Picture Me Gone

by Meg Rosoff

  Our waitress has a brown and white uniform with a green plastic badge that says her name is Merilynne. She’s nice and friendly and asks where us folks are from. I just love your accent, she says to me, and then tells us she has folks on her father’s side living in Lincolnshire (Lincoln-shy-er), England, who she keeps on meaning to look up and maybe drop in on someday?

  I wonder if she thinks Lincolnshire is somehow connected to Abraham Lincoln, and therefore partly American.

  Merilynne looks tired to me, and when she comes back carrying a tray, I’m pretty sure I know why.

  This might be the largest meal I’ve ever eaten. I can’t possibly finish the enormous pancakes, so I ask if we can take the leftovers with us, explaining that we have a dog. Makes no difference to me, says Merilynne, but not in a mean way.

  Gil pays and as we go back to our car we see Merilynne outside the diner, sitting on a step smoking a cigarette. I wonder whether she’d smoke if she knew she was pregnant. I guess she’ll find out soon enough.

  We set off again up the highway toward Canada.

  In the backseat, I open the doggy bag for Honey and find that Merilynne didn’t just empty the leftovers into a bag, but added four pieces of bacon and about a cup of corned beef hash. For your dog, says a handwritten note with a smiley face after it, and it’s signed Your server Merilynne.

  Honey sniffs the bag. There are far more clues in the world for her than for any human; her sense of smell is hundreds of times keener than mine and paints whole pictures of places she hasn’t been. I nibble the end of a piece of bacon and give her the rest, then put the aluminum tray on the seat of the car and she wolfs it all down in seconds. She’s a tidy dog, clearing up crumbs with her neat pink tongue before settling down beside me with a sigh.

  My job (other than map reading) is the radio. I lean forward between the two front seats and press the scan button to find something we both want to listen to. Mostly I can find one song we like in a row and that’s it. Then there’s news. Something about Washington. Something about a church scandal. Nothing about a middle-aged man who ran away from home for no reason in the middle of the day with a class to teach on the English Civil War, leaving his dog and baby and wife without even a note or a forwarding address. After a while I reach through the seats and turn it off. The feeling of trying to tune the radio matches the feeling of trying to tune in what’s happened to Matthew. No matter how much the scanner scans a few millimeters this way or that, the story won’t come into focus.

  The road here isn’t at all like England. Most of the time it has trees on both sides, dense as a fairy-tale forest and seeming to go on forever. You think you’re in a kind of wilderness and then suddenly the road flattens out and becomes a town, and all around are big square buildings called MAXVALUE and SUPERTREAD and WORLD OF RIBS. We are passing through one of these stretches when Gil pulls off the road in front of PHONE UNIVERSE.

  We’ll get you a cheap pay-as-you-go, he says, so you don’t have to phone Mum by way of London.

  What about you?

  I’ve got my laptop, he says and I smile. My father hates phones.

  I’m feeling homesick. I look at Honey and bury my head in the loose folds of fur at her neck and try to love her enough to make up for what she has lost. She responds politely, gazing at me without any particular warmth.

  I take her out for a walk, then put her back in the car and join Gil, who is staring at a phone that’s hopelessly wrong while the girl behind the counter recites all the reasons he should buy it. Spotting the simplest and cheapest phone, I say, We’ll have this one. The girl looks about seventeen. She’s chewing gum, wears too much makeup and is annoyed that I have chosen such a rubbish phone when she was recommending the newest most expensive thing. All our texts are free, but not to England or Holland. The girl looks it up in a book and it turns out they’re not insanely expensive, unless you go crazy and start sending texts to everyone you’ve ever met.

