Alix Ohlin - The Missing Person

“I still think it’s possible Bev Davidoff got it somewhere,” my mother went on. “Secretaries used to do that kind of thing. There’s no big mystery about it, Lynn. It was just a gift.”

“But two paintings — a pair?”

“Maybe it was a sale,” she said drily. “Frankly, I’m surprised you’re even interested. You never seemed to care about New Mexican art before.”

“I know,” I said. “Listen, I saw Daphne Michaelson today.”

My mother wrinkled her nose in a gesture I took for distaste and wrapped her hands around her coffee cup. “Did you,” she said. “Where?”

I stared at her. Did she think that Daphne Michaelson was out grocery shopping or hiking in the foothills? Did she have any idea what condition the woman was in? “I went to their house. Well, I went to look at our old house, and while I was there I stopped by the Michaelsons’ to say hello. David wasn’t there but Donny was, and so was she.”

“I see. So what does it look like? The house.”

“It’s covered in giant butterflies.”

“Fake ones, I hope.”

“They look tacky.”

“The people who bought the house seemed very nice,” my mother said in a pious tone. “A young couple with children.”

“How long has she been crazy?” I said. “I don’t remember anything strange from when we lived there.”

“It’s not nice to call people crazy.” My mother stood up and began clearing the dishes. “Donny’s a nice boy, isn’t he? And Darren is, too. When he’s away at school he calls David every Sunday night at seven o’clock sharp.”

“So you’ve told me,” I said. I followed her into the kitchen, carrying the sugar bowl and the rest of the plates.

“I always wondered why Wylie wasn’t better friends with those boys. I know they’re a bit younger, but it’s not that big an age gap.”

“You’re kidding, right?”

“No, I’m not. They’re perfectly sweet.”

“They kill frogs for sport.”

“Toads, aren’t they? And he didn’t know that until the other night,” she said, dismissing it with a wave of her hand. Then she filled a sink with water and started doing dishes. I grabbed a towel and took over the drying. For a few minutes we worked together in a harmony I had a hard time puncturing. The condo’s air-conditioning pumped audibly for a moment, then subsided. Outside, crickets sang their shrill, unmelodic song.

“You never answered my question,” I finally said.

“What question was that?”

“About Mrs. Michaelson. How long she’s been like that.” I started putting plates and cups in the cupboard, lining them up in careful rows.

“I’m not sure,” she said after a while. “I do know that her condition doesn’t seem to be worsening. If she takes her medication and avoids stress, she’s fine. David briefly had her in some kind of, you know, residence, but he couldn’t stand seeing her in there. So he brought her home.”

“How much does she understand of what’s going on?”

“You know, Lynn, I’ve never asked her,” my mother said, glancing away and — I suspected — rolling her eyes. She turned off the faucet and drained the sink, then paused for a moment with a sponge in her hand. “Up until ten years or so ago she was really quite lucid. When you kids were young we had no idea. You could talk to her, and she was odd — but within reason, you know.”

“So to speak,” I said.

She ignored me and set to wiping the sink and the surface of the stove, which, I didn’t point out to her, was not dirty in the first place. “But then something happened, with the medication or something. I’m really not sure. Apparently your brain can adjust so the medication’s no longer effective. Anyway, she got worse.” She stood in the sparkling kitchen, looking for something else to clean. When she couldn’t find anything, she put her hands on her hips and nodded, once.

“David will never leave her,” I said. “Doesn’t that bother you?”

“Of course it bothers me,” she said, her voice rough. “It bothers me that you come home for the summer and do your best to ignore me from the minute you get here. It bothers me that my son lives in the same city I do and I’m lucky to see him every two months. A great many things bother me, Lynn, but I try to keep going as best I can.”

This silenced me. A film of tears trembled in her eyes. Then the phone rang, and she stepped away from me to answer it.

“It’s for you,” she said.

Although I’d left him without regret the night before, I found myself hoping that it was Angus, calling from out of town or, better still, from some motel down the street. If he’d come to the door right then, I would’ve run out to the van within ten seconds. But it wasn’t him on the phone; it was Harold Wallace.

“You told me to call if I thought of anything else,” he said. “Well, I just thought of something else.”

I followed Harold Wallace into a back room. His blue eyes were crisscrossed violently with blood, but his hair was neatly gathered in a ponytail, he was again wearing expensive, loosefitting clothes, and overall he seemed more alert than the last time. On the phone he’d been annoyingly mysterious, refusing to explain what he’d remembered until I arrived on his doorstep, and this morning he’d offered me coffee, tea, and even a plate of bizcochitos before I suggested, politely, that we just get down to business.

“Well, here we are. My office. The nerve center of the entire operation,” he said. If this was true, then the operation was in a lot of trouble. The small bedroom — underneath a stack of books and loose papers, barely visible, was a single bed — had been buried beneath years’ worth of bureaucratic detritus. Several filing cabinets stood half-open, their drawers stuffed beyond capacity with manila folders. Framed paintings and prints were leaning against every available surface.

“It’s a system I devised myself,” he said. “I know it looks strange, but it works for me.”

“How long have you been retired?”

“Oh, I’m not really retired. I still sell work from home. Yes, I’ve still got the eye, if you know what I mean.” He eyed my chest. I caught his bloodshot gaze and shook my head, and he shrugged and turned away, his smile hinting that it was mostly done out of habit anyway.

“So you remembered something,” I said.

“After you left, I got to thinking about what you said about the child, and I remembered a girl who got pregnant and kind of disappeared. She was a wild one, that girl. Anyway, a few years later, she sent me a photograph of herself. A look-whatyou’re-missing-out-on sort of thing, if you—”

“I know what you mean,” I said.

“So I just have to go through these files and look for it. Maybe you’d like to sit down? This could take a while.”

I cleared a spot for myself on the bed and sat down to watch as he withdrew files, examined them, muttered to himself, then moved on to the next handful. Of course he could have done this before I came over, or left me alone to wade through the files myself. But he either meant for me to witness all his hard work or simply wanted company; watching him rifle through stacks of dog-eared manila folders, every once in a while glancing at me over his shoulder, I suspected it was the latter. Humming as he worked, Harold seemed perfectly happy to devote the entire morning to the search.

Actually, I felt more or less the same way. The night before, when I’d gotten off the phone, my mother was in her bedroom with the door closed, and I slunk off to my room feeling guilty and agitated. If she was going to run around with a married man whose wife was mentally ill, then she had to expect people to comment on it from time to time. That’s what I told myself, but still I’d stayed awake for hours, thinking that I’d made my mother cry.