In early August, Laura finally rose early and walked again. Out on the path she saw a runner, a bald man with a big smile and bigger ears who gave a wave and wide berth—cues he wasn’t a threat—as he loped past her with a long-legged grace she envied in her slow plodding. His face was nice enough, but those legs: heroic, dense as quarry stones. She couldn’t help but think of how they would feel locked together with hers, muscle and heat and bones, and she created an elaborate, very sweaty sexual fantasy right there on the dirt path. The next day, when she saw him again, she was embarrassed and could barely meet his eyes, pulling her stupid visor even lower.
The next day, she rose late after a night of tossing and turning but decided to walk anyway, in the early afternoon when the heat seared her skin, when the storm clouds had gathered in the east. She set out with two frozen water bottles strapped to her waist like pistols, in a new blue floppy canvas hat she had bought on sale in the District. She wanted to see the old lake again, to see what the woman had added to her art. When she reached it, the wheelbarrow sat empty next to the dock, but there was no sign of the woman. She again climbed up on the dock and peered down at the spiraling stones. She stared at the gash in the bottom, thinking of the red stain along the woman’s jaw.
She pulled a rock from her pocket, took a deep breath, and swung her arm underhand, aiming for the hole. It’d been a long time since she’d taken aim. She let go, and the stone disappeared into the dark space. She listened for a splash but heard nothing. In the stillness, she could hear only her own breathing. She took off her shoes and socks and looked down at her feet, frighteningly pale against her tan.
In the woman’s pile, Laura spied a round one of the perfect size and picked it up, tossing it between her hands until it cooled enough to clench in her fist. Stepping onto the dock, she planted her right foot behind her, lowered her shoulders, and cocked her elbow. She narrowed her gaze and pinpointed a target: a small tuft on the rim of the lake that wasn’t a lake. With her breath barely a whisper, she went into her windup, thinking, Don’t think. Speed. Go.
The rock flew. She watched it sail across the chasm, clear the lip, and bounce into the brush inches from where she’d aimed. She pumped her fist and did a twisting shimmy, the wood hot and scratchy on the balls of her feet. That strong-armed part of her: it was still there, even if she’d forgotten.
She breathed hard, hands on her hips, looking at the land around her. A lake made of stones, trees that didn’t look like trees. The whole landscape was so absurd and otherworldly she started laughing. She lived here. Holy shit. She looked down at her feet. They looked smaller, elfin. Nothing was recognizable, not even her own two feet. And yet: there she stood.
Laura slid her bare feet into the tennis shoes, grabbed the wheelbarrow, and scooted down into the dry wash. At the bottom, she checked the sky: storms still a ways off. Lining the wash above her were mesquites, shrub oaks, junipers, yuccas, and other pointy stalks she made a mental note to look up later. She stepped with care on the uneven surface, liking the crunch of rock, the buzz of insects, the softened whiz of car tires overhead. She hummed a little under her breath, warmth in her cheeks. The walls of the wash were high enough that no one could see her down there. What a strange sort of secret, to walk in a crevice of the earth.
She walked with her eyes on the ground, scanning, kicking the smooth pebbles and shale under her shoes. No sign of snakes. No signs of people either, except for the plastic bags, cellophane, and wrappers plastered in the weeds. She would return later to pick up trash, but for now she picked up stones, beautiful smooth ones that fit the heart of her palm, large round ones that lined the floor like fresh citrus. She plucked and weighed her choices, liking their loud clunk in the wheelbarrow.
She pushed the wheelbarrow farther from the lake, her eyes on the bed, scouting, following the wash’s twists and turns. Its walls grew taller as she progressed, too steep to climb out easily. At a crack of thunder, she looked up. Fat black storm clouds crept overhead. She needed to head back before she got soaked. She needed to get out of the wash, but the walls were too steep here, more like a small canyon.
She swung the wheelbarrow toward the lake. At the base of the west wall, she spotted a gray stone so smooth it shone. As she reached for it, she noticed a stick protruding through a crevice in the wall. A snake. She let out a short scream and scrambled backward. But the stick didn’t move. She squinted and then eased closer to it. She drew a sharp breath. Not a snake. Not a stick.
