by Dan Chaon
“What about tinnitus?” she says. “Ringing in the ears?”
Troy puts his hand over the phone receiver. “Loomis,” he calls. “Are you experiencing any ringing in the ears?”
“What?” Loomis says. He mutes the TV.
“Ringing in the ears?” Troy says. “Do you hear any ringing or strange humming?”
Loomis is quiet for a moment, listening attentively. Then he says: “No, I don’t think so, “ and turns the volume of the television back up.
“Well,” Shari says, “keep an eye on him. If he still seems like he’s acting funny in the morning, maybe you ought to take him in.”
“Yeah? You don’t think I should take him to the emergency room or anything?”
“I don’t,” she says. “It sounds normal.” And then she clears her throat. “And how are you doing, Troy? We haven’t talked in quite a while.”
“I’m okay,” Troy says. “Same old, same old.”
“Uh-huh,” she says. “Well, I haven’t been out to visit you in a while, I’ll have to do that pretty soon.”
“Anytime,” Troy says. “You know me. Always present.”
And then, after he hangs up, he has the urge to call Carla. Something about Shari’s voice, a kind of “wife” voice has reminded him of the ordinary, intimate conversations that men and women have when they live together—even he and Carla had such times, normal mundane stuff that he realizes now is what he misses almost more than sex.
Later, after Little Man is asleep, he tries to call her, and finds that her phone has been disconnected. “The number you have dialed is no longer in service,” the computer voice says. “If you feel you have dialed this number in error, please hang up and dial again. If you need help, dial your operator.” And then it repeats again, the same message, which he listens to in its entirety.
It’s nothing he wouldn’t have expected. Of course she’ll call when she’s ready, when she comes out of whatever new crisis she’s found herself in, but he still feels a weird anxiety. A pathway has been severed, one of the last ones, and he curls up on the couch drinking beer, with the phone on the coffee table in front of him, flipping through channels.
——
He wakes up abruptly from a sound sleep and he is dreaming that he hears a voice from a children’s program. Someone like Mr. Rogers says:
No escape for anyone, anywhere.
It scares him for a second. He can see the red light from his digital clock, which says 4:13, and there is a pale, pre-morning color to the darkness. Something inside his stomach makes a trickling sound. Yuck. He can feel himself flooding into his mind, gurgle, gurgle, like water rushing into an empty tub. Now he is hungover but blankly awake, blinking into the dimness, and whatever spirit world he had been touching is gone. He listens, and there is tinnitus, a thin metallic drone in his ear: no escape for anyone, anywhere.
He finds himself thinking about the phone call that came two nights ago, which he somehow associates with Little Man’s fall from the tree and with his general anxiety.
Just the usual sort of telemarketing call. “May I speak with Troy Timmens?” the guy said, a woodenly awkward kid who Troy felt a little sorry for, since he seemed to be a lousy salesman.
“Yeah,” Troy said. “Present.”
“Oh,” the guy said, and then wavered. “Oh,” he said. It was late in the afternoon, and Loomis was watching cartoons in the next room: Spiderman, which Troy also enjoyed watching. Troy glanced in the direction of the television as the telephone guy got his act together: reading off cue cards, Troy thought.
“I’m speaking to Troy Timmens?” the guy said, at last.
“That’s me.”
“Oh,” the guy said. “Okay.” Then he seemed to fumble again. “Well . . . Mr. Timmens, I’m . . . I’m calling today as a . . . as a representative? Of the Mrs. Glass Institute? And we’re . . . contacting people who were adopted through the Mrs. Glass House during the years 1965 and 1966. Is it safe to assume? I mean, that you are one of those people? Who was adopted from the Mrs. Glass House during the year 1966?”
“Who is this?” Troy said, and his voice hardened a bit. He didn’t like to talk about the adoption thing. It was private information, he thought, and he felt a little uncomfortable to think that this stranger was in possession of some sort of list with his name on it, a file, a record. Stuff he himself didn’t know. “Who is this?” he said, gruffly, and then, in his most formal voice: “To what is this concerning?”
