Sight

by Adrienne Maria Vrettos

  Mom was holding me against her, stroking my hair. She was crying, and at first I thought it was because Sheriff Dean had yelled at me. I looked at him and thought, Boy, are you gonna get it. But she didn’t yell back at him or kick him out of the house. She sat down in the armchair and pulled me onto her lap. I let my body go slack against her, my back snug in the warm triangle of space between her ribs and arm.

  “And he didn’t call last night?”

  Mom shook her head. “I spoke with him at lunch and asked him to pick up ketchup for the meat loaf at the market on his way home.”

  “At Sheboa’s?”

  “Oh,” Mom said, looking helplessly at Sheriff Dean. “I didn’t tell him where. Just asked him to pick it up.”

  Dean nodded and said, “We’ve contacted the boys down the hill. Maria, I think we should make an announcement. Ask folks if anyone’s seen anything.”

  Mom started crying harder, shaking her head. “It’s a small mountain, Dean. I’ve made calls, and everyone knows he’s missing.”

  “Still, Maria, I think a press conference might do some good.”

  Mom sniffed. “Okay.”

  Sheriff Dean stood. “I’ll set it up. Can Sarah Abbott come stay here with you?”

  Sarah Abbott, I knew, was Ben’s mom.

  Mom nodded. “I’ve called her already. She’ll be here soon.”

  I stayed home from school that day. Dottie came by after she’d dropped all the kids off at school. She just showed up at the door. She sat me down to color at the kitchen table while Mom was in the living room with Ben’s mom. Dottie even made lunch for us all, though Mom barely ate anything. At one thirty Dottie said she had to go, and Mom took me upstairs so I could have a nap.

  Mom was on the phone with the sheriff when I woke up and came back downstairs. My dad was not on the couch. Mom was looking with scared eyes at Ben’s mom and saying into the phone, “Why do you need that? Sheriff Dean, you tell me right now why you need that.”

  Mom flipped through our address book with a shaky hand. “It’s Dr. Wigham,” she said, “but that’s a damn scary piece of information to ask me, even as a precaution, and you know it.”

  Dr. Wigham was our dentist. I imagined my dad having a mouth full of cavities, too afraid to come home and face Mom.

  The next day Dr. Wigham was one of the people standing behind Mom, along with Sheriff Dean and Deputy Pesquera, when Mom gave a press conference on our front steps. She held me in her arms. TV reporters from down the hill were there, and their microphones hovered like a swarm of metal bees in front of Mom’s face. I closed my eyes and hid my face against her shoulder so I wouldn’t see them sting her.

  She told the bees she missed my dad and wanted him to come home. She said, “And if anybody knows where he is, they should call … They should call …” Before we’d gone outside, Sheriff Dean had written a telephone number down for my mom, so she could read it out loud to the bees. But instead of reading the number from the paper crumpled in her hand, my mom froze.

  “Five-five-five …,” I said, and the metal bees all turned their heads and crept closer to my mouth. One of the soggy-shoed reporters said, “What did you say, honey?” And I said slowly, so they would be sure to hear it, “Five-five-five-three-four-five-eight.”

  Then Sheriff Dean stepped in and said a few words, and we all filed back into the house, the reporters outside filming intros that all sounded like, “Where is Martin Moran? The Pine Mountain man disappeared two days ago …”

  Deputy Pesquera went into the kitchen to make coffee for the grown-ups, and hot chocolate for me. Mom set me in the armchair and tucked a blanket around me, telling me to close my eyes for a little bit. She sat on the couch and pushed her palms against her face. Sheriff Dean sat next to her and patted her back, making soothing noises. Dr. Wigham paced behind the couch. He’d been there since early in the morning, cutting his vacation short to bring us pictures of my dad’s teeth from his office. Every time the phone rang, Dr. Wigham would pick up the file with my dad’s name on it, looking like he was ready to dash out the door. I didn’t know what the pictures were for, and no one would tell me. In the kitchen Officer Pesquera was talking quietly to someone on our phone. She hung up and signaled something to Sheriff Dean.

  “Maria,” he said to Mom. Mom looked at him and then at Officer Pesquera.

