A Prayer for Travelers

by Ruchika Tomar

  I paused in front of the white ceramic jewelry box on her bureau. I had teased her about the naïve, girlish quality of the trinket; heart-shaped, a slim ballerina pirouetting on the lid. From my quinceañera, she had explained, laughing, and then produced a large box from the depths of her closet, all the extra party favors she had saved without knowing why. Had I ever stopped to consider this Penny, who kept fifteen heart-shaped jewelry boxes in reserve, commemorating a single tender moment in her youth? She had said nothing of the party, or of Luz and Lourdes and Flaca, who had all assuredly been there, celebrating the milestone with cake and presents, watching Alvaro waltz her across the dance floor. Penny showed me a pair of snowy pearl studs tucked inside the box’s velvet folds, a gift from her father that I never once saw her wear. It was the only time he was ever mentioned, and I hadn’t known to study her face when she said it. There was nothing in this room to point to where she might have gone, or had been taken. There’s nothing there she could want. Flaca was right. This was a life she could live without. And even though I had once been Penny’s friend and stood in these rooms beside her, I was just another intruder now.

  From the front of the unit came a heavy metallic squeak.

  “Flaca?” I had both hoped and dreaded that she would appear. But the weighty footsteps pounding down the hall to Penny’s room could not have been hers, and soon a broad-shouldered man in a uniform was filling the doorway, his gun drawn. He pointed it between my eyes. I concentrated on the hole at the end of the barrel, like a trapdoor I might leap through.

  “Hands up. Nice and slow.”

  I was still clutching Penny’s jewelry box. I set it on the dresser and spread my hands, readying myself to jump.

  79

  52

  Dale handcuffed me to a metal folding chair between two desks. The only other cop in the station was an aged, paunchy veteran who watched us with a smirk. I wanted to hate them both, but Dale, at least, had been decent, deciding not to shoot me between the eyes. Alone in Penny’s dark bedroom, he had turned me around and cuffed my wrists with as much respect as I deserved. Now he took the purse I’d stolen from Penny’s closet and turned it over on his desk, shaking out the rolls of cash atop the foraged contents of my pockets: Lamb’s worn, repurposed leather wallet stuffed with tips, a canary yellow lighter, several pieces of lint, and a tube of red lipstick I’d swiped from Penny’s bathroom, the sharp wax peak worn down from the pressure of her lips. The older cop picked up one of the rolls of cash and unwound the rubber band, counting the twenties with a low whistle. He had ideas, I could tell. He was of Lamb’s generation but hadn’t turned out quite as well. It was possible that one of these men had been the driver of the dark sedan parked behind the Texaco, the one Fischer had signaled to while dragging me out of the pancake house to his car. The older cop moved on to Penny’s empty purse, turning it over before refocusing his attention on me, scrutinizing my face and hair, my old jeans and T-shirt. I felt my face grow warm and shifted in the chair, the cuffs rattling.

  “Your wife’s bag match her outfit, Dale?”

  Dale had uncapped the lipstick, was rolling it up as if to check the color. He looked up, embarrassed.

  “This purse belong to you?” the older cop asked me.

  “Yes,” I said, and I knew then that whatever resistance I had to lying was gone now; it would take a long and concerted effort to repair. I cleared my throat. “Is Fischer here?”

  “Who?” The older cop raised his eyebrows at Dale. Look at her, he seemed to say. She asks for Fischer. Dale unfolded Lamb’s wallet, pulling out the cash. He counted the money in front of the older cop for confirmation, passing back the look he was given.

  “I’m a waitress. Those are my tips. Penny and I worked together at the diner. I just went by her place to see if she came back home. I’m sorry I went inside, okay? You could just let me go.”

  “Nah,” the older cop said.

  I regretted letting Jake talk me into coming back to work and allowing Flaca to drag me to Alvaro’s. I was turning barbed in my discontent, resentful. But after ignoring Penny’s disappearance for weeks, now these cops wanted to know who touched Penny’s countertops, who borrowed her things, who missed her? They still didn’t have any idea where she might be.

