World Gone Missing

by Doyle, Laurie Ann;

  Doing this doesn’t make a lot of sense, but doing nothing seems worse. We make our way out.

  The east side of Stern Grove is vast, full of dirt ravines and tree-lined pathways. Jack moves ahead. I stop and look up. The sky’s a deep November blue now, beautiful to most people, but ugly to me. To me, it looks like an empty, waterless expanse. The pines nearby are spindly, their branches hanging and still. The only muddy footprints I see are our own. I try to imagine Ben strolling, sitting on the bench close by, leaning back to read a book. I can’t. Our trip to Golden Gate Park five months before, how lush it now seems, how full of life. Bright, disgusting life. A wind spins dead pine needles in loose circles. People with their backs to us are better than no people at all. I long for stained sleeping bags, a tipped-over cooler, a torn shoe. I want to go home. What’s the point?

  “Let’s try over here.” Jack zigzags up an embankment energetically and suddenly I’m right behind him. It feels good putting one foot after another, much better than staying still. I’m not thinking, not moving in any definite direction. But not aimless. Not that.

  At the bottom of the ravine, Jack and I stand with our backs to one another, looking in different directions. I sigh but Jack stays quiet. As I turn, his hand grazes mine, our fingers touch. His palm feels cool and flat and wet—from sweat or rain, I can’t tell. The skin warms. We walk back.

  

  So much continues without Ben’s body. When the balances on his credit cards come due, Tom sees they’re paid using Ben’s disability, which continues rolling into their joint account. Tom keeps up Ben’s share of the rent, sends the minimum on his school loans. When Boris, Ben’s cat, meows, Tom feeds him and refills the water bowl. Tom and Rosie talk on the phone two or three times a week, brainstorming where to search next, ideas they pass on to us. Neither of them wants to look, but both urge us to.

  The fact is we’re searching less than before. We keep meaning to, telling each other Let’s check the Sunset again, and the Panhandle. Jack sporadically visits police stations and morgues. I don’t ask for news.

  It’s January, seven months since Ben disappeared. Sometimes a bill collector calls about accounts we don’t know Ben had. The man argues Ben’s alive, just hiding out.

  “Been gone that long. Really?” he says skeptically. Seems they’ve heard stories about missing family members before. I stop answering the phone altogether.

  Ben is now my loss, too. He’s a hollowness Jack and I pass between us. Sometimes the emptiness brings us together. You’re here, Jack’s eyes seem to say. You haven’t gone. Other times I can’t stand the silence; even looking at the chair where Ben sat before he disappeared hurts. I buy new cups and serving spoons, just to put away the ones Ben had touched.

  Sometimes I want to leave, do leave, and for too long, thinking maybe I’ll never come back. I spend time in places Ben never would. The Embarcadero ice rink where the skaters endlessly circle. The carousel in Golden Gate Park where the music reaches for you long after you’ve left. Still Ben finds me, slips in when I’m least expecting, his sloping shoulders, splayed hand, moist forehead. I see a dented green dumpster, half-hidden by bamboo, and I can’t help but imagine Ben lying behind it. His hair’s red where it should be black, an awful dried red. Maybe he just left for an hour or so before whoever it was did whatever they did to him. Maybe Ben didn’t want to go missing. The world’s full of strange violence and—I don’t finish the thought.

  Loneliness seeps under my collarbones, fills my breath. Suddenly I’m on the bridge driving home, steel girders gliding by. Jack’s not angry when I walk through the door. He doesn’t hover, doesn’t follow as I hang up my coat or put down my purse, ask me where I’ve been, worried. Sometimes his eyes flash a soft hello. Sometimes he hardly looks up.

  

  The day after Labor Day, Tom phones.

  “Forgive me,” he says. “Could you… come get Ben’s stuff? I’ve rented out his room.” Ben’s disability stopped three months ago in June—a year after he disappeared. There’s no money to pay Ben’s rent.

  “Come by anytime,” Tom says. “I’ll leave a key under the mat.”

  The next Sunday, we knock on the apartment door. No one answers. Jack cautiously slips the key in the lock.

  “Hello?” I call. Silence. We move toward Ben’s bedroom, a place neither of us has seen in fifteen months.

