The Best American Mystery Stories 2008

Hugh Sheehy The Invisibles

From The Kenyon Review

The end of my fifth summer singled it out forever in the stream of my childhood. Many days my mother and I cooked canned soup on a toy stovetop in our basement, pretending bombs had ruined the upstairs world. And one afternoon at the zoo, surrounded by wild animals in cages and tamer ones in trees, my mother confiscated my snow cone and yanked me behind a hedge. She crouched down and directed my attention to a small, gray-haired woman standing in front of the lions. Her face was wrinkling, rendered sexless by neglect. Families passed without the faintest interest in her.

“Cynthia, see her. She’s more or less invisible, except to the lion, who sees lunch. She’s not really invisible, but she might as well be. Wipe away that smile, little girl. We’re exactly like her.”

My fascinated mother drank from the snow cone until her lips were stained purple. She scowled and jerked her head toward the woman — the invisible, a person who is unnoticeable, hence unmemorable. Mother knew all about invisibles and kept her eyes open in public. She brought home reports: a woman licking stamps at the post office, an anguished old man in line at the bank, a girl crying by a painting in the museum. The library crawling with them.

“Remember, Cynthia, you’re an invisible, too,” she said. “Just like me. We’re in it together. Forever.”

That summer I collected her sayings and built a personality with them. I mastered my bicycle and braved the creeks and abandoned barns that lay within an hour’s journey of home, never doubting that if a bad guy appeared, he wouldn’t see me and, if he happened to be an invisible, that I moved in the aura of my all-knowing mother. Then, one August day when the corn crop was blowing, giving glimpses of sweet ears ripe for the picking, she disappeared from our house.

Over a decade after she vanished, a strange van appeared in the old parking lot at the Great Skate Arena. At once I knew an invisible drove the thing. Around the corner, in the main lot, honking cars inched forward. The grouchy cop waved his ticket book at drivers seeking a place to release excited children. No one had noticed this van, faded maroon with a custom heart-shaped bubble window on the passenger side near the back. Scabs of rust clung to the lower body, over new tires. It wasn’t the sort of car you liked to see outside a skating rink or anyplace where the typical patron was twelve years old.

“First of all it should go without saying that a guy drives that thing. But mainly I wonder how he it got into the lot.” Randall was our tall, brainy boy. He lived for logical problems like this one; the old parking lot where we smoked was separated from the new parking lot by a row of massive iron blocks with thick cable handles that only a crane could have lifted. The back of the old parking lot was closed in by a tangle of vines and meager trees. Beyond this dark thicket, from below, came the sounds of the highway.

“He must have come from down there.” Brianna squinted at the wall of vegetation. I’d put the purplish paint around her eyes. “There must be a bare patch we can’t see.”

“I would bet that a pervert drives that baby,” Randall observed of the van.

“Vans are too obvious for pervs these days.” Brianna took a stance in her vintage black and white stockings. She was little, hot, and adept at finding killer vintage clothes in thrift stores. “He’s probably some poor escapee from the psycho ward.”

They turned to me to decide, these two kids who didn’t know what invisibles were, even though they were in the club. They bore the symptoms of invisibles in denial, dying their hair black, punching steel through their lips and nostrils, wearing shirts that pictured corpses. They hung out with me. We hung out at a skating rink with junior high schoolers. No one ever caught us smoking. The list went on. Rather than try to explain our metaphysical plight — I’d never been comfortable talking about my mother — I shrugged, faked a smile, and ignored the sickening presence I sensed in the van’s heart-shaped window. The mind I detected in that window was that of an all-knowing bully waiting for you to contradict him. “I don’t know, but he’s probably sleeping in there, and either way we don’t want to wake him up. Can we go inside now and skate?”

I puffed at my cigarette between breaths, trying to hurry things along, confident that under the dome of the skating rink I’d shake my fear that a knife-swinging but otherwise unremarkable oddball lurked behind one of the dormant air-conditioning units lined up behind the skating rink.

Randall absentmindedly played with his recent nose piercing. “Look at that creepy window. If he’s in there he’s probably watching us right now.”

Through the dusty window we could see the surface of an opaque space. In our own ways we acknowledged the disadvantage of the unknowing souls we’d spied on from behind unlighted glass. Our spines all twitched a little.

“You think he’s in there?” Brianna pinched a cigarette above the filter, breaking it as she sometimes did when she was nervous. She let it fall on the cracked lot. Her voice grew quiet. “Why would someone want to sleep here?”

Randall walked over to the van and knocked three times on the heart-shaped window. Against the thick, curved glass, his knuckles made a hollow sound that echoed in my chest. Doing a good job of looking unafraid, he stood looking up at it, then smiled at us. Brianna and I watched the window for a terrible face.

Randall threw back his head and laughed like a cartoon villain who has just tied a woman to train tracks. Even at his most raucous he couldn’t draw attention from the main parking lot. He cackled until Brianna snapped another cigarette in her shaking hand, and I put my arm around her tiny shoulders. She looked so helpless, her lip shaking, her stick palm dotted with tobacco.

