by Thea Lim
“What is this?”
“Humes High yearbook.”
“I don’t understand.”
He opened the book to the middle. It fell open flat, having displayed this page many times. In faded blue ballpoint, an inscription read, Best of luck to a swell guy. Elvis.
Baird started to cackle.
“What is this?”
He turned to another page. He tapped a picture of a teenage boy with narrow shoulders, a pretty face, and a spit curl on his forehead. Elvis Aron Presley. Major: Shop, History, English.
“This is . . . Is this . . . ?” Polly sputtered.
“Elvis Presley’s high school yearbook! Now, now, now—don’t drop it.”
“You lied to me!” Polly shouted in whisper. “This isn’t yours! This is worth thousands!”
“It is mine.” His laughter stopped. “It’s mine!” He tapped another student photo: a boy with eyes and a mouth like parallel lines. Leonard Ruleman. “This is my Leonard.”
“He went to high school with Elvis?”
Baird shrugged. “Someone had to. Did you see the way they handled this? Just jamming it in with the weekly paperwork. Serves them right.”
“Why wasn’t it in a safe?”
“They’re rewiring the east wing. Everything that was stored under temperature and humidity control is temporarily housed in the site office. I told you: this week only.”
“But how did they get it in the first place if it’s yours?”
“Well, I gave it to them. I shouldn’t have.” He sighed. “It was part of my bid to redo the hotel. This is a dog-eat-dog world. I had to have something really special. So I threw this in, for the Las Vegas Hilton suite. And I won the bid, and you got a job, so it worked out for us both.”
“What if they notice it’s gone?”
He didn’t answer.
“Why did you make me steal it?”
“Listen, have you ever lost someone you loved? We’re not counting your cousin.”
“Why not?”
“He’s not dead! He could still come back. You’re young. You don’t know.” He wrapped the book in its mustard sleeve. “When someone dies, there’s no one to share your memories anymore. They become like secrets. A secret life. No one knows you lived it, but you. I didn’t want it to be that way.” He knocked on the yearbook, now pressed to his chest. “This is proof. It’s not a secret. It all happened.” He scowled. “Sounds stupid, doesn’t it?”
Norberto tapped on the glass door with his keys. “I have to lock up now.”
“We’re having a business meeting,” Baird snapped.
“I still gotta lock the doors,” Norberto said.
Polly went up to her room. She changed her clothes and ate a bowl of beans, though she wasn’t hungry. She brushed her teeth. She got into bed.
This was not the way this night was supposed to go, passing like all the other nights since she arrived, her life unchanged. Other people shared that same kind of madness that made you do terrible, witless things, just to be close to love. This could make her feel better. But still, by her own reckless design, she had only a single Saturday left in September, one last bullet, and no way to get to the beach.
The Demographics Center was in a battered strip mall that sat on the highest shoulder of the seawall, defenseless against the bleachy sun and sprays of sand, in a no-man’s-land between hotels. The windows were filthy with sea salt and mud, and Polly passed it by more than once before she realized it was her destination. She arrived as early as she could, walking from work because the shuttle would not make unauthorized stops, but a hand-drawn sign saying closed hung inside the dirty window.
So she waited a few days, and on Thursday, Baird got drunk and fell asleep before 1600, and she slipped out early enough to make it before the center closed. Again the Demographics Center looked dark and empty, but this time when she pushed on the door, it gave with a screech. She entered a sweaty office, furnished with school chairs and desk lamps on the floor.
“Forms are on the table,” said an ageless lady reading a paperback behind her desk. “Sobre la mesa.”
“I have a few questions,” Polly said.
“Mmm.”
“How much does it cost?”
“Which?”
“Putting in a search for a person.”
“An individual or a group?”
“Individual.”
“Two hundred and twenty-seven dollars.”
Polly turned to go. She couldn’t even afford a search for Donna, let alone Donna and Frank.
“You don’t want a form?”
