by Blair Hurley
By nine, Paul was up and making scrambled eggs, sipping the stale coffee from the night before. Jennifer’s apartment was a small, brick-walled space that looked out on tiny twisting streets and signs for gelato and cannoli. Jennifer put the frying pan in the sink and he went to the window, trying to imagine what she was doing behind his back. He ran his hands through his hair. It was sparse and fragile, and he usually tried not to touch it.
Using Nicole’s cell phone, he called the first number. A rich Boston accent quickly responded: “Hello? Hello?” Paul waited in silence. Then the voice said, “Nicole, is that you?”
So Nicole wasn’t with him. “This is Paul Hennessy. Nicole’s brother. Who is this?”
“Paul?” The voice faltered. “Oh right, Paul—she’s told me about you. This is Sean. I’m—Sean.”
“Can I ask how you know Nicole?”
“Is she all right? Has something happened to her?”
“Well—we don’t exactly know. She hasn’t been answering her phone for a day or two. And I’m in town, trying to find her.” He added with the old exasperation, “She’s done this before.”
“Well, we were, ya know, seeing each other. Not anymore, I guess. I haven’t heard from her recently, either, and I couldn’t get her on the phone. I was about to head down to New York myself.”
“Can we talk? I’ll drive over. Where do you live?”
In an hour they were rattling over the old plank bridge, into the outer rim of Weston. “Do you think he knows where she is?” asked Jennifer.
“Maybe.” Paul stayed hunched over the wheel, searching for numbers on the houses hidden among the trees. He was finding it hard to look at Jennifer this morning. He’d gone over a few different strategies for what he’d say to her, but they all seemed to lead to the same inevitable conclusions. The fact was, he’d long been grateful for her goodness, her simple acceptance of the situation. He’d known it was rare. Well, now all his good karma had been used up.
They spotted the house, tall and skinny, too close to the marsh. Paul could tell it was a piece of crap before they reached the muddy driveway. With the cracked and flaking shingles, it looked like it was molting. Rotting planks everywhere. A gaping hole in the roof of the garage, probably snow damage. He gripped the wheel. “Pretty much what we expected.”
Jennifer gave him a sad, amused look. “Take it easy, okay?”
At their knock, the door cracked open and a whiskery sideburned face poked out. “You’re Paul?”
“Nice to meet you. This is my friend Jennifer.” Paul didn’t stumble over what term to use this time. Sean came out onto the deck, closing the door carefully behind himself, and they shook hands. “I’m really worried, you know,” Sean said. The accent was rich, friendly to Paul’s ear. “I don’t know what happened. She stopped calling.”
“Did you—have an argument?”
“No. Not really. We were okay. I thought we were okay. She seemed afraid of something, but I don’t know what. I tried to get her to tell me, but she wouldn’t.” He rubbed his eyes. There was something Paul hadn’t expected in them: anguish.
“We’re pretty sure she’s not in danger. She’s done this before,” Jennifer said.
Sean kept his eyes on Paul. “That so?”
Paul turned away. Suddenly the impatient speech he’d prepared, the story of Nicole’s case history, didn’t seem right. “Yes, well, it was only the one time. When she was eighteen. And there was a reason.” He looked restlessly about himself, unsure of how much to say. How do you gauge the intimacy of another? He remembered meeting Jules a few times before the accident. He could tell from the look on the boy’s face that he’d had his hands all over his sister. Sean was not so easy to read.
“I hope your father’s doing all right,” Sean said.
“My father?”
“Nicole said she was helping take care of him.”
“My father’s been dead for over ten years.” It was embarrassing, to be caught up in someone else’s lie. “Can we come inside?”
Sean hesitated. “I live alone here, and without Nicole—” He was stammering as he pushed against the door, trying to get it open. “I’ve been rearranging things—”
They had to slide in sideways past the jammed door. It was a large space, a classic Victorian high-ceilinged living room, but antiques filled most of it. Old dark sea-captain furniture, blue satin upholstered couches, teak wardrobes, vintage lime-green fridges—at least two that Paul could see—crowded one another in the room. On top of various surfaces were vintage toys, Matchbox cars, Superman comics, and baseball gloves; robot penny banks and plaster statues of Saint Francis; signed baseballs, antique barometers, ratchet sets. Tools and toys and precious old things. The sound of clocks ticking all around them.
