The Missing Person (19 page)

“I'm the star of this particular show,” Daphne insisted.

“Hold on, Mom,” he told her. He left the room and came back with a large glass of water and a palmful of pills.

She studied him with the exact expression of a dog that has misbehaved while its owners were away: guilty and anticipating, even craving the punishment. She took the pills all at once, gulping them down dry, then drinking the water as a chaser, splashing a lot of it down her chin. “Ah,” she said afterward, smiling up at him.

“Good girl,” he said. “Let's get you cleaned up.” He took her by the arm, as if she were a physical invalid, and walked her into the bathroom without paying me even the slightest bit of attention.

I wandered back into the living room, wondering whether I should stay or go. I could hear the shower start, and murmuring voices. Then the phone rang, and after a while I picked it up and said, “Hello?”

“Who is this?”

“It's—Lynn. Lynn Fleming.”

“Lynn, it's David. Is Daphne there?”

“Yes, she's—she's in the shower. Donny's helping her get cleaned up. He gave her some of her pills.”

“Oh, thank God,” he said. “What a crazy goddamn escapade. She hasn't done this in about a decade.”

“That's what Donny said.”

There was a moment's silence, during which I could hear traffic and car horns, and I guessed he was out looking for her somewhere. Then he said, “What are you doing in my house?”

“She came to Wylie's apartment, and I was there.”

“What the hell did she go there for?”

I closed my eyes and said the only thing I could think of. “It's all my fault,” I told him.

“I imagine you're right,” he said, and hung up.

Finally the shower shut off and Donny led his mother into a bedroom. Feeling like I should leave, but unable to make myself do it, I sat down and listened to their muffled voices. Daphne was giggling, a sweet, girlish sound with a seductive tinge to it. Several minutes later Donny came out and sat down on a couch opposite me, seemingly not surprised that I was still there.

“Your dad called,” I said. “I told him she was back.”

He nodded. “Darren's out looking too.”

“Where do you even start when something like this happens?”

“Anywhere,” he said. “Hospitals, police, shopping malls. She likes malls.”

He picked up a remote control from the arm of the couch and turned on the television, muting the sound. It was set to ESPN and showing golf. A man in a blue sweater vest missed a putt and smacked his palm on his forehead. Donny tsked at the screen.

“Did she do this when we were kids?” I said.

Without moving his eyes from the screen, Donny shrugged and slumped down on the couch, his head resting on the back of it, his muscular thighs spread parallel to the floor.

“I dunno,” he said. “I do remember one time, at your party. Remember? The one when your mom had that big piñata? Oh, my mom was pissed.”

I didn't understand this, although I had vague memories of that party, which was full of drunken adults. I was fourteen and already acutely embarrassed by how my parents and all their friends behaved. Wylie was twelve, still on the pudgy side, and into skateboarding; he had an asymmetrical haircut all my dad's friends from work teased him about. At one point everybody started warbling along with the radio, which was such a hideous display that I had to retreat to my room. I didn't even remember the Michaelsons being there. “She was pissed off because of the piñata?”

“Dude!” Donny said, talking to the TV. After a second he said, “No, she was pissed off about my dad and your mom hanging out too much at the party. And I remember your dad—you know how he talked, we used to call him the Professor—he was all ‘Daphne, why don't we discuss this rationally,' and my mom was all ‘Fuck rationally!' I remember your dad's face, it was like he never heard anybody say ‘fuck' before, ever. Anyway, then she took off and it took us a whole day to find her. In Grants. Can you believe that?
Grants.
It's like an hour and half away. My dad asked her what the hell she was doing there and she said, ‘I always wanted to have a drink in Grants.' After that they upped her meds.”

“I don't remember any of this,” I said.

“You always were a little out of it,” Donny said. “No offense. Wow, look at that stroke. That's beautiful. That's sport.”

“What do you mean your dad and my mom hanging out?”

“Oh, you know.”

“No, I don't know.”

“Hanging out. Same as they do now.”

I pictured the two of them watching
The Manchurian Candidate
in their bathrobes at my mom's condo. Surely, if they'd been doing that at my parents' house, I would have noticed. Yet as I thought back on things, a whole phalanx of scenes lined up, neat and orderly, in my mind: my mom having David over to fix the car or to help with some household chore while my dad was at work, because he was always at work; my mom going on early-morning walks around the neighborhood, I thought by herself, or telling my dad to take Wylie and me out for the day, on a hike or a picnic in the mountains. I felt like a duped lover. I was the last to know.

