The Opposite of Music

by Janet Ruth Young

  “Bill!” Mom calls into the hallway. No answer from the living room or other rooms.

  Mom’s face is grim. We follow her, like baby ducks, to the big bathroom, where she looks up at the shower rod. Nothing. Next she goes into the kitchen and stares at the floor around the oven. Nothing.

  “All right,” Mom says. “I’m sure it’s all right.”

  Nonsensically, I open the oven door. Linda, even more nonsensically, peers into the microwave. Of course, nothing. Mom opens the kitchen curtains and looks into the backyard. Nothing.

  Mom stops at the kitchen phone. She chews the inside of her mouth while dialing Marty’s number. “Bill’s missing. Is he with you? Can you call back right away?”

  “We should fan out,” Linda says. But we don’t. I open the door to the den. The couch is there, empty, with the remote and some newspapers. It’s as quiet as when we went to sleep last night, and I get a sick feeling that this room is historical, they all are—they can be preserved just the way he left them, a Museum of Dad.

  “All right,” Mom says again.

  We go to the utility room and push aside brooms, skis, and tennis rackets. Mom pulls on a ceiling cord that brings down the ladder for the attic crawlspace. She scrambles up the stairs. The metal strongbox is still in its spot at the edge of the crawlspace. I hear Mom pull it onto her lap, shake it, and test the padlock.

  “It’s all right. It’s all here,” she says—the knives, the poisons, and the sashes of our bathrobes. Mom’s bare legs reappear on the ladder, and her bare feet touch down quickly on each step.

  “All right,” I say.

  “It’s going to be all right, you know, Mom,” Linda says. Her voice is getting trembly. “Either way, it will be all right.”

  “Either way?” Mom asks her.

  “We’ll still have each other.”

  “Honey…”

  “Wait,” Linda says. “What’s this?”

  Passing through the kitchen a second time, we see something we missed before, a folded sheet of paper resting on the counter by the bins of flour and sugar. It has one word on the front: “Adele.”

  “It’s a note,” I tell Mom. I pick up the paper, wanting to open it, but it’s really Mom’s, and so I surrender it to her.

  “I don’t know if I want to open it,” she says. “Maybe you should leave me alone for a few minutes. No, on the other hand, stay here.”

  “Do you want me to read it first?”

  “No, I’ll read it.” She unfolds the paper. I can see through the back that it contains only one sentence.

  “Okay,” Mom says. She turns the paper around so we can both see it. “Gone for a walk,” it says.

  We rush to our rooms and pull on yesterday’s clothes. Put on our boots by the living-room door—it’s mud season. Run to the driveway, where both cars are empty, and look up and down our hill to find more nothing. The highway is noisy since it’s rush hour. We follow Mom into the backyard. Here is the plastic bench where Mom and Dad sit in summer, between the rosebushes, drinking store-brand diet cola and listening to the highway noise. Here is the statue of Athena, goddess of wisdom, lying on her side wrapped in a blue tarpaulin like a shroud.

  We stop at the stockade fence that blocks our house from the highway.

  “I’ll run back there,” I say.

  I swing around the fence post and stagger into Mom’s compost heap. A small ravine separates our yard from the highway itself. I cross it in a few wobbly steps. Then Linda is behind me, standing in the partly frozen compost. I scan the northbound and southbound lanes as cars whoosh by just feet from my rubber boots.

  “I don’t see him!” I call back to Mom.

  Linda and I look at one another. A few yards away is the entrance to the tunnel. We stumble into the ravine toward the cement ring of the entrance.

  “Where are you?” Mom calls from the other side of the fence.

  “Just a minute!” Linda calls back.

  We peer into the tunnel. It’s four feet high, with eighteen inches of muddy water.

  “He wouldn’t do that,” Linda says.

  “Sometimes people do,” I tell her. “They take pills or something and crawl in someplace small to die.”

  “Dad wouldn’t do that to us. He wouldn’t make us look for him here. He wouldn’t do that to Mom.”

  “What are you two doing?” Mom yells. “Get back where I can see you.”

  I decide to concur with Linda. “We can come back. Later. If we have to.”

  The three of us run to the front of the house. Along our street neighbors are pulling out of their driveways to go to work, to take their toddlers to nursery school.

  “We need a plan,” I tell the other two. “Mom, you go uphill. I’ll go downhill. Linda, you stay here and wait for the phone to ring.” But I’m so agitated that when Mom starts to rush uphill I forget and go with her. Linda follows us too.

