The Missing Person

by Alix Ohlin

  “You live in a dream world,” my mother said from the stall. “You worshipped your father, I always knew that. And you thought everything at our house was perfect. So I never wanted to disillusion you. But Arthur, you know, was—”

  “Mom,” I said. I went into the cubicle next to hers, closed the door, and threw up, my knees on the cold tile floor. It was a sour, nasty mash that held the lingering aroma of gin. I felt simultaneously hot and cold, disgusted and relieved. Small bright lights of many colors popped and sparkled at the edge of my vision. I wanted very much to lie down on the cold tile and take a nap.

  “Are you finished?”

  “I don’t know.” I reached up and flushed the toilet.

  “What’s wrong? Do you have the flu? Should I take you to the ER?”

  “I don’t think so,” I said. My stomach was still in restless motion, but it seemed to be slowing down. I could see her navy-blue flats under the stall door; they walked to the sink and came back, and she held a damp paper towel below the door. I took it and wiped my face and blew my nose. I contemplated standing up, then thought better of it.

  “I never worshipped him,” I said, although it occurred to me, as I said it, that I had. And all my memories of being ashamed of him or angry at him were lame attempts to disguise this inevitable truth. I’d always accused Wylie of trying to be just like my father, but in the stall, looking down at my bare legs, I felt that everything I’d ever done—including leaving home and studying art history, a field as far away from physics as you could get—was meant to defy or provoke him, to overcome, in any way I could, the limits of his attention.

  “And I didn’t think everything was perfect,” I said, quieter now. The flats waited, silently. “I just never thought it was that bad.”

  “Don’t be dramatic,” my mother said, and heaved a great sigh. “It was somewhere in between.”

  I felt another wave of nausea tumble through my stomach like clothes in a dryer, and didn’t say anything. The flats left the room.

  When I went to her office fifteen minutes later, she was gone. Francie said she’d left to run some errands, but I suspected she was over at the Michaelsons’, helping David and his sons deal with Daphne—a scene I couldn’t exactly picture, and didn’t want to, either.

  Back at her condo, I let myself in, and slept through the bright hours of the day.

  I woke up in the afternoon, ravenous and weak. I ate half a pint of ice cream, took a shower, then finished the other half. I wondered where Wylie et al. had gone, and why I always had to track them down like the younger child wanting to tag along and play. They were probably tunneling beneath the city, planning to suck all of Albuquerque into the lava flows or something. I felt light-headed and strangely cheerful. It seemed like vomiting in the bathroom in front of my mother had done me a world of good.

  An uncharacteristic cloud had settled over the sky, turning the light in the condo to silver. It made me miss New York, its grayness and rain and subways, and Michael, and even the pain of losing him. A person can get nostalgic for anything, as long as it’s in the past. I wandered around the house looking at pictures. There was my parents’ wedding picture, Chicago, 1974: my mother smiling widely between dark red lips, my father looking dazed, as if stunned by his own good fortune. But maybe he was only stunned. There were hardly any other pictures of him around, and most were of Wylie and me. In every recent picture, I noticed, we had the same smile, even, practiced, and not at all genuine, as if really smiling were a childish habit we’d put away forever.

  I stared at The Wilderness Kiss for a while, its brilliant dark colors, the woman and man locked in a kind of combat with the desert looming behind them. My mother was right; I’d never thought about the reality of my parents’ marriage, what violence or heartbreak was contained in it, and with what consequences. Why was having a child—the son pictured in The Ball and Chain—so painful to Eva that it drove her insane? Studying the man in the picture, the one cradling his own mother, I saw in his thin, dark countenance a resemblance to both Wylie and Lincoln Kent, the yoga instructor.

  As I gazed at the paintings, I pictured my father with Eva on those late nights when I’d thought he was at the lab, and then bringing her work home to my mother in an act of almost brutal defiance. He must have known about her and David. He knew, and Eva was his revenge. Rose red, romantic red, red in the afternoon. But he wouldn’t leave my mother for her, even after she became pregnant, because of me and Wylie. And Eva went crazy, crazy enough to set fires and destroy her own work, just as crazy as Daphne Michaelson, alone in her house while her husband and my mother watched television together.

