by Sean Oliver
“Part of what?” he barked, thrusting out his hands. He was losing patience with the whole thing.
“Trisha…the laptop…my demolition frigging derby tonight…teachers standing on window ledges…that Albrecht weirdo coming in every week and making people cry.” Jared stared blankly. She threw up her hands, incredulous at his hesitation.
“And if you’re right, then what?” He waited for Deanna to respond. She just sat stoically. “What would we do? Let’s say you found out that your father was doing something awful. Would things really get any better? Would you be satisfied?”
Deanna got up. She stood over Jared and leaned down into him as she spoke. She pointed to the center of the living room.
“Trisha is right there,” she said just above a growl. “Picture her there, and tell her that.” She left Jared in the living room, went straight into the bedroom, and closed the door.
THIRTY-FOUR
JARED SAT IN the library, unable to stop tensing his body and grinding his foot into the ground like he was crushing out a spent cigarette. That physical strain seemed to slow the Smoke, which had been fighting its way up his back nonstop since Albrecht began this session. He looked around—didn’t seem like anyone else was doing much fighting. They were transfixed, eyes on Albrecht as he paced the center of the circle in which they sat. They barely blinked.
Jesus, they’re all in it, Jared thought.
Closing his eyes helped keep the Smoke at bay somehow. Any physical tenseness obscured the numbing crawl up his neck. He was learning to fight it, whereas he fell into its occasional grips before. But the damn thing was happening more and more often lately. He opened his eyes and relaxed his body. The Smoke seemed to dissolve right then in the library, during the session.
“Grace,” Albrecht said from the center of the circle. “You were saying?”
Grace Pappas’s head was cocked a bit, lazily drooping toward her shoulder. Her eyes were at half-mast. She shook her head.
“I feel like I fall into these little sleepwalking spells during the day,” she said. “Then it goes away and I’m just so exhausted.”
“How wonderful,” Albrecht said. Grace looked up, puzzled. “Don’t understand?”
“Not really. Sometimes I feel like I don’t need to. But when I’m more like myself, I do try to understand it.”
“You are changing, Grace. You all are. We are doing some great work together, and as part of that process your subconscious is asking you for something—one thing. It’s so hard to give, especially as adults. We’re all such confident professionals, set in our ways and armed with the tools we think we need for the job.” Albrecht balled his fists and stood like a warrior, feet apart, standing tall. “So we do this. We attack the unfamiliar. New curriculum? New policy? New teacher? Instead of dropping your hands and giving the one thing that your subconscious is asking you for.”
He scanned the room. The teachers were clinging to every word.
“What is that one thing?” Albrecht asked the silent room. No one spoke. He walked to Grace, his hand outstretched. She placed hers in it and stood as he led her to the center of the circle. She looked at him, less sleepy it seemed. She straightened her head and looked into his eyes. Her shoulders widened, she stood upright like a mannequin. He stepped closer to her, just a foot separating them.
Albrecht smiled at her. She smiled back.
He drew back and smacked her across the face with a meaty pop. Her hair flopped across her face, her knees buckled as she stepped backward.
Jared was almost knocked off his seat by the shock of the slap. Furious, he looked around the room for an ally, ready to charge Albrecht and tackle him until police came. But the room sat frozen in their chairs with that placid look on their faces, like they were all recalling a warm, distant memory.
Jared was enraged at what he’d seen. He was confused as to why he was still sitting. All he could think about was being upon Albrecht, but the tingle in his shoulders distracted him from taking action. The Smoke rolled up his spine and, in the shock of the moment, Jared’s defenses down, found its way into his neck and head. The anger was gone.
Everything was gone.
He was sitting and receiving Albrecht—without thought or emotion. Judgment about the event he’d just seen was not there. He felt like he was standing inside himself, now just a huge empty warehouse. He could think. He was aware. But he was in it now. Open, untethered.
Grace returned her gaze to Albrecht. Her eyes were watery from the smack, but she smiled at him. He grabbed her face with both hands and kissed her forehead. He looked out to the group.
“What’s the one thing that your bodies are asking you for, which Grace just gave me?” He then looked only to her.
“Trust,” Grace said. Albrecht smiled more widely.
“Yes. You were brave enough to allow that feeling to fill you. You gave your body and mind the one thing they are asking you for…asking you all for—trust. You released.” He grabbed her hand and led her back to her seat in the circle. She sat and was embraced by Arlene, sitting beside her. They were both smiling.
“Trust what is happening to you,” Albrecht said to the circle. “Open up to it, allow it to change you. That’s the first step in doing life-changing things. You want to change our tomorrow? You want to reshape the future? God, I hope so. Isn’t that why you’re all here?”
He looked around the circle, stopping at Jared.
“Where is Deanna Anastas?” he asked.
“Absent,” Jared said, in unison with a second voice, a female’s. Jared looked across the room to find it. Doris Calhoun stood at her desk, staring at him.
