The Missing Person

by Alix Ohlin

  “You would,” another nurse said, and they both laughed.

  I sat there in the lounge rubbing my face. There was a rattling sound by the doors that made me look up. Behind the glass I saw as in a dream the tousled red hair of Angus Beam.

  I stood up and went outside, the city’s apartment buildings and offices and traffic glittering in the morning sun, the slight coolness in the air hinting at fall. August was ending, the summer was ending, everything was ending.

  “I thought we should have one last cocktail,” Angus said.

  “It’s like seven o’clock in the morning or something.”

  “I know,” he said. “But I’m leaving.”

  We looked at each other. His freckles seemed to multiply before my eyes. I’d forgotten how blue his eyes were, how white his smile. “Let me guess,” I said. “Bisbee, Arizona.”

  “How’d you know?” he said, and grinned.

  We walked down the unscenic driveway toward the parking lot, the sun glinting off the fenders of cars. In the distance I could hear traffic and planes, the city awakening.

  “I’m leaving too,” I said. “Going back to New York.”

  It sounded as if I were saying it just because he was leaving, but I wasn’t. I hadn’t realized that I was going back to face Michael, school, the fortune-teller across the street, but once I said it I knew it was true. I was never going to be the kind of person I’d thought Michael could make me—art-world sophisticate, graduate-school operator, easy, slick sharer in romantic affairs—but that didn’t mean that I could just abandon the city and everything I’d started there.

  Angus and I sat down on a bench located on a cement island next to the parking lot. Judging from the quantity of cigarette butts scattered on the ground, this was where the smokers from the hospital congregated. I tried to think of what to say to him, about sex and emotion and about how all touch means something, even if that something is not exactly love.

  He held my hand. “How’s Psyche?”

  “She’s in intensive care,” I said. “She has an upper respiratory infection and smoke inhalation and I’m not even sure what else.”

  “That sounds bad.”

  “It is bad,” I said.

  He blew a soft sigh from between his lips.

  I leaned against his shoulder and closed my eyes. I felt like I could sit there forever, in a moment without past or future, the bright light warming my eyelids. “You were going to rob the casino, weren’t you?” I said. “While the lights were out. I heard you talking about the ventilation system. HVAC.”

  “Could be,” he said.

  “Why?”

  “For the money.”

  “Angus.”

  “Well, okay,” he said. “Theoretically speaking, a lot of money could prevent the development of the Shangri-la golf course. There’s a lot of state requirements that a golf course has to meet. Impact statements have to pass. Zoning and regulations. A lot of officials have to approve various permits and licenses. And officials, you know, are susceptible.”

  “You’re kidding. That would never work.”

  “You’re probably right.”

  “It’s a good thing you didn’t go ahead with it.”

  “Yeah,” he said, “a good thing.”

  The tone of his voice made me open my eyes, and he was looking away. I knew they’d gone ahead and done it anyway, and that at the beginning of the summer I would’ve said it was ridiculous and reckless and stupid and wrong, and that now I wasn’t so sure. I thought of all the times I’d driven past that sign, the pure bare bones of the land beneath it, of the way the world looked when the lights of Albuquerque went dark. The sweet sounds of Frank Sinatra slid into my head. Night and day, you are the one. Only you beneath the moon and under the sun. “I can’t believe you did it,” I said. “You’re completely insane. Out of your mind.”

  Angus laughed. “And you’re funny,” he said. “You stand outside of things, and hold people to standards you’re allowed to change at any time. I like that about you.”

  It was the least charming compliment I’d ever received, and it made me smile.

  “You’re completely insane,” I said again.

  “I know it,” he said. “Shut your eyes.” He pushed gently on my shoulder until I was sitting upright, not touching him, then kissed me on the mouth.

  The color of the sun behind my eyelids mingled, in my mind, with the redness of his hair and the flush of his skin, and with the memory of my blood rushing as we moved together. And I waited even longer than I had to before opening my eyes, to be sure that he was gone.

