If you work with or around children, you often hear a lot about how resilient they are. It’s true; I’ve met children who’ve been through things that would drive most adults to the brink. They look and act, most of the time, like any other children. In this sense—that they don’t succumb to despair, that they don’t demand a space for their pain—it’s very true that children are resilient.
But resiliency only means that a thing retains its shape. That it doesn’t break, or lose its ability to function. It doesn’t mean a child forgets the time she shared in the backyard with her mother gardening, or the fun they had together watching Bedknobs and Broomsticks at the Astro. It just means she learns to bear it. The mechanism that allowed Lisa Sample to keep her head above water in the wake of her mother’s departure has not been described or cataloged by scientists. It’s efficient, and flexible, and probably transferable from one person to another should they catch the scent on each other. But the rest of the details about it aren’t observable from the outside. You have to be closer than you really want to get to see how it works.
PART THREE
1
“Oh, my God,” Sarah Jane said when she answered the knock at Lisa Sample’s door. Jeremy was standing on the porch looking dazed. His shirt was covered with blood.
“Sorry,” he said reflexively.
“No, no,” she said. She put her arm over his shoulder and led him inside. “Are you all right?”
“It’s not me, it’s Ezra.”
“Oh, my God,” she said again. “Where is he? Where is he?”
Jeremy turned halfway back toward the door he’d just come through and nodded stiffly in the direction of the highway. “Paramedics,” he said. “I didn’t know where else to go.”
Sarah Jane grabbed a remote from an end table and turned off the television in the living room. “Didn’t they offer you a ride?” she asked, trying not to sound irritated; in the absence of details she’d begun stitching a story together, something that would explain both why Jeremy’d happened to set out for Collins and how he’d done so just in time to find Ezra in the road, his errand interrupted, the remnants of its purpose surrounding the wreck in broken plastic pieces and shiny lengths of unspooling tape.
“Could I get a little water,” he said.
“Oh, my God, of course,” she said, hurrying to the kitchen.
“Could I use the restroom,” he called after her.
“Just through the door on the other side of the couch,” she said from the kitchen over the sound of the cooling water rushing from the tap.
* * *
Washing Ezra’s blood off his hands and face in Sarah Jane’s bathroom, trying to listen to his thoughts over the new ringing sound in his ears alongside the rhythmic whoosh of his own pulse: Did she live here now? Was that it? It was obvious she’d been spending a lot of her time out here, but he hadn’t given much thought to the technicalities. Nobody likes a nosy neighbor. In the mirror, he saw his face looking tired, like he’d been up all night worrying, dusty sweat encrusting at his temples. It was a little past four in the afternoon.
Back in the living room she was waiting with a glass of ice water. “Rest,” she said, patting the couch cushion a respectful half-arm’s length from where she sat.
“Thanks,” he said. The coldness of the glass in his hand drew him earthward, down into the present moment, then eased him further down; he might easily have nodded off to sleep, glass still in hand, like an old man in a rest home. All the chaos of the highway began to ebb, seeking the place where dreams go after you wake up: the sirens breaking the stark silence; the paramedics emerging from the van all at once, two-way radios squelching arhythmically; the team strapping Ezra to the stretcher while the driver asked Jeremy question after question in rapid succession. How long has he been unconscious? Do you have any idea what he hit? Do you have a phone number for his family?
“What happened to Ezra?” she said.
“I guess he flipped that old Citation,” said Jeremy. “I don’t know why he drives that thing. Anyhow, it was upside down in the ditch.”
“Gosh,” she said. The blood on his shirt was still wet and gummy; she didn’t want to ask the obvious question.
“He was breathing when I picked him up. Unconscious, though. Thrown from the car, I guess. I figured I should just get him out of the road.”
“Sure.”
Jeremy’s momentum had been arrested; he didn’t know what to do for conversation now. It didn’t seem like a good time to put in notice anymore. “You know those telephone pole call boxes?” he said instead. “The telephones inside are like antiques. I had to say everything two or three times before they got the message.”
“Oh, jeez,” she said.
“Yeah. I think they usually have some waterproof metal door, but this one didn’t even have any door.”
“Oh, jeez,” she said again, and then, reasoning that she’d waited long enough: “Why—what was he doing all the way out here?”
Jeremy felt the adrenaline letdown take hold, his body sinking into the soft couch. It was so comfortable. He looked up at her until he caught her eyes, and then held her gaze just long enough to convey, as gently as he could, that he didn’t consider her question a real question. A person like Ezra wouldn’t have been on his way to Collins unless somebody’d called him there on some business, on or off the books.
“We should probably go get all those tapes off the road. Might rain,” he said after it had been quiet for a minute or so.
She rose rather quickly to her feet.
“No real hurry, though,” he said, smiling a little, rubbing his eyes while holding his face in his hands, really pressing the pads of his fingers down hard into his eyeballs: the pressure felt good, incredible really. “That car’s not going anyplace.”
Sarah Jane was at the hall closet, taking down a couple of canvas totes from a hook.
“You’re right, though, it might rain,” she said.