  The threadbare jackets are still squeezed between the wrinkled shirts, Ben’s big tennis shoes sit back in the shadows. Someone has taken a Cognitive Science textbook from the stack against the wall—you can see the gap—and left it on the bed. Otherwise, the room looks untouched. The same gray walls, clutter. On Ben’s desk sits a metal box I didn’t open before. I lift its lid. Inside, all but two of the black-and-white photographs are unfocused, fuzzy images you think will become clear if you look long enough, but never do. One has crisp dark edges of a man standing outside a tunnel in Golden Gate Park. Another is of Boris stretched out on a braided rug, one eye closed. I discover a souvenir San Diego shot glass with a penny stuck in it.

  Jack looks around. I numbly bend down and begin to work. Packing is a chore I’ve done dozens of times; I helped Jack when we bought the house. I’ve always liked it, this wrapping up of life in one place in anticipation of the next. Where’s the next now? I fold a pair of Ben’s extra-large T-shirts and stack them on the bed. I bundle together tube socks and lay them together like pale eggs. All of Ben’s belongings have a musty, old-man smell.

  Jack moves slowly, but I work faster and faster, wanting the whole thing over with. My hands take on a life of their own. I don’t put similar possessions together, don’t tape the boxes shut. The shelfless books—murder mysteries and computer texts—get mixed up with Ben’s tennis shoes. I wrap wadded Dockers pants that Rosie must have sent around a chipped coffee mug. Ben’s reel-to-reel tape deck sits next to a leaning stack of tapes, the labels dusty and peeling: U2, Coltrane, Mozart. There’s no cassette player. Except for a pill bottle that’s fallen, Ben’s prescriptions still sit lined up on his desk. Jack scoops up the translucent orange containers and tosses them in the trash. I open my mouth to protest, then stop. Ben’s medications have to be expired by now.

  We run out of boxes and carry belongings down in our arms. “You okay?” I ask Jack as we pass on the stairs. He nods an unconvincing yes. I lay Ben’s things inside Jack’s pickup shell, go back for more.

  Finally we finish. Ben had more to pack than we’d expected. Afterward, Jack and I stand on Broderick Street alongside his truck. He leans back, stares up at dry sycamore leaves, and ejects a long stream of pent-up breath.

  “Hey,” he says, “that was a blast.” We both crack up.

  But Ben’s possessions won’t let me go. I stare at his belongings strewn across the rusty pickup bed. Ben’s dress slacks lay twisted around a black shoe, the pages of a paperback are torn. Suddenly I want to cry: open, breathy sobs. I lean against Jack, who takes my weight. I press my face into his warm neck. Only a few tears come.

  “Let’s go,” Jack says. “We’re done here.”

  But we’re not done, we’re never done. Driving home across the bridge, things slosh back and forth behind us, as if they’d roll that way forever. As we cross into Oakland, I ask, “What are we going to do with all Ben’s stuff?” Our house is full of everything we’ve bought together over the past two years, too full.

  Jack glances at me, then stares straight ahead. “I don’t know,” he says.

  Or Best Offer

  A woman stood in Lowell’s driveway, her head glowing. The skin was so perfect and smooth— not a bump or nick anywhere—that he inexplicably shivered. Of course, he’d seen plenty of men with shaved heads before, but never a woman. This one had hair elsewhere, lots of it. Wild unplucked eyebrows arching like wings, red-brown patches under her arms, a fine blonde down her legs. The breeze played with the hem of her dress.

 
He stepped closer. Her eyes were pale green.

  She smiled. “Tell me about the car.”

  “Well, it’s out back here.” Lowell walked her around the stucco two-story to his backyard where the Ford Taurus sat in the tall grass, the car’s color so faded it seemed to blend with the foggy August air. She was the third person to come by to look at the 1994 Taurus, a car his wife brought to the marriage eighteen years ago and left when she moved out in March. He wanted nothing more than to be rid of it.

  Lowell stood by the passenger door and opened it. The smell of something spoiled—an apple core maybe, or beer left in an empty—drifted toward him. He quickly opened the driver’s side, too.

  “Runs great,” he said. “Take a look inside. Roomier than you’d think.”