  I had an almost dizzy feeling, as if I were standing at the edge of a towering cliff, and picked up the flyer from Blue Butterfly Yoga. Lincoln was teaching Ashtanga that afternoon at four o’clock. I drove up to Santa Fe, where I sat in the Caprice with my eyes on the door to the yoga studio. Only a few cars were parked in the lot. Blue Butterfly was housed in a strip mall along with a New Age bookstore, an ice cream parlor, and the coffee shop I’d noticed before, each establishment elegant in fake adobe. Behind the strip mall rose another one; they were lined up, block after block. I hadn’t eaten much besides the ice cream, and my stomach rumbled. At five-thirty people started filtering out of the yoga place. Glowing and relaxed, carrying mats and bags, they were all wearing tights or tight shorts and tight tops, clothes that covered their bodies like sausage casings. I had the windows down, and as they filed away I could hear snippets of their conversations, comments regarding numerology and nutrition, the cancerous death of a woman’s aunt (“It’s like her anger ate her up inside, literally”), and the difference between Reiki and Fendelkrais, as physical disciplines go. Lincoln Kent came out last and locked the outside door. He was wearing long black leggings and a red tank top, and with his straight posture and well-molded shoulders he looked like a ballet dancer on a short break from class. His features were small and perfect, and his short hair, fashionably cut, was dark brown, like Wylie’s and mine. Everything about him was well formed and exquisite, like a Christmas ornament or a Hummel figurine.

  I got out of the car and approached him, hoping that he wouldn’t recognize me. “Excuse me,” I said. “I’m lost. Could you help me?”

  “Ah, tourists,” he said, pointing with a well-muscled arm. “To get to the Plaza, you need to head that way.”

  “Actually, I’m looking for a place called Enchanted Mesa. I’m supposed to visit my great-aunt and I misplaced the address.”

  He smiled and took me by the arm. “I go to Enchanted Mesa all the time. It’s right around the corner. I can even walk you there, if you don’t mind a couple blocks.”

  I thanked him profusely, and he led me down the street as I tried to figure out what to say to him.

  “I think it’s a lovely facility,” he said confidingly, “and I did a lot of research. How long has your great-aunt been living there?”

  “Um, not long, I don’t think,” I said. “What about your relative?”

  “For ages and ages,” he said. “The quality of care is excellent. It is a little hard to find, but once you’ve been there you won’t have any problems.”

  We stopped in front of an adobe apartment building, by the front door with a small plaque that read ENCHANTED MESA. In a parlor to the right, a few old people in armchairs were staring disconsolately out at the bushes. Down the hallway some plinky jazz standard was being played on a piano. The place had the plush carpeting and smoothly recirculated air of an expensive institution, and the flowers on a stand in the hallway were real. But the scent of potpourri in the air wasn’t quite strong enough to disguise the smell of ammonia and feces beneath it.

  Squeezing my arm, Lincoln Kent marched up to the reception desk, where a middle-aged woman with short red hair and purple lipstick greeted him by name.

  “Hi, Bernice,” he said. “She’s looking for her great-aunt. Would you help her?”

  This was worse than crashing advanced
yoga.

  Bernice smiled at me. “What’s her name?”

  “Sylvia Beachman?” I said. This was my great-aunt, who lived in Evanston, Illinois, with my great-uncle Davis and three dachshunds. Every Christmas she sent me a card and a ten-dollar bill.

  Bernice frowned and typed away at the computer.

  I turned to Lincoln. “Thank you so much,” I told him. “I don’t mean to keep you.”

  “Hey, my pleasure. Peace. Bernice, I’ll go check on her while I’m here.”

  Bernice waved without taking her eyes off the screen, and he wandered off down the hall. “I’m not seeing a Sylvia Beachman,” she said.

  “That can’t be right,” I said.

  “Well, I know everybody in here, and I’ve never heard of a Sylvia Beachman.”

  “That can’t be,” I said. “She writes me all the time. This is Enchantment Mission, isn’t it?”

  “Enchantment Mission?” Bernice raised an eyebrow. “This is Enchanted Mesa. I don’t know about any Enchantment Mission.”

