Evidence of Life

by Barbara Taylor Sissel

  Kim spoke as if Abby hadn’t. “I am the reason Caitlin is alive and well. I am the only mother—decent mother—that child has ever known, and do you know, she made Hank put a lamp in the window and she turns it on herself every night before she goes to bed. ‘For Mommy,’ she says. She waits and waits. It makes me sick. Sondra makes me sick. She isn’t fit to be anyone’s mother, much less Caitlin’s.”

  Raw envy and a threat of tears ached under the hotter current of Kim’s indignation, and it worried Abby. It made her sorry for Kim, and she didn’t want to be sorry.

  Kim pressed her fingertips to her eyes. “Do you want to know what I hope for, what I pray for?” She dropped her arms abruptly. “That she’s dead. And in case you were wondering? I don’t care if I go to hell.” Before Abby could respond, before she could act on the thought of escape, Kim thrust open the kitchen door. “Go on,” she said, and it sounded like a dare.

  * * *

  Hank turned from the kitchen sink. The little girl beside him crowded against his legs. Still, Abby saw that she was beautiful, as beautiful as Hank and Kim were homely. Angelic, Abby thought, and yet so solemn beneath her chin-length cap of thick, shiny blond hair.

  Hank said, “This is Mrs. Bennett, Caitlin,” and he asked if she could say hello.

  But Caitlin shook her head. “Daddy, don’t go.” She was begging him.

  “I’ll be back before you can miss me, ladybug, I promise.”

  She stepped in front of him, tugging his hand. “But I already miss you.”

  Without a word, Abby wheeled and retreated, walking fast, retracing her steps.

  Hank caught her elbow near the front door and spun her around. “You contacted me, remember? You set this up. You can’t leave now.”

  She yanked her arm out of his grasp.

  He brought his hands up and backed off. “I’m sorry, but, please, please don’t go.”

  “This was a mistake.”

  “You know better.”

  Abby eyed the front door, watching herself walk through it. She’d call Hap, apologize for missing her appointment yesterday; she’d say she was ready now to go to work. Ready to get on with her life. And she would do it. In time, she would forget. Everyone said so.

  “What if your husband wasn’t alone in Bandera last winter like your friend said? What if he was with Sondra, and your friend can’t tell you because she thinks you can’t handle it?”

  Hank was talking about Kate. Kate, who never thought Abby could handle anything. Kate, who had lied to Abby in the past. “Everyone I know thinks this is a bad idea,” she said.

  “But it’s not their life, is it? It’s easy for them to sit on the fucking sidelines and dish out a lot of bullshit advice about how we’re supposed to live with this. Without knowing what happened. As if they could handle it better.”

  Abby opened the front door, then paused on the threshold. She couldn’t have said why.

  Hank’s voice drilled her back. “How often do you see it on TV, people pissing and moaning about how all they want to know is the truth. All they want is someone to say what happened, how their loved one died. Or they say, please, bring them home, we just want to bury them. Or what about when somebody gets sick and they don’t know what’s wrong? They go to doctor after doctor. They go crazy, they go insane until they know. How is this different?”

  Abby turned. “I’m not sure I can stand to know.”

  “Yeah? Well, me either.” Hank looked intently at Abby, and she couldn’t look away.

  Because he was right. If she walked out now, she would have nothing but suspicion and conjecture, the half light of maybe. Even worse, she would have to live with the knowledge that she hadn’t done every last thing she could to find her family, to find the truth, and she would hate that. Hank would go on his own to the cabin anyway. Abby could see he was resolved, and if there was something to be found there, he would be the one to find it. Somehow she couldn’t stand that either. She took in a hard breath and let it out. “All right,” she said. “Let’s go.”

  Hank nodded shortly, and when he retraced his steps down the hallway, Abby followed in his wake.

  * * *

  He drove an old-model luxury car, one of those big-fendered boats. The blue was sun-spotted and bleached like worn-out jeans. From the rough sound of the engine, Abby couldn’t imagine they would make it to the edge of town, much less all the way into the Hill Country.