THIRTY-FIVE
DETECTIVE O’MALLEY LEFT the main office after having spoken with Mariana and Lorenzo separately. He stopped just outside the doorway and flipped through his yellow legal pad—something was weird. They were such different personalities—Mariana, demonstrative and always on the edge of talking too loudly. Lorenzo, much more subdued and soft spoken.
But despite that contrast, there was something in the two interviews that made O’Malley feel like he’d done the same interview twice. He was flipping through the notes he made during both of their interviews, looking to see if their answers were the same. They were, kind of. But the truth was the truth. They said what they saw and they both worked in the same office, ten feet apart from each other. Would stand to reason that their interviews would be similar.
That was all fairly logical, but the detective was doubting this conclusion because of something much less tangible. There was something in the quality of their speech that bound them in his head. It was much less about what they were saying than it was about how they said it.
The words? No. More their outlook, their feelings about Trisha. Everything was surface level, delivered in TV-commercial catchphrases. He scanned some of the handwritten scrawl on the yellow pages of the pad.
Trisha hard worker
On time, early
Perfect attendance
Quiet
O’Malley just didn’t believe anything they said, and didn’t believe they believed it.
He continued on down the hallway toward the security desk across from the main entrance. Moore was leaned back, watching him and tapping a pencil on the desk. O’Malley’s face was still in the legal pad.
“Case closed?” Moore asked.
“The more time I’m here, the farther away I get. Should go outside and just knock on doors.”
“Ah, come on, Detective. You know you done that already.” Moore smirked at him. “Anyone out there with their doors triple bolted and windows barred up see anything?”
O’Malley stopped at the security desk, shaking his head to himself. Before he spoke, he wondered how far he should go with the security officer on temporary detail. They were just talking though, a couple of guys with a mind for the same line of work, however separated by circumstance they might have been.
“I’m thinking back to our discussion in the audi
torium yesterday, Officer Moore—”
“Arthur,” he offered.
“Arthur. And some of those words you used are bouncing around my head.”
“Like?”
O’Malley turned and leaned on the counter of the security station.
“Stepford…weird,” the detective said.
“Uh-uh,” Moore said, shaking his head.
“Which one?”
“Weird.”
“Didn’t you say weird?” O’Malley asked.
“Nope.”
“What then?”
Moore leaned forward in his chair.
“Freaky.”
“Right.” O’Malley was shaking his head and Moore was clearly enjoying himself.
“Who’d you get freaky with today?” Moore asked.
“The two office clerks.” He flipped the sheet for the names. “Mariana and Lorenzo.”
“Oh, them two. The worst-kept secret in the school.” He cocked his head knowingly.
“Ah. Might explain some of it.”
“Not all of it.” The security officer stood and grabbed his handheld radio. He clipped it onto his belt. “You want some more freaky?” He rounded the security desk and waved the detective on. O’Malley followed.
The detective couldn’t see the entire library from his vantage point outside the room, but through the glass in the closed door he could see that the teachers were seated in a circle. There was a stocky, hunched man, spectacled and professorial, pacing the center of the circle. All eyes were on him.
O’Malley was scanning the section of the human circle that he could see, about half. He’d already spoken to four or five of the teachers that were visible, but based on the size of half the circle, there had to be a few dozen teachers in there.
“What kind of workshops did you say these were?” O’Malley asked. Moore was leaning on the wall beside the door, watching the detective watching the session.
“Test prep,” Moore said. O’Malley kept staring through the door.
“You take the workshop?”
“I ain’t giving any tests.”
“Who’s the brother leaning against the wall with the blue jumpsuit and giant key ring?” Moore leaned over toward the door and looked in.
“Willie. Custodian.”
“Why does he need a test-prep workshop?”
Moore turned away from the door and walked across the hallway and leaned on the wall opposite the library.
“Man, everyone takes that workshop. Principal jumps in there, too, when he ain’t being paged somewhere else.”
“But a custodian?”
“Custodian, school nurse, guidance counselors. Man, even the cafeteria cooks are in there.”
O’Malley turned from the door and looked at Moore.
“But not you,” he said. Moore shook his head.
“Never been asked, never wanted to be.”
“Just weird that you’re the only one not in there today.”
“Me, plus the girl gone missing,” Moore said.
O’Malley nodded. “Right.”
“One other girl, too.”
THIRTY-SIX
DEANNA WAS WAVING the gun and hitting the trigger way too much. She knew it and didn’t care—it was her brand of fun. She just kept scanning any item she even remotely liked with the infrared hand unit.
Jared had been in the bathroom for fifteen minutes now and Deanna’s thin patience began to fray. She added wine goblets and a serving platter to the registry in his absence. Would he really care? He’d been in outer space the entire evening, without an opinion about anything either scanned or skipped.
It was a gender thing, no doubt. This was the bride’s domain—gift registry. Jared was predictably vocal about the music and food, but Deanna found herself at the helm with the invitations, floral selections, and almost everything else. And that’s just how she liked it.
