A Prayer for Travelers

by Ruchika Tomar

  “Alvaro—” We both heard the low, distinctive rattle at the same time. At the sight of the rattlesnake’s narrow neck rising, my heart dropped. I looked away, to the chubby girl who reappeared in the doorway holding a half-eaten chocolate ice cream cone. She stepped carefully down the path of open storage containers in our direction, wearing most of the sticky dessert as a dark stain on her lips and chin. Something about the girl’s manner, her interruption, made me long for a wet towel to wipe her mouth. I had a sense that if I ever got my hands on her, I would scrub forever, until her face was rubbed raw.

  “Come here,” I said to her. I longed to unload the beast from around my neck, but I had no idea how to speak to a fledgling girl. I tried to turn my voice into candy. She shot me a scathing look much too full of knowledge for someone still wearing lavender socks. Her attention was riveted on the tank behind me, the rattling crescendo; another sudden thwack.

  The corn snake struck the glass again and unsteadily withdrew. Inside the tank, the mouse was still trying to scratch himself to freedom. Alvaro let out a cry but seemed frozen in place; too surprised to move, or too wedded to the intrinsic autonomy of wild things. Inside the tank, the rattlesnake had taken notice of his competition, kinking his neck into a tight S, loosing a spray of venom against the glass. His rattling was insistent, mid-tempo maracas picking up speed. Even the girl was transfixed, her ice cream melting into her tight, fat fist. Thwack. The corn snake’s third strike left a bright smear of blood on the glass before the animal slipped, stunned, off the bed into a soft pile on the carpet. The rattlesnake, still hovering inside his tank, refocused his attention on the mouse scampering around in a burst of desperation. The strike was lightning fast—before I could think to close my eyes, it was over. The mouse lay twitching in the corner of the tank, a slow circle of urine coloring the glass. The little girl bent to the tank and tapped the glass, blowing her cheeks full of air. The boa around my neck raised his face near mine, tasting air.

  I tried to imagine Penny in the little girl’s place, Penny fascinated by the stalking death, Penny scooting closer to Alvaro on their couch. I could not. The girl finished her ice cream and stepped around the lifeless snake on the carpet, angling for a better view. The main event, the rattler’s slow ingestion of the corpse, was yet to unfold. If the rattler had changed his mind and managed to thrust himself through the tank to latch on to her face, I wouldn’t have blamed him.

  Alvaro was still frozen, visibly distressed but unable to move—to believe that his snakes, like his daughters, might surprise him. I couldn’t bring myself to look at the vivarium again, the soft sounds behind the glass, the corn snake’s limp scales on the floor. I took a deep breath and reached up to grip the boa’s heavy body, lifting him from my shoulders, ignoring the sharp hiss. I dropped him on the mattress and snatched back my hands, making a break for the doorway across the room, dodging Alvaro as he tried to stay me, squeezing past the open containers—don’t look down—trying not to run. I hurried down the trailer’s cold hall, calling for Flaca, and pushed open the trailer’s front door, welcoming the heat on my skin, gulping in air.

  The deathtrap was exactly where we left it, Flaca slouched behind the wheel, finishing her own ice cream cone, her attention focused on something in her lap. I came around the passenger side, half expecting to find the door locked and Flaca beginning to pull away, leaving me to chase her, pounding desperately on the glass. But when I yanked the door, it swung open in my hand. I nearly leapt inside. Flaca closed the spiral notebook of Penny’s collages, dropping it in the clutter of her back seat. I sat on my hands to keep from wrapping them around her neck. She popped the last bite of her cone into her mouth and chewed. I willed for her to choke on it.

  “Well?” she finally asked.

  “You’ve been sitting out here the whole time?”

  “Not the whole time,” she said.

  I hung on to my seat as she fired up the deathtrap and pulled a sharp U-turn in the dirt. Hurry, I wanted to say. But no one was chasing us. Alvaro, for all his deep and unsettling strangeness, had not actually been unkind. A knot of anxiety had taken up permanent residence in my chest, it would be there forever, loosening and tightening by degrees. When we were back on the dirt road heading away from Alvaro’s property, I began to breathe normally again.

  “Why did you take me there?”

  “What did he say?”

