These Nameless Things

by Shawn Smucker

  “Oh, Circe,” Misha whispered.

  “She agreed. She was very kind. Her mother immediately took to my daughter, chatting with her in a very grown-up way. When the next round of thunder rumbled around us, she jumped. But the woman was kind and reassured me that the two of them would watch her and take care of her. How often I thought of those words! How often I cursed myself for leaving her with someone else!”

  A breeze made its way down from the mountain, stirring every loose thing: the grass, our clothes, the ash in the fire pit. A gray cloud of it burst out and swirled in a funnel shape before blowing past Miho’s house and disappearing in the plains. I looked over at the girl. She was listening intently. A strand of her hair blew into her face, and she pushed it behind her ear.

  Circe got a firm look on her face, like she was determined to see this through. “I stared out into the downpour and gathered my courage to run, but then an older man came over and asked if I would like him to go out and get my car. I thought about it, but it was still raining so hard, and I felt bad asking him to do it. He was sort of hunched over, and I didn’t want him to get pneumonia or something from getting wet when I was quite capable of getting the car myself. I thanked him and told him I would do it. And I didn’t mind. It was warm, and it would only take me a moment.

  “He turned, and he smiled real big when he saw my daughter. The mother and daughter who were watching her both sort of squealed when they saw him, and then they were hugging because apparently they were very old friends. As the three of them stood there chatting, the older woman had her hand on the man’s shoulder, and he was acting very bashful about it. ‘Are you sure you don’t mind watching her?’ I asked the woman again, partially to make sure and partially to remind her about my daughter. The women both seemed completely caught up in this unexpected reunion with the older man. She smiled and waved her hand at me, saying they weren’t in a hurry and I should go on.”

  Circe took a deep breath as if going underwater. “I felt like I was diving into a pool as I started to run. Even when I wanted to breathe, the whole thing sort of took my breath away—the lightning and thunder, the ridiculously hard rain, the way it splashed up off everything. I was drenched in a second. My feet got heavy from the water soaking into my sneakers. I got to the car and frantically tried to work the key. I ripped open the door and fell into the driver’s seat, banging my head on the door frame.

  “What if I had run faster? What if I hadn’t fumbled with the keys? What if I hadn’t bumped my head? Would I have gotten there faster, in time to pick up my daughter and get her out of there?

  “I sat there in the car, rubbing the sore spot on my head. The sound of the rain was like a waterfall. It ran down the windshield, blurring everything around me. I thought of my daughter and started the car. I backed out of my space, turning toward the store. And that’s when I heard it.”

  Circe swallowed hard, as if she thought she might throw up or her body was trying to consume the words she meant to say. “The sound seemed both far away and right overhead. At first it was a dim kind of humming, like a mosquito getting closer. But I noticed that the humming was choked back at times, making it sound irregular, sputtering. It turned into a whooshing sound that came in over the parking lot, and I saw this thing drop from the sky and land right where my daughter had been sitting in the grocery cart.”

  Tears streamed down her cheeks, but Circe made none of the sounds I associated with crying. It was haunting seeing her like that, her eyes suddenly empty, staring out over the plains.

  “It was a small airplane. It seemed so absurd, so out of my normal experience that I almost couldn’t comprehend it. I sat in my car and screamed. It’s kind of embarrassing, but that’s what I did. I had my foot on the brake in the middle of that parking lot. I didn’t get out and run to her. I didn’t get out and call for help. I just stayed right there and screamed.

  “The strangest part of it all is that I know Dan’s brother had something to do with it, and that’s why I’m here. That’s why I’m waiting.”

  Her eyes were flat. It was as if she was talking about some other Dan, some other story that had nothing to do with me. I squeezed my eyes shut, pressed on my temples with my index fingers. I felt like more was coming back to me. Circe’s memory stirred the dark bottom of my subconscious, and things were rising.

  “I’m sorry, Dan,” Circe said, and I didn’t understand why she was apologizing. I glanced at her. She didn’t look like she knew either.