“Ahem,” said the awkward person. “My name is . . . David. David Smith. And I’m part of a project that’s. A project who is interviewing various, various people. And, well. May I assume? That you are in fact the Troy Timmens that was adopted from the Mrs. Glass House in July of 1966?”
It was very bothersome. Troy frowned. “Listen, man,” he said, “you can assume that I’m not liable to talk to someone over the phone about this. You need to send me a letter or something. I’m not going to talk to some guy that calls me up out of the blue.”
“Oh!” the person said, now more flustered than ever. “You mean you haven’t received a letter from us? A certified letter? It should have. Arrived.”
“Never got anything,” Troy said, sternly. “So, I don’t know, maybe you’ve got the wrong guy or whatever, but you need to send out your letter again.”
“Oh,” said the guy. “Are you sure?” His voice sounded strained, as if Troy had somehow hurt his feelings deeply, and he was trying not to cry. God, what was the problem? “Can I . . . verify your address, then?”
“Fine,” said Troy. “Look, I’m not trying to be rude. But this adoption stuff is private to me. It’s not something I talk about with just some stranger over the phone, okay?”
“Oh,” the guy said. “Of course. Of course! We understand completely.”
——
After he hung up, he’d felt weirdly troubled. A little upset, as Loomis would say. And now, at 4:13 in the morning, he feels the same way. It was very uncool of them, he thinks, those adoption people, calling up and bothering folks. It reminds him of a story that his fellow bartender, Crystal, had told him once. One afternoon, an elderly couple had shown up on her doorstep. They were driving through, they said—they lived in Oregon, now, they said, but once, when the old man was a child, he had lived in St. Bonaventure. He had lived in that very house, where Crystal was now living, and he wondered if they might come in just to look around.
“Weird!” Troy said, not sure why he felt so repulsed. “And you let them in?”
Crystal shrugged. “They were just old people,” she said. “They were, like, eighty or something. It was cute to think of them driving across the country. They were very sweet.”
But once they had been admitted into her house, the old man became emotional. “It’s so much the same!” he’d said. “I remember looking out of that window!” And then, when they walked into the living room, he started crying. “Oh!” the old man said. “I can picture mother sitting there in her chair, right there. I haven’t thought of that in years.” And he’d had to sit down, to get a grip on himself.
“Ugh!” Troy said. “How creepy!” And Crystal looked at him oddly, as if he’d missed the point of her story, or misinterpreted it.
“Not really,” she said. “I just thought it was . . . interesting. You know, about the passage of time and all.”
“I guess,” Troy had said then. But now, thinking of it, he still doesn’t think the “passage of time” is interesting. It’s invasive and spooky, and he thinks he will tell that to the adoption people if they call him again. “Look,” he’ll say. “You guys gave up your claim on me a long time ago. Signed, sealed, and delivered. That’s the end of the story, as far as I’m concerned.”
Sitting at the kitchen table, sleepless, he writes this down on a scratch pad. “Signed Sealed Delivered. End of Story.” He draws a cartoon talk bubble around the words, and then frowns, his tongue between his teeth, drawing a skull head, like he used to do when he was
a kid. It’s a happy skull, and he attaches the talk bubble to its smiling mouth. He gives the skull a bow tie and a porkpie hat. Then he crumples up the paper and throws it away. He gets up and fishes around in a drawer for a particular glass pipe that he likes. He takes his personal stash of marijuana out of the freezer, and sorts a pinch of it free of seeds and branches.
He has done nothing wrong, he thinks, but he feels like a bad person. He feels like something is his fault, something that he cannot even name but which sits like a heavy bird in a branch overhanging his mind, and he would know what it was if he only thought about it long enough.
9
March 1966
A girl has disappeared from the Mrs. Glass House. Escaped—that’s what people are saying. Nora listens to the muttered bits of gossip in the cafeteria and the television room. She nods as Dominique repeats a version of the rumor, watching Dominique’s cold-looking, red-palmed hands at work on her knitting. “I guess they’ve called her parents,” Dominique says softly. “I hope Mrs. Bibb gets fired.”