  “Who were you on the phone with?” Mom’s voice was shaking. “Who were you just talking to?”

  “Maria,” Sheriff Dean said slowly, in the way he would talk to our class about stranger danger. “They found his car.” Dr. Wigham stopped pacing. “At the bottom of the hill. It’s been burned, stripped. There was some blood, Maria.” Mom sobbed, pulling me out from the chair and sitting back on the couch with me, saying, “Oh God, oh God, oh God. Was it his? Was it his blood?”

  “We don’t have a DNA match yet, but it does not look good.”

  Then the telephone rang, and Dr. Wigham leaned over the couch with my dad’s file and held it in front of Sheriff Dean’s face as the sheriff reached for the phone. Mom yelled, “Damn it, Wigham!” and grabbed the file and pitched it across the room, where the black-and-white shiny translucent pictures of my dad’s teeth scattered across the floor. The phone was still ringing and Mom grabbed it out of Sheriff Dean’s hand.

  “Hello?” she said, and her voice was like a string pulled tight. She looked at Sheriff Dean, her eyes wide, the color gone from her face.

  “Martin?” she said, her voice shaking. And then she screamed, “Martin! Where are you? Are you okay?”

  There was a pause as she listened, her brow furrowed. “A note?” she asked.

  Dr. Wigham was across the room, stooped over and gathering the photos. He stood up, holding a piece of paper, and said, “This note? It was under the coffee table.” He started to read the note out loud, even as he handed it to Mom. “My darling Maria,” he read, before Mom grabbed it out of his hand, her wild eyes scanning it like she could read it all at once.

  “My darling Maria,” she said, her words running into one another. “I have started this letter a thousand times, but there is no easy way to say what I have to say.”

  Mom stopped reading out loud, her voice lowering to a wordless murmur as she read the next lines.

  “You’re leaving us?” she screamed into the phone.

  That scream was like a sharp knife, lopping off a part of my body that I couldn’t even see, that I didn’t even realize was there until it was gone. By now, though, all these years later, you can barely even tell I’m limping.

  The dream comes again and I find myself standing in the moonlit desert, the cool air pushing through the fabric of my sweatshirt, the low buildings of downtown Salvation outlined in the distance against the night sky. The hole in front of me is dark. I’m standing too close to its edge, and I step back, knocking into the blue plastic barrel. I don’t want to touch it, but I have to hold on to it to steady myself, to keep from stumbling, from falling into the hole. The wind dies down and I hear the footsteps again, rushing up behind me. Who are you? I ask in the dream, my hand still on the barrel, my heartbeats tripping over themselves, pounding against my chest. I turn around again and again, but I end up looking in the same direction, the footsteps behind me again, coming closer. Wake up, I say, wake up, wake up, wake up.

  A chill draft licks at my cheeks and the tips of my earlobes, and I snuggle more deeply into the warmth of my bed, peeking out from under the covers to see if I’ve left my window open. The window is closed, but the air in my room has gone frigid, its moist chill as sudden and sharp as stepping outside in just pajamas to see a snowstorm. I pull the blankets up over my head, letting my breath warm my face, and vowing once again to convince my mom that we need central heating—floor vents that, like in Pilar’s house, gust out floods of hot air. I kick my feet, trying to warm the cold sheets. My right foot bumps up against something. Am I really scrunched that far down? Far enough to kick the bed frame? I keep my head under the blankets, lifting t
hem from underneath, until in the murky darkness I can see my foot resting against the underside of a blanket that is pinned from above, by something that is definitely not my bed frame.

  “MOM!”

  I play ostrich for the ten seconds it takes her to dash into my room and tear the covers off me. She finds me curled in a ball, my eyes squeezed shut, and my fingers in my ears. I open one eye wide enough to make sure it’s her, and the other wide enough to make sure there’s no monster sitting at the foot of my bed, and I sit up.

  “I had a nightmare.”

  Mom yawns. “I’d say so. What about?”

  I shrug, now convinced that it really was my bed frame that my foot bumped against. “Monsters?”

  She pulls the covers back over me. “It’s freezing in here.” I lie back down, pulling the blankets to my chin. Mom sits on the edge of the bed, and yawns again. “Are you sure it was about monsters?” she asks. “It wasn’t about Tessa?”

