The Missing Person (8 page)

“He's ignoring me.”

“Maybe you make him uncomfortable.”

“I haven't said anything!”

“Maybe that's the problem.”

“Why's he so weird?” I said.

Angus laughed as if this was the funniest thing he'd ever heard.

“You're not very patient,” he said. “I like that.”

I sighed. “I'm starting to think you're not very discriminating.”

“Hey,” Wylie called from across the room. I expected him to be looking at me and Angus, but he wasn't. “It's time,” he said.

It was already dark. The group fanned out on foot. I saw Wylie and Stan turn the corner, heading south. Angus loped off down the street in the opposite direction without saying anything, and I found myself in step with Irina and Psyche.

“Where are we going?” I asked. In the lit windows of the houses we passed people were on display. A woman laughed drunkenly at a dinner party, the table crowded with candles, guests slumped in their chairs, the chaos of emptied plates. A cat peered angrily into the darkness from the back of a sofa. A young couple sat on a front-porch swing, smoking cigarettes and watching their sprinkler fan back and forth across the lawn. From most homes, falling over the sidewalks was the blue light of television.

“We'll be there soon,” Irina said. “Stay by me and I will tell you what to do.”

We walked for half an hour through quiet residential streets, seeing no trace of the others. I suspected that Irina's job was to divert me from whatever task was at hand. From within the sling Psyche gurgled softly to herself, as if forming opinions on the journey. Irina was humming—whether to herself or to her baby I couldn't tell, or what she might be thinking about, if she thought at all. Maybe she just followed Angus wherever he went, enjoying her television-induced fantasy of the great American desert.

“Who's Psyche's father?” I said.

Irina answered with one of her sweet smiles, and I was annoyed. How many smiles and nonanswers could a person take in a single day? The baby gurgled again, louder and with an edge in her voice, as if sensing the approach of a sensitive subject.

“I mean it,” I said. “Who is it?”

“It is nobody who you know.”

“Do you have to be so coy?”

“I don't know,” she said. She stopped and looked at me with what appeared to be real consternation. “What is ‘coy'?”

“It's . . . like lying.”

Psyche's gurgle crescendoed to a pissed-off wail. She beat her tiny fist against Irina's chest and her cheeks flushed and swelled with reproach, tears streaming down her face. People came to their windows to see who was crying. Irina hushed her, swaying her hips and whispering into her child's tiny ears. Finally Psyche sniffled and buried her head against her mother's neck.

“Don't call me a liar,” Irina said into the sudden quiet, hoisting the sling higher on her hips. “It's unkind.”

“Look, I'm sorry.”

“I said it was nobody you know.”

“And I said I was sorry.”

She then picked up the pace, and I had to work hard to keep up with her. She didn't look at me at all. We were in a nicer neighborhood now—well-tended gardens, chile ristras and rock lawns, wind chimes above doors, the spicy smoke of piñon wood rising through the air from backyard barbecues. Psyche was asleep.

“This way,” Irina said, her voice low. We were at a service entrance to a golf-course development that wasn't far, if my geography was right, from the cemetery where my father was buried. She slipped through a gap in the fence—surprisingly agile, I thought, for a woman carrying a baby—and then skulked around the perimeter of a vast expanse dotted with huge houses. I thought I could see other forms moving around, but they might have just been shadows. It was very quiet. The air wafting over acres of thick, green grass smelled cooler and wetter—like a giant swatch of Connecticut now stranded, far from home, in New Mexico. Had I come across this place in the Northeast, it would have seemed pleasant and generically suburban, but now, after hearing all the talk about water, I saw it as decadent and even outrageous, ghastly as a fur coat.

Someone whispered my name in the darkness, and I almost tripped on my brother, who was crouching against the trunk of an elm tree. “Get down,” he hissed, and Irina and I kneeled down beside him. He kept glancing over his shoulder, craning his head to look down a nearby street and even up at the sky. I'd never seen him so twitchy. A car came through the gated entrance, its headlights bearing down as if on purpose on where we huddled together behind the tree. Wylie was pressed up against me, and I could smell the sour stench of his breath and his unwashed hair.

