Wish You Were Here

by Stewart O'Nan

  He threw his cards across the ottoman, Aunt Arlene waving at them. He rolled over in a ball, and this time he was crying.

  “Go!” their mother said, getting up, and Rufus cowered, his head between his paws. “Justin, go!”

  He couldn’t stand fast enough, and their mother yanked him by the arm and swung him toward the stairs. “You stay there until you’re ready to come down and apologize. That is not appropriate behavior.”

  She sat down again on the couch, still dangerous, her anger filling the room, and the rest of them were quiet.

  “Maybe we should take a break,” Aunt Arlene said, collecting the cards, so they did. Ella went back to reading. Sam had one of Justin’s Star Wars comics. Sarah headed for the stairs.

  “I don’t want you going up there and disturbing him,” her mother told her, meaning she couldn’t go and tell him it was all right, that it was just a stupid game and Sam was being a jerk and that her mother shouldn’t have yelled at him or grabbed him so hard.

  “I just want to get my book,” she said.

  “Try a different tone.”

  “I need to get my book.”

  “That’s better.” Her mother stood up and came over to her. “I’ll get it for you. Which one is it?”

  “It’s Ella’s. It’s the one with the dragon on the cover.”

  Her mother went up, leaving her standing there. When she came back down with the book, she asked Sarah to step into the other room with her—Grandma’s room.

  “You know,” she said, “I appreciate that you’re sticking up for your brother. I think that’s important. And I know how much you do for him at home, how well you took care of him when I was sick.”

  You weren’t sick, Sarah thought.

  “But sweetheart,” her mother said, “as much as you want to, you can’t fight all of Justin’s battles for him. He’s going to have to learn how to do things for himself.”

  Sarah didn’t argue with her, didn’t say a word.

  “Okay,” her mother said, “I just wanted to let you know that.”

  Their talk was over, everything was settled. Sarah was supposed to follow her into the living room. Instead, she stayed there, baffled and angry at what an asshole her mother was being.

  It wasn’t true, though her mother would never believe it. And it wasn’t worth running the risk, here, now, of her mother hitting her or, worse, crying as she held on to her, saying she was sorry, that it was all her fault, meaning—really—that it was her father’s. When her mother was drunk or when she was just too depressed to get out of bed, Sarah had learned that the only way she and Justin were going to get through this was to fight their battles together. But she couldn’t tell her that.

  10

  It was a reflex, a motion she’d known her entire life—the postcard waiting in her other hand—but as soon as Emily licked the stamp she realized she didn’t have to.

  “Uck,” she said, wiping her fingers across her lips, though there was no taste, really, she just felt foolish.

  Sometimes she didn’t know where her mind went. She wrote things down on the calendar, then discovered them a day late. Henry was forever chiding her about leaving the oven on or forgetting to let Rufus back in. Even Arlene had started, reminding her to check her purse for her keys whenever they went somewhere together. That exasperating Maxwell practicality. She was sorry, but she didn’t have that kind of a mind. She needed her lists.

  Self-adhesive stamps. She could remember when a postcard cost two cents and there was no such thing as a zip code. Or computers or cellular telephones, she thought. The world she knew was gone—or still there but obsolete, passed by like Kersey, stranded in the long barrens between exits on the interstate that would always be new to her, though it must be almost fifty years old.

  Time had been her friend until her late thirties, then it turned against her.

  She would not let a silly stamp send her into a blue mood, not on vacation. The rain was still upon them, but she’d taken care of the lists, the garbagemen had finally come, and now she’d finished the postcard she’d promised Louise. If the mailman took it today it should arrive by Friday, Saturday at the latest—if she got it to the box in time.

  In the living room, Rufus was watching Sarah and Justin playing chess on the floor, Ella and Kenneth soldiering away at the border of the puzzle. Arlene and Margaret didn’t look up from their books. She supposed Lisa was hiding upstairs. The weather said it would rain again tomorrow, and Emily had no idea what they were going to do then.