She kneeled against the wall and studied the shape, the notched end. A tibia. She hissed through her teeth. Her heart kicked, and she glanced around. No one there. She climbed the sloped wall, digging the tips of her shoes into the dirt to get closer, pushing her hat aside. The sky rumbled, the thunder louder and closer now.
The bone appeared to be weathered, porous and cracked. Buried shallow in the crevice, or perhaps the dirt had been eroded by gushing water and rain, or perhaps an animal had been there digging. She brushed at the dirt above the protruding bone, and there: what seemed to be the curve of a rib.
She slid down to the bottom of the wash and dusted the dirt from her knees. She straightened her hat, trying to stay calm. She might be wrong—it might not be human. She walked through the wash to the dry lake and climbed out. She walked around the lake to the river path—to home, to the phone—as the rain began to fall. After a few steps, she began to trot, and then to run. She was a hundred yards away, almost to the bridge, when she realized she’d left the stone-filled wheelbarrow in the wash and her socks and water bottles on the dock, but she did not turn back.
Laura ran, her breath coming as hard and blotchy as the rain, which pelted her skin, stinging, and knocked her new hat off. She didn’t pick it up. She ran. The stones in her pocket rattled, and though there was no way she could know by sight, she thought: A girl. Somehow she knew. A girl who, not so long ago, stood somewhere, her gaze long and steady, as if she had all the time in the world.
Sounds from Inside
The noise again. Chatter and laughter, the clang of hand trucks, the drone of air-conditioning, a hiccupping thrum that ping-ponged off the metal cases and concrete floors. To Maud Winters, who stood at her case with her back to the mailroom, it sounded as if a fidgety child were twisting a radio dial, skipping across static and stations. As she pulled letters and flats from the crook of her arm and slid them into the correct slots, she clenched her teeth until her jaw bulged. Mornings like this, she wished the right ear would go all the way, too; in her darker moments, she fantasized about jamming a pick in the canal. Strike it fast, like a snake, and all would fall silent. She’d stopped wearing her hearing aid years ago because it amplified the din instead of tuning it in, and because it didn’t help with the one voice she could not stop hearing.
She paused with her hand on a white envelope, the address scrawled in blue ink. Every time, her heart made a little twitch, as if tugged by a piece of twine. She closed her fingers on the envelope, and a wave of warmth washed through her. It had been several days since she’d found one—fewer and fewer letters these days. The address was 125 Arrowhead, the last street on her route, Ms. Byrd’s old house where the new professor had moved in. Maud cased it in the correct slot, bottom right corner, the lone piece of mail in the box for the day. She repeated the address under her breath to remind herself, as if she would forget.
Maud drained her coffee and began to pull down the now-organized mail from the slots to rubber-band it and put it in her delivery trays. A voice cut through the din, seeming to come from behind her. Maud jumped and spun around. No one stood there. Luz Navarro was on the other side of the case, peering around the corner. Maud cupped her good ear. “Say again?”
Luz pointed. “Packing tape. Can I borrow? Mine disappeared.”
Maud nodded and handed it to her. Luz’s side of the case was plastered with photos of her teenage girls, the gaps between their front teeth matching hers. One was an older high school portrait of her with her brother Ro
berto—Beto, everyone called him—both with long feathered hair and oversize collars; another was of a young man in a soldier’s uniform—her brother who’d died in the run-up to the Gulf War. Maud’s side of the case was blank. She reached up and scratched at a sliver of old tape and sticky residue where the Missing poster had once been; she’d taken it down in the tenth year, when Jess would have turned twenty-seven, far removed from the kohl-eyed teenager in the picture and long since local headlines had faded from view. That also was when Maud had stopped holding anniversary memorials or trying to get the paper to do a follow-up. People had begun to look away from the posters and from her, unsure of what to do with their pity. Sometimes people asked what she planned to do—a euphemism for the question they couldn’t ask: Will you declare your daughter dead? Her answer, always, still: I don’t know. Rachel Fischer had met Hugh Leitner and gotten remarried then, and her and Rachel’s strange, unexpected friendship, those lifeline meetings over coffee and wine in Maud’s living room or on Rachel’s deck, had dwindled to occasional phone calls. Of course, Esther still brought bagels or Danish on Fridays, and Iris called frequently and brought over bags of pecans every winter. Detective Alvarez still called or stopped by on occasion, and not only when bodies were found, either; he chatted with her about the weather or the Lobos’ winning season, his salt-and-pepper hair growing saltier over the years, as had hers. They never stopped checking in. They never asked what she planned to do, even after almost two decades.
