Look Closely

by Laura Caldwell

  “Did you get those on Canyon Road?” I asked Sharon, gesturing toward the drawings.

  She handed me a glass of water and laughed, almost under her breath. “No. They’re mine.”

  “They’re great.” We both sat, me on the love seat, Sharon on the couch.

  “It’s just a hobby. Not much time to do it with my sales job.”

  Sharon’s voice was level and conversational, and I wondered what had caused the sudden shift.

  “So you’re in sales?” I wanted to keep the discussion mundane for now, establish some kind of rapport.

  “Pharmaceutical sales. It’s how I met Dan.”

  “Oh.” There was Dan’s name, sitting between us now. “And you’re obviously not together any longer?”

  A rueful smirk took over Sharon’s face. “Divorced about five years now.”

  “Did he always use the name Singer? I mean, as long as you’d known him?”

  Sharon nodded, and I noticed how quiet the house was. Somewhere in the back, Annie was playing, but there were no sounds to confirm this, and although Santa Fe was a city, I couldn’t hear any passing cars or blaring horns. No shouts or sirens.

  “He changed his name from Sutter to Singer when he moved to Santa Fe. Something about wanting to cut ties with his family. It was symbolic for him. Not that I knew this back then. It only came out when we got divorced. I kept the Singer name for Annie’s sake.”

  I tried to ignore the bitterness that had crept back into Sharon’s voice. “And he never mentioned me?” I said.

  “Dan didn’t mention much. That was part of the problem. He always kept secrets from me, and it made me crazy. I only found out about Caroline because I found a receipt that showed he wired money to her. I went nuts. I thought he was cheating on me, but then he tells me that he has a sister named Caroline in Portland who needed cash.”

  “When was this?”

  “God, it had to be the first year we were married.” She put her water glass down on a rough-hewn side table and gave me an appraising look. “You’re obviously younger than Dan.”

  “Ten years younger.”

  “And so, are there any other brothers and sisters I should know about?”

  “Just Caroline and me.”

  Sharon gave me that appraising stare once more. “There’s no estate battle or something like that, is there?”

  “What do you mean?” A breeze blew through the open windows behind my head. My hair lifted and swirled into my face. I grabbed it with one hand and pulled it over my shoulder.

  “I’m not Dan’s biggest fan anymore, but as I said, he is Annie’s father. I don’t want to hurt him or anything. So if you’re here to dig up dirt for some legal battle or something…”

  “No, no. It’s nothing like that. I’ve just never known Dan, or Caroline for that matter, so I want to get in touch.”

  “Well, I wish I could help you, but like I told you on the phone, we haven’t heard from Dan in weeks.”

  “And is that typical?”

  Sharon shrugged. “It’s not totally out of character. He used to have a mean drinking problem, and sometimes he’d disappear for days, but since we split up, he’s never missed a date with Annie. Every Wednesday and every other weekend and one holiday a year, he drives up from Albuquerque like clockwork. So I am getting a little worried now.”

  “I’m flying out of Albuquerque tomorrow, and I was thinking of stopping by his house.”

  “I can give you directions there, but you’re probably wasting your time. If he was home, he’d pick up Annie. I know that much.”

  “Have you called his friends to see what they know?”

  Sharon laughed. “You really don’t know him, I guess. Dan doesn’t have any close friends.”

  Just like Caroline, I thought. “Why?”

  “Oh, he’s got lots of acquaintances. He’s got the typical sales personality.” She made a wistful face, as if remembering something. “So he’s got buddies in the business. I know some of the guys at his company, and I figured if he didn’t show up tomorrow again, I’ll give them a call on Monday.”

  “What’s the name of the company he works for?”

  “Rider Pharmaceuticals.”

  I nodded. I knew of it. It was a large, publicly traded corporation. I thought of Dan and how alone he must feel sometimes. No wife, a child he saw only on prescribed days, no real friends. I wondered if he still wrote the way he used to, filling those lined notebooks with his stories. I asked Sharon if he was still a writer.

