We ran into the house, checked the bunk beds, the bathroom, the kitchen, the porch. Panic rose in our throats. It was 2:30 A.M. I hovered outside the door to our parents" bedroom, feeling sick to my stomach, finally nerving myself to go in.
"Mom," I said, rocking her shoulder. "Wake up. We can"t find Lindsay."
She didn"t understand at first, but once she did, she didn"t linger long enough to get mad. Immediately she began searching through rooms, halting in doorways, flipping on lights. When had we last seen her? How had this happened? She called our father"s name, and he appeared.
"Lindsay"s gone missing," she said.
"What? How?"
She ignored him. While she looked under the beds, I told Dad what had happened. Then she headed outside.
"Elizabeth. Wait," he said. He grabbed her arm, but she yanked it away. He turned to me. "Call the Beckers; ask if they"ve seen her." But I couldn"t move. My limbs were lead; my mind was stupefied. Instead, I watched as my mother headed into the lake.
This was the shape of my mother"s courage: a zigzag path, cut through deeper and deeper water, as she walked in lines parallel with the sh.o.r.e, waiting for the blunt feel of flesh that would be the body of her youngest child. I stood in the doorway and stared; there was nothing I could do. Sarah was in the woods behind the house, calling Lindsay"s name-now a hollow, ghostly sound. Dad was on the dirt road in his slippers, shining a flashlight into the trees.
Two hours pa.s.sed. Or maybe it was twenty minutes. Mrs. Becker had appeared and was standing on the beach, hugging her ribs. "Liz, be careful," she kept saying. The water was up to my mother"s collarbones. Mrs. Becker took me aside. "Go inside and call the police," she said, adding: "What in the name of G.o.d were you girls thinking?"
I couldn"t breathe. What would I possibly say to the police? "I did it, officer. I lost her, I drowned her, I hit her with a car. And all she ever wanted-" Wait a minute.
"Mom!" I said, running for the dock, dizzy from the sudden rush of hope. I got to the boat, pulled back the tarp, and there, asleep, with her thumb in her mouth, was Lindsay-alive-with her life jacket on. "I found her," I tried to say, but the words caught in my throat, came spilling out my eyes. Mom. Come here. I found her.
Today, Lindsay is sunbathing on a chaise longue that"s older than she is. Its plastic mesh is faded and fraying like straw. It"s late August, and she"s wearing a brand-new bikini whose borders don"t quite reach the high-tide mark left by its predecessor. One tanned leg is extended the length of the chaise; the other is bent at the knee. Her hair, a deep honey blond now, is piled on top of her head, and she"s wearing those oversize sungla.s.ses, the kind movie stars wear. Lindsay is seventeen.
I went away for a few years, packed all my belongings in a duffel bag, sneaked out in the middle of the night, the whole deal. But now I"m back, and Lindsay and I are trying to get along. Everyone acts as if I"ve changed, but I haven"t. Or rather: We"ve all changed. That summer was my first taste of wanting something more, of believing there was something out in the world for me. So I did it. I made my escape. I wasn"t trying to hurt anyone else; I was only trying to save myself. Still, when I returned-out of money and out of options-Lindsay acted as if I had abandoned her personally.
My eyes are on the low range of mountains across the lake. Lindsay"s head is tilted toward the sun. She makes the come here gesture with her hand.
"Give it to me," she says.
"Pusillanimous."
"Oh, man," she sighs. The P"s are her weak spot. "Give me a hint."
"When your animus needs a poos."
She bolts upright. "Is this another one of your s.e.x words?" she laughs. " "Cause I don"t know what the SAT was like back in your day. But it"s rated G now." She pats my shoulder. "I"m going to go make a sandwich. Want anything?"
"No, thanks," I say, and she walks away, the b.a.l.l.s of her feet leaving swirled pivots in the sand.
While she"s gone, I stare at the old house. It looks deserted. The wood is gray-black, and in many places, it"s falling apart. After the divorce, Mom always said there wasn"t enough money to fix anything, but it seemed as if there was more to it than that. During the school year, when he"s not giving lectures or presenting papers at a foreign university, we still see Dad every other Sunday, and he"s still his same quiet, bespectacled self. But this place feels like an abandoned set where we once filmed some scenes, an artifact from some other life, made even stranger by its eerie familiarity.
Sarah is studying in Barcelona for the summer, drinking sangria and mastering the language. In her postcards, her handwriting has become curvier. "Barcelona is an extremely humid city," she writes. "The pickpocket capital of the world."