  The woman next door, the shadow maker, is getting into her enormous van.

  “Have you seen my husband?” Mom calls.

  “I just got out here,” the neighbor responds, chirpy and regular. “Have a good one!” At the front of her house a wind chime strums: throm, blikblik.

  We clop down to the end of our street, lurching and lunging in our big galoshes. The only place to go is around a bend in the road. When we turn the bend, we see a wooded lot, the only spot in the neighborhood that hasn’t been built on yet.

  “What’s that?” Linda calls out, pointing.

  “It’s him!”

  Dad’s between the trees, awfully still, with his back to us and his head at an angle.

  “Bill!” Mom calls. She breaks into a sprint. “Bill!”

  Are his feet on the ground? I ask the no one in my mind. Tell me his feet are on the ground.

  Dad’s eyes are closed, and he stands with his head cocked, hands in his coat pockets. His white tennis sneakers are inch-deep in spring mud.

  “Bill?” Mom puts her hand on Dad’s shoulder.

  “Hello!” he says to all three of us, opening his eyes.

  “Oh, Bill,” Mom says. “We were so scared.”

  “Dad.” Linda winds her arms around Dad and squashes her head against him. Just what I wanted to do. Mom leans on both of them, trying to collect some air.

  “Bill, why didn’t you tell us you wanted to go for a walk?”

  “You were asleep,” Dad says, “so I just went. I felt like going, and I went.”

  “You could have woken us up, Dad,” I tell him. “That would have been no problem. I would have gone with you.”

  “You wanted to go by yourself?” Mom asks, standing on a dry patch and scraping one boot against the other.

  “I’m all right by myself,” he says.

  “But you should have asked us to come,” I continue automatically. “You might…” But I don’t know what he might. Forget how to walk in traffic, and step in front of a car? Turn his ankle on a wet piece of pavement? Obstruct the progress of a school bus? Bump into someone’s trash can?

  “Why are you hiding in these woods?” Mom asks, looking around at the nearly leafless trees and the coals and cans left over from someone’s beer party.

  “Something called me in here,” Dad explains. “Up there.” He points to a spot in the crown of the trees, where a single branch jitters against a freshly washed sky. “Shhh. Listen!”

  At first there are only the usual morning sounds of highway noise and slamming car doors. And then we hear it.

  Trlrlrlrlrlrlrlrlrlrlrlrl.

  Then a funny thing happens to Mom’s face. She begins to smile, and the smile grows, exceeding what you would consider normal limits and turning into a half circle. It grows until it seems like it’s taking up two-thirds of her face. Her cheeks turn into Ping-Pong balls, while her eyes get smaller and smaller. Then her eyes completely disappear.

  I DECIDE TO BECOME A PSYCHOLOGIST

  I never thought I would say this. But I have. Fritz showed me the way.

  I’ve made
many mistakes in my life so far. This experience with Dad is no exception. When I think of some of the things I’ve done, I pour a bucket of shame over my own head. Then I writhe in the shame.

  But I learned that I have too much of something, and maybe I can take whatever it is that I have too much of, and instead of putting it all on Dad, I could spread it out usefully among many people.

  Whatever that thing is, could I productively harness it? Could I distribute it to a different customer each time in a series of scheduled appointments? Could I channel it with a steady, Fritz-like gaze?

  This might be a good time, then, to do some homework. Not the kind I usually do, but the regular kind.

  Schoolwork. Whatever it is that’s been weighing down my satchel.

  THE ISLAND

  Mom, you returned the library books and threw away the nutritional supplements. A muscle pulsed in your jaw, like a Morse code of regret. You were wishing for a do-over.

  But we were like a family on an island, Mom. When we were on the island, we couldn’t tell how big the island was, what its shape was, or how long we would be there. We couldn’t know the island until we were in a boat speeding away from it. We can see everything, now that it’s too late. It was just a little island.

  Dad, you whistle a tune that sounds like music. You sound the way you did before, when you thought the world could be trusted.

  Will we see the island again? If we do, will we all still be together, or will it be Linda or me alone? And who will spot it first? Who will be the one to say, “I’ve been here before. I remember that rocky beach and that shadow”?

  But it’s spring, and the sand is gone from the streets of our suburb.

  Now fly, Triumph.