Wide Blue Yonder (31 page)

Even as she was consoled and buoyed up by the helpful principal
and his staff, Elaine couldn’t help thinking if this was so unlike Josie, did that mean Josie had been someone else all along?

Elaine assumed that the usual rumors, pregnancy and the like, were making their way through the school hallways. She wanted to get on the intercom, scream at them all to shut up.

There were times she imagined Josie was dead. She let the unspeakable idea come to rest in her mind. There were plenty of people out there who did horrible, brutal things. You didn’t have to look very hard to find them, in fact you could hardly get away from them. Elaine had seen a news show once about a murdered girl, and the girl’s mother who had gone to the crime scene some months later, just to witness it. To some people it had seemed morbid or crazy, but Elaine had understood completely. She would have done the same. Would do the same if she had to. Was already seeing, in her vision, the reeking stairwell, or the sidewalk with its pattern of crazy cracks, or the floor from which the stained mattress had already been removed. Then she asked why she was doing this to herself, and called a friend who had become a Baha’i and was famous for her optimism.

This was the way things went on for most of a week.

Elaine went to her appointment with the police youth officer. She gathered that this was someone who usually dealt with gangs. Walking into police headquarters felt unreal, like innumerable bad movies in which she was the somewhat overdressed lady whose role it was to clutch at her handbag and snivel. She sat in a plastic chair in the lobby. There didn’t seem to be much going on, in terms of crime. A fattish man in a coat and tie walked past, drinking coffee from a styrofoam cup. A woman came in to complain about a neighbor who was either cutting down trees or refusing to cut trees, Elaine couldn’t tell. She listened to the two desk clerks talk about their weekend.

“We got the subfloor done. And two of the cabinets. Then we
went to the Spaghetti Shop for dinner because you couldn’t even get to the refrigerator.”

“What did you have, the Bucket of Meatballs?”

“No, the Chicken Alfredo.”

“Oh, that’s good too.”

Elaine had arrived there early, she was always early for things. It was a bad idea because it assumed that other people took your business as seriously as you did.

“Mrs. Lindstrom?”

One of the clerks led her back behind a half-gate and directed her to another chair, wooden this time. It wasn’t a proper office, only a semipartitioned desk in a room full of desks occupied by unbusy-looking men. One of them was very carefully unwrapping a large sandwich. A fly circled him. She had expected a little more privacy. She couldn’t imagine anyone here being any help.

“Sorry to keep you waiting.” A man came up behind her and Elaine revolved in her chair trying to keep track of him and to catch up with the hand he offered. “I’m Bob Kellerman. Why don’t you tell me about your daughter.”

Elaine recited the meager list of known facts, thinking that Bob Kellerman did not look much like a cop. He had curly black hair, the type that was impermeable to brushes or combs, cut short. A woolly goatee. He wore a suit and one of those skinny, rumpled ties that was either very trendy or very much not so. She didn’t even pretend to keep track of these things anymore. Big black-rimmed glasses, the same thing. The suit fit as if it was borrowed.

“I’m really a social worker,” he said, when Elaine finished talking.

“Beg pardon?”

“People are always trying to get me figured. My background is social work, then I did advanced courses in criminology. I don’t have a gun or handcuffs or any of that.”

“Well, what do you have?”

“A tape recorder and a cell phone. OK. All we were able to find in the computer was a curfew stop a couple of months ago. Your daughter had no other record of police involvement.”

“Oh.”

“That’s usually good news.”

“It is. But I thought … I know she’s been hiding things from me. I was sure it was drugs, or worse. I was afraid she might be … being exploited.”

Kellerman shoved his clunky glasses to the top of his nose, considering. “Do you have a picture of her?”

Elaine handed it across the desk. Josie’s class picture from last year. Josie hadn’t liked it. In it she wore a white sweater and her hair was fluffed over her shoulders. She was smiling in a way that she had complained was “sappy.”

“Pretty girl.”

He probably said that about all the runaways. “Thank you.”

“Can I keep this for a while?”

Elaine realized this would be the picture on the Missing poster, if there was going to be such a thing. Josie was going to be furious.

Kellerman asked if there was any particular evidence of drug use. Alcohol? Scholastic problems?

No and no and no. He rubbed at his goatee as if it itched. “Well, she’s certainly not your usual at-risk kid. Believe me, I see enough of those to say.”