I twist my finger around a thread at the bottom of my cut-off shorts and snap it off. I"m wearing sunblock, plus a baseball cap. Lindsay is the only one in our family who tans. Sometimes, when I"m on an outdoor shoot, I"ll slather on so much SPF 45 that the other a.s.sistants tease me. "Step aside, Meg, you"re a secondary source of light." Or: "Watch out, she"ll cast a shadow." Especially Ed-he likes to rib me the most. "You glow," he says. I refuse to go out with him. Mostly I ignore them all and try to focus on adjusting the backdrop and prepping the subject. I have to admit, I like what I do. There"s something about being on the hidden side of the camera that suits me.
I hear the screen door slap, and Lindsay walks over with a BLT on a paper plate. The smell of bacon takes me by surprise.
"You know," she says, settling back into her chair, "Winnipesaukee means "Smile of the Great Spirit." " Her sandwich is cut in half, and she hands one piece to me.
"I know," I say, giving it back to her. "But that won"t be on your test." She bites off a corner, rests the plate on her stomach, stretches out, and chews.
"Perspicacious," I say, a few minutes later. Lindsay sits up and grins.
"I know that one," she says. "That means you have to come sailing with me."
"No, it doesn"t," I say. "I thought you were serious about getting these down." I don"t particularly care whether Lindsay studies or not; I just don"t feel like getting up.
But she"s already fetching the Sunfish from the side of the house. "I need a break," she says. "You need a break. Besides, it"ll be fun. I can give you another lesson. Remember how you almost capsized us?"
"No," I say. "I don"t."
She drags the boat down to the lake and stands at the water"s edge, waiting for me. "This may be our last chance. Who knows if I"ll even come back here after I go off to college."
"Oh, I"m sorry. I thought you wanted to do better on the SAT. Last I checked, there was no guarantee you were even going to get into any colleges."
Her face goes blank. Then she drops the boat and heads for the house.
"Lindz, listen-"
"No, you listen," she says, stopping in her tracks. "Why do you always say no to everything? Why do you pretend you don"t want anything, when we can all see how much you really do?"
"What are you even talking about?"
"What do you think I"m talking about? Your life."
"See, that"s the part you don"t get," I say, laughing a little. "I really don"t want anything."
"It"s so transparent, it"s pathetic."
"And I certainly don"t want anything from you," I say, not laughing anymore. "You don"t know the first thing about me, so let"s both stop pretending you do. Go on, go sailing. Waste your life."
Lindsay starts toward the house again, but then, in a single, fluid motion, she spins around, goes back to the water, gets in the boat, and sails.
I don"t watch her. Instead I turn to the neighbors" house, the Beckers, and I remember the summer we lost her. That was the last summer James and Zack"s family rented a cottage here; they bought a ski place in Vermont the following year and started going there for summers as well. But our mothers kept in touch, and Mom told me their father sent Zack away to military school when things got really bad, so now they"re waiting to see if he makes it home in one piece. I guess active duty is still part of the military school bargain. It"s hard to imagine Zack in combat, though; beneath all the bravado, there was such quiet fear.
And James, James who kissed me, apparently James fell in love while at college in the Midwest-Fran was her name, I think-and became engaged just after graduation. But six months later, in the middle of planning their wedding, one day Fran had trouble stepping off a curb. After a bunch of tests, they discovered she had Lou Gehrig"s disease. She wanted to call off the wedding, but James insisted. So they got married, and a month before their first anniversary, with James by her side, she died. Fran died, and James became a twenty-three-year-old widower. Sometimes I can"t help but wonder, if I were ever to see him again, if there would be a way to ask him, without hurting him: Does everything happen the way it"s supposed to, James? Do you still think so? This rotting house, my half-alive mother, your wife, my sister? My sister, who every time I look at her, I remember what she said when I first came back: "You left without saying good-bye."
I turn to the lake just as the broad red and yellow stripes catch the bright wind. Lindsay"s is the only boat out there, and it"s perfect. I lied before, about "Smile of the Great Spirit." I"ve been coming to this lake for nearly twenty years, and I never knew what the name meant. Where does she learn these things? Who ever taught her? I don"t remember ever teaching her a single thing. All the while, hidden in the background, she must have listened and learned in the echoes and silences the rest of us didn"t even know we made.
But she"s not in the background anymore. That"s what"s changed; that"s the difference between my sister and me. She"s on the other side of the camera. And so unafraid. I watch the boat and, in spite of myself, I"m proud of her. Against the orange sun, her sail looks like wings.