“Jesus,” said Paul. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph.”
“I know. I had this furniture from my parents and my ex-wife and it was all in the basement, but that started to flood. I’m still figuring it all out. Look at this,” he said quickly, pointing to an antique chest of drawers. “That’s beautiful old wood there, good unadulterated cherry. You can tell by the joinings that it’s old. There’s a maker’s mark somewhere. And these—” He held up some baseball cards. “Really rare. And there’s a real market for religious iconography—” He touched the herd of plaster saints, then stopped, and the frantic air dissipated, leaving only weariness. “I know.”
Paul could see, distantly, that this kind of clutter could be comforting to people. Even now Sean was touching pieces of furniture and telling stories about them: this vase, his mother’s. That swishing-tail cat clock, his grandmother’s. “What do you think’s happened to her?” Sean said. “The last time we spoke, I thought something was wrong. We have to find her.”
A heavy rain had started to fall. It was whipping the windows steadily. Paul imagined the creaking house slowly beginning to flood, its artifacts, its family history going under. This man had his own baggage to sort out. “Let me know if you hear from her,” Paul said. “I’ll do the same.”
Safe in the car, Paul and Jennifer sat for a while in silence. “Jesus,” Paul said finally. “Nicole sure knows how to pick ’em.”
“She does,” said Jennifer softly.
She meant it differently than he did. “Oh, come on,” he said.
“What?”
“You can’t honestly think that guy is good for—”
“I don’t know, Paul.” Jennifer shook her bracelets down her wrist, a sharp, irritated move. “I believe he loves her.”
Paul swung the gearshift into reverse. He wanted to argue with her more, but he sensed that it wouldn’t do much good. As he drove, he dialed the other Boston number, and a solemn-voiced man picked up. Paul told him they were looking for Nicole. “I think we should speak in person,” the man said.
When they entered the little café in Waltham, Paul knew immediately who he was. The man was by the window, sipping tea, his large frame swallowed in navy robes.
As their glances met, he rose. “Honored to meet you,” he said. Paul offered his hand. The man clasped and then bowed over it, a strange hybrid greeting. His shaved head was ruddy and freckled with sun. His hands were smooth and very dry. His gaze was direct to the point of discomfort. “Nicole has told me much about you,” he said, and they all sat down.
“You’re the—spiritual leader,” said Paul finally.
He paused with his cup halfway to his mouth. “I have been Nicole’s teacher for many years. The word, if you please, is roshi.”
“Yes—er, roshi. As I said on the phone, we haven’t heard from Nicole for a few days, and we’re getting worried.”
“I am also concerned. She has made troubling choices on her journey.”
Paul inched forward in his seat. “Am I to understand that you have sent her on some kind of journey?”
“Perhaps.”
Careful, careful, Paul thought. They were speaking in codes, dancing some kind of dance whose steps he could only guess. �
�Where did you send her?”
“A journey can be an excursion in either a mental or a physical space. It can even be a journey of memory. Nicole could have gone on all three.”
“Do you know where she is right now?”
“If I did, do you think I would tell you? Am I sure I could trust you not to interfere, not to swoop in and snatch her away?”
“It’s not like her to leave without giving me some sort of message.”
“Maybe she did, but you weren’t listening.”
Paul sat back in his chair and laced his fingers together, pressing until the knuckles were white. Riddles. Abstractions. He wanted something so simple, so direct. He wanted his sister here, safe. Even with the crazy dragon skirts and the hippie hair. And this insufferable man—sipping his tea, pretending to be the omniscient narrator of his sister’s life—had the answer but wouldn’t give it.
