A Prayer for Travelers

by Ruchika Tomar

  I carried the popcorn through the carpeted halls, up an illuminated staircase to a row of seats in the middle of the theater. I leaned back, propping my feet on the back of a chair. When the lights dimmed I began the detailed work of scrutinizing the nameless faces studding club scenes and restaurant tables behind the famous actors, the kind of roles Penny the fledgling actress might one day score for her debut: a beautiful woman laughing in candlelight over a romantic table for two; a pair of girlfriends at a mall, rifling carelessly through the clothing racks. The studied way one extra considered herself in front of a mirror, pulling at her dress with two fingers, arranging the fabric across her body. I watched the same movies again and again, determined not to miss a single anonymous face. Weren’t people like this, too? All of us moving through the peripheries of each other’s lives until the winds changed: an orphaned baby discovered on a hospital table, a father answering the phone in the middle of an afternoon, a waitress pouring coffee for a familiar face across the counter. One unsettled man living apart in a desert township, returning from a routine errand to find two young women manifested in his mother’s home.

  Toward the end of the film, a sliver of lemon-colored light sliced across the dark. The usher’s gangly shadow appeared at the side entrance, lurching along the front row to take a seat so close to the screen he must have sprained his neck looking up. If I could have spoken to him, if I didn’t feel that something had come in the night and carried away all my words and the ability to use them, I would have asked, What is it about endings? They compelled him, every day I had come, to steal into the theater during the last twenty minutes of a film. We both sat quietly, watching the pictures spin their artful fallacies, their myths of resolution. I would have spoken to him if not for the distance I would have had to travel across his apathy and my own, trespassing into the secret, silent world he had taken such obvious care to build. I could only imagine the manner of questions he might turn back on me, the lengths I would go to to avoid them. Who are you? Why do you come here? What is it you’re looking for? And I would only have been able to answer the last and most elusive, the answer only recently made clear. All the lives she should have had, all the lives she could have, still.

  When the movie was over, we remained seated until the credits finished rolling and the overhead lights eased on. Leaving was the worst part, the drive back to the Prickly Pine never long enough to lift the weariness of repetition, weeks spent asking the same questions of different faces and learning nothing new. Have you seen this girl?

  I gathered my popcorn and the sweater I’d peeled off mid-film, the days just turned cool enough to call for one. When I stood up, I heard the plastic crinkling from a bag of candy. I froze. The theater had been empty when I took my seat a couple hours before. Had I been so easily distracted by a familiar storyline that I hadn’t noticed a person entering the theater behind me, settling in one of the nearby rows? I turned around and felt the blood leave my face. He walked down into the aisle between us, one hand in his pocket, the other clenched into a fist. He wore the same baseball cap I had seen him in at the Lonestar, but under the theater’s full lights there wasn’t any chance of mistaken identity. High cheekbones and dark hair, a peculiarly set mouth. He hadn’t bothered to shave; his stubble filled in to a low beard. If he made a move in my direction, I would run. I felt a new, cold certainty staring at him across the aisle. He would never touch me. I would do anything to keep myself from being touched.

  “I heard you’re looking for me,” he said.

  67

  Inside the Golden Bear, locals milled through a polished, wood-paneled foyer that fed into a cozy dining room bar, the walls studded with buck heads and mounted shotguns, a giant axe in a glass-paneled shadow box. I took a seat in a back booth under a large American flag and watched the fat, thin, dark, pale, strange, sad people arrive; the groups of men and women clutching at one another’s hands and faces, raising their glasses as if revelry might insulate them from future harm. I scanned them for something or someone recognizable, as if Penny might spontaneously appear among them, prepared to console me through all manner of peril I had already experienced, the gamble I was taking now. I adjusted the long, thin strap of her purse between my breasts, kicking myself for not bringing Fischer’s gun to the movie theater. But I couldn’t pull a gun on Lucas Driscoll in a theater or a bar, no matter how much I might want to. If he was the kind of man Fischer said he was, I doubted it would make any difference.