After the car turned the corner and disappeared, Wylie pulled out flashlights from his backpack and handed one to each of us. “You're looking for glinting metal in the ground. Irina, go over to this side of the fairway. They should be spaced about twenty feet apart, okay?”

“Yes, of course,” she said, rolling the
r,
her voice dreamy and sweet. He reached again into his backpack and pulled out something wrapped in a towel that turned out to be a wrench. She took it and left immediately, keeping close to the fence.

“You're ready?” he asked, as if I were a stranger he'd been assigned to buddy with. I nodded. After despairing of catching even a glimpse of him, it was strange to be sitting so close, and I held my breath for fear any movement might startle him. He unwrapped another towel and handed me a wrench. “Come on,” he said.

We jogged across the golf course, playing the flashlights here and there, though my eyes were fixed on his dark ponytail.

Then he stopped short and pointed to the ground. “Put the wrench around the nozzle. If possible, you want to pull out the riser it's mounted on too, and the spring around it. But if you can't, just the nozzle's okay. Then go twenty feet and look for another nozzle with your flashlight.”

I looked down at the wrench in my hand. “Is that really going to work?”

“According to my study of the diagrams, it should work perfectly.”

“Wylie, this is stupid. Petty vandalism? Their insurance will cover the repairs, and it'll all be back to normal in a couple of days. What's the point?”

He glowered at me in the dark. His thin shoulders rose and fell with the swift rhythm of his breath, and his chest heaved in and out, almost too fast to see. “If you're not here to do this,” he said, “then you should leave.”

He looked like he hated me. But he was my brother, and I missed him in the elemental way that you can only miss your family or your home. I bent down and started to struggle with the wrench, and Wylie ran off in the dark.

I had no idea what I was doing, and was able to accomplish nothing at all with the wrench. Every time it slipped uselessly on the nozzle, I shook my head in amazement. Somehow Wylie was able to extract sprinklers from the ground, keep a twenty-year-old car running, and live successfully in the mountains for days or weeks at a time. I had no idea how he'd come by all these skills. Neither of our parents was mechanically inclined. My father, the scientist, was rendered helpless by the sight of a clogged toilet or a blown tire; after inspecting such problems, he'd shrug vaguely and leave them to my mother, who would then call the appropriate professional.

After a couple of minutes I stood up, leaving the wrench on the grass. Then I saw Angus—even from a distance I could make out his red hair—running toward me in his military posture and knees-up gait. He grabbed my hands and pulled me into a spin that landed us with a thud on the ground.

“I can't get the thing off,” I told him.

“I know. I've got a bolt cutter,” he said. He set to work, his hands fast and sure. A short while later the metal nozzle crunched and a small spray of water spurted from it onto the grass. He handed me the sprinkler head, then ran off to the next person.

I trudged down the fairway looking for Wylie. Down the slope ahead of me, a sand trap lay cut across the grass like a ditch, almost silver in the moonlight. Up by the green my brother was crouched over a sprinkler with a bolt cutter. His backpack was very well supplied.

“I'm done with mine,” I said. “Angus helped me.”

“You only did one?” he said. He ripped the sprinkler loose, an expression distantly related to a smile twisting his mouth, and ran off to find another.

For a few minutes I walked around the golf course without seeing anyone, still holding my sprinkler head, then found everybody gathered on the bank of a pond. We threw our confiscated goods into the water, where they splashed and sank, and Irina beamed at me and said, “Isn't it wonderful?” There was a lot of manic, happy whispering. I would have liked to join but didn't feel entitled, due to my total incompetence.

