The Missing Person

by Alix Ohlin

  “She’s right,” Irina said.

  “Well, it’s time to really make it the capital of nowhere. Give people a little time to think.”

  “Time to think,” Wylie said. From his lack of scowl and his rigid posture, it seemed like he loved whatever ideas this conversation was giving him.

  “Lynn,” Angus said, “you’re a genius.”

  “If you say so,” I said, and passed out.

  When I woke up everybody was gone, even Sledge. I couldn’t imagine how I’d slept through the night, in a room full of drunk and stinking people, but the throb in my head gave me a clue. There was such a thing as too much gin. I opened the front door and gazed out at the capital of nowhere. Grocery-store circulars and plastic bags rustled in tree branches. The hood of the Caprice was splattered with bird shit. My stomach was uneasy, and the taste in my mouth was sour. The heat was an insult to the body. Everything was brown and dead, and I couldn’t imagine hating anything as much as August in Albuquerque. I wanted to know where everybody was and why I’d been abandoned. I was in a very bad mood.

  I was about to shut the door when a taxi—a rare enough sight anywhere in Albuquerque—pulled up in front of the apartment building. Then Daphne Michaelson got out of the cab and paid the driver, looking crisp and unfazed by the heat. She was wearing a navy-blue dress with a white belt, white stockings, and open-toed shoes. Her nails and lips were lacquered in red. Not a single hair was out of place, and when she climbed the stairs up to the landing I could smell the distinct flowers of Chanel No. 5.

  She smiled at me, brightly, and said, “I’m looking for Wylie Fleming. The phone book says he lives here.”

  “He isn’t here,” I said, nervously conscious of my own morning-after stink.

  “You’re the other one!” she said, in the cheery tone of a Girl Scout leader addressing her charges. “I remember your visits to my office.”

  She stood in the doorway, wrinkling her powdered nose, and gave the filthy room a careful inspection that culminated in a head-to-toe look at me. Glancing back at the sleeping bags and tool racks, she raised her tweezed eyebrows, and I realized that at some point I’d stopped paying attention to the weirdness of the place.

  “Can I get you something to drink?” I said.

  “No, thank you,” she said. “I can’t stay long. I have many appointments.” She laughed again, a trilling and artificial laugh that sounded rehearsed.

  “If you say so,” I said.

  She opened her white leather handbag, took out a compact, and checked her perfect makeup in the mirror, then smacked her lips together and smiled, satisfied. I felt like I was in an old movie, something starring Lana Turner. Maybe a young Frank Sinatra would come looking for her.

  “Mrs. Michaelson,” I said, “does your family know you’re here?”

  It was the wrong thing to say. Daphne glared at me, and to compose herself she took out the compact and reapplied her lipstick, giving it a disturbing thickness. “I am occasionally allowed to chaperone myself,” she said.

  “All right.”

  “Even at times to dress myself and call taxis. Like a grown woman. Which, incidentally, I am.”

  “I know you are. Listen, I’m sorry. What can I do for you? I’d offer you a seat, but, well, there aren’t any.”

  “That’s quite all right,” she said with gracious hauteur. “I’ve come to discuss our problem of mutual interest. But we can do it standing.”

  “Problem?”

  “Problem, situation, what have you,” she said.

  “What situation are you talking about?”

  “My husband and your mother,” she said. “You think I didn’t know? There isn’t enough medication in the world. The question is what we will do about it. Now that you’re on my side we can do something. Once you came to my office, I knew you were on my side. Now, do you think you can get a gun?”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Why would I?” she said. “Let me outline a few small plans.” She pulled a small black notebook from her bag and opened it to a page filled with looping, childish handwriting.

  “Mrs. Michaelson,” I said, “I wanted to ask you about my father. Do you remember the things you said to me before? I felt like you were trying to tell me something.”

  “This is not about your father,” she said.

  “But did you ever see him with a woman with long dark hair? What about—”

  “This is about David and that whore.”

  It took me a second to register what this meant, and another second to figure out how to respond. “Um, please don’t call my mother a whore,” I said.