I go to the end of the dock, sit down, and wait. Come home, I think, staring at the bright sail. Come back. The words are disorienting, and for a second I don"t know who I"m talking to. I pull my legs against my chest and begin to rock back and forth. Come back, come back, my body is saying, until I"m not even looking at the boat anymore, but my eyes are pressed against my knees, and I realize I"ve begun to cry.
MOLLUSK MAKES A COMEBACK.
In her twenties, Katie was struggling to find a beautiful path. Having discovered what was false, she was waiting to encounter what was true. But thus far, the quest for something changeless and good had left her penniless and depressed. Every day she would eye the homeless man who hung around her block with a growing sense of kinship. She liked his signs. WE"RE ALL IN THIS TOGETHER, or WE ALL NEED A LITTLE HELP SOMETIMES. Once he"d even had the wisdom to write WE GROW RICH ONLY THROUGH WHAT WE GIVE, which Katie felt should surely be the universal slogan of all panhandlers.
She"d lost two jobs in two weeks. First, a businessman had come into the Barnes & n.o.ble near Lincoln Center where she was stacking the shelves and working the registers. As she totaled his pile of CliffsNotes, she"d said gently: "I realize these are convenient-G.o.d knows I"ve used them myself plenty of times-but you might go back and read the books sometime. Maybe later, or in addition, or something."
The slick head thought about this. "Yeah, I could do that," he said. Then, casually handing her a hundred-dollar bill, he"d added: "But then again, look where that got you." She didn"t know what he must have said to her manager, but the next day, without warning, she was fired.
The following week she went to work in a midtown office besieged by phone calls. On her first morning, she"d had to say: "Thanks for holding, can I help you?" so many times in a row that she"d once said: "Thanks for helping, can I hold you?" An honest mistake, but apparently one that was not much appreciated by the client. Then, at the end of the day, she and her supervisor had entered the elevator together. As she pushed the b.u.t.ton for the lobby, she"d said to him: "I a.s.sume we"re both going to L," which came out sounding like something that was not at all what she meant. She wasn"t exactly surprised when, at the end of the week, she wasn"t asked back.
Now she"d reached the stage where she was having difficulty mustering even enough energy to do laundry or open mail. Her friends weren"t any help. She tried explaining her malaise to her best friend, Emily, but Emily"s boyfriend, Roy, cut in.
"The point of life," he said, "as I thought I"d taught you by now, is to try to suck as much pleasure out of each pa.s.sing moment as you possibly can." But Katie was convinced there had to be more to life than pleasure-sucking. Besides, she wasn"t about to take the advice of Roy, someone whose life ambition was to have a furniture store called The Sofa King, just so he could run ads that said: "Our prices are So-fa-King low."
Emily was more understanding. "Something good"s going to come your way, I just know it," she said. "All you need is for one little thing to go right, and everything else could fall into place from there."
Katie was doubtful. She looked everywhere, even though she didn"t know what she was looking for. She was becoming an insomniac, so she found herself watching a lot of late-night TV. Plenty of people were doling out advice; it"s just that no one ever said anything useful. She clicked through infomercials selling things everybody knew n.o.body needed, and an old movie whose emotional climax she"d just missed. "What are you running from?" Clark Gable asked as he clutched the trench-coated arm of a perfectly coiffed blonde. "What is it you"re so afraid of?" Most disheartening were the reruns of a daytime talk-show host who seemed to think that tough love was the answer to everything. Diabetes? Tough love! This was what her species had to show for itself?
She went to the Museum of Natural History, figuring if she couldn"t find a sense of connectedness among her own kind, maybe seeing the full wingspan of life would console her somehow. But it was no use. Like everything else, the museum left her with more questions than answers. The mollusks in particular irritated her. What was so great about sh.e.l.lfish that they deserved their own wing?
Even the dodo bird, Raphus cucullatus as he was formally called, was a mystery. It was speculated he had become complacent because of a lack of predators. In the absence of enemies, he grew unwary, got fat, and forgot how to fly. His ancestors must have known how to fly, the little metal plaque said, in order to reach the small island of Mauritius in the middle of the Indian Ocean, where Dodo lived. But Dodo himself was just a flightless pigeon. He became extinct around 1700, killed by, among other things, semiwild pigs liberated by the Europeans. His original Latin name, from Linnaeus, was Didus ineptus-an appellation given post-extinction, in what Katie concluded was perhaps the greatest ever example of adding insult to injury.
She looked at Ineptus tenderly, wanting to touch him, but he was in his Plexiglas case. "What is it you"re running from?" she whispered, aware of the competent strangers all around her. "What are you so afraid of?" Lately she would lie awake for hours, wondering whether she should look for a place with cheaper rent? Move to a cheaper city? Apply to graduate school? Learn how to waitress? Maybe she should have studied French wines in college instead of French literature. She shielded her face with the collar of her Windbreaker so the young mothers juggling strollers and BlackBerrys wouldn"t hear her addressing the bird. "Tell me what to do," she said.