Luz leaned around the case and handed back the tape with a smile of thanks, the gap between her teeth as thick as a penny. Luz had known Jess—she was a couple of years older, her brother Beto in Jess’s class. They knew the story. Even if they hadn’t known Jess, they would know. Stories like that never died in that town. Transmitted through water or something, like cholera. Or through mail carriers. Her customers told her everything, good and bad, unburdened themselves on their front steps: sore backs and bunions, busted appliances, nephews getting married, lecherous bosses, secret affairs.
For god’s sake, don’t disappear.
Maud shook her head at the inner voice, those old words.
Luz asked, “Any big weekend plans?”
Maud said, “Paris, London, Rome. Hot date with a trapeze artist. The usual.”
Luz’s eyes widened a moment before she laughed, and Maud reminded herself: Watch the volume, Maudly. When she was younger, Maud had trouble regulating, and kids would mock and tease her, cupping their ears and yelling, What? Pardon? Say what? Say again? Then Maud learned to let fly, jokey, outrageous. To hell with them. Jess had tried not to get embarrassed, tried to make a joke of it. You’re at freight train levels again, Mom.
Luz said, “We’re all going to the Pickaxe for happy hour after shift. Beto’s working—sorry, Roberto, he hates when I call him that. He’ll give us free drinks. You should come.”
Maud glanced at the bottom corner cell in her case, 125 Arrowhead, again feeling the tiny twitch in her heart. She said, “Thanks, but I can’t. Gotta wash my hair.” She pretended to toss back long locks and patted her fuzzy gray curls, which she used to color a glossy dark brown but had let go in the past few years.
Luz smiled. “One of these days I’m going to drag you out, mamí.”
Luz. A good egg. A good kid. Trying so hard to make it okay. Maud wrapped a rubber band around a stack and snapped it, remembering, every time, how Jess used to chew rubber bands like gum. She said, “One day, maybe I’ll let you.”
Maud finished packing her trays. She loaded her parcels into the large canvas roller bin, stacked the trays on top, and hauled the bin out to her truck. Before she headed out, she ran through her supplies: water, sun hat, lunchbox, pepper spray, pens, strap cutter, pink slips, phone, scanner, lip balm.
Her route for all her eighteen years in Sycamore had been a combined walking and driving one, in the older Riverbend subdivision behind the high school. She had enough seniority to switch to one of the few all-curbline routes, like those in her own neighborhood in Roadrunner Heights or over at Juniper Meadows near the highway to Sedona. Luz, in fact, had jumped at the driving route in Roadrunner Heights, but Maud liked to walk, even in the heat, even with torrential bursts of monsoon rains, even with a forty-pound satchel hanging off her shoulder—even now, at fifty-seven, when she had to wear a brace on her creaky left knee, when her shoulders and hips ached and she knocked back ibuprofen with her morning coffee and again in the evening before bed. She pictured her father’s stooped shoulders, his swollen knees. He hadn’t loved it like she did. He had taken early retirement and spent his afternoons puttering around with house repairs (and driving her mother up the wall) until he got a part-time job at the neighborhood hardware store. She remembered her father saying he knew his mail route better than his own neighborhood, and this was true for her, too. No matter what else happened in her life, each day she could at least walk her streets.
