Before she even had a chance to knock, the door opened, and a shirtless man stood there, pointing a .22 rifle at her. A light in his house backlit him, and she saw clear oxygen tubing running from his nose, looping behind his ears, then disappearing behind the front door. The thought of a rifle and an oxygen tank scared her. She took a step back but didn’t say anything.
She wondered what good it had been to come here. They hadn’t broken down, and this man would not be helping them find Lou and Fern, not with his oxygen tank. Instead, Lucy Maud pointed to the Subaru. “Is that Ruben King’s car?”
The man lowered the barrel and looked behind her as if he didn’t know what she was talking about. “Who’s asking?”
Lucy Maud didn’t see any point in concealing her identity, though the unusual greeting had her disoriented. “I’m a friend of his son’s. Well, the mother of a friend of his son’s.” She thought for a minute. “I need his help. Is he here? My daughter and his son are missing. I think they’re together.”
His mouth fell open as he considered this news. “Huh.” He dropped the rifle to his side. “Well, I guess you better come in.” He opened the door wide for her.
She glanced back. She could still see Kevin. “Sure, just for a second. They’re not the only ones missing.”
The man brought her in and directed her to a striped velvet couch that she guessed was from the seventies. She sat, back straight, on the edge, feet tucked underneath her, looking around.
The house looked as if an old bachelor lived here alone. The ancient cathode ray television had a La-Z-Boy in front of it. Next to the La-Z-Boy sat a TV tray stacked high with newspapers, some unfolded and refolded, some still in their plastic sleeves. A pillbox was on the TV tray, too, a long clear one, with separate compartments for each day of the week. Leaned up against the La-Z-Boy were three containers of oxygen.
Lucy Maud noted all of this, perched as she was on the sofa’s edge, while the man fiddled with his oxygen tubing and sat back in the easy chair. When he put up the footrest, she said, “I can’t stay long. I’m just looking for Ruben King.”
The man cocked an eyebrow. “Do you know who I am?”
She shook her head.
“I’m Allen Potivar. Known Ruben for decades.” He watched her. “How’d you know to come down here if you don’t know who I am?” One eye was narrower than the other; she felt she was being interrogated. So what? she thought. None of this was a secret.
“Ruben told me to come down Nameless Road when I found Isaac. But I can’t find either Isaac or Boyd. My daughter. I thought he could help.” She looked away, the man’s gaze too much for her. “I saw his car from the road.”
He nodded. He was, she thought, deciding if she was telling the truth. She wished she had Boyd’s ability with people, but Lucy Maud had never had that understanding or ease. He still didn’t say anything, and she recognized his silence as another interrogation technique; he wanted her to be uncomfortable with this silence and to fill it.
“Look, is he here?”
He twisted his mouth, unprepared for the question. “Sort of.”
She exhaled, unable to control her impatience. “I don’t have time for this. Either he’s here or he’s not. Isaac and Boyd are both missing, and now I’ve got two more people missing, too.” She waved a hand behind her. “My twin sister and my senile aunt are wandering around out there. The authorities won’t help us. I don’t even know that Ruben can. But we need help from somewhere because I don’t know what else to do.” She ran a hand over her face. “And I’ve got my estranged husband in the car watching for them, but if I don’t hurry up, pretty soon he’ll be missing, too.” It seemed overwhelming suddenly, just an impossible situation.
Allen Potivar put the footrest down and leaned toward her. “Ruben King is here, on my property. Or at least he was an hour or two ago. He might be missing now, too. He doesn’t have a flashlight or anything, so he should have been back soon as it turned dark.”
She turned toward the open door, noting that he’d set the rifle down just inside. “He’s out there?”
Allen nodded. “Yep.” She shifted, leaning into the conversation, one elbow on the armrest. “And I got to decide what to tell you because, listen, if I tell you why he’s out there—what he’s after—you’ll go running out into the night, too.” Allen took a quick, deep breath through his oxygen nosepiece. “And you’ll want a piece of my pie, too, and I don’t yet know how much pie there is to go around.”