  “You know who you remind me of?” I asked. “They pay you a hundred and sixty-two dollars and thirty-nine cents a week just to look at bodies—why can’t you look at this one?”

  “Excuse me?” The paunchy veteran turned to look at me.

  “Stop,” Dale suggested.

  “You never saw it? Come on. I bet you love old cop movies. You always wanted to cruise around, eating donuts.”

  He stared at me awhile, seeming to consider just how pissed he wanted to be. He shook his head. “You’re Clinton’s girl, all right.”

  Lamb’s name was like a punch to the gut. I counted backward from ten to keep my eyes dry. But of course he knew Lamb, most townies did. Dale produced a pack of cigarettes from his desk and offered one to the older man. They lit up, the smell of smoke enough to make my mouth water. My shoulder was beginning to throb, the awkward angle of my wrist cuffed to the chair. I began the long, slow process of disappearing before their eyes.

  When Dale finished his cigarette he began to type on his computer with two index fingers, henpecking at the keys. The older cop resumed his seat at a nearby desk and made a call, leaning back in his chair, propping his boots on the desk. “Charlie? Yeah, Sam here. We got him this morning, four ounces of bud. You called it. Want us to send him your way?”

  There were no windows in the back room of the station, but the clock on the wall read a quarter past four. I began to nod off, waking each time my chin brushed against my chest. I wanted something to lean my head against something; someone. Another hour dragged by before the back door opened at the end of the hall, a current of chilly air snaking in. Fischer stalked past, pausing briefly at the end of Dale’s desk to look me over, his dark hair still wet from a shower, curling around the collar of his shirt, his mouth a firm line. A few seconds later, the door to his office slammed shut. I watched another twenty minutes tick by on the clock and wet my lips.

  “I need to go to the bathroom.”

  “Shhh.” Dale didn’t look up from his computer. I waited and drowsed, startling awake to Dale shaking my shoulder. I straightened as best as I could in the folding chair. Dale bent low over my cuffs, whispering in my ear. Behave.

  He stood me up and walked me back to Fischer’s office, pulling the door shut behind me. Fischer sat at his desk, sweeping the remains of a deli sandwich in crumpled wax paper into a trashcan. He opened a Coke and pulled a second can from a paper bag on his desk, setting it down across the desk. I took a seat and popped the soda. I took a very long drink before I dared look at him again. There was no softening around his eyes.

  “I’m sorry,” I lied.

  “What did we talk about you not doing?” He looked worn down by his shortened night, a succession of them. I tried to imagine where he laid his head to rest, the kind of place he might live, the bachelor dinners he made in some too-small kitchen—Ava already out of the house, Ava’s mother long since remarried. He was waiting for my response. I came up with a few, but when I tried to speak they floated away one by one, paper boats on a winding river. He rubbed a hand over his face. “I could throw you in jail. Do you understand?”

  “That was fingerprint powder all over her place, wasn’t it?”

  Fischer was silent for a moment, studying me. He opened a drawer on the side of his desk and pulled out a yellow folder, opening it to a stack of printed photographs. He picked up the top sheet and laid it between us on the table. The image had been blown up so close it was grainy, though it was still clearly a man walking through pneumatic doors. Older than Penny but younger than Fischer, he was slender and pale with dark hair and a sharp chin, dressed in a pair of jeans. The camera zoomed in
so close his eyes had become pixelated holes, a city haircut brushing the tops of his ears. I touched the photo, as if I might sift through all the men I had ever seen like tactile memories in order to place him.

  “Who is he?”

  “Do you recognize him?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  Fischer laid a second photo on the table, this camera directly above the man walking inside the doors. It showed an average span of shoulders, the full crown of his dark hair, the over-projected bridge of an aquiline nose.

