by Peter Rock
“Vivian!” she suddenly said, not quite turning around. She’d seen me in the reflection of the screen. “That’s creepy, sneaking up on me.”
“I was just standing here.”
Now her headphones were off, she was facing me. I could tell she was trying not to be angry. Behind her, blue spirals bounced against each other, around the screen.
“It’s okay,” she said. “Here.”
I stepped closer to her, where she was holding out her arms, but we didn’t touch. She knew it wasn’t always easy for me to touch people.
“We have to try and help each other,” she said. “To be a family. With your sister the way she is right now and everything—”
“Okay,” I said.
“We’re more than some random people put together in a house.”
“I know,” I said, feeling awkward, standing there. “It’s not your fault.”
“What’s not my fault?” she said.
“How things are,” I said. “With Audra, with me.”
Turning, I tried to walk like a fox, silent on the edges of my feet as I went back into the hallway, down the stairs, and through the kitchen.
Downstairs, all the little glass squares of Dad’s radio were dark, the red needles still. There’s enough light from the windows up by the ceiling, along the driveway. I sat in Dad’s rolling swivel chair, the seat patched with tape. Behind me in the darkness, the washer and dryer sat, silent. A pad of paper hung on a hook, but it just had numbers and times listed on it, no real writing. I found another notepad wedged behind a box on the desk, and I took it out and leaned close, squinting to read it—
Iceland is talking about the Number
Stations again. She says the volcano
can block radio waves but that her
transmitter is mobile. She’s using the
Earth-Moon-Earth technique, bouncing
her signal off the Moon and down to
me. Imagine her voice, traveling all
that way through outer space and
all that static to reach me. It’s so
surprising how people are brought
together, and which ones.
Dad’s handwriting is printing, kind of like you learn in school, only smaller, neater. If you looked at his writing from across the room you might think it was lines of numbers.
I took the headset from its hook and fit the padded black foam over my ears. I could hear nothing, only a faint rushing. The dials were here, the switches. I had watched Dad do it so many times that I knew I could turn it all on, line up the numbers. I had talked to people far away before, heard their tiny voices say hello in my ears.
I felt it then, a change in the house. I was nervous, I couldn’t hear, and I put the headset back and stood up, and waited.
“Vivian!” Audra shouted. “Are you home? Where are you?”
“Here,” I said, already upstairs, halfway into the kitchen.
She was all the way on the second floor, waiting for me at the top of the stairs.
“Were you in my room?” she said.
I didn’t say anything.
“I know someone was,” she said. “I put a piece of spiderweb on my door, across the top, and it’s broken. So I know someone was in there. Mom’s home?”
I looked across the hall; the door to our parents’ room was closed.
“It was me,” I said. “I pushed it open because I missed you.”
“Oh,” she said. “That’s good. That it was you, I mean. Not Mom and Dad again. They’re always saying they respect my privacy, but they’re into everything, all the time. Here, come in, talk to me while I get ready.”
I climbed the stairs and walked by close to her, close enough to smell her sweat, her hair. I sat on her bed.
“Girls?” Mom said, coming down the hallway.
Audra closed the door so we couldn’t hear the rest of what she was saying. I could feel Mom, standing there for a moment, then heard her turn and walk back down the hall.
“What are you getting ready for?” I said.
She pulled down the ragged tights she was wearing, kicked them into the closet, and started pulling on her camouflage pants.
“You’re not wearing underwear?” I said.
She opened a drawer of her dresser and took something out, held it up. It was white, thin ropes wrapped tightly around themselves.
“I’m going to sleep in the trees,” she said. “High up in the branches, in Mount Tabor Park.”
“What?” I said.
“It’s a hammock,” she said. “No one will know where I am.”
“Can I come?” I said.
“Not this time.” Audra was opening and closing drawers, looking up to check on me. “You know,” she said, “you can come in here anytime, look at anything you want.”
“Are you running away?” I said.
Audra laughed. “That sounds so stupid, if you say it like that, like a little kid who’s rebelling.”
“Are you?”
“Rebelling?”
“No,” I said. “Running away.”
“I’m going somewhere,” she said. “That’s different.”
“Where?” I said.
Audra didn’t say anything at first. She just looked around at the walls of her room like she hated them.
“People aren’t supposed to live in cities,” she said. “It’s so claustrophobic. And we live in a suburb, which is even worse—every person in our neighborhood is exactly the same.”
“Not exactly,” I said.
“Vivian,” she said. “You know what I mean.”
The back of Audra’s hair was clumping together, not quite like dreadlocks, and the bones in her face seemed sharper. She was starting to look kind of like another person, a woman, not like a girl anymore.
“Whose hands are those?” I said.
“Where?”
“On the wall. The bigger ones.”
“A friend,” she said, and didn’t say anything more, turning away, filling up her pockets with things I couldn’t see.
“Did he come back?” I said. “The one who disappeared?”
“Yes,” she said. “He came back for me.”
