Wish You Were Here

by Stewart O'Nan

  “That’s okay. How was Mom?”

  “Good. I was surprised.”

  “Good,” he echoed, but discovered he was hurt. He’d always kept her secrets. He was the one who needed to be close, they both knew. Spring she’d stopped calling, and twice he’d given in and dialed her number.

  “The real thing is, I told her about my rehab.”

  “No.” Meaning the accident too.

  “Not everything,” she assured him.

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know, just to explain things. If she asks you, you don’t know anything.”

  “That’s fine with me,” he said, but he wasn’t sure.

  “You can congratulate me. Or not.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I’m not. Not really. Things weren’t so great. You know.”

  “I know,” he said.

  He’d heard most of it over the phone, believing her even when her accusations seemed crazy. He didn’t think Jeff would intentionally hurt the kids by depriving them of his time, or that his pursuit of another woman was proof that he’d become mentally unstable. A husband himself, he naturally had a different view of what happened, and the resulting guilt kept him from advising her completely honestly. That she wouldn’t have listened to him anyway—that she and Jeff didn’t love each other anymore— didn’t matter. He had somehow let her down. While he knew it was stupid, he wanted to apologize for the fact that he was still married.

  “So what are you going to do?” he asked.

  “Hell if I know. Try and keep the house until the kids are through school, then get the hell out of there.”

  “I think that’s smart.”

  “I don’t see any other choice. The problem is I can’t afford it.”

  “I was going to say …” He and Lise were looking at the same thing, eventually. So far he’d been able to say no to her parents, but that wouldn’t last. “Mom might be able to help you out.”

  “I don’t want to ask her. I just don’t.”

  It had been a point of pride, since his parents hadn’t approved of her leaving college, or leaving Pittsburgh. They hadn’t liked Jeff at first either, and Meg was convinced that while their mother loved her, she didn’t like her very much.

  “I hate to ask,” she said, “but could you and Lise maybe help? Just enough to tide me over.”

  “I wish I could.” He didn’t want to go into the details. He didn’t have to; she knew he was back to making hourly wages. They hadn’t been able to save anything since he left Merck, and he offered her this as comfort.

  “Shit,” she said, and sent the butt looping into the Lerners’ yard, where it glowed like a dull eye. “I hate asking her for money.”

  “When did you ever ask Mom for money?”

  “How do you think we could afford to buy the house in the first place? I asked Dad. Jeff wasn’t making that much at Philco.”

  Of all the intimate things she’d said to him, Ken filed only this admission away, added it to the image of his sister and his view of himself. Much of his life, he’d considered himself intelligent, and yet every so often a glaring oversight like this proved that he assumed more than he knew, not only about the world—whose workings would remain closed, forever a mystery—but even those closest to him. He’d wanted her to be noble and daring to balance his meekness. He thought he shouldn’t be disappointed to find she was just like him.

  He apologized and she thanked him. If nothing else, their parents had taught them to be polite. She kissed his cheek and then led him inside. When he entered the living room, Lise pinned him with a look that said she was jealous. His mother had put on the classical station from Jamestown, so low that he didn’t hear it until he sat down and chose an old New Yorker. The pages were tacky with humidity. The boys still had another ten minutes. They were battling with their Pokémon cards. Apparently they’d already been warned about making noise, because they whispered their characters’ names: “Vileplume! Charmander!” He had no idea what special powers each of these had, the same way his father only vaguely knew the names of the superheroes Ken followed as a child. Green Arrow and Green Lantern, the Silver Surfer. Even now they seemed more adult than Pikachu and Squirtle.

  “How’s Harry?” he asked.

  “He’s all right,” Lise said, as if she was deep into the book and didn’t want to talk.