She blinked. “I don’t want any of your pie. I don’t know what pie you’re even talking about. I want to find my daughter. And my sister and my aunt.” She felt bad that Lou and Aunt Fern were almost afterthoughts.
“Okay. I’m going to hold you to that. Because you promised. Even when you find out what it is, it’s still mine. Not yours. And I agreed to share a little with Ruben King because he’s helping me.” Allen gestured to the oxygen tanks. “I can’t carry all of this stuff out there. I’ve got a portable oxygen concentrator—like a little pump—I carry with me, but the battery only lasts a couple of hours. I had to come back to the house to charge it, but he wanted to stay working. In the meantime, it got dark.” Allen fixed his gaze on hers. “He don’t even have a flashlight, like I said. That was the first thing we should have done when we opened the mine: come back up to the house and get a flashlight or a lantern or something.”
She laughed, finally putting two and two together. “A mine? That’s what he was going on about then when I talked to him? Maximilian and Pedro Zamora.”
“Yorba,” Allen corrected her. “Pedro Yorba.”
“Whatever. Y’all know that’s—” She didn’t finish the statement. What did they or she or any of them know? Rumors of gold that, if it had existed at all, would have been found a hundred years ago. “Are you saying that you have a mine on your property and that Ruben King is there?”
He reached out a hand, fingers splayed, then closed it quickly into a fist, drawing back. It wasn’t a threatening gesture but one of dismay, trying to grab his own words and shove them back in. “Now, you can’t tell anybody, you understand?”
She stood, breathing deeply so that he would take her seriously, would not dismiss her as hysterical. “Who am I going to tell? I can’t get anybody to listen to me. And this”—she gestured to the misty night beyond the open front door—“is about the craziest thing I’ve ever seen. You know what happens during a normal rain?” He didn’t answer. “Everybody stays home. They sit on their couch with a blanket and a frozen pizza and they watch TV. They don’t all go out in it and disappear.” She snapped her fingers, raising her hand above her head. “Why in the hell are people wandering off in this weather? One after another?” Even herself, she thought, even though she knew better.
He nodded, thinking about this. “Well, I know why Ruben King is out there. I’d be out there, too, if I could breathe. I smoked for just under fifty years, and let me tell you, that was a mistake.”
“Is your pump charged now?”
He glanced at the machine next to the wall. To Lucy Maud, it looked like a large lunch box. “Yes. But it’s dark. I only get two, maybe two and a half hours on that pump, and if it runs out, I might die. You ever stop breathing for a few minutes? It’s likely to kill you.” He sat back in his chair, straightening his arms for leverage, palms planted firmly on the armrests. “I almost come close enough to know a couple of times.”
She walked to the door and glanced out. Kevin still scrolled through his phone in her passenger seat, his face top-lit, everything below his glasses cast in shadow. She felt, again, how much she’d missed him, even with all of his pretend helping and general uselessness. She’d drag him through this life if she got the chance. She thought that he, too, felt some pull. He’d been with her now for close to thirty hours, and yes, he was helping find Boyd, but there was something more, something urgent and essential between the two of them, like a drink of water when you were thirsty. She knew that she was no competition for
the grad student, but here he was, with Lucy Maud and lying to the grad student. She thought of the way forward, and she decided that she was grown-up now, well accustomed to life’s amalgam of bitter and sweet, and she wondered if they would be able to reach some kind of time-share-husband deal, where she had Kevin part of the time and where he lived his Austin full-professor life the rest of the time. She didn’t want that part of his life anymore, anyway: the endless infighting of academia and the perpetual complaints about students, but also the hero worship, where every year a new crop of acolytes convened at the feet of a man who hadn’t written a book—or even a journal article—in seven years. In that world, and maybe in this one, too, his favorite thing to do was to love himself. But she didn’t care that he was Narcissus by the mountain pool. She just wanted him around some of the time.
