by Larry Crane
She quenched the dryness in her throat with a glass of water from the fridge, then shuffled to the stairs, grasped the handrail and pulled herself to the top. She ditched her clothes for a light housedress. She drew the curtains across the windows. She threw back the bedspread and slid under the top sheet, pulling it over her head.
She cringed against telephone calls she imagined getting, in which a sad Chief Nickerson informed her that Hannah’s lifeless body had been recovered from the far reaches of Shady Brook. She preferred sleep to wakefulness even though she couldn’t erase the vision of Hannah’s face covered with soggy leaves and her own disheveled hair every time she closed her eyes. She saw an icy mortuary and an attendant in white coat pulling a metal drawer open to reveal Hannah’s body.
The heat caused Marcella to push the sheet away and lay on her back to stare at the ceiling. Hot tears brimmed onto her cheeks and ran down onto the pillow. Sometime during the afternoon, she heard Celia come in the front door. Later, she closed her eyes when Celia quietly opened the door of the bedroom, looked in, and just as quietly shut it again.
In the late afternoon the sinking sun briefly pierced the clouds and created a slanting plank of light that broke through the leaves of the maple out front, past the edge of the curtain. It played against the dressing table across the bedroom, creating a wavering white disk on the ceiling, a reflection of the back of her chrome hand mirror. Something a little like an egg, Marcella thought.
“Is that you up there, Sweetie?” she said out loud. “Or just a dream?”
She felt a hand on her shoulder and opened her eyes and saw Gavin standing at the side of the bed. He’d changed out of his business suit into khakis and a tee shirt. “Wake up, sleepyhead,” he said. “Celia’s whomped up one of your marvelous Marcella’s Macaroni Salads. It’s all laid out down stairs. Come on down.”
“Bring it up to me, please,” she said.
“Come on,” he said.
“Celia will bring it.”
“Be that way,” Gavin said, smiling. He sat on the edge of the bed. “Come downstairs and be with us, Marce.”
“Have Celia save some for me,” she said, turning her back to him.
When he left for work the next morning she had not yet gotten up. When he returned in the evening he saw that she hadn’t moved. He sat on the edge of the bed and rubbed Marcella’s back.
“Our client conference is scheduled for August,” he said. “As usual, it’s expected that spouses will come along. It’s a marvelous spot, sort of rising out of the desert, as I understand it. The Ventana Canyon Resort. It’ll be low-key, hot as hell in the daytime, but cool in the evening. We’ll walk around and take it all in. We need to step away from here for just a little while. We’ve got a couple of weeks to think about it.”
Chapter 6
As the time for Ventana Canyon approached, Marcella thought of little else. At supper, she poked at the chicken parmesan that Celia had put together. We should take every meal here in the breakfast nook, she thought. Everything in our lives should be simplified. Any extravagance no matter how small—even eating in the dining room—is inappropriate with Hannah gone from our lives and her absence needing our full attention. Listen to me with all the shoulds. Never mind. Caring is sending our love out to Hannah to give her strength wherever she is.
“I wish you could understand how I feel about diverting my attention away from our baby,” she said to Gavin. "I know this resort thing is important to you and to us, but it’s frivolous in comparison to what she’s going through. Everyone who knows us is thinking the same thing. To go will seem heartless of us to anyone with any knowledge of the situation, and with good reason,” Marcella said.
Gavin slumped in his chair. “When you talk like that, you make me seem like such a toad. I don’t know what will constitute the end of the mourning period. I’m not sure you really believed that I should go back to work when I did. We have to eat to live, but even eating seems a sacrilege. Should we go on bread and water? I don’t want to diminish the importance of staying true to our baby girl. But I think I will lose my position at the bank if I don’t go to the conference. I think I will slip in their estimation if you don’t go. If I slip, our life will be even more altered. That’s it, as plain as I can put it.”
“Even more altered. Why?” she asked.
“Because it’s been six months, Marce, and sympathy has already begun to give way to practicality. It’s a sad fact.”