“I’ll have to come back in a few months. My LifeFund is low.”
“You can borrow off of it.”
“I can?”
“They let you go into overdraft. Give me your card. Let’s see if they’ll approve it.” She swiped it and the machine sang. “It went through. No going back now.”
“No, no, I didn’t want to pay yet, I just wanted to inquire.”
“Sorry, too late. Fill out a form. Pencils are there.”
Polly stared at her, disbelieving. “Two hundred and twenty-seven dollars is almost my whole passage payment for the month.”
“So sorry. Can’t reverse the transaction. You should’ve said before I swiped.” The woman stared back pugnaciously.
“But you have to reverse it. I just can’t afford that.”
“I don’t have the permissions to do that. If you have an issue, you’ll have to contact the regional financial office.”
“How do I do that?”
She tapped a sticker on her desk: TimeRaiser Financial, South-east Texas, 7311 Hillcroft St., Houston, TX. Hours: Mon–Fri, 1000–1600.
“Is there a phone number?”
“Yes, but it’s always busy. I’m not happy about it either. It’s me it inconveniences the most.”
If she could only search for one of them, she chose Donna. She would see Frank on Saturday. It was not permitted to think otherwise. All these fail-safes kept heartache and yearning sequestered. They sheltered her, and she was unprepared for the reality of writing her aunt’s name one letter per box; how paperwork makes loss actual.
“The last-known address is Buffalo?” The woman tapped the page with a pencil, dirtying the form. “So they left the territory and then you lost track of them?”
“The territory?”
“Yes, the territory.”
“Sorry. What territory?”
“The one we’re in. America.”
“Oh no, she was never here.” Though, Polly didn’t know that for sure.
“How was she employed by TimeRaiser, if she was never here?”
“She wasn’t.”
“Well then, we have no record of her. You didn’t see the logo on the door? This is a TimeRaiser office. No connection to TimeRaiser, no record.”
Polly stared down at the address sticker on the desk.
“Can I apply for a refund by mail?”
“You can try.”
“Can I borrow a piece of paper to write down this address?”
“Come on. There’s no one else you need to find?”
Frank. Frank. Frank.
“I don’t know for sure if he worked for TimeRaiser. He received TimeRaiser health benefits. From someone else. From me.”
“Oh yeah, that’ll do. Fill out another form.”
“How long do I have to wait for the result?”
“Two to five weeks.”
“Five weeks? You don’t just look in a directory?”
“We can put a rush on, for an extra forty. Gimme your card; let’s see if they’ll approve it.”
“No, thank you.”
Polly wrote Frank’s name on the form, one letter per box. This search would act as an extra measure to make it more certain she’d find him on Saturday. This time the cosmos would reward her for taking nothing for granted. This eased the pain and the panic of so much money.
Back at the PX, she wrote a letter to Donna at their
old address. Her pencil stuttered over the page. She did not know what to write.
Hi Auntie, I finally arrived in September this year. I’m doing ok. Will you write to me so I know you are ok and if you know where Frank is, can you give him my address? Love Polly
Like so many letters written home from a borderland, her note was short and carted only information, because anything else was too much for language to carry.
She had to pay Norberto for a return address too, a PO box, but she never received a response, though she did not stop waiting.
* * *
On the shuttle on Saturday morning, Polly balanced an enormous paper bag on her knees. Inside was a sleeping bag, a flashlight, and a jar of navy beans in tomato sauce. She’d borrowed the first two from Linda, the girl with the red bob, in exchange for all the cosmetics Polly had brought from 1981. She was ready to say, It’s supplies for my boss, to anyone who asked about the bag, but no one did. Baird didn’t either. He had been quiet all week. He was an intensely self-conscious person—furiously correcting himself when he misidentified the origin of a chair—and maybe he was embarrassed. She was glad for this. It would be awful to talk to someone who understood how she felt. Only indifferent listeners tighten the seal that keeps sadness inside.