She turned back to Allen Potivar. What a waste it had been to come after Ruben King—she had only been needing to do something. Now she needed to see about Aunt Fern and Lou, whose last whereabouts were a lot more clear. But this was Allen’s road, this Nameless Road. “Listen, we were driving down this road and we came to a dead end. Maybe three, four miles up? You know where I’m talking about?” He nodded. “My aunt—she’s got dementia but it’s aggressive—she got out of the car and wandered off while we were stopped. My sister followed her to bring her back. But neither one came back and it’s been a good hour or two. You have any idea what could’ve happened to them, or how I might go about finding them?” She remembered the sound of rainwater rushing down the gully. What could be swept away on a night like this? What things could go awry and never be put back quite right?
He shook his head. “There’s nothing between here and there. An old cistern for cattle, but no houses or people.”
She nodded, expecting as much. “Well,” she said, thinking as she talked, “I guess I better get back to finding them. When—if—I do, I’ll come back to help look for Ruben. And then”—she laughed, a bitter sound, remembering what had originally started this wild-goose chase—“maybe he can help me find Boyd and Isaac.”
Allen got up slowly, adjusting the oxygen tubing. “Let me—” He unplugged the oxygen generator from the wall. “Let me come with you. I’ll ride in the car with my pump and I’ll help you.”
She looked at him, doubting how much help he’d be. At the least, he’d know the area.
He caught the look. “Oh, you think I need a shirt?” White hair sprouted from his nipples and traced a line up over his belly button.
“Yes.”
“Well, all right.” He disappeared into the back room, carrying the condenser, then came back wearing a flannel work shirt, unbuttoned, put on like a jacket instead of a shirt.
“Okay. Thank you.” It seemed like the wrong thing to say.
He followed her to the car, grabbing the rifle as they filed out the door. She could not say whether this made her more nervous or less; her main thought was that at least now he wasn’t connected to a canister of pure oxygen, but merely to a machine that condensed the oxygen already present in the air. She wasn’t worried that he’d set himself ablaze if he fired the gun. He did not lock the door as he left, which surprised her, but then she considered that what he really cared about protecting was out there in the mist.
When she got in the car, Kevin squeezed her hand, then Allen Potivar opened the door and slid into the back seat. Kevin turned to look and she said, “Allen here is going to help us.” The clock on the dash said it was 12:34.
Once in the car, all the doors closed, they sat silently for a minute. Lucy Maud was unsure where to go or what to do. The only rational thought she had was that she must keep all of them together, that if any one of them wandered away from the others, the problem would only be compounded. “I guess we should drive up this road again,” she said, hoping Allen Potivar would say something, would have some bit of advice, tell her something she’d overlooked. She heard the soft whir and click of the oxygen condenser and Allen’s shallow breaths.
It was Kevin who finally spoke. “Let’s drive up to where we last saw them.”
Lucy Maud, thinking she should have left Lou and Aunt Fern at home, headed back up Nameless Road, her Taurus moving through mist thick as cotton.
Things You Would Know If You Grew Up Around Here
We Cannot Stop What Is Already Here
We knew. We knew and did nothing. In my youth, we talked about the earth heating. The UN addressed the rise in temperature in 1988, creating the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
We changed nothing, instead increasing the use of fossil fuels, adding more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. We lived our lives recklessly and with abandon, and we will see only the beginning of what we have done and what will happen. The rest we’ve left to our children, their inheritance this uncharted world.
May 25
12:15 A.M.
Boyd, on the night’s fourth iteration of the search for Caleb, trying to decide what to do. She walked between the parents, the mother going in front with the lantern, the father behind her, tinkling like bells. She walked quickly because she didn’t want the bells to overtake her.
