“No two snowflakes alike.”
Kellerman nodded, pleased. “So let’s say you wake up on an ordinary day and you make a series of choices. Coffee or tea. Shower or bath. Read the paper starting with the front page or the funnies. Every one of those choices is a sequence. A simple beginning that generates a potentially complex result. Something in the paper alarms you and you spill the coffeepot on yourself so you have to go to the emergency room where you’re given either the right or the wrong treatment; if it’s the right kind you get to go home and that sequence of your life continues, but if it’s the wrong kind you’re admitted to the hospital or maybe you die, and each of those events generates its own set of results. Just like the snowflakes, except the rules get more complicated. All the big and little events of your life. Everyone’s life. All part of some original, infinitely repeating sequence. The same enormous pattern.”
Kellerman leaned back in his chair, looking a little self-conscious, the way people did when they finished a long speech. “Blather.” He shrugged.
Elaine said, tentatively, “Well. That’s a different way to look at things. Instead of the will of God, we have the Universal Computer. I guess it makes sense. But as an explanation for life itself, it seems a little … mechanical.”
“Depends, I guess, on what you think is programming the computer to start with.”
They smiled at each other and Elaine was aware of a current of personal interest between them, not sexual, exactly—not with those silly glasses—but something on its borders. Then she remembered Josie, and her heart flattened, and the engine of worry started up again in her head. “Well, thank you,” she said again. Stood up and shook hands with him. “I hope you’re right about this being just normal teenage acting out.”
“Call me if there’s anything I can do.”
Another smile with that edge of acknowledgment in it, then Elaine got herself out to the parking lot, thinking that life couldn’t get much stranger, except that it usually did, and maybe that was part of the Cosmic Computer Program. Infinitely multiplying weirdness.
She no longer slept in her own bed. Instead she lay on the couch in the den all night, half-dozing, the television on but the sound turned off. She clicked through channel after channel, watching the hectic shapes and colors succeed one another on the screen. Here was an old sci-fi movie of the sort that used cheesy models for spaceships. You could almost see the wires dangling against the cardboard firmament. Here were three ladies from a psychic hotline, all of them wearing wigs. They were taking calls and turning over tarot cards and, Elaine knew from previous viewings, giving the callers the bad news about the fidelity of their spouses and sweethearts. She wondered if the Cosmic Computer programmed the tarot cards as well, the Magician, the High Priestess, the Fool. On the Weather Channel, a woman was standing in front of the map, wielding a pointer and moving her mouth earnestly. Red and yellow hurricanes were spinning through the South Atlantic. Green rain-shapes were nudging into Illinois. And in India, she knew, it was monsoon season.
She was supposed to go to India early next month, a two-week trip. Of course she’d have to cancel. Even if Josie came home unharmed, how could she pick up and leave? Always before on such trips Josie had stayed at Frank and Teeny’s, an arrangement that nobody was ever very happy with. Now it would be pure poison. Then again, she and Josie would have to get a lot of things worked out before they could stand to live under the same roof again. That would be a different, normal sort of problem, along with all the business complications that canceling her trip would bring. She supposed she should wish for a return to normal problems. But right now, in the middle of another numb and haunted night, it seemed as if she was burdened with the entire universe of bad possibilities.
You weren’t supposed to go to India during the monsoons. Everyone said so. There was the rain itself. Torrents of it. Roads washed away and sewers failed. Telephone lines went down. People caught agues and fevers and funguses. Best to stay home until the skies dried up. But of course, the Indians were home. Elaine thought she should go there some time in the rainy season, just to avoid feeling like a diletante tourist. She tried to imagine that much rain. The air gray with it. Steam rising from the forests, from the backs of patient cows. What happened to people who had nowhere to go, the street vendors and the barefoot children squatting on sidewalks and the fishermen in their cockleshell boats? She didn’t know, it seemed negligent of her not to know.