“You’re such an asshole,” she blurted. “I’m not going to couples-skate with you if you don’t come back right now.”

“Okay, okay.” Randall returned to the little field of safety we seemed to occupy between the brown steel door and the dormant air-conditioning unit. Above our heads, a light snapped on, and I could see how pale my friends looked, how afraid, and knew they could see it in my face, too. Randall squeezed between our bodies, with an arm for each of us. “Shall we?”

As if he could make us forget the unknown behind the dark window in the maroon travel van, he ushered Brianna and me toward the entrance around the corner, where, if she recognized us each Thursday night, the obese woman in the ticket booth would give no sign.

My mother had bad habits which arose as a result of being an invisible. She stared at strangers. She burst into laughter. These were marks of her frustration. She liked to tell cashiers that she’d already paid and make them admit that they hadn’t been totally attentive. Then she’d give the money back.

One day my father and I came home from the farmers market to a house that bore all the signs of her presence. The garage door was open, revealing the backside of her blue sedan. In the oven, cooked blueberries pushed through the flaky crust of an un-watched pie. Suspecting she was hiding in one of her usual places, I parted the dresses in her closet and looked under my parents’ tightly made bed. Outside my father walked the rows of the well-tended vegetable garden, and I balanced myself on the patio rail and stood, searching for her face in the field of swaying cornstalks that enclosed our house. Hiding was a game we played together, and with each shift of my eyes I expected to find her grinning among the rows.

When we grew tired of shouting for her, we went into the house, set the pie out to cool, and waited for her to emerge. I was excited to learn what new hiding spot my mother had found, but my father was upset over her absence. He slumped beside me on the couch and pinched the bridge of his nose. A fidgety, bald-headed man who knew numbers and tax laws, he was always forcing himself to keep his mouth shut around his wife.

The detective we spoke to offered no answer.

“Sometimes people disappear out of their lives,” he said. He kept a neat steel desk with a rectangular wire basket on one corner beside his computer monitor. Beneath a glass reading lamp he’d arranged a scene with cast-iron miniatures, an eyeless, large-chinned policeman interrogating a tied criminal who glared up with red eyes. “They just vanish, you know what I mean.”

“Not like this,” said my father. The very suggestion she’d left infuriated him. “That’s on the highway, on long road trips. Hitchhikers disappear.” He didn’t quite look at the policeman, directed his ire internally. His entire forehead seemed to throb. He held my hand with incredible gentleness.

The detective tried to disguise his pity with a perplexed smile. He looked at me as if reading my thoughts, then reached for a Rolodex. “I can direct you to someone who’s good at talking about this sort of thing.”

My father flinched away from these words, said no, thank you.

Early that winter my father told me not to expect her to come home. I stopped asking him about it but continued to watch milk cartons and mail flyers for her face. I’d just begun kindergarten and wanted to tell her she had been right all along. I was an invisible. My new teacher couldn’t bring herself to remember my name. Other children never looked at me and seemed to avoid the spaces where I played at recess. I was stuck wearing my name written on a construction paper label strung around my neck with yarn, long after the teacher had memorized my classmates. For weeks I felt like a unit of space in which a sign floated: CYNTHIA INVISIBLE HERE.

My mother would have laughed. But by then it was just me and my non-invisible father and the non-invisible woman who had begun to hang around, in a restored farmhouse out in the cornfields that ran to forgettable stretches outside the city.

After the rink let us out with a drove of children to waiting parents, Brianna and Randall left in his car to go screw in their latest secluded spot. With a mild case of virgin’s blues, I drove off alone, with a scentless, yellow, leaf-shaped air freshener swinging above my head. My drive toured the well-lighted streets of suburbs, and no headlights followed long enough to make me more than a little cold. For a few years now my fear of the dark had been completely relocated to a fear of people and especially to the signs of them in the dark, like the headlights of solitary cars and the sound of footsteps on a sidewalk. The full, rustling fields of corn I drove among on the road to my township had long been reassuring company. Though I’d seen enough horror films to envision the travel van pulling out of the vegetables, I’d ceased to think much about it.

Before leaving the rink I’d checked the old parking lot and seen only weeds bent to the gravel by new autumn winds. I’d asked the police officer who oversaw Great Skate’s traffic if the van had been towed. A tall, sour-mouthed man with a crab-red face, he considered me as if I’d claimed to have seen a UFO.

“What van?” he said. “I’ve been here all night, and there hasn’t been any van. Believe me, I would have noticed a van like that.”

“Never mind,” I told him. “I must have it mixed up with a creepy van in another abandoned parking lot.”

My snappy comeback kept me happy while I drank a chocolate malt in a booth beside a tinted diner window and watched drunk older kids come blaring in to devour large sandwiches and plates of chili cheese fries. They spilled food on their faces, shirts, and arms while getting most of it into their mouths. It was disappointing that the boy my imagination blessed with charm and intelligence stood up to belch with greater force than he could muster sitting down. Completely unseen, I made my careful exit through a fray of shouting and reckless gestures. It was after three by then, and I felt snug in my sleepiness and invisibility.