  Lucas had gone to the bar to place our order. I watched him move back through the crowd in my direction, slick as an eel. He returned with glasses aplenty; a beer for him, a Coke for me, waters for us both. A murderer with beautiful manners. He slid into a seat across the table. Even with his resuscitated beard and the baseball cap pulled low, the girls at the bar had tilted their bodies toward him at his approach. He didn’t have any trouble. The only thing I felt in his presence was anxiety, an impulse to withdraw the minute he sat down, to chase my mind where it scrabbled down a million fathomless holes—what he might have done to Penny, to the other woman whose name I didn’t know. Focus. I took a sip of soda, not daring anything stronger. I wanted my mind clear.

  “Enough people for you?” He took a sip of his beer and set it down. He tugged on the brim of his baseball cap, the same reflexive gesture I recalled from the Lonestar. It hid his eyes, highlighting his prominent cheekbones and the strange, tense way he held his mouth.

  “Not really, no.”

  Those lips curling into a sardonic smile. “Who’s afraid of the big bad wolf?”

  I studied the ochre of his skin, the hand gripping his glass. All parts of him a perverse marvel, conjured from an image into life.

  “Should I prepare to be eaten?”

  He looked away, in dismissal or boredom, a quality of restlessness I couldn’t parse. “You’re safe enough.”

  “How do I know?”

  “You never know. Only people trust each other sometimes.”

  “Where did that get my friend?”

  He shrugged. “She was fine when she left me.”

  “And then what? Where did she go?”

  He leaned in suddenly, his face closer to mine across the table. “Didn’t you say you had something to show me?”

  I hesitated. Around us there was an uptick of noise, a swell of bodies pressing through the door. I opened the purse under the table and felt for the flyer. I slid it across the table, watching him open it up, studying her face as if he hadn’t been the last person to see it alive. He stared at it a minute before crumpling the flyer into a tight paper ball. He dropped it in his beer. I watched it float.

  “Do you know how I found you?” he asked.

  I peeled my eyes away from the floating ball, back to him. “I saw you at the Lonestar.”

  “And how did I find you there?”

  “I don’t know.”

  He leaned back, smiling briefly, the flash of a gold canine tooth, the creases near his eyes folding up. “You’ve been talking,” he said. “Yapping. You were yapping to that boy at the bar. I found you at the Leaspoke easy, just by asking around. Yap, yap, yap. Lucky for you, I can’t go back there, the cops are still crawling all over.”

  “I wish that were true. I didn’t see any.”

  “You wouldn’t, would you? You’d need to open your eyes. Well, imagine my surprise when I decided to lay low for a few days and stopped for gas on my way out of town. Guess what happened?” He lay his hand over mine on the table before I could withdraw. I felt the rough calluses of his palm brushing against my knuckles, a gentle pressure. “Guy says, Hey man, haven’t I seen you before? Some girl comes in showing flyers. Passing around my fucking record.” He squeezed my hand. “Imagine that.”

  I reached my free hand toward my Coke and took a long sip, my mouth gone dry. “It’s possible I shouldn’t have done that,” I said.

  “No? I don’t know. Bec
ause here we are.” His smile tightened another inch. I glanced at the tables around us, the revelers deep in their own private worlds.

  “You’re going to stop showing my photo around,” he said.

  “I can,” I said.

  “You will.”

  “I just want to know where you met my friend.”

  “She was wandering around the poker tables, but she wasn’t making any bets. That’ll tell you. We struck up a conversation. I bought her a drink.”

  “At the Leaspoke?”

  “Where else?”

  “You’d never seen her before?”

  “Never.”

  “But your story—”

  He cut me off with another squeeze of his hand. The irony wasn’t lost on me, my futile resolution to remain untouched. “Not a story,” he said. “I didn’t touch her. I bought her a couple drinks and we went up to my room. She was so quiet, I got comfortable. Rookie mistake. When I got out of the bathroom, she was already gone. So was my wallet. If someone got to her after that, I don’t know anything about it.”