Things continued to deteriorate. The fact that she had recently fallen into the habit of masturbating to thoughts of George Gordon, the sixth Lord Byron, was not a good sign. Although generally speaking, she was an advocate of masturbation. "Sleep with a person, and you please him for a night. Teach him to m.a.s.t.u.r.b.a.t.e, and you please him for a lifetime," she would occasionally joke to her closest friends. Katie was not ashamed of Lord Byron. You had to be resourceful in life; she"d learned that early on. Now even her resourcefulness was coming to an end.
One snowy afternoon in early February, she ducked into Fliks Video, hoping for a miracle. Emily had once given her a quote that Katie liked so much, she carried it around on a sc.r.a.p of paper in her wallet. A miracle is nothing more than justice postponed, arriving to compensate those it had cruelly abandoned.
"I"m looking for a movie where justice is served," she said to the greasy-haired teenager behind the counter.
He stared at her blankly. "You mean, like, Schwarzenegger?"
"Not exactly," Katie sighed. "It"s all right. I"ll look for myself." But as she ambled along, scanning the shelves, nothing promised to be the hope-giving, wisdom-packed wallop she was searching for. Only then, as she stared at the rows of box covers, at the pictures of people laughing or embracing or crying, all caught in the heroic struggles of their lives, did a small thought occur to her with such simplicity she almost said it aloud: I am afraid to try.
Emily and Roy attempted to cheer her up. They cooked her Middle Eastern food, poured her wine. "You"re talented! You"re gorgeous!" they said. "Tell it to my landlord," said Katie. She stared at her couscous, not eating. Couscous always reminded her of cooked sand-that was probably its proper translation. Where did people muster the energy to harvest the desert and cook it? Where did everyone find the will to do all the work in the world? We"re all allowed a kind of grace period, she decided, when we can coast along, before we really need to choose a life and summon the determination to live it. Her grace period had just run out.
The following Tuesday, Valentine"s Day, her phone was disconnected and her car was towed. Katie tried to remain cheerful in the face of disaster. Well, at least I"m not Ineptus, she thought. Maybe that would be her slogan for the day. She practiced saying: "Look, I am not Ineptus," and "This is not an Ineptus you"re dealing with here, folks."
On top of that, it was cold cold cold. It was one of those days she wished her blow-dryer were battery-operated so she could stick it in her pants before she left the apartment.
She went to the munic.i.p.al building where you pay penalties and back-tickets. It quickly became clear that her strategy of avoidance had not been the best way to deal with parking violations. To get her car back would cost four more dollars than she had in her checking account. She asked the stout, thin-lipped woman behind the counter if she could borrow four dollars.
"No," the woman said.
Her eyes came to rest on the string of tissue-paper hearts hanging above the woman"s head. "Where"s the love?" said Katie. The woman did not smile. The people in line behind her grumbled. Then she remembered her emergency cash. She opened her wallet and unfolded a weather-beaten five-dollar bill. Emily had always teased her about it anyway. "Yeah, that"ll get you out of any emergency whose solution is a chai latte," she said. After her account was settled, the woman gave her a slip of paper on which was written the address of the tow lot: 770 Zerega Avenue, the Unlimited Tow Company, the Bronx.
Next she went to the Verizon payment center at Second Avenue and Thirteenth Street, just around the corner from her apartment. She waited in a long line; it seemed it was a busy time of year for the phone-disconnecting business. In general, it was not a very happy place. As if it weren"t bad enough that they disconnected your phone, they made you hang around with the kind of people who got their phones disconnected. She imagined a TV camera rolling into the room. People in rollers and sweatpants would still smile ghoulishly and wave. "Hi, Mom!" Hi! I"m here getting my phone reconnected because I"m pretty much a failure, but Hi!
She wrote the phone company a bad check. Just a small fiction that, like most fiction, had a strong foundation in truth. The money had been in her checking account just that morning, before she had to bail her car out of jail. She felt terrible handing it over to the nice man behind the counter, all smiles, but what else was she supposed to do? She"d once had to write a bad check to the post office at Christmastime, when she was mailing her packages home. And they"d been very understanding when she sent them the money a month later, saying they wouldn"t send the federal agents after all. It appeared that in her efforts to get some fuzzy mittens to her sister, Katie had committed a felony.