“Mm-hm,” Nora says, and glances toward the window. Outside, the snow is knee-deep and dense, the first week of March, and no one seems to be able to explain how the escape was accomplished. They say, for example, that the girl left in the early morning, that her footprints were found in the snow, a soft series of indentations that led to the cast-iron fence, then ended. She must have climbed over the fence, people say—a six-foot fence with arrow-spikes at the top of each metal rail—and then perhaps jumped into the bed of a truck that was waiting for her, idling on the other side. Though there were no tire tracks. And though she was eight months pregnant, huge-bellied, not built for climbing fences and jumping into trucks.
“They don’t know how she did it, that’s the thing,” Dominique says, and Nora can see the way doubt and hope are struggling with each other in Dominique’s mind. “She must have been very clever,” Dominique says, uncertainly.
Nora is quiet. What is there to say to such stories? They seem ridiculous but beautiful. Who wouldn’t want to believe that a girl could plan such a gambit, worthy of a spy? Who wouldn’t want to believe that there was a boyfriend out there, an eternally faithful boy perhaps with a flatbed pickup, the exhaust pouring out as you poised yourself over the sharp spines of the fence, the boy calling Jump! Jump! I love you, baby! as your legs coiled and you prepared to leap into the crisp snowy air like a horse across an impossible chasm.
——
Now that a month has passed, Nora finds that she is no longer surprised when she wakes up. There is no momentary gasp of unfamiliarity when she opens her eyes and discovers herself once again in this room, in this place. She lifts her eyelids: The pillow curves away from her vision like a landscape, and when she rolls over, the ceiling spreads out above her, a textured plaster ceiling with blurry yellow smoke stains running across it like the waves of a mirage; a tiny pill of cobweb quivers in an air current. She is no longer sick in the morning, no longer weak with fatigue or sudden gripping hungers. In the low, early-morning light her desk and chair have emerged from the shadows to become solid, and the bare walls are dim but visible. Outside, the blizzard continues unabated—not fierce, but relentless. Fat snowflakes the size of her thumb flatten themselves against the windowpane and pile up against the sill, and she tries to picture that heroic girl trudging determinedly, fleeing in nothing but her smock and a thin autumn coat. It doesn’t seem likely.
The girl’s name, the missing girl, is Maris. Maris, another wishful pseudonym, Nora thinks, the kind of odd, awkwardly lovely name that parents never really give to their children but that girls wish for when they are a certain age, imagining that a name will make them a different person, a princess, an exotic island. It is a good name for a girl who has, supposedly, vanished into the night.
After a while she finds herself drawn to the window. There is the bare tree and the fence beyond, dark charcoal etchings against the undifferentiated whiteness of ground and sky. Her fingers melt the ice at the edge of the glass, and she blinks slowly, thinking of that boy coming to Maris’s rescue, his face eager with love, his cheeks ruddy in the cold.
She knows that it didn’t happen.
It’s more logical, Nora thinks, to believe that Maris committed suicide. Most probably, she has hung herself in her room or taken some well-concealed pills or slit her wrists. Mrs. Bibb and the other authorities have spread the rumor of her disappearance themselves so as not to upset or alarm anyone. They are trying to cover up the poor girl’s death by creating a diversion, but the truth is that there is no “Maris,” really. There is just another Ann or Kathy or Joyce, a parade of not very bright farm girls who are all in the process of realizing that their futures are sad and pathetic and ugly. They are not “Maris” futures. They are not “Dominique” futures.
Of course that’s it, Nora thinks. The girl is dead. But still she has to admire the cleverness of the story, the image of those footprints leading out to the edge of the fence and then ending.
——
Still, the more she thinks about it, the more she realizes that it’s just a myth, just an echo of a local legend that she has heard a number of times. She recalls reading about it in the newspaper one year around Halloween time—a ghost story of sorts that involved the disappearance of a child.
