The Invisibles

by Hugh Sheehy

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 y
ou 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 deejay, 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?”