The Missing Person

Seven

We all lay sprawled on sleeping bags, the sounds of breath and snores mingling in the quiet with the rising clatter of birds. Sledge woke me by licking my ankle and prodding his wet nose repeatedly against my foot. Irina was next to me, her head inadequately pillowed on Wylie’s stomach, with Psyche pillowed in turn on her more ample body. Angus was nowhere to be seen. Sledge licked me again, this time on the cheek, and whined in my ear. I didn’t know why he always picked me. I rolled over, got a dangerous close-up of Stan’s hairy armpit, and rolled back again.

It was my second hangover in as many days, but either I hadn’t drunk as much last night or I was getting used to the condition. I felt surprisingly fine. I opened the front door and followed the dog down the stairs to the gravel parking lot. The sun was bright yet mild, the street empty, and morning glories I hadn’t noticed before bloomed full and blue. Sledge nosed around in the weeds and relieved himself on a prickly-looking shrub with orange flowers. Above me, the apartment door opened and Wylie stepped onto the landing, squinting. “Are you leaving?”

I shook my head. “Not unless you come with me.”

He made a face. “You can’t make me.”

“I can try.”

He walked down the stairs, glacier-slow, scowling all the while. At the bottom he called to the dog, who ignored him, being otherwise occupied pawing the dirt and then sniffing it, over and over. Finally he lost interest and trotted to my side, sitting down on his back legs, his face attentive and alert, apparently awaiting further instructions.

“Man, he really likes you.”

“It’s unrequited.” I climbed the stairs, and Sledge followed me. I made like I was going inside, and when he scampered in, I closed the door behind him. On the other side of the plywood I could hear his shocked and aggrieved complaints. Having outwitted him gave me an undignified but real sense of satisfaction. Then I went back down and faced Wylie. “Listen,” I said. “You can come now or a week from now, but you do have to come home. I mean it, I’m not leaving until you do. I honestly don’t care if you want to vandalize golf courses and eat food out of dumpsters, but you can’t not talk to Mom. Seriously, you can’t do that.”

In the ensuing silence a jet plane cut across the sky, heading for the Air Force base, trailing a precise white line.

My brother turned his scowl to the ground, to the plane, and reluctantly back to me. “She doesn’t understand.”

“I don’t care,” I said, holding up the keys to the Caprice. “The car’s parked on campus. Let’s go.”

We pulled up at the condo just as my mother was leaving for work. At the sound of the car maneuvering boatlike into the driveway she turned from locking the front door and froze.

After a single night in Wylie’s apartment the small condo loomed like a four-star resort: elegantly furnished, indulgently large, with washed windows and manicured grounds. For a second I felt a glimmer of revulsion, an almost physical sensation akin to nausea, or a sneeze, and shook my head at my new sympathies. I was turning into the eco-freak Patty Hearst.

Wylie got out of the car and faced her, saying nothing. She looked like she wanted to scratch his eyes out; he looked like he was waiting for her to do it. I felt ignored and beside the point, which almost came as a relief.

“You look terrible,” she said to Wylie.

“So do you,” he said.

I could see him looking her up and down, passing judgment on everything from her office job to the big brown purse weighing down her right shoulder. Back in Brooklyn, on the receiving end of all those late-night messages, I thought that Wylie had patterned himself on our father, with his scientific terminology and pseudo-academic pursuits. But now, seeing the two of them together, it occurred to me that he was much more like our mother, with the same rigid insistence on getting his way, the same tendency to withhold his emotions from the world. She unlocked the door and held it open.

“You’re coming in this house, right now, and you’re not leaving until I say so.”

Wylie glanced at me and snorted, and I said, “Please.”

As he passed her, she wrinkled her nose and told him in a level, furious voice that he looked disgusting and smelled like a farmhand, and that she shuddered to think by what behavior he had come by such a smell. She said she hadn’t raised him to live in a ditch and disappear for months at a time, and asked whether by doing these things he hoped to send her to an early grave. “Is that your goal?” she kept saying. She elaborated on this theme for the next half hour, while Wylie stood in the living room, head bowed, in the posture of a martyr. Finally, as the barrage showed no sign of letting up, he started for the white couch, and she said, crisply, “If you think you’re going to set your filthy behind on my clean furniture, then you think wrong.”

She called Francie at the office to explain she’d be late due to “unforeseen circumstances,” and then turned on the shower and stood outside the bathroom tapping her foot until Wylie stepped inside.

