Dana Spiotta: Stone Arabia

“Good morning,” she said.

He nodded. “What can I do for you?”

“I’m looking for a woman. A babysitter.”

“Yes.”

“Alice Blake.” The man nodded. He walked back to the farmhouse and stepped inside. In a few moments, he walked back to her. He pointed over to the house.

“Go to the door that says ‘honey for sale.’ There, at the back.”

“Great, thank you.” Denise walked the path to the white farmhouse. The door he pointed to was on a recently built extension. One side had Tyvek insulation sheets nailed to it. Are they allowed to use Dupont-produced Tyvek? But they weren’t random Luddites. They just wouldn’t use anything that would distract them from their worship of God. Keeping your house warm, up here, was not a luxury. It was a practicality. Denise enjoyed reading about them. They weren’t trying to live in the nineteenth century, the way people always think. They were just very cautious and deliberate about technological “innovation.” They protect their undistracted life. They are suspicious of progress, improvement, new things. They don’t blindly grab at whatever is new. They consider such things with deep skepticism. It wasn’t hard to see how much better that might work for someone.

Denise knocked softly on the door, which was unlocked and slightly ajar. She heard someone coming downstairs, and then the door opened and the woman Alice Blake stood before her. She looked like the woman Denise remembered from television, but older. Denise looked into her face — it definitely was the same woman.

“I’m Denise Kranis,” she said. “Are you Alice?”

She nodded. “Yes, good to meet you.” She gestured for Denise to step into the entryway. It felt very dark after the sunlit yard.

“You are looking for a sitter?” she said.

Denise felt strange and panicked for a moment. She stared at Alice. She shook her head.

“No, not really. That’s not true, I’m sorry. I’m very sorry.”

Alice’s brow twitched and she frowned. She pulled back ever so slightly. She knew why Denise was there. Denise felt her mouth go dry; she hadn’t really thought things through.

“What I want to say, what I want to tell you, is I’m so sorry for your loss.” Denise could feel her throat constricting as she spoke. “I want to tell you, I want to help you. Find your daughter, I mean. I know they still haven’t found anything. If I can help you.” Denise felt tears clouding her eyes, and she wiped them. The woman stood there, not moving. There she was, a stranger, so strange, really. I just wanted to help you. Because, because. How could she know I meant well? Does she think I’m something terrible, a pain tourist?

The woman could have told her to mind her own business. She could have become angry and told her to leave. But she didn’t. She also didn’t take Denise’s hands and hold them as she uttered a prayer in German. She didn’t do that. She didn’t start to cry, she didn’t say, “Thank you, sister.” She didn’t do any of those things.

She looked at Denise. Her eyes were very light blue and rimmed in red. Her skin was pale, and Denise could see she actually wasn’t very old at all. They stood there for a moment, silently looking at each other. Finally she spoke.

“It is all right. I already know my child is with the Lord.”

There was, of course, nothing to be done. She was right. Denise nodded, but didn’t move. Alice held the door open. Denise walked through and then turned back to the woman.

“It will be all right,” the woman said.

Denise walked to her car, climbed in, and backed out of the long dirt driveway.

She drove down to the city, to Ada, to all that was left.

Sometimes Denise imagined he was in Mexico, with a young wife to take care of him. Maybe he played guitar on a street corner, but that seemed unlikely. If he sold some of his things or if he secretly had stashed some money. It was possible. The police never found out anything.

Denise looked at the link Ada had sent her. Ada’s movie, Garageland, was long finished, but she had yet to find a distributor. So she posted the film in ten-minute increments on the new video website YouTube. Miraculously, or maybe not, the clips had quickly acquired thousands of hits.

The clips with old Fakes footage had the most hits. And the most comments. But the link Ada sent was for a clip of Denise. She was filmed going through Nik’s things, packing them in boxes.

ADA (offscreen)

What are you going to do with all of his stuff?

DENISE

Move it to my garage.

ADA

What do you miss most about not having your brother around?

DENISE

It is just … knowing someone your whole life — no first impressions, no seductions, no getting to know each other. It is all know, at times too much know. It is hard to accept, that knowing between us being gone.

She stretched her arm across a stack of boxes. Three rows of stacked boxes were visible behind her.

The disputes, as you age, over what is the true know, checking memories against each other, sometimes sweetly, sometimes for a talk, a sorting out, and other times angrily, because all it takes is a hint, a flash of a gun in a jacket, secret and lethal. It is hard to believe that is really gone. (She pauses, regards the boxes beneath her arm.) But there is this.

ADA

What remains.

DENISE

And what I remember, of course.

Five thousand hits and counting. People speculated in the comments over who Nik Worth really was. They had theories. Denise scoured the comments, looking for a clue of some kind. Maybe he was watching from somewhere, it wasn’t impossible. Would he love it, the attention, or be annoyed by the inaccuracies about him?

Denise signed up for a user name (DeniseK385) and posted a comment. She corrected some of the factual errors other posters had made about dates, venue names, and other trivia.

Maybe he was in the Netherlands, or Spain.

Maybe he was still in LA, with a new name and a new life. It was even possible that he would contact her at some point. But there was no point in looking for someone who didn’t want to be found. She knew he wouldn’t be looking back. He wanted to be rid of all of it. Maybe he wanted the freedom to be whatever he wanted to be now, and that required jettisoning all his past work, all his past. He wanted what it was like when he began, before all of it had piled up into a long life.

One day, without trying, Denise ended up near Vista Del Mar and Casa Real, the house they grew up in. She decided to park the car and walk up the street. It looked much nicer than when they had lived there. Each house had been fixed up and painted. The white plaster mission bungalow they used to rent now had a high hedge all the way around it. Denise decided to knock on the door, the way people sometimes do when they see a house they used to live in. She knew it would be a peculiar experience. Memory-palace stuff. Memory palaces were what mnemonic artists used to remember complicated things. Before photos and movies and tape recorders. They would imagine the layout of a building — a palace — either real or invented, and then place things to remember in each room. Then, as they walked through this imaginary house, they would remember what things or ideas they placed on the table or in the cupboard. The hippocampus organized data by some complicated interaction of ideas and spatial associations. The more familiar the building, the better the method worked.

Denise rang the bell. She told the woman who answered she used to live there — grew up there — and would she be so kind as to let her walk through? The memory-palace trick could work the other way, too. Outside of your mind, in the real world. Walk through the place where you used to live, and the details — the ceiling molding, the light from a window, the feel of floorboards as you moved across the threshold of a room — could make you remember everything you did and said and felt in that place, so many years earlier.