Wide Blue Yonder

by Jean Thompson

  Tammy’s eyebrow took a different, smirking twist. “Oh, I wouldn’t worry about that.”

  “Why’s that, Tammy? Huh? Who is he?”

  Tammy’s expression went back to sullen neutral. She was a girl with rather coarse, staring features who got herself up so provocatively you didn’t at first notice. Did the library allow glitter eyeshadow? Apparently it did. Tammy said, “Look, we don’t really hang out anymore. I don’t know what she’s doing. Is she in trouble or something?”

  Elaine, aware that anything she might say would be gossip fodder, and that she’d probably already said too much, shook her head. “I can’t find her and I need to talk to her. If you see her, please tell her that.”

  “I bet she’s fine, Mrs. Lindstrom. She’s probably just out partying. Hey, Tuesday’s the first day of school. Is she going to be there or what?”

  Elaine left and drove the streets for a time, thinking that Springfield wasn’t so big you could hide for very long, sooner or later she’d be bound to find her. But Josie could be anywhere by now. Kids ran off all the time, to Chicago or New York or the rest of the world. She was beginning to realize it wasn’t so much a matter of finding Josie as waiting for her to come home.

  Still, she called the police, who told her it was too soon to file a missing person’s report, and that most kids came home after a day or two, especially if there’s been an argument. She should call back in a few days if she hadn’t heard anything. Elaine wasn’t about to settle for that. She was accustomed to not settling for answers she didn’t like. She simply persisted, saying the same thing over and over again in different ways, until people gave ground. By the time she got off the phone, the police had agreed to flag Josie’s car on their computer, and Elaine had an appointment with the department’s youth officer.

  She decided it would be better to call Frank sooner rather than later, so he couldn’t accuse her of withholding things. Elaine reached him in Aspen the morning after Josie’s second night gone. “We had an argument. I took her keys and told her she was grounded. She found them and sneaked out while I was in the shower.”

  Frank seemed to have trouble comprehending this. “So where is she now?”

  “I don’t know, Frank. That’s why I’m calling.”

  “You can’t exert enough basic control to keep her off the street?”

  “Don’t start. You can’t keep teenagers under lock and key.” Although she had been considering doing exactly that.

  “Well, what do you want me to do? I’m fifteen hundred miles away, Elaine. Can’t I leave for a simple vacation without some damn catastrophe?”

  “You’re right, Frank. I’m sorry to disturb you. If she ever does come home, I’ll drop you a line.”

  Sound of Frank being annoyed in silence. Then he said, “What did you argue about?”

  “She’s been lying to me about some boy she’s been seeing. She wouldn’t tell me who he is.”

  “Lying? What, she said he was somebody else?”

  “She was just very evasive.” Elaine decided she would spare him her darkest suspicions. Frank would think she was nuts, maybe she was by now. “I was trying to get her away from a bad influence.” How far away was another thing she wouldn’t tell him. She never should have called that place, what was its name, something smarmy and deceptively encouraging, Horizons or Challenges. She hadn’t been thinking straight, she’d been angry and frustrated and she’d wanted to get Josie’s attention. She had wanted not to be ignored anymore.

  “Bad influence,” said Frank. “You ask me, everybody under twenty-five’s a bad influence these days.”

  “I’m trying to find the boyfriend. I expect that’s where she’s staying, with him.”

  Frank swore off to the side of the receiver. Elaine had a horrible thought. If Josie had … She couldn’t have overhead her on the phone. But if she had … “How’s Aspen?” she asked idiotically.

  “The damn time-share people screwed up the drain in the tub. It’s a total mess. I think they were grooming dogs in there. Look, shouldn’t you be doing something? Shouldn’t the police?”

  “They are.” She was trying to convince herself there was no possible way Josie could have been listening. “When are you coming back?”

  “Thursday. Unless you think we should get there sooner.”