  “She didn’t say anything about where she might be going?”

  “She didn’t have much to say, period. I wouldn’t be surprised if she didn’t know. There was something . . .” He licked his lips, trying for a word just out of grasp.

  “How did she look? How did she seem?”

  “How would I know? I’d never seen her before.”

  “How much did she get from you?”

  “Sixty bucks? Eighty?” He shrugged, slipped his hand free from my own. “Swiped a candy bar, too. If she bothered to look in my bag she could have cleaned me out.”

  Why would Penny follow this man anywhere? He was handsome enough—even now, he exuded a moody, edgy intrigue—but the quickening of my pulse signaled only menace, my antennae fine-tuned to threat. Yet if my intuition had only recently sharpened, Penny’s had long been a spike. The wheels in my mind, churning now.

  “So you saw me at the Lonestar,” I said. “You knew where I was staying. How did you find me here? I would have noticed someone following me.”

  “Would you? Let’s just say if you look for something hard enough, you can find it.”

  “But that’s not true. I’ve been looking for Penny for weeks. If you’re so good at tracking people—if you really had nothing to do with her going missing—you could find her. You could clear your name.”

  He stared at me a moment, nodded. “You’re crazy. You know that?”

  “If I’m crazy—” I didn’t finish the thought. What are you? I was running his rap sheet, his list of crimes. I wanted to ask about the unnamed woman; I knew I shouldn’t. He flashed another unfocused smile, aimed at the table, the glasses, the dark shape he saw moving around my mind.

  “I’ve always had what my mother would call delicate skin,” he said. “Do you know what that means?”

  “No.”

  “I don’t like people saying terrible things.”

  “I didn’t say anything.”

  “But you’re thinking it,” he said. “And that’s just as bad.”

  I looked down at the stained table, the pool of condensation underneath my glass. “It’s not just me showing your photo. The police must be doing the same thing.”

  “You’d be surprised.”

  “Penny doesn’t have a car,” I said. “How did she get to the Leaspoke? You say you’ve never been to Pomoc.”

  “What’s in Pomoc? It seems like everyone’s trying to go the other way.” He reached for my glass and removed the straw, laying it on the table. He tilted his head back to drain his glass, his Adam’s apple leaping in his throat. He slammed the glass back down on the table and grinned. “Hold that thought.”

  He stood up, heading for the bathrooms through the hall. I felt a degree of hopefulness flicker. If you look for something hard enough, you can find it. There was something like grudging respect in the way he spoke about Penny taking off with his money. He thought about things the way Penny did, he had angles. If he hadn’t hurt Penny, if I could convince him to try to find her, I was sure he could. But how? I felt uncomfortable enough in his proximity, and we were in a room full of people. A few minutes ticked by, and with them, a degree of my conviction. After a little while I stood up from the table, following the path he had taken past the bar, down the hall to the men’s bathroom. There was no one waiting in line. I hesitated, hoping someone else would show, but when no one did, I pushed the door open a crack, calling his name. There were two narrow stalls, a urinal, and a single small sink, the tap dribbling. No one looked to be inside. I went in then and bent over the porcelain sink, unsure whether I was going to be sick. Of course any man who managed to evade the police for months was not dumb enough to get caught by me. And on some level, I was grateful. The nausea passed and I straightened slowly, tightening the faucet, stopping the slight dribble of water. I studied the girl in the mirror, her face finally healed. A small scar, mostly hidden by my brow, that would remain always.

  71

  D E A D

  O R

  A L I V E

  68

  Indistinct Martha was missing from her post behind the Prickly Pine’s front desk. I came upon her reclining on the living room couch, watching the evening news. She held a cross-stitched pillow against her chest the way a child would embrace a doll. At the sound of my boots she sat up, glancing over her shoulder as if surprised I should appear, invading her domestic picture. But the Pine was only a hostel, and she worked the front counter in shifts. Martha lived elsewhere, she had an entire other life sacred from this.