Though she looked for any opening, she was unable to leave the Hotel Galvez until sundown, but she didn’t fuss. This was her last chance, all that was left, and she wouldn’t scorn it. She took the route of two Saturdays before. She put the flashlight and beans in her pockets and abandoned the paper bag. A beach wind carried it away, over the road and the rocks and the sand and the water, all of it the same dun color. Somewhere the sun was setting, but you couldn’t see it through the clouds. There was only the sense of light withdrawing from the sky. The road straightened, and once she saw the customs station behind the garbage moat, she walked the rest of the way almost inside the juniper hedge until her destination: the small abandoned construction site. The work had ceased not long ago; tire treads in the mud road were yet to be erased by the rain. She scampered across the garden of rebar, seeking cover in the concrete skeleton of a chalet, a three-story monster that anchored its row. She confirmed from all four directions that no one had seen her and no one was coming.
Most of the ground floor was taken up by a great mound of dirt. She was relieved to see the construction company had put in the staircase before they left. She passed a stack of doors and wooden posts like pick-up-sticks on the second floor. The third floor was vacant and still, forgotten even by vermin. Four cut-outs for windows left the room with more void than wall. As she’d observed two Saturdays ago, the sea-facing walls had been left open, maybe for the installation of a terrace. She looked out, a bad feeling between her ribs, but she saw her plan was going to work: you could see from the parking lot to the tip of the Twenty-Fifth Street pier from here. Her heartbeat calmed.
She counted twenty-six figures in total, most clustered around a shipment that had just come off a boat. She studied each head, one at a time, and when none was Frank—too tall, too small, wrong race, wrong gait—she began again. The heads kept moving and some got the once-over three or four times. She tracked one who half looked like Frank, until a floodlight’s arc showed him to be a stranger. When she was finally sure Frank wasn’t already there, she trained her eyes on the archway between the parking lot and port. Her back pinched between her shoulder blades. Night was dropping. The figures trickled away in groups, riding out in the beds of pickup trucks.
She was thinking of the story The Time Machine. When she was ten or eleven, her mother had bought her a copy with greenish ghouls on the cover from a bin in a beach-town store selling secondhand everything. All she could remember was the moment when the time machine breaks and the traveler is hurled forward into futurity. He sees a trillion sunrises and sunsets, until everything goes red. He is at the end of time. There is nothing but ashy beach and giant, slithering crabs with palpitating mouths and pale, jerking antennae. He remembers the sounds of his world, birdsong and teatime, and he thinks, All that is over. The machine is broken and the whimsical horrors he was just passing through become permanent.
No, she was remembering wrong. The machine wasn’t broken. Because the book ends with the traveler going home. She was alone in this.
She placed her hands on the sill of a glassless window. She had a ritual she’d invented for whenever panic surged. She studied her hand, the scar on her left index finger, those short bones, everything normal and recognizable, the dusting of hair on her knuckles. Polly had a childhood memory of a wooden plaque with beveled edges on a neighbor’s kitchen wall. The plaque said that God had accounted for every hair on your head. She specifically remembered the word “accounted,” though Polly did not believe in God, even if she deeply wished to.
Now she could hardly see where the land ended and the sea began. Three officers emerged from the moat, weapons strung around their waists. Polly stepped back, but not one looked in her direction. Two went ahead, sweeping their flashlights, and the third paused. The sound of a chain slapping against the fence, then being secured with a lock, echoed across the empty.
That was it. It was over. The wind blew, muggy like breath.
This couldn’t be right. She went from window to window to see if he was on any of the roads, lost, like she’d been the first few times. She wanted to call his name, again and again, until he appeared, stepping into one of the splashes of light dotting the pier, sliding out from under a jetty, running up out of the water. This was the longest she’d ever gone without saying his name.