  “No, I guess you can’t really … do anything.” It would be just like Josie to overreact in some grandiose and spiteful way. Make some rash gesture she didn’t even mean, out of pride and wounded feelings. Just like her mother.

  “Harvey’s going into the hospital the day after we get back. I’m telling you now so there won’t be any carrying on.”

  Oh God, Harvey. “Does he have any clue? Have you told him?”

  “The less he hears about it the better. You know I’m right.”

  No she didn’t, but there was only room in her for one crisis at a time, and Harvey would have to wait. “I’ll call you if there’s anything.”

  “You sound whipped.”

  “That’s me.”

  “She’ll turn up. Then I’ll beat the crap out of her.”

  “Don’t even joke like that. We’re going to have to do some serious, serious … Do you really think she’s all right?”

  “She better be or I’ll kill her.”

  She must be really far gone if talking to Frank was actually making her feel better. She hung up the phone and went back to waiting.

  School had already begun. The start of Josie’s senior year. Elaine met with the principal and the assistant principal and the guidance counselor. They were all very sympathetic and supportive and kept assuring her of what a good, an excellent, student Josie was, and how unlike her this behavior was, a minor episode, a peccadillo that would not interfere with her completing her coursework and graduating on schedule. Assuming, it went without saying, that she came back sometime soon. Meanwhile, if there was anything they could do, anything at all … There wasn’t, really, but it calmed her to talk to people who treated her as if she was in fact a good and responsible parent.

  Even as she was consoled and buoyed up by the helpful principal and his staff, Elaine couldn’t help thinking if this was so unlike Josie, did that mean Josie had been someone else all along?

  Elaine assumed that the usual rumors, pregnancy and the like, were making their way through the school hallways. She wanted to get on the intercom, scream at them all to shut up.

  There were times she imagined Josie was dead. She let the unspeakable idea come to rest in her mind. There were plenty of people out there who did horrible, brutal things. You didn’t have to look very hard to find them, in fact you could hardly get away from them. Elaine had seen a news show once about a murdered girl, and the girl’s mother who had gone to the crime scene some months later, just to witness it. To some people it had seemed morbid or crazy, but Elaine had understood completely. She would have done the same. Would do the same if she had to. Was already seeing, in her vision, the reeking stairwell, or the sidewalk with its pattern of crazy cracks, or the floor from which the stained mattress had already been removed. Then she asked why she was doing this to herself, and called a friend who had become a Baha’i and was famous for her optimism.

  This was the way things went on for most of a week.

  Elaine went to her appointment with the police youth officer. She gathered that this was someone who usually dealt with gangs. Walking into police headquarters felt unreal, like innumerable bad movies in which she was the somewhat overdressed lady whose role it was to clutch at her handbag and snivel. She sat in a plastic chair in the lobby. There didn’t seem to be much going on, in terms of crime. A fattish man in a coat and tie walked past, drinking coffee from a styrofoam cup. A woman came in to complain about a neighbor who was either cutting down trees or refusing to cut trees, Elaine couldn’t tell. She listened to the two desk clerks talk about their weekend.

  “We got the subfloor done. And two of the cabinets. Then we went to the Spaghetti Shop for di
nner because you couldn’t even get to the refrigerator.”

  “What did you have, the Bucket of Meatballs?”

  “No, the Chicken Alfredo.”

  “Oh, that’s good too.”

  Elaine had arrived there early, she was always early for things. It was a bad idea because it assumed that other people took your business as seriously as you did.

  “Mrs. Lindstrom?”

  One of the clerks led her back behind a half-gate and directed her to another chair, wooden this time. It wasn’t a proper office, only a semipartitioned desk in a room full of desks occupied by unbusy-looking men. One of them was very carefully unwrapping a large sandwich. A fly circled him. She had expected a little more privacy. She couldn’t imagine anyone here being any help.

  “Sorry to keep you waiting.” A man came up behind her and Elaine revolved in her chair trying to keep track of him and to catch up with the hand he offered. “I’m Bob Kellerman. Why don’t you tell me about your daughter.”

