Search Party

by Valerie Trueblood

  She sat unwrapping a striped candy. “Get me the canvas one, honey. Here, you take that stuff.”

  Then she stood up. The legs were short for the body, and sprung backward, in a dizzying inverse of a knee. His son was hanging a bulging canvas sack from the hand-piece of the crutch, which was like a stick shift, black rubber grooved for fingers.

  Well. This was Lupe, of whom Robert had been told and not told.

  His son’s mild face, flushed and broken out, had a broad smile. “My father,” he said humbly to the girl. “Dad, this is Guadalupe! Lupe! Lupe McCann!”

  Robert stepped forward with his hand out, saying to himself, Don’t offer to help. “Hello, Loopy.”

  “Lu-peh, Dad!”

  The girl got the candy between her side teeth and smiled a little gust of peppermint. One cheek was printed where she had been sleeping on it, and her bushy black hair stood straight up on that side. Below the tangles the face was pretty in a puppet way, with round eyes in matted eyelashes like bits of hairbrush. She propped herself and gripped Robert’s hand so hard his thumb-joint popped. She sat down a second time and handed up two spiral notebooks with which he found himself pointing the way to the porch steps, as if she might not see them.

  Halfway up the steps she stopped. “Wait! My machine!” Quickly Robert made way for the thought of a device, some pump or tank she must require.

  “Got it.” Billy was behind her lugging a box and a duffel bag, Robert’s huge yellowed army duffel that the boys had each taken to camp long ago, ten years apart.

  “Oh! Look!” Lupe was turning around and around on the hooked rug like a skier doing a swivel. Out the window lay the inky waters of the Strait of Georgia, with a white ferry passing in the distance and seagulls wheeling. “Oh, this I like! A real island, a real cabin! I’m so glad—I thought it might be one of those villas.” So she knew there was Ann’s money.

  “Little lady,” Billy said out of the side of his mouth, “I said cabin and I meant cabin.” That was new, any sort of comeback from Billy. But was he Billy any more? Maybe by now, after six years in graduate school, he was Bill, or Will—though at twenty-eight he still bore the marks of junior high: nodding cowlick and fists in pockets. “What’s with the others?”

  “They missed the Nanaimo ferry last night and I guess they missed the one you folks took this morning. Sit down, sit down, coffee’s on.”

  “My brother is never on time,” Billy told Lupe. “He’s the spoiled one.”

  Was there any truth to that? Robert could not have said. Of the past he had only a vague sense, once in a while, of a half-built house where a man on a ladder was hammering, and the man, though stronger and thinner than he was now, was himself, yet a sort of idiot, deaf and blind to all but a very few things. Down a hallway of doors standing open, in this vision, were a half-grown, silent boy and a smaller one who could not stand to be left alone. That was Billy, the toddler. No one else. Inexcusably, no mother. With no warning, no preparation of any kind, their mother had removed herself into death. A story so old Robert never went beyond the beginning.

  “I see the bathroom,” Lupe said, as if they were playing a game. “Under the ladder!”

  “Oh, yeah, here . . .” Billy unzipped the duffel and rummaged. He handed her a flowered bag.

  Well, the loft was out, for their room. How could she climb? Alan and Martine would have to sleep up there.

  Lupe urinated long and hard while Robert talked over the sound. “Did you get a look at the wall, where the pylon came down? At the far end? I’ve got Smalley coming with some concrete. Sit down, sit down. I expect you had a wait for the midget, it’s been full every day.” Then he felt himself blush—why must he do this, in his sixties?—because of the girl’s size. By midget he meant the little car ferry, not much more than a chugging raft, that took you back into the Strait from Vancouver Island, and out to the Gulf Islands. Billy, still wearing the dazed smile, didn’t answer but sighed, cradled his mug and looked out at the water with eyes so bright he might have been getting ready to cry.

