Among the Missing (2 page)

“Ugh!” she said, and Allen observed its wrinkled, bog man face dispassionately.

“Now, now,” Allen said. He was a tall, soft-spoken man, and was more amused by Sandi’s mother’s foibles than Sandi herself was. “You never know when he might come in handy,” and he looked at her sidelong, gently ironic. “Personally,” he said, “I feel safer already.”

And they’d laughed. Allen put his long arm around her shoulder and snickered silently, breathing against her neck while Safety Man slid to the floor like a paper doll.

Now that Allen is dead, it doesn’t seem so funny anymore. Now that she is a widow with two young daughters, Safety Man has begun to seem entirely necessary, and there are times when she is in such a hurry to get him out of his bag, to get him unfolded and blown up that her hands actually tremble. Something is happening to her.

There are fears she doesn’t talk about. There is an old lady she sees at the place where she often eats lunch. “O God, O
God,” the lady will say, “O Jesus, sweet Jesus, my Lord and Savior, what have I done?” And Sandi watches as the old woman bows her head. The old woman is nicely dressed, about Sandi’s mother’s age, speaking calmly, good posture, her gloved hands clasped in front of her chef’s salad.

And there is a man who follows Sandi down the street and keeps screaming, “Kelly!” at her back. He thinks she is Kelly. “Baby,” he calls. “Do you have a heart? Kelly, I’m asking you a question! Do you have a heart?” And she doesn’t turn, she never gets a clear look at his face, though she can feel his body not far behind her.

Sandi is not as desperate as these people, but she can see how it is possible.

Since Allen died, she has been worrying about going insane. There is a history of it in her family. It happened to her uncle Sammy, a religious fanatic who’d ended his own life in the belief that Satan was planting small packets of dust in the hair behind his ears. Once, he’d told Sandi confidentially, he’d thrown a packet of dust on the floor of his living room, and suddenly the furniture began attacking him. It flew around the room, striking him glancing blows until he fled the house. “I guess I learned my lesson!” he told her. “I’ll never do that again!” A few weeks later, he put a shotgun in his mouth and pulled the trigger.

Sandi’s mother is not such an extreme case, but she, too, has become increasingly eccentric since the death of Sandi’s father. She has become a believer in various causes, and sends Sandi clippings, or calls on the phone to tell her about certain toxic
chemicals in the air and water, about the apocalyptic disappearance of frogs from the hemisphere, about the overuse of antibiotics creating a strain of super-resistant viruses, about the dangers of microwave ovens. She accosts people in waiting rooms and supermarkets, digging deep into her purse and bringing up photocopied pamphlets, which she will urge on strangers. “Read this if you don’t believe me!” And they will pretend to read it, careful and serious, because they are afraid of her and want her to leave them alone.

But she is functional. At sixty-eight, she still works as a nurse’s aide on the neurological ward of the hospital. She’ll regale Sandi with the most horrifying stories about her brain-damaged patients. Then she’ll say how much she loves her job.

Sandi, too, is functional. Besides Safety Man, there is nothing abnormal about her life. She works, like before, as a claims adjuster at the IRS. She used to have trouble getting up in the morning, but now she wakes before the alarm. She is showered and dressed before her daughters even begin to stir; she has their cereal in the bowls, ready to be doused with milk, their lunches packed, even little loving notes tucked in between bologna sandwiches and juice boxes. She stands at the door as they finish their breakfasts, sipping her coffee, her beige trench coat over her arm. At this very moment, hundreds of women in this exact coat are hurrying down Michigan Avenue. She is no different from them, despite the inflatable man in her tote bag.

The girls love Safety Man. Megan is ten and Molly is eight, and they have decided that Safety Man is handsome. They have been involved in dressing him: their father’s old black leather
jacket and sunglasses, and a baseball cap, turned backward. They are pleased to be protected by a life-size simulated male guardian, and when she drops them off at school, they bid him farewell. “So long, Jules,” they call. They have decided that they would like to have a boyfriend named Jules.