While he was showering she made scrambled eggs, fried bacon, brewed coffee, and put bread in the toaster — each gesture, from stirring the eggs to putting juice on the table, executed with the oppressive accuracy of the truly angry. Not knowing what else to do, I set the table, which was getting to be my main contribution to the household.

When Wylie came into the kitchen his hair was flowing loosely down below his shoulders, still wet and gleaming red-brown in the morning sun. He was wearing a pair of khaki shorts and a plaid short-sleeved shirt I recognized — my heart turning over in my chest — as my father’s, and he smelled like strawberry shampoo. Our mother nodded at a chair, and he sat down, in what seemed like the first step in some ritual indoctrination. I kept waiting for her to bring out the clippers and shave his head, like at boot camp, but instead she brought out a spatula and served eggs. Wylie and I ate enveloped in stiff silence, throughout which she would not stop staring at him, even as she sipped mechanically at a cup of coffee. I shifted in my seat. She stared and stared.

If Wylie noticed it, he gave no sign. He tucked his long hair delicately behind his ears and ate two servings of bacon and eggs. The silence didn’t seem to bother him even a bit. He put away five pieces of toast, an entire sliced tomato, and three glasses of juice.

When he finished, my mother ordered us to do the dishes, then wiped her lips with a napkin and gathered up her purse and keys.

“I have to go to work now, because that’s what responsible people do,” she said. “You will be here tonight when I get home at five.” She waited for Wylie to answer, but he didn’t. “Lynnie,” she added, and I nodded to make it clear I understood.

The silence lasted while I did the dishes and Wylie dried them and put everything away. I was looking forward to hitting the couch and checking on my old friends in celebrity television, with maybe a side trip to the Weather Channel. But Wylie’d started jittering — tapping his toes, just like our mother, and glancing out the window every fifteen seconds — and I felt compelled to pick up where her staring had left off.

He looked at me, annoyed. “Are you going to do this all day?”

“You heard Mom. If you leave, my life won’t be worth living.”

“Lynn, leave me alone. Where I’m going, you can’t follow.”

“And where is that?”

“To the bathroom.”

“So you’re not leaving, right? Promise me.”

Wylie sighed, and I stared at him until he nodded.

“Okay,” he said, “promise.”

I let him go. I stretched out on the couch, feeling drowsy— still tired from the night before — and when I woke up there was a coin of drool on the couch cushion and a woman on television extolling the long-lasting clean of a brand-new detergent. The house seemed ominously quiet.

I jumped up, checked the bathroom and the bedroom where I’d been staying, then doubled back to the living room and kitchen. It wasn’t like there were a lot of places he could hide, but I kept circling through the condo, purposeless and rushed, the way you do in dreams. The Caprice still sat in the driveway, its ivory paint glowing dully in the yellow light of the afternoon. I hopped up and down on the baking asphalt and then headed around back, where my mother maintained a small patch of lawn, and on a shady strip of ground along the side of the house I found Wylie, still moderately clean, snoring in the dirt.

One arm was flung over his side in a gesture of total exhaustion. He looked as if he’d literally fallen down asleep. For a couple minutes I sat in the weeds and studied him: the veins roping down his tanned legs, the slack fabric of my father’s too-big shirt against his chest, his nicks and bruises and scars. With shorter hair and glasses, I thought, he’d look eerily like the pictures I’d seen of my father as a young man. Did my mother see this too, every time she looked at him? I didn’t know how she could stand it. Seeing him now, exposed and asleep and alive, was almost more than I could handle.

I reached out and flicked my index finger against the thickly callused sole of his right foot, which he moved. I flicked the other foot and he moved that one too, then moaned softly. I flicked his arm and said, “Hey. Wake up.” He nestled his cheek deeper into the dirt, apparently too comfortable to budge. “Let’s play cards,” I said. “Or Monopoly. I’m bored.”

After some more flicking and a couple of well-placed pokes, he opened his bleary eyes. The circles beneath them had faded to a vaguer blue. “What are you, six years old?”

“I bet I can still beat you at hearts.”

“In your dreams,” he said.

“My years away from the game have only sharpened my thirst for victory,” I told him.

He sat up. He’d tied his hair back again, and although it was still shiny and thick, he’d managed to rub some dirt and weeds into it during his nap. He was looking like his old self again. “Youth and ability are on my side,” he said. “Let’s go.”