  After a time Lupe came out, made her way to the glider and flopped down on it. It sent up a rusty creaking as she pumped it, poling with the crutches. She didn’t stop until Robert brought coffee and then she leaned back, smoothing the faded seahorses with their afterimage of mildew. “Are we in heaven?” She had an odd, jokey voice, a bit . . . hard-boiled. Or maybe just playful. Was that what his wife would have said? He still patted along some dusty shelf for Ann’s opinions. “That’s a great ladder. I bet you built it.” Of course Billy would have told her that.

  “I confess I did. My wife and I.” An off-kilter thing he wouldn’t build today. But Ann had sat notching the rails by hand, with a hammer and a chisel.

  “Put that over here, would you, Billy honey.” A Mae West sort of voice, with another candy in the cheek. She delved in the canvas bag. “Every minute I’m here I have to sew. We’re going straight from here to the wedding.”

  Robert said, “Wedding?”

  Billy said, “Remember, Dad? We have Maria’s wedding on Saturday? Lupe’s sister?”

  It was too late; now they were assessing his memory.

  HE would cross his legs, turn a page, scratch the stubble on his neck. Some evenings he made no more noise than a moth in a lampshade.

  He had opened up the cabin himself for the first time since his stroke. His sons lent it freely; blankets were hanging spread out to air on the loft railing, and the cake of soap in the shower stall was soap, not a piece of bone as it always had been in summer when they arrived as a family. His rod and reel were messily stowed; on the back porch there was fishy water in the bottom of the bucket that should have been turned over.

  Could he keep his balance enough to fish off the rocks.

  In the medicine cabinet where he put his pills he found a box of condoms. Wildflowers sat on the counter in a mason jar, holding down a note in a precise hand: “we both thank you alan for a week of sweet serenity.”

  His sons had had a phone put in, and both had been calling. How many sea lions had passed? Was the woodstove working? It had always worked. They meant was he counting, was he cooking. What would he be like when they got there.

  “I’ll show them,” he had told Loretta, his office temp. She had him flexing the affected arm.

  “They don’t know!” she said. “You tell them! You say you’re fine!”

  When his secretary Rose Fitch retired, personnel had sent a temp, with the promise of a real assistant—they weren’t called secretaries anymore—once the job was posted. But after the stroke, Robert had put in for a full-time position for Loretta. Usually the agency sent girls, but Loretta was a woman in her fifties, with pictures of children on her screen saver. They were her foster children, she said proudly. She was divorced, with no children of her own. She had gone in and screamed—of the truth of this Robert soon had no doubt—until the agency let her keep several of these children with her on past the age of eighteen. They were grown now; the pictures were old.

  Loretta came from a temp agency but she brought a folder of references and letters of commendation with her. Soon she had things organized more efficiently in the office than his old secretary Rose had in twenty years. Often he heard her outside his door, getting up to walk to and fro in the high heels she wore despite her weight, as she pored over files she was going to enter into the computer, stopping now and then as if she couldn’t believe what she was reading. After a few hours, if he opened his door, she liked to take off her glasses and say, “Whoa, Honey!” The glasses had dug deep marks on either side of her nose. They were reading glasses and after wearing them all day she couldn’t see a thing. At the end of her first week at work she took the glasses off, dropped the pearl chain that held them onto her bosom, and whether she could see Robert or not, told him the story of her life.

  It was largely the story of the foster children and the courts. Jobs, long-ago marriage barely figured. Loretta spoke of her life with a combination of perplex
ity and satisfaction that pushed the pink skin of her forehead into thick even ridges like crayons, which in later weeks he would be half-tempted to lean over and press with a finger. He knew not to do that, not to touch an employee, male or female, or let his bad arm graze one, or say anything suggestive. Suggestive of . . . what? Of the body. A subject Robert would not suggest to anyone. He was not like some of the others his age in the firm, bumping into girls at the copiers. He knew what would offend; he kept up.

  He was surprised at himself for listening patiently to Loretta while the office doors opened and closed for the day and the elevators rose and sank. Normally he would have made some summarizing remark to cut such a session short. He always put a firm stop to any employee’s attempts to bring personal business into the office.

