Alix Ohlin - The Missing Person

“But what if it spreads?” I said. “What about people?”

“It won’t,” he said firmly. “Trust me.”

Shadows walked ahead of me as I stood there noticing everything: the stalks of desert grasses swaying in the night wind; the howl of coyotes, plaintive and distant; the black ash of night and the pinpricks of stars. In front of me the shadows melted into darkness and I couldn’t see them anymore. I breathed in and out. I was alone.

Then Psyche started crying again, in real pain, it seemed to me. This is ridiculous, I thought, she needs to go to the hospital. I ran until I caught up with Irina, who was kneeling by a boulder and frantically shushing the baby. Psyche’s face was splotched and yellow, a shade skin should never have. She was coughing hard between her cries, her head pressed to Irina’s chest, and it sounded like she was throwing up. Then, ahead of us, sparks exploded into the night in a small, brilliant spray: the fire was set. The flames reminded me of the sparklers Wylie and I used to run around with on the Fourth of July, and there stole into my mind an image of my father leaning against the back of the house, a cocktail in one hand, watching us chase each other, his face lit by the flicker of a dwindling sparkler. My mother, inside in the kitchen, was shaking her head and watching us, too, from the window over the sink. Remembering this moment, the unbridled simplicity of the holiday, our backyard, our family, I felt unmistakably happy and then, just as unmistakably, terrible. Which was worse, I wondered: enduring the wash of loss over your life, or surviving long enough to feel its ebb? Wylie thought I stayed away so I wouldn’t have to feel the pain of it, but this wasn’t true. I hadn’t come home so I wouldn’t have to recover.

The fire flared and smoke rose in a loose gray column toward the power lines as Psyche’s sad aria carried into the night. I wanted to see her in the oasis of a hospital waiting room, bathed in the antiseptic brilliance of fluorescent lights, doctors in white coats dispensing pills, giving injections, and placing the medals of the stethoscopes, round and reassuring, over her tiny heart.

Angus materialized beside us. “Just wait,” he said. “Soon the real fun starts.”

“What’s that?” I said, looking at him.

“Oh, this is just the tip of the iceberg,” he said.

“Angus,” I said, “I have to take the baby to the hospital. I’m taking the van.”

“No way. Just wait fifteen minutes until we’re done. We need the van.”

“Then I’ll take Gerald’s car. Get me the keys.”

“Yeah, right,” Angus said, and laughed. I felt like he would’ve laughed at anything I said. In the distant glow of the fire his smile looked wet.

“I mean it,” I said. Psyche sounded like she was gagging on her own vomit, then started crying again.

“She’s right,” Wylie said. I didn’t know where he’d come from.

“Gerald will never give her the keys.”

“He will if you ask him to,” Wylie said.

“I think you have a misguided sense of our dynamic,” Angus said.

“Oh, shut up,” Wylie said, walking right up to him and standing there, nose to nose.

I knew he wanted to punch him, and it seemed like a fine idea to me. There was a whispering sound behind me, buzzing in my ear like an unwelcome bug, and when I finally took a moment to listen it resolved into Irina’s voice. “Angus, she is right, we need to go now. Angus, Angus, Angus,” she kept saying, as if she’d forgotten most other English words. Then I smelled tobacco and cologne, and Gerald was standing beside me.

“Are you provoking all this noise,” he asked Angus, “or are you letting it happen?”

Angus didn’t answer.

“The baby’s really sick,” I said to Gerald. “We need your car.”

“No.”

“You’re not being reasonable,” I said, looking back and forth between him and Angus. “If you let us have the car, we’ll take the crying baby away and there’ll be less noise. It’s a win-win situation.”

“Win-win,” Angus repeated softly. “Gerald—”

“No.”

“Come on,” I said.

“Listen to her,” Wylie said urgently.

“You can’t have the car. But you do have to shut the baby up until this is done.”

“For God’s sake, why?” I said.

Gerald ignored me, looking at Angus. “You know we need the car.”

Wylie took a swing at Gerald. Somebody stepped on the dog’s tail, and he howled, along with the baby, and Irina started sobbing. Wylie and Gerald were truly fighting now, grappling and punching, grunting and heaving with breath. I’d never seen Wylie fight before and hadn’t known that he could. I sprinted back to the van and rummaged through the tools and trash until I found the crate I was looking for and pulled out the BB gun.

The thought of Angus firing it into the wall now seemed like years ago, and it aroused in me a strong, sexual sense of regret; then the wind delivered the sounds of Psyche crying, and I ran back to the tumult and pointed the BB gun at Gerald Lobachevski. “Give me the keys,” I said.

He ignored me completely. Wylie’d just hit him on the cheek, and Gerald had pushed him back, and they were sizing each other up in that strangely polite way men have when they’re trying to decide who’ll go on the attack next.

I could see Irina’s shadow and the shivering, sickly, wailing shadow that was her child. “Wylie,” I said, louder. “I’m going to shoot him. Stand back.”

“What?” Gerald said.

“Where’d you get that gun?” Wylie said.

“This is New Mexico,” I said. “Everybody has a gun.”

Angus’s eyes focused on me, and I knew he remembered the same day I did, the long afternoon in the motel, the soft sounds of television, our two selves slipping together on the sheets. “You better watch it, Gerald,” he said then. “That’s my gun.”

I was holding the gun out in front of me with my arms locked like they do in movies. My finger on the trigger was shaking. I thought this should feel like a dream, but it didn’t; it all felt gloriously real, each second defined, as it passed, in miniature splendor. “Pull the keys out of your pocket,” I said, “and hand them to Wylie.”

Gerald dropped his fists and looked at me with what I had to admit was considerable dignity for a man faced with a gun he didn’t know was loaded with BBs. “Don’t be stupid,” he said to me.

“Show me the keys,” I said.

He shrugged, and did.

Wylie stepped forward and grabbed them. “Let’s go,” he said.

Wylie drove. Psyche was quiet, a silence that now seemed ominous. Irina was quiet too, and when I asked how she was doing — she was sitting in the back — she didn’t answer. I asked her again.

“I am worrying,” she said tightly. Her shadowed face had an ugly red sheen; her breath was labored and her voice hoarse. She was sick, too.

“Wylie,” I said.

“I know,” he said. The car bounced and jostled on the dirt road, then turned velvet-smooth — it was an expensive sedan— as we sped onto the highway. After several minutes I could see the city’s loose beginnings ahead, farms and spread-out houses and the flow of gas stations. Beside the road the land sloped away to sheer nothing. Somewhere in that nothing, I knew, fire was catching in the desert grasses, a flower of spark blossoming into the air, the smoking particles fizzing and popping like a lightning storm. Ahead of the car the lights of the city stitched an uneven seam against the hem of the night sky. The world took on a funhouse cast, dense with terrible possibilities. We raced past a gas station, and inside the brilliantly lit interior of the Quick Mart a man stood behind the counter smoking and gazing out at the night.