  “Nothing! Did you really think he would?”

  “Maybe. He’s not exactly predictable.”

  I punched her in the arm. Her mouth dropped open. We drove in silence, Flaca rubbing her shoulder. I was perched at the edge of my seat and forced myself to lean back. I wrapped my hands around my own shoulders to make sure the boa was no longer there.

  “Did you know Lamb just died?”

  Flaca glanced over. I wasn’t entirely sure she knew who Lamb was, but she looked surprised. “When?” she asked.

  “A few days ago.”

  We were silent for a moment, Flaca looking increasingly uncomfortable. “I didn’t know.” she said finally. Then, “Are you expecting me to say something? Life’s a beautiful journey?” Flaca glanced at me again. “Because it’s not.”

  “I know,” I said. Then, “Look, when we got back from Carr I dropped Penny off. I didn’t hear from her the next day. But the next morning someone called the house. Early—four, five a.m. I didn’t get to the phone in time. It could have been her.”

  “What do you think she was going to say?”

  “I have no idea. What if she was in trouble?”

  We were back on the main road. I wanted my corner of the bed and the warm, heavy dogs pressed up against me. Flaca was driving too fast, leadfooting the gas.

  “He said Penny wouldn’t go far.”

  Flaca shook her head. “I’d go over to her place,” she said. “Where they used to live. After her mother left, her brother ran off. Alvaro worked all the time, my parents, too. When he was home we sometimes forgot he was sleeping, we could get loud and wake him up. He didn’t like that. He didn’t like kids, I thought, but now look at Guapa, it wasn’t kids—it was us he didn’t like. He loved those fucking snakes, though. I get it, working all the time, your wife gone, a kid like Penny—she wasn’t any help. We were just kids, we got loud, had fights, stupid stuff. When he wanted to punish us, he’d make us clean out the snake bins. Then he’d put the snakes in the bathtub one by one, you know, fill the tub up with a little water. Put us in there, too, to help soak them. Penny was always so scared, no matter what kind they were. I used to think, well, maybe he thought she’d get over it. But now I think you could tell she never would. When we were bad he’d make us get in with them and leave us there for hours.”

  I remembered Penny on the mountain, the expression on her face. My throat was closing up.

  “Penny was punished a lot, Cale.”

  “Yes.”

  “I wasn’t always with her. Do you understand?”

  “I think so.”

  “He called a few weeks ago asking for money. Business was never great, except one year when we were freshmen. All those new businesses in Tehacama started using him, but when construction was over on the junction, all the people everyone thought would come just didn’t. You know. They closed and the nursery started to tank again. He let the house go. She was furious! She thought one day she’d do well enough to make him sorry. I knew she was saving her money for something. What if she gave it to him? What if he took it?”

  “Why would she?”

  “I don’t know. Guapa? She felt guilty. I feel guilty, now. No matter how we fought, whenever she had more money, she took care of me. When I was up, I got her. That’s the way it goes, right? But it’s been so busy. She kept asking me to go with her to get her things. Ugh. I hate him, he hates us—why bother? There’s nothing there she could want. But she needed to see him, I think, to confront him. Maybe she got tired
of waiting for me and went by herself.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “He said she didn’t go far. How would he know? You want to know where she is, I’m trying to tell you.”

  “Flaca—”

  “Wherever he buried her,” she said.

  46

  The dogs covered me with their warm, solemn bodies, packing themselves in as if I were an organ to be harvested, a heart in transit to some new, more capable vessel. Trixie’s snout poked the hollow of my throat, her breath dampening my skin. Wolf curled up with his spine pressed against my low back, emitting a low, intermittent whine. Somewhere a phone was ringing again. I climbed off the bed slowly, a prolonged effort. All the muscles in my back felt stiff from sleeping in torqued positions in the big hospital chair, until the moment I had given up and crawled onto the edge of Lamb’s gurney, his slim parenthesis. Only now I couldn’t remember how long ago that had been. Three days ago? Yesterday? In the hall I fumbled for the receiver, pressing it to my ear.

  “Cale? How’re you doing, kid?” In the long, awkward pause that followed, I could tell Jake had heard the news. “What time is it?” My voice like I had gargled a whole glass of rubbing alcohol.