Walking away from the counter, she remembered that she still had a small amount of money left in her savings account. She"d always liked the idea of savings, even if she wasn"t particularly keen on its practice. She liked calling it saving, too, because it was like that: You think you"re saving something, when actually, it saves you.
But she needed to transfer the money right away, before the phone company discovered her check was bad. It was after five o"clock, but there was still telebanking. Perhaps there was a use, after all, for the rampant inbreeding of technology and information, and all their mutant offspring.
She used the pay phone across the street from her apartment. It must have been the coldest day in the history of winter. Too bad she couldn"t go inside and use her own phone, but she understood that sometimes it"s hard to fix a thing by using the thing that needs fixing.
She put in a quarter and did a little jump-dance to try to get warm. For such-and-such corporate account, press 3; for such-and-such-and-such credit card, press 7. She plumbed the depths of her purse for more change and came up with a few nickels. Several yards away, the homeless man was sitting on a piece of cardboard, feeding pigeons out of a grimy paper bag. How could anyone be whistling on a day like this? One of the birds wandered over to Katie. She ignored it, but it wouldn"t go away.
"I don"t have anything for you," she said. "I"ve got my own problems here." The bird cooed softly in the snow at her feet.
She pressed more b.u.t.tons and waited. Not only were they making her jump through countless audio hoops, but the worst part was, every time she got within sight of her goal she was mysteriously disconnected. It seemed that modern technology was not the perfect uberland all the ads claimed it would be.
She was almost out of change when she was disconnected, again. She was incredulous. She was beside herself. But she wouldn"t give up. She couldn"t give up. She had to at least be able to do this one little thing.
She started over. Numbers, shivering, coins.
Click.
She stared at the pigeon, wanted to wring its feathery little purple-gray neck. "I am not a Dodo bird!" she shouted. "Go away!"
The homeless man looked up when she yelled. He gazed at her, and for the first time, she noticed his sign.
YOU"RE JUST ABOUT TO GET TO THE GOOD PART, it read.
Had she begun to hallucinate? Her vision was blurry; she blinked and stared. Then she walked over to him.
"Is that for me?" she said. "Did you write that for me?" The homeless man just smiled, a toothless, beatific smile, and rattled his paper cup. Katie dropped in her last quarter.
She walked all the way to the Bronx. The snow was stiff and crusty, but she was wearing st.u.r.dy boots, and was able to make steady progress. The air seemed to have gotten warmer, too. She was not a Dodo bird, complacent unto extinction. She was a mollusk, barnacled and determined. She would survive. She would survive and multiply, until one day entire wings of museums would be filled with her kind. Mollusk makes a comeback, she thought. Her cheeks were pink from the cold, which her mother always said brought out her good looks, and her lips were rosy with her new favorite lipstick. It was officially called "Brick," but Katie had conceived of a better name: "I"m not really a waitress."
She marched to the Unlimited Tow Company, and on the way, she made a plan. On the cross streets, she asked her feet questions: "What are you so afraid of? What is it you"re running from?" And on the avenues, she made them reply: "We"re afraid of failure, and afraid of success. We are afraid of being loved, and afraid of being alone. The world is full of pain, and this is scary. And the world is crazy-beautiful, and that"s daunting, too. Worst of all, so little is under our control." When she heard this last answer, she stopped and struck a deal. "All you have to do is try," she said. "Okay?" Her feet resumed their motion. That was their way of nodding.
She would eventually get to the tow lot and pa.s.s through a chain-link fence into the sea of automobiles. Somewhere there would be a man in a heated trailer who would take her receipt and show her to her car. Somewhere there would be a good part, waiting to begin.
I KNEW YOU"D BE LOVELY
His birthday was only three days away, and Hannah had to find Tom the perfect gift: prescient, ingenious, unique, unforgettable. All month she"d been looking for clues from the universe. She scoured the Internet, studied mail-order catalogs, stole peeks inside other people"s briefcases. Finally she found herself resorting to desperate measures, and was trying to read the minds of the men seated across from her on the commuter train. She stared at them under the bright lights and asked telepathically: What do you want most in the whole world that costs under two hundred dollars and would fit in a box?
Her psychic ac.u.men, however, was proving to be as dim as her prospects. To make matters worse, she"d been caught squinting purposefully at strangers, a posture she quickly tried to pa.s.s off as an attempt to read the contact-lens advertis.e.m.e.nts. By the time she got to work, she had the kind of headache that made her think she might in fact need contact lenses. She was also on the verge of full-scale panic. Hannah knew that if she didn"t find the gift that demonstrated she, better than anyone, understood the very contours of Tom"s soul, she could lose him.