The Missing Person

by Alix Ohlin

  “What do you mean you’re not sure? Didn’t you keep records? Isn’t that what this room’s for?”

  Harold gazed at me, the file fluttering gently in his hands. “The seventies,” he finally said, “weren’t a time of meticulous filing.”

  I sighed. “What happened to her child? I mean, she did have one, right? I found a picture taken when she was pregnant.”

  “Yes,” he said, “I remember. After she had the kid, things really weren’t the same for old Eva.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “She got that thing that women get,” he said.

  “You’ll have to be more specific, Harold.”

  “After they have kids. You know, they get tired and emotional. As the British say.”

  “Do you mean postpartum depression?” I stood up, turning the concept over in my mind. “How bad was it?” Bad as a brain tumor, I was thinking, or a love affair with Diego Rivera?

  “I don’t exactly know,” Harold said, shifting around uncomfortably on the bed. “She was definitely on the wacky side there for a while.”

  “Who was the father?” I said.

  Harold shrugged. “Could’ve been anybody, you know. Anybody at all.”

  “What happened to the child?”

  “I have no idea,” he said.

  “Are you sure? Isn’t there anybody you could ask? And what about her other paintings? Somebody must know what happened to them, don’t you think?”

  Harold physically retreated from this volley of questions, leaning back against the wall with the folder pressed against his chest, as if shielding himself from my thirst for knowledge. “I’d have to give it some thought,” he said.

  “Okay.” I stood there looking at him, waiting.

  “It might take a couple days.”

  “Well, all right.”

  “You’d come back, wouldn’t you?” he said. “I’m starting to enjoy our little chats.”

  “Can I hold on to this picture while you do?”

  “I guess so.”

  “Think away, Harold,” I said. “You’ve been a tremendous help.” At the front door, I turned around and kissed him on his dry, old man’s cheek, and he beamed.

  On the interstate, just past the future site of the Shangri-la golf course, I took an exit and turned back to Santa Fe. There was something suspicious about Harold’s display of going through the files, only to pull out the right one at the exact moment I asked about his progress. The way he’d nodded so quickly and said that the father could have been anybody, and kept insisting that my father and Eva might have known each other. He knew more, it seemed to me, than he was letting on. For the moment I set aside my thoughts about the dissertation, and how I could sell it to Michael, to focus on my father. I felt an almost physical sensation of curiosity, a prickling down my spine, at the idea that I was going to learn something new, that there was a side to him I’d never noticed while he was alive.

  Harold’s red SUV was still parked in front of his tidy condo, ready to navigate the ruggedly potholed streets of Santa Fe. I nudged the Caprice behind another expedition-style vehicle—fortunately, all the cars were so large that it wasn’t difficult to hide mine—and rolled down the window. A breeze guided the smell of pine trees into the car. I could hear the tinny notes of an ice cream truck trolling for kids along some nearby street, the half-broken melody sounding sinister and intent. It was just past noon.

  Harold came out fifteen or twenty minutes later, wearing a dark-blue shirt over skintight black shorts that glistened in the sun. Over his shoulder he carried a large cloth bag that reminded me of Irina’s baby sling. I trailed him through lunch-hour traffic, wondering where on earth he was going in that outfit. His first stop was a health-food store in a strip mall. I gave him a few minutes, then stepped inside. If he saw me, I planned to act surprised and engage him in polite conversation about the benefits of whole-grain foods. But he was standing at the counter with his back to me, talking to a clerk about bee pollen. The smell of incense hung heavy in the air. Lurking behind a stack of unsweetened cereals and herbal teas, I listened to his querulous, shaky voice.

  “I need energy,” he was saying to the clerk, a young woman with a long ponytail and glowing, rosy skin. “I feel so run-down, I can barely get up in the morning. You know what I mean?”

  “It sounds as if you have systemic issues,” she told him.

  “What do I take for that?” Harold said.

  She steered him in the direction of some vegetarian multivitamins, and I went back to the car. Several minutes later he came out bearing a large brown bag, presumably full of systemic cures.