  “No one’s at fault,” Abe said. “These things are from long, long ago. If having these memories and talking about them will help you move on, then that’s a good thing. If hearing someone’s memories stirs up more recollections of your own, good! We’re here to talk and, by doing so, move forward.”

  While my initial response to Circe’s memory had been to recoil and not want to know any more, a kind of hunger remained. If these people were somehow connected with my brother, I wanted to know how. Maybe it would help me find him. Maybe it would help me bring him back.

  “Would anyone like to go next?” Abe asked.

  A few of them glanced at him, hesitation on their faces. A few kept staring at the ground. There was a long silence.

  Po spoke, his normally whimsical accent terse and sharp, as if he was trying to hide his anger and doing a very poor job of it. He scared me. I finally understood why he had given me such a glare yesterday morning.

  “I’ll go,” he said, running a hand through his red hair. His fingers trembled. “I’ll tell you what happened. But I’m not rushing it.”

  13 Po’s Story

  I WATCHED ABE, hoping to get something from him, anything that might bolster my spirits. A smile, perhaps. A nod. But he looked intently at Po, and I felt very much alone. Po cleared his throat, and I felt a kind of helplessness, like I was being carried along on a river in rough water, not knowing how much longer it would be until I was sent careening over the falls.

  “Jan and I had spent the previous week hiking in America,” Po said, his words deliberate, rehearsed, “in some of the most remote areas we could find. All we had with us, we carried on our backs. She was a trooper too, and carried as much as me. She insisted on cooking, not because I thought she should but because she hated my food. ‘You’re always burning things,’ she would tell me with a smile. ‘You’re always running too hot.’ She giggled after she said that, and I would protest. ‘What? My food is just fine, thank you very much.’”

  Po stopped and smiled to himself, now fully immersed in his own story.

  “‘It’s true,’ she’d say, and she’d try to make up. She’d come over to me, hug me, and then pull away so she could look at my face. ‘Maybe it’s because of your red hair. Everything about you is burning.’ That always made me laugh. At night by the fire, she’d run her fingers through my hair and talk about how much it looked like flames.

  “Anyway, there we were, making our way on a trail, and she was hopping from one rock to another when she hurt her foot. I thought it was a pretty straightforward sprain—it didn’t look like anything was broken—but it was bad, so I tried carrying her for a while. We weren’t getting anywhere. She was trying to tough it out, but I could tell her pain was getting worse.

  “We cut through the woods toward a spot on the map that indicated a road, and it was really slow going. The day was dying, and her foot was swelling, like a sausage ready to split. It definitely seemed worse than a sprain. I was afraid because I had no way to stop the pain. We’d rest every so often and elevate her foot to relieve the pressure. Eventually we got to the road where there was this narrow shoulder, so we set up camp there in the dusk and hoped a car would come. She was moaning and biting her lip and trying not to make a fuss, but she was hurt bad.”

  In the silence between sentences, when he stopped for a moment, all I could hear was the wind coming down over the mountain and sweeping past us. Sometimes when it picked up, the girl held her cloak so it wouldn’t flap and Miss B held the corners
of her shawl close to her chest. I could see the edges of the garden from where I sat. The corn tassels flailed wildly. I realized Po had stopped talking, and he was staring at me, not saying a word. It sent a hollow jolt through my stomach.

  “It didn’t take too long for a car to show up. It was this old woman,” he said. “She drove past and went far enough that I was disappointed, like she had decided to leave us behind or hadn’t seen us, but her brake lights came on and she eased to a stop. I saw her bright white reverse lights, so I walked toward her. I could tell she was afraid I might hurt her. She only put her window down an inch or so.