  “You know about the writing, huh?” Sharon said. She sipped her water again, her face suddenly sad. “I think I might be the only person he let read those stories.”

  “What were they like?”

  “They were usually about men or boys who ran away from home and experienced freedom on the road. They used to piss me off.”

  “Do you have any of them?”

  “No. He let me read them, but he always kept them close. Too close. I was always telling him to send them to literary magazines, but he never would. He did write a short essay for one of the papers in town.”

  “Do you still have that?”

  “I think I might. Do you want to wait while I look for it?”

  “Yes, thanks.”

  Sharon began walking out of the room. She stopped under the door frame and turned around. “Would you like to see some pictures?”

  “Oh, that would be great.” I could hear the excitement in my own voice.

  “There’s an album right there,” she said, pointing to the lower shelf of the coffee table.

  I leaned forward and found a small, maroon, leather-bound album. Photos of my family.

  The room had grown dimmer as the darkness outside crept in. A light was on in the kitchen, and a lamp was lit across the room, but I still needed to switch on the barrel lamp on the end table.

  In the first photo, Dan stood with his arms at his sides, smiling into the camera. It must have been moving day, because he was in the very room where I now sat, but none of Sharon’s drawings hung on the wall and no drapes covered the windows. Dan’s hair was much shorter than I remembered it, his blond bangs pushed up in front. I stared at his face, the white flash of his teeth and the dots of his eyes, but the photo had been taken at least ten feet away from him. So while I tried to read something there, all I saw was a man I once knew, who looked very pleased to have his own house in Santa Fe.

  The next few pictures were of Sharon and Dan together. Some were clearly taken at a wedding or some other function because they were both dressed up, Dan in a suit. The others appeared to have been taken around Santa Fe—at sidewalk cafés or parties where there were crowds of people in the background. Those were closer shots, and I noticed that Dan was smiling in each, his arm usually tossed over Sharon’s shoulders. The smile never really left his mouth, though. Instead, his lips seemed set, while the rest of his face was flat. Had he always made such a face in pictures?

  I moved on through the album, the rest of it devoted to the decorating of their house and the birth of Annie. She had been an adorable baby, with fat, rosy cheeks and curly tufts of hair. Her light brown eyes, my mother’s eyes, had been large at birth, making her look startled.

  “That’s me,” I heard, and I nearly jumped. Annie had come into the room and was standing at the other side of the end table, peering at the album.

  “You were a very pretty baby.”

  Annie just nodded as if this was obvious.

  “Do you want to look at these pictures with me? You could tell me where some of them were taken.”

  Annie nodded again. She climbed onto the couch and settled in next to me so that our legs touched. I tried to act as if this happened all the time, as if I sat this close to a child to whom I was related. But in reality, I’d had little exposure to kids. I felt inadequate around them.

  Annie clearly knew how to entertain herself, though, because she was soon pointing at pictures, naming people, telling me how old she was in var
ious photos. As I listened to her, asking a few questions for clarification, I realized that my niece was a lot like myself, an only child who couldn’t rely on others for amusement, who had to learn to play by herself or not play at all.

  “That was my fourth birthday,” Annie said. She gestured to a photo of herself in a pointed red birthday hat, Dan at her side, holding up a white frosted cake for the camera. “They were already divorced then, but Mom let him come to my party, even though it wasn’t a Wednesday or Saturday.”

  “Oh.” I wasn’t sure how to respond to that. I had grown up without any siblings, just like Annie, but I never had to deal with warring parents. I wondered if having no mother at all was better somehow than having a father who disappointed you, who didn’t show up, who made you worry.

  I looked closer at the birthday shot. While Dan was lifting the cake for the benefit of the picture, his eyes were on his child with a look of adoration. He certainly didn’t appear to be a parent who would go on a drinking binge and not show up or call for weeks, but then what did I know? Maybe it was as simple as that. Yet in the corners of my mind, I knew it couldn’t be that easy. Dan had seemingly disappeared on the same day as Caroline, a few days after I’d received the letter, one week before I went to Chicago and Woodland Dunes.