They flew into Tucson for an evening arrival and rented a Ford Torino. The resort was a collection of adobe-style buildings fused into a sheer cliff at the end of a paved road that twisted through the golf course. Lush tees, fairways, and greens flourished in the midst of brown desert. Flowering succulents dotted the mounds and hollows and surrounded the gigantic Saguaro Cactus that saluted like soldiers whose prickly skin had been peppered by balls from errant golf shots. Within an hour of finding their room on the second floor, they sat on their balcony sipping Mimosas and squinting into the sun as it disappeared into cool desert silence.
The conference was a series of presentations by Gavin’s lieutenants the first day, followed in the evening by a formal dinner and speech by Cokey Roberts: Kent State Students and the Cambodia Incursion. The second day was given over to client schmoozing that included tennis or golf for the business people and a day at the spa or shopping in Tucson for the spouses.
Marcella skipped the shopping and stayed in the room. After the maid came and did up the bed, she dropped onto the bedspread and quickly fell asleep. There was no escaping the moving pictures of Hannah that played against the back of her eyelids, all in chronological order: as a toddler carrying Gavin’s shoes to the back bedroom after he’d shed them moments after coming home from work—barreling recklessly down the slope of their driveway on her bike in third grade—skipping around the maypole with all of her laughing friends.
She awoke and went to the window to look down on the patio in front. Gavin sat beside a woman in a golf cart gesticulating and laughing as they came in off the eighteenth hole of the golf course. It felt as if she’d just been poked in the chest with the pointed knuckle of someone’s fist.
Here I am, sequestering myself, surrendering to a nap, while Gavin cavorts outside with his clients. He has no trouble pushing thoughts of Hannah off into the atmosphere when they interfere with this indulgence called The Semi-Annual Client Conference, all expenses paid.
The evening’s activities involved eating, drinking, and dancing. If this isn’t betrayal, what is then? she thought. How can this pretentious fandango, Ventana Canyon Resort, live side-by-side with the fact of the disappearance of our child? Don’t make a scene of it, even tonight alone with him. He never makes a scene. He doesn’t care enough to.
In the morning she managed to bring off a sparkling socializing presence with departing clients and their spouses who had no inkling of the stiffness gripping the back of her neck. She did it to tame the tinge of guilt that had crept into her heart.
It isn’t fair to lay it all off on him—the whole responsibility of going on in all sorts of ways—while I cave-in to hopelessness and sleep the days away. Does he feel the same dead weight in his chest? Who knows, she thought.
As the last of the clients and Northern Trust staff broke away from the farewell brunch in the resort ballroom, the smiles Marcella and Gavin managed to keep plastered to their faces faded. They meandered out to the registration area and sunk into one of the plush couches that ringed the enclosure.
It’s exhausting keeping up fake A Game cheerfulness, but I know the drill—Gavin’s the boss and needs to show it—ready with the names of every last client as well as their spouses—a wizard at having a spot-on observation about something going on in their life. As his wife, I’m overjoyed to meet and mingle with all of them, of course. I’m good at it. I should be by now—with my practiced sincerity, the laugh that never fails to light up the face of the dullest in the crowd. Everyone knows us—everything about us.
And everyone studiously avoids the subject of Hannah.
“That wasn’t so bad, was it?” Gavin said, allowing a long sigh.
“Of course not,” she said. “We’re a team, a good one. Everyone knows it and expects us to live up to the billing.”
“We don’t have to hurry back home,” he said. “It’s hot down here, but it’s the same up there, maybe worse. Credit the dry heat. Everyone does. We could just hang around the pool, or even the room. Air conditioning, it’s a wonderful thing.”
What will people say, she thought. ‘They’re off frolicking somewhere in the Southwest. Didn’t take long for them to get back in the swing of things.’
“We’re not goofing off here,” Gavin said. "Northern doesn’t pay me to ignore clients. I don’t like it any more than you do, but we have to sparkle. It’s not a betrayal to do this.”
“I vote we board the next plane,” she said. “I don’t care what people say about us. But I can’t ignore what my body tells me—I’m Hannah’s mother and if I stop thinking of her for one second, it’s permission for everyone else to do the same. I don’t want to be in that position. I refuse.”