“Then where is she?”

“The odds are she’s fine. She’s mad and she’s making sure you know it.”

“Odds,” said Elaine unhappily.

“Does her father live with you?”

“We’re divorced but he’s here in town.” Elaine felt she had to make some explanation. “That is, he’s not here right now. He’s on
vacation.” That didn’t sound right either. “I’ve talked to him and he’s coming back in a few days.”

Elaine gave up. She honestly hadn’t intended to make Frank sound like an absentee slob of a parent.

Kellerman asked her about Josie’s friends, anyplace she might have gone. Older kids who might have their own apartments. Elaine said she had called everyone she could think of. “They either don’t know anything or they won’t tell me. It’s the boyfriend, I’m sure. You hear about these things all the time. Young, impressionable girls taking up with criminals because they’re able to exert an influence over them.” She hoped that Kellerman would know she was talking about sex without her having to come out and say it.

“You know, you’re just making it harder on yourself. You don’t know any of this for sure.”

“Being hard on myself isn’t the problem right now.”

“Would you say you have a generally good relationship with your daughter, at least until this episode, or have there always been problems?”

“Is any of this going to help you find her?”

“It’s a family situation. So I’m asking.”

She hadn’t come here for counseling, especially from some bad-suit semi-hipster. He was younger than she was, but still too old to be dressing like a comedy-show host. She couldn’t see his feet, but she would bet money he was wearing tennis shoes. “We argue over the usual things. Curfew, schoolwork, boys. She’s never run away before. Please tell me what you’re going to do.”

“I’ll pass her description and photo on to the patrol units. They won’t start an investigation without some evidence of coercion or foul play.”

“You mean, finding her body?”

Kellerman said, evenly, “It’s not a criminal matter yet. That’s all I’m saying.”

“Fine.” Elaine began to get up.

“I know the most urgent thing is finding her, but you might want to think about what you’re going to do once she gets back. How you want to address the issues.”

Elaine sat down again. “I want to be able to talk to her. We can’t have a conversation now that doesn’t explode in our faces. I want her to stop being so angry at me just because I’m there to be angry at. I don’t want her to be so unhappy.”

“What is she unhappy about?”

“Her father and me divorcing. Him remarrying. I’m not sure what else. That she can’t grow up and move out in the next fifteen minutes.”

“That all sounds pretty normal.”

“It’s not a normal world anymore.”

“How so?”

“There are too many sick, crazed people out there who make meanness their life. Everyday you read some new depraved thing in the headlines. I can’t not imagine the worst. I can’t not worry about her. Even when she was sitting in the same room with me I worried. Kids think they can handle everything. They don’t have a clue.”

“Maybe not, but most of them get by. Turn out just fine.”

“Do they?” Elaine was aware she was being shrill, her voice spiraling up into some region of fatigue and grievance. “Fine. None of us are fine.”

“Why’s that?”

“We’re sick at heart. Everybody. More or less. Nobody knows how they’re supposed to live. Or even if there is a supposed to. Never mind. God, I hate it when I get like this. I want my daughter back.”

“You’ll get her back. I’m betting on it. And maybe it’ll turn out to be a good thing. A chance to put your relationship on a different basis.”

“Yes,” said Elaine. She felt as if she had emptied herself out in a heap on the desk, in front of a strange stranger.

“I hope you’ll do some things for yourself in the meantime. Be with family, friends, whatever support group you have.”

Elaine had a brother in Denver, but he was not the kind of brother you called to make yourself feel better. “I’ve told some of my friends, certainly, but I haven’t wanted to broadcast it. People start feeling they ought to do something. People you don’t especially like show up at your door with pound cakes.”

“Of course, the more people who know about it, the more out there looking for her.”

Elaine acknowledged that this was so. She supposed she felt reluctant about telling people. Josie’s running away some kind of disreputable event. Bullshit, Josie would have said. Would she ever stop making mistakes, marching off smartly in all the wrong directions? She had to admit, Kellerman was good. He’d gotten her to consider any number of things, say aloud any number of things she had not intended. She had not taken him seriously. She supposed people often did not. He was contemplating his hands, which he had tented together on the desk, as if he knew what she was thinking and was modestly avoiding her gaze.

Elaine said, “Thank you. I guess I needed to unload some of that.”