  “Half past noon,” he said. “Wednesday.”

  “Anything about Penny?”

  “Nothing yet.”

  But when did Penny disappear? When did Lamb die? I remembered climbing out of bed to use the bathroom, gulping palmfuls of water at the faucet, walking downstairs at regular intervals to let the dogs in and out of the yard. Gone were the transitions from day to night, the reckoning of hours. I could hear Jake hesitating on the line. He seemed sympathetic, but I was sure this wasn’t the only reason for his call. When did I begin to doubt all kindness offered? But Jake was never a friend, only an employer, and I was the second waitress to leave him in a month.

  “You need me at the diner,” I said.

  “I called to see how you were feeling.” He paused. “But if you want to get your mind off things, it’s not the worst idea.”

  I was still wearing the shirt I had worn to the hospital. The faintly sour odor trailing me from the bed to the phone, I realized, was my own.

  “You think you can come in tonight?” he asked.

  “Maybe tomorrow,” I said.

  “How about the night shift? Rico will be here.”

  “Okay. Jake, who told you?”

  “Sheriff came by,” he said.

  After I hung up I went downstairs, turning on the lights in the kitchen. Surprising, still, to find no tepid inch of coffee at the bottom of the pot, none of Lamb’s toast crumbs scattered on the counter. Everything was exactly where I’d left it. I set the coffee to brew and walked onto the porch in the sun, the wood warming the soles of my feet. Jake said it was just past noon, but it was already too bright; the light sparkled against the pie tins Jackson hung on the new peach tree he’d planted near our fence in some paroxysm of faith, knowing full well that stone fruit wouldn’t last a year in our soil. I searched the mountain for the large, flat boulder Penny and I had climbed on a few weeks earlier, a smooth island of stone amid the stretches of half-burnt brush, like battle scars on some great, injured beast. When summer was gone, townie volunteers would choose a single temperate afternoon to trudge up the mountain and cut back the scrub, clearing the mountain of charred leaves and stems.

  The door rattled behind me, the dogs poking their noses in the screen, snuffling mightily. I held it open and they rushed out, pressing themselves against my legs like cats. These fifteen minutes, the longest we had been away from each other in days. I picked up the empty pack of cigarettes left discarded on Lamb’s chair, though I hadn’t bothered to light up since returning from the hospital. I had lived for days without cigarettes, food, friends. It was expected I would persist.

  I was starting to remember snippets of conversation from the hospital, flashes of memory, the baby-faced doctor, the reason the time between then and now had been wiped clean: two white pills like candy submarines in a paper cup, an orange vial containing more of the same. Like Rena, I had taken all the pills too quickly, I had enjoyed their ability to free me of feeling. I tried probing my memory further—a warning given, the doctor’s expression of concern. But there was no way to recall how I had arrived home, if the doctor had driven me, a beleaguered nurse.

  The dogs wandered to the edge of the porch and looked back, unable to decide whether I might be left alone. How much did they know? Could they understand that Lamb was never coming back? There was a rustle in the weeds on the grade and Wolf took off like a shot across the yard. A small, reckless gopher scrambled across the dirt, disappearing into a snarl of brush too thorny for even Wolf to hazard. He crouched down and barked furiously, regretting his size. Trixie remained poised on the edge of the porch, her ears drawn. She glanced over her shoulder, her eyes communicating all the gentle curiosity of an intelligent animal.

  “Go,” I said.

  She leapt off the porch, hurrying to catch up.

  51

  I asked Flaca to drop me off at the Crossroads, night blanketing the warren of boxy mobile homes, their windows as we drove by black, black, black. The lawn in front of the park was vacant, the young girls I had seen tossing their plastic ball back and forth, gone, too. Did they live here? Were they sisters? I hoped they were sleeping soundly, tucked into their worn twin beds. They already shared an intimacy greater than Penny and her morbid little clone—or else why had I never heard of her? Flaca insisted Penny and her little sister weren’t close—strangers, even—so why would Penny want to invest in the girl’s care? The world of siblings was a mystery I couldn’t fathom. Still, it was a relief to glimpse the inner workings of another family nearly as convoluted as mine.

