The Missing Person

by Alix Ohlin

  “I’m leaving,” I said, “in the car. And unless you want to get arrested, you’ll come too. Time’s up,” I said, “ now.”

  Everybody scurried into the cul-de-sac. Irina said to the neighbor, “No, the police cannot help us,” and her voice was as vexed and fretful as any wife’s; then she spun around, hurried down the sidewalk, and ducked into the shadows beside me.

  Somehow I drove—suspended in a kind of adrenaline calm—and fifteen minutes later pulled into an empty strip-mall parking lot, with Wylie, Irina, and the baby in the backseat. The car reeked of chlorine and wet clothes. Psyche had stopped crying, and everything was silent.

  My heartbeat was loud in my ears, but I let out a long breath—it felt like the first I’d taken in a long time—and then I started to laugh. “That was crazy,” I said. I glanced at Wylie, expecting to see him laughing too, but he was fidgeting and looking back and forth from Irina to me, his eyebrows twisted in thought.

  “Okay,” he finally said, “let’s go back.”

  “What? Wylie, come on.”

  “I’m serious. Let’s keep going. We can do a country-club pool, maybe. We’ll break into the poolhouse and use their drainage system. It might take me a couple of minutes to figure it out, but it’ll drain faster than with the submersible pump, so that’s an advantage.” He was almost panting. “Listen, I understand it’s a suboptimal situation, but flexibility’s the key to our success.”

  “Wylie,” I said, “no way.”

  Irina, in the back, kept silent.

  “There is absolutely no reason we can’t do this,” Wylie said. Instead of slouching, he was straight and serious now, making eye contact with each of us. “We can be in and out in five minutes, tops. Once I get it draining, we can leave. Really, we can do it.”

  “No, we can’t,” I said. His expression told me that if I didn’t put it in his terms, he’d never speak to me again. “Wylie, the plan’s inherently flawed. We don’t know what their system’s like or even where it is. And instead of three other men you’ve got me, Irina, and a six-month-old baby. For a much larger pool. It’d be so much better to regroup and revise our tactics rather than risk everything for this.”

  “She is actually seven months,” Irina corrected.

  “Sorry,” I said.

  “It’s okay, I am not offended.”

  Wylie was looking down at the seat and smoothing the duct tape over a tear in the upholstery.

  “There will be plenty of other opportunities,” I said. “But for tonight I say we retrench and, well, analyze the suboptimal nature of events. Then we can, you know, figure out how to do it better next time.”

  We sat in the dark, the Caprice’s engine idling like a smoker’s cough, while Wylie thought it over. When he met my eyes again I was almost sure—not a hundred percent, but nonetheless—I saw a flash of gratitude.

  “It could be that continuing tonight isn’t the most efficient use of our resources,” he said.

  I smiled. “I think you’re right.”

  Psyche cried relentlessly as we drove back to the apartment, which made conversation impossible. Wylie was slumped sideways against the door, and I could see him turning over the night’s events in his mind, evaluating and analyzing and formulating alternatives for the future. You could say this much about him: he was always thinking. Irina, her round face ducked close to the sling, shushed and sang to the baby, but to no avail. Above us, clouds skittered across the face of the moon.

  For some reason, I thought of Harold Wallace drinking alone in his well-manicured, beige-and-white house, and then about my mother, wondering where she was and what she was doing.

  It was almost three o’clock when we got to Wylie’s place. Irina disappeared into the back room with Psyche, who was still crying. Angus, Stan, and Berto were lying on the floor drinking beer by candlelight, looking sleepy and stoned. Angus smiled and gestured for me to come over, but I shook my head. Something about him was bothering me, starting with the way he’d laughed when things went wrong, as if none of this really mattered to him; it didn’t mean that much to me, either, but it did to the others, and he was, after all, one of them. He stared at me hard for a second, then shrugged and turned his attention to Wylie, who was pacing in a tight circle.

  “That,” my brother said, “was a disaster.”

  Stan nodded his head. “It was fairly hideous.”