Each day advanced the same: starting in the truck over at Overton Orchards. That morning, Iris was out on the tractor and Paul, home for a visit, was carrying a ladder across the field. Maud stopped and watched him a moment, noting the pronounced hunch of his shoulders, the shine of his now-bald head. She whistled, sharp and quick, and Iris turned with a wave. Then Maud drove the truck over to Riverbend and parked. Her satchel grew lighter at the end of each relay, the steps counter at her waist clicking from the hundreds to the thousands, and she marked her progress by yard features: the oak stump with kids’ carved initials on the corner of Dry Run; the tilting streetlamp on Bottlebrush; the hairpin cul-de-sac on Alameda. She knew the dogs, the pitch and lengths of their barks and growls. She knew which box hinges squeaked, which swayed on loose posts, which were dented and scratched and rusted. She knew what it was to pull down the little metal door, anticipating what lay inside, so she took care stuffing the boxes. Some part of her felt as if she were watching over it all, keeping everyone safe. And in some ways, she was: she had called ambulances, police, and family members. They watched out for her, too, old women and men waiting at the door with smiles, with envelopes of cash and boxes of fudge at Christmas. The path of her day was clear-cut, waiting for her every morning like a faithful pet, and she did not veer. Some would find this mind-numbingly monotonous, but not Maud. She needed the sureness of pavement, of brick steps, of concrete driveways under her rubber-soled shoes. She needed to feel the strike of her feet on surfaces that would not disappear beneath her.
After the mornings when she found letters, Maud tended to be distracted and jittery all day, walking at a faster pace, her satchel thumping her hip. Long-ago images and sounds snuck in when she was like this, tunneling under the wall of her defenses. All the tricks she’d learned in counseling with those other families of the missing, learning how to take care of herself, to stop the spiral of obsession—pushing air into her belly, a countdown from ten to one in an elevator that opened onto her safe place, tying the thought to a balloon and watching it disappear into the sky—none of it worked. There was Jess’s voice, or what had become an approximation of it, like words and phrases from her notebooks, or the outgoing message on their old answering machine. The words buzzed like swarms of cicadas at dusk. Maud pressed her finger to her good ear, closing it off, as if she could block the sound of memory.
In the early years, Maud heard and saw Jess everywhere. In her dreams at first: Jess turned up without explanation, the same age, suspended in time, waiting on the doorstep or inside the house. Oh, Mom, I know you love to worry. I’m right here. So Maud took a lot of sleep aids to stay in that world as long as she could. When she wasn’t at work, she was in bed, trying to get closer to the dreams. But then Maud began to see Jess in broad daylight. She’d see Dani Newell, or Angie Juarez, or other kids around town, all those young smooth faces, and behind them she’d see Jess ducking around pillars and street corners, ghost girl, her voice and long curls trailing.
And then there were the imaginings, the speculation about what had happened: body snatched, b
ody bloated, body burned, body naked, body floating, body bleeding, body buried alive. Maud’s counselor taught her how to replace her terrible images with a more positive one: Mexico, their family vacation spot before the divorce, the last place they’d traveled together the summer before Jess disappeared. The last place Maud remembered Jess being happy. Maud had trained herself to see one image: Jess standing at the blue-gray Sea of Cortez at sunset. The water lapped over Jess’s ankles, and she smiled, bathed in the final light of day.
As she walked her route, Maud tried to get to that image. She managed to get in her mental elevator and count down; the door dinged and opened to her safe beach: Mexico. But there was young Jess on the beach in a stretched-out tee and floppy hat, drinking a bottle of 7UP, chewing Chiclets, saying, “Mama, mama, watch!” as she hurled herself at the spawning grunions at sunset. “Mama, look!” There was Jess riding on her father’s broad back, the three of them standing together in the low surf at sunset. There was Jess and Dani Newell, her first best friend, sipping their sodas, toes in the sand. There was Jess, infant—body tiny, body spongy, body rocked and nursed, squalling and red-faced and perfect—and teenage, rolling her eyes at Maud from the passenger seat. Jess, staring down the Thanksgiving table at Adam Newell. Jess, huddled on her bed, crying as if her heart had turned inside out. There was Maud’s counselor, a kind woman, asking, “What is it you see for yourself, Maud?” which Maud never could answer. Lately, when she had tried to think about this question, she had been conjuring the fireflies on her grandparents’ farm in Tennessee, the summer when she’d lost the hearing in her left ear and most of it in her right. When the counselor gently pushed, asking, “But what else? What about the future?” Maud couldn’t say. She could see backward but never forward. Only the endless now.
Sycamore Page 3