“I don’t want to abandon all those people,” she said after a moment’s consideration.
“Abs,” James said gently. “I’ve been thinking about this all day. I went out and met the guy’s father. Don’t take this the wrong way, OK?”
Abby scowled and folded her arms; James was a very arrogant brother sometimes.
“Those people don’t even know you exist,” he said, and though she felt like she ought to have been offended, she knew he was right.
6
You don’t see a lot of grain silos in New Mexico. They’re there, of course; silos are the great hidden constant of the industrialized world. But you only ever notice them if you happen to reach the saturation point: if you live across the street from one, say, or if, on your way to work each day, you drive past so many outcroppings of them that you lose count. In the West or down South, you have to go off the main highways to see them. Out here you’re bound to see a few.
James remained in the upstairs room after Abby had gone; the glare of the old monitor made his eyes burn, so he scooted the rolling chair over to the window to rest for a minute. He looked out: near the boundary line, diagonally opposite the abandoned cars, stood the remains of an animal enclosure, pigs probably. Its rough wooden beams sagged but held their intended shape; you could picture the whole of it thriving with life some spring morning, spry and noisy, bright and needful. Just over its distal beams, right before the fallow Pratt field gave way to the neatly tilled furrows of the neighboring property, was a pile of discarded wood with bits of rusting wire jutting out from it: something roughly dismantled either by hand or by hatchet, left to warp and splinter in the sun and rain.
To one side of this modest ruin, just before where the grass grew high and wild, was a squat silo, dull silver, with a cap like an inverted funnel. There couldn’t be anything in it, could there? James sat and thought. If this house had been empty for some time before Mom and Dad arrived, then any grain left in the silo would be rotten by now, perhaps wholly decomposed. He imagined fermented slurry seeping out into the soil, the ground gradually absorbing it over the course of several frozen winters and thawing springs, no trace left of the process.
At first he didn’t like the idea, but as he sat staring through the window, he grew fonder of it: a small place, unmarkably emptied of something that had been there once but found its own way out, mindlessly, without intention, by allowing time and air and its own internal moisture to do the work. A relic of no demonstrable presence. He wondered.
By the time he reached the silo on foot, about ten minutes later—getting there was slower going than he’d envisioned; grass was thick on the ground, and the dirt from which it grew was lumpy and uneven, not the gentle rumpled blanket it appeared to be from the upstairs window—he had a clear picture in his mind of what he’d see there, and it wasn’t far off from what he actually found: an empty space enclosed by corrugated tin.
He’d expected a concrete foundation, someplace for grain to safely rest; but the silo stood atop bare earth, stray weeds growing inside it now: pale grasses availing themselves of the small daily ration of sunlight that came through a warping space where some screws had come loose. He could imagine himself staking a claim to someplace like this: finding it as a young boy and designating it a clubhouse or a fort.
But as a young boy, he had been happy; he’d gone to a big school, found many friends and some enemies there, lived a life so busy with errands and activities that there’d been a calendar on his wall by the time he was seven, so he wouldn’t lose track of soccer practice and swimming lessons. When he pictured a boy who might make this tiny silo his playhouse, he saw someone whose nearest friend was clear across the neighboring field. It was a lonely thing to imagine.
As his mind idled in the three-quarter dark it also wandered to the contents of the tapes in the second box: the one Abby hadn’t gotten around to emptying and arranging on the cellar floor. Were there tapes in it marked Silo #1, or Night Silo, or North Boundary? What was on them? New people, further detail? Of course there is not enough light inside the silo to record anything that happens there beyond the audio, but James wasn’t thinking that far ahead. He pictured faces, action; revelations instead of only the solitary sound of our voices in the dark.
The trip back to the house felt shorter than the walk out had been. He went back up to where the computer was. The questions he wanted to answer and the ones he meant to leave alone had coalesced into two distinct groups. Even on his mom’s antique connection he thought he could get it all settled by evening.
* * *
The old computer tower buzzed and whirred as James fed his scant supply of useful search terms into the browser: the address of his parents’ new house; the names by which people had either identified themselves or one another on the tapes; a few names and dates he’d harvested from a property deed among Dad’s business papers in the filing cabinet. Current owner, prior residence, date of birth: it was enough.
“Oh, seriously?” he said when he saw a Tripod page as the top result. It was like looking through a telescope into a lost age. “People still use Tripod?”
The page was headlined THEY WERE OUR SONS AND DAUGHTERS, and was a place people had gone, in desperation, to put their grief. It boasted all the trappings of the initial expansion of the Internet from college campuses and computer laboratories to the wider world: site design from a template supplied by the host, clip art, and several uncorrected spelling errors in the single paragraph atop the frame. The Michael Christopher Gathering Also Known As Michael’s Friends Has Brainwashed Our Childrern And Our Families. This Is Our Story, it began, and continued:
Most of Us Have Spent Many Years Seraching For Those We Have Lost. Now We Can Use the World Wide Web to Share Our Story. Please Use These Pages To Learn About Who Michael Christopher Is And Ask In Your Heart If You Can Help.