At home the lights were on, the ceiling fans spinning, but the rooms were empty, the doors that should have been closed, open. The air felt charged with a panic that made me run around the ground level, looking for someone.

On the patio I found my stepmother, an impressive work of self-made beauty with big pale hair, smoking in her black robe. She stood beneath the moon and gazed out over a mile of dark, shining corn. She’d been asleep and since getting up had poured herself a glass of wine. When I came up to the rail near her, she gasped and took a step back.

“Just me,” I said. “No psycho killer.”

She squinted down and took a step in my direction. “Your father’s looking for you.”

I laughed, imagining my father exploring warehouses, deserted docks, shouting my name. He never worried about me and never made me come home by a certain time. “Where is he looking?”

“He just needs to feel like he’s doing something.” When she was sleepy, speech did not come easily to her, and I took her strange look for effort. “I’ve been watching him drive around the block for an hour.” By “block” she referred to the square mile of cornfield fringed every few hundred yards with houses like ours. Across the field, where the highway joined back road after back road, the twin twinkles of headlights turned in the direction of our road, and disappeared into the dark mass of the crops. “That’s him now.”

As I looked for his headlights she grabbed hold of my wrist with her cold, hard hand. Something like profound relief came over her. Her grip was strong, and she gazed resolutely into the darkness of the field that lay between us and the sight of my father’s headlights. When I tried to pull away she said, “Stay right here with me until he gets here, please.” I’d never heard her voice so grim.

I let her hold my hand and stepped closer to her. We were still getting to know each other and, being the more girly of us, she looked almost afraid that I would touch her. Then she hugged me against her and sighed.

“What’s happening?”

“Your little friends. Your poor little friends.” She could never remember their names, but she could still feel sorry for them. She repeated herself twice and wouldn’t say anything more.

The police had discovered Randall’s car in a new subdivision where no houses had yet been built, a street making a wide figure eight among undeveloped plots of land. Through the summer the grass had grown tall and seedy, hiding the view of the new street from the country road that led to it, and it was no shocker that Randall and Brianna had been going back there to get it on. They were connoisseurs of discreet sex nooks, the way some couples criticize movies and people they know. Until then I’d believed that doing it in seclusion was an appropriate pastime for a pair of invisible teenagers, but now I felt ashamed of my joke.

The police had been called about teenagers screaming in the subdivision. When they arrived they found only the car and no sign of Randall or Brianna, who evidently still had her purse. People agreed that this was a good sign, though maybe just to agree there was a good sign. Both windows on the driver’s side of Randall’s car were shattered. But there was no blood in the car or on the street, no further signs of struggle, and so the police were hopeful.

Because the detective considered time was an important factor, he questioned me that night in my living room. Eager to help, I rehearsed describing the van while watching our front window for headlights. When they arrived my father and stepmother left me alone with a youngish, good-looking detective and a couple of policemen. This wasn’t the same detective who’d looked for my mother, but his personality made up for the dissimilarity.

Detective Volmar had a scar on his lip and spoke courteously. He sat with his legs crossed and listened as I explained the awful prognostications I’d experienced at Great Skate when I’d seen the van.

“But afterward you let your friends go home,” he said at one point. “Why did you do that?”

“I guess I wasn’t scared anymore. I should have trusted my instinct. I knew he was an invisible.”

The detective had a mean-spirited, doubtful smirk. “An invisible?”

“It’s someone who doesn’t get noticed, who for one reason or another isn’t memorable. I think maybe some of them go bad, become things like kidnappers, or serial killers.”

“That’s interesting. How do you know this van driver was an invisible?”

I explained how invisibles stand out to one another, how the traffic cop at Great Skate hadn’t even seen the strange van, even though it was parked so conspicuously in the seemingly inaccessible old parking lot. Therefore, I reasoned, the van driver was an invisible.

Detective Volmar told one of the cops standing by to find out who this traffic policeman was and to get him on a cell phone or radio. “How did you notice him, then? If he was an invisible.”

“Because I’m an invisible,” I said. “And my friends are, too. That’s how he saw us.”

After asking a few more questions Detective Volmar thanked me and said he’d appreciate it if he could question me at a later date, should his investigation require it. I told him I only wanted my friends to turn up.

He laughed, I suppose at my eagerness. “Gosh you’re a nice kid, um...” He glanced at his report for my name, then admitted with a wince that he’d forgotten it. “Sorry.”

“Don’t worry. Happens all the time.”

The suburb was in an uproar for days. The police department issued a temporary sunset curfew, and in every class at school I sat within earshot of some boy or girl who complained about getting taken into the station or sent home by stern police officers. There were as many stories about sightings of the maroon travel van, near the trailer park, in the oceanic parking lot of the old supermarket, all of them obviously derivative of urban legend. In the halls you saw the usual theater created around a local tragedy. Outwardly my peers showed sympathy for Randall and Brianna. Many joined hands and wept at the assembly where the principal reminded us that we were one community. Girls who never spoke to me invited me to sit with them at lunch.

