How Will I Know You?

by Jessica Treadway

  On the pond, a few younger children were wobbling on their skates near the shore, their mothers standing around watching and chatting as they sipped from cups and Thermoses. I saw no sign of Joy, so I assumed she was in the shack. After a moment considering what I might say when I encountered her (I decided to pretend it was a coincidence, then take it from there, depending on her reaction), I turned off the engine and headed inside.

  There were a lot of cars in the lot, but I realized when I saw no other customers in the place that they must have belonged to the mothers out on the pond. The clerk behind the counter looked up but not at me when I entered, and I did a double take, remembering him from the barbecue at Susanne’s house. I raised my hand in a half wave, but he just scowled in response, and I figured he didn’t remember our brief conversation that day. He continued to watch me after I headed down the first aisle, feeling compelled to act like a customer even though I felt the urgency to find Joy.

  Being watched in a store was, of course, nothing new; it’s happened all my life. I remember going to the Vinyl Village in college, to browse and sometimes buy old records to play on the hi-fi my father said my mother had left behind. I made them suspicious there my first few times, because although I could tell they expected me to head for the racks featuring Sam Cooke, Billie Holiday, and Otis Redding, I passed these by and stopped instead before the bins containing Shostakovich, Berlioz, and Chopin. When I took the LPs into the listening room, the clerks at the counter pretended not to keep an eye on me, but I knew they did. Once they got to know me—which happened during my third visit to the store, when I came out of the room with the cover to Debussy’s La Mer by Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic, asking if they could find me the better recording by Boulez and the Cleveland Orchestra—they relaxed, then began greeting me by name every time I came in. I could tell they were pleased with themselves for having a black friend. I know this kind of thing is supposed to bother me; I know that other people, especially black people, would say it should. I sometimes feel disappointed when I recognize the limitations of a relationship because of how others show themselves to be, but I can’t go so far as to say it bothers me.

  Why do white people think their tests for you are the only ones that matter? It’s as if everyone on both sides understands that all you have to do is pass those tests, and then things can be fine. I’m pretty sure it’s never occurred to these people that I have tests for them, too. The difference, of course, is that they can’t imagine any repercussions that might matter to them of failing my test. But it matters to me. That’s not always enough, but it’s better than nothing.

  At the end of the aisle, I picked up an item at random—a package of index cards, I think—and brought it up to the counter. “Find everything you were looking for?” the clerk said, and I couldn’t tell whether he was mocking my purchase or genuinely wondering if he could help me locate something else from my list. I held my breath because the mix of smells coming off him was so strong—stale perspiration and marijuana—and realized that what I had taken to be a scowl could have been purely the nature of what years of pot smoking had done to his face. When I didn’t answer right away he added, “What the fuck are you staring at?”

  As if the word “fuck” were a signal of some kind, the door to the rear office swung open and a man who must have been the boss came out as I was saying to the clerk, “We’ve met before, remember? I was just trying to place you.”

  I was doing my best to smooth the moment over, but what I said only made it worse, if it’s fair to judge from the way he seemed to receive my words, clattering my change on the counter between us instead of dropping it into my hand.

  “Problem?” the boss asked.

  “No problem,” the clerk said, but he was unable to hide what he thought of me. “Smoke break,” he added, and without waiting for permission or dismissal, he headed toward the door.

  His boss shrugged at me, and I read it as the apology I believe he intended. He said Hey, then asked, “You play?” For a moment I thought he wanted to sell me some lottery tickets. I must have looked confused because he added, “Football. You’re just—you look like you could have been a tackle. I played, is why I ask.”

  He got redder and redder the more he talked, and wanting to save him, I shook my head. “My grandmother wouldn’t let me.” I realized how that sounded but resisted defending it: the truth was that I’d always been glad Grandee wouldn’t allow me to go out for football, even if I’d wanted to.

  “Smart lady.” He laughed. “I’d be better off myself if I hadn’t taken all those knocks to the head.”

