by Joseph Fink
Keisha stopped going to groups. She stopped sitting in circles, stopped describing the shape of the monster that was devouring her, because now she knew that she didn’t understand even the most basic shape of it. The counselors from the groups and some fellow grievers who weren’t quite friends but weren’t quite not friends called her for a few weeks, checking in, but after she assured them over and over that she was fine, they gave up and let her be, and then it was her alone in the house with the question that her life had become.
She quit her job, such as it had been. Ever since what she had believed to be a death, she had been taking a leave, anyway. She went through Alice’s things. Her work stuff, her laptop, letters hidden under piles of clothes. Was that an invasion of privacy? Keisha wasn’t sure. It’s not an invasion of privacy to go through a dead wife’s records. That’s being organized. But Alice wasn’t dead. So did she deserve privacy?
Keisha didn’t care. Alice had made herself a mystery, and now everything she left was a clue. She was a missing persons case and everything she had ever touched was evidence, right down to Keisha’s hands, her skin. The abandoned wife, exhibit A.
Again and again, in the papers and computer files. Phrases Keisha didn’t understand. Praxis. Vector H. References to a war, to “missions.” And more than any other, to Bay and Creek Shipping. Over and over Alice had written about Bay and Creek Shipping.
Keisha had called about a job with Bay and Creek the next day.
“Shit,” said Sylvia.
“Yeah,” said Keisha. Neither of them said anything else for a while.
On the way through Georgia, they passed a house by the highway with a pile of trash burning on its front lawn, big orange flames, thick plume of smoke. A man standing there watching it burn. Sylvia only saw it for a moment, and only in the corner of her eye, and that slice of time was stuck in her head that way forever. The man never moving. The fire never consuming. Keisha never saw him. That moment of time didn’t exist for her at all.
Even after a couple days, Sylvia smelled as strong as ever. Something natural, but not. Organic, but aggressively so.
“What’s that smell?” Keisha asked.
“I was wondering how long you’d be polite. It’s heather oil.”
“Why are you drenched in heather oil?”
“Yeah, I dunno,” Sylvia said. “I’ve heard the Hungry Man, he doesn’t like it. Wards him off. Probably bullshit but . . .” She shrugged.
“You heard that? Where did you hear it from?”
“You think we’re the only lives he’s touched? You think you’re the only one he’s talked to? Word gets around. I’ve been wandering this country for almost a year now. Others have seen him. I’ve met them. Most were too scared to be as helpful as you.”
Sylvia smiled at her and Keisha managed back a grimace that was a distant cousin of a smile.
“Bad news. I’m real scared too. Kind of all the time. Used to go to therapy and shit.”
“Ain’t important if you’re scared,” Sylvia said. “You’re helping anyway. Can’t control feeling fear. Can control what you do while feeling it. Learned that too.”
“A hard-won lesson of life on the road?”
“Nah, I used to go to therapy too. Anxiety bros?” She held up a fist and Keisha bumped it. Sylvia did a big exploding movement with her fingers, adding sound effects. They both laughed.
“Sure. Anxiety bros,” Keisha said. “I’m still only taking you as far as Savannah, though. Then I have to get back to my thing.”
“I know. Man, I hope you find her.”
“Yeah.”
“Hope she wants to be found.”
“Yeah,” Keisha said. “Yeah.”
Another silence. Keisha didn’t want to say what she was about to say but was unable to stop the words.
“Shit,” she said. “Let’s break into a police station.”
“Thank god,” said Sylvia. “I kept thinking, ‘She’s gonna offer to help me, right?’ And then you didn’t and I was, like, ‘Man, I thought she was a good person.’”
“So I’m a good person now?”
“Good? Remains to be seen. You’re cool, though. Let’s do this.”
10
Savannah looked like a city half remembered from a visit years before. Hazy and dreamlike. Brick buildings sagged into themselves. The trees were more moss than tree. The park at the center of town was full of gutter punks. Kids who had run away out of choice, not out of fear. Two of them catcalled passersby, the same line over and over. They’d removed themselves from the system enough to stop showering but not enough to stop harassing women.
Keisha and Sylvia walked the few blocks to the station and scoped it out. The front of the station was a big glass window, fine, but the rest was cinder-block blank, barred windows, a back door hazardously blocked by a dumpster, nothing that could be crawled through or into. It was a box with one available opening, and that opening was right on the street. Even trying to case the place was hard. There were cops everywhere, hanging out, chatting, and staring at Keisha and Sylvia as they tried to casually walk by.
“Nothing casual about the two of us, I guess,” Keisha said.
“Could we just run in and run out?”
“There’s one usable door. You run in, it’d be tricky to run out.”
They took their fourth walk down the block. An officer across the street watched them with open suspicion. Keisha felt her heart pound seeing the uniform, remembering a dark parking lot in Kansas.
“Not the front then,” she said. “I’m going to walk down that alley, meet me on the other side.”
At the end of the alley was another dumpster. Well, fuck it then. She climbed up on it and from there got on the roof. Body prone so there would be no footsteps, she crawled along the top of the building. There were skylights at regular intervals. She peered over the edge of one, down at a desk that needed decluttering and a floor that needed mopping. She inched her way back, hopped from roof to dumpster to ground, and continued through the alley to where Sylvia was waiting.