He wondered what to ask next. He had to outwit this man, trap him in his own verbal cul-de-sacs. He had to be plainspoken and direct. “It seems that you’re deliberately obfuscating,” he said. “Nicole talks to me. Nicole would tell me if she was leaving. We talk to each other.”
“It may be difficult for a nonpractitioner to understand,” the roshi said. “But Zen students are always looking for the place that is human experience without words, without talk. It takes hard work to find this place. You must break ties with anyone who prevents you from reaching it. And when the conditions are right, it comes upon you suddenly. Suddenly you get a lightning bolt.” He tapped his forehead, smiling scornfully. “Only some people ever experience it. Maybe if you pray, you might feel it. I wouldn’t expect you to understand.”
Under the table, Jennifer gripped his knee. “What do you teach her?” Paul asked. “What are you telling her?”
“I’m afraid I can’t divulge that sort of information. The training my students undertake is confidential.”
“You’re not a doctor.”
“The Buddha called himself a physician of the soul. I take my role no less seriously.”
Paul had felt sadness less than an hour ago in Sean’s crowded living room; now he could feel the beginnings of rage. “I need to know where she is, and I think you know more about that than you’re telling us. Now, are you going to keep fucking with me?”
To his surprise, the man did not blink. “No, I am not fucking with you, Mr. Hennessy. I am Nicole’s master, and that relationship is for life. My loyalty is to her, as hers is to me.”
“What is all this master and student B.S.? What the hell does that mean? Are you some sort of—creep?” His voice was growing louder. “What have you done to her?”
The man turned his head to the side as if preparing for a blow. “You wouldn’t understand.”
“You call yourself a holy man? How about not lying to us and trying to help one of your followers?”
“I am not lying to you any more than you are lying to yourself.”
Paul half-rose in his seat. “I don’t have time for Zen mind games right now.”
“It’s no game. Nicole has mentioned you to me; I know you are married. This woman is not your wife, though; you introduced her as your friend. Yet she has had her hand on your knee under the table. You call my relationship with Nicole bullshit. But you are the one who is lying.” The man rose, pulling his robes about himself with a final, satisfied tug. “I know what is best for Nicole. You’d be wise not to interfere.” And he left the café, Paul mute in his wake.
He was still for only a moment. He got up silently and followed the man out of the shop and around the corner to the parking lot. It was still raining lightly, and the roshi was fumbling with an umbrella. Paul wanted to grab the umbrella and hurl it to the ground. He wanted to smack him across the face, see blood in his little tea-stained teeth. But there was still the choirboy in him somewhere, the boy who bowed his head to priests and holy men. He watched the roshi get into his ancient rust-colored car and struggle to back out of his narrow space, adjusting and correcting. Then he drove away.
Jennifer had caught up to him behind the coffee shop. “What’s going on?”
“Nothing.”
She stopped. “What an asshole.”
“I don’t know,” he said. He took her hand, and they walked quickly away in the rain. Maybe he needed to go home. Maybe he needed to let Nicole lead her own strange life.
Paul lay on the bed. He could hear Jennifer putting things in his bag. “Where will you look next?” she asked.
“I’ve got to get back to work.” He sighed.
“Maybe she doesn’t want to be found. Maybe it’s time to just—let her go.”
She was at the foot of the bed, folding a sweater and jamming it into the bottom of his suitcase. “Sometimes people don’t want to be found. My uncle was like that. My father’s brother. He was an addict, a drifter. My family did everything they could. They sent him to rehab, to the family priest, you name it. He disappeared when he was in his twenties. Twenty years later, my father stumbled over his feet. He was sleeping on a grate in Copley Square. My father begged him to come home. My uncle smiled, shook his hand, and walked away.”
Paul sat up. He felt cold, but he wasn’t sure if he was angry or afraid.
He remembered the warm rush of Nicole’s little-girl voice in his ear, when they were both young and staring at the stars, when she whispered to him what it must be like to be in space: it had to be cold, and dark, but darker than any darkness you knew, and quiet, but quieter than the deepest silence. He remembered her questions when he was a little older and she thought he knew everything: what’s it like to be tall, and what’s it like to fall in love, and what happens to us when we die? And then a little older, impatient with his advice, his hectoring: I know there’s a part of you that understands me.