Down the seawall road, a light bobbed in the distance. It was just a trick. She’d been following the flashlights with her eyes and now she was seeing things. But the guard saw it too. He’d been squatting against a storage shed at the gate; now he stood up. It was a pickup truck. There was no one in the bed and she could not see how many in the cab. She listened, desperate to hear the sighing of the engine slowing down, but the sea was too loud. Please, please, please.
It was going too fast to pull up at the port. It would zip right past. It was close enough to illuminate the guard’s face. He was Thibodeaux, the boy who’d pushed her face into the gravel.
She’d put it out of her mind that that had ever happened. Now she could feel his knee like a fist at the back of her neck, and his fingers scrabbling at her skin. She went cold and sweaty, like she had a fever. Saliva puddled in her mouth, warning of vomit. She slumped, as though someone else was piloting her body. But she needed to see, even just the sight of the truck passing by. She put her head down, just for a second, to clear it. When she looked again, the truck was in the parking lot.
The driver’s door opened. A man stepped out. Too few steps from the cab to the gate to analyze his gait. His body was blocked by the car. “Turn around,” Polly said. The man was speaking to Thibodeaux, asking a question. The guard shook his head, no. “I’m up here,” Polly said. “Turn around, turn around.” The man was going back to his car.
No.
How fast could she get down there? She’d never make it in time. She ran down the stairs anyway. If they arrested her, Frank would bail her out. But she was four steps down when she felt Thibodeaux’s knee against her neck again, a ball of bone mashing her face into the gravel, suffocating her. There was no railing and she was going to fall into the dirt. She heard the faraway sounds of shouting. She climbed back up on hands and knees. She got to the window. Another guard was jogging to the gate. The man was still there. “Turn around, turn around.”
The second guard reached the gate. He was handing something through the bars. The driver had to step forward, reaching through light, and finally she saw his face.
The years could have made him fatter and grayer. It could still be him.
Then she saw what he’d come for: a small duffel bag. He had not come for her.
The stranger got back into the cab. The taillights glowed red, then white. The guards leaned on the gate, chatting. The truck rolled
backwards, swung left, and went back the way it came.
She stood at the hole in the wall for a long time. She trailed every car that came and went—a cargo truck, a minibus, a station wagon—but nobody else stopped. Midnight seemed an arbitrary time to stop waiting, so she didn’t. Once she took more than a few steps away from her post, it would be certain Frank was lost, so she stayed put, even when her feet shrieked, even after it had been ages since the last car, and there was nothing left but the fingernail moon.
It really had happened. He had come. Just before dawn, he’d pulled up the mud lane in his old blue Celica. He wound down the window and shouted her name. He took the stairs two at a time. His brown curls. She was just living the moments in a muddled sequence, waiting for him still, taking the morning shuttle back with the night managers and the laundry workers, cheeks swollen from tears, when he’d already arrived. He lifted her off the ground. He held her inside his sweet, briny, sighing heat. He was not sick, or tired, or aged. It was like back at the start.
* * *
Polly could not manage how poorly she’d predicted how it would all end. Her mind warped under this weight, and defense mechanisms wobbled out of the warping. The less evidence she had, the more she believed Frank knew exactly where she was, and he was coming to bring her home.
She kept going to the discarded construction site by the port, until September was three, four, five Saturdays past, and then something else happened. Future dates of all kinds acquired mythic qualities. Frank would find her before her mother’s birthday, before the end of daylight saving time, before the handwritten expiration date on the dairy products in Norberto’s PX. She needed to own the milk for this predictive power to work. So she went down to the store and waited until Norberto was out giving someone directions. And then into her pocket she slipped a pat of butter that had been floating extravagantly in a vat of ice water. Milk would have been too big to conceal on her body. The butter set the wait at ten days. She bought tokens to feed her fridge’s coin slot, so the butter didn’t go rancid before its time. She stayed in her apartment as much as possible, in case Frank showed up. She left her window open all night so she would hear if someone rattled the front door.