  When I got back to the ER, a horrible shriek was coming down a hallway, a woman sobbing and shouting unintelligibly. The nurses at reception were acting as if nothing was happening while family members in the waiting area whispered and exchanged panicked looks as they tried to guess whether the voice was one of their own. To me it sounded like Irina.

  I ran down the hallway to an open door. The shrieks were piercing and Czech. Irina was sitting up in bed wailing and banging her fists against the mattress on either side of her body, her round, pretty face twisted and splotchy, and her body wasted and frail. Wylie was standing beside her, trying helplessly to catch her fists as she flailed away. A doctor was looking on with an expression of detachment that unnerved me. The only person whose head turned when I came in was my mother, who was crying. She took my arm and led me out into the green hallway.

  “They couldn’t save Psyche,” she said, and I started crying too.

  After death, a great numbness, like a coat of ice over a pond. My mother and I made room in the condo for Irina and Wylie to move in. They stayed in the room I’d been using, and I slept on the couch in the living room. The days that followed, for all their grief and horror and shock, resembled my childhood more than any in recent years: living again in a house full of people, eating meals and doing dishes together, maneuvering around one another for showers. Irina was a shadow of herself, and we all thought, Wylie especially, that she would not survive the loss. He was with her every second, holding her hand and looking at her, as if the fact of being seen would somehow keep her alive. And maybe he was right; she did not die.

  On a brutally hot afternoon Psyche was buried in the same cemetery that held my father. My mother had made all the arrangements, and the four of us stood under a tent as the unfathomably small casket was lowered into the ground. So far as I knew, Stan and Berto and Angus and Gerald weren’t even aware of what had happened. Irina’s eyes looked dead in their sockets. The earth was dry and cracked, and a breeze blew sandy grit into our faces. Except for the priest, nobody said anything. There was nothing to say.

  We kept on rising, eating, and sleeping through the final days of August. It looked like life but wasn’t, really. The Sunrise Casino reported a substantial theft, and the Shangri-la golf course was put on hold pending environmental review. David Michaelson managed to persuade the police that Wylie, Irina, and I bore no responsibility for any materials in the car we’d borrowed; what Gerald told them, I didn’t know and didn’t care to ask. I recovered the Caprice and took it in to be repaired. When my mother went back to work, I asked her to book me a plane ticket to New York, and she did.

  I wrapped Eva Kent’s paintings in bubble wrap and brown paper, and arranged to ship them back to my apartment. I wanted to hang them there, as a reminder of the desert, the summer, and, most of all, my father.

  As I was finishing the packing, I decided to call Harold Wallace, who picked up the phone on the second ring and sounded happy enough to hear from me. “I’m taking the paintings back to New York,” I told him.

  “Going to write that little paper of yours?” he said.

  “My dissertation,” I said, offended until I remembered that I hadn’t exactly behaved like a paragon of art-historical scholarship around him. Then I sighed. “I’m not sure it’ll be about Eva, but I am going to write it.”

  “Well, you know I’m not really retired,” Harold said. “I
still represent a select group of wonderful artists. You may want to take a look sometime.”

  “Thanks,” I said. There was a silence on the line, in which I imagined him slipping into one of his reveries, in his white living room. “Listen, I saw Eva.” Harold still said nothing. I thought about telling him about Lincoln and our conversation about his father, but what would be the point? “I won’t go see her again,” I added. “Or bother any of you. I just wanted to tell you, well, that I really do love her work.” I waited for a long couple seconds, wondering if Harold was even there, until he spoke.

  “Me, too,” he said.

  Throughout all this time, Wylie and Irina stayed in their room most of the day and night. They were both losing weight, their clothes seeming to grow larger and larger. I was afraid for both of them, and yet I didn’t know what to say that could make them feel any better.