  “I told her my wife hurt her foot pretty bad, and she asked if I was going to murder her. So I asked her if she planned on murdering me, and she chuckled, a nervous little sound. I thought she might drive away. I was sure I looked terrifying after being in the wilderness for as long as we had been. But I went back and told Jan this old lady was going to help us. I lifted her up, carried her to the car, and the old lady got out. I guess she had decided to trust us and let fate take its course. She opened the rear passenger door for me and I gently eased Jan in. I walked back to get our stuff, brought it to the car, and climbed into the rear seat with Jan. It was almost completely dark by this point.

  “The old lady explained our options. The closest hospital was a five- or six-hour drive, and I couldn’t tell if this was because it was that far away or because she drove slow. She was willing to take us there in the morning—she couldn’t make the trip that night because she had already been away from home for too long and had to care for her husband. There was a small, private airstrip not too far off, and she thought they might be able to fly us to an airport close to the hospital. If she remembered right, the small plane flew back and forth twice a day, once at night and once in the morning.

  “I honestly thought I was in some kind of a nightmare. We were in America but couldn’t get to a hospital? It was so frustrating. We decided to look into the plane option, so she drove there gingerly. Jan whimpered every time we hit a bump, and the old lady emitted a kind of sigh when she heard Jan, as if trying to apologize without words.”

  Po stopped, and the sudden silence made me look up, but this time he wasn’t looking at me. He was staring up at the mountain. I followed his gaze and let my eyes roam the cliffs high above us, the snowy peaks, the fractured angles and jutting faces.

  “I can’t believe I’m remembering all of this,” Po muttered. “Where did all of this stuff vanish off to? I feel like if I had remembered before now, I could have done something about it.

  “Anyway, it was late when we got to the airstrip, which was nothing more than a large warehouse-type building flanked by a chain-link fence. I climbed out of the car and walked through the dark. There were trees all around. It was hard to imagine a clearing large enough for a plane to take off.

  “A voice called out to me from inside the building, so I turned and walked toward it. As a man came toward me, I told him my wife needed to get to the hospital. He said the plane had already come back and wasn’t leaving until early in the morning. I asked if he was the pilot and said we’d be willing to pay extra, but he said that wouldn’t work. They didn’t fly at night. When I pressed him, he gave me this sarcastic little grin and said his brother was the pilot and was drunk.”

  When Po said these words, a jolt went through me.

  “I wondered how I could get Jan through an entire night. That’s when he told me they only had one seat on the plane. I was so frustrated. This wasn’t what I had in mind at all. I started pacing. Maybe one of the other passengers would sell me their seat in the morning. I asked him what time the plane left, and he told me six a.m. sharp.”

  Po ran his hands through his hair, looking frustrated, as if having the experience right there in front of us for the first time. “I asked him how I was supposed to get to the hospital.

  “‘We have a neighbor who sometimes rents out his car,’ he said.

  “‘Why can’t we just take it now?’ I asked.

  “He shrugged. ‘You can, but it would probably take us just as long to drive there with the storms that came through.’

  “‘We’ll take that last seat,’ I said, and then I asked him if they had a place we could sleep. He said they did. I asked him if they had any Tylenol. He said they could do better than that.”

  I glanced around the circle. Everyone was caught up in the story. Misha’s head was tilted to the side and her eyes squinted in a kind of wincing sympathy. Circe nodded.

  “That night was like hell on earth for Jan. She was in so much pain, and I was really worried for her—a sprain shouldn’t have been like that. Her foot was purple and green, and the painkillers weren’t working. I didn’t sleep all night.

  “The plane was a Cessna 172. Don’t ask me how I remember that when there are other things I can’t remember and should be able to recall. That name and model number are stuck in my mind. Cessna 172. The runway was paved, kind of, with lots of loose stones. The pilot was barely sober, but we didn’t have any other options. Jan was so out of it that she couldn’t have had any concerns anyway. I watched them take off, and the wings dipped a little one way, then the other, and they were off. It killed me to send Jan off that way in her condition. He had promised me that his brother the pilot would make sure she got to the hospital. I had sent a wad of cash along to help him remember.”

  He looked over at me. “I guess by now you know you’re the brother.”