  He found an article about the building of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, but with the music—big strings and a clamoring piano—he couldn’t concentrate. Meg had taken the chair by the fireplace, her hair shielding her face. He was glad they’d talked, but unsatisfied, too. For some reason he’d expected more, and he wondered if she realized how often he’d thought of her this last year, alone out there and falling apart. He’d done nothing, called every week, twenty minutes, half an hour at best. He’d wanted to come out for Easter but Lise had made plans with her parents. He remembered thinking of Meg while the children darted across the yard with their baskets. They reminded him of when they were little, outside St. James, Meg dragging him around by the wrist, making sure he got his fill. He wanted to do something like that for her.

  The clock on the mantel let him set the magazine aside.

  “Okay, spudlers,” he said, “time to head that way.”

  Since they weren’t watching TV, there were no protests. They rubber-banded their cards and went up.

  “Brush teeth,” Lise reminded.

  Upstairs, the girls were giggling over something. The boys couldn’t resist picking on them, but he hurried them past like a prison guard. The air was thick, and he turned the fan on.

  Their conversation whirled in his head, filled with unstated implications. It sounded like Meg was giving up, admitting defeat. This latest turn made sense, another of her unfinished plans. He hoped their mother had been gentle with her, and thought that he would probably never know, not honestly.

  The boys left blue slugs of toothpaste on the basin. He expected Sam to bug him for a story but he and Justin were busy with their cards. “Lights out in one hour,” he commanded from the top of the stairs, “boys and girls.” They obeyed by ignoring him, by not whining. Before he opened the door at the bottom, he tucked the folded blanket under one arm.

  “The boys are down,” he announced to the living room, and Lise thanked him. He could hear Rufus drinking in the kitchen, his chain clanking against the metal bowl. He screened the blanket from his mother with his body as he crossed the fireplace, slid it around front as he turned into the kitchen. He had no explanation for Arlene, who looked up, holding the fridge open, just breezed by her and outside like he was going to get a beer.

  In the dark, he was pleased with his little espionage until he slipped on the stone by the garage door. He flailed an arm out for balance and whacked the frame. He saved himself but dropped the blanket in the wet grass.

  “Motherfucker!” he said, fingers stinging. One knuckle was bleeding, sweet to the taste.

  He was just picking up the blanket when a car pulled in the drive, its lights nailing him to the garage. They dimmed, the night turning green, deep blue, and he saw it was the police. For a moment he wondered if they’d jump out with their guns drawn, thinking he was a burglar. He waved and tossed the blanket in the garage, shut the door and walked to the cruiser.

  He was surprised to find only one officer in the car, a heavyset guy in his mid-twenties with thick glasses and an undershirt peeking out from his uniform. As a teenager Ken had acquired his stoner friends’ disdain for the police, but that had mellowed with age, and now more often they seemed to him helpless and not very bright, especially the young ones, like this guy. He was from the sheriff’s department, not the state cops he’d talked to this afternoon. He asked Ken if he’d noticed anyone around the Lerners’ before the alarm went off, then walked around the outside, shining his light in the windows.

  His mother stepped out on the porch, holding the door.

  “Ask him if he knows anything about the gas station,” she
ordered him, then went back in.

  “Nothing,” the deputy reported after one circuit. “It’s routine, we have to check them when they pop like that. I don’t remember this one being a problem.”

  He had a miniature clipboard mounted on his dash and pulled it out to write something Ken needed to sign in a space marked COMPLAINANT.

  “Say,” Ken said, handing it back with the pen, “did they find out anything more about that gas station up in Mayville?”

  “She’s still missing as far as I know.”

  “The clerk?”

  “I’ve got a picture of her somewhere.” He ducked in the car and came out with a MISSING flyer, the center a photocopy of a snapshot. The girl was light-haired and smiling, subtly bucktoothed; the picture looked like it came from a yearbook. TRACY ANN CALER, it said underneath, with her date of birth and other particulars. Ken did the math automatically. She was nineteen.

  “Looks like whoever robbed the place took her with them.”

  “Oh my God,” Ken said. “I was one of the people they interviewed. I must have walked in right after it happened.”