Stan led us to an exit road on the far side of the development, and Angus said, “Let's all scatter and meet at the apartment.” Irina gestured for me to walk with her, but I shook my head and said, “I'm going with Wylie.” For a second my brother stood there on the sidewalk tensed on the balls of his feet. Then he just shrugged, and people started peeling off.

The moon shone on the reflective surfaces of signs warning of children playing, one-way traffic, resident parking only. Slouched under his backpack, Wylie soldiered on, his fists clenching and unclenching with the rhythm of his hurried steps. I kept waiting for the absolute perfect thing to say to appear in my mind, and the longer I waited, the more absolute and perfect that thing had to be. Meanwhile his silence was so conspicuous that I could practically see it surrounding him. When he was little, instead of refusing to eat food he didn't like, Wylie just stuck it into a corner of his mouth, sitting at the table like a deranged gerbil, his cheek bulging with brussels sprouts until my mother, half laughing, ordered him to spit it out.

He went inside a 7-Eleven and came out with a bottle of Wild Turkey in a paper bag.

“Could we stop for a second?” I said.

“Why?”

“Because my feet hurt and I'm tired.”

He shrugged again. On the next block, a small, disconsolate playground occupied a patch of dirt. I sat down on the merry-go-round, and Wylie stood punching a tetherball around its pole. We passed the bottle back and forth. Then he pulled a joint out of his pocket and lit it, and we shared that too. I felt slightly better.

“So what's next?” I finally said.

“Are you sure you want to know?”

“Didn't I just ask?”

He thrust his hands into the pockets of his jeans. “We've got a whole summer's worth of stuff planned. Our launch program will roll out activities on a regular schedule. A city experiencing escalating chaos will have to ask itself if its priorities are in the right place.”

“You think so?”

He sat down next to me, and the merry-go-round shuddered slightly under even his delicate weight. We started to spin, slow but definite, pushing off with the soles of our shoes.

“Lynnie,” he said, his voice urgent and guileless, “what does it mean to have beliefs if you don't act on them? Doesn't every single moment of our lives come with a choice attached? You might say these are philosophical questions with no practical bearing, but what I'm trying to tell you is that philosophical questions are the only questions there are.” He lay back against the spinning platform and spread out his skinny arms, the cloth beneath his armpits yellowed with sweat.

“Where are you living?” I said.

“I sleep wherever. Sometimes I camp. I scrounge food from dumpsters. I don't want to get mired down in trappings. I don't want to consume.”

“Except for Wild Turkey.”

“Flexibility,” he said, “is the difference between ideology and dogma.”

Across the street, a light went off and slipped us further into darkness. I couldn't see his face anymore, and but for the rank smell I might have doubted he was there. I let my feet drag in the dirt to stop the spinning. “Listen,” I said. “Speaking of flexibility, I really wish you'd come home. Just for like an hour or something.”

“I can't do that.”

“Wylie, you're being so stupid,” I said. “Of course you can.”

We wandered slowly back to the apartment, talking about nothing in particular. Sirens rose and fell in the distance, and the wind flapped my hair across my face and into my mouth. By the time we arrived the party was in full swing, music playing, Irina slow-dancing with Angus, the baby cradled in between them. There was some Wild Turkey left, and also beer and gin. The dog, annoyed by all the commotion, got up and padded into the other room to sleep.

Seven

We all lay sprawled on sleeping bags, the sounds of breath and snores mingling in the quiet with the rising clatter of birds. Sledge woke me by licking my ankle and prodding his wet nose repeatedly against my foot. Irina was next to me, her head inadequately pillowed on Wylie's stomach, with Psyche pillowed in turn on her more ample body. Angus was nowhere to be seen. Sledge licked me again, this time on the cheek, and whined in my ear. I didn't know why he always picked me. I rolled over, got a dangerous close-up of Stan's hairy armpit, and rolled back again.