  We set off again. I’m putting Suzanne’s and Matthew’s numbers into the phone and following our progress on the map. Now that there’s just one lane in each direction it’s fairly slow. Mostly because of Gil’s driving, which is not exactly expert and also a little bit wandery due to being on the wrong side of the road, something he occasionally forgets. He doesn’t notice the cars piling up behind us, looking more and more annoyed. Whenever there’s a straight stretch of road and the broken passing line appears, cars pull out and flash by at twice our speed. Gil doesn’t look, just drives with his eyes straight ahead, his shoulders hunched over the wheel. He has to concentrate very hard because driving is not one of his natural skills. I’ve turned off the GPS because it jabbers constantly and annoys us both.

  The Automobile Association of America number gets copied from the back of the map where Suzanne wrote it and entered into the new phone, so that makes three people to text in America. For an instant I consider sending the AAA a text reassuring them that we’re doing just fine and they don’t have to worry about coming to tow us out of a ditch at the side of the road.

  What I do instead is send Matthew a text.

  Hi Matthew. It’s Mila. Gil’s daughter from London. We’re in America looking for you. Honey’s with us. She’s missing you. Please tell us where you are.

  I wonder if saying that Honey misses him is mean, suggesting that none of us cares about him as much as she does. But in the end I send it, thinking he should know the truth. Then I wait. But there’s no reply.

  Gil and I talk a little bit about what we see, but mostly we drive in silence.

  Where shall we stop for lunch? Gil asks eventually. Food becomes a big subject when you’re driving.

  Let’s keep going till we see a restaurant we like.

  So we do. We drive through a village full of big Victorian houses. Some of them look all newly painted and some look incredibly run-down. Occasionally we pass a shack that could be right out of a cartoon—windows all different sizes like someone’s found them at the dump, walls held together with bits of nailed wood and gaffer tape, an ancient rusted car with no wheels up on bricks, broken toys and a scraggy dog by the front porch.

  This area was popular as a summer resort for rich people at the turn of the century, says Gil. Nowadays it’s full of hippies and dropouts—and probably survivalists and other scary types, he says as we pass a tattoo parlor set in the grounds of one of the big Victorian houses.

  I squint at him. Since when are you an expert?

  He reaches into the side pocket of the door, hands me a fat guidebook (Frommer’s New York State), and says, Do you think Suzanne would send us off without reference books?

  I leaf through it for a minute and then go back to watching the road. How about there, I say, pointing at a white wooden house with green shutters and a wide porch. It has a hand-painted sign that says LENA’S CURIOSITIES AND CAFE.

  At the same pace that he drives, Gil pulls off the road and glides to a stop.

  The menu is nailed to a post on the big wide porch. Try some soup and sandwiches on Lena’s homemade bread reads the line across the top. But it’s the curiosities that I’m curious about. And when we push through the door, it’s clear that they’re the main act.

  All over the walls are stuffed heads, about fifty of them. There’s a large carved eagle painted black, a stuffed fish, an etching of a herd of buffalo, an entire snake skeleton in a glass display box and a faded Japanese kimono hung on the wall. There’s a big turtle shell made into a bowl and a fish tank full of crab shells. Also a pair of wooden skis with leather bindings nailed to the wall and beside them some snowshoes.

  They look very old. A painting in a big gold frame of an Indian squaw kneeling by a fire needs dusting. There are candles in wine bottles on every table. A pigeon I think might be stuffed turns out to be real. Behind the register is a weasel with a rat in its mouth. It’s missing one glass eye. Not everyone would want to eat in these surroundings.

  Can our dog come in?

  It’s against the
law, says the woman, but she looks at Honey and nods. As long as she’s quiet and doesn’t mind cats.

  Well, she’s quiet, obviously, but I don’t know what she thinks of cats. Not much, it seems, because she ignores the big gray one staring at us from her perch on the windowsill and lies down under the table. For a big dog, she’s good at slipping into a small space.

  You folks from England? the woman asks, and Gil says, Yes.

  I like your accent, she says, looking at me, and I don’t know whether to say thank you.

  We order bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwiches. I ask for root beer because I’ve never tried it. The person we guess is Lena brings Gil coffee without him asking. When he looks surprised, she frowns.

  You don’t want it?

  No, he says, flustered, I mean, yes. I do.