  She propped her bike—a pink cruiser with thick whitewalls and a silver basket—against the house and slipped off her backpack. Instead of walking to the car, she sat on the steps next to a pot of dead marigolds—something else Sarah had left—and for a moment turquoise panties flashed before her dress fell between her knees. “Isn’t it kind of old?”

  “Old isn’t necessarily bad,” he said, his fingers going to his hair. Once it’d been a thick brush of black. Now it was white, a pure unruly white that made him feel older than forty-seven, hair that people said made him look distinguished. Distinguished—that he hadn’t felt like in months. “The car’s reliable. That’s what I’m trying to say. The engine’s got only sixty-six thousand on it.” Okay, seventy-five, but close enough.

  She tilted her head in a way that made the skin gleam.

  “We could take it around the block, if you’d like. A test drive?”

  The woman wandered now over to the Ford without a word. She peered in the dusty windows and ran her finger gracefully over a long scratch on the passenger door. “What happened here?”

  He shrugged as if he couldn’t remember. “Got keyed, I think.” The afternoon had started out as one of those well-meaning trips with Sarah to Crissy Field. Within an hour, he was driving around Ghirardelli Square screaming at the windshield. Doing things he’d later regret, like dragging a sharp key across the side of the car.

  The woman nodded as if she understood. “What’s the trunk like? I need a big trunk. I haul a lot of stuff.”

  Lowell wanted to ask her what kind of stuff, but stopped himself. All the junk he’d discovered getting the car ready to sell had been tossed back there: Styrofoam takeout boxes, a plastic bag of Sarah’s bras and pajamas destined for the thrift shop, his faded copy of Great Expectations.

  He fingered the keys in his pocket but didn’t bring them out. “Trunk’s roomy, too.”

  “Great.” She smiled and looked around the narrow yard. Lowell’s shoulders rose a little. This he couldn’t hide: the grass so high it’d turned to straw and seed, thick ivy vines threatening to pull down the fence. Dead needles from the pine trees in back buried what was left of Sarah’s impatiens.

  “Your yard’s cool,” the woman said.

  “It is?”

  “Yeah, wild.” She picked a long blade of grass and ran it lightly up her arm. “Grown out.”

  He found himself grinning. That she liked what he’d ignored so badly for the past six months appealed to him more than he expected. The yard had been Sarah’s domain. Something she spent hours planting and fertilizing and fussing over, especially after they gave up on having children. Became child free, as people put it. Only it wasn’t free. She’d pull him outside for long discussions about princess flower versus angel’s trumpet, a clover mix instead of grass.

  When they were first married, he’d loved the way Sarah could examine something from every possible angle, talk on and on. Then it began to drive him crazy. It was easier to let Sarah decide which plants and exactly where, while he did the grunt work, the digging, hauling, and mowing. They’d worked outside in the garden last August. This summer, he avoided the yard altogether.

  The woman did a little spin on her toes. “The car’s good,” she said, looking right at him. “I’d like to buy it.”

  “Wouldn’t you like to drive it first? See how it runs?”

  She shook her head—her beautiful, naked head. “It’s just what I want. A good, reliable car. Not big. Not small. The mileage’s decent, right?”

  “Not bad,” he said. A lot of Fords got worse.

  “Awesome.” She rummaged in her backpack and brought out a slip of pale blue paper folded in thirds. “Here’s a thousand.”

  He should have known. “The ad says two. I’ve a copy here in the house. The Blue Book is closer to three thousand. It’s a fair price. More than fair.”

  “You’re right. Absolutely. It’s just—” She squinted as though the light coming through the pine trees was too bright. “Can I pay you in installments?”

  Lowell handed her the check back. “Sorry. It’s my wife’s car, really. We’re separated, you know, and it’s tricky—”

  “I’ll give you half today and the rest next week. You can keep the car the whole time.” Her arm floated over her head and Lowell found himself staring at the tuft of reddish hair. “Just don’t sell it.”

  “Can you get me cash?”

  “Cash is totally fine. Really. I’ll run to the bank. Be right back.” The next thing he knew, she and her pink bicycle were rolling down the sidewalk.