  Loretta had arms that could heave the stuck drawer out of the filing cabinet. She had a big head of hair, the blondness of which varied every month or so from yellow to the color of manila file folders to off-white. He knew she feared she would be done out of the job while he was on leave. Every few days he had been calling in from the cabin to tell her to sit tight. “Call me if anybody even looks sideways at you.”

  “I guess I will!”

  “I mean your job.”

  “And you do like I told you. Don’t fool with any blueprint. You made a promise. The only thing you do is you squeeze that

  little ball.”

  “I’m crushing it.”

  AROUND the glider, sheets of a dress pattern settled on the floor. Billy was bowing along scooping them up like dropped underthings. Robert drank his coffee with a mild exasperation. Ann had sewed. The filmy hissing paper might once have sent him into that dry, unspecific, widower’s craving, itself a memory now.

  “Yeah, put it there. In front of the window.” Through the pins pressed between her lips the girl employed a sort of singsong, as if she had to go through a calming litany for everyone present, like a coach, or an animal tamer.

  “Her sewing machine. Lupe’s the maid of honor in the wedding,” Billy said proudly.

  “Matron of honor! Don’t forget I’m divorced. Or maybe I’m back to being a maid.”

  “You’re welcome to put the sewing machine on the desk,” Robert interrupted. But he would have to move the piles of books. How in fact would she carry anything? A frying pan, a child? How would she live?

  It was obvious. She would get hold of someone to help her. Someone with a conscience, someone weak, a man who could be manipulated. A boy. Billy.

  “Here.” Robert got up to move the books.

  Billy got there ahead of him. He held up The Golden Treasury of Natural History. “Back to school?”

  “Thought I’d learn a little something.”

  “It’s never too late, right, Loop? Dad spent all his life as a structural engineer.”

  “Not quite all. Some of it may remain.”

  Slime molds are like plants in some ways and like animals in others. He had found a box of the boys’ old schoolbooks in the closet. Paging through them he felt a settling-in, a release of independence, a sinking. While he read he could squeeze the ball. He still had powers of concentration that he could summon, but he didn’t want to read fiction or anything from his own field.

  “What you do, you get right up in their face!” Loretta said when he went in for his temporary disability. He had gone straight back to the office but he was having to brace himself when Loretta brought in anything new for him to do. “Blueprints,” she would say with a grimace, putting them in his basket. He delayed signing off on anything. With bridges there was no leeway. He no longer had his eye for detail. No one had to tell him he had received an insult. That was what the doctor called the stroke: insult. Perhaps that was why he was so full of suspicion. The word was out that his good nature could not be relied on. He would wait until the elevator was empty; he would slump against his office door once he had it shut on all the well-wishing and offers and compliments.

  Some agreement had been reached above his head that he was not quite ready, he was going to have to build up to it. A longer leave had to be put through; he went through the formalities but his application snagged on a young man in personnel, whose memo Loretta snatched. “Too simple for the minds down there! I’m going. I’ll explain so they get it.” That was the last he heard of the snag; the leave came through the next day.

  “Well, hello there!” said Lupe. Two seagulls on the mossy windowsill were peering in as she positioned the machine on the desk. She ducked, disappearing below the sill, and both gulls skewed their heads to see her.

  “Would you look at that,” Billy said. “They like you.”

  “Sure. Sure they do. I was a seagull in my former life.”

  “You were,” Billy said, coming up behind her and beginning to massage her shoulders. “A scavenger, right?”

  Lupe laughed; she crossed her arms at the elbow and flapped her hands. Her build was slight, but under the bulky sweatshirt Robert had noticed volume, a slinging back and forth of globes. She had let her head fall back to laugh and Billy bent over it, presumably to press his lips to the red upside-down mouth. Robert could not see exactly what was going on because their backs were to him, but they stayed that way for several seconds.

  He couldn’t do what he usually did after breakfast, sit down and leaf through the old books all morning until he fell asleep in the chair. The question was whether he was resting up, in this state in which a furious impatience blinked on between long dazes that were like standing at an abandoned bus stop.

