by Cote Smith
Inside a few auxiliary lights glowed. Robyn woke a desktop from sleep mode. “You know there are laws, right? I could get into so much trouble.”
“But I filled out the form,” Lia said.
Robyn clacked at the keyboard with her long fingers, and Lia knew she was still drunk when it made her sad to think that those long fingers, perfectly designed to play the piano or the guitar or any instrument, really, would spend the rest of their lives punching keys in the post office.
“I’m drunk,” Lia said.
“Now what am I searching?” Robyn asked.
“Hold on,” Lia said, and dug around in her pocket for the empty envelope her mother had given her. “Here we are. Max Finlayson.”
“Let me see.” Robyn took the envelope from Lia.
“Wait. Is this the scientist guy?”
“Who?” Lia said.
“I read this book, Signals. It’s a novel, but it’s based on this guy who I guess is a real person. He’s obsessed with finding aliens. I just got to the part where the aliens contact him through a filling in his mouth. But he’s never had a cavity. He thinks it’s a government implant,” Robyn said. “You’ve never heard of him?”
An alarm pulsed momentarily in Lia’s brain. Two wires sparked at each other, just out of reach.
“All right,” Robyn said, “let’s do this before I sober up. So your mother wants an address so she can break this guy’s heart?”
“Something like that,” Lia said.
“Well, I can narrow it down. But there are a lot of Max Finlaysons in the US. Look: Max of Maine, Max of Mississippi, Tennessee. This thing will give a count of how many letters at a specific address ended up undeliverable, but that could mean anything. If it was the wrong address, or we couldn’t find the place, say if it was up in the mountains or something. Like, look at this one. Max of Colorado. Bunch of letters died trying to make it to this guy. Same thing for this one, Max of California. I assume it’s a guy. Hey, what if it’s Maxine?”
“Does it say who sent the letters?”
“It does for the California ones. Deirdre Wells. That who your Max mailed?”
“No,” Lia said, and double-checked the envelope. “It just says Dorothy. All right. I guess give me the top ten then. The Maxes with the max hits.”
“Coming up,” Robyn said. “But can you write them down? They monitor everything we print.”
Lia took out her notepad, flipped to the last used page, marked with notes about Menninger, about Moyer and McNellis. She turned the page and wrote. Max of California, of Colorado, of Wyoming and Tennessee.
“You good?” Robyn said.
“Wait,” Lia said. A spark crackled. The computer’s cursor blinked a secret message to her. She closed her eyes and felt it in her teeth. “Can you look up international addresses? Like for Australia or someplace?”
“Nah,” Robyn said. “Actually, maybe. I don’t know. I’ve never tried.” She grinned at Lia. “What are you up to, Miss Fish?”
* * *
Lia woke up well after noon, her head swirling with the events of the previous night. The drinks she’d downed, the bushes and dumpsters she’d peed behind. Thankfully Robyn was there, in her drunken memories, lifting her spirits, keeping her company. It felt good to think of her, to not be alone for once, when she was making questionable decisions.
When Lia sat up, she was relieved to be in her own bed, though why she was wearing Robyn’s jean jacket she couldn’t say.
“Was it worth it?” her mother asked. She was standing in the doorway, arms folded across her chest. “You missed class.”
“It was for class.”
“And how’s that.”
“I went to the post office, like you told me,” Lia said, but didn’t have the energy to explain any further. And truthfully, she wasn’t sure she could if she tried. At the moment, the last thing she could remember was Robyn yelling to order pizza or she’d burn down the whole building.
“I didn’t know they had a two-drink minimum,” her mother said. She stepped out of the corner. “Well, let’s see it then. Your ‘homework.’ ”
Lia groaned. “Mom.”
“No, come on.”
“I don’t know where I put it.”
“Check that jacket.”
Lia reached into the side pockets and pulled out a lighter. Her mother rolled her eyes. Lia searched the jacket’s inside pocket, found half a pizza crust and her notepad. She handed them both to her mother and dropped her face into her pillow.