  “You got that right, man,” Berto said. “Maybe we should go back to the stuff everybody else is doing? Like the demonstrations and all that shit.”

  “Fuck demonstrations,” Angus said, keeping his eyes on Wylie.

  “No need for harsh language, man,” Berto said.

  “Hey, if you want to start a letter-writing campaign, go right ahead,” Angus said, smiling at him.

  “Unforgivably disastrous,” Wylie said, still pacing, and now clenching his hands into fists. “Completely fragmented. We’ve got to do a major overhaul of our planning process. This can’t happen again. It’s a waste of time and resources.”

  “Listen, it was only an experiment,” Angus said. “We tried, and it didn’t work out. Next time we’ll do better.”

  Stan and Berto looked back and forth, expectantly, between Angus and Wylie. I had a feeling they’d been witness to these debates before.

  “You said we could be in and out in five minutes!” my brother snapped. “You said we could drain half the neighborhood in one night! But we only got through one, Angus. You’re the water-systems expert, you were supposed to deal with the logistics, and we only did one pool!”

  “So it’s my fault?” Angus still didn’t look upset. He was just lying there, every once in a while drinking from his beer bottle. In the glow of the candles his hair looked darker than usual, its red turning to rust.

  “I depended on your expertise,” Wylie said, “and it was a mistake.” He slowly lowered himself to the dusty floor and crossed his legs. “I won’t make that mistake again.”

  “Hey, buddy,” Angus said. “It wasn’t that bad.”

  “Don’t call me that,” Wylie said. “I’m not your buddy.”

  “You sure as hell are, buddy.”

  Angus was still smiling, which annoyed me, but my brother was seething. Watching the both of them, knowing they’d be up all night arguing, I sighed. “I’m going back to Mom’s,” I said then. “I feel bad. I haven’t seen her in ages. I don’t even know how she’s doing.”

  “She’s fine,” Wylie said.

  “Oh, how would you know?”

  “Do you think I don’t go by to check on her?” His dark eyes were flashing. He was just as mad at me as he was at Angus, as he was at the rest of the world.

  “I don’t know what to think about you, Wylie,” I said. “And you don’t exactly help me figure it out.”

  He tapped his fingers on the floor and nodded in a tight staccato. “That must be tough for you,” he said.

  I left them all behind, their floor squatting and arguments and plans, the baby still mewling in the bedroom. My mother didn’t wake up when I came in, and in her little guest room I crawled between soft clean sheets. I’d thought that it would feel like coming home. Nowhere else in the world promised that sensation—not Brooklyn, not cheap motel rooms or my brother’s apartment, certainly not Paris or the Upper West Side—but my last thoughts before sleep were uneasy. I wished I knew where else on earth I should have gone.

  Eleven

  David Michaelson served me coffee. When I stumbled into the kitchen and saw him in a red-striped bathrobe, smiling at me, I realized I’d almost forgotten he existed.

  My mother was sitting at the table with her coffee, her short hair unmussed by sleep. “Look what the cat dragged in,” she said in an even tone.

  “I’ve been with Wylie,” I said, as if this excused everything, and took the cup from David’s large hand. After the relentless grunge of recent days my mother’s place seemed unbearably clean and orderly; I practically had to squint to look at it. Even the utensils sparkle
d alarmingly.

  “How is old Wylie?” David set his own cup down on the table, sat down opposite me, and met my gaze without any sign of awkwardness. “I felt real bad about the way things ended last time. There’s no reason we can’t have a civil discussion about environmental issues. No reason at all.”

  “David,” my mother said.

  He smiled at her, pleasantly, then turned back to me, gesticulating in a lawyerly manner, his elbows on the table. “But if people just storm out every time there’s a disagreement, well, civility doesn’t stand a chance, now does it?” His reasonableness was making me queasy, or maybe it was the triangle of curly chest hair his bathrobe exposed when he leaned forward. I focused instead on my coffee, which was simultaneously bitter and enjoyable. It felt good to wake up and drink coffee in a normal cup, in a normal kitchen, with no hangover at all.