Perhaps she should move to India. Make a new start. People liked her there. She could lead a useful, harmless life. Spend her days in simple tasks. Make offerings of food and flowers at the local shrines. Ganesh, the lucky elephant god. Shiva of the graceful arms. Blue-skinned Krishna. Gods who had been around for long enough to offer the consolations of ancient wisdom. In this vision she walked barefoot over the cool wood floor of a quiet room. Birds with names she did not yet know sang in the branches of a many-trunked banyan tree. Elaine drank a perfect cup of tea and lay back on a scented cushion and she was not aware she was asleep until the doorbell rang.
Morning. The bell chimed again. When Elaine hurried to the door, her blood stopped cold. A uniformed policeman stood on the front step.
“Mrs. Lindstrom? I’m here about your daughter.”
She moaned, a deep, animal sound.
“Ma’am? It’s nothing bad. I’m just here to ask you some questions.”
She moaned again.
“If that’s OK. Or maybe right now isn’t a good time for you.”
Elaine backed into the living room and sat down on the couch. She waved a hand in front of her face. A swarm of small black insects had materialized in her vision.
“Can I get you something? Glass of water?”
She nodded. His footsteps crossed the hall and she heard him opening cupboards and running water. Then he was back, presenting her with a not-quite-cold glass of tap water. Elaine drank it. “Thank you.”
“I apologize, ma’am. I should have called first.”
“No, it’s nice they sent someone.” He was a very serious-looking young policeman with a sunburn and a little black mustache. “What questions, what did you say?”
“Just some routine … some routine follow-up matters.”
She told him to sit down and he cleared his throat formally. “I really am sorry for alarming you like that.”
“I’m a little on edge these days.”
“Of course. Understandably. When did you last see your daughter?”
“Friday night around seven. I already reported this. Twice. Officer—”
“Crook. I know, ma’am. This is just …”
“Routine. All right. Aren’t you going to write anything down?”
Elaine waited while he produced a notebook and balanced it on one knee to write. He was making it all look very difficult. Meanwhile her hair was a rat’s nest and she needed to brush her teeth. He asked her for Josie’s age, description, license plate number of her car. Friends and associates. Who what when where. All of which she had provided before. She was beginning to feel a kind of dismal foreboding about the police, any rapport with Kellerman notwithstanding. And she was ready to be disappointed in him also if he was the one who’d sent this polite but desperately laboring young man. She couldn’t help feeling that he was here as part of some training exercise.
“And the two of you had an argument. About …”
“She has a boyfriend I don’t approve of. Excuse me.” Elaine got up and fled to the bathroom before young Sergeant Friday could fumble himself out of his chair. Behind the closed door she tried to get as much of her head as possible under the cold water faucet. At this point she looked better wet. She toweled off and returned to the living room. “Don’t get up, please.” With lessening patience she resumed her seat across from him.
He was flipping through his notebook as if there was something important there, although all he was doing was going back and forth between the same two pages. “So this boyfriend …” he began again.<
br />
“Yes, cherchez the boyfriend.”
He looked at her without any change of expression. Maybe it wasn’t that funny. “And what did she say about him?”
“Not much. I don’t even have a name.” Elaine had decided not to go into the details. “Look, I don’t mean to be rude, but I really have reported all this before.”
“Always a chance that going over the same ground again will yield some new information,” he said stolidly. Elaine wanted to ask him if he was new to the force. She wanted to shower and go in to her neglected store. She wondered what it would take to get him to leave.
“Let me see now. OK. What items did she take with her from the home? As in. Belongings. Clothing.”
He was such a nice-looking young man. It was a shame he had so much difficulty putting two words together.
“Some clothes. Not a lot. Her purse, wallet. A little money.” Not her own, Elaine could have told him, but she didn’t see the point of that. “She left most of her things. She didn’t have to run away like some …” Elaine couldn’t think what it was like. “She’s very impetuous. Emotional. Once she gets mad or worked up about something, she gets all carried away.”