Lia heard her mother flipping through the pages. She wondered what she saw there. The Moyer and McNellis mess, yes. The manifest of Maxes, maybe. What else? Return addresses for dead letters sent to Menninger? Names of family members who could shed light on what really happened there? She felt a familiar burning in her chest, though it was quickly overruled by the nausea in her throat.
“Lia, what’s this?” her mother said. Lia kept her head in the pillow. “This. This note about Emile.”
Lia rolled over. “What?” She crawled off the bed and snatched the notepad from her mother’s hands. There it was, her uncle’s name, though she could barely recognize her own handwriting.
“Lia, this isn’t what we talked about.”
“Mom, I don’t remember any of this.”
She ran her finger over a list, eight names or so, jotted after the top ten Maxes. Emile Haddock. Helen Mueller. Warren Chambers. And more.
“Lia? What did you do?”
There was a flutter of panic in her mother’s voice. Her face looked frightened and white in the room’s gaunt light.
“What? I didn’t do anything.”
“Did you contact these people?”
“No,” she said. “I mean, I don’t think so.” But how could she be sure? She didn’t even remember how she got home. Her mother took the notepad and sat down on Lia’s bed. Lia didn’t understand what her mother was getting so upset about. They were just names, one of which happened to be Emile. Unless—what if they were next to his name for a reason?
Lia looked at the names again. She’d seen them before. Of course she had.
“Mom, are these—?” But she already knew the answer. Every one of them was listed on the Limetown Commission Summary. She remembered finding Emile’s name with her finger, how it affirmed something in her, a sense of loss, like reading the names on a war monument. And though she understood she was supposed to feel sad, she couldn’t, not in the way she felt she was supposed to, not for a man she couldn’t remember.
“Mom, I really didn’t mean to do this. I’m trying—”
“I know,” her mother said. “It just gets stuck, doesn’t it? Keeps tugging at you.”
Lia nodded, though she wasn’t sure what was tugging at her mother. For Lia, it was the mystery, the not knowing, but when she looked at her mother and saw the sadness lurking in her eyes, she wondered if there was something more.
Her mother closed the notepad and patted Lia’s hands. “Anyway, there’s no harm. I already went looking for half these people.”
“Is that where you were, when you disappeared?”
“Some of the time, yes. But I never found anything. Only abandoned houses, apartments.”
Lia thought of her own dead ends—of Menninger, of Dr. McNellis—and how a smarter person would have turned around and gone the other way.
“How did you make yourself stop?” she asked.
“I didn’t,” her mother said. “Your father did. That was his one condition. No more searching.”
“But he’d asked you before.”
“I guess I finally realized something, when you were away.” She took Lia’s hand. “Why do I need to keep searching?” she said. “I have you.”
* * *
Lia tried to convince herself that what her mother said was true. That the mystery didn’t matter as long as she had her family. But something still felt off. She watched her mother closely over the next few weeks, and sometimes, in the evening, Lia would c
atch her mother staring out the kitchen window, frozen over a sink full of dishes. Or, once, during the middle of math, Lia excused herself so she could sneak down the hall, past her mother’s office, where she spied her mother sitting in her office chair, pen in hand, gazing directly at the blank wall.
“I think there’s something wrong with her,” she told Robyn one night at the Bourgeois Pig. They’d hung out a few times since the night they snuck into the post office. Most nights Lia sat quietly and listened to Robyn complain about her job. But tonight, the discussion found its way to family, and when the attention was turned to Lia, it felt good, for once, to not hold back, and to have a friend to share her worries with. “I’m worried she’s depressed. Legitimately.”
Robyn swirled a glass of scotch, watching the rocks melt. “I had an aunt like that,” she said. “Worked the same job cutting cards at a greeting card factory since she was eighteen. Did that for thirty years straight, retired early. Can you imagine that, being done with work in your forties? She had like half her life left to do whatever she wanted. Anyway, one day my uncle comes home and there she is, sitting at the kitchen table with a bunch of paper, just cutting away. All the pages were blank, but she didn’t care.”
“You made that up,” Lia said.
“I did not! I think about that shit all the time. It’s genetic, you know. Stuff like that.” She made her fingers into scissors, cut at Lia’s arm.
