Search Party

by Valerie Trueblood

  In the early hours of this occasion Cam had laughed a good deal more than she usually did because Daisy knew how to be funny about herself and her art and her son, exactly the same way he made fun of her, showing no pity. “Where were we? Lord no, no more pinot. Take it away! I admit he didn’t have the best example, growing up. But—he appealed to women. That is something that cannot be helped.” She filled her glass and Cam’s. “She ran off with a bore from the business school. Of course there were plenty left to comfort him. Coming around. For a while.”

  The telephone rang all day. He answered it or he didn’t, depending on his mood. Cam could have told Daisy that. No one, man or woman, came.

  At some point in the evening Cam was drunk for the second time in her life and knew it and gave in to the impulse to flop over her canvas bag and pull out the drawing she had made of Lawrence. Daisy looked at it in silence and then she tried to stand up. She had some trouble getting out of the deep chair because she had already met somebody else for a drink before this. “You hold this, I don’t want it on the wet table.” Then she was gone a long time, fifteen minutes. Finally Cam followed her to the ladies room. You could suffer a clot or a hemorrhage at any age; Daisy could be sprawled under the door of the booth.

  There was Daisy, at the big softly lit mirror with her eyes shut. She had a mascara wand out, lying open among crumpled tissues. “I can’t find the top,” she said in a hopeless voice, losing her balance. Cam picked it up off the floor. “Where did you put that?” Daisy rasped, when Cam was in the booth.

  “I just gave it to you.”

  “I mean that picture.”

  “In my bag.”

  “Don’t show me things like that, oh, no, no, no,” she said when she joined Cam at the table some time later. “Sign it.” She never asked if the drawing was for her; she just took it. After Cam had signed it Daisy sat with her eyes shut. Cam decided to order two more plates of the miniature crab cakes with caramelized onion, even though it was Daisy’s treat. She beckoned the waiter over. She felt Daisy had put things in her hands.

  They would talk on the phone, they would make lists in his kitchen, but this was the only evening she and Daisy ever spent together, socially.

  THE bookstore in the old schoolhouse was gone. Taped boxes filled the space where bookshelves and display tables had stood the week before.

  This upset him but he pulled himself together. “Good thing I brought my own,” he said. He had sent her back into the house to get it, the scuffed little Les Symbolistes, from the pile on his bed that she knew to leave when she pulled the covers up.

  It was early afternoon, shadow just leaking from under the cars in the parking lot. A group of girls came up the school steps, laughing and talking on their phones, slapping the marble with their flip-flops. She recognized them; they were from her high school. At the top they wheeled and set off down the hall, one of them showing a roll of skin above her cutoffs. That one had been in her art class. Cam had liked her; she liked people her own size and bigger, liked to think of them standing in front of a mirror seeing if they could pinch the number of inches of belly that meant fat.

  She leaned, as if a current from them had swept her. She couldn’t tell if they had seen her. She was two years ahead of them, or at least of the one she knew from art class. Out in the world. Despite the C’s on her transcript, she had finished her CNA at the community college in a year. Once she was certified it was easy to find a job with a home health agency. Probably just speaking English, Daisy said later, got her that job. For two months she had cut thick toenails and helped old men take showers. Not many agreed to it, half of those who did would not let her into the bathroom, and every so often one of them who did, sitting on the shower chair with water streaming off him and calling her “a big gal” or “a doll,” would ask her for something she had to pretend not to understand. She changed their loose gray jockeys or pajama bottoms or long johns or reported on the fact that there was nothing to change them into, and sometimes, though as a home health aide she was not supposed to do what either a nurse or a housekeeping aide would do, opened the bathroom door on messes that would throw her schedule off for hours.

  Then she saw the ad for Lawrence. She quit the agency the day after Daisy interviewed her. The salary was more than either her mother or her brother in the service made. To everything she said, Daisy’s reply was, “Mmm, yes, so, mmhmm . . .” The next day Daisy called her on her cell while she was trying to talk her way into a huge old guy’s apartment while he blocked the door with his belly—never mind finding soap in the cat-smelling dark behind him and getting somebody his size into a shower stall. Daisy said, “I think we can work this.” As if it were a scheme between the two of them.

  Nothing about mature or cultured. Cam hadn’t even met the invalid. Why was his mother hiring her when he was a grown man, a college professor? Because his mother had the money. And he didn’t want to interview anybody, so why should he? That was how Daisy saw it, and apparently Lawrence too.

  “He’s just like me,” Daisy said. “He was.”

  IF he is in the bathroom Cam doesn’t go into the hall because she doesn’t want him to think she is listening. If there is cleaning up to do, she does it later. Sharon told her she would need to get in there, and showed her the 409 under the sink, stored in small jars because the jug is too heavy for him to lift. The time is not far off when she will have to rinse him off, bathe him. Touch the knobs of spine she can see under his shirt.

  This was part of the routine for the other nurses. Sharon made sure Cam was informed about his “endowment,” as she called it. But with Cam, for some reason, he is back to shutting the door. He even locks it. It’s an old door, with a sticking lock. He doesn’t realize that with his hands the way they are he could get shut in there. Things like that happen. People get trapped. In her week of training at the agency they learned how to take a door off the hinges. She has already made sure the hinges aren’t painted over.

