by Barbara Hall
She didn’t say anything. She moved into the room and said, “Come into the living room.”
I could tell from her tone that she wasn’t talking about opening presents.
I followed her into the living room and my heart was working very hard. There was a breaking news story on. I could barely make myself say it:
“Is it Dad?”
All my life I knew that if something bad happened to my father, we’d probably hear it on the news before we got a call. That’s how it went with famous people.
“No,” she said.
By then I was staring at the screen and before I heard the words I saw the crawl on the TV screen.
“Local girl lost in Angeles Forest.”
“Who?” I asked my mother. “Someone we know?”
Then the reporter was talking: “The sixteen-year-old girl from West Los Angeles, a student at Laurel Hall Academy, was separated from her parents during a hiking trip late on Christmas Eve. Her parents, Drs. Hugh and Evelyn Wyler, are well-known scientists who do research in the areas of physics and biology. Their youngest daughter, Vivien, was last seen by them yesterday when she fell behind the family during their hike. So far, the search has revealed no sign of her, and we’ve been told that the temperatures did dip into the twenties here last night.”
I looked at my mother.
“They’ll find her, right? They always find people, don’t they?”
“I think they do. Usually.”
“But the twenties, that’s not so cold. She probably found a cave.”
“Probably,” Mom said.
We stood staring at the screen, pictures of rescue workers and dogs and helicopters moving past, and I couldn’t believe this was all going on right before my eyes, all over my friend Viv, who had stood next to me on a stage, singing my songs, just a few days before.
“What should we do?” I asked.
She didn’t know the answer to that, either.
I heard my cell phone ring and grabbed it. It was Gigi.
“Oh, my God, have you turned on the TV?”
“Yes,” I said. “We’re watching it now.”
“What can we do?” she asked.
“I don’t know.”
“I’m coming over. I’m gonna call Ella and we’ll come over. We should all be together.”
Mom called Ed the Guitar Guy and he came over. He had a friend who had a friend who was a cop in that area of the country so he called and talked to him. But the cop had no news. It was just the same as what we were hearing on the TV. The cop did say that the majority of the time they found people within twenty-four hours but there was bad weather, clouds moving in, and if it started to snow it could really set things back.
Ed and Mom and I ate eggs while we waited for my friends. We were quiet.
After a moment Mom put her face in her hands and sat there.
“Are you crying?” I asked.
“No,” she said. “I was praying.”
“Oh, Mom, don’t.”
“I didn’t ask you to join me.”
“It’s superstition. It’s ridiculous. We need to do something real.”
“Hey,” Ed said, precisely in the tone of a father.
“Hey, what?”
“I know you’re scared,” he said. “But I can’t let you take it out on your mother.”
I thought about taking him on and telling him he wasn’t an authority figure, he was just some guy who sold guitars, but I realized this was far from the time to do that. So I backed off.
Gigi and Ella arrived and Mom made them some food and we went over all the details again. Gigi’s father had talked to Viv’s father and they had been walking for half an hour before they realized she wasn’t with them. She was dressed well but she didn’t have any food or water with her. She had a cell phone but it had died because she had mentioned that on the walk. He said the rescue workers were pretty optimistic but the weather was a real threat.
“Should we go up there?” I asked my mother.
“No, sweetie. There’s nothing we can do. It would just create more stress.”
We sat there looking at the news for another hour or so and then my mother said, “We have to do something. Let’s go.”
Ed drove us up to the Angeles Forest, which was about an hour away, and we couldn’t get very close to where they were searching. They made us sit and wait in the restaurant of a lodge. We drank tea and stared out the windows at the clouds lying close to the ground. It looked and smelled like snow. I thought about how odd it was that we lived in a desert but we were just an hour away from snow. An hour away from a forest so vast that you could get lost in it and stay lost for a long time.
After a couple of hours the Wylers came in with one of their other daughters, Claire. She was a freshman at Pomona, and the only thing I knew about her was that she, like the other sister, Jasmine, was smarter than Viv Viv said both her sisters were smart and she was the sporty one. Her parents didn’t get her, she said, and worried about her all the time. I remembered telling her that nobody’s parents got them; she was probably just being sensitive. But she said that wasn’t the case, she really was the black sheep, but she wasn’t all that bothered by it. She meant, it, too. Viv didn’t get emotional. Just as she didn’t take it all that seriously that she had a voice most girls would kill for. Viv was centered and strong and I realized how much I had come to like her and rely on her. She would be okay. She had to be. If anyone could figure out how to survive, it had to be Viv because she wouldn’t panic. She was an athlete. She understood her body and what it could do. Which was probably how she had gotten into trouble. Feeling overconfident, getting separated from the others.
The Wylers didn’t say much but they were glad to see us. I realized it was helpful for us to be there. Ed talked in low tones to Viv’s father. My mother just had her hand on Evelyn’s shoulder. I felt for the first time, maybe ever, how much harder it was to be the adults. And I wasn’t sure I could do that when it was my turn.