  “It’s a big deal. They’re bringing in the FBI.”

  “It didn’t look like there was any violence.”

  “That’s one of the things they’re looking at.”

  “Oh my God,” Ken said again.

  “Yeah,” the policeman said. “You think a place like this is safe, a little town like Mayville. It’s not.”

  He told Ken to give them a call if the alarm went off again, then backed out of the drive, his lights playing over the Lerners’, dazzling the reflectors on their mailbox.

  Ken waited, listening as the car dwindled and the wind in the trees closed over it. He sucked his knuckle but the blood had stopped. The cop had said “them.” It must have been more than one person to do it in daylight on a Sunday morning. Nineteen, he thought, and for an instant saw a flash of teeth and clothesline cutting into thin wrists. He tried not to think of Ella, or Sarah. The trunk of a car, the basement of a farmhouse out in the middle of nowhere. Driving out, he’d been comforted by how much country there was, how insignificant, finally, the cities were. Now he pictured her stashed back in the hills far off the interstate, some hunting cabin, the men talking in another room, brothers maybe. It was hard to see it as anything but a bad movie. He tried to imagine what her parents must be going through.

  He shook his head and walked toward the porch as if he could flee the news, leave it out here. His mother would want to know everything, and then they would never hear the end of it. Already he could see the story taking its place in their family history—“that was the summer that girl was kidnaped”—and his own role, wandering into the convenience mart, unaware. In all of her stories, he was clueless, forever innocent.

  She would find out eventually, he figured.

  The light was orange inside, a product of the lamp shades, relics from the sixties.

  “Well?” his mother asked.

  “False alarm.”

  “We know that. Did he venture a guess why?”

  “He just did a walkaround. He said he didn’t remember the house ever being a problem.”

  “It may be a new system, since they’re selling the place. What about the gas station?”

  “He said the FBI’s supposed to be coming in.”

  “They think it’s serious then.”

  “The clerk’s still missing, that’s about all he could say.”

  “So they think it’s an inside job.”

  “He didn’t say.”

  “Well,” his mother announced to the room at large, as if the one word implied a much deeper meaning. “It appears we have a mystery.”

  “Excuse me,” Lise said, too proper, and got up and headed for the bathroom.

  “Was the clerk a man or a woman?” Meg asked.

  “Good question,” his mother said.

  “He didn’t say.”

  “He was just full of information, wasn’t he?” his mother said. “So, what do we absolutely know for certain?”

  While she propounded her theories, Ken was aware of Lise’s absence. She’d taken her book with her, was undoubtedly reading on the pot, the door locked, hiding the same way she accused him of abandoning her. It seemed, after so many years together, that their tactics were all bald, their moves few. He supposed his own were even more feeble, and that she indulged him as much out of habit as love. Maybe at some point it was the same thing. He tolerated his mother’s familiar condescension while Lise, having grown up differently, could not. His mother’s martyrdom, her pompousness—all of these had fallen to him, but not her implacable certainty, and because he recognized these qualities in her, he was forever apologizing, questioning his own motives and means. He shouldn’t have mentioned the clerk. He hadn’t meant to tell her anything.

  The discussion waned, and then when Arlene returned with Rufus, rekindled. He tried to establish simple kidnaping; otherwise, why bring in the FBI? The toilet flushed behind the door, as if in rebuttal. Only Meg noticed it. While his mother and Arlene were rehashing the latest police-union snafu in Pittsburgh, Lise snuck out of the bathroom and upstairs, Meg’s eyes following her, then finding him.

  “Well,” their mother finally said, “this is all fascinating but I need my beauty sleep. Don’t forget your lists for tomorrow.”

  “Right,” Ken said, because he’d completely forgotten.

  A last check on the weather—rain, Arlene insisted—and she waved her book at them and closed her door. He felt drained, as if a long game had ended. He thought he wanted a beer, but Lise came down the stairs in her bulky Tufts sweatshirt and took his arm, pressed against him to let him know she was braless, smiling at his surprise.