  I smiled back, appreciating his effort to make up for the awkwardness in the air. Remembering that Susanne was waiting for a call from me, I decided it couldn’t hurt to ask, “Did you see a girl, a teenager, in here? About this big?” I held a hand up to indicate Joy’s height.

  “There’s a few of them out there. See?” He pointed out at the pond, and now I saw a group of girls gathered to one side behind a stand of trees that must have hidden them from me when I first pulled in. There were four of them, including Joy. Relieved to have her in sight, I took a few steps toward the window to see that she and another of the girls were yelling at each other. Gesturing. Fighting the way girls do, without any physical contact.

  I told him I saw who I was looking for, and on my way out I almost bumped into Cliff (his name came to me suddenly, though too late), as he flicked his lighter desperately in flameless clicks. He muttered something I couldn’t quite decipher, but I didn’t ask him to repeat it. Beyond him, at the pay phone, I saw another teenage girl who appeared on the verge of tears. She seemed so miserable that I smiled, but she let her eyes dart down without returning the smile and turned her back to me to look out at the ice, in the direction of the abandoned condo complex and the woods Cass had told me the kids call the Undead Forest.

  I am used to this, too: white people looking away when you catch their eye, though I hardly even register it anymore. I got back in the car and turned it on, idling for a moment as I considered my next move. Joy may have been arguing with her friends, but there was no reason to think she was in danger. And I knew it would hardly do for me to head out there and insist that she go back home. Some black guy, I remembered her saying to Susanne, and I imagined the looks the other girls would give me—let alone what they’d say to one another, afterward—if I approached them now.

  I opened my phone and dialed Susanne, who answered on the first ring. “She’s fine,” I told her, hearing that she sounded frantic. “They look like they’re wrapping it up, whatever it is. I’m sure she’ll be home soon.”

  “Oh, thank God.” I could almost feel the warmth of her breath coming through the phone, and the intimacy of it made me wince. I hung up before she could ask me to stay until Joy left, or thank me, or say anything else; it was too painful, and as I put the Fury in gear and pulled out of the lot, I resolved to stop all this foolishness and—how does the phrase go?—move on with my life. Easier said than done, though. Like everything.

  At home I sketched for a few hours, then turned on the TV for company as I ate a microwaved meal. That was when I saw the breaking news about a girl believed missing and presumed drowned, and I kept watching (if I could have held my breath the whole time, I would have) until they identified her as Joy. Then Susanne came on the screen, and I had to turn the set off. I reached for my phone, at the same time realizing I could not call her. I could not do anything other than sit here and pick up this book and start writing, though now that I’ve come to the end of it, I’m no closer to understanding what might have happened than I was when I began.

  Zero Visibility

  Friday afternoon and Tom was stalling again, not wanting to leave the shack to go home. Alison had invited her parents for dinner, saying she wanted to make it up to all of them—lying about being pregnant, worrying them all with a DUI her father had had to make go away. “How about making it up to me by not having your parents ove
r?” Tom asked, but she pretended to think he was joking.

  He was glad to have an excuse to go to the shack in the first place, feeling the need to check up on Cliff, who’d already missed two shifts—without calling in—since he’d been hired. Tom resolved that the third time would be the last; he was inclined to allow a couple of strikes, but he’d be damned if he’d let somebody who worked for him make him look like a chump.

  Alison told him he couldn’t fire the new guy. “Why not?” Tom asked.

  “He’s an addict. That’s a disability.”

  Tom snorted. “Bullshit. He just likes getting high.”

  “Okay, don’t listen to me, but it’s true.” She shrugged and raised a hand as if to say Go ahead, find out the hard way. “We had an in-service about this. You have to give him a break.”

  He was still pissed off about this as he drove to the shack, but as it turned out, going in ended up being a good move, given the tense moments between Cliff and the black guy. Sitting in the back room, he’d heard Cliff say “fuck” and came out to see what was going on, which the customer seemed to appreciate even if Cliff obviously did not. After Cliff left in a huff to smoke outside, Tom made a stupid remark about football and then felt like an idiot, but the guy was generous enough not to seem to resent it. Their brief exchange left Tom feeling good about himself: he was no racist, even if he did have one for a father-in-law.