  “Hey,” Lowell yelled, but the woman kept pedaling. “Wait!” He didn’t even know her name.

  

  The phone rang half a dozen times. Usually he let calls roll over to the muted answering machine—his cell got lost months ago—but at the last minute, he decided to pick this one up. Maybe it was someone else calling about the car. The woman with the shaved head had never returned. It’d been a week and a half and the Taurus was still sitting out there in the weeds.

  “Any luck?”

  Sarah. She phoned once, maybe twice a week, usually when the boyfriend was out. No reason we shouldn’t talk, she’d said. No reason we can’t be friends. He’d agreed, at first thinking no problem. He missed Sarah sometimes, all her energy and deliberate decision-making.

  “No, not yet,” he said.

  “Maybe we should lower the price. What do you think? It’s been three weeks. Nobody wants American cars anymore. Not that I completely blame them. A Taurus isn’t exactly exciting. You put OBO in the ad, right? In bold?” The car was technically Sarah’s property, but she’d offered to split the money down the middle if he did the selling part. And he could use the extra thousand to pay for the big screen he’d bought.

  “Of course.” Actually, he hadn’t.

  “You cleaned up the yard, too, like we talked about? Mowed the grass so it’ll show off the car?”

  “Tell you what, Sarah. Let’s change the ad. List your number.”

  “Okay, okay, Lowell. But don’t you think we should lower the price? I know you’re going to say the Blue Book’s a good third higher, but it’s taking an awfully long time. Let’s face it, the car’s old. All scratched up.”

  Wasn’t she the one who’d thrown the keys at him? Who’d yelled Go ahead! He’d been standing close to the car and his arm had seemed to fire by itself.

  “Hello?”

  “Look, Sarah. The car’s going to sell. We just need to give it time, is all. ” He hung up.

  After a minute, the phone rang again. This time he didn’t even go near it.

  

  The blinds in the kitchen sagged. One side splayed crookedly, the other tightly bunched up. After breakfast that next Saturday, Lowell went yet another time to try to fix them and the whole thing fell off at his feet. The sun shone through the dusty windowpane for the first time in months, illuminating the big white kitchen. He’d told Sarah he wasn’t moving out.. Absolutely not. She could live wherever she pleased with that balding sociologist of hers, but he was staying put.

  L
owell leaned toward the window now, his heart racing.

  Out in the yard was the woman with the shaved head circling the Ford, her legs looking longer than he remembered. He opened the door and walked out on the back steps, forgetting he was just in his plaid boxers.

  She smiled and waved. “I called, you know. Like a billion times. You never called back. So I just came over. You haven’t sold the car, have you?”

  “Didn’t you say you’d be right back?” He’d given up days ago.

  She kept smiling. She was wearing a short black skirt and white lacy stockings that made her thighs look pale and muscular. “I left you a message. Messages.” She held out a thick envelope. “It’s all there. Go ahead, you can count it if you want.”

  “It is?” Lowell stepped onto the wet grass. “The whole two thousand?”

  “No, silly. The whole one thousand. Sorry it took me so long. We’ve been in rehearsal.”

  He opened the envelope slowly. “Rehearsal?”

  “I’m a dancer.”

  “You mean like ballet?”

  “No.” She did a little pirouette and landed with her feet turned out and heels touching. “Modern. But not Martha Graham modern. Trisha Brown modern. We have a company in the Mission called Pull. Maybe you’ve heard of it?”

  “Awesome.” He had no idea who she was talking about. “Sure you don’t want to go for a test drive?” He imagined her sitting next to him. What would the air smell like? Jasmine?

  “How about we go for coffee?” she said. “I’m dying for a cup.”

  When the waiter at Emporio’s in Union Square asked if he’d like a Mimosa Tangelo Special along with the double cappuccino, Lowell said Sure, why not. He wasn’t all that great at talking with people he knew, much less with people he didn’t. Flagg said she’d like one, too.

  Flagg—that was her name, she’d told him. Two g’s.

  Lowell hadn’t sat this close to a woman in months. When he asked her how she ended up with that name, hoping for a good long story that would let just him sit and look, watch the light move across the silvery skin of her head, watch the people who turned to stare, too—Flagg just shrugged.