We spent the afternoon playing cards and drinking orange juice in the quiet living room, listening to so-called edgy pop music on the radio. I had the feeling that our truce would hold as long as I didn’t mention guerrilla tactics, mother’s wishes, alternative lifestyles, or weird friends. As a result conversation was limited. We stuck to the game and, in a hobby that dated back to childhood, the construction of elaborate snacks from whatever we could find in the kitchen. After a multi-course meal involving peanut butter, chips and salsa, bananas, ice cream, and popcorn dusted with Parmesan cheese, another round of napping ensued.

Our mother came home at the dot of five, and she didn’t come alone. Two seconds after I heard her pull into the driveway, a second car parked alongside the curb. David Michaelson stepped out into the street wearing another Western-style shirt and blue jeans held up with an elephantine silver buckle that would have been useful for attracting the attention of search-and-rescue planes overhead. Two young men then emerged, each a variation on the theme of David Michaelson: beefy, with dark curly hair and thick chests, but slimmer and clean-shaven. They had to be Donny and Darren, the sports stars.

“Oh, God,” I said.

Wylie didn’t even look up from his most recent snack, an open-face sandwich layered with tuna fish, cheddar cheese, shredded carrots, and olives. “And you wonder why I don’t like to come home.”

The Michaelsons helped unload countless grocery bags from our mother’s car and conveyed them up to the front door, as Wylie and I braced ourselves in the living room.

Our mother came inside first and greeted us with a brisk smile. “Children,” she said.

We were having a dinner party. Our mother established headquarters in the kitchen and ordered everyone about: arranging for the unstocking of groceries, the placement of appetizers, the ordering of cocktails.

“Lynn,” David said. “Wylie. What can I offer you both to drink? I believe we’ve got a full bar.”

I looked at Wylie, who sat with his head bowed, licking tuna juice off his thumb. “I’ll have some wine,” I said. “I’m sure Wylie wants a beer.”

“Alrighty then!” David slapped a large hand on my shoulder and went back into the kitchen, crossing paths with his sons, who sat down and slouched back in their chairs, so far that their muscular legs were almost parallel with their heads. Their faces were pale. I knew they both spent a lot of time playing hockey, but couldn’t remember which was Donny and which was Darren.

“So,” one of them said. “Long time no see.” He was wearing shorts and a pair of flip-flops with little fishes stuck on the plastic stems between his toes.

I gave them what I hoped was a polite smile. “Since we used to live next door, I guess,” I said.

“Yep,” the other one said. “Long time.”

When their father came back with the drinks, I drank half of mine and asked them how school was going. One of them launched into a complicated story about a fierce rivalry with another team, a saga of violence and retribution that had been going on all season. This led to a greatest-hits list of reminiscences, with highlights about practical jokes and personal vendettas. “So then we go, right?” Donny or Darren said. “And he body-checks me? And gets thrown out of the game?”

“That landed Donny in the hospital,” David said to me. He was sipping from a glass of red wine, and the bottom of his mustache was wet. “He had to have sixteen stitches. This kid was violent.”

“And that’s when Darren hatched his nefarious plan.”

“What was that?” Wylie asked.

Michaelson Sr. sat down on the arm of the couch, next to me, with his legs crossed and his arm stretched along the back. The last time I’d seen him, over enchiladas, he was counseling an intervention for Wylie, but he didn’t seem about to confront him now.

“My plan involved a frog,” Darren said. “Actually, several frogs.”

“Where we live — you guys remember — we had a lot of frogs in our backyard,” Donny explained. “We captured them, and put ’em in a shoebox and then stuck ’em in his shoes, so when he took off his skates, right. .” He had to stop, since he was choking on his own laughter.

“He squishes these little frogs with his feet!”

“Oh, man! You should’ve seen the expression on his face!”

All three Michaelsons were paralyzed now, clutching their stomachs and listing from side to side, their laughter coming in breathless hoots.

“And the smell!” Darren said.

“Wow,” I said. “That’s really gross.”

The brothers bobbed their heads up and down in asthmatic hilarity.

“Yeah,” Donny finally got out. “Gross!”

“So, you’re saying you killed them in advance?” I said.

“Well, yeah, obviously. Otherwise they would’ve jumped out of the shoes.”

“How’d you kill the frogs?” Wylie said. I glanced at him, but his tone and face were set and calm.

“We, um, squished them.”