  “Get in,” he said through the open passenger window.

  She bent down. “We can take mine. I have to move it anyway for you to get out.”

  He flicked a glance at the rearview mirror taking in the image of the shinier, newer, pricier BMW. “I can go around,” he said, and his voice was inflected with elements of resentment and desire. He couldn’t look at her.

  And Abby acquiesced because of this. Because he seemed mortified and furious with himself for it, and more protest from her would only unman him further. This man who had already been so unmanned. The passenger door screeched violently when Abby shut it. The seat belt stuck and Hank had to help her with it. He backed down the drive, maneuvering around her car, heedless that he was driving over the front yard. Abby guessed it didn’t matter. It wasn’t more than a square of weed-choked, scorched earth anyway. She watched the BMW until it was out of sight, wondering if it would be safe, if it would still be here for her when they returned tonight.

  Hank said, “Sondra wouldn’t be caught dead riding in this car, much less driving it. I’m always wishing I could afford something better. Better house, better neighborhood, better schools for Caitlin, but selling insurance these days, it sucks, you know? I own my own agency, and business is lousy. It’s always lousy. I did manage to get Sondra a new car a couple of years ago. Lexus, loaded. Real classy. Cost a fortune. I keep making the payments, too, like I know where it is.”

  They were at the western outskirts of town when the rain Abby had dreaded began. Hank fiddled with the knob that controlled the windshield wipers. Nothing happened. He tried again, and when the blades picked up, lumbering across the glass, he smiled uneasily as if to suggest that Abby shouldn’t put her faith in them. Or him, or this journey they were undertaking at her insistence. But for all she knew, he could have some alternate plan in mind; he could take her anywhere, do anything to her. She couldn’t stop him. And if she were to disappear, no one but his sister Kim would know where to begin to search for her. And Abby wasn’t certain that Kim was right in her mind.

  “I guess you got your ears burned off.”

  “Excuse me?” Abby turned to Hank.

  “I’m guessing Kimmie unloaded on you about Sondra. My wife and sister don’t get along, not even when Sondra’s acting right.”

  Abby didn’t want to know what Hank meant by “acting right” as opposed to not. She didn’t want to hear the history behind Kim’s hostility. Kim wasn’t “right” either, nor was Hank, really, and Abby was already unnerved enough. “How long have you been married?” Abby asked the conventional question and hoped Hank would follow her lead, that he would confine their talk to matters that were small and of little consequence. But even as she hoped for this, she knew it was impossible, that their situation had already broken every civilized boundary. Abby somehow sensed that Hank would be as hell-bent on spilling the family drama as his sister.

  He answered that he and Sondra had been married nearly twelve years, and he went on as Abby had known, had feared that he would.

  “I fell in love with her the second I saw her,” Hank said, “even though I knew I didn’t stand a chance. She was gorgeous. I was nobody. Second-string junior varsity football benchwarmer. She never gave me a second look. She was too busy working her way through first-string.”

  The pause that came was as disconcerting to Abby as Hank’s speech.

  “She’s that kind of woman, you know
? She could dress in a potato sack and guys still wouldn’t keep from seeing, from wanting to—” Hank’s voice crumpled. He cleared his throat, raised his hand, resettled it. “She wants you to. She likes attention. Craves it, actually.”

  Abby thought of what Kim had told her, that Hank had caught his wife stripping in a men’s club. Again, Kim had said, as if Sondra had a habit of doing it. Abby studied the windshield, the one unwipered corner where the rain-formed rivulets broke into fat veins of polished silver. She wondered if Hank would talk about that next. She wondered if she asked, would he stop the car and let her out?

  “You probably want to know what she saw in a guy like me,” he said. “It’s okay. Everybody does. It’s because I’m safe, see? She can trust me, trust I’ll be faithful, like the family dog.” He switched on the radio, punched the row of buttons, got nothing but a voice swimming in static that reminded Abby of Lindsey’s call from Boerne. “It’s about Daddy—” “I’m in the restroom—” Followed by sobbing. Abby was convinced of it now, that Lindsey had been crying.

