I leaned back into the dull comfort of a six-pack and Lorinda walked right into it. Or, to the edge, anyway. She was standing in the door looking at me and her uncle, her hair for an instant touching both sides of the doorjamb at once. Her uncle waved to her and some of the students noticed, and I winced inside. To show how displeased she was with the whole situation—her uncle was her family, not mine—she sat down with us and took a big, tearing bite of my chicken sandwich. Maybe I was the only one holding my breath, I don’t know.
She paid our tab and led us out. We piled into her uncle’s truck and she asked to borrow it after we dropped him off. He told us not to worry about being careful; I pictured us driving home with a telephone pole angled out over the tailgate, its butt hooked under the toolbox.
“I’m sorry,” I told her.
She shrugged, no eye contact at all, and drove north until I fell asleep against the door panel. She shook me awake maybe an hour later. We were at one of those halfway diners that feed the cross-country bus crowds, that just have rows and rows of toilets. We didn’t go inside, but to the far island of pumps, the handles all garbage-bagged over.
“This where you get make-believe unleaded?” I asked, chocking my door open with my foot.
“Something like that,” she said.
I started to get out but she was holding my wrist again. Not looking at me, but in the rearview.
I pulled my door to and watched real casual in my mirror, but there were just truckers walking in and out, always stopping just before the door to spit, all the cold air in the place rushing past them.
“Ed told me about you getting lost that time,” I told her. “It’s all right.”
She looked at me, didn’t answer, and I rewound, played it back, what she’d heard: all right. As if it had been her fault.
“Where were you?” I asked, quieter.
“Here,” she said.
“I mean then.”
“Lost,” she said, in a different voice, then stood out of the car before I could follow up, apologize.
I stood too, leaned over the hood to steady myself.
She came around to my side, reached into the squeegee bucket hose-clamped onto the pole, and pulled out a freezer bag with Jeremy Michaels’ face in it. Only it was me, not the picture she’d taken earlier but one while I was sleeping. I thought of the papers on her fake nightstand rustling, closed my eyes, opened them again.
I pulled it from her, turned my back, peeled the top apart.
In a neat, non-Lorinda hand on the back of the picture were the words yes I’ve seen this boy.
It was for the Michaels. Twenty-two years after they’d asked.
I could see them in their tasteful, trying-to-be-nondescript clothes out here at the last island, pulling their son’s picture up from the developing tray the bucket had to be to them; the fairy tale.
“We needed the money,” Lorinda said, and then said it again.
I laughed without quite smiling, and held the picture to my face, leaving my prints all over the back of it.
When she tried to touch me I pushed her away harder than I meant to and she fell over an old gravity hose and rolled away from me, like she was expecting more. I stepped forward once and she stopped, staring up at me, and I didn’t lower my hand to her, just turned for the diner instead, settled into a booth by the plate glass. All the truckers were watching me over their coffee. I stared at my hands on the table, pressed them into it to keep my fingers from shaking.
We needed the money.
The waitress wouldn’t take my order because she’d seen Lorinda fall. I grinned at the stupidity of it all, didn’t stop until one of the truckers settled into the booth across from me. He just stared. I looked up at him and knew what was coming, knew there was no help, so just did what I could: pushed the table hard into his chest, pinning him for a moment while I scrambled up. The front door was locked, though. I pressed my forehead to the glass then turned to see the heel of the trucker’s hand coming at me, palm up, and then there was the sound of keys, and then I was outside on the asphalt.
He told me he was showing me what it felt like.
I laughed again and he sat on my stomach, holding my hair with one hand, hitting me with the other, the waitress—his girlfriend?—watching from the register, holding her finger to a key as if she could just push it and pretend this moment wasn’t happening, that she’d just been standing there ringing up a customer the whole time. I tried to wave to her for some reason and the snapshot of me fluttered away, like your soul does in a book, and, to complete the scene, make it right, everything suddenly bleached itself out, got washed into paler versions of itself.
It was Lorinda, in her uncle’s truck.
She rolled up until her bumper was an arm’s length from my head, and I looked up at the rusted undercarriage.
“He’s not worth it,” one of the bus-people said to Lorinda.
She tried to pick me up and I shrugged her away again, climbed the grill myself, felt around to the passenger side.
“We needed the money,” she said ten miles later, then again at twenty, and in the movie I was watching in my head now, of this, a demure Ford had pulled out of the parking lot behind us, was following us even now, Mr. Michaels holding his wife’s hand across the bench seat.
How he hadn’t stepped out of the car to keep the trucker off me, I had no idea. It was for the best, though; I would have screamed with him walking up out of the asphalt like that, one hand extended.
I wasn’t worried about the phone bill anymore. Lorinda sat across the living room from me, in the windowsill. “We don’t have to keep doing it,” she said. “It was just supposed to be that one time.”
I shrugged. The side of my face hurt. This was a vegan house, though: there was nothing to put on it to pull the pain out. If that even worked.
“How’d you get hold of them?” I asked.