  “Jeez.” Billy was back to The Golden Treasury. “‘The lace-wing fly has to lay its eggs in a special way to keep the first lace-wing flies that hatch from eating up the eggs that have not yet hatched.’” Now Lupe was down on the floor by the window, with her legs out in front of her, mounds of shiny orange material between them. There was no way it could be comfortable to sit like that. She already had the pattern pinned to the material and she was cutting. Orange. Orange bridesmaids. A color to make even a normal person look like a clown. She cut fast, paying no attention to what was coming out behind the shears as they snaked around the pins making a dancing gasp.

  “So Dad. A hatchet-footed animal with no head. ‘They use their feet as burrowing tools. Sometimes they pull themselves along with them.’ Who am I?”

  “A cripple!” Lupe sang out from the floor, and laughed with what Robert was beginning to see as an absurd merriment.

  “Cut it out, Lupe,” Billy said.

  “I already did!”

  “You know what I mean,” Billy said in a crooning tone that set Robert’s teeth on edge. “Listen to this. ‘The softly colored rosebud jelly is pretty at night as well as in the daytime. It shines in the dark.’” Lupe grinned at him from across the room. “‘This small animal catches its prey with its long tentacles. The tentacles are sticky.’ OK. ‘A starfish, let us suppose, comes upon an oyster. It fastens one or more of its arms to each half of the oyster’s shell. The suction disk holds its arm tightly to the shell. Then it tries to pull the shell open. At first the oyster can hold its own—’”

  “Whoo hoo.” Lupe yawned broadly. “I’m done with this part. I’m tired. Why don’t we take a nap.”

  “So Dad . . .” Billy was apologetic. “What if we did rest up for a while before they get here? Would you mind?”

  “Not I,” Robert said, picking up the mugs. “I’ve been known to take a nap myself.”

  “Other room, Loop, that one’s Dad’s.” Billy followed him into the kitchen. “You know, Dad. I just wanted to tell you something. I don’t know if you . . . I just want to say . . . Lupe is the smartest person I’ve ever met.”

  “Well now, that’s a compliment all right.”

  “And I want you to get to know her.”

  “I hope to.”

  “Dad? I just want . . .”

  “I hope to.”

  It was too cold to go outside and stay there. Robert fed the woodstove and put the radio and the fan on for noi
se and then he went into his room and lay down. He took the sea life book in with him. This was a book that drew his eye; he left it on top of the pile on the desk, where he could glance at the picture on the jacket, of a little open-mouthed fish with eyes on stalks. The fish was hiding in seagrass, in its black eyes a look that stopped Robert no matter how many times he noticed it, of wondering sadness.

  He was in bed a good deal anyway, at the wrong times. He wouldn’t get under the covers until the night was half over, and then it seemed he never moved off his back until the sun hit him. After that he’d lie half in and half out of sweaty sleep for an hour, two hours, before he got to the window in his pajamas, jaws pried apart by the first of countless yawns. Then he would quickly get the stove going, and catnap until midafternoon in his chair. Then he would really wake up.

  No one would put up with him if he went back to work in this condition, worse than when he left. Soon somebody in the elevator would be saying, “Robert Mallow has come to a complete standstill.”

  HE thought at first that Alan had hurt himself, but he had merely cut his hair so short the dents in his skull showed, and dyed the stubble an iodine color. After the hug and the kisses on both cheeks, which Alan always imposed with an aggrieved smile, like unwelcome treats, he held Robert at arm’s length and said, “So how are you?”

  “I’m in great shape!” Robert said heartily.

  Then came Martine, Alan’s second wife, absently chewing her dark lips. She too kissed Robert twice, but she was French-Canadian, from her it was natural, merely a cool touch, faintly scented with resin because she was a painter.

  By three o’clock they had carted in half a dozen bags of groceries and finished handing their bags up to the loft. Alan pressed his ear to the door of the bunk room. “They really are asleep in there, aren’t they. One of them snores. So what’s all this on the floor?”