“Where’s he from?” I said.
“Not the city,” she said. “A long ways from here. That’s where we’re going.”
“When?” I said. “Just you and him?”
Audra glanced out the window, where the shadowy trees were swaying, then checked the hammock, all folded up in her hand.
“Don’t worry,” she said to me, and then she went around me, out of the bedroom, down the stairs.
In a moment I heard the front door open, slam shut, and then I saw her walking away, pushing the tire so it swung up, loose on its rope, back and forth behind her as she went down the street.
That was the night when Audra waited until we were all asleep and then she broke the screen of the television in the living room, shattered it so it looked like a spiderweb. She somehow took the computer in my parents’ room apart, too, unscrewing the plastic cover and taking pieces out so it would never work again.
She did this all silently, while Mom and Dad were asleep in their bed. That was one reason she’d studied all those ways of walking, to do things like that.
SEVEN
It took a day or two to know that Audra was really gone. It felt different, the house felt different, the three of us wondering and worrying in different ways, trying to understand what was happening.
On the third day I stood in a thin beam of sunlight, next to the window the bird had crashed into. The window was clear, the bird’s feathers washed away.
I started down the stairs, peeking through the railing. It was dark down there except for the lights in the tiny windows of the radio. Dad had the headset on and he was slumped over, his elbows on the desk and his hands over his face.
I got close so I could hear sounds and voices buzzing in the air, nothing I could understand. And when I came around the side of him I saw that his eyes were cl
osed. He jumped a little when I reached out and touched his shoulder, then opened his eyes and looked at me.
“Are you feeling okay?” he said, his voice louder than it had to be. He pulled the headset down around his neck, reached to switch off the radio.
I turned and went up the stairs, not stopping when he called my name. I should have told him not to worry, but I didn’t. I should have told him that Audra was fine, wherever she was. She was out there, somewhere—I felt it, even though it would be days before I found the note she’d left in my underwear drawer. It was wrapped with twine around a heavy pocketknife, a folding knife with just one sharp blade that I still have, and a magnifying glass. The note said: The most important rule, then, for anyone who is suddenly faced with a survival situation, is to keep from panicking.
I knew that, of course. I wasn’t going to panic, but still I was confused and unhappy to be left behind.
Ten times a day I checked my notebook to see if there were new words for me. In those first days without Audra, the pages were blank. I took out a pen and wrote, as small as I could, at the top of the next blank page: Where is my sister? What do you want me to do?
Those first days, Mom and Dad worried about me, too. They gave me Audra’s cell phone, the one she’d left behind, and kept asking me if anyone had called it. The only calls I got were from them, Mom and Dad, checking that I was okay and wanting to know where I was.
I think they wondered why I wasn’t more upset, and they thought I knew something, that Audra had told me something that she hadn’t told them. They kept asking and asking and I said I didn’t know. Then they stopped asking, like that would make me want to come and tell them what I knew.
Mom talked about how Audra had been hanging out with new people, people we didn’t know. She said someone could have taken Audra, that anything could have happened.
This was at dinner, and I sat there between Mom and Dad with Audra’s chair empty. Mom’s pyramid light, next to her, made one side of her face bright and the other all shadowy. Dad had set out an extra plate and a fork and a knife, like that might bring my sister back at any moment, like she’d sit down to eat the chicken casserole with us.
“I feel so hopeless,” Mom said, then.
Dad reached out and touched my arm. “How are you feeling, Vivian?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“What about the kids at school?” Mom said.
“What about them?”
“Do you think they know anything?” she said. “Is anyone saying anything?”
“About Audra?” I said. “They wouldn’t. We don’t talk to the same people. No one really talks to me.”
Audra’s white plate reflected the lamp in the ceiling. The room was too quiet and it was dark outside and the windows were like mirrors showing the three of us to ourselves. I felt awkward, bad for Mom and Dad, but right then we couldn’t help each other. Sitting there, I could see straight through the doorway, into the living room where the television still sat with its screen shattered in a web.
“We can’t really make her do anything,” Dad said. “We know that. She has to want to come back.”
“If she can come back,” Mom said.
“We have to assume she’s all right,” he said.
“We do?” she said.
“I have to,” he said.
“It’s just that she left all her things,” Mom said. “Where could she have gone without her things?”
I’d already searched around Audra’s room, just as my parents had, looking for clues. There were no answers really, no notes or plans or letters or maps left behind. Just all the clothes Mom gave her from Nordstrom that she never wore, all her schoolbooks, her running trophies with the plastic, golden girls on top. The handprints on the wall.
What I didn’t tell them was that the books were missing. It was hard to see that because the shelf was a mess and there were still so many books on it, but some of her favorites and all the survival books were missing, taken wherever she’d gone, where she’d need them.
I didn’t know, I couldn’t believe that she was already gone for good, far away from our city like she’d said. I wrote her a note and left it folded in her desk drawer:
Here I am. I am not panicking.