What bothered Deanna was not Jared’s indifference, but rather his distance. He wasn’t hearing her and it was happening more regularly. It had nothing to do with Crock-Pots and throw pillows. He couldn’t focus. He was unable to pay attention to her. While Deanna craved control of decisions, she equally needed attention.
Fifteen minutes. What in Christ’s name was he doing?
She was done with the kitchenware and wanted to move to bedding, but Spacey would be lost for the rest of the night if she went to another section of the store without him. She sat down at a dining room table display that was too rustic to be attractive, and waited for her prince.
She pulled out her phone and sank as she opened her text messages and had nothing new. Did she expect Trisha to just pop up?
Kind of.
The season would be changing and it seemed another door was closing on finding her best friend. Every ending of some sort seemed to feel that way—the first Sunday night after Trisha was gone, the last day of the month of January. Soon it would be spring break. Gradually, in the healthy way that our perfectly constructed psyche handles unthinkable grief, Trisha would fade in Deanna’s mind. Her cell phone was the magic wand that could bring her back. She held onto magic like grieving parents and best friends do.
Seventeen minutes—too long for anything that should happen in a Nieman’s bathroom. Deanna pushed herself out of the dining room chair, strode to the restroom alcove and didn’t stop there. She sideswiped a guy exiting the men’s room as she went in.
“Sorry,” she offered as he looked back at her.
“Wrong door,” he said. She didn’t even turn. She was inside.
“Dude, what the fuck?” she said to the room. The urinals were vacant, but two stall doors were closed.
“I’m guessing that’s for me,” came Jared’s voice from the general direction of the stalls.
“Do you need an ambulance?” She heard a loud sigh across the room.
A stall door opened and Jared came out, wiping his forehead. Deanna bugged her eyes at him and opened her hands—what’s going on?
Jared walked past her to the sink and ran the water on his hands. He splashed his face.
“Felt faint,” he said.
“For twenty minutes? You either faint or you don’t.” She watched him dry his hands and try to bring life back to his face. “Why don’t you go grab a couch in the shoe section? I’ll be done in a half hour.” Stopping the registry building, the closest thing to a free shopping spree, was unthinkable. He could go sweat it out, whatever it was.
“I’m okay. It’s fading.” He looked at her, all cleaned up, hands at his sides. He was ready to go.
“Hang on,” she said, holding up a hand and looking down. “I’m not dealing with this shit every time we have wedding stuff to do.”
“It’s not that.”
“Yeah, it is.”
“It’s school, I think. Panic attacks.”
“Funny, the school panic attacks happen when we’re making plans for the wedding.”
A toilet flushed, then a stranger emerged from the far stall, buckling his belt. He shook his head as he passed Deanna.
“I’ll leave you two alone,” he said. She watched him until he was gone. She turned back to Jared.
“I see we’re going ahead with this discussion in here, as if it were totally normal,” he said.
“Twenty minutes in a bathroom isn’t normal.”
“I was sick.”
“Then text.”
“I thought you’d be happy.”
“That you were sick?”
“Happy to shop.” They stood in the bathroom and let the echoes of their escalating voices die on the tile. Deanna walked to the sink and leaned on it.
“We are past the point of no return with this,” she said. “Invitations are out, calendars are marked, the honeymoon is booked.”
“I know.”
“Then be honest with me,” Deanna said. She softened. She wanted to listen to him. There was so much going on, between the personal horror they were going through with Trisha, and then planning a bless
ed event. She’d also spent more than a small amount of time forcing thoughts of George from her head. She was confounded by the disappearance and by her father. There was too much living in uncertainty these days.
She needed to listen to Jared. Things were too hard without him on the team.
“Do you want out of this?”
“No.” He said it without hesitation.
“You act like you do. Anyone watching us would say, ‘There’s a dude that’s gonna bail.’”
“I love you. I don’t want to leave you.”
“Then why is this hard for you? Why is dealing with the wedding so hard?”
“Dee, don’t you think it’s all hard right now? How happy are you—scanning bowls and thinking about possibly having a wedding without our friend? How about that daddy-daughter dance? Have you thought about how that’s going to go considering—” he stopped and gestured “—the stuff you found?”
Deanna was looking around the room trying not to break. Of course it was hard, ridiculously so. She was bending her face into a smile most of the time. But she couldn’t stop living. If it was going to be a life without Trisha, then that’s the challenge with which she’d have to deal.
But it would have to be life without Trisha.
The door to the men’s room opened and a gentleman entered and paused, seeing Deanna leaning on the sink and her Jared beside her.
“We need a minute,” Jared said.
“It’s closed,” Deanna said before Jared finished, and the man left. They both went back to staring at the tile pattern on the floor.
“I don’t want to have these feelings,” Jared said. “They just come. I don’t want to lie to you.”
“While I’m standing there putting together our wedding registry for our hundred-and-fifty guests, can you please just lie to me?”
Jared watched her take her phone out of her pocket, swipe open her texts. Nothing. She closed it.