I told Donny I had to go—“See ya,” he said—and left the house in a daze. The next thing I knew I was going eighty on the highway with the windows down, and a trucker in the next lane waved at me, tanned and friendly, showing me all the missing teeth in his smile.

Eighteen

When I pulled up at Worldwide Travel, I felt like I hadn't seen the place in years. When I stepped gratefully into the frigid air-conditioning, Francie looked up at me without recognition and went back to her computer, squinting at her monitor with her blue-lidded eyes.

“Francie,” I said.

She looked at me again and said, “Lynnie! I didn't even recognize you, honey! Are you all right?”

“Everything's fine,” I said.

“Do you want to go wash up? Your mom's with somebody just now.”

The door to my mother's office was closed, and I wondered if David was in there with her. I nodded at Francie, then went into the bathroom, and what I saw in the mirror wasn't pretty: hair matted from sleeping on a grimy floor; face smudged with dirt and probably spilled gin; a T-shirt that was wrinkled and stained. In the small room I could tell that I really needed a shower. I took a long look at myself and shrugged. “You're turning into Wylie,” I said out loud. Nonetheless I washed my face and patted my hair with water, smoothing it somewhat, though there was a ratty tangle at the base of my neck. I felt deeply, impossibly calm. I thought I'd feel that way forever, but my mother came through the door, and then I knew I wouldn't.

She stood before me in the fluorescent light, the lines of her face etched almost blue in the severity of its glow. She'd gotten a haircut recently, and her straight, neat hair was clipped even closer and more neatly than usual around her ears. I found myself staring at her blue-striped blouse, which was made from a slightly sheer fabric that showed the contours of her bra. The thought of her and David together while my father was alive kept flashing in my brain, unwanted and too loud, like commercials on TV. It was one thing for her to have taken up with a married man out of her widowed grief and his impossible home situation; it was quite another for it to have started years ago, in the past, when there weren't such excuses. I couldn't be generous about it; I could hardly even allow the thought of it into my mind.

“You should be ashamed,” my mother said.

“Ha!” I said, sounding weirdly like Daphne Michaelson. After this I started to choke and had to take a drink from the sink. I felt dizzy, too, all of a sudden, and kept clutching the sink after I was done drinking.

“That poor woman hasn't had an episode in years,” my mother went on. She was standing so close to me that I could smell the clean, slightly medicinal scent of her lotion or deodorant.

My stomach churned. I couldn't remember when I'd last eaten, or what it was. “I don't feel good,” I said.

“Nor should you,” my mother said primly. “David told me you've been harassing her. She's not a well woman, Lynnie. You can't just treat people any old way you like and not expect there to be consequences.”

I stared at her. The fluorescent lights seemed to buzz and twitch, veering from white to blue to white again, the tiles swimming on the floor. I lifted my hand from the sink and then, still dizzy, put it back again. “Any old way?” I said. “What about you, Mom? How do you treat Daphne Michaelson? What are you, her best friend?”

My mother shook her head. She was prepared for this, I could tell. “Don't start with that,” she said. “You're an adult. Not a child.”

“I don't feel good,” I said again.

She went into a stall and closed the door. I could hear her pee, then the sharp quick sound of her pulling down the toilet paper. The whole time I stared at myself in the mirror, wondering if I was going to throw up.

“You live in a dream world,” my mother said from the stall. “You worshipped your father, I always knew that. And you thought everything at our house was perfect. So I never wanted to disillusion you. But Arthur, you know, was—”

“Mom,” I said. I went into the cubicle next to hers, closed the door, and threw up, my knees on the cold tile floor. It was a sour, nasty mash that held the lingering aroma of gin. I felt simultaneously hot and cold, disgusted and relieved. Small bright lights of many colors popped and sparkled at the edge of my vision. I wanted very much to lie down on the cold tile and take a nap.

“Are you finished?”

“I don't know.” I reached up and flushed the toilet.

“What's wrong? Do you have the flu? Should I take you to the ER?”

“I don't think so,” I said. My stomach was still in restless motion, but it seemed to be slowing down. I could see her navy-blue flats under the stall door; they walked to the sink and came back, and she held a damp paper towel below the door. I took it and wiped my face and blew my nose. I contemplated standing up, then thought better of it.