I declined, sat in the bleachers by the baseball diamond, as usual, though the absence of my best friends made it impossible to eat anything. The weather was getting colder and windier, the sky higher up, and it was even a little frightening to sit near the empty dugout, so far from the school building that no one would have heard me shouting if I’d needed help. But mostly I felt sad, hoped my friends would turn up, and doubted they would. This struck me as the kind of situation where hoping is something you do to allay dread. Our farming region was small, its people interconnected in a way that made secrets short-lived, and I feared that the driver of the maroon travel van and my friends were long gone.

Once my mother explained that invisibility could be an advantage. “I don’t want to fill your head with too many possibilities, little girl.” We were sitting on swings at the metropark, her shoes mired in wood chips while mine dangled above them, and she was talking on and on while I adored her — our usual rapprochement. “I don’t want other people’s inventions to get in the way of your imagination. Who knows what you could come up with? I talk too much to have a good idea, so I sure as hell don’t know. You seem like a good apple to me. Am I right? Are you a good apple?”

“I’m a good apple,” I insisted.

“I know it, little girl. You don’t have to tell me. I don’t have to worry about you going off the map and doing something crazy.”

Going off the map, she’d said. The idea intrigued me, though at the same time it was a disappointment. Hadn’t I been off the map my whole childhood? Wasn’t I still off the map, a seventeen-year-old whose idea of a good time on a Friday night was roller-skating in giant circles in a crowd of twelve-year-olds?

No one knew what I thought, and I was little more than a statistic in attendance- and grade-books. English teachers wrote little congratulatory notes on my essays, but I only wrote back to them what they’d said in class. And anyway they were invisibles, too. My father had to work all the time. His parenting style consisted of giving me money and trusting me.

The first time I dreamed of Brianna and Randall after they disappeared, my bed was in the middle of the floor at Great Skate. The rink must have been closed, because the music was off and only a few lights were on. We appeared to be the only people in the place. I had awoken there, still wearing baggy pajamas, to find them skating circles around me. My friends had changed. They spoke and skated like Randall and Brianna but looked older, sickly, their eyes sunk in their faces.

“Hi, Cynthia,” said Brianna, whizzing past.

“Hey, Cynth,” said Randall, over her shoulder.

“Where have you two been? Everyone’s been so afraid for you.”

“They shouldn’t be,” said Brianna.

“No reason to worry about us. None at all.”

“You shouldn’t keep secrets from your friends,” said Brianna, circling again.

“You should have told us we were invisibles, Cynthia,” said Randall.

“You knew.”

“I didn’t think you’d believe me,” I said.

“You should have trusted us,” said Randall.

“We’re your friends.”

“We could have gone off the map a long time ago,” said Randall. He frowned, shaking his head. “A long time ago. That would have been best for everyone.”

“What did you say?”

“Have you ever thought about going off the map?” asked Brianna.

“I definitely prefer life off the map,” Randall said. “It’s everything I dreamed it would be.”

“Or would have, if someone had told us about it.”

“Have you seen my mother?”

Brianna’s grinning face glided close to mine. There were frown lines around her little mouth. “You want to know where we heard that?”

Randall stopped with his face in mine. His teeth looked gray in the low light. He was pointing off to the side of the rink, to the shadows around the concessions counter. “We heard it from him.”

The moment I became aware of the silhouette of a man standing at the edge of the rink, I was possessed by such a desire to scream that I woke up in my bed, back in my bedroom. It was early morning, before seven, and in a few minutes my alarm would go off. Outside, rain fell from a dark sky into the acres of dispirited corn plants.

Though the wait tortured me, I let two weeks pass before investigating the site where Randall and Brianna had vanished. Each night my friends met me in the dark skating rink and cautioned me to wait for the police to leave the crime scene alone. Their faces were getting older. For a few days I stayed home from school and flipped through yearbooks, reexamining pored-over panoramic photos for our faces. In all three yearbooks there were only the standard shots of each of us and, the one year I missed picture day, they hadn’t even listed me under Not Pictured. Afraid of police by day, afraid of the maroon van by night, I drove around, often taking the road that led past the subdivision where they were heard screaming. I couldn’t see over the tall grass that blocked the street inside. I attended unsolicited conferences with the pamphlet-bearing guidance counselor at school and watched television in an empty house.

One morning, just before I woke for school, Brianna and Randall told me the crime scene would be deserted.

“It’s safe to go now,” said Brianna.

“If you’re still interested, that is,” said Randall.

The subdivision-to-be was north of the next township, on a farm road with a few old houses perched jauntily along a deep irrigation ditch. The autumn rain had begun to break down the high grasses in the undeveloped lots, but I still had enough cover back there that I didn’t mind getting out of my car to walk around. The weather had knocked down the police tape. Clean light poured out of the sky, drying the few leaves that the brisk wind picked up and flew around the new-paved street.