“This isn’t like that,” he said. “Nicole is not like that. Something has frightened her. I don’t know what it is, but I know her.” And he said suddenly, fiercely knowing it to be true, “Nicole doesn’t want me to let her go.”
Jennifer paused; his hands were on her hands. “All right,” she said softly.
“Jenn,” he said. “Aren’t we good together? Can’t we just keep going the way we have for now?”
She bit her lip. “How can this be our lives?” she asked.
She went to her desk and pulled out a piece of paper. An e-mail printout. He struggled to read the chain of messages. First an e-mail from himself to Jennifer. Confirming the time of some previous visit, asking her to wear the blue dress and chill the beer. Something more risqué below that, some pillow talk. And at the top of the e-mail chain, another e-mail from his account, sent to Jennifer:
Dear person,
Whoever you are, please leave my Dad alone. Leave ALL OF US alone.
Sincerely,
June
It was Sunday and Paul was supposed to be on a two o’clock bus to New York, but instead he and Jennifer sat in her car outside the Peaceful Healing Zen Center. “I don’t think he knows anything, Paul,” Jennifer said.
He didn’t think the guy knew much, either. But he wasn’t completely sure. He had to be sure.
“You’ll miss the last bus.”
“I can go tomorrow.”
“You just don’t want to go.”
“Wait.” The roshi came out. He was still wearing his navy robes, but he had a Red Sox jacket over them and a newsie cap covered his shaved head. He was carrying a cloth laundry hamper.
They watched him slip the key under a loose brick by the door, then head down the street. “Come on, he might come back,” Paul said. They retrieved the key and entered the building, quickly checking rooms. A front studio, with a stack of floor cushions, a back room, a janitor’s closet, another back room. He hurried down the narrow halls.
“Where are we going, Paul?” Jennifer said.
There wasn’t much to see. No basement, no people hiding, no devotees in chains. Just a converted storefront, a collection of nearly empty rooms. Here was the back ex
it, which opened onto a gravel parking lot shared with the neighboring stores. Beyond that, a wall of chicken wire and an unexpectedly lush proliferation of bushes and trees.
“That’s the community garden,” Jennifer said. “You can rent plots there.” She pointed: little fenced-off territories, with early spring buds of onion shoots and daffodils.
“Come on.” Paul lifted the latch on the chicken-wire door. Here was a narrow pathway through the plots, winding its way on through the damp green. They could see fresh footprints in the damp earth. He’d been here.
“I don’t like this, Paul.” The air moved loudly through the branches. Just a few steps down the path, they were violently surrounded by green, isolated from the street.
“I don’t like it, either,” he said. “But I have to see.” He started walking quickly down the path. It was too wet for gardeners to be out; he was alone in the sylvan quiet. The wild bushes were tall around him, but the plots themselves were mostly stark black soil, nothing sprouting yet. He followed the muddy footprints down one grassy path, then another. Here must be the man’s little plot: inside a roofed enclosure, on tables was a circle of bonsai trees. Paul paused for a moment, admiring the precise proportions of a tiny pine, a minute spruce. He could appreciate the aesthetic pleasure of these delicate things. Beside them was spread an array of tools—wire cutters, snub-nosed pliers. And now he could see the technique behind the artistry: black wires spiraled tightly about the slender fingerling trunks, embracing them cruelly.
He looked around himself in silence.
Down one narrow turn stood a long shed with a hole in its roof, presumably damaged by storms and snow. When he got to the shed, he saw a flimsy bicycle lock on the door. His pulse quickened.
A rotting hoe was leaning up against the side of the shed. He used it like a crowbar, leveraging the door open. And then he was swinging at it, tearing chunks out of the old wood, sending the lock flying.
He had to wait for the dust and splinters to settle before he could see inside. He craned his head through the darkness: a collapsing gardener’s shed, full of rusting tools. A hand mower and a rake, another hoe and trowels and a spade. Nothing else.