“They never changed their number,” she said, looking away, eight stories down.
Meaning she’d had the flyer all along.
I scrunched my hair at the front of my head.
“They want to meet you,” she said.
“You know I can’t trust you anymore,” I told her.
She closed her eyes.
“I always screw things up,” she said.
She was sitting on the coffee table across from me now. It was maybe lunch, but we weren’t eating. I wondered for a moment if maybe I was Jeremy Michaels, kidnapped, eased into another neighborhood, another household.
“Where were you?” I asked her.
“I told—” she started, looking north, to the diner, but then got it: where was she when she was ten, and got lost.
“Will you trust me, then?” she asked.
I told her I didn’t know, and wasn’t lying. We had needed the money, though. And people are so easy around Christmas.
“You know where Deermont is, right?” she asked.
I nodded: two hours south, maybe. The opposite direction from my vigilante diner. I touched my face, looked for her to go on. She covered her eyes and said they used to camp there, her family. This time her mother hadn’t been able to make it, though. It was just her and her father, and it had taken me however long I had known her then to realize that she never called him “Dad.” It was always the formal term, Father. Like he was that far away, or, like God, that close, that inside.
“You don’t have to,” I told her.
She told me anyway, though.
They went to their usual place, with the rock overhang. He wrote her name in the soot by his head and said people had been using this place for centuries, because it was high, and because the scooped-out part of the cliff curled the heat back at you, and because, if you stoked your fire, you could see it for miles and miles. Lorinda fell asleep looking first at her name, then, when the flames were gone and all that was left was ember light, at the after-image of her name, until she wasn’t sure if it was even there anymore.
When she woke, h
er father was gone.
She was twenty-two when she told me this, but I could hear the ten-year-old in her voice, looking around for which tree to pee behind, if “behind” even meant anything without anybody else there.
Of course she got lost. It was like her uncle said, like I’d not meant, really: she went to the bathroom and never came back. For three weeks, anyway.
Little Girl Lost. It was what they called her on the radio, in the paper, on the news. She even showed me a flyer with her face on it and there she was at ten, in frayed pigtails.
He was fishing, she said. Her father. Fishing. Like he always did, leaving the women in camp for the morning, only this time it was just her, Lorinda.
That first day she walked to what she thought was camp over and over, and never heard her name being called, just waited for night and how she’d see the scooped-out part of the cliff that was theirs. How her father had probably worked all day dragging wood to it for the bonfire.
She sat on the highest clear spot she could find and hugged her knees and woke that way in the velvety, unbroken black.
On the second day she found a stream and drank from her cupped hands, then followed the stream to another, smaller one, and another, until it was just a trickle, a damp spot under the woven yellow grass. There hadn’t been trash in any of them. Once she heard a truck on what she knew had to be a blacktop road, its tires whirring, engine laboring, but then it was gone before she could find that road, and four more days slipped by. Her pigtails were frizzy now, straggling down onto her shoulders. She was eating the soft insides of bark she peeled off certain trees, and digging for some bulb-plant that had maybe been a turnip.
On the seventh day, she found the camp again. It was deserted. The raccoons had been at the stuffing of the sleeping bags, so everything was coated with angel hair. Her father had left the camp, forgotten it. She looked down into the basin, where he had to be looking for her. By now he wasn’t supposed to just start a bonfire, but burn the whole forest down, do away with the trees and just leave her there standing from the ash.
She broke open the one can of beans that was left and fingered them into her mouth along with the leaves and dirt they’d fallen into.
This left two more weeks.
Lorinda shrugged, hugging her knees again now in the window well of her apartment, and said they didn’t matter, those fourteen other days. The helicopters made their patterns, her shoes fell apart, she heard another truck—an RV—even saw a flash of a mirror or lens from across the valley. It was too far away, though, and probably lost too.
Partway through the second week, she found another can of beans. It was from the six-pack her father’d had at camp. It was sitting on a rock, right-side up. She watched it all morning, then stood, walked straight to it, and smashed it on a sharp rock in the creek. The water swirled brown for an instant with juice, but she only lost a spoonful of beans, if spoons still mattered.
Sometime after that she started seeing her father.
Telling me this, her voice became uneven, then too controlled.
I told her again that she didn’t have to, but she just went on.
The first time she saw him, he was walking funny, and she thought it might be because he’d been hurt trying to find her, or had worn his good boots out, was breaking in another, better pair.
She sat in the shade of her tree and waited for him to see her, to save her, rescue her, but as he drew closer she saw why he was lifting his feet so high: hip-boots. For wading. There was even a creel strapped over his shoulder, and when he turned sideways to navigate a rock, the long, limber rod which had been invisible straight on revealed itself.
He called her name, his voice strong and clear.
She didn’t answer.
He walked within twenty feet of her.
Lorinda closed her eyes after this part, refusing to let him still get to her. It wasn’t an act. Even now I know it wasn’t an act.