There was evidence of my friends all over the ground, though the police probably couldn’t see that. Dried wads of Brianna’s green bubble gum lay like moldy little brains all over the pavement. Cigarettes only she could have broken. There were the wrappers from the tacos that Randall ordered in what he deemed practical boxes of six. Walking along the concave gutter, passing out of the crime scene, I came to a kind of midden of used condoms and wrappers, blown dry and brittle through the warrens of tall grass. I wondered how many were scattered through the undergrowth, and was overcome with the sense that this was all that remained of my friends.

“I seen you come in here.”

When I looked up I didn’t see the old man who had come from across the street to talk to me — I saw the maroon van, idling in front of me, with a tall man beside it. Long, muscled arms hung out of his shirt, and he wore faded, tight jeans. His blonde hair was long and filthy, his skin a burned red, his black eyes bright and dense. Only a few times in my life had my imagination brought something into this world — usually it took me elsewhere. The vision lasted a second, and then I was looking at an old man in bib overalls, standing a few feet away from me. Seeing he’d scared me, he lowered his shoulders and turned slightly. He’d parted his hair on the right, presumably with the comb in his breast pocket.

“Hi,” I said.

“You should go home. The police still come around sometimes, and they wouldn’t be happy to run into you back here.”

“My friends were the ones who... were here.” I didn’t know how to describe what had happened to them to this stranger.

“The ones got taken.” The old man nodded. “I called the cops about it.”

It was only then that I noticed the blandness in his face, the lights-out quality that rises in a person’s eyes after years of being overlooked. “You saw the van, too?”

From the way he puckered his lips as he nodded, it was obvious he felt responsible for my friends’ disappearance. “I used to think, ‘Let them have their fun back there.’ I know things are different now, but I got married when I was about their age. I always thought any kids who had the nerve to go off like that deserved a little time alone.” He looked at me hard and said, “Not all of us find somebody who’s exactly like us, if you catch my drift.”

My mother pitied my father, who never knew what to do with her. “I know,” I said.

“Then I seen him follow them back in here, and I knew I made a mistake letting them have the place.” He stood with his hands in the deep pockets of his overalls, staring at the taped-off crime scene, which the wind had broken down into an awkward triangle. “I knew I couldn’t help them then. Still I came running back here, and that van almost ran me down.”

“Do you think the police will find them?” It was stupid to ask this, because asking him to answer hurt him, more than it did me, watching him struggle to lie.

He gave up and said, “I don’t know if I can in good conscience tell you to hope too much.”

“I keep dreaming about them,” I said.

“I do, too,” he said.

Detective Volmar telephoned a few days after I’d visited the subdivision where the driver of the maroon van apprehended my friends. He wanted to know if I was opposed to the idea of a free breakfast. He even offered to come out and pick me up.

“I hate to impose on people in their own homes,” he explained a second time, as he drove me through the fields of yellowing cornstalks to the nearby diner where, he couldn’t have known, I sometimes ate alone at night. “They get nervous to have a policeman in the house. I guess they’re afraid I’ll notice the infraction of a tiny law while I’m there, one they don’t even know they’re breaking. People break laws all the time. Sometimes I think we have so many just so I can arrest someone if I know I need to.”

In daylight the restaurant was cleaner and full of shadows, staffed with new cooks and waitresses, strangers to me. We sat down at a booth whose window gave out to a view of the township’s main street, the storefronts of old lawyers’ offices and a realtor. Detective Volmar said he found all this very quaint. Then he ordered the largest breakfast platter on the menu and requested extra bacon. He drank black coffee in large gulps and knew where his mug was without looking at it.

I ordered a cup of yogurt with granola, something I could crunch on and finish without really trying to eat. Between the weird dreams and missing my friends, my appetite still hadn’t returned. The detective may have thought I was a dainty eater, though maybe I flattered myself to think he noticed. He listened to me with interest, but his eyes were a critical compound of belief and disbelief applied to my every statement. He must have been thinking things he didn’t say.

“The first time we talked, you didn’t mention that your mother went missing a long time ago.”

“Sorry,” I said.

“Not at all. I’m surprised your dad didn’t say anything. The case is still officially open, but nobody’s working on it anymore. Whoever had it figured her for a deserter.” With one skeptical shrug he won my gratitude and trust. “There’s no evidence for that, though.”

“Do you think the disappearances are connected?”

Detective Volmar smiled with what compassion he could muster. “There’s no reason to think so. But I’ve been thinking about what you told me the night I interviewed you in your living room. I’m curious about the connection you made between invisibles and serial killers.”

“You really believed me about invisibles?”

He drained half his water glass and shrugged. “We’ll see. You obviously believe in them.”

“It’s because I mentioned the van, and the old man did, too. Isn’t it?”

He turned his head away slightly. “I’d appreciate it if you didn’t talk to a lot of people about the details of the case. The public already knows too much. As it happens, we don’t know much more than the guy who called us, and apparently, you know as much as he does.” He paused and let the waitress refill his coffee mug, then continued solemnly, with his fingers playing together on the paper placemat. “But I cannot afford not to be open-minded about this. Two kids have disappeared.”