But what could she do? She had been shaken awake twice; the fourth time she had been expecting the cold hand on her shoulder and so had been waiting. No matter what Boyd said, the man and the woman said the same things they had in the first encounter, as if the first conversation had been recorded and was just being replayed. By the third time that the man had asked for Boyd’s help, Boyd started to pay attention to how the body stood, to where the gaze fell. At some point, she realized he was reacting to an earlier version of her, that he was watching her where she’d stood during that first encounter, and she did not think that he saw her now. It was unsettling to see his gaze focus on a place beyond her, to see him conversing with some trace, some ghost of a Boyd now left in the night.
She stepped aside to let the father pass, and she walked behind them slowly, the fairy twinkling and lantern light outpacing her in the night. When she could no longer see or hear them, she sat, back against a granite outcrop, the stone exfoliating and brittle, the least comfortable seat she’d had all night.
It was now the deepest part of night. The stillness was a weight, pinning her to the earth, and the air had a blackness, a sense of swimming through deep water. She heard a ratcheting noise in the trees, and it made her think of the earth as a clock, winding herself.
She remembered again the bean tendrils around her wrist, then she thought of the shadows twisting on the branches in the shape of cocoons, the moon revelatory, the beat of earth and time synchronizing in a way with which she was not familiar.
The tendrils on her wrists had felt restrictive, like manacles. But the night—while the night was a weight on her shoulders, it was not burdensome or unwelcome, but was instead the ballast of a life that was in danger of floating away. It was a tether to something beautiful, something life-giving, a lifeline tossed from a greater vessel.
She could not explain what was happening now with time. She knew that Caleb and his parents were wisps of something that had come before, impressions left on soft clay that had hardened into fossils. But she could not say where in time she was now, nor even if time was a thing she could pin down.
She remembered Ruben King trying to explain the theory of relativity to her, and she had pictured the universe as a panel of fabric, warped by the gravity of the objects it contained. But Mr. King had lost her when he had tried to explain that time and space were on a spectrum, that time bled into space and vice versa. This had made no sense to her, this image of a spectrum. How could a point be more time than space, or more space than time? He had seen her confusion and suggested another image, not spectrum but grid, and her Cartesian mind had grasped this, had seen the grid laid over the universe, had been able to understand a point as here in space, here in time, no one without the other. The idea had snapped into place, much like the grid across the universe, but still, she’d found herself unable t
o follow TV shows or movies that had talked about rips in the time-space continuum. No matter. Now she thought of the grid of the universe as three-dimensional, of the axis of time as being exceedingly tall, with all time layered upon a place.
The bean tendrils. The riotous roar of a garden alive. The scarecrow walking—where? Footprints she had followed until they had disappeared into the water. The incantation when she had planted: Be fruitful. Multiply. The sense that something had awoken, that she had come to rest on an island that was really the back of a whale. The body of the thing submerged, its scope only visible in its proportions.
She watched for the man, hoping to see him approach, but he did not come for such a long time. Finally, she laid her head back on the crumbling rock, and when her eyes closed, she felt the hand on her shoulder. She would not be allowed to see him coming. His arrival must always be a surprise.
He asked her the usual questions, but she didn’t even bother to answer. It didn’t matter. He and the woman responded as if she did. They continued their little drama without her, but when it came time to move on in search of Caleb, with Boyd in the middle, she remained seated. She would not go with them this time, would not wander the hills chased by tinkling feet, would sit here and wait for the next time the hand touched her shoulder.
But they froze when she didn’t join them. They got stuck, caught on their track, and she thought, ominously somehow, of a vinyl record that was not cut in a spiral but in a series of concentric circles, the needle stuck in the same groove until it could manually be moved. She did not know how to do this and was waiting for dawn to somehow break the pattern.
A breath. Two. Still they waited for her. This part of the drama would not be allowed to continue until she got up and went with them. Another pause as she figured out what to do. She could not bear their stillness, nor the sense that all life had stopped. She listened and heard insects in trees, wind in the pin oaks. It was just them. If she turned now and walked away, would some hunter or hiker wander across them one day, still stuck here, waiting for Boyd to join them?
Things You Would Know If You Grew Up Around Here Page 17