by Hugh Sheehy
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 noninvisible father and the noninvisible 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.”
The memory of this 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 girlier 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.”
Af
ter 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 moved up next to her. 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, muscley 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 la
sted 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.”
“I know,” I said, remembering how my mother pitied my father for failing to understand her.
“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.