“What do you want to know?”

“Well, you say you’re invisible. Plainly, you’re not. So what exactly do you mean?”

“It’s hard to explain,” I said. “I’m not sure I fully understand it either. My mother was never that clear about it. But think of it this way. How did you find out about me?”

Detective Volmar looked from the streaked window to me. “Your father called the station and said you were missing. I guess he’d heard about your friends and thought you were with them. Then you got home, and he called to say you were there.”

“So the whole time you were coming to my house, you were expecting to question a seventeen-year-old girl, right?”

“Right.”

“So maybe that helped you to see me a little more clearly. Maybe, if you knew nothing about me, I could sit right next to you, and you would never have known it. Not because I’m literally invisible, but because I don’t connect to other people. Some people just fall through the cracks. But most of us want to be seen, so we make an effort. I’m somebody’s daughter, and until a while ago I was somebody’s friend. My mother was somebody’s daughter, somebody’s friend, somebody’s wife, and somebody’s mother, in that order.”

“What does this have to do with murderers?”

“I think some people get themselves noticed by taking revenge.”

“Why not get noticed in a more subtle way?” Detective Volmar’s toast arrived, and he proceeded to question me as he scooped grape jelly from a plastic tub. “Why not become somebody’s husband or wife?”

I thought of my friends and my mother, how much it enraged me to see the sunset curfew lifted the week before and to see life return to normal at the high school. “Because it hurts a lot when someone forgets you,” I said. “Taking revenge is one way to make sure no one ever does it again.”

There I was, in the dream that had become nightly. I sat up in bed in the middle of the skating rink, watching Brianna and Randall skate around me like a pair of professionals. They’d improved quite a bit, skating so much in my dreams, and they could do things like double axels and land rolling on four wheels. That said about their skating, their bodies looked considerably worse, older, more starved. One of Randall’s ears seemed to be coming off, and a sore I hadn’t immediately noticed on Brianna’s cheek was growing. What fingernails remained were black, and the skin where the others had been was dry, red, and wrinkled.

Their moods grew nastier with their appearances. I didn’t say much, mostly just listened to them describe what it was like to drive around in the van with the man who stood at the edge of the rink. He never moved. I’d begun to doubt that he knew we were there.

Sometimes Brianna or Randall would make a teasing reference to my mother, and I would beg them to tell me where she was, what had happened to her. However, my pleading could only last for so long, as I knew a game when it was being played at my expense, and then I would just sit there, my feelings hurt, as they laughed.

“So why didn’t you tell your boyfriend where we are?” asked Randall.

“She’s afraid he’ll like me better. Even like this, I’m prettier.”

“What’s the use?” I asked. “He can’t come into my dream and put you in handcuffs. He wouldn’t be interested in that stuff. Besides, he knows where you are.”

“And where’s that?” said Randall, as Brianna turned about to skate backward, with her arms crossed over her small breasts.

“You’re in the maroon van. With that guy. Isn’t it obvious?”

Brianna smiled knowingly at Randall. “Do you want to know what we see?”

“Forests, mountains, lakes, eagles, coyotes, a comet,” Randall counted off his list on the fingers of one hand, starting over whenever he reached his thumb. “A nautilus shell, sharks feeding in a school of silver fish, the White House, rattlesnakes, tarantula eggs, the Grand Canyon, your mother, cottonmouths, a panther.”

“Your mother,” said Brianna. “We saw your mother.”

“When?”

“When!” Randall shouted.

“Where did you see her?” I asked.

“Where!”

Brianna shook her head at me. “Is that really what you want to know? Or would you rather know if she asked about you?”

Her insight left me speechless; yes, this was exactly what I wanted to know. Whether she missed me, thought of me, regretted leaving. Did she plan to come back?

“No, no, no, and no,” said Randall, laughing in the villainous way he had beneath the heart-shaped window of the van behind Great Skate the night of his disappearance.

“Stop, Randall,” said Brianna, putting her hands on her sides. I couldn’t tell if she was serious; as her face deteriorated it conveyed fewer and fewer variations on a lurid scowl. “You don’t know when to quit kidding. Honestly, you’ll hurt a girl’s feelings that way.” She looked at me, the gleaming in her dry eyes limitless. “You can see for yourself. If you meet us. Come to Great Skate this weekend,” she said. “You’ll know where to find us. But don’t tell your boyfriend. We’ll know about it, and so will he.” She nodded at the silhouetted man at the edge of the rink. The lights in the rink came up then, so I could see the line of his mouth, enough to know that he watched us and disapproved.

Sometimes I thought about what I would have been like if I still had a mother, if I’d look, sound, dress, and think like her. If I would love cruelty like she had.

We would play this joke on my father, when he got home from work.

The joke was only good on certain days. I wanted to play it all the time, but my mother knew better. She would stop in my bedroom doorway, interrupting whatever fantasy I had going on. Her toothy smile made me feel like she’d caught me doing something wrong. “Cynthia, should we hide from your father?”