  Daphne’s eyes flashed at me, and the notebook trembled in her hands. “Drunken travel-agent whore,” she said, drawing out each syllable with evident relish.

  “Okay, that’s it.” I gestured toward the landing. “Time for you to go. I’d call you a cab, but we don’t have a phone here.”

  “I’m not leaving.”

  “Yes you are.”

  I walked out onto the landing, as if to show her how, exactly, this might be accomplished, but she didn’t follow. I looked back to where she stood framed in the darkness of the apartment.

  “You’ll have to drive me,” she said. “I spent my last dime on the taxi ride here.”

  I drove Daphne, in silence, back to the Michaelsons’ house, where nobody was home, and followed her inside. The doors to the bedrooms were open, and in one of them was an entire wall of trophies, shelf upon shelf of little gold and silver men, knees bent, arms bent to hold bats or sticks or balls. The Michaelson kids, I had to admit, were pretty good at what they’d chosen to do, which was more than either Wylie or I could say. Daphne went into her room, sitting down in her chair with a magazine, and didn’t seem surprised when I stepped inside. I wasn’t exactly sure what to do, but leaving her alone didn’t seem like the smartest thing. I don’t know what I expected—a cache of pills piled behind the curtain, or a purse bristling with razor blades—but everything looked exactly as it had before.

  Daphne crossed her legs and looked at me severely. “I’m quite disappointed in you,” she said. “Perhaps I’ll have better luck with Wylie. He always was the one with gumption.”

  “Gumption?” I said.

  “And personality. You, on the other hand, have no personality, and I am highly disappointed.” She was staring at me fixedly, more Joan Crawford now than Lana Turner, and then she leaned forward and started scratching her right ankle with manicured fingernails.

  “Look, I’m sorry,” I said, wondering if she bought her own clothes, or sent David out for them, or simply wore the same outfits she’d bought when she was less ill, back in the seventies. She kept on scratching. By now she was tearing rips and runs in the sheer white hose, but she didn’t appear to notice. “Are you all right?”

  “No, I’m not all right. I’m disappointed. That’s what I keep telling you.”

  “Right. But you also seem kind of, well, itchy.”

  Daphne lifted her hand and gazed at it in momentary wonder, then raised it to her cheek and started scratching there. I noticed the droplets of blood swelling through the torn hose at her ankle, and angry red streaks smearing the makeup on her cheeks. I went over and held both her hands in mine.

  “Please stop that,” I kept saying, as if she were a child or a reasonable person.

  “Disappointed!” she kept saying back. Then she pulled away from me—she was much stronger than I ever would’ve guessed—and cowered behind her chair, looking as if she thought I might shoot her. Momentarily annoyed that she was afraid of me, of all people, I went into the kitchen and searched around for phone numbers. In the directory by the fridge I found the number of David’s law firm, but he wasn’t there, and I didn’t know what kind of message to leave. I also didn’t know where Donny or Darren might be. For some reason, whether habit or the absence of any other options, I opened the fridge door, as if help might be waiting for me there. There were four rotisserie chickens and abou
t a side of beef. Then I heard a car pull up in the driveway.

  When Donny came through the front door, his doughy face was almost unrecognizable, marked grimly by stress, and only his blue, knee-length surf shorts seemed familiar. For a second, standing in the hall, he looked eerily like his father. I could see him struggling to come up with an explanation for my presence, and failing.

  “Your mom’s here,” I said, “and she’s a little upset.”

  “A little upset!” Daphne called from her room. “Ha!”

  I trailed Donny down the hall, and saw her, back in her chair, tearing pages from a magazine and stacking them on the floor. Even her mania had a certain order to it.

  “Mom?” Donny kneeled down next to her. “It’s okay. Dad’s coming.”

  “Oh, now that’s a relief,” Daphne said. “All my problems are solved.”

  Donny looked at me. His big muscled arms were on his mother’s lap, the weight of them holding her still. “She hasn’t done this in years,” he said.