It was my second hangover in as many days, but either I hadn't drunk as much last night or I was getting used to the condition. I felt surprisingly fine. I opened the front door and followed the dog down the stairs to the gravel parking lot. The sun was bright yet mild, the street empty, and morning glories I hadn't noticed before bloomed full and blue. Sledge nosed around in the weeds and relieved himself on a prickly-looking shrub with orange flowers. Above me, the apartment door opened and Wylie stepped onto the landing, squinting. “Are you leaving?”

I shook my head. “Not unless you come with me.”

He made a face. “You can't make me.”

“I can try.”

He walked down the stairs, glacier-slow, scowling all the while. At the bottom he called to the dog, who ignored him, being otherwise occupied pawing the dirt and then sniffing it, over and over. Finally he lost interest and trotted to my side, sitting down on his back legs, his face attentive and alert, apparently awaiting further instructions.

“Man, he really likes you.”

“It's unrequited.” I climbed the stairs, and Sledge followed me. I made like I was going inside, and when he scampered in, I closed the door behind him. On the other side of the plywood I could hear his shocked and aggrieved complaints. Having outwitted him gave me an undignified but real sense of satisfaction. Then I went back down and faced Wylie. “Listen,” I said. “You can come now or a week from now, but you do have to come home. I mean it, I'm not leaving until you do. I honestly don't care if you want to vandalize golf courses and eat food out of dumpsters, but you can't not talk to Mom. Seriously, you can't do that.”

In the ensuing silence a jet plane cut across the sky, heading for the Air Force base, trailing a precise white line.

My brother turned his scowl to the ground, to the plane, and reluctantly back to me. “She doesn't understand.”

“I don't care,” I said, holding up the keys to the Caprice. “The car's parked on campus. Let's go.”

We pulled up at the condo just as my mother was leaving for work. At the sound of the car maneuvering boatlike into the driveway she turned from locking the front door and froze.

After a single night in Wylie's apartment the small condo loomed like a four-star resort: elegantly furnished, indulgently large, with washed windows and manicured grounds. For a second I felt a glimmer of revulsion, an almost physical sensation akin to nausea, or a sneeze, and shook my head at my new sympathies. I was turning into the eco-freak Patty Hearst.

Wylie got out of the car and faced her, saying nothing. She looked like she wanted to scratch his eyes out; he looked like he was waiting for her to do it. I felt ignored and beside the point, which almost came as a relief.

“You look terrible,” she said to Wylie.

“So do you,” he said.

I could see him looking her up and down, passing judgment on everything from her office job to the big brown purse weighing down her right shoulder. Back in Brooklyn, on the receiving end of all those late-night messages, I thought that Wylie had patterned himself on our father, with his scientific terminology and pseudo-academic pursuits. But now, seeing the two of them together, it occurred to me that he was much more like our mother, with the same rigid insistence on getting his way, the same tendency to withhold his emotions from the world. She unlocked the door and held it open.

“You're coming in this house, right now, and you're not leaving until I say so.”

Wylie glanced at me and snorted, and I said, “Please.”

As he passed her, she wrinkled her nose and told him in a level, furious voice that he looked disgusting and smelled like a farmhand, and that she shuddered to think by what behavior he had come by such a smell. She said she hadn't raised him to live in a ditch and disappear for months at a time, and asked whether by doing these things he hoped to send her to an early grave. “Is that your goal?” she kept saying. She elaborated on this theme for the next half hour, while Wylie stood in the living room, head bowed, in the posture of a martyr. Finally, as the barrage showed no sign of letting up, he started for the white couch, and she said, crisply, “If you think you're going to set your filthy behind on my clean furniture, then you think wrong.”

She called Francie at the office to explain she'd be late due to “unforeseen circumstances,” and then turned on the shower and stood outside the bathroom tapping her foot until Wylie stepped inside.

While he was showering she made scrambled eggs, fried bacon, brewed coffee, and put bread in the toaster—each gesture, from stirring the eggs to putting juice on the table, executed with the oppressive accuracy of the truly angry. Not knowing what else to do, I set the table, which was getting to be my main contribution to the household.