  “Sometimes my wife goes on, like, these benders. She goes to the men’s clubs and you know—” Hank broke off.

  Their gazes collided and quickstepped away.

  He said, “It’s what scares me, that some pervert got hold of her. She didn’t do it all the time; she’s not hardened to that life like a lot of those women. In fact it had been almost three years when Sondra went back to it this last time. I thought she was done with it. She was working for the judge and she seemed settled. She seemed normal, you know what I mean? More normal than I’d ever seen her.”

  Another pause dithered. Abby twisted her wedding rings on her finger.

  “Sometimes I think if I was just a more exciting guy, if I could just keep her entertained, then I think, how can she do it? Why does she? She’s so smart. She’s got a fucking degree in psychology, for Christ’s sake.”

  Surprised, Abby looked at Hank, then away.

  “After I found out she was dancing again, I tried to talk sense to her. I wanted her to come home,” he said.

  “She wouldn’t?” Abby was resigned now. There was something about riding in the car, being pinned up, a captive audience. Somehow it implied intimacy, confession. As if the situation needed further inducement for that.

  “Nope. She refused. She stayed in touch with Caitlin, though, through maybe the middle of February, but then nothing. Her house in the Heights was locked up. Nobody’d seen her there or at the club. None of her friends had seen or heard from her either. It was like she vanished right off the face of the earth.”

  “You called the police?”

  “They didn’t give a damn. They were like everybody else, they figured she got tired of the wife-and-mother routine and took off.”

  “Because you were separated.”

  “Because she’s done it before. I didn’t think too much about it myself until she didn’t show up for Caitlin’s birthday last April. Sondra wouldn’t have missed that. She wouldn’t have.”

  “Poor Caitlin,” Abby murmured, remembering the little girl, her small angelic face, the anguished way she’d clung to Hank. He shouldn’t have left her. Abby regretted her part in it.

  Hank said Sondra’s landlord had called him to come and clear out the house in May. “Took me half a day. Besides all the office equipment and business crap, sample books and fabric and doodads everywhere, the upstairs was stuffed with her furniture. The closet and dresser drawers were full of her clothes, there was makeup strewn everywhere. Even her toothbrush was still there. None of it meant a damn to the cops. They said she could buy new stuff. I told them there was no activity on our credit cards, no withdrawals from our joint account. They said she was making her own money, she could get new cards. They said she probably had a new guy and a new life. Assholes.”

  After a moment, Abby said, “It’s good you have Kim to help out with Caitlin,” even though she wasn’t sure it was good at all.

  “Yeah, we’ve always been close. Even though she’s younger she looks after me. When we were kids, she was always taking up for me and getting whaled on for it. One day when my old man was whipping her with his belt, I went off on him. I couldn’t stop myself. I get like that sometimes. Get pushed to a certain point and can’t think straight, you know? I just explode.”

  Abby looked at him. She didn’t know.

  “I see red. Literally. It’s like a mist.” He brushed the air in front of his face. “That day? When I took on my old man? He landed in the ER. I was gone by the time they fixed him up. I never went home after that.”

  Hank fiddled with the buttons on the dash, bumping up the fan speed on the defroster, and Abby looked at his misshapen knuckles; she slicked her gaze along the tight line of his jaw, where a tiny pulse needled the flesh near his ear. Her heart tapped insistently.

  Ahead in the near-distance, a huge flock of geese angled across her view, and she focused on them, their undulating vee-shaped flight. Headed for the coast, she thought. If the weather was good and Nick was driving, she’d ask him to pull over. She would say she had to hear their song. The sound put her in such awe. Lindsey, Jake and Nick had always poked fun at her for it. Abby remembered feeling in such moments as if the four of them were knit into a single fabric from one thread. Now her throat knotted with tears.