Nodding yes, I would gather up my dolls, as they were necessary props.

“Where should we hide, so he can’t see us?”

The pantry worked best. We could watch through a crack in the door as my father walked around the house, his loafers clacking on the wooden floors, his shoulders trying to shrug off his suit jacket. When he shouted our names my mother would hold me against her, covering my mouth with her hand. If I needed to laugh, tell me, I was to bite her.

After a while my father would grew so frustrated that his patience failed, and he would make himself a sandwich. This amused us because he’d never learned to snack properly. After watching him mutter miserably over his approximation of the perfect sandwich my mother had prepared and hidden in the pantry with us, we’d wait until he took a beer out onto the patio. Then, very quietly, we would emerge from hiding, she to make him a plate and fill the sink with sudsy dishwater, I to sit on the tiles at her feet with my dolls. Once we were in our respective swings of wash and play, she would open the window and call to him to come in.

“Where were you?” my father would ask, moving to dump his poor sandwich in the garbage, now that my mother’s handiwork awaited him. “I was just in here looking for you.”

My mother would wrinkle her eyebrows, and she’d send me a wink when my father wasn’t looking. “Why, we were right here the whole time. You walked right past. I don’t know why you didn’t see us. Sometimes I think you just don’t appreciate us.”

Night was falling earlier now, and though the maroon van was not in the old parking lot when I arrived at the skating rink, I wasn’t completely filled with doubt. If my friends were indeed alive, on the run with the driver of the maroon van, they would need to make an inconspicuous entrance. They were simply waiting for the right moment to appear and send me a signal to join them. I wondered what it would be like, to feel the road passing beneath me, what the van smelled like inside, all the things I would see from the heart-shaped window.

Every Friday in October was Halloween at Great Skate, and that night I waited in a line of fifth- and sixth-grade vampires, witches, he-devils, she-devils, and various other monsters. I had dressed up like the invisible man from the black-and-white movie by wrapping my face in white bandages and wearing sunglasses. I put my hair up in a bun, under a black fedora, and since I was neither a tall nor a large-chested girl, I blended with the younger children.

The heavyset woman in the little ticket booth charged me for a child’s admission, an unforeseen bonus that under other circumstances would have thrilled me but now only disoriented me a little. I entered the booming atmosphere of the crowded skating dome, got a locker and put on my skates, then glided around the polished wooden floor to sounds of campy eighties hits. On the white walls of the rink, echelons of colored light spots slowly rotated against the flow of disguised skaters. The deep voice of the DJ, hidden away in his booth, announced specially themed skates. All around me boys and girls coasted together, five and six years younger than me, already oblivious to me. It was fine, that had been my childhood, and for a while I had fun being nobody, soaring along to the music. I could do and think anything, be anyone, the only catch being that I had no one to share it with. That’s when I noticed the man watching me from the rail of the rink floor, back behind the bathrooms, near the fire exit.

He was tall and strong-looking, leaning over the rail on his elbows, staring directly at me once I’d noticed him. He’d brushed his long blonde hair behind his ears, revealing his ruddy face. He lifted one hand and waved at me. His attempt to smile only seemed to worsen his mood. A person like that you could never touch, only brush against, and never truly speak with, only at. At this moment I became sure that my friends were dead. I bent my knees and somehow avoided wiping out on the hard, hot floor. I neither waved back nor turned my head abruptly away, but he continued to watch me as I passed him. He would move his face over, as if to push it into my line of vision, and wink at me.

I tried to think of some way I might slip off the rink floor and telephone Detective Volmar without chasing off the man at the rail. I wanted not only to escape him but to see him hauled off by the police. Nothing short of a complete victory would be acceptable. Under my mask I wanted to cry but knew I had to keep moving. As long as I kept skating, I could find a way out, call for help, and do what I could. I skated until the man relaxed and let his hands hang limp over the rink floor, as if to say he would wait on me. Then I skated through a large group of angels and, with that blockade behind me, coasted off the floor at the far end of the rink. I skated out into the lobby, where I found the crabby traffic cop eating a soft pretzel as he peered into a vending machine that flattened pennies and stamped them with winged roller skates.

Once I’d pulled away the bandages and sunglasses he remembered me. Because I was so upset, he hardly needed to hear my story to come running with me around to the back of the rink. It was difficult to run on my skates, but I was afraid of being left behind, isolated in a space where no one could see me, the only kind of space where I’d be vulnerable to the man I’d seen next to the rink. The traffic cop barked into his radio as he ran ahead of me around the corner into the empty back lot. I nearly lost my balance when I saw there was no maroon van waiting for us.

The officer didn’t need to think twice. “We’ve been looking for that van. He’s probably driving something else.” He pulled open the emergency exit door of the rink and ushered me inside. “Come on. Show me where you saw him.”