Klickitat. I know that you would
not truly leave me behind.
EIGHT
The next morning, I slept late. The house was quiet when I woke up. I couldn’t hear anyone moving around.
I got dressed and put my books in my backpack, and that’s when I saw it. My phone, the cell phone that had been Audra’s, was on my desk, all shattered. Not just the screen part—the whole thing was broken into pieces, so the plastic numbers and the battery and the wires were all loose, spread out so there was no way it would ever work again.
Audra had come in the night, had stood so close and hadn’t awakened me. I went into her room, which looked the same, even though it felt different. Maybe I was just getting used to her being gone, being in her room alone, but still I thought or wanted to think that she might be coming back in the night, picking up things she’d need, checking on me while I slept.
Out the window I could see the tree, the swing, a blue car driving past.
I looked at the handprints on the wall, her bed made more neatly than she would ever make it, the Nordstrom dresses hanging in her open closet.
I was afraid to check her drawer, to be disappointed; when I looked, though, the note was gone. That meant that Audra had not left me behind, that she could not be too far away.
Next, I went downstairs, past the kitchen table with my plate and cereal bowl and pill bottles where Mom had set them. As I began to sit down, I heard static, like wind in the basement, a hissing, then a beeping.
“Dad?” I said.
There was no answer.
Downstairs, I could see the needles, jerking in the lit windows, and hear the hiss coming from the headset where it hung on its hook. I fit it over my head, over my ears. I listened, the static thick and then quieter, the channels lining up, somewhere out in the air, and someone surfacing.
“TF8GX calling N7NTU. CQ, TF8GX.”
N7NTU is Dad’s call sign. On the radio, when you say “CQ” that means “Seek You”—you’re letting someone know you’re trying to reach them. Sometimes you arrange a time when you’ll be on a certain frequency, and other times you just hope they’re there.
“Hello?” I said. “Hello?”
“Be happy, Oregon,” a voice said. “This is Iceland.”
The voice had an accent; I’d never heard one like it before. Maybe that was partly the radio, the distance. And the voice sounded like a boy, maybe, but more like a woman. Dad had said Iceland was a woman, a friend of his.
“It’s not him,” I said. “I’m his daughter.”
“He’s looking for you. Have you returned?”
“No,” I said. “That’s not me. I’m the younger one.”
“Vivian,” Iceland said. “Yes, of course. I have been hearing about you for a long time. I know a lot about you.”
“Like what?” I said.
“And now we’re having a conversation.” Static pushed into her voice, then back away. “Has your sister returned?”
“No,” I said.
“I lost my sister, too,” she said. “Five years ago. Berglind was her name.”
I glanced over at the washer and dryer, up at the small window by the ceiling, a piece of gray sky. It was hard to turn my head, the headset’s cord against my neck.
“How is your father doing with all this?” Iceland said. “With your sister gone?”
“All right,” I said. “Okay, I guess.”
“It must have been a surprise,” she said.
“I guess so,” I said. “I don’t know.”
“It’s so cold and beautiful here, now,” she said.
“Are you really in Iceland?” I said. “Or is that just a name you use?”
“The sea looks like metal and the sky i
s clear. I was out hunting eiderdown this morning, on the lava flows, the nests there. It grew so windy and I’m so old and not steady. I have to use two canes, to walk on the flows.”
“How old are you?” I said.
“When I was a girl,” she said, static creeping into her words, “I couldn’t walk at all. I just sat in a wheelchair and watched the barges go by. I would daydream about all the places they’d go, all the places I could not go. How is your weather?”
Then the static rose and tangled; I thought I could still hear her, pieces of words in that snarl, then I thought I lost her. I was about to take off the headset when things cleared again.
“The static,” I said.
“Some think it’s only noise,” she said. “That is incorrect. Sometimes it’s interference from lightning, or in the atmosphere. Sometimes it’s simply too many people trying to talk at once, trying to reach you.”
“Trying to reach me?” I shivered, the headset’s cord sliding across my bare neck.
“So many signals,” she said. “All at once. Some say static is the lack of motion, but that is incorrect. Static means there is so much movement in so many directions that the vibration is inward, not outward.”
“Like on a television screen,” I said. “That kind of static.”
“Did you answer me,” she said, “before, about your weather?”
“It’s raining here,” I said. “I haven’t been outside yet today, though.”
“Do you think,” she said, “do you think that people are really talking about weather when they talk about weather, or are they talking about something else?”
“Like what?”
“Like how they are actually feeling.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Weather, I guess.”
“You must miss your sister,” she said. “I certainly miss mine—though I still talk to her on the radio.”
“How?” I said. “You said she was lost.”
“Berglind died, yes,” she said. “But sisters have all sorts of ways to find each other. You are a special girl. Your Audra will come back, somehow.”
“She’s not dead,” I said.
“Did I say she was? Good-bye, Vivian. Perhaps we’ll speak again. Look after your father, now.”