When Wylie came into the kitchen his hair was flowing loosely down below his shoulders, still wet and gleaming red-brown in the morning sun. He was wearing a pair of khaki shorts and a plaid short-sleeved shirt I recognized—my heart turning over in my chest—as my father's, and he smelled like strawberry shampoo. Our mother nodded at a chair, and he sat down, in what seemed like the first step in some ritual indoctrination. I kept waiting for her to bring out the clippers and shave his head, like at boot camp, but instead she brought out a spatula and served eggs. Wylie and I ate enveloped in stiff silence, throughout which she would not stop staring at him, even as she sipped mechanically at a cup of coffee. I shifted in my seat. She stared and stared.

If Wylie noticed it, he gave no sign. He tucked his long hair delicately behind his ears and ate two servings of bacon and eggs. The silence didn't seem to bother him even a bit. He put away five pieces of toast, an entire sliced tomato, and three glasses of juice.

When he finished, my mother ordered us to do the dishes, then wiped her lips with a napkin and gathered up her purse and keys.

“I have to go to work now, because that's what responsible people do,” she said. “You will be here tonight when I get home at five.” She waited for Wylie to answer, but he didn't. “Lynnie,” she added, and I nodded to make it clear I understood.

The silence lasted while I did the dishes and Wylie dried them and put everything away. I was looking forward to hitting the couch and checking on my old friends in celebrity television, with maybe a side trip to the Weather Channel. But Wylie'd started jittering—tapping his toes, just like our mother, and glancing out the window every fifteen seconds—and I felt compelled to pick up where her staring had left off.

He looked at me, annoyed. “Are you going to do this all day?”

“You heard Mom. If you leave, my life won't be worth living.”

“Lynn, leave me alone. Where I'm going, you can't follow.”

“And where is that?”

“To the bathroom.”

“So you're not leaving, right? Promise me.”

Wylie sighed, and I stared at him until he nodded.

“Okay,” he said, “promise.”

I let him go. I stretched out on the couch, feeling drowsy— still tired from the night before—and when I woke up there was a coin of drool on the couch cushion and a woman on television extolling the long-lasting clean of a brand-new detergent. The house seemed ominously quiet.

I jumped up, checked the bathroom and the bedroom where I'd been staying, then doubled back to the living room and kitchen. It wasn't like there were a lot of places he could hide, but I kept circling through the condo, purposeless and rushed, the way you do in dreams. The Caprice still sat in the driveway, its ivory paint glowing dully in the yellow light of the afternoon. I hopped up and down on the baking asphalt and then headed around back, where my mother maintained a small patch of lawn, and on a shady strip of ground along the side of the house I found Wylie, still moderately clean, snoring in the dirt.

One arm was flung over his side in a gesture of total exhaustion. He looked as if he'd literally fallen down asleep. For a couple minutes I sat in the weeds and studied him: the veins roping down his tanned legs, the slack fabric of my father's too-big shirt against his chest, his nicks and bruises and scars. With shorter hair and glasses, I thought, he'd look eerily like the pictures I'd seen of my father as a young man. Did my mother see this too, every time she looked at him? I didn't know how she could stand it. Seeing him now, exposed and asleep and alive, was almost more than I could handle.

I reached out and flicked my index finger against the thickly callused sole of his right foot, which he moved. I flicked the other foot and he moved that one too, then moaned softly. I flicked his arm and said, “Hey. Wake up.” He nestled his cheek deeper into the dirt, apparently too comfortable to budge. “Let's play cards,” I said. “Or Monopoly. I'm bored.”

After some more flicking and a couple of well-placed pokes, he opened his bleary eyes. The circles beneath them had faded to a vaguer blue. “What are you, six years old?”

“I bet I can still beat you at hearts.”

“In your dreams,” he said.

“My years away from the game have only sharpened my thirst for victory,” I told him.