Gigi started to cry and Ella glared at her and said, “Cut it out, I mean it. They don’t need that right now.”
“You’re right,” Gigi said, and sucked it up. “But she’s gonna be okay, right? We can’t know someone who could disappear and …”
She didn’t say “die.”
Ella shook her head and stared at her Converse shoes. Her foot was swinging back and forth, fast and hard.
“It sure would be great to believe in God right now,” I couldn’t help saying.
Ella raised her eyes to me. “It’s Christmas.”
“Right. I forgot.”
“How does that matter?” Gigi asked. “And who doesn’t believe in God? Everybody does, even if they’re not religious.”
I didn’t say anything more about it, about how my father had taken God out the door along with famous.
We stayed at the lodge with Viv’s family. I was lying on the couch in front of the fire when my mother woke me up.
“They found her?” I asked, my heart pounding.
“No,” she said. “But we have to go home. It’s starting to snow.”
That was the first time I felt panicked and I couldn’t stop the tears that had started to well up the night before at Mass and seemed somehow related.
I didn’t even fight it when Ed the Guitar guy put an arm around my shoulders and I let him lead me out to the car. Ella and Gigi followed and there was nothing to say.
Day Four
WHEN BAD THINGS HAPPEN, THE HARDEST THING TO BELIEVE is that the machinery of life just keeps going. Everything I did made me feel guilty and strange, from brushing my teeth to watching television. It bothered me enough to say some version of it out loud to my mother.
“It was like that when your father left,” she said. “I couldn’t understand the whole idea of the sun rising and setting, let alone going to the grocery store or washing the dishes.”
“How did it change?”
“It just does, slowly, over time.”
We were still on winter break. Ella and Gigi and I got together the first two days but that made things worse because it just reminded us of who was missing. Then I just stayed in the house and watched the news and ate junk. Ed the Guitar Guy tried to coax me out of my worry with some music, showing me new guitar licks, and I allowed myself to get sucked in because it did give me some relief, a reasonable distraction.
But then things would happen, like getting e-mail and letters from Coachella, telling us the rules and guidelines and asking us to submit our set list for our upcoming show. They were pleased to have the Fringers join them and could we please submit the full names and addresses of all the band members and what instruments they played so they could post it on their Web site.
I went ahead with the plans because not doing it felt like saying she wouldn’t be around for it. But it was hard to handle all the feelings that came up. Because I did feel disappointed that we might not make it. And then I felt horrible about that.
Then the e-mail. That made things almost unbearable.
My father had written back. It was waiting for me that Christmas night, when I got back from the Angeles Forest.
Hey, Rock Princess,
This is exciting news. It coincides with a fit of island fever. I’ve been thinking about revisiting the other society and this is the perfect occasion for it. If you’re serious, put me on the guest list. Maybe you could even get me backstage. Send me the dates. Love and congrats. D.
I had no idea what to do with that information. I couldn’t tell my mother because I didn’t want to remind her that I was still talking to him. I didn’t want her to know that he might come to Coachella because I couldn’t imagine what that would do to her. And I couldn’t even think about the fact that none of this would come to pass, anyway, because Viv might not come back.
On day four a vigil was held for Viv at Laurel Hall. Half of the student body came back from whatever they were doing to attend. Parents came, too. Some locals who had nothing to do with the school came. Religious people and political activists and people who decided that this was all the fault of global warming. Redmond Dwayne and the Clauses came and Mom and Ed the Guitar Guy and Ella and Gigi and their parents and Jeff and the Bos from Peace Pizza. I was glad to see Jeff but I felt guilty about that. Dr. Bonny made a speech and then she turned the service over to a priest and then a rabbi and then a Buddhist monk and finally to a grief counselor. We lit candles and we sang and afterward I didn’t feel like much had been accomplished. Ella and Gigi and I talked about hanging out at somebody’s house afterward but we didn’t have any enthusiasm for it. We had seen each other every day and it wasn’t helping.
Walking to the car with Mom and Ed, I heard someone calling after me. I turned and watched Jeff catching up to me. His cheeks were red from running.
“Street,” he said. “Do you want to go for coffee or something? And then I’ll take you home.”
“I guess not,” I said.
“Honey, it might help,” Mom said.
“How would it help?”
“Get your mind off of things,” Ed said.
“I don’t want my mind off of things.” I turned to Jeff and said, “I’m sorry, I don’t mean to be rude, it just doesn’t seem like the best time.”
He nodded. And yet I couldn’t move. He said something to my mother. The next thing I knew he was leading me by the shoulders and then I was inside his Volkswagen Jetta and before he could start the engine I was crying harder than I could remember crying since maybe the first grade when my dad left. Jeff sat very still and didn’t try to touch me or say anything. My nose was running and I wiped it on my sleeves until Jeff gave me a handkerchief. It had his initials on it.
