green eyes; black eyes. Can't speak. Answers to Sweetheart. The faces on the flyers were fuzzy, smudged, the eyes staring like the eyes of the dead.

The neon sign in the front window of The Mullet still glowed
CLOSED
, but the door was open, propped back by a straggly potted palm. There was a faint fishy odor of fry-grease lingering in the parking lot; two trucks and a rusted Chevy Nova were parked in the half-shade of the awning. I went inside, conscious of my shorts and bare arms. The air was cool and dark, stale with cigarette smoke, and it took a minute for my eyes to adjust.

“We're not ready for ya, hon,” a woman called to me from the grill behind the bar. “Coffee's making, but that's all we got right now.”

“Coffee's fine,” I said. There was no bulletin board, no place to pin a flyer. I sat down at the far end of the bar, wrapping my feet around the legs of the stool.

“Bottomless cup,” the woman said, giving me my coffee and a quick smile before hooking the phone off the wall and dialing briskly. “It's me,” she said into the receiver. “You better get your ass in here. I got customers.” She rolled her eyes at me. “I don't want to hear about it.” When she hung up, she was laughing.

“My son's got himself a little girlfriend. Makes it hard to get him up in the morning.”

I could see how it would be when her son finally arrived, the good-natured back-and-forth between them. “Could you tell me if you've seen this person?” I said, taking a flyer out of my bag. “He's my brother.”

“Just a minute,” she said, turning down the grill. When she came back to the counter, she sighed, pushing her hair behind her ears, revealing tiny sparkling earrings, the brightest things in that room. “Haven't found him yet?” she said. “So sorry, hon. I still got his picture posted at the waterside entrance.”

“This same person?” I asked, astonished. “How did you get his picture?”

“Some old guy brought it in a while ago. Maybe a year…was it that long?” She put one finger to her cheek, thinking. “He asked for a glass of water, and he drank it like this”—she pantomimed, mouth open, head back—“so his lips wouldn't touch
the glass. You could tell he had some sort of nervous problems. He thought your brother might be working one of the boats, but these are all our local boys. I'll tell you what I told him—if this boy shows up, I'll sure call.”

I wanted to touch my own face to see what expression I was wearing.

“Hon,” she said. I must have looked sad. “I am sorry about your brother.”

“Thanks,” I said, and after I finished my coffee, I ordered a beer. The woman's son arrived and served it to me, rumple-headed, his face still faintly creased from the bedsheets. “Hustle up there, Romeo,” the woman said.

“Aw, Ma.”

She winked at me, bumped his hip with her own.

“Aw, Ma.”

“My Romeo,” she said. “My lady-killer.”

When I left, they were working at the grill, side by side, the son smiling back at her beneath the tangled curtain of his hair. I spent the day doing what my mother had asked, posting flyers in Saint James City, Bokeelia, swinging back inland to Cape Coral. Nearly everywhere I went, I found my father's faded flyers. Eventually, I ended up in Fort Myers, where I walked along a crowded beach, stepping over sand castles, broken shells, the tanned feet of lovers. It was getting dark by the time I returned to Pleasant Acres, sunburned and thirsty, eager to put the week behind me. My father was waiting for me at the kitchen table. “Where'd you go?”

“Beach.”

“I remember telling you no.”

I felt as if I'd been sucked back into childhood: I saw myself standing before him, small, frightened, trying to keep my face impassive as I waited to be punished for whatever rule I'd broken. But then I came back into myself, into the present: I was not a
child anymore. “It's good to know you remember something right,” I said. “All that crap you told Lily Sweet about Sam.”

My father looked away from me, stared into the cup of his own clasped hands. “Sam was a good boy,” he finally said, so gently he could have been my mother. “Isn't it something, how he could just disappear like that? How anyone of us”—he snapped his fingers—“and that's it. That's all.” He touched the tips of his index fingers together, over and over. “I worried about you all day.”

“I'm sorry.”

“All day long.”

“I'm sorry,” I said again.

He got up and went to the kitchen. I sat down on the couch as if nothing had happened. But the interaction had shattered the balance of caution and silence we'd woven between us. During supper, we made polite conversation. We watched each other, caught each other watching. Before he went to his room for the night, my father dug into his pocket and handed me another key. “You can look in Sam's room if you want,” he said, in a voice I didn't recognize. “Just don't change anything, OK? I got it all laid out the way I like it.” And then, without warning, he started to cry, his arms at his sides, not hiding his face. I put my arms around him, and for a moment, he did not pull away.

The room smelled of cedar and the underlying odor of Florida tap water, mildewed, swampy, strange. The only light aside from the dull overhead fixture was the lamp that had once been beside my bed. It belonged to both Sam and me when we'd shared a room as children, arguing whether to leave the door open or closed, the night-light on or off. There was the tricycle that had first been mine, pink, with pink tassels streaming from the handlebars. I remembered how my legs had stretched to reach the pedals. When Sam was old enough to inherit it, my father had repainted it red, white, and blue. Now, in old age, its true color
showed through. There were Sam's old skateboards leaning up against the wall and, beside them, the baseball and bat and glove that he never used much, despite my father's earnest lectures on How a Sport Builds Character. There were boxes of schoolwork my mother had saved, Sam's and mine jumbled together; the childish drawings hanging on the walls were the ones I had given her because she said she liked them. The Horton Wildcats banner on the wall had been my father's gift to Sam, but I'd never seen the football trophies before. I picked one up; it belonged to my father's brother, my uncle who had died in the war. The plaques behind them were mine; I'd assumed they were still boxed up in my bedroom closet.
Chopin Competition, Third Prize, Milwaukee. Contemporary Musical Festival, First Prize, Minneapolis. Milwaukee Conservatory Medal of Achievement
. I touched them, remembering a time when I thought myself capable of great things. I touched the drawings, the schoolbooks, the fishing pole Sam hadn't wanted for Christmas. I touched the padded varsity jacket hanging in the closet, the kind football players wore.

This was not Sam's jacket. These were not Sam's old-fashioned athletic shoes. Sam wore black leather jackets and combat boots, the tongues hanging out, obscene. Sometimes, at night, he wore eye makeup and bracelets studded with metal, his hair spiked tall and fierce. A car would be waiting, there was always a car waiting, with the radio thumping and the windows rolled up and tinted dark so you couldn't see who was inside, and then Sam would be passing through the kitchen and out the door as if he were already invisible, safe, gone. Outside, a door would swing open like a welcoming arm, and for a moment the music would be crisp and sharp, and maybe we'd hear voices and the sort of laughter men use only among themselves. And then the car would squeal down the long gravel drive and roar toward Milwaukee, most nights not returning until dawn.