“But carefully, you know, so that they’d still be squishy in the shoes.” Darren wiped a tear from his eye and shook with a few final tremors.

David Michaelson looked at Wylie. “Now, I realize it might not be too politically or animalistically correct,” he said, “but you’ve got to admit it’s pretty funny.”

“You had to see the guy,” Darren said, “running around the locker room with frog parts stuck to his feet, yelling ‘What the fuck! What the fuck!’”

“I thought I was gonna die it was so funny,” Donny added.

“They were probably toads,” Wylie said.

“Is that a fact?” David said.

“Where you live it was more likely to have been toads,” Wylie said. “Wide and fat, with warty skin? Their habitat’s around the Northeast Heights. Some of them are desert toads. Down by the Rio Grande there are a lot of bullfrogs, but up where you are there’s less water, so, yeah, I think you actually killed a lot of toads.”

“Toads, huh?” Darren said. He thrust his hands in his pockets.

“Ah, well,” David said, “boys will be boys.”

“And toads will be toads,” Darren said. Donny elbowed him in the ribs and said, “‘What the fuck! What the fuck!’” and they both cracked up again.

Our mother came out into the room, smiling another brisk and terrible smile. “Who’d like another drink?” she said.

“I would,” Wylie and I said at the same time.

I followed her back to the kitchen, where things were simmering in multiple pots. The oven was on and onions were turning golden in a sauté pan. Everything smelled excellent, and it occurred to me that she was capable of much better cooking than anything she’d served me so far this summer. In the other room I could hear the Michaelsons launching into yet another story guaranteed to please Wylie, probably involving the torture of puppies or the wanton discarding of recyclable materials.

“I think it’s going well, don’t you?” my mother said.

I poured myself another hefty glass of wine. “Are you out of your mind?”

“No, I don’t believe I am. And I’ll thank you not to speak to me in that fashion.”

“Sorry,” I said. “But seriously, Mom, what were you thinking? Can’t we just have one night, the three of us? I finally get Wylie to come home, and this is what you do?”

“David is part of my life now, and you children have to accept that.”

“So’s David’s wife, and you didn’t invite her.”

She kept her back to me, tasting something with her finger.

I considered repeating myself, in case she hadn’t heard me, then thought better of it and headed back to the living room, where a troublesome silence had taken over.

Wylie was sitting with his head practically between his knees, clutching himself for dear life.

David looked up at me with an expression of concern, placed a hand on Wylie’s back, and said, “He’s not feeling very well, I don’t think.”

I saw a shudder run down my brother’s spine.

“I’m fine,” Wylie muttered from between his knees.

“Maybe you should lie down or something,” Donny said.

“I think dinner’s almost ready,” I offered helpfully.

“I’m fine,” Wylie said again, and uncurled his head. “Just a little nauseous.”

“It’s probably all those snacks,” I said.

“No,” he said, “it isn’t.”

We sat there sipping disconsolately from our drinks until my mother announced that dinner was served. There were linen napkins on the table and the good china we once used only at Christmas. For a second the world slipped, loosened around its edges, and I was standing in the past: the smell and heat of candles, the white tablecloth with green trim, my father’s face flushed as he lifted his chin and laughed at something Wylie or I said. All of this — this present day — seemed imaginary and flimsy compared to that memory; it shocked me to think that he was dead and the rest of us, here in my mother’s house, were still alive. Then I sat down.

“Let us pray,” David said. His sons bowed their heads, as did my mother. Wylie and I looked at each other across the table.

“Dear God,” David went on. His voice was relaxed and familiar, as if God were a neighbor with whom he was accustomed to discussing baseball or the weather. “When we sit down in a lovely home with a lovely meal prepared by a lovely woman, in the company of family and friends, we remember to be grateful to you, Lord, and take it as a sign of your continuing and blessed grace which you bestow upon us every day, and we thank you for it. Amen.”

“Amen,” said everybody except me and Wylie.

Across the table, Darren winked at me and said, “Good grub, good meat — thanks, God, let’s eat.”

We were served a fine and complicated meal involving pork tenderloin and braised vegetables and sauces and sides, and I would have eaten a lot had I not spent the entire day emptying the kitchen cupboards. Instead I drank several more glasses of red wine and picked at my food. Fortunately, the Michaelsons were there to pick up the slack, and their appetites were substantial. Wylie, to my amazement, continued to eat without stopping, methodically clearing one helping and serving himself another, as if he were a camel or some other animal capable of storing enough food to last through the lean weeks to come. Seated at the head of the table, our mother poured wine and proposed toasts: to summer, to children reunited with their parents, to old neighbors, et cetera. From the other end of the table David toasted her back, the wet hem of his mustache glinting in the candlelight. Outside, the red sun glowered low in the sky, the horizon soupy and green, the world colored like an infection. We ate.