  “I’m the star of this particular show,” Daphne insisted.

  “Hold on, Mom,” he told her. He left the room and came back with a large glass of water and a palmful of pills.

  She studied him with the exact expression of a dog that has misbehaved while its owners were away: guilty and anticipating, even craving the punishment. She took the pills all at once, gulping them down dry, then drinking the water as a chaser, splashing a lot of it down her chin. “Ah,” she said afterward, smiling up at him.

  “Good girl,” he said. “Let’s get you cleaned up.” He took her by the arm, as if she were a physical invalid, and walked her into the bathroom without paying me even the slightest bit of attention.

  I wandered back into the living room, wondering whether I should stay or go. I could hear the shower start, and murmuring voices. Then the phone rang, and after a while I picked it up and said, “Hello?”

  “Who is this?”

  “It’s—Lynn. Lynn Fleming.”

  “Lynn, it’s David. Is Daphne there?”

  “Yes, she’s—she’s in the shower. Donny’s helping her get cleaned up. He gave her some of her pills.”

  “Oh, thank God,” he said. “What a crazy goddamn escapade. She hasn’t done this in about a decade.”

  “That’s what Donny said.”

  There was a moment’s silence, during which I could hear traffic and car horns, and I guessed he was out looking for her somewhere. Then he said, “What are you doing in my house?”

  “She came to Wylie’s apartment, and I was there.”

  “What the hell did she go there for?”

  I closed my eyes and said the only thing I could think of. “It’s all my fault,” I told him.

  “I imagine you’re right,” he said, and hung up.

  Finally the shower shut off and Donny led his mother into a bedroom. Feeling like I should leave, but unable to make myself do it, I sat down and listened to their muffled voices. Daphne was giggling, a sweet, girlish sound with a seductive tinge to it. Several minutes later Donny came out and sat down on a couch opposite me, seemingly not surprised that I was still there.

  “Your dad called,” I said. “I told him she was back.”

  He nodded. “Darren’s out looking too.”

  “Where do you even start when something like this happens?”

  “Anywhere,” he said. “Hospitals, police, shopping malls. She likes malls.”

  He picked up a remote control from the arm of the couch and turned on the television, muting the sound. It was set to ESPN and showing golf. A man in a blue sweater vest missed a putt and smacked his palm on his forehead. Donny tsked at the screen.

  “Did she do this when we were kids?” I said.

  Without moving his eyes from the screen, Donny shrugged and slumped down on the couch, his head resting on the back of it, his muscular thighs spread parallel to the floor.

  “I dunno,” he said. “I do remember one time, at your party. Remember? The one when your mom had that big piñata? Oh, my mom was pissed.”

  I didn’t understand this, although I had vague memories of that party, which was full of drunken adults. I was fourteen and already acutely embarrassed by how my parents and all their friends behaved. Wylie was twelve, still on the pudgy side, and into skateboarding; he had an asymmetrical haircut all my dad’s friends from work teased him about. At one point everybody started warbling along with the radio, which was such a hideous display that I had to retreat to my room. I didn’t even remember the Michaelsons being there. “She was pissed off because of the piñata?”

  “Dude!” Donny said, talking to the TV. After a second he said, “No, she was pissed off about my dad and your mom hanging out too much at the party. And I remember your dad—you know how he talked, we used to call him the Professor—he was all ‘Daphne, why don’t we discuss this rationally,’ and my mom was all ‘Fuck rationally!’ I remember your dad’s face, it was like he never heard anybody say ‘fuck’ before, ever. Anyway, then she took off and it took us a whole day to find her. In Grants. Can you believe that? Grants. It’s like an hour and half away. My dad asked her what the hell she was doing there and she said, ‘I always wanted to have a drink in Grants.’ After that they upped her meds.”

  “I don’t remember any of this,” I said.

  “You always were a little out of it,” Donny said. “No offense. Wow, look at that stroke. That’s beautiful. That’s sport.”

  “What do you mean your dad and my mom hanging out?”

  “Oh, you know.”