  “Do you miss your dad?” I asked Annie, to fill the silence of the living room. I had never been comfortable with open spaces of quiet, certainly not with a young girl who seemed so foreign and yet familiar.

  “Yeah,” Annie said with a little tilt of her head. “But he’s fine. He’s coming back soon.” She sounded very sure of her words, and I wondered if she was mimicking the lines her mother had fed her since Dan failed to show up.

  “I’m sure he will.”

  “Do you know my dad?”

  “Yes. He’s my brother.”

  She looked at me for a moment. She seemed to have her mother’s talent for appraising people.

  “Well, he’s probably coming home soon,” Annie said, turning another page of the book. “He won’t be gone very long. He misses me too much.” She kept turning the photos over, not bothering to stop any longer to explain them.

  Something about the deliberation of the girl’s movements, the precise way her little fingers with their delicate nails continued paging through the album, made me wonder. And after a second, I said, “How do you know?”

  The small fingers kept moving, flipping pages, until Annie reached the end. Without a word, she started over at the beginning of the book again, with Dan surrounded by boxes, before she was even born.

  I didn’t push. I watched Annie turning and turning the pages until she put her hand over one picture, as if saving her place on the page. She looked at me. “Promise not to tell?” she said in a soft voice.

  I leaned closer. “Promise,” I said, matching her whisper.

  The girl moved toward me, until her mouth nearly rested on my ear. I could feel her faint breath. “My dad’s not drinking again. He’s just on a vacation.”

  I tried to stay very still as if Annie were a deer that could be startled back into the forest. I strained to hear toward the back of the house, for any signs of Sharon advancing to the room and finding me, again, in close physical contact with her daughter.

  When Annie didn’t move, didn’t say anything, I turned my own head a little, so that I could angle my words toward her. “How do you know?”

  “He called me when Mom was still at work. He had to take some time off, but he’ll be back. He can’t not come back because he misses me. He’ll only be gone a little while.”

  Annie sat back away and smiled as if it were all just that simple.

  I wanted to ask her—When did he call? Where is he staying? Did he give you a number?—but I only said, “Does your mom know?”

  Annie shook her head. “She doesn’t like Dad much.” Her face looked stricken. “You won’t tell her, will you?”

  “No,” I said, the word coming fast. “Of course not.”

  “I finally found it,” Sharon said, coming into the room. “And I wrote down the directions to Dan’s house.” Her face held a pleasant cast, but when she looked from me to her child and back again, her expression became more wary.

  “Great, thanks.” I stood from the couch, the album falling off my lap. “Sorry.” I bent to pick it up, but Annie had already scooted to the floor and grabbed it. I stood again, and let my hands fall to my sides, flustered with Annie’s confidences.

  Sharon watched me another moment before she crossed the room, holding out a fluttering piece of newsprint.

  I took it, glancing at the title and byline. A Midwesterner Searches For Uncommon Beauty, by Dan Singer. It was a short piece with no accompanying photos. “Should I go somewhere to copy this and bring it back?” I asked Sharon.

  “That’s not necessary. I had a couple of them tucked away.”

  “Well, thank you so much.” I didn’t want to leave Annie. I wanted to see the girl’s room and her treasures, to talk to her more about her dad, not just about his call but what she knew of him in general, what she thought of Dan Sutter Singer, but Sharon stood still, waiting, it seemed, for me to go.

  “Thanks for everything,” I said.

  “I’ll tell him you’re looking for him,” Sharon said. “Whenever he turns up, that is.”

  Both Annie and Sharon walked me to the door, Annie hanging back a little.

  “It was really nice to meet you both,” I said as I opened the door. Just then the phone rang from inside.

  “You, too,” Sharon said, glancing over her shoulder toward the sound of the phone. “Drive safe.”