  They stopped for gas and bought cheese and crackers to snack on in the car, rather than take time for a real lunch. Neither of them commented on it when they passed the Riverbend Lodge on their way through Bandera. North of town, Hank turned west on an unmarked asphalt road. A ranch road. The Hill Country was networked with such roads. The natives knew them as well as they knew the creases on their palms. But someone who didn’t know the land could get lost, utterly, irrevocably, especially today without even the sun to define direction.

  After several miles, the land gained a gentle incline. The road surface changed into a jolting bed of caliche and crushed rock. The rain softened. Limestone outcroppings loomed from the mist, pencil sketches in charcoal and gold. Sound was muted, as indistinct as the view. For all Abby knew, the world had disappeared except for this narrow stretch of road they traveled on.

  “Eerie out here, isn’t it?” Hank seemed to read her thoughts. “Kind of gives you the creeps. Almost anything could happen. Nobody’d find you, maybe for a long time. Maybe never.”

  Abby felt the twitch of his glance. Was he making conversation? Baiting her? Warning her? She didn’t know. She left the pause alone.

  “I remember once when I was a kid, my old man brought me and Kim out here camping. He took us to see this place called Boneyard Draw. You ever hear of it?”

  Abby said she had, that she knew the story behind it, but Hank paid no attention.

  “It’s where Indians drove an entire herd of wild horses off the canyon edge rather than let the U.S. cavalry have them, and they rotted there until there was nothing left but their bones. That’s how it got its name. They say sometimes you can still hear the horses screaming.” Hank snicked his tongue against his teeth. “You want to talk about eerie.”

  No, Abby thought, and she turned to the passenger window, but rather than the view, what confronted her was an image in her mind’s eye of all those bones. Bones strewn in careless heaps, unclaimed, unmourned. But it was so easy out here for such things to happen, for an animal or a car—a car with her husband and daughter in it—to fly off the cracked lip of some bluff and tumble into an abyss. And whatever life survived such a fall was then left to suffer horribly and to die alone without comfort.

  Despair boiled right under the surface of Abby’s skin; she could feel the heated pressure mounting and she fisted her hands. She could not do this, could not lose her composure, not now, not in front of this man, this near stranger. She groped in her mind for something else, a distraction, and remembered the fawn. Dennis’s fawn. She wondered how it was d
oing, if it had grown. She wondered what Dennis would say if he could see her now. He had told her not to do anything crazy. He had said she should call him first.

  The car slowed; they turned again to the west. Ground up an even steeper incline. The engine shuddered as if it might stall. Abby glanced at Hank. “Not much farther,” he said.

  “Are there neighbors?” she asked.

  “Not in any direction for maybe five miles.”

  “So you can come and go without anyone knowing, I guess.”

  Hank’s brows rose as if he wondered what she meant.

  Abby wasn’t sure herself, only that she felt anxious, but along with that, she felt a certain sense of fatalism, too. She guessed she’d come too far now to be afraid. So what if Hank had dangerous intentions? Life itself concealed dangerous intentions. You could never know them ahead of time. Uncertainty was adversity’s companion. Or maybe it was calamity’s companion. Hadn’t she heard that somewhere?

  The car stopped, and the cabin materialized out of the mist, a snug-looking, unassuming little house made of logs. A neatly kept house. A house that looked cared for despite its great age, that even looked loved. Abby could love it, she thought, in some mix of wonder and consternation. She studied the wide front porch, trying to imagine Nick seated on the rough wooden bench by the door. If she put her hand on it, would she intuit his presence? Feel some vibration? But she avoided contact with it altogether when she followed Hank through the front door.

  He disappeared through an archway on Abby’s left. She closed the door and looked around, bemused. The room had low ceilings with beams that gave it a cozy feel. But it was the way it was furnished that captured Abby’s attention, or rather it was the little touches that drew her, how the light coming through the lace curtain hanging in the front window showed off the delicacy of its pattern. She didn’t mind that the edges were frayed. It only added to the charm. The wood floor was scarred and uneven, but there were rugs, floral-patterned in soft faded colors of rose and green and gold.