“Compromise with me, Marce. We’ll dump all the ready-made merriment in the trash can where it belongs. But, I need a break. We both do. We need to breathe. Let all this open space absorb the gloom clinging to us. I’ve been putting on this brave face for months, and it’s dragging me down. I want to just drive off into the open desert and let it pop the pressure. Let’s spend a night in the boonies, alone with each other. Let’s push all the troubles away for just one night. Please, Marce.”
How can I refuse? Our troubles don’t amount to anything in comparison to Hannah’s. But we’re here and I can’t say no to ‘please.’ He’s never said please to me before, ever.
They packed up the Torino and shot almost due north from Tucson through Phoenix and Flagstaff toward Kayenta, with the AC blasting away at the desert heat.
“You’re doing your best not to smile,” Gavin said.
“I agreed to come.”
“After I twisted your arm. Are you ever going to smile again?”
“I agreed to take this drive. So, drive,” she said.
“Monument Valley. If you’re this close to paradise, you have to go see it.”
“I’m not happy that we’ve come out here together,” she said. “You know that. But, I do welcome something, whatever it may be, to replace the nothingness we’ve been living with. There. I said it. Let’s go.”
It was a largely silent seven-hour trip with a single pit stop at a Howard Johnson restaurant just north of Phoenix. They came into Kayenta suddenly—little more than a scattering of buildings with a couple of modest sit-down restaurants and fast-food spots. Kayenta is at the southern end of Monument Valley. Its one cultural attraction was the library. The road sign read Kayenta: Population 5,364. They had a burger and a beer at the Longhorn Restaurant and booked a room with a king-size bed in the Monument Valley Inn. At nine o’clock they sat side-by-side watching Carol Burnett on TV.
“What is it about the investigator we hired that you like?” she asked.
“Nothing. He’s straightforward. Clear-eyed. We voted to do everything we could think of to keep up the pressure. He’s doing it. That’s all.”
“He hasn’t come up with anything new.”
“He warned us in the beginning that there are no guarantees. Besides, it isn’t nothing. Within a month he came up with the only clue we have. It just hasn’t gone anywhere yet.”
“The phantom van,” Marcella said.
“Not phantom. Nobody wrote down the plate number, so what did he have to go on? It’s a miracle he was able to track it this far.”
“A window glass installer from somewhere unknown, unnamed.”
“He did the scut work, interviewing. What was it, seventy-five interviews? One after another. It’s tenuous, but it’s something.”
“What do we know? Braun’s Bakery needs a replacement glass for their pastry display case. Something’s unique about it. So they call a number provided by the local glass shop, and this guy comes out in a white van. He measures and takes the order, says it’s going to take a while, he’s swamped. That’s all we know.”
“It’s a special order. The guy’s a subcontractor. At some point, he’ll go back to deliver the glass. Maybe he saw something. It’s a tremendously long shot to say the least. Meanwhile, Rathskeller keeps tracking. It’s something. Better than the police.”
“They have no record of such a van.”
“There are thousands of nondescript white delivery vans.”
“All right. I’ll shut up,” Marcella said.
After an Egg MacMuffin and coffee in the car, they drove north on tar-dripped macadam out of Kayenta on a road laid down in a straight line through the magnificent but desolate Monument Valley toward Mexican Hat—a flat desert vista with classic red buttes rising up far off in the blue haze. The earth merged with the sky at the horizon. It seemed as if they were flying. The spires were better in real life, bigger, than they ever were in a John Wayne western, poking up through the sage—like full to bursting massive helium balloons.
“Rathskeller is helping, but we could do more, Gavin,” she said. “We’re paralyzed, waiting for something to turn up. We’re smart people. Why can’t we come up with more ideas?”
“I’m not standing in the way of any good idea from anybody, but I’m drained, Marce. My brain is on empty. Can we just coast along for a while and not load-up on more urgency? Maybe that can get the synapses firing again.”