  “We’re going to take a walk,” she announced.

  “Have fun,” Meg said.

  Outside, he detoured around to the garage for the blanket, this time careful of the stones. The moon off the lake peeked in the windows, his father’s junk nothing but black mounds. The light in the little fridge didn’t work and the necks clinked together, the crimped caps biting his fingers.

  “You’re so sneaky,” she said, and carried the beers for him.

  The dock shifted beneath their feet. It was clear and the lake was calm, the lights of Midway’s boathouse drawn on the dark water like flames. He wondered if Tracy Ann Caler had done this this summer, if she had a boyfriend, maybe a guy she went with through high school. He imagined the Lerners’ alarm going off again, the floods on the roof freezing them like convicts tunneling under a wall. He wished they could take the boat out in the middle and just drift, lay the seats flat and gaze up at the stars. They didn’t have to make love.

  It was nothing to worry about, just the usual paranoia his family brought out in him. He missed Boston, even his damn job, the daily imperative of something to do.

  He spread the blanket in front of the bench and they folded down onto it. He didn’t know what to do with his bottle cap, so she shoved them both in her pocket. They kissed, and he could taste the beer, but hot now. Tracy Ann. Trace. She pressed his shoulder and he lay down. He solved the copper button of her jeans while she worked on his shirt. She wasn’t wearing anything there either.

  “It’s been a while,” she said.

  “I know.”

  They didn’t talk. They knew each other, and sometimes, after being apart so long, they found out why they were together in the first place, discovered nerves and muscles they couldn’t remember using and stretched them till they ached. They returned to each other.

  It made him lie still, stricken, sticky, his mind wiped clean. It made her laugh, made her jump up.

  “Come on!” she said, tugging his arm.

  “What?” He was putty, and gave in, balked only when he saw she was leading him to the ladder. “No.”

  “Yes. I’ll go first.”

  She did, groaning, her shoulders white against the dark water. She reached her arms up. “Come on.”

  Th
e wind blew through his body.

  “You’re crazy.”

  “And you’re not.”

  “Yeah,” he said, climbing down, the water shocking on his ankles, freezing his thighs, “but mine’s hereditary.”

  13

  Meg wished she’d left a window open, but she couldn’t lower one now without turning the van on, so she leaned her seat back and lit up, the dope in the bowl crackling, warming her lungs. The smoke roiled like storm clouds, filming the windshield, then dissipated. This was her reward for telling her mother about the divorce, and she wouldn’t second-guess it. She had so few pleasures left. Let her have this one without guilt.

  They would talk again, Meg was sure, but the worst was over. She would have to listen to her mother’s opinions and deflect her questions all week, but she’d done the hard part. She would not freak out about the money yet. She needed to let things settle, let her mother come to her. There was time.

  She flicked the lighter again but the bowl was spent. She tapped it into the ashtray and lay back, looking up at the chestnut, the leaves black and overlapped, joining into a huge shadow with scalloped edges, a monster leaning over the garage. The tree had been here when she was a girl, the garage too, with its musty smell, its eaves full of squirrels. There were probably things in the garage her father hadn’t moved since she was born, and the thought made her realize how odd it was that they were all here, gathered, out of all the possible places in the world, by this little lake in the middle of nowhere. It seemed wildly arbitrary, like planets suddenly lining up, electrons switching molecules.

  Her mother wanted a list of five things she wanted, like it was a game show, a lottery. What she wanted—she could admit it now, alone and stoned—was to be young again, to try it all over: love, family, everything. That wasn’t what her mother was offering, just furniture, mementos, souvenirs of another life. It was all gone, she thought. With the cottage, they could pretend it wasn’t, but it was, as sure as Jeff would never come back to her or Sarah would never love her like a child again. Time destroyed everything.

  “Poof,” she said, the fingers of one hand extending all at once, a slow explosion.