“Yes ma’am.”
“Anyway, I didn’t see or hear her go.”
“She leave any sort of note, letter? Anything that might be helpful?”
As if she wouldn’t have noticed. “I don’t think so, but perhaps you’d like to look around.” Glad to have an excuse to dislodge him, Elaine led him up the stairs and waved him into Josie’s white-carpeted bedroom. “The scene of the crime,” she said, and left him standing irresolutely in the center of Josie’s guitar books and dinky jewelry and the heart-shaped pillow she’d had since sixth grade and the shoes scattered where Josie had kicked them off. Elaine couldn’t go in there any more. It was like the home of a messy ghost. She went off to take her shower, not caring what he thought of her.
He wasn’t upstairs when she finished dressing and came out. He was back in the living room, looking dour and twitchy. He didn’t seem to have found anything in Josie’s room, at least he didn’t have any evidence bags or fingerprint stuff or whatever the police toted around. “Are we finished?” Elaine said. “Shouldn’t you be out investigating now?”
“She must be very intelligent, your daughter. All those books.”
“I suppose so,” said Elaine, wondering at this.
“She’s going to college, I bet. I mean, she could if she wanted to.”
“If she plans on coming back to finish high school first.”
“I’m sorry to have disturbed you.”
“I was already disturbed.”
She put a hand on the doorknob and he ducked his head and sidled toward it. “Is someone going to call me?” Elaine asked. “Updates and so on? Because I have to be honest with you, I haven’t been knocked out so far by the police effort.”
“I promise you, I will personally be doing everything possible to correct the situation.”
He was so odd. Did they train them not to smile?
On his way out his gaze was caught by a framed photograph on the wall, Josie at age seven, an age when she still beamed for photographs. Her hair was silky and daffodil-colored and she was wearing her favorite pink velvet dress. Elaine thought of all the photographs of missing children, the pictures on milk cartons and such, how they aged the pictures to approximate what the child would look like now that time had passed. What if you started with this happy little girl, then added ten years of sullen growing up? Would you get a good likeness?
“That’s the best time,” said Elaine. “When they’re little and it hasn’t occurred to them not to love you. Do you have any children, Officer?”
An easy question, she would have thought, but he didn’t seem to want to answer. Shook his head, no.
“She’s all I have,” said Elaine. Behind her in the house the telephone rang. She nodded, embarrassed because she could never keep from saying things, exhausting herself with words, then shut the door on him and went to pick up the phone.
It was Frank, back in town and wanting to hear the news. Of which there was none. She was glad he’d returned because now there was someone else to deal with the school and the police and whoever else. Frank knew people, people he made money for. Surely he would know who to call to find her. He would organize a posse, offer a reward. But he sounded just as aggravated and unsure as she was. “I can’t believe nobody’s seen her. What is this, Unsolved Mysteries? Alien Abductions?”
“Will you please not talk like that?”
Frank said he was sorry. “I don’t believe in that stuff anyway,” he apologized.
Elaine let some silence tick by, to show him she was still upset. Frank’s disappointing her was such a familiar sensation, such a well-established injury, her anger at him so well rehearsed, she could tune into it as easily as if it were a preset radio station in her car. Punch the button, sing the song. Would she ever be free of it? She said, “Maybe we’ll get a postcard from Hawaii or Buenos Aires or somewhere. I’m almost beginning to hope so.”
“How could she get that far without money” said Frank, then they were both forced to think about all the ways a pretty young girl might be conveyed to distant places. To change the subject, Elaine asked him if he was still going to take Harvey to the hospital tomorrow.
“I’m not the one who’s going to be there, but it’s all set up. And don’t worry, it’s a group of trained professionals.”
People who came to your house and sprayed for termites advertised themselves the same way. But Elaine only said that she would try to find time to go see Harvey today, just because somebody had to start worrying about his cat and his clothes and such. Fine, said Frank, not paying particular attention. This new crisis was turning Harvey into nothing more than a piece of unfinished business.
