Where She Has Gone (15 page)

At school, deadlines had come and gone, then extension dates as well. I risked the loss of my scholarship, failing grades, an expulsion, but couldn’t muster the sense of urgency required to avert these things. At the prodding of one of my professors, I finally went into the university’s counselling centre one day to get a letter of excuse that would allow incompletes to be registered on my file rather than failures.
The centre was the same one where I’d attended sessions several years before with a young graduate student who wore muslin blouses and did body work with me in a mat-lined room. It looked unchanged now except for the strangeness of remembering myself within it, the same narrow, labyrinthine halls, the same reception area hidden away at their core like the prize or trap at the heart of a maze. The receptionist smiled as one had back then, handed me a form to complete with that air of not wanting to let it be seen how she thought herself different from me. It occurred to me as it had then – and it was reassuring, in a way, to feel this thought repeat itself across the years, to feel there was still a link between who I’d been then and who I was now, as if I had not, after all, become a monster – that it was exactly in a place such as this, a place of cure, that you felt most ill.

I was assigned to an older woman who had the trace of an accent, with that attractive, well-groomed look professional women often had that always touched a particular chord of longing in me. Her office was cramped but had none of the usual institutional air of a university office – there were a few plants in the window, a hand-knitted rug on the floor. She asked me questions and gave me small, encouraging smiles. There was a certain shyness in her manner that somehow put me at ease, perhaps simply because it was the normal thing to expect in a stranger rather than the false intimacy I associated with this setting.

I told her about my father’s suicide a year before and my mother’s death when I was small. I had thought these things could somehow stand in for the rest, but it was surprising how small a space they seemed to occupy in the bald relating of them, how much they didn’t account for.

“And the baby,” the counsellor said. “The girl. After your mother died. You didn’t say what happened to her.”

“Oh. She was all right. She came to live with us.”

“Your father accepted her?”

“Yes. Not really.”

I found myself telling her about Rita, how we had treated her, how she had ended up leaving us. There was that one incident that had started things, when my father had beaten her while my aunt and I stood by.

“It seems stupid now,” I said. “It was over a dog we’d taken in. My father wanted to kill it because it got into the chickens, and Rita tried to stop him.”

“Kill it how?”

“With a shotgun.”

“He was holding a gun the whole time?”

“Yes. I mean, he dropped it or something when he took off his belt. I don’t remember exactly.”

“And then he hit her.”

“Yes.”

“And what were you thinking?”

“I don’t know. We were all thinking it. That he was going to kill her.”

“Would he have done that?”

“I don’t think so.”

“But you didn’t know that then.”

“No. But that wasn’t even the point. It wasn’t even that he was actually angry at her. It’s just that she was always
there
. That she didn’t just disappear or something. I thought then, we all must have thought it, that if he just killed her it would be easier.”

“Oh.”

We both seemed a bit taken aback to have arrived at this admission. There was an instant’s awkward silence.

“Anyway it’s normal,” the counsellor said. “You were only a child then.”

“Yes.”

At the end of the session, she made a few quick notations on a writing pad and said I could pick up the letter I needed the following day.

“And your sister?” she said. “Do you still see her?”

“Yes. She lives in the city now. She goes to school here.”

“And you get along?”

“Yes.”

She gave me a sort of timid look, as if embarrassed for me at all I’d been forced to reveal.

“You can come back again if you want to. I’m here the whole summer.”

“Thank you.”

I went back to my days of television and sleep. They were growing almost comfortable now, like time taken out from the ordained order of things that was only for me, that didn’t connect to any future or past. It occurred to me, in this state, that there could be a dissolution point in a life where the logic of cause and effect suddenly ceased to apply, where there was not enough sense in things for any forward line to present itself. Perhaps that was how people came to kill themselves: they simply reached this blankness they disappeared in, this moment when the story of their lives no longer cohered.