The legend itself is always presented, even in the newspaper, as a “true-life mystery.” There are names, dates, places that suggest the sheen of fact. Apparently, for example, this incident took place on December 31, 1899, on a homestead located some seven miles east of Little Bow. The family who lived there was named Ambrose, a young couple with two sons.
On that particular night, a small group of friends had gathered at the Ambrose place to celebrate the coming new year. They sang songs and made toasts while the two boys, aged six and eight, popped corn over the fire. Outside, a heavy snow was accumulating.
At about ten o’clock, Mr. Ambrose asked his elder son, Oliver, to get some water from the well. The snow had stopped falling, and a gibbous moon was visible behind the breaking clouds, casting a pale light over the open yard and the fields beyond. Mrs. Ambrose watched as her son trudged out in his new Christmas overshoes, the silver bucket swinging lightly in one hand.
But the boy had not been gone more than a few minutes when the gathered party heard him cry out for help. “Momma!” he shrieked once, shrilly, as if he were being attacked, and then the sound stopped abruptly.
The adults rushed outdoors, Mr. Ambrose carrying a kerosene lamp, though the whole snow-covered prairie landscape seemed to glow, almost phosphorescent, in the moonlight. There was no sign of the boy, no sound, only the miles of treeless fields and snowdrifts, wafting into shadow. The boy’s tracks ended about halfway to the well. There were no other marks of any kind in the fresh snow, only Oliver’s footprints, and the bucket, lying there on its side. The wind sent a soft curlicue of powder around it.
According to the newspaper, a subsequent investigation only verified the adults’ account of the incident. No further clues were discovered, and eventually the mysterious case was “quietly dropped” for lack of evidence. The last time Nora had seen the story recounted in the newspaper, they’d added a “human interest” element by consulting several experts, who suggested possibilities that ranged from the boy being carried off by eagles to being abducted by a UFO. One man, a private investigator from Denver, debunked the whole thing. He said that perhaps the boy merely made his way to the well in some playful way, so his tracks didn’t show—along a fence, maybe—and then had fallen into the well and drowned.
——
When she was growing up, Nora herself had never thought too carefully beyond the chill left by those clear, abruptly ended footprints. There was an emotional reality to the story, a confirmation of what she’d always secretly felt—that there was something tentative about her own existence, something tenuous. She could remember her father sending her out to do some chore after dark—garbage she’d forgotten to haul, a sp
rinkler not turned off—and how the thought of that old story would spread across her skin as she hesitated in the doorway, the growing certainty, as she stepped out into the night, that she wouldn’t ever come back from her errand.
Even now, sitting alone in her room, thinking of the story gives her an uneasy feeling. She looks at her wristwatch—6:40 in the morning, which is not a time to be superstitious and skittish. But still. The silence suddenly seems uncanny, and she throws back the covers and pads in her nightgown, barefoot, to the door, which is open just enough to be uncomfortable, just enough to feel as if someone could be looking in.
No one is, of course. The hallway is empty; it’s still almost an hour until breakfast and the quiet is perhaps even normal. Many of the girls here sleep so much they seem to be barely alive. Twelve, fifteen hours a day, she calculates. There is one girl in particular, “Ursula,” whom Nora has taken a vaguely scientific interest in—Ursula appears at lunch and dinner, groggy, eyes pinched, waddling with her enormous belly like a manatee. Nora thinks she is either carrying a grotesquely large infant or twins, but the point is that Ursula seems capable of sleeping anywhere. She sits in the TV room with her fat thighs spread open, her mouth ajar; she sometimes dozes over her food in the cafeteria, nodding with her fork and knife poised on her plate. Once, while they were in line to go out to a movie, Nora had seen Ursula asleep on her feet, waiting to be given her tin ring, her cheek nuzzled against her shoulder, her eyes fitfully closed, even as her feet shuffled forward in response to the other girls’ movements. Sometimes Nora wishes that she could be like this girl, that she could accomplish the next dreadful months in a kind of coma.