  “Oh, man,” I said. “I don’t believe this.”

  “You’ve never visited her before?”

  “I’m from New York.” I leaned forward. “Listen, do you mind if I just go find Lincoln and tell him what happened? He’s been helping me.”

  Bernice looked me up and down and decided, apparently, that I wasn’t a threat to the elderly.

  “Room 325,” she said wearily. “Sign in here.”

  I walked down one carpeted hallway to another, past the open doors of shared rooms, the sounds of competing televisions broadcasting game shows and local news. An old woman in a light-blue cable-knit cardigan sat weeping in a doorway, her mouth rigid with pain or sadness, the thin wisps of her hair trembling in concert with her sobs. Some old people were playing cards in a lounge whose windows faced the side of the Blue Butterfly strip mall. Through one window I could see a teenaged girl wiping down the counter of the ice cream parlor, and from this context her smooth, tanned skin and long legs looked profane, or dreamlike, or both.

  Inside room 325, Lincoln Kent and a woman were sitting in facing chairs. From the photograph I’d seen, she was recognizably Eva Kent—but aged, decrepit, blank. Her dark hair was shot through with gray and hung limply to her chin. She was wearing baggy pink pants and a white shirt with a flower pattern; the sleeves fell to her wrists, but the skin on her hands was mottled red and white as if ravaged by some disease: the fire. She slouched in her chair, hunched over her low, large breasts. There was no trace of the ferocious pregnant woman with the center part and the burning cigarette, or of the woman in the painting with a slash of red across her face. In fact there was no trace of anything at all. Lincoln was reading to her, but she didn’t seem to be listening, only staring into space. Her room was generic, artless, plain, and it smelled bad. Whatever she had once been, I thought, she wasn’t an artist now.

  The sight of her took me aback, and I realized how much I’d been counting on talking to her, asking her about my father and her work and life, on getting all the answers I’d thought she could provide. I walked down the hallway, bought a Coke from a machine, and pressed the cool can against my face. A nurse came by and smiled at me sympathetically.

  “Eva Kent,” I said. “What’s wrong with her, exactly?”

  She shrugged and bought a Dr Pepper. “Brain chemistry, I guess.”

  I stood there for a minute or two, not sure what to do next.

  Then Lincoln came down the hall, smiling at me. “Hey, did you find your great-aunt?”

  “Not exactly,” I said.

  He put his hand on my arm, again. “She didn’t—”

  “Oh, no,” I said. “It turns out I have the wrong place, is all. I messed up. It’s not the first time.”

  He bought a can of iced tea. “Don’t be so hard on yourself,” he said sweetly.

  “How was your visit?” I asked him.

  “Well, with my mother,” he said, “it’s hard to tell.” As he sipped his tea, he raised one leg and placed his right foot against his left knee in a yoga pose, looking completely relaxed.

  I gazed intently at his delicate features and dark hair. I still couldn’t figure out how to ask him what I wanted to know. “Is your father in here too?” I said.

  “Oh, no,” he said, with a pleasant, musical laugh. “Just my mother. I’m reading Buddhist texts to her right now. I don’t know if she finds it uplifting, but I do.”

  “Has she been here long?”

  “For as long as I can remember,” he said. “My godfather, Harold—well, unofficial godfather—he put her in here when I was just a kid. I used to hate visiting her, but now I find it kind of restful. I try to think of it as a means of contemplation.” He was sounding like he had in yoga class, his voice low and rhythmic, almost a chant.

  “What about the rest of your family?” I said. “Do they come too?”

  “I don’t have much family.” Lincoln put his leg down and hoisted up the other, and at the same time—with the can of tea in his right hand—twisted his arms up above his neck. “My mother didn’t have many relatives, and my dad died when I was twelve.”

  “He did?” I said. “Are you sure?”

  He raised an eyebrow at the question, then laughed. “Yeah, I’m sure. He was this crazy hippie who lived up in Madrid, and in his last will and testament he left me and my mom a lucky horseshoe and his VW minibus. It didn’t even run.”