  Back on the road, we weaved and dodged and changed lanes and turned corners—I tried to keep right behind him, for fearing of losing him—until he parked at another strip mall, in front of a coffee shop specializing in “locally roasted” beans. Pulling to the curb, I unrolled the window and smelled the burnt, acrid scent of the roasting. There were some elderly people lined up outside, apparently desperate for a jolt of caffeine. But Harold took his cloth bag next door, into Blue Butterfly Yoga. All of a sudden, following an old man with systemic issues to a yoga class, I didn’t feel like much of a scholar. I crossed my arms over the sticky vinyl of the steering wheel, telling myself I was an idiot. Then I saw a woman with long dark hair get out of a yellow convertible and go into the yoga studio. From the back I couldn’t tell how old she was, but I had a passing, insane thought: What if Harold knew a lot more about Eva than he was saying? What if this was her?

  Inside, harp music was playing, and pairs of shoes were stacked in a cubbyhole unit in the entryway, exuding an unpleasant aroma. Copies of the Blue Butterfly class schedules were piled on a table and I grabbed one and stuck it in the back pocket of my shorts. On the other side of a blue batik curtain I could hear violent slapping sounds, punctuated by the occasional grunt, as if people were getting paddywhacked back there. I stuck my head around the curtain and saw it was a martial-arts class and that the slaps were people being flung to the floor by their instructor, a tiny young woman with her hair in pigtails. When she noticed me, she smiled brightly—a two-hundred-pound man still groaning at her bare feet—and said, “Ashtanga’s in the other studio.”

  I left my sandals with the others and snuck into the back of another room, where Harold’s shiny black butt was now cradled gently on a folded blanket. He was sitting in the lotus position, his back to me. At the front of the room, a thin young man with short brown hair sat with his palms pressed and his eyes closed, humming. Wearing a see-through purple tank top and blue tights, he appeared to be in amazing shape; even the veins that ran along his biceps looked perfect in their contours.

  The room was very warm. There were around ten people, including the woman with the long black hair, who was sitting next to Harold. I grabbed a folded blanket from a pile at the back and sat down in the lotus position. My knees cracked loudly, and a bald man turned around to stare. I could hear Harold chanting “Om,” his voice reedy and weak. The instructor raised his stringy arms straight up, displaying twin thickets of armpit hair and some remarkably well-defined abdominal muscles. The woman with the long dark hair released a long, sexual-sounding groan, but Harold paid her no mind. Imitating the instructor’s movement, I swayed to one side, held the position, then swayed to the other. I closed my eyes. It was remarkably easy to follow someone, I thought, and insert yourself into their day. I should do it more often.

  A general shuffling sound made me open my eyes. Everyone else had moved to the sides of the room, where they lay flat on their backs with their legs hoisted up on the walls, and I scrambled to follow. This was a mistake. No way could I get my legs flat against the wall, not without snapping them in half. The instructor moved lightly through the room, touching shoulders, at one point placing a foot on someone’s stomach to flatten it. He had very long toes. When he reached me, sitting there in the lotus with my head bowed and eyes closed, I could hear him pause momentarily before moving on.

>   The heat now seemed even more intense, and sweat was streaming down my back. The people around me had moved to the middle of the room, where they sprawled on their backs, their legs doubled backwards over their heads and their arms twisted together. I had no idea how they’d accomplished this feat, or for what purpose. Even Harold had managed to contort himself into a semblance of the appropriate position. His T-shirt had slipped up, revealing a broad expanse of his starkly white skin, and sweat was puddled around him. Some people were twisted so far around that they were now looking back in my direction, their cheeks flushed and eyes eerily unfocused, their breathing labored.

  The perfect muscles of the instructor were folded in on themselves like origami. “Hold it,” he was saying. “Hold it.”

  How he could speak from within the pretzeled confines of his body was beyond me. I couldn’t even make out where his head was. My own legs, though I was trying to extend them over my back like the others, refused to go any higher than my ears, and my stomach was killing me.

  “Feel the toxins of the day draining away. From your heart, your liver, your kidneys. From your tongue, your teeth, your throat. Feel everything letting go.”