“So here’s what, Sylvia. I’m going to need you to make a distraction.”
“What kind of distraction?”
“That I don’t know, but I need to do something very stupid and very loud, so I need you to do something stupider and louder than me.”
She grinned.
“I know just the thing.”
“Oh, man, don’t tell me. I’d have to try to stop you. Just do it.”
Keisha clambered back on the roof and waited. She couldn’t see anything from her crouched position, but then, if she couldn’t tell when Sylvia’s distraction started, the distraction hadn’t been big enough. As she waited, she wondered how stupid she was, letting a teenager lead her to sitting on a roof waiting to do some silly stunt that would land her with a felony charge. But all that became moot as time passed with no sign of Sylvia, and Keisha knew that it had gone wrong and that Sylvia had been caught, with Keisha aiding and abetting her in this nonsense.
Then the distraction came, and it was big enough.
Sylvia had strolled a few blocks away, broken into a car, and hot-wired it. A few years on the road had made her good at that, for the days when hitchhiking wasn’t working or she had a gut feeling that today would be the day a murderer would pick her up if she tried thumbing a ride. She drove the car to the street in front of the station, pointed it at that big glass front window, and, in a move that she managed with far more grace than she would ever have expected, simultaneously gave it a rev and rolled out. The sedan heaved forward, then rolled on momentum, slow enough that everyone could get out of the way but fast enough to be unstoppable. It entered the front window with a pop and came to a rest there. A lot of the cops ran after Sylvia, which she knew would leave the station empty for Keisha, great!, but also meant, oh shit, there were a bunch of cops after her. There was no way she could outrun them, but she had planned a route to a hiding spot down a side street. Her one chance was to get to the
spot before any of her pursuers turned the corner and saw her hiding. She couldn’t waste time looking back and so she dove behind the wall she had picked out and crouched there, praying to whatever was out there, praying that none of them had seen her. All of them ran by. She put her head against the wall and closed her eyes. Now it was all up to this woman she had met only a couple days before.
Keisha heard the car and was immediately on her feet, stomping on the skylight until it gave and her body went with it. She landed hard on her side in a shower of glass and found she was somehow unharmed. The cops were all either out front inspecting the damage or failing to catch Sylvia, and so she was alone in a room with five desks. She wasted a good thirty seconds finding the one with Ben Campbell’s nameplate. By that point she had no time to look at what she was grabbing. She seized every scrap of paper on top of and inside of his desk and threw it into her bag. It was time to get out of there.
Which is when it occurred to her, with the usual stab of disappointment in herself, that she had not fully thought through this plan. Because get out of there how? The front was a swarm of uniforms, the back door was blocked, and the skylight was high above and rimmed with vicious broken glass. She was trapped. Panic welled up her neck, sloshed around her brain, made it difficult for thoughts to connect. Giving up felt like a reasonable option, but she shook that off, tried to find determination or at least manufacture a simulacrum of it. Every second she stood there, the probability of getting caught ticked toward one. She tried jumping, but the skylight was way too high for that. She scrambled around for a miracle. But there was no miracle. There was only her, and her body, and whatever she would be able to do with that body.
So she clambered up on Officer Campbell’s desk, turned, and, without giving herself time to think, hurled herself from the desk up at the skylight, sucking in her stomach in a half-assed attempt to keep from bleeding out on the glass.
Her hands slapped onto the roof, and her chest slammed into the edge and that did some bad things, but there wasn’t much glass where she hit, so she avoided getting completely skewered. Even with the excitement of the car, there was no way a bunch of cops wouldn’t notice a woman jumping off a desk and half landing up through a skylight. She had to move fast. Her chest was on fire, and her hands were painfully sliding on the sandpaper roof, about to lose grip. Footsteps, louder and louder. Shouts. In a few moments, there would be a hand around her ankle. She thought again about a parking lot in Kansas. About an arm on her throat. And she dug her hands harder into that roof, pulling with whatever she had and ignoring the pain as her chest slid along the edge. In a moment, she was off the roof onto the ground with a brief, awkward stop on the dumpster that didn’t so much slow her fall as roll her ankle. And so, bleeding and limping, she tore as fast as she could away from the station.
She ran until the world flickered at the edges, until she could hear the hollow of her breath. She made it back to the truck where Sylvia was already waiting. They were about a half hour out of town on the highway, the long slashes on Keisha’s chest no longer bleeding, her ankle throbbing, when she started laughing. She laughed and laughed, and Sylvia started laughing too. Every time they glanced at each other another wave would come. They laughed until there was no sound, only shaking, and Keisha had hiccups for the next two hours.
11
Fourteen months ago. Keisha’s friends, and yes, she had once had friends, even though that idea seemed as distant from her current life as every other part of her past, were worried about her sudden obsession, and especially her plan to become a truck driver.
“Do you know how hard those things must be to drive?” said Margaret, the last friend she hadn’t fully pushed away with the utter focus on finding a wife they all believed was dead. They were in a kitchen that had once been Keisha and Alice’s kitchen, and soon would be no one’s kitchen, a kitchen in a house that would stand empty month after month.