  Daisy put in a big open shower with bars, but he has to seat himself on the chair, and Cam can hear him stumble and knock it against the tile or knock it all the way over and have to take his time scraping it into position.

  In the garage, draped in a tablecloth, sits a wheelchair more expensive than a car, that Daisy will have to sell on eBay unused. In a crowded hall rented for the memorial—who are all these men and women Cam has never seen, saying they have lost him?—Daisy will say, “There’s that face,” and having never touched Cam before, close in on her with a hug that knocks the breath out of her. And there, the blonde wife, with a husband trailing after her, and there a tall sullen boy of about eight, with no crease between his eyebrows but unmistakably thin and careful and watchful, there at last the son.

  ALL at once the tiny birds burst out of the hedge like spray out of a nozzle. His eyes widen, meet hers. Clearly he saw it, whatever he says about his vision. No one but the two of them saw it, she feels sure. “Ah,” he says. She waits; always he has to put words to what goes on. He begins. “Once, anything could fly.” Is he more cautious than usual? “Of old, that is, anything could be depicted with wings. Even snakes. The Egyptians, the Phoenicians, the Judeans . . .” He pauses, looks into his cold coffee.

  The girls from her high school come by, going the other way. This time they all give a wrist-wave—so they did see her before, and identified her and talked about her.

  The one she knows says, “How’s it going?”

  “Good. What’s up at school?” Then she remembers they must have just graduated.

  “Good,” they sing out, and give the wave again.

  Lawrence sits up straighter while this goes on, because girls are near, but he doesn’t really notice them. He has no idea Cam knows anyone, anywhere, except him. He is concentrating. “One and all, they esteemed a winged cobra,” he goes on. “And the winged snake, remember, in . . . in . . .”

  Cam says, “Yeah, that guy.”

  “In Herodotus.” He smiles. Then she can tell
by the way he chews on his lip and says, “He saw the wing-bones,” that he is tired and they will have to get going. Waiting for him to let her take part of his weight so he can stand up will take a while. Half the time in public he leaves the walker collapsed. Sometimes even walking he’ll carry it for as long as he can and then have her carry it.

  Wait. He is not quite ready to stand. “Last night I was at a party having one of those conversations where you’re buried up to your neck and people are going to step on your head.” She knows he means a dream; he wasn’t at a party; he was in his study looking out the black window and she was in the living room watching TV.

  He recites in French. She stretches, gives up on holding her face in what her grandmother says a woman should never part with, a pleasant expression. A willing expression, as if French matters. “Biting the warm earth where the lilacs grow,” he says, just barely lifting all ten fingers.

  “That would be you-know-who,” she answers. Then she’s sorry because the tone of exasperation that normally pleases him has caught him off guard.

  After a while he says, “I’ll show you something.” He has made a decision. “Let’s see the book. The book, the book.”

  “Sorry.” She gets it out of her bag and gives it to him. The way he takes it, carefully in one hand, makes her think of her mother handing the missal across her to her father at Mass. Her father parted the halves of his coat, felt his chest as he always did, and sank onto the kneeler. Was he taking the right medications? A weight of shame for all of them in her family settles on her. When he sat in his chair at home, did she, Cam, bring him anything? She bows her head. She says to Lawrence, “I don’t think my father had any books.”

  “Never mind.” The flashlight look. “As Molière tells us, reading goes ill with the married state.”

  “The married state.” He likes it when she simply repeats his words.

  “See this?”

  She shrugs; it’s in French.

  “‘With his times,’” he reads to her, bending close to the page and following his finger, “‘the poet should not involve himself.’ Da da da . . . here it is: ‘he should work mysteriously with regard to later or never.’” He holds up his hands and spreads them triumphantly. “Ah! With regard to later or never.”

  She shrugs again, to hide the yawn.

  “That’s not what I want you to see.” He is feeling among the pages with his stalled fingers. Finally he comes to an illustration, covered with a sheet of onionskin. “Here we have,” he says, beginning to smooth the cover sheet like somebody stroking a kitten. Finally he lifts it by a corner. “Here we have. Ah.”

  She studies the painting of a man. It must be a painting, though it is in black and white.

  “There. Manet. Manet painted him. Everyone painted him. Sadness incarnate. You see?”

  She nods.

  “Having a salon of Symbolistes did not protect him. He was a bourgeois like everybody else. He lost his little son Anatole. This picture,” he adds, “was painted before that happened.”

  To him, that was logical. She could understand that. She understood everything he said. The order in which things happened might be nothing, when you thought about it. Your life was there, like your fingerprint, inescapable. Why not? Each year filling with what belonged to it and to you, and flushing away what was going to turn out not to be yours. A disease could seem to come out of nowhere. A job, a person. Not out of nowhere. Yours. It was all lined up like the school buses. Rose of Lima had foreseen the day of her own death.