  Po waited as if he needed my nod, my acknowledgment, before he could continue. I stared at the ground, closed my eyes, and nodded. Then he continued with his story.

  “I was worried about the storm, and I told Dan that. He told me it would be fine, and he claimed storms moved in a certain direction there, pointing vaguely away from the spot where I had last seen the Cessna. I stood there for a long time watching the storm, noting how it wasn’t moving the way he said it would. After that, he drove me to the other guy’s house and I rented that car he had told me about.”

  Po stopped. He tried to speak again, but his voice had tiny fractures in it. He took a deep breath, raising his shoulders deliberately to take in more air. A sense of panic rested on me. I wanted to run. I didn’t want to hear the end. I had a sense of what happened, and that was all I needed.

  “I first heard what had happened on the radio. I was only a few hours into my drive, and the rain was coming down in sheets. I knew it when I heard it. I knew it was her plane. But I kept driving. I didn’t cry. I didn’t break down. Something in me thought that if I could keep driving, it wouldn’t be true. I’d never have to face it as long as I didn’t push the brake.”

  He nodded as if trying to convince us that every single word he said was true. He nodded over and over again.

  “I drove around for a long time, just kept driving in circles.”

  14 When the Plane Fell from the Sky

  WE SAT THERE for a long time, and no one said anything.

  “Are you okay, Dan?” Abe asked, and I nodded, though it wasn’t true. I wasn’t all right. Their stories weighed on me. I tried to look out over the houses, stare into the plains, but there was no escape, not even there. I wished Miho would come over and comfort me in some way. I needed something. Anything. But their words were everywhere. They were inside of me. And a picture was revealing itself in my mind, an understanding of where these stories were going. I didn’t know if it was because I was putting the clues together or because the memory was coming back to me.

  “Let’s take a break,” Abe suggested, and there was a collective sigh.

  Miss B stood up and stretched. Po slumped farther forward, his face in his hands. No one looked at me. No one knew what to do with my presence. I felt as if I had become superfluous to the proceeding, as if everything would move along better if I wasn’t there.

  “I’ll get some food,” Miho said, even though it was well after lunch. The sky had reached its brightest point a while ago. The afternoon was upon us, and at this r
ate dusk would settle with us still here, sitting around the fire pit. I glanced over at John and Misha and watched Miho walk away.

  Even when Miho returned with the food, no one else said anything.

  “We’re getting somewhere, aren’t we?” Abe asked quietly, but no one replied, so he took a bite of bread and passed the bowl of raspberries to his right.

  Was Abe trying to work everyone through their issues so they would go east? But he knew I wasn’t going anywhere without my brother. Did he want me to be here on my own? Did he think that if everyone else left, I would change my mind?

  I watched the girl eat. She moved in tiny motions, like a mouse holding a small morsel, nibbling.

  “Her name is Lucia,” Abe said, and by the lack of reaction from everyone else, I could tell I was the last to learn this.

  “Really?” I asked. “Did she tell you?”

  “She wrote it down.” Abe was clearly trying to be patient with me.

  “Did she write anything else down?” I asked sarcastically. I couldn’t help it. I felt cornered and defensive.

  “She can’t speak,” Miho said in a flat voice, “but she can hear, Dan.”

  I sighed and closed my eyes. “I’m sorry.” I couldn’t remember Miho ever talking to me in that way, disappointment in her voice.

  For a little while, the only thing I could hear was the sound of people eating, a fresh breeze coming in over the mountain, and eventually, when everyone was finished, John pacing in the grass behind us.

  “John, your turn,” Abe said, and his voice sounded hoarse.

  John’s massive bulk was striding back and forth with a nonsensical urgency. He was wringing his hands, muttering to himself. He nodded at Abe and came over. It didn’t look like he was going to sit for this one.

  “So . . .” He cleared his throat. He took up his pacing again, as if trying to decide exactly how to begin. His feet sounded like soft pads on the stone. His gaze roamed from one person to the next, finally landing on Abe. “I can’t,” he said.