  Sam was in the kitchen, twisting open one of the plastic bottles of Kool-Aid that filled up their recycle bin, a swampy green the color of antifreeze, pure sugar. It was ten-thirty, and as far as she could tell, his mother hadn’t fixed him breakfast yet.

  “Did you ask an adult if you could have that?” Emily said.

  “No.”

  “You need to eat breakfast first. Go ask your father to fix you something.”

  He obeyed wordlessly, clearly unconcerned, and she sighed. She couldn’t imagine her acting like that with her grandmother Hedrick. She wouldn’t have been able to sit down for a week.

  “Rain, rain, go away,” she said at the back door, and pushed the wet umbrella through before stepping out. She was careful on the stairs, watching her feet, all the while gripping the postcard in a fist, afraid it would fall, water smearing the ink.

  A gust of wind shoved her square in the back like a hand, and she feared for the umbrella, tugged it down about her shoulders.

  “Just miserable,” she said, squishing across the drive.

  The road was empty, her toad nowhere to be seen. She was afraid when she opened the lid she would find today’s mail, but then when she pulled the tin flange down, hunched close, protecting the dry inside with her umbrella, she saw instead a seething mass of ants.

  She fell back as if stabbed, and the postcard fluttered from her grasp. She fished for it with a swipe of her free hand, but it eluded her, landing facedown on the road. She tried to pinch it up quickly before any real damage was done, in the process grinding it against the wet asphalt.

  “Goddammit!”

  It was ruined. You could still read it, but the front looked awful, as if someone had stepped on it (and she’d picked this one special from the Institute gift shop, a campy shot of the lake from the sixties, the water swimming-pool blue). She couldn’t send this to Louise.

  She left the lid open, vainly hoping the rain might disperse some of them, and tromped back toward the kitchen, her face rigid, intent.

  “Kenneth!” she called before she was even through the door. “Kenneth!”

  11

  He’d plotted it like a crime, stealing the opportunity to shoot. He brought along the two gas cans, ostensibly to combine trips, but really to buy himself time, give him an excuse to stop at the Gas-n-Go. He had the Holga loaded, bulky as a revolver in the pocket of his windbreaker. As bad as the garage was, it was a start. As always, Morgan was right. Take it frame by frame, roll by roll, just keep at it until something happens, because it will. It all came down to patience—like anything, Morgan said—and Ken had patience. If nothing else, the last ten years proved that.

  At this point there was nothing else he wanted to do with his life. He’d cast his lot, as his mother dramatically put it, and it was too late to change.

  There were times, like now, driving with the radio on low, wipers slapping away the rain, when he could see himself thanking a black-tie audience for an award, a great pompous blowup of one of his photos being lowered to the waxed stage behind him, the image he’d seen first now a worldwide icon like Eddie Adams’s street execution in Vietnam. In his tuxedo he held up the gold statuette, the medal, and bent to the stemlike microphone. “I’d like to thank my wife Lise,” he’d begin, “and my teacher Morgan.” His children, his father, his mother. In his daydreams he dedicated the award to his own students, the new generation they could trust with the future of the art. The applause followed him off.
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br />   Absurd as it seemed—impossible, since no one wanted his pictures— that fantasy had actually happened to a classmate of his, Davis Larrimore, two years ago. Technically, Larrimore was a mess, but his brother-in-law had an in at Newsweek and got him a job with their Seoul bureau. He’d been covering the Hyundai strike when a Molotov cocktail struck a soldier caught between the skirmish lines. A wave of strikers broke forward, and the soldier’s comrades deserted him. The frames Larrimore took of the crowd kicking him to death were too disturbing for the cover of Newsweek, but by the end of the year the images were everywhere, and they gave Larrimore a Pulitzer. “Right place, right time,” Morgan said when Ken bitched about his luck. And anyway, Morgan said with a shrug, that was a completely different kind of photography. Ken just had to work on his own work.

  And he had, at that point zealously, sure that his effort would be rewarded and then confused when it wasn’t. He’d always been promising, ever since he was a child—advanced placement, high SATs, dean’s list—but now, nearing forty, he couldn’t call himself promising. If he’d ever had promise, he’d squandered it. The proof was irrefutable. He’d accomplished nothing, and the suspicion that he’d been a fool all along, an impostor, nagged at him, despite Morgan’s assurances.