  “I don’t dream about Tessa,” I lie. “I don’t dream about any of them.”

  She nods.

  “You know that,” I say, more harshly than I mean to. What I want to say is, You’re the reason I don’t dream about them. I block them out, for you.

  My mom studies me. “What if you did dream about them?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “What do you think you would see?”

  “I don’t know.” I close my eyes, faking sleepiness. “Probably the same thing I saw the first time.”

  “Probably,” my mom says. “You’re probably right.”

  Three

  I feel like I’m being flooded.

  A secret can do that to you.

  It can spend weeks and months and years shrunk down so small it’s just a warm knot at the base of your spine, and then all of a sudden it can gush up, like a tide rising and pulsing against the inside of your skin, and while everyone else is taking notes in last-period geometry, it’s all you can do to keep from drowning right there in your high-tops.

  “Are you all right?” Pilar whispers to me when I stand up from my desk.

  I try for an unconcerned nod, but end up just sticking out my bottom lip and making some sort of wobbly bobble-head motion.

  Pilar laughs.

  More than anything in the whole entire world, I want to sit back down at the desk with her and laugh so hard that we get kicked out of class. I want the ridiculous head bobble that I just did to get entered into the Pilar and Dylan Stupid Faces Hall of Fame, for us to make at each other in really inappropriate moments. Like during church. Or in one of those assemblies where storytellers in rainbow leotards come to “rap” to us about the dangers of drugs and drinking.

  When I get to the front of the classroom, I stop. Our teacher, Mrs. Gunther, turns to me from the dry-erase board, pausing mid-isosceles triangle, and says, “Ms. Driscoll?”

  I make a sound like “Arnrng!” my hand pressed to my stomach, my tongue halfway out of my mouth.

  She reels back ever so slightly and points at the door with her dry-erase marker.

  “Well, go, then!”

  I run out into the hall and bend over double with laughter that turns quickly to tears, my shoulder pressed against the wall to keep myself from falling over.

  I stand up straight and wipe my face with my sweatshirt and take deep breaths until they stop getting caught in my throat.

  “I’m a mess,” I say aloud, laughing. Then crying. And then hiccuping so hard I burp. Which makes me laugh.

  I peek out the window and see the buses have arrived, and that the bus drivers have gone inside the cafeteria for coffee. I slip out the side door.

  The school bell rings and I stay lying down where I’ve hidden on the bus, scrunching myself a little to make sure my head isn’t hanging out into the aisle. I hear the voices of the drivers coming toward the bus. Dottie curses when she gets to the bus, seeing the door I left open. She climbs into the driver’s seat, and in a moment the lights flicker on and warm, dry air comes blasting out of the heater vents.

  The intercom crackles before Dottie’s voice comes booming through the speakers. “Fran saw you get on the bus, so you might as well sit up.”

  For a second I have the irrational hope that there’s some other kid slouched down in another seat, maybe all the way in the back of the bus.

  “Oh, for Pete’s sake,” Dottie’s voice crackles. “Dylan, sit up.”

  I push myself upright, peeking over the tops of the seats to see Dottie looking at me in the oversize rearview mirror.

  “You all right?” she asks, putting the microphone away.

  I nod.

  “Fran wants me to make sure you’re not on drugs. Are you on drugs?”

  I shake my head.

  “Say something so I know you’re not on drugs.”

  “I’m not on drugs,” I say, sitting up taller.

  “Okay, then.” She picks up the microphone again and turns the channel. “She’s fine, Fran. I think she just missed me.” They both laugh, Fran’s voice tinny and snapping.

  The wind off the lake is whipping sand against the side of the bus. The sound makes me think of buckshot, or the way Mom makes popcorn—kernels clattering into the heavy iron pot she made my dad carry with them on the bus all the way cross-country, when they were just married and in love and still together. It makes me think of the night, in the desert, the truck’s dizzying spin sending sand into the air, and the sound of it falling back down again.