  Elaine recited the meager list of known facts, thinking that Bob Kellerman did not look much like a cop. He had curly black hair, the type that was impermeable to brushes or combs, cut short. A woolly goatee. He wore a suit and one of those skinny, rumpled ties that was either very trendy or very much not so. She didn’t even pretend to keep track of these things anymore. Big black-rimmed glasses, the same thing. The suit fit as if it was borrowed.

  “I’m really a social worker,” he said, when Elaine finished talking.

  “Beg pardon?”

  “People are always trying to get me figured. My background is social work, then I did advanced courses in criminology. I don’t have a gun or handcuffs or any of that.”

  “Well, what do you have?”

  “A tape recorder and a cell phone. OK. All we were able to find in the computer was a curfew stop a couple of months ago. Your daughter had no other record of police involvement.”

  “Oh.”

  “That’s usually good news.”

  “It is. But I thought … I know she’s been hiding things from me. I was sure it was drugs, or worse. I was afraid she might be … being exploited.”

  Kellerman shoved his clunky glasses to the top of his nose, considering. “Do you have a picture of her?”

  Elaine handed it across the desk. Josie’s class picture from last year. Josie hadn’t liked it. In it she wore a white sweater and her hair was fluffed over her shoulders. She was smiling in a way that she had complained was “sappy.”

  “Pretty girl.”

  He probably said that about all the runaways. “Thank you.”

  “Can I keep this for a while?”

  Elaine realized this would be the picture on the Missing poster, if there was going to be such a thing. Josie was going to be furious.

  Kellerman asked if there was any particular evidence of drug use. Alcohol? Scholastic problems?

  No and no and no. He rubbed at his goatee as if it itched. “Well, she’s certainly not your usual at-risk kid. Believe me, I see enough of those to say.”

  “Then where is she?”

  “The odds are she’s fine. She’s mad and she’s making sure you know it.”

  “Odds,” said Elaine unhappily.

  “Does her father live with you?”

  “We’re divorced but he’s here in town.” Elaine felt she had to make some explanation. “That is, he’s not here right now. He’s on vacation.” That didn’t sound right either. “I’ve talked to him and he’s coming back in a few days.”

  Elaine gave up. She honestly hadn’t intended to make Frank sound like an absentee slob of a parent.

  Kellerman asked her about Josie’s friends, anyplace she might have gone. Older kids who might have their own apartments. Elaine said she had called everyone she could think of. “They either don’t know anything or they won’t tell me. It’s the boyfriend, I’m sure. You hear about these things all the time. Young, impressionable girls taking up with criminals because they’re able to exert an influence over them.” She hoped that Kellerman would know she was talking about sex without her having to come out and say it.

  “You know, you’re just making it harder on yourself. You don’t know any of this for sure.”

  “Being hard on myself isn’t the problem right now.”

  “Would you say you have a generally good relationship with your daughter, at least until this episode, or have there always been problems?”

  “Is any of this going to help you find her?”

  “It’s a family situation. So I’m asking.”

  She hadn’t come here for counseling, especially from some bad-suit semi-hipster. He was younger than she was, but still too old to be dressing like a comedy-show host. She couldn’t see his feet, but she would bet money he was wearing tennis shoes. “We argue over the usual things. Curfew, schoolwork, boys. She’s never run away before. Please tell me what you’re going to do.”

  “I’ll pass her description and photo on to the patrol units. They won’t start an investigation without some evidence of coercion or foul play.”

  “You mean, finding her body?”

  Kellerman said, evenly, “It’s not a criminal matter yet. That’s all I’m saying.”

  “Fine.” Elaine began to get up.

  “I know the most urgent thing is finding her, but you might want to think about what you’re going to do once she gets back. How you want to address the issues.”

  Elaine sat down again. “I want to be able to talk to her. We can’t have a conversation now that doesn’t explode in our faces. I want her to stop being so angry at me just because I’m there to be angry at. I don’t want her to be so unhappy.”

