Alix Ohlin - The Missing Person

I was the only one who went outside, calling his name again, twice. I knew he heard me, but he didn’t turn around, running silently down the street and disappearing around the corner.

Inside, my mother was shaking her head, David had his arm around her, and the sons were doing dishes. I couldn’t stand to stay in there. I went back outside and sat on the trunk of the Caprice. Lights around me blinked on and off: distant headlights showing through the gaps between houses, people drawing the curtains on a window down the street.

Later, much later, I fell asleep with the nagging feeling that there was something I could have done but didn’t, might have prevented but let slip — a slim thought that kept getting away from me, like something glimpsed out of the corner of my eye, but when I turned my head, it was gone.

July came, summer bursting into full bloom, the long heat of arid days and the brown edge of wilt around plants. The city announced a water shortage and promoted discounts on rock-garden materials and low-flush toilets. On the Fourth, my mother and David invited me along to watch fireworks explode over the muddy dregs of the Rio Grande, but I declined. Instead I sat in a lawn chair in her tiny backyard listening to the manic end of a bipolar swing: the quiet, crickety hush that usually blanketed my mother’s neighborhood gave way to the whistle of bottle rockets, the screech of tires, the occasional backfire, hoots and hollers of people driving by. Children calling out the names of other children. A vodka and tonic sweated peacefully in my hand.

Of all the seasons, summer felt the most like childhood. I was thinking about vacations when Wylie and I were little, the four of us piling into the car for road trips to Colorado, my dad’s family in Chicago, or, once, the Grand Canyon. My father loved maps, and every night in the motel room he’d unfold one and draw a blue line over the road we’d traveled that day. One time, in a small town on the outskirts of Denver, I woke up in the middle of the night in a strange motel room, dizzy, entranced, sick with fever. My brother was breathing noisily next to me — he was a mouth breather — but he looked like a stranger, and so did my parents in their bed. Laid out on the desk was an unfolded map tracing our path from Albuquerque, heading north, but the world was a puzzle, the geography foreign: I didn’t recognize the route we’d taken or the location of home. My father rolled over and asked what I was doing.

“I’m trying to do my homework,” I told him, “but I don’t understand it.” He pressed a large palm flat against my forehead and then scooped me up. Shivering in my nightgown, I fought against him because it hurt my skin to be touched, and a minute later I threw up in his lap. He was three years older than I was now.

“And so what,” I said out loud, to myself, in the dark. I finished my drink. In a lull of quiet between illegal fireworks I heard the crunching sound of someone walking around the side of the condo. I stood up and found myself on the receiving end of a bear hug given by Angus Beam, my cheek smashed against his bare shoulder, my feet momentarily off the ground. I’d forgotten the odor of his body — part close skin, part distant chemical — and the dense spray of orange-brown freckles across his grinning face.

“Happy patriotic holiday,” he said, releasing me. “Need anything plumbed?”

“Actually, there is a strange smell coming from the garbage disposal. Like a nasty, rotten kind of smell. Can you help with that?”

“I know just the thing,” he said. “Get me a lemon and two glasses of ice.”

“You’re kidding.”

He went into the kitchen without answering. I brought him the supplies, and he cut the lemon in half with a Leatherman he pulled out of his back pocket.

“Watch,” he said. He poured a glass of ice down the disposal, switched it on — a ferocious, grinding sound — and turned on the cold water. He ground up half the lemon, too, then wiped his hands. “You’re all set.”

I stuck my nose over the sink, and the smell was gone. “Hey, it worked,” I said. “What’s the other glass of ice for?”

“I was hoping you’d make me a drink with it.”

His eyes shone. He was the only person around who ever seemed truly happy to see me. We poured vodka, tonic, ice, and lemon juice into his water bottle and went for a walk, holding hands like a couple of civilized people.

The sky was fizzing. Small green rockets popped and showered in the air, and every once in a while a big white explosion was followed by a single bang, like a bomb going off, whose sound hit me right in the chest and made me shudder. At these moments Angus squeezed my hand. We drifted through the streets, not talking much. The smell of innumerable barbecues sailed out on the night air. Cars swerved recklessly through the streets and ran red lights, their stereos pumping. Everybody seemed to be drunk. On the enclosed front porch of an adobe bungalow, the windows of the house itself dark, a dog was shaking piteously and howling in fear. I told Angus about Wylie defining “toad killer” in his argument with my mother’s boyfriend — I stumbled over the word, but couldn’t think what else to call him, really — and he practically keeled over laughing. He was wearing jean cutoffs, and when he slapped his leg his hand left a white imprint on his skin.

“Those people sound horrible,” he said when he finally straightened up. “How do you stand living in that boxy little place with the boxy little backyard and those horrible people? Why don’t you leave?”

The idea had never occurred to me, though I wasn’t about to admit it. “I don’t know,” I said. “My mom—”

“Your mom thinks I’m the devil.”

“I didn’t know you two had met.”

“We haven’t,” Angus said, grabbing my hand again.

We kept walking, in silence now, until we came to the gate of a small, run-down cemetery with crooked graves whose colorful fake flowers competed against an army of weeds. We went inside and looked around, examining all the old Spanish names. Angus was quiet, and I knew he’d decided this was a romantic and memorable context for a kiss. I didn’t think this kind of seriousness suited him as well as laughter did, and didn’t feel like being the target of his courtship, so I got it all over with by kissing him.

We stood there kissing under the moon. I touched the nape of his neck, where delicate hairs lay slick with sweat. His skin radiated heat against the palm of my hand, and his arms came around my waist to pull me closer. There was a flash of red behind my eyes.

“Let’s go to a motel,” I told him.

“We could just stay here. It’ll be gorgeous and unique.”

I stepped back, although I maintained a gentle grip on his hands. “It’ll be more gorgeous in a motel. Also, comfortable.”

“Come on.” He was grinning again, and running a hand through his hair, now all helter-skelter points. “Let’s make love in the face of death. Let’s feel alive.”

“I’m leaving,” I said. “Are you coming?”

He crossed his tanned arms. “I love the way you make unreasonable demands.”

“You’ve got a real knack for compliments,” I said.

I loved the sterile anonymity of the motel, its small bathtub and plywood dresser. We could be anywhere, I said to myself. We are anywhere. An hour later, Angus in the shower, I left a message on my mother’s answering machine.

“It’s me. Lynn. Listen, I’m going to be away for a few days but I don’t want you to worry. I’ll be fine. So will Wylie — I mean, I think he will, not that I’m with him right now or anything. Okay, see you. Bye.”

Angus went out for a six-pack of beer and a pizza, and we sprawled on the bed watching CNN. Every once in a while he’d run the palm of his hand from my neck down my back, then start over again from the bottom. I fell asleep to the weather forecast, blue currents and red arrows crossing a map of the world.