  Flaca pulled in front of Penny’s unit, her headlights sweeping up the small exterior staircase, ribbons of yellow caution tape crossed over the landing.

  “What the fuck?” Flaca asked.

  “I guess the police came,” I said, but I made no move to get out of the car. The tape was only a signifier, it didn’t tell us anything we didn’t already know. Penny was missing, and the police were supposed to be looking for her. Only it hadn’t seemed like they were looking very hard. Maybe the caution tape meant Fischer was keeping his promise to do everything he could to find Penny. I had no intention of keeping mine.

  “You really want to go in there again?”

  “No,” I said, but I still hoped I might find a new clue, something I had missed before. I was sure that if I tried to sleep, I would feel the boa’s cool, dry skin under my fingertips and see the flash of a black tongue. I forced myself to get out of the car but held the door. Flaca was still leaning over the steering wheel, squinting at Penny’s unit. She looked as if she were mulling over a question bigger than the yellow caution tape, bigger than I might know how to answer. Her high had long since faded, leaving behind someone I had only ever seen glimpses of, stripped of her loudmouth talk, the bullying swagger.

  “You can come with me if you want,” I said.

  “What’s the point?”

  I hesitated. “I don’t know.”

  She shook her head, shifting the car into reverse, her foot was keeping the brake. “But if you find something,” she said, “call.”

  I shut the door and watched her pull away, the taillights flashing red as she turned at the end of the lane. Alone again, I waited for a neighbor’s sleep-worn voice to yell out a window about the noise, but the only sound was the caution tape flickering in the breeze. The quarter moon offered just enough light to show me up the stairs. I ducked underneath the tape and looked under the pot of bee balm for Penny’s extra key. It was missing too, but when I tried the door, it was open. I scooped up the pot of flowers and hit the lights. Letting the door rest against the latch, I moved past the TV and the futon, the mirrored table, my eyes adjusting to the room. A week had given the
unit the stale, untouched quality of a mausoleum.

  In the kitchen a fine black powder covered the countertops, the microwave, even the fridge where Lourdes’ baby shower announcement still hung. I reached for the faucet and realized my hands were already covered with the same inky grain. The tap gurgled and spit before dribbling a tiny stream of water into the plant’s soil. I set the pot on the counter, rubbing my damp fingers together. The black powder smeared between them, making the irregular whorls of each fingertip distinct. I had touched all of Penny’s counters and doorknobs, I had been a part of her life. So if the police had lifted her prints from the kitchen, they also had mine, preserved in some lab in county.

  Inside Penny’s fridge someone had thrown out the Styrofoam container from the diner, but her bottle of ketchup and the carton of eggs remained. I opened the crisper, several cans of Budweiser rolling against each other. The freezer was the same, trays of ice, the coffee can cold to the touch. I took it down, prying off the lid, certain that if the police had found Penny’s spare key, they had found her cash, too—but all the tightly rolled bills were there. I took the can with me down the hall to Penny’s bathroom, setting it on the counter while I rifled through her medicine cabinet: toothpaste and floss, a half-empty box of Trojans, and a row of six pennies arranged on the bottom shelf, heads up. Useless objects that now carried the gravity of relics. I pulled back the shower curtain and took her shampoo off the shelf, flipping the cap to take a whiff of the bright scent she left behind on T-shirts and pillowcases.

  They had been in Penny’s bedroom, too. They had stripped her mattress of its sheets, revealing a rust-colored stain in its center—a spilled drink, a period bled through. One of my library books was still on the nightstand, overdue. The top drawer of the nightstand was ajar, Penny’s fingertips trapped in print dust; I pulled it open and rifled past a silky lavender sleep mask and a pot of lip gloss, an array of loose bobby pins. I surveyed her bookcase and picked up a fashion magazine, flipping through its lacelike pages, gaping holes left where Penny had gone to work with her scissors. But though I searched the room high and low, I could find no subsequent pile of haphazard images, no notebooks of collage. Some of Penny’s blouses and dresses were draped over the chair at her desk, others hung neatly in her closet, patiently awaiting her return. I grabbed one of the purses lined up on a shelf—tan, faux snakeskin—and transferred the cash from the coffee can inside, rolling the empty can under Penny’s bed.