  In my dreams, Psyche burbled and sang and waved her fat, sweet arms, and then there were crashes and screams and cars careening off slick roads into the chaos of an unlit night. Waking in tears, I tried not to imagine what Irina dreamed about, or thought when she awoke.

  I missed Angus, his quick smile, his skin, how happy he always was to see me. I wished I could have stayed with him forever in a world without New York or Bisbee, without consequence or regret; a world of cheap motels, cable television, gin, and sex. I tried to picture what he was doing now, where he was, who he was with. Lying in bed one early morning, just past six, I asked myself what seemed like the most important question: how does anyone get used to the ends of things?

  I got up and took a cup of coffee outside. The days that week had been hot and windless, but in the early hours the air was cool, almost chill. I decided to go for a drive. The streets were still empty, and the first chile-roasting stands were setting up along the major boulevards. Everything looked washed out and pale, under a kind of brown cloud, and fighter jets from the base boomed overhead, two by two.

  I pulled up in front of the Michaelsons’ house. Since my last visit, the people who lived in our old house had painted the shutters purple and added a stained-glass dragonfly to the display of butterflies on the front wall. A few tiny humming-birds were dive-bombing the red sections of the dragonfly, thinking they might find sustenance there. David came out wearing a blue bathrobe and leather slippers. His hair was a mess. He bent down stiffly to pick up the newspaper lying folded on his front lawn. As he straightened up, he saw me sitting there in the car, lifted a hand, and waved.

  I got out and started up the walk.

  He stood there without looking down at the paper, which impressed me; most people can’t just stand in one place and watch somebody walk up to them. He didn’t move a muscle. Beside him, in the unmanicured front yard, a prickly pear cactus spread thick and purple with fruit that was starting to rot. Another pair of fighter jets came roaring overhead and disappeared into the cloudless horizon.

  “How’s your mom?” David said once I was standing in front of him.

  “She’s all right, I guess,” I said, noticing there were circles beneath his eyes. I’d assumed that she saw him during the day, or at the very least spoke to him on the phone. “You haven’t talked to her?”

  “She said she needed some time with her family.”

  Nestled somewhere inside the prickly pear an insect was buzzing angrily. I put my hands in the pockets of my jeans. “Aren’t you her family too?”

  David looked surprised and amused. “Ha,” he said. His robe was falling open in the front, revealing thick chest hair. He stuck the newspaper under his arm and readjusted the robe.

  “I came to say I’m leaving,” I said.

  “Is that so,” he said.

  “Yes, it is.”

  “Well,” he said, “don’t be a stranger.” He laid a hand lightly on my arm, a brief but deliberate touch, then stepped back inside his house.

  When I got back to the condo, my mother was drinking coffee in her neatly pressed work clothes. She smiled when she saw me, a haggard, joyless smile.

  I sat down at the table opposite her and watched her make toast. “I just got back from David’s.”

  My mother, applying butter to her toast with a knife designed specifically for that purpose, seemed intent on spreading it to a scientific degree of evenness. Her face was still frozen in a dazed smile that looked even more bereft than the contorted features of grief.

  “Did you hear what I said?”

  “I heard you.”

  “How come you haven’t been talking to him? You can’t just act like he doesn’t exist.”

  She sat down and started to eat, taking small, neat bites that reminded me of somebody, although I couldn’t at first place it. Then I realized: it was David. I watched as she chewed, swallowed, and sipped coffee.

  “I’ve been busy,” she finally said.

  I made a snorting sound and contemplated that dazed smile, wondering if she’d had that same expression in the aftermath of my father’s death. But of all those days and weeks I could remember nothing at all.

  Wylie came out of the bedroom, poured himself a cup of coffee, and sat down next to me at the table. Hairs from his long braid were frizzing all around his head, golden in the morning light. He looked older and terribly, wrongly thinner.