To get out of the apartment I’d sometimes stop in at the café on College where Elena waited tables, sitting with her in a back booth during her breaks while she drank coffee and chain-smoked cigarettes. She was letting herself turn pretty
again, had let her hair grow and had revived some dresses and skirts from her old wardrobe as if she was reverting through a sort of negligence to her former self. She had taken to her work with what looked liked a dogged commitment to getting it right, quick and civil and precise in everything she did as if waitressing were a science she was mastering. But it was clear from the quiet energy that came off her as she worked that she relished being out in the world like this, having a job, being on her own. It was a kind of respite for me to watch her, to see this little piece of the world that was still functioning and sound, hadn’t lost its way.

She’d finally had a call from Rita, from London, about a week after her departure.

“How did she seem?” I said.

“I dunno. Just fine, I suppose. We didn’t really get into details.”

She’d had a call from Mrs. Amherst as well, who was back in Mersea finalizing the details of her move. Apparently Rita had phoned her and given her some story about travelling through Europe with a tour group.

“Did you tell her the truth?” I said.

“Which is what, exactly?”

“She must have wondered. Where she got the money, for instance.”

“It’s not the kind of thing Mom would ask about. She doesn’t really like to know any more than she has to.”

“Maybe it’s because you don’t tell her things,” I said.

“Tell her what? That Rita’s run off with a sixty-year-old man? That I’m a lesbian?”

A couple of heads turned at the booth across from us, but Elena ignored them.

“I know you think I’m hard on her,” she said. “But we’re the kids, remember? She’s the parent. When Dad died she was basically drunk the whole time we were home. We could have used a little support then too. Just a word. Anything. Rita especially. She’s pretty messed up where Mom’s concerned. When she was a kid Mom used to make her feel she was defective or something because of where she came from. It was like she was hedging her bets in case she didn’t turn out right.”

But beneath the bitterness in her voice there was a lingering note of question, of doubt, as if she were inviting someone to contradict her.

“Will you see her before she goes back to England?” I said.

“Yeah. I don’t know. We’ll see.”

Since the night of Rita’s party, Sid seemed to have gone back into whatever hole it was he occasionally disappeared into; I’d sometimes see his lights on in the night or hear his steps on the fire escape, but then days would pass and there’d be no sign of him. Finally one day I ran into him outside our building. Somehow he’d managed to find out that Rita had gone.

“So I guess she’s doing the whole sixties trip,” he said. “On the road and all that.”

“I guess.”

He was his usual blithe, unreadable self, with that disarming smile he would put on like a reflex to hide the wheels turning beneath.

“Anyway, I just wanted to say that nothing happened between us,” he said. “I mean, she’s a nice kid.”

I had no word from Rita directly until nearly a month after her departure, when I got a postcard from her, from Paris. It showed a reproduction of a Degas, a pastel sketch of a dancer
done against a wash of pale, almost unearthly green. The note on the back had no salutation, only a single floating phrase, “Just to let you know I’m okay,” and her initial. At the bottom, John had included a note: “Sorry to have missed you when we left. I hope your work goes well.”

I took heart from the simplicity of her note, had been imagining her completely changed, inaccessible, and yet there was still this core of her that I knew that for all the questions and revelations was still something I was connected to. The thought of her in Europe, in a specific, locatable place there, conjured up less a sense of distance than of proximity: it was the continent that had conceived us both even if we had never shared it. If things had been different I would have liked to have returned there one day with her, into the mountains that were perhaps encoded in her cells, into the winding streets of our village. We’d go along and I’d point out this street, this house, her own womb-dark history, what she perhaps had taken in back then through some dim, deeper-than-thought awareness.

There was something about her card, though, that left a niggling residue: the note from John, its simple presence or just the look of its tight, careful script that wasn’t right somehow. I was reminded again that I knew next to nothing about him; and yet the strange thing was exactly that I’d never had the least doubt that Rita was safe with him, had known from the outset, in some animal way, that he wouldn’t harm her. I thought back to the day that I’d followed him home, the sight of him in the shop doorway, the weird, almost preternatural energy that had seemed to come off him then but which I’d never quite been able to give a shape to or trace to an origin.

