Sara Majka - Cities I've Never Lived In - Stories

It was here that I first read about a twenty-four-year-old girl who had gone missing near the harbor. With the newspaper on my lap, I told Richard. He asked what day she had gone missing. When I told him, he said that she was a student of his at the night class he taught at the arts school. He had driven her that night after class, to a bar by the waterfront; he’d seen her walking along the road and offered her a ride. The police had been there after class on Thursday. What could I tell them? he asked me. What do I know about this girl?

Over the following weeks, he told me the story several times. He also told me that on two occasions they had gone to a bar together, and she had told him stories about her life. He told me a little about it. I also read newspaper articles, a blog that her friends started, the police transcript. I talked to people at the local paper where I worked — enough so that I began to piece together what had happened.

The night she disappeared had been warm for February, and the warmth had brought the fog in. It would have been hard to see her at the side of the road on the outskirts of the city, where there were a few boarded-up buildings, some empty warehouses. She would have been walking along a strip of sidewalk, the streetlights illuminating the fog.

There would have been a darting quality to her, with her high shoulders and lanky arms. She walked without gloves, without a hat, her hands stuffed into her coat pockets, her breath a cloud in front of her. The fog, the buildings, the streetlights. Her fragility and toughness, the physicality of her walk. I could get that far. And to my husband backing out of the parking space, leaning forward to clear the windshield, arranging the books and papers at his side, fiddling with the radio. He saw a movement in and out of the streetlight. He almost didn’t see her. He cleared more of the window, craned his neck, then eased the car out of the lot. He pulled to the side of the road just ahead of her and leaned across to open the door.

He said, Louise, Louise, and she grabbed the door and put her head in. Her hair fell across her face. Her face, even when she held her hair aside, would have been in shadow, the overhead light having broken months ago.

Do you want a ride? he said.

She lingered with one hand on the door. Okay, yes, she said, thank you. She lowered herself, a puff of air coming up through the cracks of seat leather. She settled her purse on her lap, didn’t buckle her seat belt. She was close enough so he could see her then. Her curls escaping from a loose bun. Her eyes with shadows underneath.

I had imagined at first that he was a sudden flurry of activity, leaning over to swipe at the empty coffee cups as she sat down, but as he told the story, I understood this wasn’t the case. He was comfortable with her, he knew how to talk to her. He said simply, continuing a conversation they’d had at the bar weeks earlier, Why New Mexico?

It was seven years ago, she said. She had left home. Her roommate worked at a snack bar in a bowling alley, and they shared a room in a ranch house with windows only in back; there weren’t any windows in front. The room contained boxes that didn’t belong to them. Someone had tacked sheets over the walls.

She slouched in the seat while talking to him, as if the ride was going to take hours rather than minutes. She laughed quietly, looked over at my husband, thought of the bowling alley, the nacho chips with cheese from a pump, the orange T-shirts the counter help wore. Anyway, she said, I was seventeen and I liked to bowl.

Are you any good? my husband asked, but it wasn’t a real question; he was busy looking for the White Heart, a bar by the waterfront. He slowed the car. The bar was down a cobblestone alley blocked off to traffic. He pulled over next to the barrier and looked at her. He had parked in an interval between streetlights and she opened the door to turn on the overhead light. It’s broken, he told her. You could put in a new bulb, she said. I could, he said.

She slipped out, pulling her purse after her. She said, Thanks, see you next week, and bounded toward the side of the bar. He watched her silhouette, her hand reaching up, feeling the lump of her hair as if tucking it in then swinging open the door — a clumsily balletic move, the dropping of the hand and swinging it out again. Then the door settled closed. He sat there for some time. He told me this offhandedly, had said, There’s something else. Maybe ten minutes after the girl had gone in, I—

Ten minutes, I said.

Yes, he said, I stayed for a while in the car.

What did you do?

I don’t know, he said.

We were silent, then he said, While I was there, a man walked past.

The man walked down the alley and entered the bar the same way as the girl. My husband thought it was Alec. But there had been the fog, the darkness, he couldn’t be sure.

It didn’t seem like his sort of place, my husband said. But it looked just like him.

You didn’t see his face? I asked.

No, but I’m nearly certain it was him.

I realized that I had seen the girl before. She had been at a party at Alec’s house. He lived across the harbor, in a half-weatherproofed cottage. The porch was covered in vines that gave it an enclosed, hidden feel. Alec and the girl had sat together on a wicker sofa. She had her legs pulled close to her. Her shirt was baggy, too big for her, and the hem of her skirt was unraveling.

Alec rarely looked at people when he talked, and his body was turned away from her, his face down. From where I sat, I couldn’t see his eyes, though I knew they were hazel — in certain lights they were specked with yellow and usually rimmed in red; he rarely slept well.

I glanced at them a few times from the kitchen window, but I paid more attention when the girl left — a funny girl with sandals in one hand, shells around her ankle, walking down the dirt road. When he came in, we stood in the kitchen, which was very white, and leaned against the cabinets, finishing gin and tonics. I waited for him to say something, and he didn’t. He finished his drink, and I took his glass and poured him another. He sat on the counter, his feet against the faucet.

I had met him shortly after his wife left him, though I didn’t know that at the time. I never found out if she left for another man or in response to his remoteness. Perhaps she thought she would be able to live with it because she loved him, but after several years realized that she couldn’t. I had seen a picture of her. She had large eyes, a warm smile, and warm brown hair around her face. I imagined, based on the picture, the kindness in her and the sadness she would have felt in leaving him.

His office was at the end of a corridor. Sometimes I brought lunch, and we would sit there with only his desk between us. In this way I learned bits of his life, that he had spent his childhood in Maine but his family had moved to Chicago when he was a teenager, that he had moved early in his career from job to job, that there was some sort of dissatisfaction there, a sense that despite his love of history, the profession itself suited him as little as anything else.

Do you know what my mother once said? he said. Don’t talk too much. If you stay quiet, people will assume complexity. She also said I was a cold fish.

He looked up, surprised and unsure about what he had just said. I kept my gaze even and mouthed the words cold fish. What are people thinking sometimes? I said. I felt compassion for this man who never thought he would speak those words out loud. Life can be so unkind, I said to him. And he nodded, though who knew with Alec whether it was in agreement or simply a reflex.

I called Alec after my husband told me he might have seen him that night. We agreed to meet at a café. Alec sat with his chair pulled out and his body turned as if toward a third person.