  Our mother stood up and wiped her lips, and I thought she was leaving for work, but instead she moved behind Wylie, unfastened his braid, and spread his hair over his shoulders. Slowly, as I watched her, she rebraided his long, fine hair, smoothing out all that was loose and errant, and refastened the elastic at the bottom. And Wylie let her do it; he let her.

  Days passed, and Irina began to move about the house during the daylight hours and sleep through the night, and there grew a semblance of regularity to things. She and Wylie took evening walks around the neighborhood, moving at the slow pace of invalids and holding hands. I saw that heartbreak wasn’t going to kill her, any more than running away from home to live on the street of a foreign city had, and that behind her smiling tenderness, her misleading innocence, was hidden a hard determination to survive. I saw, too, that Wylie was there whenever she reached out her hand, to catch it. He would not let her drift away, the way the three of us had after the death of my father, and I admired him for that.

  In the end I asked my mother to go with me to my father’s grave. She nodded and said, “I usually go before work.” It was cool the morning we drove to the cemetery, the light still silvery and weak. Albuquerque was just waking. The city’s few junior skyscrapers rose up against the flat expanse of suburbs; cars shot fast along the broad freeways; houses stood low and solid in their lots. The world was going on.

  We passed the emerald fairways of a golf course, where men were already out playing, and turned into the cemetery, an altogether paler green. We stopped first at Psyche’s grave, where fine shoots of grass were beginning to come up through the fresh dirt, then walked slowly over to my father’s.

  “Does David ever come here with you?” I asked.

  My mother looked surprised, and for the first time in days that numb smile left her face.

  “Why would he?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe he’d like to.”

  “I never thought about it.”

  “Well, it’s up to you,” I said.

  She handed me a flower to put on the grave. On the power lines ringing the cemetery small birds sang a little two-note song. A thin fingernail of moon still hung in the pale sky, the Sandias blue in the distance. I thought of my father hiking with Wylie and me in the mountains, his big hands and hairy knuckles moving quickly as he built a fire, the tilt of his head and the flicker of his eyes and the low, unmistakable rumble of his laughter, and Psyche’s voice whispering above and below it all. My mother and I held each other until it was time to leave.

  It was my mother, also, who took me to the airport a few days later, after I’d said good-bye to Wylie and Irina. We drove past the pine trees along the university streets, the reflective windo
ws of strip-mall stores, the freaks and fanatics on Central Avenue. In Brooklyn, I knew, the psychic was waiting, busy at work, the neon hands of her sign shaping a symbol meant to represent the future, but I was in love with Albuquerque then: the sun shone indiscriminately over the city, its kaleidoscope of color and noise and car exhaust and trash, the mix and din of the present day. As the nose of the plane lifted, shifting us all back in our seats, I watched the small, receding jewels of lawns and swimming pools and the vast brown wash of the mountains. The woman beside me opened the slick pages of a fashion magazine with an audible snap. We flew east, toward the green of the Midwest, our connecting flights and final destinations, and quickly, quickly, the desert disappeared.

  Alix Ohlin

  The Missing Person

  Alix Ohlin was born in Montreal and studied at Harvard University and the Michener Center for Writers in Austin, Texas. Her fiction has been selected for Best New American Voices 2004 and Best American Short Stories 2005. She has received awards and fellowships from The Atlantic Monthly, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the MacDowell Colony, and Yaddo. She lives in Easton, Pennsylvania, and teaches at Lafayette College.

  FIRST VINTAGE CONTEMPORARIES EDITION, AUGUST 2006

  Copyright © 2005 by Alix Ohlin

  Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks and Vintage Contemporaries is

  a trademark of Random House, Inc.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the

  product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to

  actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:

  Ohlin, Alix.

  The missing person: a novel / Alix Ohlin. —1st ed.

  p. cm.

  1. Women art historians—Fiction. 2. Brothers and sisters—Fiction.

  3. Albuquerque (N.M.)—Fiction. 4. Environmentalists—Fiction.