The Invisibles

by Hugh Sheehy

  Most disturbing were the photographs. Some were several years old and could only have come from her apartment. The detectives had a theory that he’d found a way to get in and steal so few things that no one would notice. But I wondered whether she’d given them to him for some unimaginable reason. There were pictures of her parents and her sister, even one of me eating cereal from a mixing bowl once when I had a hilariously bad hangover. They were all pictures I was familiar with, ones she and I had looked at with enough attention to make them part of us. It seemed she would have noticed they were gone.

  I did remember something then. It struck me as crucial to understanding what had happened, though the detective was not interested. My fiancée had been a beautiful woman and, before that, a very pretty girl. She told me once that all her life there had been men who breathed on the other end of the telephone line, who drove by her house at night, who followed her in public places and went out of their ways to put themselves in the line of her vision. There had always been men who showed up, uninvited, to visit her in places, at work and parties, at her parents’ house when she was young and the driveway was empty of cars. She spoke about these men and boys with something like nostalgia, as if she both pitied and enjoyed their obsessions and missed them now that they were gone.

  “Don’t get so jealous,” she told me one time as we lay together on the couch. “They’re nothing compared to you. You’re not in competition with them or anyone.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked.

  She gave me one of her cryptic little smiles. “You actually caught me.”

  Back at my camper, we didn’t bother to go in. We were both more than primed, and I carried Janine through the dunes as she held her arms around my neck and kissed me. It was like something out of a romantic comedy, except we were going to fuck. It was high tide, and we found a spot between ghost crab burrows.

  Afterward, Janine shook the sand out of her clothes and got dressed. She was tired and annoyed by how much sand had gotten into her hair and by the after-sex silence that had descended. She seemed nervous I would now reveal my true identity as a jerk.

  “Let’s go for a swim,” I said. “We’ll have your first surfing lesson.”

  She raised her eyebrows and gave me a slight frown. “I need to sleep right now. I get really cranky when I don’t get enough sleep.”

  This was very different from Elise, who had always been willing to stay up for another round, who had been my partner in putting many parties to bed. Janine scratched in her hair, knocking loose little deposits of sand, and scowled to show her disgust. She was at a loss for how to go to bed and was pouting severely until she saw my hammock hanging between two palms. She looked back, smiling tentatively. “Can I sleep in that without being eaten alive?”

  Since I had to work in two hours, I decided against sleep and took my surfboard down to the water. The water was moving out, giving rise to short stubborn waves that were just enough to stand up on and ride for a few seconds. It required enough effort to take my mind off the strangeness of the future, and altogether it was a good morning. The murky green water radiated out beneath me in uneven planes of waves and wavelets, a heap of broken glass outlined by the sun. I pretended Janine was Elise asleep and felt a burst of strength. Crashing waves and crying seagulls evoked the steady indolence of an early Friday night, when everything is calm, in anticipation of going out to the unknown. I skated around on my board, looking shoreward. Janine hung between the palms like a hooked sardine.

  Though I’ve always assumed each person is unique, Elise believed in types. We used to argue about it. I took the position that she couldn’t put people into neat categories, while she argued that I was putting off critical thinking in the interest of naïve openness, which was no different, she said, than a kind of enthusiastic idiocy. This was the flip side of the kindness that dominated her personality — a disappointed honesty that would tear out your heart as if it were a Post-it note. I would get angry and tell her to describe some of these types, and she would always start with heroes and villains.

  “Heroes and villains?” I said once, when I was tired of hearing her recount the same old list. “That sounds like a fucking Jeopardy category. What the fuck do those terms even mean?”

  “The really good guys,” she said lightly, “and the really, really bad ones.”

  “Something tells me there’s a reference to me here,” I said.

  She shrugged.

  “Come on. I’m one of the good guys, right?”

  She just winked and gave me a kiss on the throat.

  Janine moved her two small suitcases into my camper with the intention of staying the week. She was going to be in Cocoa Beach, anyway, she said. When I asked why she was in town she shrugged and opened the refrigerator to see what there was to drink. She seemed like she was used to having things her way.

  The longer she stayed, the less she reminded me of Elise. It was obvious from her car and her clothes and her manners that she came from money. She had expensive tastes that she indulged with her own money at meat and fish markets, and she insisted that we cook supper at night. When I teased her for priding herself on being able to follow recipes, she smiled condescendingly, for to her I was a surfer who worked as a lifeguard, a simple beast of the seashore, a dependent of burrito shops. She had no way of knowing how carefully I’d invested or about the financial work I did out west, and I had no intention of telling her. Both of us were happy with our secrets, and we avoided talking about the past, which could only get in the way of the surfing and screwing. During my watch she would lie out, the only sunbather on the beach, and when Chuck stopped his truck by my chair to talk, I sensed his eyes looking at her from behind his mirrored sunglasses. Otherwise Janine and I were alone.