  “Oh,” she said, “come sit.” She patted the couch beside her. Only Martha knew how many hours I spent locked inside my very blue room, its lurid intensity evoking a submerged chamber, the interior of a tank or a pool, a vibrant ship’s hold, a secret hollow for sequester. Who would paint such a room? I wasn’t even sure the Pine had any other residents. The first night, I thought I heard someone moving through the walls, and the next day I found a slippery shower stall in the communal bathroom down the hall, a damp hand towel hung askew by the sink, an iridescent bubble clinging to the bar of gardenia soap in its porcelain dish. But I had heard no one since. It was only Martha and me, tiptoeing around each other for nearly a week. The first night I’d shown Martha Penny’s flyer, she had declined to speak. But we had been strangers then. Were we still strangers now? I had forgotten how other humans interacted, I had grown rusty with any socialization beyond the most transactional. Have you seen this girl?

  “What are you thinking?” she asked.

  I took a seat on the edge of the couch. Martha turned down the volume. On the screen, a petite blond anchorwoman in a navy skirt stood up behind the news desk and walked across the studio to deliver the weather report. Strong, shapely legs; a conciliatory smile. She stopped in front of a green screen layered with a topographical map of the state, replete with dips and valleys, and gestured toward towns and not-quite-towns littered over the display like so many impractical jewels. These temperatures indicated how our skin might feel in the wild. Pomoc was never listed on these maps, nor any place like it. When Lamb and I watched the news, we considered the forecast for the two cities nearest to Pomoc on either side and approximated the difference. How to locate legitimacy on a map, value.

  A short wand coalesced in the anchor’s hand. She circled a churning white mass over Reno, drawing arrows pointing east. A cold jet stream reversing direction. The temperatures dipped for tomorrow’s forecast, a blue cartoon thermostat shivering on the screen under several falling snowflakes.

  “That’s impossible. Snow?”

  “It won’t stick,” Martha said, but she didn’t sound surprised, either. Summer was long gone and I was the only one who couldn’t quite grasp its passing. I needed a long and lingering autumn, a tenure with which to ease into another state of being.

 
“It’s only a flurry,” she said, reaching for the remote to lower the volume. “It’ll blow in and blow out, like you. Which reminds me, tomorrow’s payday if you’re staying.”

  “I don’t think I am.”

  “Why am I not surprised?”

  “You’ve been very kind,” I said.

  “Did you at least get to the cultural center?”

  “I’ve been taking classes.”

  “No! Glassblowing!” Martha nearly jumped out of her seat. I had never seen a woman so excited. I had robbed her of this capacity in my mind, I had shortchanged her pleasure. I was surprised enough to smile. On the television screen, they had cut to a dark-haired newscaster in a yellow rain slicker standing under Reno’s distinctive lighted arch, the man’s expression solemn in the downpour, tiny drops of water clinging to his glasses.

  “Ceramics,” I told her. Then, hesitating, “I don’t know why. I’ve been wondering what other people feel when they make things. Why do they do it?”

  Martha looked deflated.

  “It’s supposed to be fun, honey,” she said. “Aren’t you having any fun?”

  I stood up then, making my apologies. Martha grabbed the remote and turned the volume back up, the man’s voice exactly as monotonous as I’d imagined, the droning nature of desert news. Employees reported the abandoned vehicle after guests of the casino complained it hadn’t been moved for several days. Police believe it belongs to this man—I made my way down the hall to the room with the groove-paneled door and pushed it in, realizing only a moment too late that the door was already a millimeter ajar, that I hadn’t needed my key. Before I could move, Lucas grabbed me roughly by the arm, yanking me inside. He clamped a hand over my mouth, pulling me tight with an arm over my chest, his mouth at my ear. Martha hollered from the front room, her voice barely discernible over the blare of the TV.