The first half hour passed without incident. Our mother told stories about the travel industry, describing the outrageously false claims made by fleabag hotels charging luxury prices and the insufferable demands of cheapskate clients who wanted to tour the world for the price of a bus ticket to El Paso. Even Wylie laughed. David asked me how my studies were going, and his boys leaned forward to hear my answer.

“I’m working on my dissertation, I guess.”

“You must be smart,” said Donny.

“Of course she’s smart,” David said. “You know, Lynn, I love art. Whenever I’m in a foreign city, the first place I go is the museum.”

“Really,” I said. I assumed my mother had told him to say this.

“Lynn’s loved paintings since she was a little kid,” Wylie said. “She used to just stand there and stare at them, like she was sleepwalking or something. You could talk to her and she wouldn’t even hear you.”

“You loved paintings when you were a kid?” Darren said.

“When I was a kid,” Donny said, “I loved baseball and, I don’t know, making fun of girls.”

“Some things never change,” Darren said philosophically, then elbowed his brother, and they both laughed.

David wiped his mustache delicately with his napkin and patted his belly as though complimenting it on a job well done.

Meanwhile Donny, Darren, and Wylie all used pieces of bread to clear their plates of any last vestiges and sat back with an air of regretful finality.

Donny grinned at Wylie across the table. “For a skinny guy, you can put a lot away.”

“It’s probably his first square meal in weeks,” our mother said.

“If I don’t eat real regular, I get irritable and off-balance,” Donny volunteered.

“Now that makes sense,” she said, looking at Wylie.

“I feel good now,” Wylie told her quietly.

“I’m sure glad to hear it,” David said. “You were giving your mother quite a scare.”

“Was I?” Wylie said.

“Now, son, you know you were. Running around with all those—” here he paused, and smoothed his mustache with his right index finger—“antisocial types.”

I watched Wylie smile at this, first gently and then widely.

“Those antisocial types,” he said quietly, “are good people doing important work, and they’re my best friends.”

“Those people are spoiled brats and trust-fund babies. I’ll bet you dollars to donuts that they’re living off their parents while they run around thinking they’re righteous because they spike trees.”

“You don’t know that they spike trees,” I said. “You don’t know anything about them.”

“You’d be surprised what I know,” David told me. “I know it’s not all fun and games and some big party like you kids think it is.” His lips were sputtering beneath his mustache. “I know that there are serious issues at stake.”

“Like hell you do,” I said. I was drunk.

At the end of the table, my mother covered her face with her hands. “Why are you defending those people?”

“Why shouldn’t she defend them?” Wylie said.

“Now, listen, young lady,” David said. “I’m as environmentally sensitive as the next person—”

“Sure you are, when the next person’s a toad killer,” Wylie said.

“What’s that mean?” Donny said, and Darren shifted in his seat.

“Toad killer,” Wylie said slowly. He was still smiling, his jaw clenched, and the words issued from between his teeth in a whisper. He stood up. In the flickering candlelight his smile shimmered with rage. “As in one who kills toads just for the fun of it.”

“Sit down,” our mother said. He ignored her. Across from me, Darren wiped a finger over his plate and licked off some final morsel. His father rose heavily to his feet and held up his palms in what I guessed he thought was a soothing gesture. But it had the opposite effect, and Wylie whirled on our mother and said, “You don’t understand anything.” I said his name, and he looked at me and shook his head, then ran out of the house in his clean, bare, callused feet.

I was the only one who went outside, calling his name again, twice. I knew he heard me, but he didn’t turn around, running silently down the street and disappearing around the corner.

Inside, my mother was shaking her head, David had his arm around her, and the sons were doing dishes. I couldn’t stand to stay in there. I went back outside and sat on the trunk of the Caprice. Lights around me blinked on and off: distant headlights showing through the gaps between houses, people drawing the curtains on a window down the street.

Later, much later, I fell asleep with the nagging feeling that there was something I could have done but didn’t, might have prevented but let slip — a slim thought that kept getting away from me, like something glimpsed out of the corner of my eye, but when I turned my head, it was gone.