He sat up. He'd tied his hair back again, and although it was still shiny and thick, he'd managed to rub some dirt and weeds into it during his nap. He was looking like his old self again. “Youth and ability are on my side,” he said. “Let's go.”

We spent the afternoon playing cards and drinking orange juice in the quiet living room, listening to so-called edgy pop music on the radio. I had the feeling that our truce would hold as long as I didn't mention guerrilla tactics, mother's wishes, alternative lifestyles, or weird friends. As a result conversation was limited. We stuck to the game and, in a hobby that dated back to childhood, the construction of elaborate snacks from whatever we could find in the kitchen. After a multi-course meal involving peanut butter, chips and salsa, bananas, ice cream, and popcorn dusted with Parmesan cheese, another round of napping ensued.

Our mother came home at the dot of five, and she didn't come alone. Two seconds after I heard her pull into the driveway, a second car parked alongside the curb. David Michaelson stepped out into the street wearing another Western-style shirt and blue jeans held up with an elephantine silver buckle that would have been useful for attracting the attention of search-and-rescue planes overhead. Two young men then emerged, each a variation on the theme of David Michaelson: beefy, with dark curly hair and thick chests, but slimmer and clean-shaven. They had to be Donny and Darren, the sports stars.

“Oh, God,” I said.

Wylie didn't even look up from his most recent snack, an open-face sandwich layered with tuna fish, cheddar cheese, shredded carrots, and olives. “And you wonder why I don't like to come home.”

The Michaelsons helped unload countless grocery bags from our mother's car and conveyed them up to the front door, as Wylie and I braced ourselves in the living room.

Our mother came inside first and greeted us with a brisk smile. “Children,” she said.

We were having a dinner party. Our mother established headquarters in the kitchen and ordered everyone about: arranging for the unstocking of groceries, the placement of appetizers, the ordering of cocktails.

“Lynn,” David said. “Wylie. What can I offer you both to drink? I believe we've got a full bar.”

I looked at Wylie, who sat with his head bowed, licking tuna juice off his thumb. “I'll have some wine,” I said. “I'm sure Wylie wants a beer.”

“Alrighty then!” David slapped a large hand on my shoulder and went back into the kitchen, crossing paths with his sons, who sat down and slouched back in their chairs, so far that their muscular legs were almost parallel with their heads. Their faces were pale. I knew they both spent a lot of time playing hockey, but couldn't remember which was Donny and which was Darren.

“So,” one of them said. “Long time no see.” He was wearing shorts and a pair of flip-flops with little fishes stuck on the plastic stems between his toes.

I gave them what I hoped was a polite smile. “Since we used to live next door, I guess,” I said.

“Yep,” the other one said. “Long time.”

When their father came back with the drinks, I drank half of mine and asked them how school was going. One of them launched into a complicated story about a fierce rivalry with another team, a saga of violence and retribution that had been going on all season. This led to a greatest-hits list of reminiscences, with highlights about practical jokes and personal vendettas. “So then we go, right?” Donny or Darren said. “And he body-checks me? And gets thrown out of the game?”

“That landed Donny in the hospital,” David said to me. He was sipping from a glass of red wine, and the bottom of his mustache was wet. “He had to have sixteen stitches. This kid was violent.”

“And that's when Darren hatched his nefarious plan.”

“What was that?” Wylie asked.

Michaelson Sr. sat down on the arm of the couch, next to me, with his legs crossed and his arm stretched along the back. The last time I'd seen him, over enchiladas, he was counseling an intervention for Wylie, but he didn't seem about to confront him now.

“My plan involved a frog,” Darren said. “Actually, several frogs.”

“Where we live—you guys remember—we had a lot of frogs in our backyard,” Donny explained. “We captured them, and put 'em in a shoebox and then stuck 'em in his shoes, so when he took off his skates, right . . .” He had to stop, since he was choking on his own laughter.