Sandi works all day, picks up the girls, makes dinner, does a few loads of laundry. She doesn’t have hallucinations or strange thoughts. She doesn’t feel paranoid, exactly, though the odor of accidents, of sudden, inexplicable death is with her always. Most of the time, during the day, her fears seem ridiculous, and even somewhat clichéd. She knows she cannot predict the bad things that lie in wait for her, can never really know. She accepts this, most of the time. She tries not to think about her husband.

Still, when the girls are asleep and the house is quiet, Sandi feels certain that he will appear to her. He is here somewhere, she thinks. The most supernatural thing she can imagine is the idea that he has truly ceased to exist, that she will never see him again.

At night, she goes down to the kitchen, which is where he passed away. He had been standing at the counter, making coffee. No one else was awake, and when she found him he was sprawled on the tile, not breathing. She called 911, then pressed her mouth to his lips, thrust her palms against his chest, trying to remember high school CPR. But he had been dead for a while.

She finds herself standing there in the kitchen, waiting. She imagines that he will walk in, a translucent hologram of himself,
like ghosts on TV—that loping, easygoing tall man’s walk he had, a sleepy smile on his face. But she would be satisfied even with something less than that—a blurry shape in the door frame like a smudge on a photo negative, or a bobbing light passing through the hall. Anything, anything. She can remember how badly she once wanted to believe in ghosts, how much she’d wanted, after her father died, to believe that he was watching over her—“hovering above us,” as her mother said.

But she never felt any sort of presence, then or now. There is nothing but Safety Man, sitting in the window facing the street, his positionable hands clutching a book, his positionable head bent toward it in thoughtful repose, a Milan Kundera novel that she’d found among Allen’s books, a passage he’d underlined: “Chance and chance alone has a message for us. Everything that occurs out of necessity, everything expected, repeats day in and day out, is mute. Only chance can speak to us. We read its messages much as gypsies read the images made by coffee grounds at the bottom of a cup.” Alone beside the standing lamp, Safety Man considers the passage as Sandi sleeps. Because he has no legs, his jeans hang flaccidly from his waist. He reads and reads, a lonely figure.

Most of the time, Sandi is okay. Everything feels anesthetized. The worst part is when her mother calls. Sandi’s mother still lives on the outskirts of Denver, in the small suburb where Sandi grew up; her voice on the phone is boxy and distant. Mostly, Sandi’s mother wants to talk about her job, her patients, whom Sandi has come to know like characters in a book—Brad, the comatose boy who’d been in a bicycle accident, and whose thick,
beautiful hair her mother likes to comb; Adrienne, who had drug-induced brain damage, and who compulsively hides things in her bra; little old Mr. Hudgins, who suffers from confusion after a small stroke. Sometimes he feels certain that Sandi’s mother is his wife. But the cast of her mother’s stories is always changing, and Sandi has learned not to become too attached to any one of them. Once, when she asked after a patient that her mother had talked about frequently, her mother had sighed forgetfully. “Oh, didn’t I tell you?” she said. “He passed away a couple of weeks ago.”

Sometimes, Sandi’s mother likes to talk about death or other philosophical issues. One night after dinner, while Sandi is drinking tea at the kitchen table and the girls are watching music videos on television, Sandi’s mother calls to ask whether she believes in an afterlife.

“I realized,” Sandi’s mother says. “I don’t know this about you.”

Sandi sighs. “I don’t know, Mom,” she says. “I really haven’t given it much thought.”

“Oh, you must have some opinion!” her mother says. She has that bright, nursely twinkle in her voice that makes Sandi cringe.

“Really,” Sandi says. “It’s not something I want to talk about. I mean, I
hope
that there’s some part of us that lives on. That’s about as far as I’ve imagined at this point.”

“Hmm …” her mother says thoughtfully. “I’m undecided, myself. I don’t think most people are interesting enough to have souls.” And her voice takes on a musing quality that Sandi recognizes with grim resignation. “Do you know that the living now outnumber the dead? You understand what I’m saying? It’s
the result of the global population boom. There are six billion people alive on this planet, and that’s more than have died in all of recorded history! It’s a fact.”

“Where did you hear that?” Sandi asks. “That doesn’t seem accurate.”

“Oh, it’s true,” Sandi’s mother says brightly. “I read it!” Then she sighs. “Oh, Sandi,” she says. “I wish your father and I had given you kids some religious training when you were young. Religion would be very helpful to you right now.”