One night when I was out in my car I drove by John’s apartment. I thought I noticed a light on in his front room, and drove back around to the sidestreet nearby to make sure I’d seen correctly. Yes, it was his place: I remembered the shop below, the pale yellow brick of the façade. Perhaps he had a timer on; but then I saw a figure move across the light, in one direction and back again. I had an instant’s throb of suspicion, a sense of duplicity like a tiny alarm in some not-quite-accessible chamber of the brain, before realizing there was probably a simple explanation, that he’d sublet the place or that a friend had come by to look after things. My first thought then was that it would be possible, therefore, to get inside; and it was in having the thought, in seeing, in my mind’s eye, John’s apartment laid out before me as if it were the inside of his head, that something shifted in me like a tumbler falling into place, and some new understanding of him seemed to shimmer briefly before me. For an instant that sudden sense of him played in my mind like the barely held fragment of a dream, never quite coalescing into solid shape; and then it was gone. I sat watching his window for several minutes more, hoping it might help dredge up what that instant’s certainty had been, what it had been trying to tell me. But finally the window went black, showing only the mirrored reflection of neon and of other blank windows across the street.

I went by John’s apartment again the following morning, watching it from the window of a coffee shop across the street. It was a Saturday, and the sidewalks were thick with shoppers, in shorts and halters and flimsy summerwear because of a sudden heatwave. The heat gave a slow, shimmery unreality to things as if some conspiracy were unfolding, as if every movement, the passersby peering in windows, the customers emerging from shops, had been carefully choreographed to present the bland, false face of normality.

Around eleven o’clock a woman emerged from the door that led up to John’s apartment, wearing sunglasses and jeans and an untucked Indian blouse. She fumbled with her keys a moment as she went to lock the door, dropped them, bent to collect them. Her hair was a dark, wavy mass that shifted and swayed like a separate entity when she moved, with that permanent windblown look as if she’d been standing for hours in a stiff ocean breeze.

She went down the street and into the variety store I’d seen John use. A few minutes later, a bag of groceries in hand, she emerged and returned to the apartment. It was unclear to me now what my plan had been, how I’d thought that just the evidence that someone was actually inside John’s apartment could be enough to gain me entry into it. I watched the people going in and out of shops along the street and it seemed strange that one floor above there were these other spaces that were completely inviolable.

I crossed the street. There was a single buzzer at John’s door; I pressed it.

She was at the door in an instant, swinging it open with a guilelessness that made my heart sink. Her hair had got tousled in her descent and she reached up to pull it back from her shoulders, her blouse hiking up a split second to reveal a thin rim of naked waist.

“Hi,” she said, a little breathless. Behind her, a narrow staircase led up through semi-darkness.

“I’m sorry to bother you. I’m a friend of John’s.”

“You mean Mr. Keller?”

I realized I didn’t know John’s surname. It crossed my mind that this whole thing might be a mistake, that I’d got the apartment wrong or that John had moved, had never existed.

“Yes,” I said.

“He’s away in Europe. I’m just subletting.”

“Oh. I wasn’t sure if he’d gone yet.”

“Yeah. About a month ago.”

I was losing heart. She looked younger than she had from a distance, in her early twenties perhaps; without sunglasses, her face radiated a pale, freckled innocence.

“There were some books that I lent him. They were kind of important. For my thesis. I’d replace them but they’re sort of hard to get a hold of.”

A barest flicker of hesitation: there was this problem to solve, but no clear solution.

“I could look for them, if you want. I don’t think he’d mind that.”

At some point soon, she would begin to see through me and the whole thing would turn ugly.

“I’d have to write out the titles, they’re a bit complicated. If you’ve got a pen and paper –”