More drinks came, and although she told herself to be careful, a part of Lia embraced the buzz that washed over her body. Is this what the ocean feels like? she wondered. She couldn’t say. She’d never been. Not in the water, anyway. Not even in Australia. She’d seen it, but never swam.
“You’ve never been in the ocean?” Robyn asked. They had stopped at a pizza place that handed out slices to drunk college kids through a twenty-four-hour magical window. Lia was sitting on the hood of Robyn’s car.
“Did I say that out loud?”
Robyn laughed at her. “Kind of. Something about Australia.”
She grabbed Lia’s arm. “Let’s do it. Are you ready?”
“What?” Lia said. “Right now?”
“Why not? It’s only an hour away.”
“Won’t it be, you know, freezing?”
“Oh, right,” Robyn said. She looked up at the cold black sky, then puffed her breath out before her, testing the temperature. “Well, so we won’t swim for long. Just a quick dip. It’ll be better that way. You know, invigorate the spirit.”
Lia tried to laugh the idea off, but Robyn wouldn’t quit. “Fine,” Lia said. “If it’ll make you happy.”
Robyn downed some coffee, sobering up for the drive. Lia reclined in the passenger seat, nodding off intermittently, so that the entire night began to feel like a dream. She woke to the sound of tires on a gravel road, as Robyn snaked through the fog. The headlights only revealed ten feet in front of them, so that even when they were close, and Robyn rolled down the windows, Lia could smell the ocean but not see it. Robyn parked the car. Outside, the rain had stopped, but the air was colder than in Eugene. Robyn remained undeterred, grabbing extra shirts she kept in the trunk for some reason.
“Oh!” she said. “Lia! I almost forgot. Your letter came.” She held up an envelope that she pulled from the trunk.
Lia shivered beside the car door. “What letter?”
“Um, the one you asked for, that night at the post office?” She glanced at Lia. “I almost got fired for this. I still might.”
Lia didn’t know what to say.
“Jesus,” Robyn said. She shook her head, threw a shirt at Lia’s face. “You need to learn to hold your liquor.”
Lia wrapped the shirt around herself for warmth. “Can I see it?”
“Sure,” Robyn said. “After we swim.”
“It’s like fifty degrees. You’re seriously going in there?”
“I am. And so are you, if you want to know what the letter says.”
She stashed the letter in the trunk, slammed it shut, and set off toward the ocean. By the time Lia made it to the beach, Robyn had already stripped down to her underwear.
“Miss Fish,” Robyn said. “Strip.”
There was something overwhelming about all that water. It made her feel so small, insignificant, like the world could toss her away and it wouldn’t matter one bit.
“This letter better be worth it,” she said.
“Beats me,” Robyn said. “He’s your uncle.”
“What did you just say?”
“You really don’t remember?” Robyn said. “After we did all those Max searches, you started going on and on about your uncle. How you never knew him, didn’t know anything about him until he disappeared. You made me do a search.”
“And we found something?”
“One letter, I think. To a Claire somebody. You requested the letter be sent to my office, forged Claire’s signature right in front of me. Man, any of this ring a bell?”
Lia kicked off her shoes. She pushed down her pants and peeled away her jacket and shirt. Her body turned cold immediately, but Lia didn’t feel it. She felt a warmth in her chest, the pull of the ocean, the desire to know what the letter said.
“I guess that’s a yes,” Robyn said, but Lia wasn’t listening. She was tearing down the beach, wading into the unknown.
When she first jumped in, the initial jolt was so cold she thought her blood would freeze in her veins. She heard Robyn’s voice, saying she would have to go farther out if she wanted her letter. Lia’s body resisted. She couldn’t make it move. Then came the wave. It pushed her out before pulling her in. She felt her veins open up.
* * *
She shivered for hours afterward. Robyn blasted the heat, but her body wouldn’t stop shaking. She held the envelope in her hands. She hadn’t opened it yet, wouldn’t until she was home, in her room, where she could read it without anyone peering over her shoulder. When Robyn dropped her off, she squeezed her hand. “Sorry about that,” she said. “I should have stayed closer to you, in the water.” Lia pulled her hand away and got out of the car.
