Michelle Hoover: Bottomland

“Can’t you open it?”

I startled. Agnes waited behind me on the stairs. “What’s wrong?” she said.

“Go on, I’ll take care of it.”

“But. ”

“Borrow something of mine. We’re late for the chickens.”

Agnes groaned and hurried off. I pushed at the door with my shoulder and it gave an inch. Finally I ran at it with my full weight. The frame popped, the wood cracking. Inside the room was dark.

What had Father taught us? Never make too much of something. Lest that something make a fool of you instead.

The smell of the girls hit me at once, earthy and sweet. Myrle’s bed was empty, unmade, but Esther’s was straight as a piece of wood. Against the far wall, Agnes’ bed stood alone. Behind the door, a small wooden chair lay on its side, one of its legs broken — the very thing that must have held the door closed. In a draft from the stairs, the drawings Agnes had hung of our family stirred, Mother watching me as if I’d somehow forgotten her. The room otherwise appeared untouched, the dresser tops clean save for the girls’ combs, the bone brown and marbled for Esther and dove-colored for Myrle. A picture of a woman’s hand stuck to the mirror, the hand bodiless and pale with a bracelet cutting into its wrist, an advertisement Myrle had torn out herself. Under Myrle’s bed was a shadow, and I crouched to my knees to know what it was. A hammer. The end of it was ruined and fresh with chips of wood.

“What’s wrong?”

“Agnes, I told you. ” I took to my feet, but it was only Patricia, dull little Patricia. A lump of a woman and kind as cotton, Ray’s wife was lovely in the way of ghosts, her hands forever gripped in front of her as if to stave off violence.

“They’re gone,” I said.

“What do you mean?”

“They’re not here,” I snapped.

Patricia stepped into the room with a puzzled look and touched Myrle’s pillow. The woman was so slow and vacant, older than me though seeming not. She took up the pillow and started to plump it, only to sit on the bed as if tired. “But where could they be?”

I sat next to her, the hammer heavy in my lap. Surely the girls were hiding in the barn or had taken the bicycle. Gone to our neighbors the Clarks for breakfast, to the Elliots to see the new pups — though they avoided both houses as much as we ever did. Patricia stared about the room, her hands closed between her thighs. A tide was rising in my throat. On a busy morning such as this. On any morning at all, and the girls had gone running about. But there, out of the corner of my eye, the chair lay on its side with its broken leg, a damaged child.

“Oh dear,” Patricia sighed. Before she could say another word, Agnes appeared in the door, my brothers behind her holding their hats.

“Agnes,” I complained.

Ray shouldered his way in. “What have they done now?”

“Did you see them outside?”

He shook his head.

“Maybe they went to town,” Patricia mumbled.

“But it’s miles,” I said. “And they couldn’t have made it on foot. Not in the dark.”

“It’s Esther,” Ray said. “She’d run off at any chance.”

“No,” Lee let out. He stepped in with chaff on his skin and the smell of the barn. “I just don’t think they’d do that, run off. They’ve never tried anything the like.”

“And what about the chair?” I asked.

Ray caught the chair in his fists and the leg dangled until he broke it off.

“It doesn’t make sense,” Patricia said. She tried to take Ray’s hand, but both were locked around the chair, even the two stubby fingers on his bad side. Lee stood at the door and juggled the broken knob, stooping to eye the bolt. Without a word, Agnes waited alone in the hall. She wore one of my own dresses, and it draped the boards at her feet. I followed her gaze. The only window in the room hung low between the girls’ beds, the frame so small a grown woman couldn’t get her shoulders through if she tried.

“Let’s not tell Father,” Ray said. “Not yet.”

“How can we not tell him?” I asked. But Father, he’d gotten into the habit of sleeping late. Ever since Mother went, the work had fallen more and more to us, while Father walked the property from one end to the next as if counting pennies.

“Yes,” I said, thinking we might find the girls, we might settle everything, before Father knew we’d lost track of them for even a few hours. The others looked at me, waiting. Downstairs in the kitchen, the stovepipes shuddered. At the far end of the hall, the snap of Father’s cane. We turned our heads. Soon he would appear in the doorway with his face red and sweating above his beard, his jacket gaping. Already at the bottom of the stairs, he called out, “What are you all making there?”

With a glance over her shoulder, Agnes drew up her skirt, took a step in. “The window’s open,” she whispered.

“So?”

She nodded at the hammer in my hand. “Father had it nailed shut last year.”

We set off on our search. At first we circled our own acres, only to come up short when we reached the fences. Lee scoured the smokehouse and barn, as if the girls could have fallen asleep with the cows, and Father worked his way along the river, stabbing at the water with his cane. Soon we headed farther out, Agnes and Patricia to the Clarks’ and myself to the Elliots’, the men staying behind to finish stocking the pens. Dutchy , our neighbors had said of us before the war, though with Father’s accent and the misfortune of his birthplace, they now knew us for Germans and believed that far the worse. The horses stood with their chests against the wooden gates, watching us. The bells on the cows struck a hollow note as they ate. The land rose up in front of me, a gray place.

The Elliot house was quiet. As I stepped onto their porch, I knew the girls would never visit by choice. The farm was ragged, what with only the old man to care for it, his son and the son’s wife, flighty newlyweds as they were. The porch cracked underfoot. Rot had set into the sills. And there was old Mr. Elliot, opening the screen with a squint before I could dare knock. He worried at me as if trying to remember which of the Hess girls I was.

“It’s Nan, Mr. Elliot.”

“Haven’t seen you in a long while.”

“Have you seen any of us?”

“Nope, no.” He scratched at his ear. Mr. Elliot was well over seventy. His eyes drifted and his forearm shook as he leaned against his cane. The poor man, waiting for me to explain myself. But what could I say? That the girls hadn’t done their chores? That we had somehow misplaced them?

“Our girls,” I started again. “The two youngest. They seem to have wandered off.”

Old Elliot looked blank. An American flag hung curled around the porch post, stripped and bleeding its colors. “Wandered off, you say?”

“Have you seen them?”

“I haven’t seen any of you. Those girls, they must be joking. That’s what girls do. The kind I used to know.”

“Would you mind if I looked around?”

The old man winced. Behind him, the door swung open again. His son Tom slouched against the frame, licking his lower lip. “What’s this here?”

“She’s asking about the girls,” Mr. Elliot said.

“What for?”

“Have you seen them? Esther and Myrle.”

Tom shook his head and shook it again. “Why would I?” His eyes were pale and dim, and a twitch made him blink every few minutes, lifting the corners of his smile into something different. The boy had been a wreck since the war, though he’d gotten a girl to marry him, and a surprise marriage that.

“Another time, maybe.” I peered past them into the dark house, a light over the table and a greater darkness in the hall. “And say hello to your wife for me, Tom. In school, Dora and I used to be very good friends.”