  “No, I don’t know.”

  “Hanging out. Same as they do now.”

  I pictured the two of them watching The Manchurian Candidate in their bathrobes at my mom’s condo. Surely, if they’d been doing that at my parents’ house, I would have noticed. Yet as I thought back on things, a whole phalanx of scenes lined up, neat and orderly, in my mind: my mom having David over to fix the car or to help with some household chore while my dad was at work, because he was always at work; my mom going on early-morning walks around the neighborhood, I thought by herself, or telling my dad to take Wylie and me out for the day, on a hike or a picnic in the mountains. I felt like a duped lover. I was the last to know.

  I told Donny I had to go—“See ya,” he said—and left the house in a daze. The next thing I knew I was going eighty on the highway with the windows down, and a trucker in the next lane waved at me, tanned and friendly, showing me all the missing teeth in his smile.

  Eighteen

  When I pulled up at Worldwide Travel, I felt like I hadn’t seen the place in years. When I stepped gratefully into the frigid air-conditioning, Francie looked up at me without recognition and went back to her computer, squinting at her monitor with her blue-lidded eyes.

  “Francie,” I said.

  She looked at me again and said, “Lynnie! I didn’t even recognize you, honey! Are you all right?”

  “Everything’s fine,” I said.

  “Do you want to go wash up? Your mom’s with somebody just now.”

  The door to my mother’s office was closed, and I wondered if David was in there with her. I nodded at Francie, then went into the bathroom, and what I saw in the mirror wasn’t pretty: hair matted from sleeping on a grimy floor; face smudged with dirt and probably spilled gin; a T-shirt that was wrinkled and stained. In the small room I could tell that I really needed a shower. I took a long look at myself and shrugged. “You’re turning into Wylie,” I said out loud. Nonetheless I washed my face and patted my hair with water, smoothing it somewhat, though there was a ratty tangle at the base of my neck. I felt deeply, impossibly calm. I thought I’d feel that way forever, but my mother came through the door, and then I knew I wouldn’t.

  She stood before me in the fluorescent light, the lines of her face etched almost blue in the severity of its glow. She’d gotten a haircut recently, and her straight, neat hair was clipped even closer and more neatly than usual around her ears. I found myself staring a
t her blue-striped blouse, which was made from a slightly sheer fabric that showed the contours of her bra. The thought of her and David together while my father was alive kept flashing in my brain, unwanted and too loud, like commercials on TV. It was one thing for her to have taken up with a married man out of her widowed grief and his impossible home situation; it was quite another for it to have started years ago, in the past, when there weren’t such excuses. I couldn’t be generous about it; I could hardly even allow the thought of it into my mind.

  “You should be ashamed,” my mother said.

  “Ha!” I said, sounding weirdly like Daphne Michaelson. After this I started to choke and had to take a drink from the sink. I felt dizzy, too, all of a sudden, and kept clutching the sink after I was done drinking.

  “That poor woman hasn’t had an episode in years,” my mother went on. She was standing so close to me that I could smell the clean, slightly medicinal scent of her lotion or deodorant.

  My stomach churned. I couldn’t remember when I’d last eaten, or what it was. “I don’t feel good,” I said.

  “Nor should you,” my mother said primly. “David told me you’ve been harassing her. She’s not a well woman, Lynnie. You can’t just treat people any old way you like and not expect there to be consequences.”

  I stared at her. The fluorescent lights seemed to buzz and twitch, veering from white to blue to white again, the tiles swimming on the floor. I lifted my hand from the sink and then, still dizzy, put it back again. “Any old way?” I said. “What about you, Mom? How do you treat Daphne Michaelson? What are you, her best friend?”

  My mother shook her head. She was prepared for this, I could tell. “Don’t start with that,” she said. “You’re an adult. Not a child.”

  “I don’t feel good,” I said again.

  She went into a stall and closed the door. I could hear her pee, then the sharp quick sound of her pulling down the toilet paper. The whole time I stared at myself in the mirror, wondering if I was going to throw up.