  The day was dark, trees waving, a storm blowing in from the north. The Putt-Putt came, and the graveyard, the high grass around the stones flattened by the weight of the rain, wet flags left over from Memorial Day, their stakes marked with bronze stars. His father did not consider him a failure, he was sure, and yet these last months his thoughts seemed to revolve around the idea, picking at it like a scab. Once Ken had shown him his darkroom—neat as his father’s workbench—walking him through the developing process. His father was impressed, as he always was, with the technical steps, the calibrated magic of the chemistry, and complimented Ken on the image (from the side, his father in his favorite chair, reading the business section of the Post-Gazette). He was sincere, because the print had become a favorite, hanging in the upstairs hall across from the bathroom. Thanksgivings Ken would come across it and admire his own composition, the way the light supernova-ed in the half-glasses balanced on his father’s nose, a happy accident.

  His father was not ambitious (much to his mother’s chagrin, he later found out). He took the bus downtown every morning, dragged his briefcase home at night. Success to him meant having the time to do nothing. Happiness was fishing, or being settled in his chair of a Sunday afternoon in the fall, the leaves raked high in piles, reading the paper while a ball game played. It was this ideal of peace that Meg had despised as complacency and that his mother defended as his right. But of all of them, his father was the least demanding, pleased by their high scores yet understanding when they flubbed a test. If anything, his expectations were too low. If Ken wanted to surprise him with some stunning, unexpected triumph the way Meg had with her rebelliousness, it was too late now. He was down to pleasing himself—or Lise, though honestly he could not imagine her ever being impressed with him again.

  He should be more like his father, he thought. That would be the way to honor him, not by mooning after a Pulitzer.

  A bolt of static crashed through the radio. He turned it off as if it were interfering with his thoughts. He was driving fast for the rain, timing himself by the dash clock, which seemed crazy, seeing as the challenge was to fill up the hours somehow, make the day pass faster. He had to be back to take the boys to the casino—not that he minded. He’d take another roll or two there with the Holga, work that nostalgic riff, the old pinball machines and sex-appeal testers, the greased cables of the ferry.

  The old hotel, the garage, the Putt-Putt, the cemetery—it all belonged to the same faded turn-of-the-century world of Chautauqua, and for an instant he saw an exhibit, a book, a life’s work documenting everything here, building up a library from which to choose the most telling images. He liked the idea of a larger project, impossible to fulfill too quickly. Shoot enough and something will come, Morgan said. Maybe that’s what he needed.

  No, it was ridiculous, grandiose, and noticing how he leapt at the possibility made him feel desperate.

  The farm stands were closed, but the Gas-n-Go was open as if nothing had happened, the sides of both islands occupied. In the windows the beer neon glowed. There was no police car parked by the ice machine or the caged propane tanks, just a rusty Suburban, a banged-up truck. He’d expected it to bear some more dire sign.

  On the way into Mayville he saw her face stapled to pole after pole, taped to a barbershop window, the door of a darkened sub shop. It was a quiet town, a backwater with a Doric courthouse and two blocks of rotting Victorians anchoring a hilly grid of split-level ranches surrounded by a county of bankrupt dairy farms going back to ragweed and thistle. He didn’t think she could still be here, stashed in someone’s basement, locked in a dripping barn.

  The road curved, turned sharply, and Main Street ran up from the lake like a boat ramp. The Golden Dawn seemed to be the only going concern downtown, but when he pulled into the empty space in front of the True Value, its lights were on, the storefront giving off a cozy glow. The sidewalk was raised above the sloping street and protected by a black railing of pipe; he had to climb a crumbling set of steps before he reached the door.