Her dad was in the living room. Not waiting, he claimed, but awake. “Old habits,” he said.
He patted the couch cushion next to him, and Lia sat down, reluctantly, the unopened letter crumpled against her chest. Above the TV ticked a cuckoo clock, a beat behind Lia’s pounding heart.
“Whiskey?” her dad said.
“Scotch.”
“Whatever happened to beer?”
“I grew up.”
Her dad laughed. He kissed the top of her head. It felt good to be next to him, his warmth, to pretend for a moment that he was just mildly upset that his daughter had stayed out too late, drinking with her friend.
“I’m glad you’re happy,” Lia said.
“Of course I’m happy. I’ve got my Apple back.”
“And Mom.”
“Who?” her dad joked. “Oh yeah, her too.”
He rubbed her arm, still pocked with goose bumps from the plunge into the ocean.
“So you forgave her?” Lia said. “For everything.”
Her father sighed. He closed his eyes, as if he’d find the right words if he thought hard enough. “It’s not a zero-sum game. I’ve made mistakes too. None of them are unforgivable.”
But if Mom had kept going? Lia wanted to say. If she kept searching, how long would it have been before she crossed a line? Or had she already crossed it, without Lia’s dad knowing, then quickly jumped back when she saw what was on the other side?
She didn’t say any of these things. She didn’t want to get into it, not with the dead letter resting secretly with her.
“That’s all in the past,” her dad said. “Tell me about your day.”
“It was fine,” Lia said, but didn’t go into any detail. She slipped under her dad’s arm, her hand holding the envelope to her chest. She crept upstairs to her room, closed the door, and sat cross-legged on her bed. She took out the envelope and laid it in front of her.
She didn’t believe her dad: the past wasn’t a thing you could forget. What’s past is prologue, Miss Scott would have said, and as Lia opened the envelope, slowly, so the slightest tear wouldn’t make a sound, she wondered if what was inside would indeed foretell the events to come.
Inside the envelope was a short note, and a picture. She read the note first.
Claire,
Tell me about your dreams. Tell me everything you remember. No? Then let me tell you mine. I’m a kid again, in the attic. You rescue me. Flash forward. I’m a teenager in school, alone in the parking lot. You talk to me. I’m a lab rat trapped in a cage. You free me. I’m in a motel. You return to me. In the dream, everything is perfect. Outside it is where the real problems lie. I mess up. I find you. I fail you. You say the past is the past, and I say, yes, exactly, it’s a foundation. Cracks and all. You say your future is here, with your family, and I say that is not the future I hear. I hear popcorn popping. I hear you whisper in my ear to be quiet: The show is starting. I hear her scratching on the sidewalk with chalk. I hear her crying in my arms, wondering why she feels different. I hear us sitting her down, explaining that different isn’t bad. To be different is good, especially when you find someone to be different with.
Later, I hear even more. I hear without having to listen. Without having to ask. (Tell me.) Your thoughts. Her thoughts. They’re always with me. I hear the sound of none of us ever being alone.
All this to say: there is still time. Tell me about your dreams. Tell me the future you see, and I’ll tell you what I hear.
My love to the Apple,
Emile
The wave socked Lia in the chest. Before she could catch her breath, another wave struck. Apple. She was drowning. She looked for Robyn’s hand to steady herself. She found the photo instead. Two people sitting on a bench. A couple. The man wearing a yellow scarf. The scarf Lia found in the attic, buried beneath books. The woman rested her head on the man’s shoulder. Lia had never seen her so young. So happy. A wave pulled her under. She fought to the top. The photo was in her hand. She left her room. She was descending the stairs. She was walking down the hall. She kept her head above the water, long enough to read the caption. Emile and Claire. She was opening a bedroom door, creeping into her parents’ bedroom. She put the photo next to her mother’s sleeping face, and as a final wave pulled her under, this time for good, through the blue of the night, the black of the ocean, she wondered what would happen if she bent down to the woman lying in her mother’s bed, the woman in the photo, and whispered into her ear, Claire.