We hurried into the red light that filled the domed room, and from the rail along the rink scanned a hundred masked faces for the one I’d seen watching me all night. I looked out on the floor, along the tables by the concessions area, among the few arcade games on the far wall. There was no place where the man could have been hiding, not really. The traffic cop dashed into the men’s room and then the ladies’ room. A group of little girls came running out, then the cop, looking frustrated.

A minute of confusion passed before the rest of the police came running in. The music was stopped and the children were herded off the floor so the cops could search the premises. The situation quickly became humiliating and inexplicable, with a lot of adults scowling, tweeners complaining. The man who’d been watching me was gone. None of the twelve-year-olds questioned remembered seeing him at the rail. A few said they might have seen somebody, but their voices were too eager. Their descriptions contradicted each other.

In all there were eight police cruisers in the parking lot, their lights flashing in the pungent autumn night. Some of the twelve or so officers complained while looking at me, to let me know I’d wasted their time. Detective Volmar showed up in an unmarked white car and was very kind to me. He told a few other cops that they couldn’t understand what I’d been through, though I had the feeling that he, too, was irritated. He put me in the back of his car with the door open and told me to put my shoes back on. Then he telephoned my father.

About a year later, the man who became known as the Lake Erie killer was arrested in a small town in southern Michigan, a short drive from our suburb in the cornfields. The police discovered the bones of an estimated thirty-one people in the crawl space beneath his house. Brianna and Randall’s clothes were some of the first pieces of evidence found, and a detective said it was only a matter of time before their skulls were identified. Also found in one of three garages built on the killer’s sprawling property was the maroon travel van my friends and I had seen outside Great Skate the night they’d disappeared. I saw this after school in a news flash I watched in my living room and saw part of an interview with the killer’s mother and then a segment where a serial killer expert compared this killer to others. When the station broadcast footage of the police arresting the man who had murdered my friends, he wasn’t anyone I recognized. He was older, around average height, with neat brown hair and glasses. He had soft cheeks, the sort of face I would never imagine hid plans to kill somebody.

My father and stepmother were there with me, waiting for me to speak, to say that this was the guy I’d seen in the rink that night the police had tried to come to my rescue. They wanted to see my fear vanish forever. I only shook my head. What if my mother was one of the bodies they’d found, one of those so decayed it would never be identified? The more I thought about it the more possible it seemed and the more I understood I might still be sick. My face must have betrayed my fear, because my father and stepmother suddenly grew ashamed of themselves.

“Let’s get out of here,” I said. Soon, I knew, the telephone would be ringing. Randall’s parents and Brianna’s mother would be calling to speak to me. There was weeping to do, relief to share, and bitterness to acknowledge, and now there was a figure to blame it on. Out the window behind my father and stepmother, the sun rippled in the golden light above the drying, broken stalks of last summer’s corn. It was getting cold again, the days shortening. Soon the outdoor businesses would close for the winter.

“How about ice cream?” I said.

By then I’d stopped dreaming about Brianna and Randall in the skating rink. They appeared in my dreams, but in the usual nonsensical places, their faces no longer marbled with decay, but fresh and young, as I had known them. They didn’t seem to remember what had happened to them, even when, during a dream set in my front yard, I saw the maroon van drive slowly past us. In the dream it was sunny, there were birds hunting worms in the grass, and I felt no fear after the van had gone. “I’ve been wanting to ask you two,” I said to my friends. “Is the driver of the van the killer or not? Or is he someone else?”

“What driver?” Randall said.

“I don’t know any van driver,” Brianna said.

On the day the police caught the Lake Erie killer, my father, my stepmother, and I came back from the ice cream stand having licked our fingers clean. The burnt flavor of sugar cones lingered in our mouths, and rather than accept the grim circumstances awaiting us, my father suggested we use the remaining daylight to build a scarecrow in the front yard. He dug a flannel shirt and a pair of brown corduroys from a trunk of old clothes, and I found a pillowcase we could use for a head. In the yard we stuffed these things full of leaves. We posted an old shovel handle in the hard ground and hung the great grotesque doll on it. I’d painted ferocious blue eyes and a stitched red frown for a face, and my father fastened on a gray fedora with safety pins. My stepmother sat on the porch swing, bundled up in a blanket, watching as she sipped hot peppermint tea.

The day turned dark over the bare trees, faster than we’d expected, and by the time we joined my stepmother on the porch swing, with leaf scraps clinging to our hair and sweatshirts, the sun was setting, and a wild wind had sprung up. The trees swayed, noisily rattling their branches together. We sat in a tight row on the wooden seat and watched the scarecrow flail its arms in the dusk, casting dead leaves up at the shuddering boughs of our maples, like a wizard trying to rebuild the summer. Inside the house, the telephone rang and rang. The answering machine kept switching on, and we laughed to hear my father gloomily repeating that we weren’t home. Maybe that was a little cruel, hiding just then, but we would make up for it later. We would call those people back, and shout, laugh, cry — produce the sounds that people make when they’re together. We owed them that much, out of the empathy we felt, listening to them speak slowly, faithfully putting words into the void of our answering machine, against the chill that grows when a name is said and silence answers.