“I’ve lost any faith I had in the police and all the experts. They’re as ineffectual as we are. Time keeps slipping away.”
“You mean the FBI. Well, they only assist. Unless there’s something definite pointing to interstate abduction or whatever. With all the time that’s gone by, nothing is popping up. I believe Nickerson and the others are doing everything there is to do. Leads come up and drift off into nothing again, but at least the search is still alive. We don’t want to send a message that we’ve given up or that they should give up. We keep bugging them, poking them. That’s what we’ve been doing and what we should continue to do.”
A road sign instructed visitors to respect the Navaho Indian custom of not taking pictures of them. Marcella stared out the side window at the unreal silent moonscape where a twisting gravel track led to an outlook at the top of a mesa far-off in the distance. Another side road climbed steeply to its top, the outlook nothing more than a flat empty place to park. There was a single wire trash basket containing a handful of paper cups and cartons. They walked to the far end of the parking space and looked out across the treeless expanse.
“What do you truly hope for?” Marcella said.
“I hope she’s alive.”
“That’s all?”
“It’s hard to believe that she’s actually going to come back to us. I just hope that somewhere out there, she’s alive,” he said.
“I hope she knows that we’ll never stop looking.”
“Life keeps going. Brett’s graduated. Celia’s accepted at Carleton. We’ll need to drive her up to Northfield. We can’t lay a guilt trip on her for enrolling or for Brett to plan his future. It’s not betrayal to continue living. We can’t just lie down in bed. We can’t.”
“I feel completely hollow inside. Useless,” Marcella said. “But, we keep hoping. That’s what we do. Nothing else matters.”
She turned. Back beside the trash basket she saw a scraggly coy dog sniffing, a female with swollen teats. The animal pivoted and stood still staring back at them, the hot wind ruffling her gray-brown fur, her eyes blinking against the swirling dust.
“We don’t have anything to give her,” Marcella said.
“No. She’ll survive.”
“How about the pups?”
“They’ll survive too,” Gavin said.
“We’re splintering. We’ll be alone in the house when Celia leaves for Carleton.”
“It happens. We wanted them to be independent and strong.”
“You did. I want them home with us, especially now.”
“We can’t raise them strong, then rescind the whole shooting match as soon as something happens,” he said.
“Something happens? Is that how you see it?”
“Stop testing me.”
“Survival is the best we can hope for?”
“I didn’t suggest this trip to push Hannah out of our lives. I don’t want to forget even for a second.”
The main highway connected to Route 261, and by late afternoon they found themselves north of Mexican Hat, Utah, creeping down nasty switchbacks from the top of the Mokee Dugway, a thousand-foot drop in three miles—with sagebrush desert stretching out at the bottom of it to more mesas and buttes in the distance.
At the bottom, Valley of the Gods Road, a dusty track, appeared through the dirt streaked windshield and they turned off, ready by this time to collapse. They found a low-slung ranch house set off on the right side of the road and a sign: Valley of the Gods B&B.
“Do you think I was saying you wanted to forget?” Marcella asked.
“Sometimes I think you feel you’re in this alone. That I’ve gone on and left you.”
“Brett and Celia must think that of us—the way we pushed them to go on with their lives and leave these messy things to us.”
“They couldn’t think that.”
“They do. I know they do.”
The B&B had a vacancy and they grabbed it. The house got better the more they saw of it. The walls were all stone, and the roof was hand-hewn rafters and wide planks. They were directed down the road a mile or two to The Swingin’ Steak. The menu was limited but good—T-bone steak and bottled beer. Back at the B&B they sank into deep cushioned chairs on the veranda with their legs stretched out, gazing at the sun sinking behind the rim of the sky.
The rock formations running out to the horizon melted into their own shadows. The night came on them quickly almost as if a curtain slid in from both sides—and without any man-made sources interfering, all light was extinguished except that projected from the thin crescent moon and Venus hanging low in the western sky. They stepped off the verandah and away from the house and looked up into the brilliant display of celestial bodies splashed overhead and around them, as if they were peering out of a spacecraft porthole as it circumnavigated the planet.