Alix Ohlin - The Missing Person

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.