  “David,” my mother said again.

  “Well, does it stand a chance?”

  “You’ll be late.”

  Lifting his meaty wrist, David checked his watch and nodded.

  “You’re right,” he said, “as always,” and then he winked at me. I squinted back. He left the table, lumbered out of the kitchen, and disappeared. My mother finished her final sip of coffee and stood up. “I’d better get ready too. By the way, someone called for you this morning before you were up. I didn’t even know you were here, of course.”

  “Who?”

  “Angus. Wylie’s friend. If that’s what he is.”

  “Angus called here?” Saying his name in front of her felt weird.

  “At seven. He said he’d be out of town for a few days but that you shouldn’t worry. He said he’d be working.” Her emphasis on “working” made clear how little she believed this statement.

  “He’s a plumber,” I said.

  “I see.”

  “Have you ever even met him?”

  “No,” she said. She cleared the dishes and I followed her into the kitchen. “But Wylie used to talk about him all the time. Back when he actually talked. So you like him, do you?”

  “Not exactly. It’s more like—I can’t seem to leave him alone.” She turned to face me, and the look in her eyes was unexpectedly mild.

  “Well, that’s how it is sometimes,” she said.

  David Michaelson reappeared in a gray double-breasted suit and cowboy boots, presenting himself to us with open arms. “I’m in court today,” he told me. “Gotta look shiny and new.”

  “Good,” I said faintly.

  He pecked my mother on the cheek—like a dutiful husband—winked at me again, then left. My mother changed into her sensible travel-agent clothes and left, too. I felt tremendously happy to be alone.

  After roaming through the house for a while I came to her bedroom. She hadn’t neglected to make the bed, and even the pillows beneath the covers were arranged to geometric perfection. I thought about passing out on the floor of Wylie’s unfurnished apartment, with my brother sprawled beside me. It seemed highly unlikely that we were her actual children. But on the bureau, next to her small jewelry box, were pictures of Wylie and me in the grip of goofy, soft-cheeked adolescence, complete with rolled eyes and acne. And there, visiting family in Chicago, were all four of us, skyscrapers looming behind us, the wind lifting our hair.

  Finding the red-striped bathrobe hanging inside her closet, I wondered how often David stayed over, and what he told his wife when he did. In my last snooping spree I hadn’t noticed any conspicuous male clothing, and none was apparent now. There wasn’t even an extra toothbrush in the bathroom; but maybe he toted one with him, or maybe my mother shared hers. Some things were impossible for a person to contemplate and still want to live.

  I went out in the Caprice, determined to see the house I still thought of as home, and drove through endless residential neighborhoods toward the bare mountains. The dead air of mid-July rendered the city flat and even. I listened to country music and tapped my fingers on the vinyl steering wheel.

  Though two years had gone by since I’d seen the house, and though I’d lived through those years and recorded their passing, I was nonetheless shocked to find that the place did not look the same. It had been repainted a cotton-candy pink, first of all, and the people who lived there now had fixed to its exterior several gigantic plastic butterflies who were mounting an attack in a zigzag pattern, seemingly aimed at my old bedroom window. On the front door hung a wreath made of braided wheat and blue-checked Indian corn. I felt sure that somewhere in the vicinity, lurking, there were garden gnomes. The driveway, freshly asphalted, spread dark crumbles across the bordering expanse of our old lawn.

  The last time I’d been here was a week after the funeral. A couple of days later my mother explained, briskly and undebatably, that she saw no sense in waiting and would be packing everything up and moving. I’d said fine, there was nothing I wanted anyway, and she smiled tightly and said she doubted this was true. Seeing the house now made me realize how much work it must have been for her and Wylie, and how drastic her resolve to break with the past. I wondered if this was when Wylie had decided to empty his apartment of its possessions, when he saw all of ours in moving boxes.

