Alix Ohlin - The Missing Person

“David,” my mother said again.

“Well, does it stand a chance?”

“You’ll be late.”

Lifting his meaty wrist, David checked his watch and nodded.

“You’re right,” he said, “as always,” and then he winked at me. I squinted back. He left the table, lumbered out of the kitchen, and disappeared. My mother finished her final sip of coffee and stood up. “I’d better get ready too. By the way, someone called for you this morning before you were up. I didn’t even know you were here, of course.”

“Who?”

“Angus. Wylie’s friend. If that’s what he is.”

“Angus called here?” Saying his name in front of her felt weird.

“At seven. He said he’d be out of town for a few days but that you shouldn’t worry. He said he’d be working.” Her emphasis on “working” made clear how little she believed this statement.

“He’s a plumber,” I said.

“I see.”

“Have you ever even met him?”

“No,” she said. She cleared the dishes and I followed her into the kitchen. “But Wylie used to talk about him all the time. Back when he actually talked. So you like him, do you?”

“Not exactly. It’s more like — I can’t seem to leave him alone.” She turned to face me, and the look in her eyes was unexpectedly mild.

“Well, that’s how it is sometimes,” she said.

David Michaelson reappeared in a gray double-breasted suit and cowboy boots, presenting himself to us with open arms. “I’m in court today,” he told me. “Gotta look shiny and new.”

“Good,” I said faintly.

He pecked my mother on the cheek — like a dutiful husband — winked at me again, then left. My mother changed into her sensible travel-agent clothes and left, too. I felt tremendously happy to be alone.

After roaming through the house for a while I came to her bedroom. She hadn’t neglected to make the bed, and even the pillows beneath the covers were arranged to geometric perfection. I thought about passing out on the floor of Wylie’s unfurnished apartment, with my brother sprawled beside me. It seemed highly unlikely that we were her actual children. But on the bureau, next to her small jewelry box, were pictures of Wylie and me in the grip of goofy, soft-cheeked adolescence, complete with rolled eyes and acne. And there, visiting family in Chicago, were all four of us, skyscrapers looming behind us, the wind lifting our hair.

Finding the red-striped bathrobe hanging inside her closet, I wondered how often David stayed over, and what he told his wife when he did. In my last snooping spree I hadn’t noticed any conspicuous male clothing, and none was apparent now. There wasn’t even an extra toothbrush in the bathroom; but maybe he toted one with him, or maybe my mother shared hers. Some things were impossible for a person to contemplate and still want to live.

I went out in the Caprice, determined to see the house I still thought of as home, and drove through endless residential neighborhoods toward the bare mountains. The dead air of mid-July rendered the city flat and even. I listened to country music and tapped my fingers on the vinyl steering wheel.

Though two years had gone by since I’d seen the house, and though I’d lived through those years and recorded their passing, I was nonetheless shocked to find that the place did not look the same. It had been repainted a cotton-candy pink, first of all, and the people who lived there now had fixed to its exterior several gigantic plastic butterflies who were mounting an attack in a zigzag pattern, seemingly aimed at my old bedroom window. On the front door hung a wreath made of braided wheat and blue-checked Indian corn. I felt sure that somewhere in the vicinity, lurking, there were garden gnomes. The driveway, freshly asphalted, spread dark crumbles across the bordering expanse of our old lawn.

The last time I’d been here was a week after the funeral. A couple of days later my mother explained, briskly and undebatably, that she saw no sense in waiting and would be packing everything up and moving. I’d said fine, there was nothing I wanted anyway, and she smiled tightly and said she doubted this was true. Seeing the house now made me realize how much work it must have been for her and Wylie, and how drastic her resolve to break with the past. I wondered if this was when Wylie had decided to empty his apartment of its possessions, when he saw all of ours in moving boxes.

Instead of walking to the front door with the wreath I went next door to the Michaelsons’. At least their house still looked the same; shrubs formed a geometric ring in front of their door, and a basketball hoop hung above the driveway. Their yard, formerly a lawn, was now hard-packed dirt, which I guessed Wylie would’ve approved of. I rang the doorbell.

It was Donny, I was almost positive, who opened the door, wearing long surf shorts dotted with miniature surfers, each catching his own personal wave. Barefoot and shirtless, he was holding a tall glass of milk that had given him a faint white mustache. “Hey,” he said. “Come to check out the old neighborhood, huh?”

“I guess so.”

“I always wondered how come you guys never come by.”

“You did?”

“Well, not, like, literally always or anything.”

I looked at him. “You’re Donny, right?”

“Yeah, you can remember ’cause I’m taller.”

“Right,” I said, not bothering to point out that Darren wasn’t there for comparison’s sake. “Can I come in?”

He glanced quickly behind him, then stepped back from the door. “Um, okay. Can you wait in here for a sec?” he said, and disappeared into a long, dark hallway, where I heard him murmuring to someone whose voice was too soft to make out.

The living room looked like the home of much younger children, with a baseball mitt on the couch and a soccer ball in the corner. An open box of Pop-Tarts was sitting next to some comic books on the coffee table.

Donny strode back in.

“Yup, the old ’hood. Let’s go into the backyard, okay?” he said, leading me out through the sliding patio doors to the back. “The people who live next door to us now are super nice. They’re real religious. They’ve got a sweet garden back there, too.”

I looked over the fence at the yard where Wylie and I used to play. On summer nights we sometimes slept back there in a tent. Now it was divided into neat rows of squash and tomatoes. The Michaelsons’ yard, by contrast, had been let slide. The lawn had faded into dirt splotched with a few patches of yellow grass, and the only sign of life was a battered picnic table under the shade of a pine tree, where Donny and I sat down.

“Remember when we were little, and you and Wylie always played those weird games in your backyard? You pretended you were savages or something.”

I didn’t remember, but nodded anyway.

“Darren and I watched you sometimes. We thought you were total freaks,” he said, shaking his head in a fit of nostalgia. “No offense or anything. Hey, can I get you a glass of milk? Or a soda?”

“I’d take some water.”

“You got it,” he said. He padded inside, and I went back to the fence, hoping to look into our old house through the rear windows, but the glass threw back sheets of glare. I remembered one cookout we had, when Wylie got overexcited and poured a bottle of barbecue sauce right on top of his head; my father reached over with a paper napkin to wipe off his face, and none of us could stop laughing. The paper napkins kept sticking to Wylie and the more my father wiped the worse it got, until they both had to give up and take showers.

From the Michaelsons’ house came the sound of shattering glass, followed by “Shit!” Donny said something else, but I couldn’t hear what. I went inside and saw him standing with a broom at the far side of the kitchen, sweeping up some shards.