James read the text dutifully, but his eyes were drawn irresistibly to the faces underneath it, arranged like portraits in a high school yearbook. He felt the nausea he’d fought back in the basement two days ago return: all this trauma felt private, raw, something to be protected from outsiders. He disliked feeling like a voyeur.
If You Have Seen Any of the People On This Page, Please Sign Our Guestbook. You Can Also Reach Us By Email. Every Little Bit Helps, We Can Be Reached At [email protected].
He had to click through seven faces and read their stories—of children or parents gone missing, notes left behind, whole lifetimes coming to consist only of loose ends—before he got to Irene Sample.
This is my wife, Irene, the mother of our only daughter, Lisa. Lisa is thirty now. She was Five when Irene was taken from us. Although we are apart now I know we both still miss her every day. I am an old man now but there will always be a place in my home for you, Irene. Lisa lives in Nevada now. She has an apartment there. She would love to See you.
Her hair was in a modest bun; her smile was gentle, unforced. The picture was in black and white and had been taken at a photo studio in a Montgomery Ward. It had so little in common with the world in which James lived most of his life that looking at it made him feel dizzy.
Their grief wasn’t his to bear, he knew. But it was inside him all the same, like a secret entrusted to a messenger. He dimmed the monitor to black and closed his eyes; the residual gleam ebbed against his eyelids for the better part of a minute. He felt very tired. He did not return to the site to read the guestbook again, where Jeremy Heldt—in a note read eight times in total, according to a helpful counter at the bottom right corner of the post—shared his small part of the story with no one in particular.
Just wanted to stop by here to say I am sorry for all you have had to go through. I know what it is like to lose your mother. Hope someday you can get the answers you need.
Abby came in; James opened his eyes. “Did you write to him yet?” she said.
“I’m getting to it,” he said, reaching for the dial quaintly housed in the right underside of the
monitor.
* * *
They ate dinner all together that night; Emily made a big pasta bake and heated up some dinner rolls. To the parents, this gathering felt miraculous: it was fifteen hundred miles from Collins to West Covina; they hadn’t reckoned the other distances collapsed at the table, from Portland and Santa Fe, from the outside silo to the upstairs room. The weird shock of the videotapes James had recovered from the Oldsmobile loaned a sense of common purpose to their reunion now, something easier to approach than the things they’d all been both thinking of and trying not to think about just yesterday morning: advancing age, graduation, their various places in the world.
“So tell me about Nevada,” Ed said to his son. He intoned the long initial a in Nevada with relish: it takes outsiders forever to get over it.
“I met the dude’s dad,” said James. “Steve. He says his son is fine and lives in Des Moines and he used to work at a video store.”
“And?”
“That’s pretty much it,” said James, looking around the table. “Abby thinks we should just drop it from there.”
“Do you think that?” Ed asked, turning.
“Kind of,” said Abby. “I don’t know.”
“Well,” Ed said, and his children both steeled themselves: Dad was about to try to shepherd them toward a conclusion. The opening gambit of Dad’s conclusion schtick was always a barrage of questions. “What if these had been just somebody’s regular home movies?”
“Dad, I know where you’re going with this, but please with the what-ifs,” said James. Ed looked back at him with wonder, trying to suppress his delight: he didn’t want to condescend; there’s a complex but palpable joy in seeing your children outgrow you. “There are three things we can do, OK? One, we can watch all the tapes and keep finding people if they say their names and check up on them. No, right?”
He waited, looking around the table, then continued. “Two, we go to the horse’s mouth and talk to the guy whose name we do know, which we can do because his father gave me his e-mail address. Jeremy.” Ed and Emily exchanged a glance; none of this was news to Abby, but she followed along, enjoying the mildly ridiculous but still impressive persona James had adopted, its ad hoc expertise cut just today from whole cloth.
“Or we don’t do anything,” said Emily, certain she’d arrived at James’s third possibility. “We talk more about why this bothers us and respect that it’s not our affair.”
“No, Mom,” said James. “I mean, yes, to me that’s obvious, but Abby hates that one.”
“Would you just tell them?” Abby said.
“She made me send the e-mail,” he said. Everybody exhaled quietly.
“We decided together,” protested Abby.
“That’s what you’ve been doing up there all afternoon?” said Emily.
“I looked at a few other things first. Abby was right, it was all a dead end.”
“Has he written back?” Ed asked, visibly concerned.
“It took him, like, a minute,” James said, measuring his tone; he felt his father’s need for something close to a definitive yes, something to shift the conversation back into the world of known quantities. “He sent me the address of the woman asking him questions on the tape. She lives in Tama. It’s less than an hour from here.”
He was holding something back; families can tell. They waited.
“He also said to leave her alone,” James said, finally. “‘You should leave her alone,’ is exactly what he wrote. ‘You probably won’t. I know how it is. I’ve seen it personally. But I wish you would.’”
They looked around, and down at their plates.
“He’s right,” said Abby resolutely.
“I know he’s right,” said James.
“Is it going to make a difference?” asked Abby.
“No,” said James.
“Was there anything else?” said Ed.