  So, what’s the problem? Her face is stern.

  Gil accepts the coffee.

  You staying in Saratoga Springs? Racing fans?

  Not really, I tell her. Not at all, in fact.

  Well, that’s good cause it’s the wrong season, she says. You’re either much too late or much too early. I went there once with my husband. Long time ago. She cackles a little and then goes off to the kitchen and comes out again with our sandwiches and sits herself down in a big comfortable chair by the door, adding up receipts while we eat. She’s a genuine one-man band, is Lena.

  When we come up to pay, she and Gil chat about racing. It’s a short chat. As far as I know, the sum total of Gil’s knowledge about racing is Red Rum and maybe Frankie Dettori, the jockey who dismounts by leaping up in the air.

  Where’d you say you folks are off to? asks Lena when the conversation fades. Gil tells her the name of the town that’s closest to Matthew’s camp and she says, Still a long way to go.

  And I think, You can say that again.

  fourteen

  Have you ever seen a terrier at work? It stands stock-still, quivering all over with anticipation, waiting for the moment the slip collar comes off. Then there’s a fraction of a second where it seems to explode, launching itself forward at its prey. And a terrible snarling and growling and shaking and squeaking as it gets to grips, quite literally, with the rat. It’s not nice, but it is impressive. And quick.

  It is not a sense of responsibility or a desire to please that makes a dog do this. It’s what they’re bred to do. They can’t help it. If I were a dog, I’d be part terrier.

  The rational part of me makes a flow chart with two columns, headed MATTHEW IS DEAD and MATTHEW IS ALIVE.

  If Matthew is dead, there are four possibilities:

  (A) Murder

  (B) Suicide

  (C) Accidental death

  (D) Illness—stroke or heart attack?

  At Suzanne’s, I Googled cases of people who suddenly walk away from their homes and families. Some of the reasons are:

  (A) Madness

  (B) Amnesia

  (C) Money problems

  (D) Marital woes

  (E) Secret second family

  (F) Depression

  (G) Fired from job but hasn’t told wife

  (H) Crisis of religious faith or near-death experience

  (I) Terrible secret

  (J) Kidnapping

  (K) Mental illness

  (L) Doesn’t know why

  Many of these reasons are confusing. Why wouldn’t you tell your wife if you lost your job? What’s so bad about a crisis of faith? What sort of secret? Someday I’ll understand more of these things. At the moment I just have to think them through. Not everything you want to know is explained properly on Google.

  To be thorough, I have to take into account the possibility that Matthew was kidnapped. But why would someone kidnap a middle-aged professor of British history? I have no idea. For all I know he has links to the Chinese underworld, about which I know less than nothing, except what I once saw in a TV movie.

  Despite the fact that I can sweep a crime scene for rats like a terrier, I frequently have trouble putting clues together due to gaps in my knowledge of the world. I could do with a middle-aged accomplice. Gil is not the person for this job. Miss Marple would be better.

  Take marriage. Marieka and Gil have been together for twenty years but have never married. Marieka says it’s because where she grew up, women were independent and didn’t want to have some man put a ring on their finger and tell them to do the washing-up.

  This makes me laugh. I can’t imagine either of my parents acting like that. When I asked Gil why he and Marieka never married, he said, I wouldn’t dream of presuming.

  Presuming what? I asked.

  I don’t remember if he answered.

  Matthew had lots of girlfriends but didn’t get married till he met Suzanne. He was forty-two. This tells me something too, but I’m not sure what. Whenever I imagine him, it’s on a mountain with a frozen beard. Not the sort of person you imagine getting married.

  Most of my friends at school have parents who look like married people are supposed to look—women in dresses, men in ties. Catlin’s mum trained as a teacher but stays home each day while Catlin’s dad goes to work for a software company. Every time I see her, I think she looks out of place in her house as if she doesn’t know where to sit.