“I’ll learn,” Keisha said. She didn’t want to talk to Margaret. She didn’t want to talk to anyone.
“You’ll learn.” Margaret sat at the counter. “Keisha, how long has it been since you were in therapy?”
“Too busy.”
“I know.” Margaret tried to make a compassionate expression, which really pissed Keisha off. “Finding Alice.”
“Yes, finding Alice. Yes, that’s what I’m doing. Because my wife isn’t dead. And as long as she isn’t dead, I will use every moment of my life finding her. And I don’t need therapy for that. I need support. And if you can’t give me support, you can give me my fucking quiet morning back.”
And that was the last time she had spoken to Margaret. Margaret did return, five days later, to try to make amends, to try to find some better way into the maze that Keisha was running inside her head, but by then no one was home. Margaret would check the house once or twice a month, to see if Keisha had come home, had decided to get better, but eventually Margaret realized she hadn’t checked the house in a couple months and then she never did again.
Keisha and Sylvia stopped in a parking lot off 95 and went through what they had taken.
A lot, and mostly crap. Reports. Department memos. Printed-out emails. Because it became apparent that Ben was the type of person who printed out his emails to read them. Which would have been amazing luck if his emails had been anything but the dull minutiae of his job. Ticket quotas. Reminders of policies. Automatic emails to let him know that someone had responded to his comment on Huffington Post. Even the emails that might hold interest didn’t have enough information to lead to further investigation. Emails to a library near Tulsa with questions about a flooding incident they experienced as a result of burst pipes over the winter, and questions about papers there belonging to someone named Cynthia. Repeated delivery failures from Ben’s attempts to email a variety of addresses all with the domain of praxis.edu. Keisha paused at those, but his sent emails contained nothing but short greetings, and none of them had gotten anything but an automatic error reply.
“Do any of these places seem important to you?” said Sylvia, after nearly an hour of tedious reading in which they had both learned a lot about Ben’s opinions on Star Trek canon.
It was a list of cities, handwritten on the back of one of the printed-out emails.
VECTOR H
Everett
Kingston
Waco
Victorville
Paw Paw
Burnt Prairie
Vector H. Keisha felt the swoon of grief. One of the phrases from Alice’s secret papers.
“Yeah,” she managed. “This is definitely something.” She considered the crossed-out names and the one that had been underlined. “Of course it had to be the one on the complete other side of the country.”
She had been getting frantic calls from Bay and Creek, about the missing travel-sized deodorant shipment, about the missing truck, about the missing her. She had ignored them. So she probably didn’t have a job now. That was fine. After everything she had lost, what was a job?
“This is going to be a long drive,” Sylvia said. “Do you have an iPhone hookup in here or something?”
Keisha considered this teenager whom she had only known a few days. The girl was so young. And so fucking brave. She was so much braver than Keisha. Smarter too. Faster. Stronger. By almost any measure, a better person. And, knowing this, Keisha knew what she had to do.
Sylvia didn’t take it well. Immediately reverted into arms crossed, slumping back, an angry kid with a bargaining mother.
“Well, you can kick me out if you want,” she said. “Be a dick move after everything, but I’ll find another way to get there.”
And Keisha believed that she would. Sylvia had gotten a long way on her own, and she could get a whole lot further. It wasn’t a question of could, though, but should.
“It’s silly, what we’re doing, Sylvia,” she said. “Maybe even it’s wrong. But you and I, we can’t not do it. Right?”
Jaw set, a slight nod.
<
br /> “Right,” Keisha said. “We’d be out here no matter what, even though whatever is waiting in that town, it’s not good. Maybe it’s the kind of thing a person doesn’t come back from. And, Sylvia, I am a foolish, foolish person. Because I’m going to go. No matter what, I’m going to that place.”
“And I am too,” Sylvia said, in a voice soft as stone, gentle as a knife.
“But you’re not a fool,” Keisha said. “The Thistle Man, the Hungry Man, whoever else is doing all this, they should be terrified of you. Because I think you’re going to be the one who stops it. No, I mean it. I think you haven’t even grown into the force for good you could become. But you won’t stop anything if you get killed poking around some town that may or may not have any answers. That doesn’t have to happen. Because, no matter what, I’m going to go there. Whether you go or stay, it’s too late for me. I need you to be smarter than me. I need you to lie low, and keep trying to hear what you can hear, and I need you to grow and get even smarter and more powerful than you are now. Let me be the fool. You be the one who lives.”
It was only when the drops reached her mouth that she noticed she was crying.
“Whatever needs to be done in that place,” she finished, “I will fucking do it. I really will. And if I fail, then you will be right here, alive and ready.”
Keisha didn’t say please. Didn’t try to touch Sylvia or make any gesture. She sat and she waited. Either Sylvia would agree with her or she wouldn’t. The girl was old enough to know which. Sylvia’s glare faltered at the edge of her eyes. Her arms loosened. And then she pulled Keisha into a fierce hug. She shook through the hug, and so by transposition Keisha shook too. Sylvia’s tears soaked into the shoulder of Keisha’s T-shirt.