“Oh, really?” Sandi says. She thinks of Uncle Sammy and his packets of devil dust.

“Well, you are that type of person, sweetheart,” her mother says firmly. “You’ve always been that way, ever since you were little. I’m very comfortable with doubt, and I thought you’d be the same way, because you’re my child. But you’re not that way at all!”

Sandi doesn’t know what to say to her. “Comfortable with doubt?” What does that mean? Where has her mother picked up language like that? “Okay,” Sandi says passively. She has been reading a lot of self-help books with the same tone. They spoke like this—“coping,” “coming to terms,” “finding closure.” As if such a thing is possible.

At the IRS, sometimes people are threatened. The woman in the next cubicle, Janice, has been getting letters from a man who wants to kill and eat her. It’s not funny, Sandi feels, though Janice often pretends it is. She reads his letters aloud—gruesome descriptions of what this person would like to do to her—and her voice takes on a dry, comic quality, as if it is nothing more
than an anecdote. “It’s like something out of a movie!” Janice exclaims. And Sandi loves Janice’s easy, unfrightened confidence.

Still, when she and Janice go out to lunch, Sandi wonders if the letter-writer might be watching, following them. As they pass through the lobby of the building where they work, Sandi watches the faces. The man will look outwardly normal, Sandi feels. She lets her eyes rest on the lecherous security guards at the front desk, the skinny one and the handsome one. She scans over the heavy-set man who sits before his open briefcase, eating a sandwich; beyond him, three young men in identical suits and haircuts burst into laughter; through the window behind them, Sandi can see the figures of people walking by on the sidewalk, their shapes hazy in the windblown snow, the small cadre of secretaries huddled against the side of the building, smoking cigarettes.

Once, not long ago, she walked past the standing ashtray they convene around. She remembers looking down. There, among the slender, lipstick-stained cigarette butts, which stood up in the gravel like dead trees, she saw a tooth—a human tooth, lying there. She stood staring at it. What’s happening to the world? she thought.

She wishes she could tell this story to Allen. What would he say? she wonders.

She has noticed that when she imagines speaking to him, she can clearly hear his voice. She can carry on long conversations in her head, and it seems very real. For a while, she’d had the same experience after her father died. Then the voice faded away.

Most of the time, she imagines Allen laughing his baritone
laugh. “You’ve really built a big thing out of this, haven’t you?” he says. He would tease her into smiling about it. “You’re a trooper with the big stuff, but you obsess over the details,” he says. “You’re funny that way.”

Once, he told her that he thought she tended to “displace her emotions.” She didn’t mind it when he would use this kind of jargon, though she kidded him about it. He had been a psychology major in college, had become an insurance salesman. She didn’t think he could help himself. It was something she’d loved about him, that mix of irony and kindly officiousness.

“
Displaced emotion
,” she’d said, rolling her eyes. “Oh, please. What does that mean, exactly?”

He smiled a little, as if he knew more than he was willing to say. They were washing dishes, and he handed her a plate to dry. “It means,” he said, “that you’re not worried about what you
think
you’re worried about.”

Which is something she worries about, nowadays. What should she be worried about? What are the things she tries not to think about?

Well, there’s this: Sometimes, she sleeps with Safety Man. The thought of someone knowing this actually makes her blush, so she tries not to let it cross her mind. It’s no one’s business—probably it’s perfectly natural, perfectly normal to want to fill that empty spot in their bed with a body, even an artificial one.

But what about that one night, when she’d stayed up late, drinking? In bed, she’d boozily cuddled against Safety Man, legless though he was. She’d even kissed him.

No, she doesn’t think about that. She doesn’t think about
the way, in crowds, she sees Allen’s face, or her mother, or her daughters, and her heart will crackle like a product being freeze-dried. She doesn’t think about the janitor who resembles Safety Man, disappearing around the corner of a hallway as she walks from her cubicle to the restroom to pat water on her face. She doesn’t think about her mother, clutching her at Allen’s funeral. “You know, honey,” her mother said, “you’re never going to find another man who loves you as much as Allen did.” Her mother sighed. “It’s a real tragedy,” she said, and put a hand to her throat, as if to constrict a sob.