by Lou Berney
Their grandmother’s house had a finished basement with wood-paneled walls and a linoleum-tile floor, separated from the rest of the house by two doors and a flight of steep, narrow steps. Genevieve had staked her claim right away. She dragged her mattress down to the basement, her boxes of records and clothes and makeup. For the first time in her life Julianna had a room to herself, though she still spent most of her time downstairs with Genevieve.
That red velvet sofa that used to be Grandma’s. Remember it? Remember the linoleum floor in the basement? Remember how we went to the carpet store and begged them and they gave us some of the carpet squares they used for samples? Each square was a different color, a different kind of carpet. You made a joke about that, about used carpet, something dirty and hilarious, but I can’t remember what it was.
When the psychic said that Genevieve would be home soon, Julianna saw Joe frown.
“Oh!” Carol said. “Did you hear that?”
Julianna’s mother remained expressionless. Carol leaned across and squeezed her hand again.
Looking back, Julianna wondered if Carol truly believed what the psychic said or if she was just clueless. Maybe Carol believed that hope, no matter how faint or false it might be, was a necessary kind of nourishment, like the cookies and tamales and ham casseroles with cornflake crust that she’d brought over every day since Genevieve disappeared.
Her husband, Joe, was not clueless. Julianna understood that now. He could see the pain in her mother’s eyes.
“It’s Christmastime,” the psychic said, rocking back and forth. “and Genevieve is walking up the—”
“That’s enough,” Joe said quietly, but with sufficient force to turn the psychic’s head.
“Honey,” Carol warned him.
The psychic’s boyfriend stirred. He was in the easy chair, pinned beneath his huge belly.
Joe worked at a gas station, a mechanic. There was always grease in the grooves and swirls of his knuckles. He had seemed so old to Julianna at the time, but he was probably forty or so, only a couple of years older than Julianna was now.
“That’s enough,” Joe said again. And then, after thinking about it, “Thank you.”
The psychic lifted a hand, five silver rings, and bowed her head. She rose from the sofa, paused to sneeze again, then exited in a dramatic swirl of gauzy black fabric. Her boyfriend hobbled out on his cane after her.
Another spray of rain cracked against the window. One of Julianna’s legs, crossed beneath the other, had gone to sleep.
At the time, in that moment, Julianna hated Joe. She wanted to hear the psychic finish telling them how her sister would come walking up the driveway at Christmas.
The day after Carol brought the psychic to their house, or maybe it was a few days later, the two detectives stopped by. Carol and her husband were still there—or there again—Aunt Nancy, too, and the rain hadn’t stopped. Julianna sat cross-legged on the dusty wood floor. The little house smelled like mildew and ham casserole.
It had been three weeks since the Saturday night that Genevieve had vanished from the state fair. The younger of the two detectives, the grimmer of the two, told their mother that the police were still working hard to find Genevieve. They continued to pursue every possible avenue of investigation.
Joe understood what they were saying. “Nothing?” he said. “You got nothing at all?”
The older detective, Fitch, cleared his throat but didn’t answer. Their mother remained expressionless. Aunt Nancy said, “Hell.”
“That’s good, though, isn’t it?” Carol said after a second, looking around from face to face to face. “If there’s no evidence that someone— That’s a good thing. It means Genevieve . . . it means maybe she wasn’t . . . maybe she just . . . she could have just . . . jaunted off on her own! To California, the ocean.”
“That’s possible,” the older detective said, carefully. “However, unfortunately, as we’ve explained before—”
“We’re operating under the assumption that foul play was involved,” his younger, grimmer partner said.
Because why, if Genevieve had jaunted off on her own, would she have left behind her car? Her purse? Her little sister?
The police had found the old Cutlass still parked right where Genevieve and Julianna had left it, in a grassy field used as an overflow lot, not far from the Made in Oklahoma Building. They’d found the purse, empty, in a ditch half a mile from the fairgrounds. A security guard had found Julianna sitting alone outside the rodeo arena, at nearly midnight, more than three hours after Genevieve told her she’d be right back.