“I never worshipped him,” I said, although it occurred to me, as I said it, that I had. And all my memories of being ashamed of him or angry at him were lame attempts to disguise this inevitable truth. I'd always accused Wylie of trying to be just like my father, but in the stall, looking down at my bare legs, I felt that everything I'd ever done—including leaving home and studying art history, a field as far away from physics as you could get—was meant to defy or provoke him, to overcome, in any way I could, the limits of his attention.

“And I didn't think everything was perfect,” I said, quieter now. The flats waited, silently. “I just never thought it was
that bad.
”

“Don't be dramatic,” my mother said, and heaved a great sigh. “It was somewhere in between.”

I felt another wave of nausea tumble through my stomach like clothes in a dryer, and didn't say anything. The flats left the room.

When I went to her office fifteen minutes later, she was gone. Francie said she'd left to run some errands, but I suspected she was over at the Michaelsons', helping David and his sons deal with Daphne—a scene I couldn't exactly picture, and didn't want to, either.

Back at her condo, I let myself in, and slept through the bright hours of the day.

I woke up in the afternoon, ravenous and weak. I ate half a pint of ice cream, took a shower, then finished the other half. I wondered where Wylie et al. had gone, and why I always had to track them down like the younger child wanting to tag along and play. They were probably tunneling beneath the city, planning to suck all of Albuquerque into the lava flows or something. I felt light-headed and strangely cheerful. It seemed like vomiting in the bathroom in front of my mother had done me a world of good.

An uncharacteristic cloud had settled over the sky, turning the light in the condo to silver. It made me miss New York, its grayness and rain and subways, and Michael, and even the pain of losing him. A person can get nostalgic for anything, as long as it's in the past. I wandered around the house looking at pictures. There was my parents' wedding picture, Chicago, 1974: my mother smiling widely between dark red lips, my father looking dazed, as if stunned by his own good fortune. But maybe he was only stunned. There were hardly any other pictures of him around, and most were of Wylie and me. In every recent picture, I noticed, we had the same smile, even, practiced, and not at all genuine, as if really smiling were a childish habit we'd put away forever.

I stared at
The Wilderness Kiss
for a while, its brilliant dark colors, the woman and man locked in a kind of combat with the desert looming behind them. My mother was right; I'd never thought about the reality of my parents' marriage, what violence or heartbreak was contained in it, and with what consequences. Why was having a child—the son pictured in
The Ball and Chain
—so painful to Eva that it drove her insane? Studying the man in the picture, the one cradling his own mother, I saw in his thin, dark countenance a resemblance to both Wylie and Lincoln Kent, the yoga instructor.

As I gazed at the paintings, I pictured my father with Eva on those late nights when I'd thought he was at the lab, and then bringing her work home to my mother in an act of almost brutal defiance. He must have known about her and David. He knew, and Eva was his revenge.
Rose red, romantic red, red in
the afternoon.
But he wouldn't leave my mother for her, even after she became pregnant, because of me and Wylie. And Eva went crazy, crazy enough to set fires and destroy her own work, just as crazy as Daphne Michaelson, alone in her house while her husband and my mother watched television together.

I had an almost dizzy feeling, as if I were standing at the edge of a towering cliff, and picked up the flyer from Blue Butterfly Yoga. Lincoln was teaching Ashtanga that afternoon at four o'clock. I drove up to Santa Fe, where I sat in the Caprice with my eyes on the door to the yoga studio. Only a few cars were parked in the lot. Blue Butterfly was housed in a strip mall along with a New Age bookstore, an ice cream parlor, and the coffee shop I'd noticed before, each establishment elegant in fake adobe. Behind the strip mall rose another one; they were lined up, block after block. I hadn't eaten much besides the ice cream, and my stomach rumbled. At five-thirty people started filtering out of the yoga place. Glowing and relaxed, carrying mats and bags, they were all wearing tights or tight shorts and tight tops, clothes that covered their bodies like sausage casings. I had the windows down, and as they filed away I could hear snippets of their conversations, comments regarding numerology and nutrition, the cancerous death of a woman's aunt (“It's like her anger ate her up inside, literally”), and the difference between Reiki and Fendelkrais, as physical disciplines go. Lincoln Kent came out last and locked the outside door. He was wearing long black leggings and a red tank top, and with his straight posture and well-molded shoulders he looked like a ballet dancer on a short break from class. His features were small and perfect, and his short hair, fashionably cut, was dark brown, like Wylie's and mine. Everything about him was well formed and exquisite, like a Christmas ornament or a Hummel figurine.