  After the fourth day I began to feel the inevitability of the end. Though she never answered her phone when it rang, Janine would immediately play her messages, her face setting grimly as she listened. Something was wrong, but I never pushed her to tell me about it. Not only was I afraid that asking would encourage her to leave, but I’d been through enough therapy to know sharing was overrated for people who already knew how to communicate.

  On our eighth day together, I’d closed the perpetually unvisited beach and was putting five ears of corn onto the grill when Janine said we had to talk.

  It was inevitable, but I didn’t have to like it. “So talk.”

  “No, I mean it. We need to discuss some things.”

  “You’ve been in the camper,” I said. “I don’t exactly have a den.”

  “Right here is fine.” She drew a line in the sand with her big toe and looked up at me. The sun was going down and violet light surrounded us, bluing the palm trunks. “I don’t want to go into it, but my family’s all fucked up,” she said. “They’ve sent someone down here to get me.”

  “To ‘get’ you?”

  She was serious. “He’s a private investigator. He’s kind of dangerous. Not to me.”

  “So what?” Reluctant to hear this, I shook salt out over the corn, even though it just fell on the husks. “How’s he going to find you out here?”

  “Dennis, come on. People have seen us in public. The city is tiny. There are like five real bars.”

  “It doesn’t matter. You’re an adult.”

  “You ever hear of adult kidnapping?”

  “That’s bull,” I said. “You’re my witness to that.”

  “But they can make it difficult for you. And Willis could hurt you. Really hurt you.”

  “Willis? His name is Willis?”

  “And there’s the car. It’s mine, but it’s in my dad’s name.”

  “So?”

  “So they can say it’s stolen.”

  “So abandon it.”

  “Dennis, this is serious.”

  “So what?” I said. I stared at the fire lapping up around the whitening coals. I knew she was saying she had to leave. “So what? What do I care? How do you want your hamburg
er cooked?”

  She touched my arm, and I finally looked at her. What I saw surprised me. Here was a young woman looking at me with a scolding impatience, resembling no one I’d known.

  The next morning she got up before sunrise to pack her car. She laughed at my ridiculous offer of blankets and food, which was more for my own comfort than for hers. She had gone into a new state of mind, a high-energy departure mode, and was reluctant to acknowledge me, as if I’d only slow her down. She brushed past me with her suitcases and ignored me when I said her name, then ran back into the camper for a last check. She wanted to be gone already, I realized, and so I simply waited by her car.

  She came out of the camper, play-pouting, making big sad eyes at me. I just stared at her.

  She sighed. “Listen. If Willis comes around here looking for you, give me a call to let me know you’re okay. And if he doesn’t come around, give me a call anyhow.” She took my phone from my pocket and entered her information into it.

  “Don’t you want mine?”

  She waved her hand dismissively. “I’ll get it when you call.”

  “If I call.”

  She raised her eyebrows as if there were no other possibility. “Oh. You’ll call.”

  “Tell me something,” I said. “Your parents have sent this Willis guy after you before. How often do you do this?”

  She broke into a full smile. She had made herself up for the road and was looking quite beautiful in a soft brown trapeze dress. “I am what I am,” she said, wrinkling her nose as she pulled free of my hands.

  After she’d gone I had to go down to the beach to work. As usual, it was empty, and I put out the orange flags and rescue buoys and radioed in that the beach was officially open. It was a cool, windy morning, and dark clouds were moving swiftly out to sea, so fast that the cape was unlikely to get any of the rain they carried. I was standing out on the chair, watching distant black dolphins leap out of the troubled water, when Chuck drove up to the stand. I pulled down the hood of my sweatshirt and climbed down to talk to him at his rolled-down window.

  He looked worried. “Where’s the girl?”

  “Gone. About an hour ago.”

  “I hope so, man. We have a missing persons APB this morning for a Janine Devereaux. I don’t know if she told you that was her name, but it’s the girl who’s been staying with you. Down to the last detail.” He showed me the printout of a sorority photo in which Janine had parted her hair down the middle and wore an ivory blouse and a strand of pearls. As a sorority girl, Elise would have had a distinct sex appeal.

  “She’s definitely on the freeway by now.”

  Chuck took the picture away, and I guessed his eyes were angry behind those big sunglasses. “Is she really gone, Dennis?” he said, trying to sound tough. “I’d hate to have to arrest you.”

  “Cut it out. She left less than an hour ago,” I told him. “I tried to stop her.”

  He hissed out a breath. “You should count your blessings. I don’t know who these people are, but all the police chiefs are on the phone this morning. There’s something big going on.”

  “Not really,” I said. “Nothing that hasn’t happened before.”

  Around eleven that night I was sitting in the dark camper, watching a fuzzy detective show on the television, when a car passed on the road with no headlights, which in the Florida woods at night could only be intentional. I quickly went to the camper door and let myself out. The door was lightweight and easy to close without a sound. I made it to the palms where my hammock was tied and waited until I heard the soft footsteps coming through the Bermuda grass.