  Throughout the room, the breathing eased and quieted. People were actually taking the opportunity to ruminate while remaining in their positions. My legs mutinied and crashed onto the floor with a slap that broke the mood. The woman I’d taken to be Eva Kent turned her head and stared at me. She couldn’t have been older than I was.

  “Close your eyes. Feel the worries of the day leaving your heart.” The instructor’s voice was light and pleasant, with a chime almost, like a musical instrument. “Your heart is a feather in your chest.”

  I tried picturing this, and couldn’t. Then I felt a hand touching my knee, and when I looked up, the yoga instructor was kneeling by my side.

  “Feel the toxins draining from your system in your sweat,” he said in his chiming voice. Then he hissed in my ear, in a distinctly unpleasant tone, “This isn’t a beginners’ class. Didn’t you consult the schedule?”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I just wanted to check it out.”

  “Inside your body purity is emerging,” he said sweetly, still glowering at me, and then whispered, “Level one meets on Tuesdays. Today’s Wednesday!”

  “Sorry,” I said again.

  “This happens all the time,” he said, no longer bothering to keep his voice down. “It drives me completely freaking insane.”

  I stood up. “I’m going now.” Everybody in the room was looking at me, all in various stages of unfurling, like fronds in spring. I gave Harold what I hoped was a nonchalant, vaguely surprised “Oh, you’re here too?” wave. He just sat up and stared at me.

  “I don’t know why I bother to make these schedules when nobody reads them,” the instructor said. “This is advanced Ashtanga, for crying out loud. Put your blanket back. Don’t leave here without putting your blanket back.”

  I did as I was told.

  “Folded!” he said.

  The drive back from Santa Fe passed quickly, borne on the tide of my absolute embarrassment—Harold’s face looming always before me, along with the rest of the unfurling yogis. What the hell was I thinking? I wished very much that the whole day had never happened.

  I hit town at five o’clock, when Albuquerque’s offices were evacuated as if in a sudden panic. So far as I could tell, nobody in this town ever worked a minute later. Fleeing employees stalled the roads in every direction, one per car, heads lolling in boredom, staring straight ahead. I rolled down the windows and got a lungful of exhaust-redolent air. The two interstates that met in the city arched and crossed, bridges above air, in the center of the sky. Over everything in my view lay the pallor of dust. I exited and drove the back streets instead, recognizing in my desire to keep the car moving, even if the route ultimately proved far longer, a tendency of my father’s. Wylie had it too. Waiting at a red light behind two other cars, I thought I saw the eggplant-colored Plumbarama van drive past in the opposite direction. I made a quick right, but by the time I got turned around the van was nowhere in sight. Probably I had just imagined it.

  I cruised through residential neighborhoods, at a speed that felt more like walking than anything gasoline-powered. Dogs lay still and panting in the shade of trees. Cats were in hiding. In someone’s yard two small children were playing a game that seemed to involve the simulation of vomiting. As I drove past, one of them lifted his arm and shook his fist at me.

  Threatened by children, humiliated by yoga instructors, and sticking sweatily to the vinyl front seat, I finally pulled into my mother’s driveway. Nobody was home. I tossed my sweaty clothes onto a pile and took a quick, cold shower. Then I found a beer in the back of the fridge and sat in the backyard, the sweet relief of alcohol slipping down my throat, the wafting suburban smells comforting me: the charcoal smoke of backyard grills, the first hints of citronella, the gasoline putter of lawnmowers and weed whackers. I was half-asleep by the time a car door slammed shut out front and my mother and David came around the back.

  “Hey, it’s Lynnie!” David said, holding out his hand. “We saw that fearsome contraption of your brother’s in the driveway and guessed you were back.”

  I nodded. My mother, without meeting my eyes, gestured toward the back door. I held it open for her and she stepped inside, carrying a brown paper bag of groceries.

  “You’ll join us for dinner, I hope,” David said.

  In the kitchen my mother was making short work of the groceries. Into the crisper flew the broccoli and green beans. Up into cupboards went the cereal. The breadbox, of course, was the destination of bread. Plastic bags, empty, folded, and creaseless, met their fate in the recycling bin she kept beneath the sink. David and I stood on opposite sides of the kitchen, watching her.

