Shya Scanlon - The Guild of Saint Cooper

I opened the coffee grinder to pour in some beans. There were grounds caked below the blade, and I banged it against the counter to set them free.

Crystal grabbed her purse from the counter. “Well, we’re off. See you tonight.”

I poured the dislodged coffee grounds onto a paper towel. We’d run out of filters, as had the store. There would be no more filters. “Seriously,” I said, managing my grounds, “where the hell do you go every day?”

Crystal cocked her head as if making a decision. There was beauty in her. She reached for Olivia’s hand, and together they walked out onto the back porch and down the steps.

I ground some more coffee, poured it onto the paper towel with the old grounds, and then carefully put the towel into the coffeemaker, folding the corners down so they wouldn’t interfere with the water. I thought about where I’d been in my book before putting it down. The story was about a public relations war between two self-help seminar gurus, narrated by a double agent, a mole within one of the seminars sent to discover whether a carefully guarded technology called Existencelastic Macrobial Foreshortening truly resulted in “transpositional epiphany,” as the brochure said it would. If I remembered correctly, the mole had been driving up the gravel path to the retreat’s offices when he thought he saw, running through the woods, someone who looked exactly like himself. He’d stopped his car, opened the door, and stepped out. The figure in the woods, too, had stopped and turned around. And suddenly the perspective had shifted, leaving the reader in the mind of the person running — a version of the mole who’d experienced the Foreshortening process, had gone AWOL, and was now being chased by agents from the very guru who’d sent him: an egomaniacal hirsute barber named Shya Scanlon.

I poured myself a cup of coffee and sipped at liquid too hot to have taste.

“I mean,” I said aloud, “where the fuck do you go from there?”

I suddenly felt apathetic. Nonetheless, I was committed to finishing the book. Or, at least, to continuing. To “going on.”

There was a knock at the door, and I hurried over before the noise could wake up Blake. It was Happy Edelstein.

“Hey, Hap,” I said. “Today’s the day, isn’t it. Wow. You know, Brock just took off—”

“Have you seen Alice?”

“I got up like ten minutes ago.”

“Last night, maybe? She disappeared. We think she ran away.”

Happy’s face was pale and his eyes were bloodshot; his hair, normally so carefully combed, was a greasy mess. He was a thin man, cave-chested and gaunt, but he looked almost intimidating just then.

“Shit, Hap. I haven’t.”

“We’ve been packing, you know. Today was the day, early. Last night she said she was coming down here to say goodbye.”

He teetered on one foot, looking over my shoulder into the living room.

“Happy, seriously, I haven’t seen her. Do you want to look around? We wouldn’t take in a, what, seventeen-year-old girl?”

Happy squinted at me, sizing me up. “Sixteen,” he said.

“See — she’ll turn up, won’t she? I just can’t imagine…Hey, let me go ask Kent. Okay?”

Happy just stared.

I climbed the stairs, thinking maybe I should be running. Walking might make a suspicious man more suspicious, but running might cause more alarm than necessary — I truly did assume she’d turn up — so I compromised by taking two stairs at a time. Alice would come back, I thought. No doubt she was secreting herself away with some boyfriend, saying her goodbyes.

Kent lay nearly sideways in the king-size bed he’d been sharing with his wife and daughter. He looked up at me as I entered the room.

“I haven’t seen her,” he said.

“You heard?”

He nodded to the window, which was open.

“Well, shit.”

Kent rolled over. “There’s nothing even remotely so resourceful as a teenage girl.”

“Great,” I said. “That’s what I’ll tell Happy.”

“What’s going on?” my mother called from across the hall.

“Alice. Have you seen her?”

“Oh dear,” she said. Moments later she was following me back downstairs, where she went straight to the front door and tried to console Hap. “It’s just what they do,” she said, and thumbed in my direction. “Believe me, this one ran off every chance he could get. But then he’d get hungry.”

I nodded, spreading my arms as if to say, See? Here I am, at my mother’s house!

“She’ll come home.”

Happy turned slowly, faced the day, took a deep breath. He walked down the three steps to street level and without another word made for Fred’s. What else could he do? I had to assume that variations of this scene were playing out all over the city — teenagers tempted to see an evacuated city as a giant parent-free playground. My mother was right, after all. I would have done the same. It was scary to think about Olivia disappearing, though she was far too young to adopt any but her parents’ perspective on such major events. Still, it was somehow comforting to be reminded that other perspectives were possible. Not just possible: manifest.

In the front yard, my mother had cleared out a lot of the weeds and had laid down stones to mark partitions. A few of them formed a semicircle below a holly tree she’d been threatening to cut down for years. The tree was beautiful but had grown to interfere with the power line running the house. It now wore a blue X of painter’s tape.

“What’s that for?” I asked.

“Sythia.”

That evening Blake and I took a walk. It was still hot, but a breeze had picked up and was moving cool, salty air in from the Sound. We passed the Edelstein house and saw them sitting on a standing porch swing, looking solemn. I waved and said we’d keep an eye out. Alice’s mother, Josie, brought her hands up to her face. Happy gave me a dirty look before turning to comfort her.

“Nice one,” Blake said under her breath.

“Well, shit.”

Two squirrels ran across the street and swirled up the trunk of a fat oak. We watched them chase each other insanely, chirping like birds.

“They’re probably pretty stoked about the evacuation,” I said.

“I doubt it. No more free handouts. Why haven’t I met those people?”

“The Edelsteins? I don’t know. Actually, I do know. Well, I don’t know, maybe I know.”

“Wow.”

“Well, there was this thing.”

“Oh my God, don’t tell me you—”

“No, Jesus! The story is, I’d just heard from Nancy about selling Forecast and I was visiting my mom — remember? I was coming back from the store with a bottle of wine, and Alice was looking at me through the window and I waved, and then I saw an un-burst water balloon in the yard, and I picked it up and chucked it at her. You know, it was just a playful thing. But the window broke. It was an old single-paned piece of glass, and it shattered. Josie came to the window — this was in the afternoon, and Happy wasn’t home — and…”

“What? And what?”

“I can’t believe you thought I slept with Josie.”

“I was just giving you shit.”

“No, you weren’t.”

“Tell the story, Blake.”

“So Josie comes to the window and asks me what happened and I kind of stammer it out, and then run up the lawn and get to the front door, and she meets me there and she opens the door and we look over at Alice, who’s still shocked. She’s not hurt, and we both burst into laughter. I think it was just out of relief, you know, but the minute we begin to laugh Alice snaps out of it and starts to cry.

“I’m apologizing, and somehow I tell her about the book, and Josie’s just floored, like she’s never met an author, and she disappears into the kitchen and comes back with this bottle of champagne, and we basically proceed to get drunk. We drank her champagne and opened the wine I bought. We didn’t even clean up the glass.