  “I’ve never seen him before.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Yes.” I heard the conviction in my voice, a certainty I didn’t actually feel. I was trying to recall every man I’d ever seen come through the diner: the familiar faces of the regulars, fuzzier recollections of travelers just passing through. I wanted to believe this man would have stuck out to me, even in passing. But if I’d seen him before, I’d forgotten him just as quickly.

  Fischer set a third photo on the table. It was a bird’s-eye shot of a casino, people milling around a gaming floor. Fischer pointed to a craps table, where several men were bent over the green felt, the casino lights lengthening shadows at the edge of the frame. A dark-haired woman reached for a chip with a slim, tanned arm, a swatch of bright fabric visible on her side. It took a moment to reconcile the figure with Penny. The yellow sundress that made her look as if she was from the islands? Hadn’t I seen it in her closet an hour ago, hanging up among her clothes? I couldn’t be sure.

  Another photograph, another angle: her face still pixelated, indistinct. Impossible to read her eyes or what was in them, fear or excitement. She was standing now, the photograph highlighting the familiar way she held her body, tilting her torso away from every speaker, as if she meant to take in the whole of them at once. It was most certainly that dress, and the thin red strap across her chest a heart-shaped purse I had seen her wear more than once, slinging it over her head on our way out the door. The man had his hand splayed across her lower back. It looked as if she was being escorted off the floor, their faces pointed toward an area of the casino just out of range. I pointed to the space we couldn’t see.

  “What’s over there?”

  “Elevators.” He consulted the file. “They were taken a week ago, the night after you dropped her off.”

  A beat went by; long enough for the news to sink in. I shoved the photographs across the table, Fischer grabbing at them to keep them from falling to the ground. How could she do it? Run again, when we had just been granted reprieve. I saw the sandman in my mind—six inches from my face with those astonishing blue eyes, his mouth a grimace—the way he appeared every night in my dreams. The whole story was on the tip of my tongue. I wanted confession, absolution. I wanted to hurt Penny, othered by the image, made suddenly a stranger; I wanted to point a finger at the girl in the yellow dress being led handily off the page. That girl nearly got us killed, starting a chase that, to my mind, had never ended. But photographs couldn’t tell the whole story. They couldn’t fill in the gaps, the ruptures in thought where decisions were made. Had Penny gone to Alvaro’s after I dropped her off, as Flaca thought? Had he said or done something to make her flee? A man enters a casino and meets a beautiful girl. What happens next? I picked up the last photograph again, studying the tables. The carpet a fuzzy indistinguishable pattern of red and blue splotches. It nagged some loose thread in my mind. All casino carpeting, more or less the same.

  “All these big casinos are hours away. How’d she get there? And if you know where she is, why don’t you just go get her? Why did you tape off her place?”

  “County’s been looking for this guy for a few months for running on his warrant. We received these photos a couple days ago, along with every other precinct in a hundred-mile radius. It was a lucky hit.”

  “Who is he? Why do they want him?”

  Fischer didn’t answer. I stood up, unable to sit still.

  “You’re not going to tell me?”

  “I’m telling you what I can. We know he checked in to the hotel for one night. We know they were both there that night because we have her on the floor. Cameras show him checking out the next morning alone. Unless she used an alias, there are no records that your friend ever had a room of her own.”

  I realized I was pacing. I stopped. “You mean you found her, and then you lost her again. Who is he?”

  “I was hoping you could tell me. If you can remember seeing him before, there might be reason to believe Penny went to the casino to meet him.”

  “He’s not from the diner, not that I know. You have to ask someone else. You’re not checking with her friends—”

  “Cale, of all the friends we tried, there was only one”—he checked the file again—“Lourdes Hernandez? Who was willing to come in and look these over. She identified Penny as the girl in the photos. Said she’d never seen him before, either.” He leaned back in his chair, spreading his hands. “You want to do something to help? Get her other friends to actually come in.”