  Cliff returned to his post after his smoke break, but it was only to collect his jacket from under the shelf. “You’re on till five,” Tom reminded him, but Cliff said, “The hell with that, I got someplace to be” and huddled out again into the cold. With anyone else Tom would have followed him out and told him he was fired, but remembering Alison’s warning, he took Cliff’s place behind the counter and felt like the guy had done him a favor by giving him a legitimate excuse not to go home yet.

  A few minutes before five, Estelle came in for the night shift. She laughed when Tom told her Cliff had taken off early, as if anything else would have surprised her. When Tom dawdled in leaving, she grinned and said, “The Strong Arms coming for dinner again?”

  “Busted,” he told her, grinning back, and then he had no choice but to head home. Doug and Helen had beaten him there, as usual, and as usual he parked on the street. In the kitchen, Alison and her mother chatted over their glasses of Diet Coke. His wife’s cheeks were flushed from opening the oven to check on the meatloaf, and when Tom stepped into the house, he tried to believe it was pleasure instead of surprise he saw on her face. The expression he read there, despite not wanting to recognize it, was the familiar one of Oh yeah, I forgot you were coming. If it weren’t for the fact that he knew how much her accident had scared her, he might have guessed—from the flush and the briefly confused look in her eyes—that she’d been drinking. He tried to ignore the thought as he went toward the women to deliver a kiss first to his wife, then to his mother-in-law, before cracking a Genny. Alison handed him a glass, telling him that since he was late, he’d have to drink it with dinner.

  “Why the rush?” he asked, then remembered. Of course: another meeting. She’d been going every night since the one after the accident—thirty meetings in thirty days was what they advised. Sometimes Helen picked her up, sometimes she went by herself. When she came home, Alison could be quiet or energized, and if he asked, she might tell him things other people had said. In only two weeks, Tom had become familiar with the phrases she and other drunks (for some reason she preferred this word to “alcoholic”; Tom assumed it had something to do with wanting to appear down to earth and not teacherly, as she scarfed down Chips Ahoy! in a church basement trying to satisfy the urge for sugar she wasn’t feeding with wine and whiskey) were supposed to say to themselves, to stay sober. Keep it simple. You’re only as sick as your secrets. First things first.

  When Doug’s cell phone rang in his pocket five minutes after they’d sat down, they all understood that the meal was most likely over. While his father-in-law stood to answer it, Tom heard his own cell ringing in the kitchen. Seeing that the call was from dispatch, the first thing he thought was I shouldn’t have had a beer.

  But what he heard erased any traces of fuzziness he might have felt: they needed him at the lake. To recover a body. Leave now. He and Doug hung up at the same time, meeting back at the table. Alison waved with one hand as Helen told them, “We get it, go.” Doug bolted out to the Buick and took off while Tom hauled up his diving gear, which he kept on standby at the back door, threw it in the truck, and peeled out after his father-in-law.

  Shit, shit, shit. He didn’t feel ready. It was dark out; the dive would be in black water, his first in zero visibility.

  If someone had told him in high school that someday he’d find himself groping around in water for something nobody wanted to touch, he’d have laughed and said, Yeah, that’ll happen. Right after I become a Boy Scout. In his wildest dreams he’d never thought he’d end up a rescue diver. But he took the class, then joined the crew, because he knew it would boost his stock in Doug’s eyes (which he cared about only because Alison cared about it), and he wasn’t sure how else to do that. To his surprise, he was good at it. Or maybe it wasn’t a surprise: maybe he’d guessed, in the part of himself he avoided looking at, that he was destined for this. That he would be good at it—steady, his wits in place no matter what happened, unlikely to panic. The same quality that allowed him to withstand and even sometimes enjoy the pressure on the field, being rushed as he sought someone open to a pass (hearing inside the heat of his helmet the whoosh of the words You got time, you got time—and the miracle of it was that just by telling it to himself, he made the time), kicked in on his first dive and each one after. Jack, the dive instructor, had told them that fourteen to sixteen breaths per minute was what a beginner could expect, but from the start Tom had measured the experienced rate of eight to ten. In the pool, practicing, he managed to avoid the hard, sharp obstacles (chicken wire, rebar) the trainers planted for the newbies so they’d learn to feel in front of them before they moved, and he was the only one of his group who’d located and brought up, every time, the dummy drowning victim named Laureen, after Jack’s first ex-wife. Natalie and the others in the class had called Tom “Gills,” and he tried not to show how much he liked it.