  It chimed behind him, the smell of free popcorn welcoming him inside. Long ago the owner had installed a machine like the one at a theater, making the trip to the store a highlight for Ken as a child. Every summer since he could remember he’d come here with his father, a strictly male pilgrimage, stocking up on fuses, mouse baits, rolls of screening—all the things that had renewed the cottage and now cluttered the garage. His father knew where everything was, ranged the aisles as if he worked there, but Ken couldn’t make sense of the store’s organization. He wandered the shelves like a lab rat—tempted, every minute, to use the Holga—until in a far corner he ran across a wall of insecticides in tall cans. He read three carefully, weighing their ingredients, finally choosing one with a cartoon of a dead ant on the front.

  His mother had been in such a hurry for him to get it that she hadn’t given him any money. It was cheap enough, he figured.

  The woman at the register rang it up without a word, and Ken recalled his father talking with the owner, a man he presumably knew. Just chitchat, the weather, the level of the lake, but there was a connection there, a neighborly acquaintance that Ken felt none of in this transaction. The woman was older, wearing a Bills sweatshirt, and while there was no one else in the store, she seemed annoyed, as if she was busy with something else. When he thanked her, the words squeaked out as if he hadn’t spoken in months.

  On the bulletin board by the door was the flyer, and it struck him that his strangled thank-you would have been the extent of his conversation with Tracy Ann Caler if she’d been there. Looking at the bad picture of her, he realized that he’d never met her, never spoken with her, never actually seen her alive. And yet, strangely, that made her even more his. She was his secret as surely as if he’d kidnaped her himself.

  The feeling that he was in some way responsible, if only as a witness, would not go away. He’d always considered himself too levelheaded to develop anything resembling an obsession. Perhaps that’s what this was, but, unaccustomed to such bizarre thoughts, he’d failed to recognize it. Because it was nuts. She could have been anybody. He didn’t know her at all.

  Outside, letting the 4Runner defrost, he peered down Main Street at the shallow end of the lake, the old train station turned into a bike shop, the Chautauqua Belle in her slip, waiting out the rain. He wondered what it would be like to live here. Quiet. Cold in winter, and pretty in the snow. They could sink their savings into one of those ten-room monstrosities with a massive gas furnace and three staircases. He could see himself running a studio out of the house, taking formal portraits of families posed in their church clothes. In time, he would establish himself, make a name, take out an ad in the Yellow Pages. He’d keep his accounts in the den
, crunching his budget on his computer while outside the leaves spun and fluttered down. And all the while, secretly, he would be piecing together Tracy Ann’s case, talking to people she knew, photocopying documents, filling a drawer with folders.

  “You are a psycho,” he said, and rubbed his window clean so he could see to back out.

  Beyond the Golden Dawn, the streets were deserted. Outside of a shabby two-story brick building, by the curb, sat a flowered couch, on top of it a big console TV, facedown. The apartment must have been upstairs, above the liquor store. He could not imagine who lived there. Someone like Tracy Ann Caler. A town like this would always be a mystery to him—to any outsider. His ideas of small-town life were probably wrong, drawn from Jimmy Stewart movies and episodes of The Twilight Zone. Down in Jamestown there was that creep who gave all those teenagers AIDS. The locals said he was an outsider, but that didn’t explain why their kids were swapping partners like a barn dance, and some of them were Ella’s age. Their neighborhood in Cambridge seemed almost wholesome in comparison.

  He checked the clock on the dash, adjusting how much time he could spend at the Gas-n-Go, restoring an extra five minutes he’d taken away earlier. His plan was simple. While he filled the cans at the island with his other hand—without looking—he’d be shooting the front, the pumps, whatever the Holga decided to include. When he went in to pay, he’d circle around back and bend down like he was reaching for a Coke and do the same thing to the aisles, the coffee corner, the rack of maps. If he saw the opportunity, he’d try to do the counter, get the register, all following Morgan’s directive, just shoot. The anticipation of working cranked him up, an athlete waiting for a game to start.

  Ahead, the Gas-n-Go shone, its yellow sign bright in the rain. He wanted the outside of the inside island so he would have cover to shoot from, and it looked like he would get it, except there was a black Chevy between him and the doors. He pulled in and pulled as far up as he could. Before he lifted the latch for the back, he checked his pocket like a robber, making sure the Holga was there.