“He said never to write to him again. Not in a mean way, I don’t think,” said James. “‘I know you probably have a lot of questions, but I would appreciate it if you would please not write to me again. Don’t take this personally but all this stuff is none of your business. Sincerely, Jeremy Heldt.’”
“‘Sincerely’?” said Abby.
“‘Sincerely,’” James repeated, and Emily Pratt, alone among his audience, caught the sadness in his voice, this mood of concern for a stranger whose need to insulate himself from some unknown grief seemed both so clear and so hard to claim. It made her feel proud, to have a son like James.
When the pasta was all gone they finished off the dinner rolls. Any casual onlooker would have thought they were locals.
7
In most lives, in most places, people go missing. This isn’t as true as it was in a less connected age; people see more of their high school classmates on Facebook every day than they previously would have in their entire lives after graduation. Lonely husbands or wives form secondary accounts to keep track of lost loves and secret prospects; short of catastrophe, these points of contact never wholly erode. They may go ignored for months or years, but they crackle away in the cables, never wholly out of reach.
In Iowa we had a head start on this whole process, because when we gather on the Fourth of July or at Christmas, we find joy in tracing movements. The habit travels with us; whether we end up moving to Worthington or Owatonna or to the Black Hills in South Dakota, we maintain keen interest in what became of whom, whether we knew them well or not. If somebody in upper management at Mahindra got to talking with Mike about smallmouth bass at the annual expo in Des Moines and ended up offering him a package with better benefits, then that was how Mike and his family ended up in Troy: we may never see Troy with our own eyes, but we’ll know where Mike and the kids are all the same. Bill went back to Ashton. Oh, is that right? Yes, he never warmed up to Storm Lake, he feels more at home when he’s near where the folks used to live. Yes, that’s what Davy said, too; well, but he goes by Dave now, I think he only ever spent two years outside of Urbandale in his life. From Ashton to Bangkok to Spirit Lake to Ventura, and onward, to points further west beyond the imagination, we keep track of our own. It would feel like putting on airs to call it our passion, but it’s hard to know what else to call it. It’s sufficient work until it comes time to part ways, which we always must do, too soon sometimes.
Did anybody ever hear from Stephanie? Yes, she’s teaching again; she was in Ames for a while at Fellows Elementary, they say she had a gift with the special needs kids, but she’s not there any more, I don’t think, when I saw her at the Wheatsfield Grocery she said she still missed Chicago. Just recently? No, it was a while back, Ezra was working the counter, he looks so different from when he was young and still limps a little from the accident. Do his parents still farm? Yes, his father will still be hauling beans to the Farmer’s Exchange in that antique tractor with the cart behind it until he’s ninety-three, it’s all he knows how to do. But didn’t Ezra go off to school in Nebraska? Well, sure, but how’s he going to just turn around and be a Big Red guy for the rest of his life, everybody knew he’d be back. You know that nice secretary friend of Steve Heldt’s was a Cornhusker, though. She came to visit in the hospital. But Steve never remarried, did he? No, it didn’t work out, I guess. He says they still get dinner sometimes, though. I think it’s nice.
It’s not that nobody ever gets away: that’s not true. It’s that you carry it with you. It doesn’t matter that the days roll on like hills too low to give names to; they might be of use later, so you keep them. You replay them to keep their memory alive. It feels worthwhile because it is.
* * *
What will you do now? Lisa asks Sarah Jane, off camera.
I guess I’ll just go back home, Sarah Jane replies.
You were putting the house up for sale, says Lisa.
No serious buyers, says Sarah Jane. The agent says it could take months.
Lisa’s throat convulses when she tries to stifle her sobs. Sarah Jane’s face, in the frame,
shows compassion, empathy, and hurt. Her time with Lisa will seem like a strange dream of middle age in later years: some people take their savings and travel to Europe when they feel restless, but it costs so much to travel, certainly more than the monthly income from a single video rental store.
It’ll be all right, she says. We’ll both be all right. She reaches out with her right hand, but Lisa does not reach out to take it.
Lisa’s voice is desperate, lost.
Thank you for trying to help, she says.
Of course, says Sarah Jane, rising, walking with her arms open toward the tripod and then past it. If you look close you can see from the gentleness of her stride that she would have made a good mother.
The copy of Burnt Offerings onto which this scene was transferred is at the Goodwill in Ames next to the Hy-Vee on Lincoln Way. It was left there in the late summer of 2002. It sits on a shelf now next to several dozen other movies like it, back near the books; it’s an early VHS, housed in an oversized black plastic shell that’s grown old and is cracking along the edge. No one is ever going to take it home and watch it. It will probably be there forever.
* * *
There was no RV park in Tama; the nearest one was Shady Oaks, in Marshalltown, and people who parked there had no need to venture further than a highway stop for supplies. So Lisa was surprised to see the Greener Pastures coming, advancing steadily down the street. She stood at her window on the second floor and she watched; she couldn’t make out the faces of the people inside, but she could imagine them, how they probably looked. The vehicle itself, in the slow pace of the straight line it followed and the cheery tan and yellow of its camper shell, appeared like a seeker after something, certain of its quest but unsure of the path.
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