“You really feel that way? About the world being rotten and everybody’s miserable? Something like that?”

“I don’t know. Sometimes. When I’m feeling low. When I haven’t slept for three days and my only child runs off to show how much she despises me, yeah, I do. Other times I think that being alive is what paradise is. Or that’s how it should be. Listen
to me. Have you ever heard such blathering?” She was glad no one else in the room was really close enough to hear.

“It’s interesting blather,” said Kellerman. “High-minded. Gives the joint some class. What about people who walk around saying, ‘It’s the Lord’s will,’ or ‘Everything happens for a reason.’ Aren’t they happy? They’ve got a system. They’re covered.”

Elaine was beginning to enjoy the conversation in a way she would not have expected. “It must be a wonderful way to live. Thinking that your every action is fraught with significance. Finding a parking place. Not finding a parking place. Everything part of the infinite plan.”

“Well, maybe everything is. Just not the way people think. I was reading this article about something called ‘cellular automatons. ’”

“Cellular …”

“It’s a computer simulation that tries to mirror the way the laws of nature work. It has to do with how complex results derive from simple beginnings. Seemingly random events are actually predictable. The result of repeating a sequence of possible combinations.”

Elaine shook her head. “Sorry. Not a computer person.”

“It’s not really about computers. I’m not explaining it very well. Imagine water vapor freezing into snowflakes. The flakes can take any number of shapes, an infinite number. But you start with just a few basic combinations of crystals. Think of a horizontal row of three squares. Then one square beneath it. Some of the squares are empty, some of them are filled in. All solid or all blank or something inbetween. A sequence. Replicate the sequence according to a regular set of rules, over and over and over, like a computer would, and you get, guess what?”

“No two snowflakes alike.”

Kellerman nodded, pleased. “So let’s say you wake up on an
ordinary day and you make a series of choices. Coffee or tea. Shower or bath. Read the paper starting with the front page or the funnies. Every one of those choices is a sequence. A simple beginning that generates a potentially complex result. Something in the paper alarms you and you spill the coffeepot on yourself so you have to go to the emergency room where you’re given either the right or the wrong treatment; if it’s the right kind you get to go home and that sequence of your life continues, but if it’s the wrong kind you’re admitted to the hospital or maybe you die, and each of those events generates its own set of results. Just like the snowflakes, except the rules get more complicated. All the big and little events of your life. Everyone’s life. All part of some original, infinitely repeating sequence. The same enormous pattern.”

Kellerman leaned back in his chair, looking a little self-conscious, the way people did when they finished a long speech. “Blather.” He shrugged.

Elaine said, tentatively, “Well. That’s a different way to look at things. Instead of the will of God, we have the Universal Computer. I guess it makes sense. But as an explanation for life itself, it seems a little … mechanical.”

“Depends, I guess, on what you think is programming the computer to start with.”

They smiled at each other and Elaine was aware of a current of personal interest between them, not sexual, exactly—not with those silly glasses—but something on its borders. Then she remembered Josie, and her heart flattened, and the engine of worry started up again in her head. “Well, thank you,” she said again. Stood up and shook hands with him. “I hope you’re right about this being just normal teenage acting out.”

“Call me if there’s anything I can do.”

Another smile with that edge of acknowledgment in it, then Elaine got herself out to the parking lot, thinking that life couldn’t
get much stranger, except that it usually did, and maybe that was part of the Cosmic Computer Program. Infinitely multiplying weirdness.

She no longer slept in her own bed. Instead she lay on the couch in the den all night, half-dozing, the television on but the sound turned off. She clicked through channel after channel, watching the hectic shapes and colors succeed one another on the screen. Here was an old sci-fi movie of the sort that used cheesy models for spaceships. You could almost see the wires dangling against the cardboard firmament. Here were three ladies from a psychic hotline, all of them wearing wigs. They were taking calls and turning over tarot cards and, Elaine knew from previous viewings, giving the callers the bad news about the fidelity of their spouses and sweethearts. She wondered if the Cosmic Computer programmed the tarot cards as well, the Magician, the High Priestess, the Fool. On the Weather Channel, a woman was standing in front of the map, wielding a pointer and moving her mouth earnestly. Red and yellow hurricanes were spinning through the South Atlantic. Green rain-shapes were nudging into Illinois. And in India, she knew, it was monsoon season.