“But you don’t know that it was foul play,” Carol tried again. “You don’t know that for certain.”
Just shut up! Julianna remembered thinking. Shut up! She supposed that was the exact moment she stopped hating Joe and started hating Carol.
“No, ma’am,” the younger, grimmer detective said again. “We will continue to pursue every possible avenue of investigation.”
Did the detectives already know, three weeks after Genevieve disappeared, that they would never find her, never find her body, that twenty-six years later no one would have any idea what had happened to her? Probably they did. Julianna understood now what those two detectives had understood then, that the State Fair of Oklahoma—thousands of visitors, armies of vendors and roadies, all those Future Farmers of America and itinerant carnival workers—was a bad place to go missing. The on-ramp to Interstate 40 was less than two hundred yards from the south gate of the fairgrounds. You could leave the fair at midnight and be in Albuquerque for breakfast. Or Memphis. Or anywhere.
And it was a bad time to go missing, too, 1986. Before cell phones, before ATMs and security cameras everywhere, when people still used cash, not credit cards, to buy gas and groceries and fast food.
“Just remember what Bronwyn saw,” Carol told their mother. Bronwyn was the psychic’s name. Carol reached over and squeezed their mother’s hand. “Hold on to that, Eileen.”
Their mother remained expressionless. The detectives left. Julianna remembered the rain, the rain, the rain. It seemed like it rained every day for weeks that autumn. In November they watched the Oklahoma-Nebraska football game on TV. The players slipped and slid all over the muddy field.
After Genevieve disappeared, Julianna’s relationship with her mother changed. How could it not? They’d lost not only Genevieve but also an essential part of who they themselves were. The simplest conversation at the dinner table was exhausting, too heavy to carry far.
How was school.
Okay.
Maybe they would have drifted apart anyway, as parents and children often did. Julianna turned thirteen and became a teenager. Her mother studied for her real-estate license. Julianna left for college. Her mother met a man who liked to fix things, who thought he could fix anything, and a year or so after Julianna started nursing school, her mother and the man moved to California. Julianna’s mother called to tell her about the move, a polite courtesy. Julianna wished her the best. The conversation, thirty seconds, was exhausting.
Her mother passed away in 2004. Julianna had flown out for the funeral, a small service at a suburban cemetery on the fringes of the Inland Empire. She laid flowers on the gravestone and felt only what had already been missing for a long time.
JULIANNA WAS THINKING about the psychic today because the new anesthesiologist, the one from Russia, wore a silver ring on her thumb.
“I think we are all okay here, then,” she told Julianna. She handed the chart back and noticed Julianna looking at her ring. “You like? It is antique. My grandmother.”
“It’s very nice,” Julianna said. The anesthesiologist walked away, her sneakers squeaking, and Julianna thought how much she disliked that sound. She disliked the bright, cold lights overhead and the saline bags hanging like organs, fat and glistening, from
the skeleton spines of IV stands. The greasy feel of hand-sanitizer foam and the boxes of latex gloves in different sizes. Small, medium, large, extra-large, 2XX.
Julianna, a nurse, basically disliked hospitals. How was that for irony?
She especially disliked the parts of the hospital that were designed to make you forget you were in a hospital. The blond wood, the framed prints of flowery meadows. As in, Isn’t this a warm, cheerful place? A place where you have nothing to be afraid of?
Julianna supposed that in the old days hospitals didn’t try so hard to disguise what they were: places where you suffered and died.
She worked downstairs in Recovery. That was another irony. For Julianna. And for a lot of the patients who ended up there.
Genevieve would have come up with something funny to say about all the different sizes of latex gloves. Julianna could hear her.
Poor fella, goes in for a prostate exam and the doctor snaps on a pair of those 2XX’s.
“Oh, Nurse!” The elderly woman in number nine. She had summoned Julianna four times in the past thirty minutes.
“How are you feeling, Mrs. Bender?” Julianna said.