  Sharon turned and disappeared into the house. Based on her speed, I bet that it was a man calling, maybe someone she was dating.

  “Bye,” I said to Annie, daring to ruffle the girl’s hair.

  Annie smiled up at me, then crooked a finger, gesturing for me to bend down. I did so, and Annie whispered in my ear, “He went to Orleans.”

  “What?” I said.

  “He went to Orleans,” she repeated in a louder whisper.

  “New Orleans?”

  She nodded.

  17

  I got lost trying to find my way out of Santa Fe, my head too full of information, senses, images, like Annie’s light breath in my ear, Dan’s adult face in the pages of the album, his call to Annie from New Orleans. I wished I could fly there right now. But where would I look? Who would I talk to? Plus, I’d packed only a small bag with a pair of jeans and a T-shirt, and more importantly, hadn’t done any work on the McKnight case. The other problem was that my return flight wasn’t until tomorrow afternoon, and I was scheduled to fly out of Albuquerque, since I had planned on going to Dan’s house tomorrow. But maybe I could switch and get a flight home tonight or tomorrow morning.

  I called the airline from my cell phone, while driving in circles around Santa Fe, continually winding up, again and again, on a street called Paseo.

  “No available direct flights out of Santa Fe to New York until tomorrow night,” said the agent.

  “How about to New Orleans?” I said.

  A pause, the sound of fingers on a keyboard. “Not unless you want to pay a thousand dollars. You’re better off just driving to Albuquerque and getting the flight that you’re booked on tomorrow.”

  The night sky was totally black now, and I strained to read the street signs. Finally, I pulled over at a convenience store and got directions to the hotel I had found on the Internet and reserved for that night. It was located roughly between Santa Fe and Albuquerque, about an hour away. I would still get to see Dan’s house tomorrow, on Saturday, and get back to New York by tomorrow afternoon. Sunday, I would work, and Monday, I needed to meet with Beth Halverson at McKnight Corporation in Chicago. And maybe New Orleans from there?

  As I drove away from the city, I was struck by a feeling of immense space. A few lights twinkled in the distance, occasionally illuminating the side of a mountain face, but otherwise it was sheer black. T
he desert stretched out all around me.

  The Tamaya Hotel & Spa was a large property set in the middle of nowhere. I drove under a long portico and gave the rental car to the valet. At the front desk, a cheerful hotel employee had me checked into a club-level room in a matter of seconds. After the time spent with Annie, the thought of another impersonal hotel room left me feeling bereft. I asked the desk clerk to have my bag sent up to the room and got directions to the bar.

  I ordered a Baileys and decaf and took my mug and purse to the limestone patio outside, where two adobe fireplaces stood on either end, deep chairs in front of them. One set of chairs was occupied by a couple who were kissing and laughing softly, a bucket of champagne in front of them. I felt a flash of envy. It had been so long since I’d been part of a couple like that. I still went on dates here and there. Maddy sometimes set me up with friends of the guys she was dating, but they were usually much older than I, and although Maddy enjoyed that age difference, I never really connected with any of them. Occasionally, I met men when I was out. Sometimes I dated attorneys I knew from my cases. But for the last few years, I had simply been more interested in my career than my love life. Now, though, with this search into my family, with the separation I felt from my father, I wished I had a boyfriend or some family member who knew all about me, who would understand what I was doing, who would help me if I wanted, who would only listen if I wanted that, too.

  I swear, as I sat there, craving companionship, craving family, I could almost feel the warmth of Annie’s hand in mine. My niece, my niece, I kept saying in my head. Family. And yet, when would I see her again? Would I ever see her again?

  I sat in the low leather chair in front of the other fireplace and took a sip of my drink. Maddy, I thought. I didn’t have a boyfriend, I didn’t have much of a family, but I did have Maddy. I reached into my purse and pulled out my phone, hitting the speed dial. She wasn’t there, and she didn’t answer her cell, either. This was getting to be a habit, one that left me feeling lost out here in the desert by myself.