  Gil glances away from the road for the briefest of seconds and asks what I’m doing and I tell him I’m thinking as hard as I can, in circles and retrogrades and whatever else I can drum up. I ask him the same question and he says he’s driving Matthew’s wife’s car up toward Canada.

  I know that, I answer. But what else?

  I’m thinking too, he says. I’m thinking about my fool of a friend.

  What have you concluded? I ask, ignoring the comment about the fool.

  Nothing, Gil says. What about you?

  I’m trying to be methodical, I say—slightly pointedly, because he never is. I’m trying to organize the possibilities. Once we’ve done that, it will make our job a little easier.

  Oh, you think so?

  Yes, I do. I look over at him. He’s facing forward because he’s driving, but he swivels an eye on me.

  Look, I say. You can’t just let your thoughts float around in the ether and hope eventually they’ll connect with something. It’s absurd.

  No, it’s not, Gil says. Lots of good things happen that way. Penicillin. Teflon. Smart dust. Something happens that you weren’t expecting and it shifts the outcome completely. You have to be open to it.

  When I open my brain, I tell him, things bounce around and fall out. They don’t connect with anything. Maybe I haven’t got enough points of reference stored up yet.

  You’re young, he says, that’s probably it. When I let my thoughts float around, I trust that they’ll latch on to something useful in the end or make an association I wouldn’t necessarily have predicted. I’m trusting that they’ll find the right thought to complete, all by themselves. The right bit of fact to go ping. You have to trust your brain sometimes.

  Maybe, I’m thinking. But so far I only trust my brain up to a point. Without guidance it could skew off in any crazy direction or just wander into a cul-de-sac for a snooze. That’s why I make charts. Anyway, I say to Gil, I hope it happens. I really do. Because my flow chart hasn’t got me anywhere useful.

  Gil smiles without taking his eyes off the road. We’ll get there.

  You think so? Privately I’m feeling doubtful, but I don’t say so.

  Yes. One way or another, we will.

  OK, I say, and then I stop making a flow chart, reach back and pat Honey, who’s dozing, and look out of the window for a while. But it’s hard to stop my brain from thinking.

  Tell me everything you know about the accident, I say to Gil.

  Which accident?

  The one that killed Owen.

  He glances at me. Is that relevant?

  Of course it’s relevant. How can I understand Matthew without all the facts? You never know which ones will turn out to be important.

  OK, Gil says. OK. But I’m n
ot sure I remember everything.

  I sit very still and wait.

  So . . . Matt picked Owen up after a swimming practice, says Gil. It was evening. Winter. Dark. They had to take the highway for a short distance, just long enough for one of those big articulated tractor-trailers to skid and crash into the back of their car. It was crushed.

  The whole car?

  The back of the car.

  And what about Matthew?

  He was uninjured. Bruised a bit.

  Wait . . . Owen was sitting in the back?

  Yes.

  That’s strange.

  I don’t know, Perguntador. Maybe American kids have to sit in the back because it’s safer?

  Little kids. He was taller than Suzanne.

  Maybe they’d just dropped someone off or he wanted to stretch out. Maybe there was shopping in the front. Sports kit.

  Maybe. And then?

  They were in the fast lane. An ambulance came. Police. I remember Suzanne telling Marieka at the time that Matthew was completely exonerated by the police.

  Exonerated? I’m frowning, confused.

  Found not guilty.

  Not guilty of what? Was he a suspect?

  I don’t think so. It’s just normal, I guess. Make sure he didn’t fall asleep at the wheel or wasn’t on drugs or anything.

  I think about this. Exonerated? The grieving father? I try to picture the scene. Once more I look at Gil. What about the truck? I ask.

  It was coming up behind them. The driver tried to swerve and flipped over the center strip. The back of it must have swung round and smashed Matt’s car.

  And the driver?

  I guess he died too.

  You guess he died?

  He died.

  A moving picture takes shape in my brain. Matthew and Owen in the fast lane, far left. The truck coming up behind them. Not in the same lane, presumably, not in the fast lane. One lane to the right. What causes a huge truck to skid?