A Prayer for Travelers

by Ruchika Tomar

  “¿Dime?”

  “Hola, ¿puedo hablar con Lourdes Hernandez?”

  The receiver crashed back into its cradle, the dial tone flat and steady in my ear. I dialed another number, letting it ring endlessly before I was forced to hang up. Two more calls, both wrong numbers. I bypassed several answering machines, a disconnected phone line bleating in angry protest. Others rang on, too, their owners still punching out time cards in towns near and far, stripping off their coveralls, readying themselves for the drive home. The next number I dialed rang twice before a woman answered, listening to my request without comment. She set the phone down on a desk or table, my own voice echoing back to me. A moment later the phone was picked up again.

  “¿Quién es?” A new voice, young enough.

  “Lourdes?”

  “Who’s this?”

  “Cale—we went to school together. At Vista. Also before.” I imagined her on the other end of the line, a moon-shaped face with dimples, the Monroe piercing above her thin lips. In her silence I could hear the TV in the background, the new baby crying.

  “Am I supposed to know you?”

  I rolled my eyes to the ceiling, a spider web of fine cracks in the plaster. “You do know me,” I said. “It’s about Penny? I work with her at the diner.”

  “So?”

  “So she didn’t show up for work last night. No one’s heard from her. I didn’t know who else to call. Maybe you know where she could be?”

  “Nope.” She clipped it, but her voice eased up a degree.

  “You don’t have any idea?”

  “How am I supposed to know? I don’t even see her anymore. I’m at the college now.”

  “I heard,” I said. “That’s great. I just—”

  “I had a baby,” Lourdes continued, “we wanted to. What did Penny say?”

  “About what?” I asked. “I was just wondering if—”

  “She thinks it’s too soon. I know. But I can do both. I’m transferring to a real college in a year or two. You watch. We’re getting married as soon as we save up. No one wants to marry Penny now, so she’s jealous of people who can.”

  “Lourdes? I really just called because Penny didn’t come to work. I used the spare key at her place. She wasn’t there. I found her cellphone. You know what I mean? She doesn’t miss work, not ever.”

  “Which Kate are you, anyway? The one with the freckles? The Chinese girl?”

  “No, that’s—it’s Cale. Could you call her parents?”

  “Cale. Overalls, right? Geskin’s geometry II? Flaca stole his grade book once. Didn’t help her. I think I do remember you. You got a B. So quiet, I thought you were smarter than that.”

  “Lourdes!”

  “What?” A snort. “He wouldn’t know.”

  “How can you be sure?”

  “Her father? Are you serious?”

  “What about her mom?” I said, remembering the short, squat woman waiting in the elementary school parking lot after third grade open house. Two long dark braids, a sweatshirt, flat sandals, leaning on the hood of the station wagon that took Penny home. A woman made memorable for how unlike Penny she seemed, how rarely she appeared.

  “Her mom? Are you crazy? Her mom moved away ages ago. Wyoming someplace. Colorado.” In the background, the baby crying again. “Anyway, I don’t even have her number.”

  “Let me give you mine, in case you hear from her.”

  “No way. Ask Flaca,” she said, her voice already receding from the phone.

  “I don’t have her number, either. Can you give it to me?” I ripped the schedule off the bulletin board, pushpins pinging on the floor. I scanned the desk for a pen. “Lourdes?”

  She had already hung up.

  7

  I sat up reading in bed, a fan balanced on the lip of the dresser blowing air across my bare legs. Wolf lay curled alongside me on the mattress, panting. Already this dry, steady June heat was responsible for suffocating Pomoc’s oldest working postwoman in her bed; the radio warned against leaving children alone in the car. I sucked down a Coke and fished an ice cube out of the glass for Wolf, yelping when his sharp-toothed enthusiasm pierced flesh. You’re going to lose a finger someday, feeding him ice like that. On the edges of every subsequent page, an abstract crimson smear.