* * *
She stood by the wreck with her hand over her mouth for a minute or more; the hypnotic uniformity of rural highways allows for plenty of cars in ditches, but Ezra’s crash had been especially dramatic. There were long skid lines on the blacktop, and the driver’s-side door had been torn from its hinges. It lay interior-side-up thirty feet from the wreck, its window shattered.
When the shock ebbed a little, she started picking up tapes from the highway; there were dozens. She put them one at a time into a tote bag until it was full, then carried it back to her car and traded it out for an empty one. Jeremy scowled as he helped her scour the highway and the shoulder, but didn’t say anything. He wouldn’t have known where to begin.
“They’re just—they’re everywhere,” she said at one point, her voice the only sound for miles.
When she’d recovered as many as she could find, and then spent ten fruitless minutes searching for more, she stood for a moment at the roadside, sizing up what remained of Ezra’s old Citation. It was upside down; she could have crawled in through the missing door and scoured the interior, but there was no way of checking the trunk.
“Better get going,” she said with audible reluctance.
“I guess,” said Jeremy. “We should maybe call the hospital.”
“Here,” she said, retrieving a cell phone from her pocket. “There’s no phone back at the house.”
He accepted it while fixing her with a harder look than he liked having to give anybody, because he’d already seen the army-green rotary phone attached to the wall of the kitchen, and he knew the telephone wires running all down State Highway 65 weren’t just there for show.
“It says there’s no service,” he said, holding the phone at arm’s length with the screen facing away from him so she could see it. In the future, cell phones like the one Sarah Jane handed Jeremy would be referred to as “burners”: cheap phones, often purchased without a contract at a department store, to be used for a very short period of time and then thrown away.
“Should we check a little farther down the road?” she said.
“You have to let me use your phone,” he said, knowing what he had to say next, resenting it. “I saw it, it’s right there in the kitchen.”
She stared blankly past him, as if there were a figure emerging from the fields across the highway, and drew in a deep, even breath through her nostrils, trying not to let it show.
“Of course it is,” she said at last, not meeting his gaze. “What am I thinking, of course there is, let’s just go.”
It was a mile and three quarters back to the Collins house; the rain started up after a minute or so. If it rains, and you’ve been worrying out loud about whether it might rain later, then that’s a good omen. The corners of Sarah Jane’s mouth turned up slightly, involuntarily.
To Jeremy she looked ominous; this morning had been awful. “It’s none of my business,” he said, finally, against the grain of a lifetime of social conditioning, “but why are you—you know—your house is back in Nevada, do you even live there any more, I don’t know.” He had done his best not to make it sound like he was prying. Still, he looked over at her from the passenger’s side, checking her face for clues.
When she spoke, it seemed clear she’d practiced her response. “I met a friend who needs a little help,” she said, her eyes never leaving the road.
“All right, but Ezra—”
There were no cars coming from either direction. Even the smallest breezes breach the quiet a little on these roads away from town.
“He’s just a kid.”
Her expression did not change. “My friend needs all the help she can get,” she said lightly, as if it were something already asked and answered. It takes a crew to raise a building. Everyone needs a little help sometimes.
* * *
It would be great to tell you that you’re going to see Irene Sample again—that we’ve shifted our focus in order to make her return all the more joyous and conflicted, that she’s going to call Collins from someplace far away, maybe today, and say she’s all right, that her life has been a journey through good times and bad; that she’ll say “I can’t explain it, I can hardly believe it myself” while her daughter, grown now, sobs aloud, stifling her cries with her free hand, finally calming herself enough to tell her aged mother to come visit, come visit, she’ll pay for the ticket, she’ll drive up to get her if she has to: Where is she? It would be my sad duty then to tell you about how the line goes dead as Lisa is unburdening herself, the dial tone breaking in to alert her that for some indeterminate stretch of time she has been talking to herself, or to no one, or to the birds in the field she sees through the window from her place by the wall phone in the kitchen. I wouldn’t like that—following Lisa out onto the front porch where the gourd bird feeder colonized by wasps is now gone, replaced by a hummingbird feeder—which is tidier, sure, but birds nest in the gourds, they lay eggs that hatch, it’s wondrous. And what does she say to Jeremy and Sarah Jane when they return from surveying the scene of the accident? How can she explain?
I’d settle for saying that Irene just shows up one day a few weeks from now out of the clear blue sky, the way people sometimes seem to do in Lisa’s life. There she is now—an old woman, pulling up in an Oldsmobile Cutlass Ciera, tires pleasantly crushing the stray unrenewed clumps of gravel along the long driveway. It’s summer, she’s wearing sunglasses. Sarah Jane hears the car drive up, hears the driver kill the motor: Lisa, who’s that? It’s my mother. She’s found me.