“I never took you for a guy with initialed handkerchiefs.”
He shrugged. “Walking contradiction.”
“Do you keep them around for when girls cry?”
“My mom gives them to me. She’s old school. I can’t give them back, it would hurt her feelings. So I keep them.”
“You are a conundrum,” I said.
“Yeah. So are you.”
“Yeah?”
“You write those songs and you get up there onstage and you let people see all sides of you. But not you. Not really.”
“I just cried and wiped my nose in front of you.”
“I’m going to savor this moment,” he said.
“Okay, take me for coffee, gearhead, or take me home.”
We went to a place around the corner from the school and across the street from the Guitar Center and the Indonesian shop where we’d made offerings to the prayer box. Every now and then he said something about how sure he was they were going to find her, and if you thought about it, four days wasn’t that long. He knew all kinds of stories about people being found after two or three weeks.
“Viv’s smart, right?” he said.
“Yes and no.”
“Her parents are scientists.”
“She’s a jock. I mean, she’s not stupid, but I don’t know if we can rely on her survival skills. She’s a great singer, that’s what she is. I’d love to have her talent. I mean, not her talent, that’s hers. I’d like to have a voice like hers.”
“But then you wouldn’t have a voice like yours.”
“That’s no loss to the world.”
He turned his head, a kind of puppy head cock.
“Is this an act?” he asked.
“Is what an act?”
“You don’t know how cool you are.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. I don’t even know what color my hair is.”
“It’s striped,” he said. “That’s not a plan?”
“Nothing is a plan, Jeff. Everything’s random.”
“If you understood numbers, you wouldn’t say that.”
I put my head in my hands. “Really? Right now?”
He leaned across the table and made me look up.
“I quit smoking,” he said.
“That was a short hobby.”
“It was stupid. It was to make you notice me.”
“How could I not notice you? You work with me.”
He shook his hair out of his face. He must have known I liked that gesture.
He said, “Here’s my dirty secret. I love the whole world of X’s and O’s talking to each other and—”
“Jeff, that’s not a secret.”
“Let me finish. And to me, it’s like art. The way we create these systems striving for perfection, connecting us all. Hardly anyone else sees it as art. Well, at MIT or Caltech, but like you, they see it as geekdom. I didn’t think I could ever get you or anyone to see me as anything but that.”
“So what do you want me to do? Officially declare, ‘You are not a geek’?”
“I just want you to see me.”
“I see you. I don’t know what you mean by that.”
He opened his mouth and closed it again. As if he had run out of words.
My phone rang. I glanced down at the number. It was my mother’s.
“Hold that thought,” I said.
I knew what it was before I answered it.
“They found her,” I said.
“Yes. She’s going to be okay.”
And for the second time I started blubbering right in front of Jeff.
Then It Gets Weird
“WHEN PEOPLE DIE OR NEARLY DIE, THEY GET INSTANTLY POPULAR. It’s the glamour, the thing that sets you apart and makes people want to form a connection.”
This was something my father said on the occasion of the death of some rock legend that he happened to
know. He explained to me in an e-mail that the guy was marginally talented and never very likable but now he was going to “get perfect.” He said, “Make sure you don’t count on death as your backup plan.”
I didn’t think that made my dad as weird as it might have sounded. He was a poet; he saw things that way and he couldn’t help sharing them. And I liked that he never filtered his ideas for me. He talked to me as if I’d always been capable of hearing things like that. And in a way, as if I was more capable than my mother.
But the point is, he was so often right.
We went to the hospital and it was nearly impossible to find a place to sit in the waiting room. Now Viv was a rock star.
Gigi and Ella and I hugged each other and talked very quickly and it took a while to get annoyed about not getting to see her. We waited patiently along with so many of the people who’d been at the vigil, including Redmond Dwayne, and all the parents, and Jeff, who had driven me directly there. He leaned against the wall, smiling at me from across the room. He was giving me space. He’d probably read about doing that.
It was close to nine when my mother came in and said, “Visiting hours are almost over. We should probably go home.”
“What? Not see Viv?”
She said, “Her parents are with her. She has a lot of visitors, even the press. We can come back tomorrow.”
“It’s not fair,” I said. “We’re her band.”
She put a hand on my shoulder and said, “She’s going to be around for a while. We can come back.”
“Yeah, okay,” I said. I had momentarily forgotten my gratitude.
I was saying goodbye to Gigi and Ella when a nurse entered the waiting room and said, “Is there a Blanche out here? A Blanche Kelly?”
I turned and raised my hand as if I were in school. The nurse pointed a clipboard at me.
“You’re Blanche?”
“Yes.”
“She wants to see you. Visiting hours are really over, so everybody else go home.”
Mom and Ed had to stay behind and I followed the nurse down a corridor, into an elevator and down another corridor. It was late and people were leaving, in various states of emotion.