“I’m such a pest, aren’t I? But it’s so chilly in here.”
“You’re not a pest. I’m glad you buzzed me.”
Julianna pulled another blanket from the cabinet and fanned it over Mrs. Bender. The surgeon had removed most of the rest of her colon, but her blue eyes were bright and fierce.
“Is my son back?”
“Not yet,” Julianna said. The son: balding without grace, good suit worn poorly, an expression like he’d just swallowed a burp. He’d stepped out forty-five minutes ago to make a quick call. He’d treated Julianna like a waitress. She was no longer surprised that so many people did.
Julianna took Mrs. Bender’s hand and gave it a gentle squeeze.
“You have the most beautiful eyes, Mrs. Bender.”
“You’re one to talk, sister.” Mrs. Bender managed a faint, sly smile. “But yes. I was quite the beauty in my day.”
“Hearts were broken?”
“Not enough, if you take my meaning.” She gave Julianna a wink. “That’s my advice to you.”
Julianna smiled. “I’ll keep it in mind.”
“My son, you know, is newly single. Available, in other words.” She watched for Julianna’s reaction, with that faint, sly smile.
“I know, I know, you’re much too lovely for him,” Mrs. Bender said. “I can say that because he’s my son and I love him. Because why should I lie? Life is short.”
“I’m sure he’ll be right back,” Julianna said.
Mrs. Bender nodded. She closed her eyes as a wave of nausea washed over her.
“Make hay while the sun shines,” she murmured. “Make hay while the sun shines. Make hay while the sun shines.”
Julianna stepped out of the room and pulled the curtain shut. Donna, magenta scrubs, sneakers squeaking, bustled around the corner looking for her.
“You’re off in ten, aren’t you?” Beneath Donna’s perfume was the tang of nicotine.
“I am,” Julianna said.
“We’re getting drinks. Gonna get our hooch on. What do you say?”
“As enticing as that sounds.”
“You’re no fun.”
“I’m really not.”
Donna spanked her on the ass with a clipboard and moved past, sneakers squeaking.
YOU SHOULD HAVE seen my big sister, Mrs. Bender.
After twenty-six years, that was still Julianna’s first reaction whenever someone told her she was pretty. Whenever someone, every now and then, told her she looked hot or fine or beautiful, in a bar, on a beach, in the crew cab of a Dodge Ram, let’s get those panties off you, babe.
You should have seen my big sister, you want to talk about beautiful.
Awkward. When your first boyfriend is stroking your cheek and leaning in for a kiss and you burst into tears.
Genevieve would have been mortified. She would have disowned Julianna on the spot. Genevieve would have said, Juli, you dork, you make me feel like bursting into tears.
You want to talk about beautiful? One time Genevieve had slipped off her sunglasses, just that, nothing more, and a guy passing by on a motorcycle had swerved and almost wiped out.
It was Genevieve. It was the way she slipped off her sunglasses. The way she did everything.
Genevieve said it blew her mind, how Julianna could be such a major dork.
“Does this make me a dork?” Julianna would ask. She’d do her version of Kevin Bacon’s big dance in Footloose, and Genevieve would have to bury her face in a couch pillow, laughing.
Julianna’s first boyfriend, junior year of high school, didn’t have a clue why she’d burst into tears. All he’d done was stroke her cheek and lean in for a kiss, tell her she was the prettiest girl he’d ever known.
Julianna’s ponytail always gave her a headache by the end of shift, so she snapped off the rubber band and shook out her hair as she walked to the parking garage. She drove the long way home, down Western instead of the Broadway Extension, and stopped to pick up dinner at Whole Foods. It was on Western, not far from where the old railroad bridge used to stand, the one that high-school kids covered with graffiti every football season. The city had torn the bridge down years ago to extend Classen Boulevard. Julianna couldn’t remember what, if anything, had been torn down to make room for Whole Foods, even though the store was barely six months old. An apartment complex, maybe?