I got out of the car and approached him, hoping that he wouldn't recognize me. “Excuse me,” I said. “I'm lost. Could you help me?”

“Ah, tourists,” he said, pointing with a well-muscled arm. “To get to the Plaza, you need to head that way.”

“Actually, I'm looking for a place called Enchanted Mesa. I'm supposed to visit my great-aunt and I misplaced the address.”

He smiled and took me by the arm. “I go to Enchanted Mesa all the time. It's right around the corner. I can even walk you there, if you don't mind a couple blocks.”

I thanked him profusely, and he led me down the street as I tried to figure out what to say to him.

“I think it's a lovely facility,” he said confidingly, “and I did a
lot
of research. How long has your great-aunt been living there?”

“Um, not long, I don't think,” I said. “What about your relative?”

“For ages and ages,” he said. “The quality of care is excellent. It
is
a little hard to find, but once you've been there you won't have any problems.”

We stopped in front of an adobe apartment building, by the front door with a small plaque that read ENCHANTED MESA. In a parlor to the right, a few old people in armchairs were staring disconsolately out at the bushes. Down the hallway some plinky jazz standard was being played on a piano. The place had the plush carpeting and smoothly recirculated air of an expensive institution, and the flowers on a stand in the hallway were real. But the scent of potpourri in the air wasn't quite strong enough to disguise the smell of ammonia and feces beneath it.

Squeezing my arm, Lincoln Kent marched up to the reception desk, where a middle-aged woman with short red hair and purple lipstick greeted him by name.

“Hi, Bernice,” he said. “She's looking for her great-aunt. Would you help her?”

This was worse than crashing advanced yoga.

Bernice smiled at me. “What's her name?”

“Sylvia Beachman?” I said. This was my great-aunt, who lived in Evanston, Illinois, with my great-uncle Davis and three dachshunds. Every Christmas she sent me a card and a ten-dollar bill.

Bernice frowned and typed away at the computer.

I turned to Lincoln. “Thank you so much,” I told him. “I don't mean to keep you.”

“Hey, my pleasure. Peace. Bernice, I'll go check on her while I'm here.”

Bernice waved without taking her eyes off the screen, and he wandered off down the hall. “I'm not seeing a Sylvia Beachman,” she said.

“That can't be right,” I said.

“Well, I know everybody in here, and I've never heard of a Sylvia Beachman.”

“That can't be,” I said. “She writes me all the time. This is Enchantment Mission, isn't it?”

“Enchant
ment Mission
?” Bernice raised an eyebrow. “This is Enchant
ed Mesa.
I don't know about any Enchantment Mission.”

“Oh, man,” I said. “I don't believe this.”

“You've never visited her before?”

“I'm from New York.” I leaned forward. “Listen, do you mind if I just go find Lincoln and tell him what happened? He's been helping me.”

Bernice looked me up and down and decided, apparently, that I wasn't a threat to the elderly.

“Room 325,” she said wearily. “Sign in here.”

I walked down one carpeted hallway to another, past the open doors of shared rooms, the sounds of competing televisions broadcasting game shows and local news. An old woman in a light-blue cable-knit cardigan sat weeping in a doorway, her mouth rigid with pain or sadness, the thin wisps of her hair trembling in concert with her sobs. Some old people were playing cards in a lounge whose windows faced the side of the Blue Butterfly strip mall. Through one window I could see a teenaged girl wiping down the counter of the ice cream parlor, and from this context her smooth, tanned skin and long legs looked profane, or dreamlike, or both.

Inside room 325, Lincoln Kent and a woman were sitting in facing chairs. From the photograph I'd seen, she was recognizably Eva Kent—but aged, decrepit, blank. Her dark hair was shot through with gray and hung limply to her chin. She was wearing baggy pink pants and a white shirt with a flower pattern; the sleeves fell to her wrists, but the skin on her hands was mottled red and white as if ravaged by some disease: the fire. She slouched in her chair, hunched over her low, large breasts. There was no trace of the ferocious pregnant woman with the center part and the burning cigarette, or of the woman in the painting with a slash of red across her face. In fact there was no trace of anything at all. Lincoln was reading to her, but she didn't seem to be listening, only staring into space. Her room was generic, artless, plain, and it smelled bad. Whatever she had once been, I thought, she wasn't an artist now.