  He closed the book and leaned over to put it in her bag, resting his forehead on the table as he did it and for a second or two after. That was a first.

  He prepared to stand up. They looked at each other in their shared life. Everything was familiar. It was all coming to pass as if they were reliving it, what they would do now or later or never.

  Two years later she would be a wife, her husband not someone she met after Lawrence had died but a man she had known since grade school. A friend of her brother’s, a friend of Ray Malala’s. She would go on drawing but nothing would come of it. She would never, with all her children, be as married as this.

  Street of Dreams

  THE children knew how to be quiet. They knew how to make sure the blinds were closed and the shades down, or to play in hallways where there were no windows; they knew to flush the toilet once a day, while the recycling truck was grinding or someone ran a lawnmower next door. They knew how to cram sleeping bags into the three computer boxes and tape them and shove them into a closet while their father went to the door. He picked up a clipboard and put a pen behind his ear before the real estate agent got the lockbox open.

  He was a real estate agent himself and knew how to put the other agent at ease, how to call the children in, introduce them, send them to play in another room—“They have stuff with them. I like to bring them along when I’m doing this”—indicating his clipboard, while in the other room they would be grabbing a sock or a Kleenex and stuffing it into their pockets. He would explain the balloons tied to the FOR SALE sign: “Yesterday we thought we had a buyer.” Balloons would allow for some coming and going, some glimpses of children. Sometimes an agent saw the balloons and just passed by, like a soldier of Herod.

  If an agent came alone, their father would say, “We’ll get out of your way. No, really, I can come back any time and finish up.” If a client came too he’d say, “Isn’t this great?” The houses were not the best by any means. Usually they were on the edge of town, in an area where yards lost their fences and flowerbeds, sidewalks disappeared, and cars parked in ruts. “Great little place!” he would say, and this would be a clue to the other agent, if she was on the ball, to say, “Well, it’s our lucky day! It’s still on the market.”

  They would drive around, eat at Taco Bell, go back in a couple of hours for the boxes. From there they would go straight to a different house.

  Sometimes, in houses with electric ranges and power, they cooked. Gas was usually off. They never used the oven, because a hot oven door was a giveaway. They didn’t fry because of the smell. They boiled. You could boil potatoes, along with eggs for your next meal, and mash up the eggshell and bury it under pine needles. Every once in a while, they boiled chicken thighs, but the smell was strong and they were left with bones. Carrots you could eat without peeling them, and bananas and apples, putting peels and cores into a ziplock bag. You had to be sure it wasn’t full enough to pop, inside the computer box.

  Their father always remembered to take the bag to their school and drop it in the Dumpster. He was very neat, careful, and patient. He was the opposite of their mother.

  While they were in school he did the laundry at the apartment of their mother’s friend Melissa, who was at work. He had the key Melissa had given their mother, long ago when their mother was well, with friends and a job. At the beginning of this period, while their father was going to the hospital every day, before he knew their mother would not be getting out, they had let themselves into Melissa’s apartment while she was on vacation and stayed for two weeks.

  They knew not to tell their mother anything about that, or the yard sale. Everything left from it was in a U-Store, an aluminum room they could have lived in except that it had no windows or bathroom. Mandy knew you had to pay rent or someone would pile the furniture outside in the rain. But if that happened their father had a plan. He could put everything under a tarp on the cement slab beside his friend Gary’s trailer. They could even prop the tarp and live under it. “You’re as crazy as she is,” Gary said. The slab was a foundation for a house, but it was old now and had a big crack where Mandy and Cody stuck their hands, pretending it led down into the center of the earth.

  Their father needed to sell a house and he had not sold one in a long time. He had the hours they were in school and that was all, because he wouldn’t leave them alone even though Mandy was eight and had skipped a grade. She was in fourth grade. Cody was six, in first grade.

  Child
Protective Services caught up with them but it took the agency six months. It had them on the books already because of things neighbors had said about their mother.

  The last house they stayed in, out in the country at the edge of a pine forest being cleared, was on the Street of Dreams. There was no street yet, but five houses were already furnished for the coming tours, each with its own grounds landscaped to match it. There was a castle with a moat and a black and white timbered house with a hedge cut into animal shapes. At night Cody was afraid of the dark because the streetlights weren’t installed, but their father moved the three sleeping bags close together and gave him a flashlight of his own.

  They were not in the beds but in the laundry room of the biggest house Mandy had ever seen. The front door had a huge brass knocker that would echo out over the pine stumps the day Child Protective Services arrived, and gold-edged ribbons sealing the six toilet seats. The table was set with platters instead of plates, and glasses as big as pitchers, and thick, tasseled napkins. The couches and chairs were huge and heavy on the deep carpet, and nothing creaked or rattled or made any sound at all, as if, before their father with his smile of promise turned the key, giants had lived as secretly as they were living in the house.

  Who Is He That Will Harm You?

  “I HEARD what you said to your girlfriend.”

  “Why do you say that, ‘girlfriend’?” She looked up, stretched out on the couch with the Sunday paper, into his frown. “I mean, I don’t say girlfriends. A friend’s a friend, right?”