Lydia Millet - Ghost Lights

“We — we still haven’t been able to establish contact,” she told the mother with some hesitation, and he felt certain that only he could hear her voice waver.

“Milk?” asked Angela. “Or sugar?”

“Just a little milk, please,” said Susan, and nodded distractedly.

“No thanks, not for me.”

“I check in with the embassy on a daily basis,” went on Susan. “But there’s nothing they can do, on the active side. It’s quite a small facility. They don’t have resources. All they can do is relay any reports that come in.”

“Oh, yes,” said Angela, nodding as she poured milk into both of their cups. Hal considered waving a hand to prevent her, but then gave up. “The boat man worked for them, didn’t he.”

“Pardon?”

“I think the man who called about the boat worked for the embassy.”

She put Susan’s cup in front of her on the counter and walked around the island toward Hal. At the same time Susan turned to both of them, wide-eyed and deliberate. He accepted his cup and smiled gratefully.

“What boat?” asked Susan, with a hint of alarm. “What do you mean?”

“The man called about a boat he was in.”

“I had no idea,” said Susan. “Oh my God.”

She wandered back to the couch and sat down heavily. Angela glided back to the kitchen, oblivious, and poured her own coffee.

“Oh yes. The little white motorboat. They found it.”

Susan gazed at her agape as she came back in, holding her cup delicately, and perched in a chair opposite.

“Tell us the details,” said Hal carefully. “Won’t you? Susan has been very, very worried.”

“There was a little white motorboat he was in? With a native guide, you know, a tour guide doing the driving. Then the other day they found the boat, but there was no one in it. It floated back down to the beach, and there were some people fishing just then, or someone there was a fisherman. .? Anyway. Do they fish there? Something about fishing.”

“Just the boat?” asked Susan.

She seemed to him to be entranced, breathless and possibly fearful. He reached out and rested his hand on her shoulder.

“A man from the embassy called me, I thought he said. Or wait. Maybe it was the United Nations. Don’t they also have policemen?”

Angela crossed her legs gracefully and cocked her head, as though idly wondering.

“Uh,” said Hal slowly. “Are you sure they called you?” She was beginning to show her lack of acuity; for all they knew the boat story was a full-fledged delusion. “Did you, for instance, get a name from this informant?”

“It was the hotel where Thomas was staying,” said the attendant from the doorway, and Angela sipped her tea. “The resort hotel. They made an inquiry and then they called us.”

“Of course,” said Susan faintly. Her cheeks were flushed, Hal noticed, but he could not tell whether she was upset or excited at the news, whether it chilled or encouraged her.

“They have not seen Thomas yet,” said the attendant.

“No,” agreed Susan, and shook her head. “I do know that much.” She went to pick up her coffee cup — for something to occupy her, Hal guessed — and gulped from it thirstily, looking away from them.

“You take care of his business,” said the attendant, and smiled at Susan. “I know because of the paychecks!”

“Yes, I do,” said Susan. “But we may need to change that. It’s one reason I came. Mrs. Stern? If you have the means, you may find it easier to pay Vera’s wages out of your own accounts for a while. T.’s finances are in transition. With all this confusion. Will that be a problem?”

“Oh? Oh. No,” said Angela, and waved a hand dismissively at Vera. “My checkbook is in there,” and she gestured toward a small writing desk.

“I am already paid for last week,” said Vera. “No problem. OK. Excuse me.”

“I would also like,” said Susan slowly, as Vera disappeared down a corridor, “to hire someone. I want to take action , I want to step in. I owe it to him. We all do. And to his business, which needs him. We’re losing money daily.”

“Someone?”

“A private security firm. To investigate what happened down there. I can handle it out of our petty cash fund at first, and draw on his other accounts later, if it starts to drag out.”

Angela nodded but Hal thought she was hardly listening.

“You know, to fly down and be in-country. Have a team on the ground. A search party actively looking for him. I would do it myself, but I have to handle things at this end.”

“Whatever you think, dear,” said Angela. “But don’t worry too much. He doesn’t really need them.”

“Them?”

“You know. Policemen.”

There was a pause, during which Angela recrossed her legs and smoothed her slacks over one thin thigh. From the apartment above them Hal could hear a bass line thudding. The rhythm was powerful but the melody indistinct. He tried to attune himself to the music, in case of recognition. In the meantime he was conscious of the quietness in the room, the soup tureen with its outdated homunculi in their robes and black topknots.

He had a sense of the rapidly cooling coffee in his cup, which he could not drink because he did not like coffee with milk, and the uncanny calm of the mother, which settled on her like a soporific. . was she indifferent to her son, his well-being? Or was she absent?

“I hope you’re right,” said Susan to Angela, and smiled tightly.

“That boy has always landed on his feet.”

“But this is. .”

“Trust me.”

After a few moments Susan consulted her watch.

“Well. I should probably be getting back,” she said, and Hal placed his coffee cup on the end table, relieved to be rid of it, and rose. “Do you have a couple of photographs I could take with me? To give them for the investigation?”

“Oh!” said Angela. “Certainly.”

She handed Susan a white and gold album off a shelf, and Hal waited impatiently while Susan paged through it, slipping snapshots from beneath plastic.

“It was good to see you,” said Angela when Susan gave it back. “Thank you for visiting me.”

She stood beside them at the door, benign and passive as they filed out. Susan was agitated, almost distraught. For his own part, all he was thinking as they left was: So, about the free love.

He wanted to ask her but he knew the question would seem irrelevant, pathetic in its smallness and its self-interest. There was a man’s life at stake. She was thinking only of that. The specter of death trumped the free-love worry.

“I should have done it before,” she said, shaking her head as she strode ahead of him toward the street. “I should have followed my instincts.”

For him, however, there was no specter of death, frankly. For one of them, there was the specter of death; for the other, only the specter of free love.

“I should have hired someone right away, but it’s not the kind of. . I mean who thinks of that? You know?”

“I do know,” he said, with what he hoped was solemnity.

“I’m going to call them today. All it takes is picking up the phone and a credit card. A couple of photos. . but why would they call her ?”

“I’m sorry?”

They were standing at her car, facing each other.

“That hotel. They had explicit instructions to call me . I had to authorize the charges to his card, finally. . she can’t do anything with the information, you saw how she is.”

“I did. It’s just she is his mother.”

“Still. It’s unprofessional that they didn’t call me .”

“Maybe the language barrier. A misunderstanding.”

He wondered if she was close to discerning his near-complete indifference to these questions, if she could discern the fact that he was hiding the real worry. What about the free love.