  An immense man went to my camper door and began rapping impatiently on the hollow metal. He called out, “Hello, hello? Anybody home?” A moment later he drew what I assumed was a gun from the region of his waist, tried the knob, and opened the door wide. For a moment he stood at the step below the door, looking into the camper, and I got a look at half of his grinning face, one eye bright with lizard mischief shining darkly out of thick folds of gray skin. Gun out before him, he went inside and shut the door and locked it.

  I stood back behind the trees, knowing that when he came out he’d be blind in the night. My body had gone numb with fright and something else which made it tolerable. The camper shook as this guy Willis went back and forth inside, and then the lights inside went out, and the trailer was still for what must have been a few minutes.

  He must have waited until his eyes adjusted to the darkness, because he emerged suddenly and stepped out into the yard, a shifting inky giant with wide elbows holding a gun out in front of him. He didn’t bother closing the trailer door, and he lingered in front of it, as if he thought I might try to slip past him and back inside. In the dark he was a hulk, a bogeyman whose heavy breathing rose above the sound of the insects. After a while he seemed to accept that I was not going to confront him, and he began to taunt me. “Come on, Denny,” he said. “Don’t you want to save Janine from the big bad wolf? Maybe she’ll let you stick it in her one more time if you play the big huntsman.” He let out a deep-throated giggle. “Probably not, though. She’s probably forgotten all about you already. But that’s not what this is really about, is it?”

  I must have reacted with an exhale or a small movement, because he sensed the direction in which I was hiding, and turned to address me. His smile was audible in his voice. “It is remarkable, how much she resembles Elise, isn’t it? It really is something how much two people can look alike. But you know what, Denny? It’s not that strange, really it’s not. When you get into my line of work, you see that it’s actually pretty goddamn commonplace.” He paused, listening, then resumed. “Although what you did is pretty strange, a little perverse. I’ll have to tell Janine all about it when I see her.”

  He put one foot back then, bracing himself, as if expecting me to burst out of the darkness to fight for her honor, or for Elise’s or for my own. When I did not appear, he gave a sigh. Gradually, the dark ridge of his shoulders relaxed, and he lowered his gun. His voice no longer smiled when he said, “Well, Denny. You are strange.”

  I stood in the dark yard long after he had trudged off through the grass and driven away to where I no longer heard his car. At first I remained still out of caution, afraid it was an illusion he had contrived and that he was still there, just beyond the far side of the camper, waiting for me to move. Slowly I began to accept that I was alone. A long time passed, and then something did move across the open yard. It was a possum with three babies in tow, clumsily ambling over the earth. They were nearly to the grill when I stepped out from the trees and scared them into a run. For the animals, it was just another night in the woods.

  My camper felt unsafe for the night, so I headed down to the beach. Waves smacked ashore, and the lifeguard chair stood facing the horizon, where ocean and sky muddled in darkness. I thought I might sleep up there, where I’d be hidden from sight by the backrest. But once I climbed up and felt the wind on my face, I began to think about going into town instead. It was still early, after all, and in the bars the night was only beginning. Still I felt no rush to call a taxi. I felt rich in time. It would be a while before women got up from their chairs to dance where there was no dance floor. I wondered if Willis had been telling the truth, if all the cities and towns were full of people just like Elise and me, if what we all thought was secret was a myth we told each other behind closed doors. Maybe all that stood between the finance guy I’d been and the lifeguard I’d become was this surfer boy disguise and the impulse to try it on.

  I took out my phone and called Janine as promised. The signal on the beach was weak, and when I got her voicemail, waves of static interfered with the recorded greeting. “Hey, it’s me,” said a distant female voice. It could have been anyone. “After the beep, you can tell me all about it.”

  Messages from the beach always came through unclear, and I doubted she would know my voice. At any rate I had nothing more to say to her. I left a message for Elise, telling her how
much I missed her, and then I put my phone away.

  THE FLANNERY O’CONNOR AWARD FOR SHORT FICTION

  David Walton, Evening Out

  Leigh Allison Wilson, From the Bottom Up

  Sandra Thompson, Close-Ups

  Susan Neville, The Invention of Flight

  Mary Hood, How Far She Went

  François Camoin, Why Men Are Afraid of Women

  Molly Giles, Rough Translations

  Daniel Curley, Living with Snakes

  Peter Meinke, The Piano Tuner

  Tony Ardizzone, The Evening News

  Salvatore La Puma, The Boys of Bensonhurst

  Melissa Pritchard, Spirit Seizures

  Philip F. Deaver, Silent Retreats

  Gail Galloway Adams, The Purchase of Order

  Carole L. Glickfeld, Useful Gifts

  Antonya Nelson, The Expendables

  Nancy Zafris, The People I Know

  Debra Monroe, The Source of Trouble

  Robert H. Abel, Ghost Traps

  T. M. McNally, Low Flying Aircraft

  Alfred DePew, The Melancholy of Departure

  Dennis Hathaway, The Consequences of Desire

  Rita Ciresi, Mother Rocket