  But before now he’d only gone under to bring up the gun a guy he’d known in high school had used to shoot his wife and her woman lover (another of their classmates, Jennie Cruz), and the broken pedal of a five-speed belonging to a boy abducted by his ex-con junkie father as he rode home from school one day. This would be his first attempt to locate an actual person, and in zero vis, at that. Was anyone ever ready for this? He told himself to calm down; he’d have help out there, lots of people around, he wouldn’t be doing it alone.

  He pulled up next to the woods, behind Doug’s car, and saw the hovercraft waiting at the edge of the water. Doug, having just been briefed, filled him in: teenage girl believed to have fallen through, in the water too long by now, no way she was still alive but they needed to find the body.

  Tom remembered seeing them out there only a few hours earlier, and wondered which girl it was that had gone under—Snake Girl or one of the others? The mission was recovery, not rescue, though of course they weren’t telling the family that. As Natalie helped him into his suit, he tried not to hear what he knew were the parents’ voices, screaming: Go get her! Go! The boat sped them out to the hole and he let himself fall in, fall under. He gave a single pull on the tether to let Natalie know he was okay to leave the surface. In many ways, it was a relief: once he was in the water with his mask and his tank, he heard only the sounds of the air moving through his regulator; he’d left the voices, and their panic, behind.

  He began sweeping with his gloves in a grid pattern as he tried not to let himself recognize the truth, which was that he did not actually want to find a body down there. He finished working the grid once, then tugged on the tether to signal Natalie that he was starting back without having
detected anything. Maybe they’re wrong, he thought. The girl didn’t go under; something else made the hole. Or maybe she fell through but escaped somehow, then ran away. Or something. They’d find out later.

  Then he felt it: a hand on his wrist. Latching on, fingers around the skin of his dry suit, the grip cold and hard. He shook it off, flipped onto his back, and began kicking his fins with everything he had toward the surface. What the fuck! He knew how stupid it was to swear inside his mask, use up the air required to do so, but he couldn’t stop himself. (Later that night, going over the entire fiasco in his mind, he corrected himself: Not couldn’t stop. Didn’t.)

  He began kicking so violently that he barely registered the urgent pull signal from Natalie, asking if he was okay. Before he’d realized he had freed himself from whatever had seized him, he’d done the unthinkable: pulled his mask off and begun battling toward the top. Natalie yanked on the tether—Trouble?—but Tom ignored it, giving no signal back. The shock of the cold water hitting his face triggered an almost unbearable impulse to breathe, but at the last moment he remembered his secondary air supply—the bailout bottle—hooked up the regulator, and started to take in breaths that wouldn’t kill him. Breaking the surface, he heard the screaming begin from the mother on shore. Though he couldn’t make out the words, he knew the scream was some variation of: Where is she? You have her? and he knew he had failed.

  He got on the boat, threw the mouthpiece aside, and gasped. “Anything?” Natalie said, holding the radio ready. Tom shook his head.

  “I got tangled up in some weeds. That’s it.” His breath came in heaves. “Creepy as shit, but no body.” Later, he would try to convince himself that it might have been different if he’d thought there was a chance she was still alive. He also tried telling himself that maybe he’d been wrong, after all; maybe it had been only a weed, and not the hand of the dead girl, wrapping itself around his arm.