After that she followed him, watched him work the small, virgin streams, pull silver fish out of the water that glinted in the sun as they died, the green line leading out of their mouths like a slender tongue extended in pain. When he met with the rangers at lunch and the middle of the afternoon, for news, reports of her, the rangers would point along the skyline, trace grids in the dirt showing where they’d searched, where he had. They didn’t brush them away when they were done with them either, so at night she could emerge from the trees, stand in the squares, a ghost of herself.
I didn’t even ask where she slept, or if she did.
I did understand about when they found her, though, in the ditch of a farm-to-market road. She was just sitting, watching the cars pass by. Drawn by the hum of the tires. Which wasn’t the thing that made the news that afternoon. What made the news was that the driver of the car that finally pulled over had to scramble over the fence and through the brush and deep into the woods to finally catch her, and even then she fought. Even at ten years old, after nearly three weeks in the bush.
In her living room, being smart, I told her that it’s like with language: a kid can pick it up. Or lose it.
She smiled.
“Along with everything else,” she said.
That her dad brought tackle with him to look for her was one thing. But that she just watched him. That she could.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“Now you know,” she said, shrugging, and I did: the thing she’d been doing with Jeremy Michael’s parents hadn’t been about the money. It had been a test; she’d watched them coast up to the fuel island with the same eyes she’d watched her father with when she was lost. The same eyes she watched me with sometimes, in the street.
Now I knew.
“It’s not Christmas anymore, y’know,” I told her, my voice almost shaking.
She breathed out hard, through her nose.
“Run,” she said, just that, looking out the window, her back to the money divided on the coffee table, and I did, taking the close way around the building because I could feel her in the sway of my back, watching.
That night I followed a homeless man through the streets from doorway to doorway, and once when he raised his fist over his head to rail at some half-remembered injury I saw the thinnest hint of a phosphorescent line tracing delicate S-shapes in the night sky above him, and I looked away, stole across town into the graffiti-steam tunnels under the college, and up out of them into the basement of one of the resident halls, the couches and the television and the academic life. Soon enough one of the fraternity boys stumbled down in his boxers to shove change into the vending machine, then stood by my couch looking at the same program I was, tossing salted peanuts into his mouth.
“This one again?” he said—the show—and I laughed, shrugged, and betrayed everything I thought I stood for.
It was three days before I had to leave, before the rent-a-cop asked for my student ID then actually ran it through, asked me what floor I lived on. By then I’d put Lorinda together in my head some, though. Enough, anyway. It all came down to her salads, how of course she liked them. It wasn’t the turnips she’d dug up, but her father. How he had to have cooked the fish he caught, their smoke wisping through the trees, their taste in the air.
With some of the money from the coffee table I bought a beer at Tanner’s, waiting for Lorinda to fill the door again, or not to, and with the rest I bought a cork board from the bookstore next door, carried it under my arm through the streets, collecting abandoned tacks from telephone poles. The parts of their shafts which were buried in the oily wood were shiny and bright. The flyer I was trying to ignore was the homeless man I’d seen fishing the other night. He was gone.
By the time I found another apartment, I was Jeremy, slipping away in the third grade, watching my parents through parted bushes, Huck Finning past my own memorial service. It didn’t last, though, the apartment. Or, my rent. I called my father and he breathed in deep for a lecture, and I left him talking, the payphone receiver balanced to catch th
e rain, drown him out.
Summer Session One started and Tanner’s dropped its prices, started serving more margaritas on the patio. It’s where I saw Ed again. He had his own beer in cans up the sleeve of his shirt, so that at first, his arms were stiff like a robot. But as the day wore on they were wet yarn waving before him as he wheeled from our table to the bathroom, the bathroom to our table. We drank, and drank, each revolutionaries in our own way maybe, in our minds at least, and I told him I knew about her now, Lorinda, Lindy, the whole Little Girl Lost thing, and he eyed me over his mug, asked if I thought it really happened, then?
“What?” I said, and turned to the door, half-expecting her to appear in ratted pigtails—summoned, her hair matted with leaf litter like she’d never been found at all.
Ed shrugged it off, but then I got a little more out of him later: Lorinda weighed more when they found her than she did when they’d gone on the trip.
In the incomplete silence he left—the suggestion—I closed my eyes to try to think about this, cracked the beer open on the dash of his truck we were suddenly in. The beer sloshed over my hand.
“Careful,” I told him, Ed, and he wheeled through molasses over to the other curb, and we urged the earth to keep rolling under us until his house came into view at the end of the street.
“The meat tree,” Ed said, spraying beer before him in a fine mist.
I focused on him. We were leaning on his dumpster-truck in the backyard.
He laughed, looked up at the trees all around, like fingers reaching into the sky, and I thought of her again, at ten, alone in the woods, then told Ed about the scam she was pulling on the Michaels. How she was using the Michaels to get back at her father. I was crying drunk by then. The trucker’s fist had left an impression under my eye somehow—a ring?—and I’d taken to holding my finger there. It was like all our mothers had done with Jeremy’s name: used us to fill it up.
The Ones That Got Away Page 21