  I walked across the hall to Lamb’s bathroom for a Band-Aid and froze with my hand outstretched toward the medicine cabinet. In the sink, a thick splatter of blood clung wetly to the porcelain. Taken alone, it signified nothing more than an accident with a razor, a deeply bitten tongue. Only at lunch, I hadn’t noticed any cuts on Lamb’s cheek, he hadn’t complained of a split anything. He drank his coffee too hot and too strong, then pushed back from the table to smoke a cigarette alone on the porch.

  In the medicine cabinet I upset a tube of toothpaste, a box of cinnamon toothpicks, cuticle scissors, a bottle of rubbing alcohol. No Band-Aids, no styptic pencil. But behind a new bar of soap were two missile-shaped suckers on the bottom shelf. Fentanyl, the name all the girls at Vista learned when Lisa Jo Baker went to visit her sick grandmother in Vegas and returned in an anesthetic cloud, stumbling down the halls in her cork espadrilles. In the small wastebasket under the sink were more crumpled tissues stuck together with blood; a bouquet of soft, speckled paper roses.

  I was in the habit of regularly inventorying Lamb: his occasional restlessness, his aches and sprains, the accumulative gray peppering his hair, the smoker’s cough that seemed to exist alongside him in perpetuity, as Lamb-like as his green cans of shaving cream and black cotton socks sold five-for-ten at the drugstore on Main. Now I left the bathroom and walked to my bedroom and shut the door, kicked off my slippers, and stretched out on the bed. I closed my eyes. Only when I woke hours later did I understand I had slept. The room was warm and foggy and there was a vague foreboding in the air, like a slow and dangerous animal had broken into the house and was even now moving up the stairs. I strained to hear Lamb’s familiar downstairs sounds: the scrape of a chair pushed back, a cup being placed on a counter, the opening and closing of the icebox when he stole a slice of cheese.

  I forced myself to go downstairs. The rooms were empty and the back door was open to the screen. The world outside was a deep, vibrant navy. Wolf was splayed on the back porch with his hind legs illuminated in a pool of light. I spotted Lamb in his white shirt pulling weeds at the top of the grade and resisted the urge to run out into the middle of the yard and scream. He would have made me climb the grade. Instead I went back inside to make a pot of coffee. When it was done I turned off all the lights, so he had no choice but to pack it all in. It still took him thirty minutes and when he pushed open the screen door he looked foul, foul. For the first time in my life, I didn’t care.

  “Sit down,” I said.

  34

  The second time I went to the station, I parked down the dirt road from the police station and hiked up along the rocky shoulder, a fine, bone-colored dust clinging to my boots. The front desk was still vacant, trapped under its filmy shroud. I pushed aside the tarps to the back office, following the sound of voices. The buzzcut cop was leaning at the edge of his desk, talking to a tall, trim older man in profile—his rigid posture still familiar, the thick, dark hair curling over his ears. The uniform I remembered was long gone, replaced by a light collared shirt and dark jeans, a shield clipped to his belt.

  Buzzcut cop glanced over, his expression turning sour. “You’re back.”

  “I want to file a report.”

  “Friend skipped work yesterday,” Buzzcut explained to the older man. “Forgot to call.”

  “My friend’s missing.” I paused, studying the other man. “You’re Ava’s daddy, aren’t you?”

  “Call him Sheriff,” Buzzcut said.

  From the middle of the floor I had a sense the older man was trying to place me, to figure out if I was someone he should
know.

  “Do you remember a fat boy named Dallas?” I asked him.

  He gave a half-smile. “Where was this?”

  “Career day. You gave him the baton from your duty belt. He broke a desk with it.”

  His face softened, tempering the ten years between then and now. “I do remember that.”

  If there is something to be said for daughters, this was it. Guilt, our familiarity with the form and how to play it. It would be impossible for him to recall, under any other circumstance, the lone hour he spent in his daughter’s classroom a decade earlier; the messy-haired tomboy sitting Indian-style on the floor among other children, her skinned knee flush against his daughter’s own. He squinted, mining the depths of memory. He was just a brash cop then, dangling a pair of handcuffs in front of twenty-six puppy faces, sermonizing on the dangers of drunk driving ten years before we would earn the address.