  “Nobody puts away a load of groceries like your mother,” he said fondly. Crouched down on the floor, rearranging some delinquent items on the lower shelf of the fridge, my mother blushed and glanced at him briefly, a swift, demure look that made me feel like an intruder. I was about to go back outside when she straightened up and held out a bottle of beer in my direction, still not looking at me. I opened it by covering it with the hem of my T-shirt and twisting, which David seemed to interpret as a sign of weakness.

  “Let me do that for you,” he said, holding out his large hand.

  “That’s okay. I’ve got it, thanks.”

  “If you’re sure,” he said. I was already drinking from the bottle. He smiled down at my mother.

  “Excuse me for a second,” I said. I walked down the hallway to my room, which in every respect contrasted poorly with the rest of the house: the bed was unmade, the floor littered with clothes that had a faint but unmistakably organic scent. I was becoming one of the great unwashed. Eva Kent’s paintings sat on the dresser, their thick layers of paint as violent and mysterious as ever. I sat down on the bed. In a pine tree just outside the window, a bird—I didn’t know what kind—cackled and squawked. The world was densely populated with things I did not know. There was a soft knock on the door, and my mother came in. She’d changed from her office clothes into shorts and a loose-fitting shirt, and looked comfortable but fatigued, very fine lines etched everywhere on her skin. “Everything all right?” she said.

  “Mom,” I said, “I just didn’t have a very good day.”

  She sat down next to me, and I remembered how, when I was sixteen, I’d been forced by my parents’ machinations to go on a date with Francie Garcia’s son, Luis. I had a zit on my forehead the size of a quarter and felt monstrous and degraded by adolescence. The date, by mutual consent, was short. I slunk home afterward and found my mother waiting for me on the couch in the living room, with the television on. My father had already gone to bed, and I sat down next to her, furious, undignified, and told her I would never let her do that to me again. Then I leaned my forehead against her shoulder and cried. “If you wait long enough,” she said, “this will all be over, an
d it will get better. I promise.”

  Now, in silence, we sat in her condo with her married boyfriend here and Wylie not here, and I wondered if this was what she’d meant by “better.” Then she put her hand on the small of my back, still not saying anything, and I knew that this at least was true: in this house, on this day or any other, I would never be refused.

  Thirteen

  An uneasy peace is peaceful nonetheless. I was surprised at how happy I was, over the next few days, to play the good daughter, tidying up around the house and waiting for my mother to get home from work. I put all thoughts of Harold Wallace and his yogically contorted buttocks out of my mind. Several times we had dinner with David, the three of us marshaling enough energy for friendly conversation about topics of the day. We never talked about Wylie. David’s manner toward me became less bombastic, more subdued, and he no longer cried out my name like a cheer every time he saw me. This came as a relief. My mother cooked a sequence of elaborate meals—from braised lamb shank to chicken satay— which she arranged on serving plates in displays worthy of food magazines. There were desserts and specially chosen wines. She emerged from the kitchen bearing fragrant dishes, blushing proudly at our praise.

  I thought, None of this is so hard.

  One sweltering Wednesday I even went down to her office so we could have lunch with Francie and Luis of the long-ago date. He and I ate enchiladas and watched our mothers beam at each other with pride. After a little while I understood what Francie had meant by saying she didn’t think Luis would ever settle down: he was gay. All his teenage awkwardness had been replaced with an almost intimidating social ease. He was beautifully dressed and mannered, pulling out chairs for his mother and mine; drawing his mother out on the subject of her spectacular garden; making us all laugh. Francie put her hand over his and squeezed it as she bragged relentlessly about his accomplishments at work and exclaimed how lucky she was to have him around. It verged on disgusting. Then, halfway through the meal, she excused herself to visit the ladies’ room, and I saw a trace of exhaustion emerge on his careful features. All this politeness and admiration and laughter was part of some agreement between them, some ongoing negotiation that made everything else, within limits, okay.