It’d even be OK if we had to learn that something has gone terribly wrong—that she gets arrested for shoplifting in Rapid City one year and takes a plea, and when the group moves on, they leave her behind; and so, after serving her thirty days in the county jail, she emerges directionless, no sense of where to go, afraid to see if the bridges she crossed to get here are still standing: and so she walks until she finds a church, Assemblies of God Rapid City, and they find a parishioner who’s willing to give her room and board until she can get back up on her feet; and then she calls home to Crescent, but the number’s been disconnected, because Peter and Lisa don’t live there any more. They left ages ago. They are driving around the country looking for Irene, following up on tips and rumors that never pan out. Lisa’s childhood is ruined; Peter can’t put himself back together; Irene can only guess at this from the message she’s hearing, The number you have called is not in service at this time, but her guess is good enough. She can’t call her parents; she can’t stand it; there is the possibility that they are both dead. It’s been seven years. She finds work at a drugstore, abandoned by the family she’s forsaken her husband and daughter for. She sleeps as long as she can at night. Just being awake feels hard most days. She tries to read her dog-eared Bible, but the connection is lost. She buries her memories under any worthless dirt she can find to pile on top of them: watching television, doing crosswords, working jigsaw puzzles from the Goodwill on a coffee table in her efficiency apartment.
None of this is true, or maybe some of it is. I don’t know. Irene Sample was never seen again. Several private detectives reported leads and rumors to Peter until his money ran out; once, Patricia Lumley saw a woman standing in the alley behind the post office and thought it was Irene, but she didn’t get out of her car to check. It could have been anybody, she told herself when she got home: and besides, wouldn’t Irene be much older by now? Of course she would. It had been years.
2
He nodded goodbye at Sarah Jane while backing down the long driveway, in what felt like the first moment of real substance since leaving the house that morning; everything from then to now had already begun to seem like a weightless vision. The exhilaration of the highway out from town; the blunt trauma of the flipped Citation in the ditch with Ezra’s unconscious body out in front of it; the dream of arrival at the Sample house, the return to the site of the crash: they all folded rapidly into one another, light fading down and back up between individual moments in a hurried preview of the familiar scene now growing smaller and more concentrated on the other side of the windshield. The cornfield to the left, that work shed at its edge. The empty driveway in the sun. The house down at the end. It all looked different with light on it, but there could be no doubt. He had seen it before.
The fuel indicator was nearly red by the time he got back to Story County. He pulled off the highway at a Casey’s in Colo to get gas; at the counter, paying, he saw the foil-wrapped hamburgers under the bright heat lamp, all that shiny false promise. He knew they would be dry, bland, barely worth eating, but he was suddenly ravenous. The huge bites he tore off with his teeth as he drove, burger in one hand and steering wheel in the other, felt like the most nourishing food he’d ever eaten, like something from the potluck at a wake. The point isn’t how healthy the food is, he thought to himself, crumpling the sad silver wrapper. The point is how hungry you are.
His father hadn’t come home from work yet. Jeremy went back to his bedroom, taking his shirt off and tossing it into a corner of the room as he entered. He felt like calling Stephanie to tell her what he’d learned; he imagined her excited voice on the other end, making plans for the next move, sorting through possibilities. It might restore a little light to the scene, breathe some air into it. But he wanted to lie down first, just for a minute; and, of course, as soon as he did, his body began to feel heavy, like an old tree. His thoughts grew less coherent, following an instinctive pattern of connection and reference as he drifted into a deep sleep—gathering, as he went, images of Stephanie’s maps and printouts, blue ink fresh on the paper spread out across the table at Gregory’s, brighter days of the fairly recent past.
* * *
“Where do you get them all?” Sarah Jane said. They were in the cellar; Lisa was hunched over an editing block at a worktable, razor in hand. She felt afraid asking; if their conversations approached this subject, it was only to circle it from a place high above, like a flock of starlings shading a field.
“Get what,” she said.
“Some you make yourself,” she said, not looking up, “and some you already had.”
Sarah Jane laughed a small laugh. “‘You’?”
Lisa turned now to look over her shoulder; she, too, was smiling. “You know what I mean. Besides, who knows?” She reached for a tape atop a five-high stack, held it up: it was unlabeled. It might have been blank, but it could have been anything. “There’s so many of them now. Some of these could have been made by anybody.”
She turned back to the table to resume her cuts and splices; Sarah Jane could see the yellow grease pencil on the loose lengths of master tape. It was easier than she might have guessed, regarding the process while trying not to dwell on its ends. She didn’t like to think of the tapes shot on the property, the ones with identifiable signposts. But these others seemed benign. By themselves they were nothing: long static shots. It was kind of neat how different they felt when Lisa got done with them.
“But you made most of them,” she said, the dread returning, not meaning to be rude but wanting to help as much as she could.
“A fair number of them, yes,” Lisa said, again without looking up, absorbed in her labor. The soft spots in her armor were hard to see, but you meet a lot of lonely people working the counter at a video store. You wish you could do something for them. There might be some mutual benefit in it, who knows, if there were only some readily available point of contact.
There was no reason to press the point. She watched Lisa’s fingers nimbly working at the plastic sprockets and hinges, the warm quiet of the cellar returning. “Is there a specific word for the little thing you push in to make the housing open?” she asked when the moment had passed.
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