  “Please,” I said.

  The buzzcut cop was watching our exchange closely. He stuck a hand in his pocket, jangling loose change. “Boss? I’m going for smokes.”

  The sheriff reached out a hand to stay him, motioning in the direction of an open door at the end of the room, behind the rows of desks.

  “Wait in there,” he said. “Five minutes.”

  * * *

  —

  On the windowsill of the sheriff’s office was a photograph of a younger, better behaved Ava: her neat, brunette bob, a smattering of freckles across a pert nose. I stood awkwardly in the room studying the photograph and the row of plaques arranged behind it, snapshots of the sheriff in banquet halls with other suited blues, shaking hands with Carson’s silver-haired chief. Just outside the door, Sheriff Fischer and the buzzcut cop were still speaking to each other in hushed tones. When Fischer finally came in he took his seat, gesturing across his desk for me to do the same. I sank into a chair bucketed from wear, trying not to think of all the others who must have sat there year after year, the kind of news they had come to deliver. Up close, the sheriff wore his age in the shallow bows around his mouth, the delicate feathering around his eyes, an almost imperceptible quality of fatigue. But we had all grown older, made adjustments. In the last two years of high school even Ava had transformed, shedding her cop’s-daughter naïveté in a surprising second coming as an inky-eyed goth. What happened to some girls between the fourth and twelfth grades, and not others? I had never experienced this blossoming; I spent every lunch hour eating a sandwich on the low stone planter in front of school, watching mohawked boys in black trench coats make out with girls on the knoll, until one day Ava appeared among them. Our own shared past reduced to the occasional smile Ava flashed down the halls in my direction, her incisors filed to predatory dimension.

  “So you’re friends with my daughter,” the sheriff said.

  “I was.” I hesitated. “More so in grade school.”

  He smiled. “You don’t have to explain.”

  “Sheriff—”

  “Just Fischer, all right?”

  “I’m worried about a friend of mine. She didn’t show up to work yesterday. She never misses. I went by her place.”

  “You knocked. Looked in the windows?”

  “I know where she keeps the spare key. I went inside.”

  “And?”

  “She wasn’t there. I found her cellphone.”

  “Could she have gone out for some milk, something like that?”

  “No. She takes her phone with her.”

  “What about a purse?”

  “I didn’t see one.”

  “But she usually wears one.”

  “Yes. Sometimes.”

  “You girls,” he made a motion with his hand, encompassing us both. “How old are you?”

  “She’s nineteen. Listen, I don’t know what he told you—”

  “He didn’t tell me anything.” Fischer cut it with a smile. “Look, sometimes this happens. People take off, dry out a little. They come back when they’re ready.”

  I stared at Fischer across the desk. He touched his cheek just below his eye. I realized he was miming the bruise under my own. “What happened here?”

  “I just want to file a report.” I heard how loud my voice sounded, filling up the room. His smile underwent a slow demise.

  “Of course. If that’s what you want.”

  He rolled his chair in closer to the desk, keeping an eye on me as he rifled through a drawer, pulling a sheet of paper free and sliding it across the desk. I took a pen from the cup on his desk, uncapped it. Stared at the black bold type of the form. MISSING PERSONS REPORT. I hesitated, putting pen to paper.

  “If I fill this out right now, and she comes back, what happens?”

  “Nothing.”

  REPORT TYPE (circle one): RUNAWAY VOLUNTARY MISSING ADULT LOST DEPENDENT ADULT UNKNOWN CIRCUMSTANCES CATASTROPHE STRANGER ABDUCTION SUSPICIOUS CIRCUMSTANCES PARENTAL/FAMILY ABDUCTION

  Catastrophe. My pen hovered above the word. I circled UNKNOWN CIRCUMSTANCES and moved on. Under REPORTING PARTY I wrote my name. I printed all my answers carefully, recalling handwriting lessons from school: HAIR COLOR (black), EYE COLOR (brown), LAST KNOWN RESIDENCE (the Crossroads), IDENTIFYING MARKS (mole on right cheek), JEWELRY (none). There were other questions—a surprising number—I couldn’t answer: CLOTHING LAST WORN ( ) POSSIBLE DESTINATIONS ( ). My pen hovered over LIFESTYLE ( ). I wrote it in. (Waitress).