The landscape of memory was like that. Sometimes the near seemed far, far away and the faraway was right beneath your feet.
Julianna filled her biodegradable cardboard carton with chicken tikka masala, basmati rice, and some sad-looking broccoli. A guy with his own carton, and a nice smile, shook his head.
“That broccoli,” he said. “You’re braver than me.”
She smiled back and moved on to the lentils.
“The masala looks good, though,” the guy said.
“Excuse me,” she said, and reached past him for a biodegradable cardboard lid.
He had ginger hair and smelled like soap. She guessed he was . . . thirty-two? Six years younger than her. He wore pressed khakis and a pale blue button-down shirt. Julianna guessed he worked at one of the big energy companies, Chesapeake or Devon.
Energy. When Julianna had been growing up, it was still called the oil and gas business. And there’d been an old brick mansion at the corner of Sixty-third and Western, where the Chesapeake campus was now. The mansion, their mother said, was a home for bad girls.
“Dumb girls,” Genevieve told Julianna. “They don’t know what a rubber is?”
Julianna giggled, but she was only ten or eleven at the time and wasn’t entirely sure herself what a rubber was. Or what exactly qualified a girl as “bad.” She had worried that Genevieve might be sent to the mansion on Western, since Genevieve drank beer and cut classes and snuck out at night to go see her friends. One time she’d come home from a party drunk and their mother had thrown a fit.
The guy stepped around Julianna and spooned rice into his carton.
“Doctor?” he said. Probably he guessed by her scrubs that she was a nurse but hoped the question might flatter her.
“Nurse.”
“Cool.”
“Sometimes it is.”
“Right. Oh, right. I can imagine. It’s not like on TV, is it? Like that one show.”
“I don’t know. I doubt it.”
“It’s not glamorous, in other words,” he said.
“Glamour is rare.”
“My name’s Ryan, by the way.”
She wondered how often Ryan from Chesapeake or Devon, with the ginger hair and the nice smile, the easy confidence, hit on women at Whole Foods. Should Julianna feel special? There we
re three other women at the food bar. One had a wedding ring, one was less attractive than Julianna, one more so.
“Julianna,” she said.
“I’m bad at this,” he said. It was meant to be disarming, and almost was.
Julianna assumed her best caregiver face, concerned and sympathetic. “You’re bad at picking up dinner?”
Two of the three other women at the food bar, the married woman and the one more attractive than Julianna, kept stealing glances, lingering over the soup tureens so they could watch this little scene unfold.
The guy smiled his nice smile again. He seemed earnest and sweet. On the weekends he played golf, in an OU visor, in a sweater vest with the logo of the Oak Tree Country Club embroidered just above his heart. “Listen. Were you planning to eat in? We could grab a table.”
“Let’s go to your place,” Julianna said, and for a second all the soup ladles stopped clinking.
In the parking lot, next to his car, they kissed for a while. Julianna’s mind wandered. Two teenage girls passing by giggled at them. Julianna hadn’t had sex with a guy since her brief spring fling with one of the radiologists at the hospital six months ago. Six months! Genevieve would be horrified. You dork!
She guessed that Ryan with the ginger hair would be fine in bed, unimaginative but diligent. He was a nice kisser. Part of her wanted him, part of her didn’t. It was a coin flip, really. She kissed him and waited to see where the coin landed.
“Wow,” he said when they finally broke apart.
“You’re a nice kisser,” she said.
“You, too.”
When she started to walk away, he said, “Wait, you should—I’ll give you my address, or do you want to ride with me?”
She stopped and turned and watched his face. “Did you think I was serious?” She assumed her caregiver expression again, concerned and sympathetic. “You didn’t, did you?”
When she got home, she heated up the chicken tikka masala and ate in front of her laptop. There was a Facebook page she’d discovered: “Remember When in OKC.” It was unbelievably banal. Someone would post, “Remember Springlake Amusement Park over on Eastern Avenue?” And someone else would reply, “Yeah! With that big wooden roller coaster!”