  I stared into his tranquil eyes. A crazy hippie with a lucky horseshoe: this was the last thing I’d expected him to say. I felt an intense, burning anger toward Harold, for leading me astray; it seemed like his fault I was here. I wondered why on earth he’d lied to me—and then it occurred to me that he might not have known about the crazy hippie. I remembered Eva’s note from California, after she’d run away: Dear Harold, I know you will take care of things. Maybe she’d known that Harold would take better care of her son if he thought there was no one else to do it.

  “Hold this for a second, will you?” Lincoln asked. I took his drink, and he did a backward bend and then a forward one, sweeping his head down between his outstretched legs. When he came up again his face was red.

  I wanted to contradict his story about the hippie father; but on what evidence, and for what reason? Beyond the paintings themselves, I had no reason to think that my father and Eva had even known each other, much less that he’d played any part in her illness. Anything can make a person go crazy: grief, anger, brain chemistry, life.

  As I looked at the yoga instructor, the lines I’d drawn— from Eva to her paintings to my father to me—turned to vapor and disappeared. Eva had probably never met my father, and hadn’t gone crazy because of their affair. Nor had Daphne Michaelson been trying to tell me anything at all, except that she distinctly preferred certain shades of red lipstick over others. I’d invented all of it. I’d started out wanting to construct a story about the paintings for Michael, and wound up tailoring it to myself. “Sometimes I think I’m the one who’s crazy,” I said out loud.

  “Honey, everybody’s crazy,” Lincoln said. “The only sane person I know is my cat. Good luck with your great-aunt, okay?” Then he took back his drink and walked away down the hall.

  Outside the sun still shone, heavy, inescapable, and my eyes started to water in the parking lot and wouldn’t stop. The Caprice fired up with a knocking sound, and the engine gave a low moan when I pulled out. For the second time this summer I went to my father’s grave, which was every bit as inadequate as I remembered it: the sickly, brown-tinged grass, edging into dirt at the sides of the cemetery; the shiny red granite of new-fashioned tombstones, some with photographs airbrushed on them, the dead smiling and youthful, never anticipating to what purpose the pictures would be put. Or maybe they were smiling because they knew that their grip on the living would never be released; they’d maintain their mystery forever; they’d never have to answer any questions. As I was thinking this, a flock of crows landed a few graves in front of me and b
egan to pick and tear at the grass, their ragged black feathers shiny in the light.

  In the mid-distance rose the Sandias, their reddish-brown peaks outlined crisp and wild as in a painting by Eva Kent. She and Daphne could have quite a party together, I thought. My mother was the only sane woman I knew, and her sanity was so conspicuously neat and controlled that I was starting to wonder about her, too. This summer was crowded with crazy women and caretaking men, with parents who made their children uneasy, with condos and apartments and institutions, with homes that were not what they’d once been. And everywhere there were fathers, or awkward yet unavoidable substitutes: David Michaelson; Harold Wallace; even Wylie doting fatherlike on Psyche. The days were full of fathers, and none of them was mine. Grief roiled across the world, forever rippling its surface; that, I thought, was the permanent wave. When a feeling’s that tenacious, what can you do but say hello to it and keep going? I turned away to find my mother and tell her, as best I could, that I was sorry.

  Nineteen

  The Caprice shuddered whenever I went above sixty-five, its chassis shaking like a child with a high fever: a new and disturbing symptom. In the rearview mirror I could see a thin band of black air moving across the sky, and when I rolled down the window, the ashy smell of a fire wafted faintly through the car. This whole state was as dry as kindling, ready to light. I could barely remember the last time I’d seen rain.

  The curtains were drawn at my mother’s house and I saw shapes moving behind them—my mother and David, no doubt, waiting for me to come home, make my apologies, and face my punishment. Maybe I could spend a week at his house, doing chores as a means of reparation, like the child I truly was. But as I opened the front door, from the kitchen came the sweet sounds of Frank Sinatra, tinkling glasses, and loud, low, horsey laughter. Wylie, Angus, and Irina, with Psyche in her sling, were all making themselves drinks, and the entire contents of my mother’s well-provisioned refrigerator were emptied onto the counter. Sandwiches were in the making; fruit was being peeled and eaten. As a group they smelled delightful, soapy and fresh, their cheeks red and shiny from recent showers.