  “What is she unhappy about?”

  “Her father and me divorcing. Him remarrying. I’m not sure what else. That she can’t grow up and move out in the next fifteen minutes.”

  “That all sounds pretty normal.”

  “It’s not a normal world anymore.”

  “How so?”

  “There are too many sick, crazed people out there who make meanness their life. Everyday you read some new depraved thing in the headlines. I can’t not imagine the worst. I can’t not worry about her. Even when she was sitting in the same room with me I worried. Kids think they can handle everything. They don’t have a clue.”

  “Maybe not, but most of them get by. Turn out just fine.”

  “Do they?” Elaine was aware she was being shrill, her voice spiraling up into some region of fatigue and grievance. “Fine. None of us are fine.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “We’re sick at heart. Everybody. More or less. Nobody knows how they’re supposed to live. Or even if there is a supposed to. Never mind. God, I hate it when I get like this. I want my daughter back.”

  “You’ll get her back. I’m betting on it. And maybe it’ll turn out to be a good thing. A chance to put your relationship on a different basis.”

  “Yes,” said Elaine. She felt as if she had emptied herself out in a heap on the desk, in front of a strange stranger.

  “I hope you’ll do some things for yourself in the meantime. Be with family, friends, whatever support group you have.”

  Elaine had a brother in Denver, but he was not the kind of brother you called to make yourself feel better. “I’ve told some of my friends, certainly, but I haven’t wanted to broadcast it. People start feeling they ought to do something. People you don’t especially like show up at your door with pound cakes.”

  “Of course, the more people who know about it, the more out there looking for her.”

  Elaine acknowledged that this was so. She supposed she felt reluctant about telling people. Josie’s running away some kind of disreputable event. Bullshit, Josie would have said. Would she ever stop making mistakes, marching off smartly in all the wrong directions? She had to admit, Kellerman was good. He’d gotten her to consider any number of things, say aloud any number of things she had not intended. She had not taken him seriously. She supposed people
often did not. He was contemplating his hands, which he had tented together on the desk, as if he knew what she was thinking and was modestly avoiding her gaze.

  Elaine said, “Thank you. I guess I needed to unload some of that.”

  “You really feel that way? About the world being rotten and everybody’s miserable? Something like that?”

  “I don’t know. Sometimes. When I’m feeling low. When I haven’t slept for three days and my only child runs off to show how much she despises me, yeah, I do. Other times I think that being alive is what paradise is. Or that’s how it should be. Listen to me. Have you ever heard such blathering?” She was glad no one else in the room was really close enough to hear.

  “It’s interesting blather,” said Kellerman. “High-minded. Gives the joint some class. What about people who walk around saying, ‘It’s the Lord’s will,’ or ‘Everything happens for a reason.’ Aren’t they happy? They’ve got a system. They’re covered.”

  Elaine was beginning to enjoy the conversation in a way she would not have expected. “It must be a wonderful way to live. Thinking that your every action is fraught with significance. Finding a parking place. Not finding a parking place. Everything part of the infinite plan.”

  “Well, maybe everything is. Just not the way people think. I was reading this article about something called ‘cellular automatons. ’”

  “Cellular …”

  “It’s a computer simulation that tries to mirror the way the laws of nature work. It has to do with how complex results derive from simple beginnings. Seemingly random events are actually predictable. The result of repeating a sequence of possible combinations.”

  Elaine shook her head. “Sorry. Not a computer person.”

  “It’s not really about computers. I’m not explaining it very well. Imagine water vapor freezing into snowflakes. The flakes can take any number of shapes, an infinite number. But you start with just a few basic combinations of crystals. Think of a horizontal row of three squares. Then one square beneath it. Some of the squares are empty, some of them are filled in. All solid or all blank or something inbetween. A sequence. Replicate the sequence according to a regular set of rules, over and over and over, like a computer would, and you get, guess what?”