After Elaine got off the phone, she tried to call Harvey. No answer. At Trade Winds she tackled the pile of work waiting for her, but she kept forgetting what she was doing. Paper was only something inexplicably attached to her hand. Numbers were in code. People came in and she spoke to them and they spoke back. Once she put her head down on the counter and slept so hard that she drooled. When she woke, her fingernails were clenched tightly into her palms.
In this same muzzy, unfocused state Elaine left the store and drove to Harvey’s house. All his shades were drawn, as usual. Nobody really used window shades anymore, it occurred to her. They’d gone out of fashion when she wasn’t paying attention. Harvey’s grass needed mowing. It was still warm enough for it to have grown shaggy. The elm tree in the front yard—trust Harvey to still have an undiseased elm, maybe the last in town—was dropping its leaves in a shiftless fashion. The last rains had clumped them together and they stuck to the bottom of her shoes as she crossed the yard to the porch. Knocking. “Harvey?”
The glass at the top of the door had a little curtain over it. Rosa’s doing, she imagined. “Harvey?” When she tried the doorknob it was locked. Another something different. Because she could not think of what else to do she simply stood there for a time. The house across the street was currently occupied by a black family or families with a tribe of little kids who played in the yard or rode their bikes in taunting orbits around one another. People were always coming and going, coming and going there. Car doors slammed, tires kicked up the gravel in the driveway, morning and night. Maybe they were drug dealers. Maybe they only had complicated social relationships. Elaine decided it didn’t really matter. There was something heartening about a house with so many people in it, so much human commotion. She had never lived that way. Both the family she had grown up in and the one she had started were small and getting smaller. Frank long gone. Josie missing. For someone with a reasonable number of friends—a support group, Kellerman called it—a retail business, a chamber of commerce membership, and a book club, she seemed to spend a lot of time alone. Now she was getting maudlin, self-pitying. When Harvey was taken away she would lose one more co
nnection, one more path to something outside of herself. How strange and sad that she should feel that way about him. She knocked on the front door one more time, then left.
Back at the house there were three messages on her answering machine, none of them from Josie. Lyla had called from the store to say that the credit card machine wasn’t working so was it all right if she just took people’s names and phone numbers and they could come back later to pay? A neighbor Elaine was not particularly fond of had called to ask about the police car she’d seen in the driveway, wondering what exciting misfortune was in progress. And Bob Kellerman left a message saying that he just wanted to check in with her, assure her that steps were being taken. She should feel free to call him anytime.
Elaine listened to this last message a second time. Then poured herself a glass of wine—she hadn’t been drinking at all lately, for fear of losing whatever control she had left—and went upstairs to lie down in her own bed. There she dozed, woke up to fix herself some dinner, went back to bed and slept dreamlessly until the phone woke her the next morning.
“You won’t believe this.”
“Frank? Is that you?” She was having too many conversations like this, with her brain still stuck in park.
“… most bizarre … You’d better get over to Harvey’s. This is incredible.”
“What is? Frank!”
He took a long, whistling breath. “Harvey has a gun and he’s barricaded himself in the house and he’s holding Josie hostage.”
Bandido
Could her life suck any more? Were the bookies in Las Vegas giving odds? Fifty to one, hundred to one, it didn’t matter. She’d bet money that somehow things were going to get even worse.
Josie cried and cried. Buried her face in those funky dusty couch cushions and leaked tears. Whenever she thought she was finally going dry, she remembered Mitch’s craven face turned away from her, or the girl’s gauzy, perfumed shoulders, or her mother accusing her of hateful, unspeakable things, and she started in all over again. Her face was always puffy now from crying, and she was getting a backache from the crack in the cushions you could never avoid. It would serve everybody right if she ended up with a deformed spine.
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