  Instead of walking to the front door with the wreath I went next door to the Michaelsons’. At least their house still looked the same; shrubs formed a geometric ring in front of their door, and a basketball hoop hung above the driveway. Their yard, formerly a lawn, was now hard-packed dirt, which I guessed Wylie would’ve approved of. I rang the doorbell.

  It was Donny, I was almost positive, who opened the door, wearing long surf shorts dotted with miniature surfers, each catching his own personal wave. Barefoot and shirtless, he was holding a tall glass of milk that had given him a faint white mustache. “Hey,” he said. “Come to check out the old neighborhood, huh?”

  “I guess so.”

  “I always wondered how come you guys never come by.”

  “You did?”

  “Well, not, like, literally always or anything.”

  I looked at him. “You’re Donny, right?”

  “Yeah, you can remember ’cause I’m taller.”

  “Right,” I said, not bothering to point out that Darren wasn’t there for comparison’s sake. “Can I come in?”

  He glanced quickly behind him, then stepped back from the door. “Um, okay. Can you wait in here for a sec?” he said, and disappeared into a long, dark hallway, where I heard him murmuring to someone whose voice was too soft to make out.

  The living room looked like the home of much younger children, with a baseball mitt on the couch and a soccer ball in the corner. An open box of Pop-Tarts was sitting next to some comic books on the coffee table.

  Donny strode back in.

  “Yup, the old ’hood. Let’s go into the backyard, okay?” he said, leading me out through the sliding patio doors to the back. “The people who live next door to us now are super nice. They’re real religious. They’ve got a sweet garden back there, too.”

  I looked over the fence at the yard where Wylie and I used to play. On summer nights we sometimes slept back there in a tent. Now it was divided into neat rows of squash and tomatoes. The Michaelsons’ yard, by contrast, had been let slide. The lawn had faded into dirt splotched with a few patches of yellow grass, and the only sign of life was a battered picnic table under the shade of a pine tree, where Donny and I sat down.

  “Remember when we were little, and you and Wylie always played those weird games in your backyard? You pretended you were savages or something.”

  I didn’t remember, but nodded anyway.

  “Darren and I watched you sometimes. We thought you were total freaks,” he said, shaking his head in a fit of nostalgia. “No offense or anything. Hey, can I get you a glass of milk? Or a soda?”

  “I’d take some water.”

  “You got it,” he said. He padded inside, and I went back to the fence, hoping to look into our old house through the rear windows, but the glass threw back sheets of glare. I remem
bered one cookout we had, when Wylie got overexcited and poured a bottle of barbecue sauce right on top of his head; my father reached over with a paper napkin to wipe off his face, and none of us could stop laughing. The paper napkins kept sticking to Wylie and the more my father wiped the worse it got, until they both had to give up and take showers.

  From the Michaelsons’ house came the sound of shattering glass, followed by “Shit!” Donny said something else, but I couldn’t hear what. I went inside and saw him standing with a broom at the far side of the kitchen, sweeping up some shards.

  “I’m a total klutz,” he said apologetically. “I’ll be just a sec with your water.”

  I could hear a woman moaning down the hall, in a bedroom that, in our house, had belonged to Wylie. The door was open, and while Donny took care of the dustbin I walked inside.

  Although I couldn’t summon any specific memory of her from childhood, I knew it was Daphne Michaelson. She was sitting in an armchair reading Vogue, moaning softly to herself as she turned the pages. Her finger- and toenails were painted a brilliant shade of red, her brown hair fell in stylish waves to her shoulders, and her pale skin was dusted to an elegant beige. She was wearing a pink dress and brown slingback pumps, and she looked like a million dollars.

  “Oh, excuse me,” I said. She crossed her legs and smiled at me, stopping her moaning, and wagged her right foot up and down in its pump. “I used to live next door?”

  “I have a permanent wave,” she said, in a not unfriendly tone, but then turned back to the magazine.

  Except for the armchair, the room was mostly bare of furniture. Lining one wall, floor to ceiling, were wooden bookshelves that looked homemade, filled completely with hundreds upon hundreds of Vogue magazines, their thick white spines neatly tapped into place.