  I picked up the photograph again, looking for everything that wasn’t there. Between dropping Penny off at her place, and Penny arriving at the casino, she had spoken to Flaca; she might have gone to see Alvaro. I weighed telling Fischer about Alvaro myself. Maybe he already knew.

  “What’s this guy’s warrant for?”

  Fischer straightened the photos and shut the folder. It was his turn to stand. It seemed our time together, and my potential usefulness, had expired.

  “Fischer. What did he do?”

  Fischer came around the desk. Allow me to escort you the fuck out of my office. When he came near I grabbed his sleeve, pulling him toward me. He let himself get close, not nearly close enough. He ran warm, the first two buttons of his shirt were undone, his sleeves rolled up. I could feel the heat radiating from his core. He kept his eyes focused on my chin, the tail end of his breath tickling my cheek. He was just a father, and I had recently lost one. When he spoke his voice was low and even; it might have soothed me, if I didn’t listen to his words. “Beat up an old girlfriend. Skipped his arraignment. A month later, another court date, neither party showed. Lawyer was worried. They sent officers to her house on a wellness check. She wasn’t there.”

  “Missing? Just like Penny.”

  “The girl could just be lying low. Staying with a friend somewhere out of town, if she thought it was a better way to stay safe. Maybe she didn’t want to risk seeing him in court. She’d be careful not to tell anyone where she was going.”

  “And him?”

  “He was spotted in Noe the following week, alone. Then, nothing. Whatever he did or didn’t do, he can’t run forever. They’ll get him.”

  “But they never sent out these photos because of Penny in the first place. She’s just a way for you all to find him. We don’t matter to you at all.”

  “That’s not true.” He was studying me with a curious expression. “Cale.”

  I released his sleeve. I couldn’t bear to be there a minute longer. I opened the door to his office and walked into the main room of the station, past Dale, past the older vet’s empty desk, pushing through the tarp and the empty waiting room with its bolted orange chairs, straight out through the front door. Outside, the morning was cool. The sky was a crisp blue. It was a ten-mile walk home. I heard the station door behind me and Dale’s keys jangling on his duty belt as he came up beside me, clutching the snakeskin purse, its long strap trailing in the dirt.

  “Want a ride?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  Dale held open the door to the back seat, dropped the bag on my lap, and shut the door. I checked the purse. All of my belongings and Penny’s money had been replaced. If I had one friend left in the world, it was Dale. He obeyed the speed limit the whole way, taking the dirt roads at a slow crawl, passing the abandoned train depot, the remaining tracks half cov
ered by earth. Pomoc’s previous life and all the people who had lived it. Pomoc in all her colors. The neutral taupe and char, her eternal yawning sky.

  20

  Penny drove too fast, tearing it the whole way out of town. We flew down Main Street to the on-ramp and coasted down the empty highway with the windows rolled down. It was already ten degrees cooler than the mobile home, which seemed to incubate heat, absorbing sunlight all day and loath to ever let it go. Half an hour earlier we lay prone as starfish on the floor in front of the television, sweating under its shifting Technicolor glare. Fix it, I said, my voice lost against the sound of the box fan rattling in the window, making more noise than air.

  Now neither one of us spoke on the drive, our silence grown easy. After twenty minutes she pulled off a familiar truck stop into a bright tourist bay lined with clusters of fast food joints, gas stations, and cheap motels. Even though I wasn’t hungry the restaurants appealed, if only for the frosty air-conditioning pumping inside. But we had rolled out of Penny’s still barefoot. I wore a pair of shorts and a T-shirt, no shoes. Penny wore the baggy nightshirt she slept in and little else.

  She pulled around to the Skylark Lodge and cut our headlights, easing the truck up the rear drive. It was a two-level, multiunit stucco spread with a tremulous-looking staircase on either end. The original custard paint was flaking from the walls of the second floor, but the first boasted a fresh coat of jaunty tangerine. It was a bust motel, all the dirty channels free. I glanced toward the check-in window near the front drive. The room was lit up but the desk was empty, no one visible behind the bulletproof glass.