  I lean out the window of the bus, keeping my mouth closed and my eyes squeezed shut against the grit peppering my face. I could let the wind and the sand work their work on me, teasing at my skin, until it starts to crack and break off and fly away, until I have no face, and then no head, and then no me. I’ll just be sand, blowing through the pine trees until the wind runs out of breath and all the pieces of me fall to the ground. My problems couldn’t follow me. They’d get snagged in the sharp branches of the tallest trees, where they would flutter and snap in the wind like gray ghosts.

  “Bad cheese again?”

  I open my eyes. Pilar is looking up at me from the sidewalk. She reaches up to hand me the geometry notebook I left in class. “MayBe thinks you’re lactose intolerant.”

  “That could be it,” I say.

  “And Thea thinks you’re faking it.” She snorts.

  “I’m not faking.”

  “She just wants to know how you do it so well.”

  The wind picks up and we both raise a hand to shield our faces.

  I’m not—”

  “So, I take it you’re not coming with us over to Thea’s so she can practice on your hair?” Pilar interrupts. I’d forgotten. Thea’s mom said she’d give her a job at the salon this summer, if Thea got good enough.

  “My stomach—”

  “Hurts again. I know,” Pilar says.

  She scuffs the pavement with a black high-top, and I follow her gaze to where MayBe and Thea are walking out of school. They wave to us, and Pilar points to me and makes a barfing motion. “Feel better!” they call.

  “It’s all right,” Pilar says. “We’ll do it tomorrow if you’re better. Okay, then.” Pilar pauses, and then looks up at me. “Well, get well soon.”

  She steps back from the bus.

  “Pilar, come on, I’m sorry,” I say, leaning farther out the window. “Please don’t be mad at me.”

  “I’m not mad at you,” she says. “I just wish you’d feel better already.”

  “I will,” I say quickly. “I’m sure I’ll feel better soon.”

  “Go home and drink some ginger tea or something.”

  The bus rumbles to life with the last of the students trailing on, and I pull myself back inside. “You still love me, though, right?” I call out the window.

  “Like the sister I never wanted,” she says. She runs for her bus and calls back over her shoulder, “Call me after you puke or poop or whatever it is you need to do.”

  “Okay!” I shout. “I will! Bye!” I clo
se the window, collapse against the seat, and wipe the dirt away from the corners of my mouth and eyes.

  The rain has started again, and Dottie has turned on her windshield wipers. I rub a line into the steam that’s gathered on the window and then touch my chilled finger to my bruised cheek.

  In the village the school bus stops in front of the grocery store with its vinyl banner strung up across the front, reading, NEW MANAGEMENT! There’s a bunch of construction workers standing outside of the store’s giant new front window, and as I walk up to the front of the bus, I stoop a little to try to get a closer look. I get to the front just in time to hear Dottie’s shocked whisper. “Those dirty sons of buttercups!”

  “What’s going on?” I ask, and she shifts her position so I can see out her driver’s side window. The workers have ripped off the letters that have, for as long as I’ve lived here, spelled out SHEBOA’S GROCERY. They’ve even pried off the giant lopsided wooden cutout of a pine tree that used to tower over the letter S. The new sign, laid out on the ground in the rain, reads PARADISE MOUNTAIN GOURMET GROCERY in fancy script, punctuated by a perfectly straight drawing of a pine tree.

  Dottie’s already on the radio, barely bothering to open the bus door for us, saying into the receiver, “Frannie, you’ll never guess where I won’t be buying my groceries from now on.”

  When I get off the bus, I see the weekend bumper sticker war has already started. In the parking lot in front of the grocery store, there’s a sports car with a bright yellow bumper sticker that reads IF YOU DIDN’T WANT US UP HERE, WHY’D YOU CALL IT PARADISE?

  “We were outvoted,” I say to myself, weaving through the small crowd of locals who have gathered in the rain to curse the new sign.

  “You got that right,” one of them says as I walk by.

  “Like to see that little whippet try to drive down the hill in this rain.”

  “Robbie, you’ll be towing them up over the side before the weekend’s out, I guarantee it.”

  I turn and see that Frank’s dad is in the crowd, laughing from under the brim of his grease-stained baseball cap. “You gonna drum up some business for me?” he asks the man who just spoke. “Give that hot rod a little nudge toward the guardrail?” Everyone laughs.