  Fischer was watching me carefully. When I set down the pen he took the form, reviewing my answers.

  “When was the last time you saw her?”

  “I’m not overreacting. We went to school together. We work together down at Jake’s.”

  “Last time you saw her?”

  “I dropped her off the day before yesterday, we . . .” I felt the cold, wet paper towels Penny wiped across my throat in the gas station bathroom, the red water dripping down my shirt. “We went for a drive.”

  “A drive to where?”

  “What?”

  “Where were you driving to?”

  “Just around. We were bored. We wanted to drive.”

  “You girls drinking?”

  “No.”

  “Take anything else? You smoke?”

  “No, nothing.”

  “Is that when you got your—” He waved at the right side of my face.

  I should have been prepared for the question. I should have identified all the pertinent details that were safe enough to share and sifted them carefully from the others. But if I’d thought long enough about all the questions I might be asked, I wouldn’t have come at all.

  “Okay,” he said. “So you’re just driving around, the two of you, going nowhere, not drinking or getting high, not doing anything you ought to have gotten pulled over for, and then—”

  “That’s not it, really. I—”

  “No argument? Any reason you think she could be avoiding you?”

  “No.” I realized I was clutching the edges of the chair, and let go. “I left her at her place and haven’t heard from her since.”

  “When was that? What time?”

  I lifted my hair above my head, then let it down. The room had grown exponentially warmer. I glanced over my shoulder; he had shut the door to his office when he came in. Why hadn’t I noticed? Now he picked up the form and scanned over my answers again. I opened my mouth slightly and tried taking small breaths through it.

  “Cale. I’m saying that right? What time did you drop her off?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Give me a range, would you? Morning, afternoon?”

  A reasonable question, a fair one. Still, a salty taste began filling my mouth. The room was actually hot; a pressure was building steadily in my ears. I could feel my body tighten against the impulse to return to that night. How to explain that time had broken apart, that it would not come bac
k together again?

  “I can’t—” I stood up, but the look he gave made me swallow. I sat down again. I crossed my legs, a single booted foot twitching. Fischer was still watching me with eyes the color of toffee, the quality of liquid. I could feel them moving over my face and neck, I balled my hands into fists.

  He looked at the sheet again. “Penelope . . .”

  “Penélope Miguela Reyes. Penny.”

  “Does she have a boyfriend?”

  “No.”

  “Did you reach out to her parents?”

  “They’re not close. She doesn’t live with them. But her friends—there are a couple girls. I don’t know their numbers, but they might know. I can give you their names.”

  I reached for the form again and turned it over, tried printing them out. The pen was slippery now, difficult to grip. Christina Pilar Cruz. Lourdes Hernandez. Mariana Lucia Perez. “They’re in the palo. Can you find them?”

  “If we need to. Suppose you want to tell me how you got that eye? You don’t seem like the fighting type.”

  I licked my lips. “How would you know?”

  He smiled. “I’ve been doing this a long time.”

  “Penny and I didn’t fight.”

  “You mentioned her phone. Where is it now?”

  I stood up again, reaching into my back pocket to hand it over. He took it, closing his fingers around mine, checking my eyes for permission. He moved his thumb, slowly, inching it over my knuckles. First left, then right. An easy, simple thing. I swallowed carefully.

  “I want you to try to relax a little.”

  “No, it’s just—”

  “Relax. Close your eyes.”

  His thumb, slow. Left again. Circling the bone.

  “Good. Keep them closed. Okay? Take a deep breath. That’s it. You’re with your friend again. You girls went out for a drive. You’re on your way back home. What time of day is it? What does it look like outside?”