Among the Missing (19 page)

“It’s good,” he said. “The food?”

“Yes,” she said. “Delicious.” He watched her put a piece of steak to her mouth.

What she ought to tell him she cannot tell him. It makes no sense. Or else it makes sense in the wrong way. She has just turned forty, and there is a growing unease that they could name and analyze and discuss.

There is a picture on her desk at work. It is of her father holding her first child, who, in the photograph, is a drooly infant of six months. The child, Michael, leans against his grandfather’s thick shoulder, his mouth open in a one-toothed, loose smile of sleepy comfort. He clutches his grandpa’s finger in one absent fist.

The grandfather, five years dead, no longer exists, and the child, Michael, a fourth grader whose face is only vaguely recognizable in the soft, plump cheeks of the infant, has already long disappeared into his own thoughts and feelings: He likes shells and stamps, he is affectionate, not much trouble, but of course she will never really know what he is thinking. The current Michael has very little to do with the photograph she has on her desk. She often folds her hands in front of the photograph and observes it, aware of a sort of emptiness opening around her, spreading like ripples around a stone tossed into a still pool.

For several weeks, perhaps almost a month, she was in love with the man with the prosthetic arm. That is to say, she began to think of him regularly, a slow romantic ache opening up inside her. She saw his brown, deerlike eyes, his mouth, surrounded by dark stubble. She felt the cold smoothness of that hook against her hand. At night, her husband asleep beside her, she shuddered, imagining the curved metal brushing down the hollow at her throat, between her breasts, down her stomach. She traced the path with her finger. She was at a loss to explain it, the power of this image.

Eventually, she knew, it would pass. She would never see the man again, though for a while she even went to the library regularly and walked through the aisles. She found herself replaying the small scene in her head. She held the napkins in her hand,
and hooks clamped over them. She looped the rubber bands over the hook. Their eyes met. Something might have happened, then.

After a while, she knew that this would fade. Her life would change again. Even now, there was an infinity of paths she could take.

Her husband was feeling blue. He came up behind her and put his arm around her waist while she was standing in the kitchen. “I love you so much,” he said. “I don’t know what I would do without you.”

“I know,” she said, as he pressed his lips against her ear. “Ditto.” She closed her eyes, enjoying his touch.

What if they’d never met? It made her stiffen a bit, because it seemed so governed by chance, so improbable. How many small, offhand choices had led her to the college where they met, had led her to the room where they first looked at one another, had led her to be sad and in need of someone who thought she was beautiful? She thought, if they had not jumped off that haystack, would there have been a fire? Would there, instead, be a grown-up child, another husband, another life? How many people were forever different, how many people ceased to exist every time she turned one way rather than another? Surely, if it were so random, she could not be held accountable?

But she couldn’t be certain. As her husband held her close, she could feel the pulse of other choices, other lives, opening up beneath her. Her past crackled behind her like a terrible lightning, branches and branches, endless, and then nothing.

I
was grown up now, married, with a family of my own, but still the Ormsons wanted to see me, just like always. “Sharon Ormson called,” my mother said the morning after we arrived. We had flown into Colorado from Fort Lauderdale the night before, the children bickering through the entire flight, and all I really wanted at that moment was a cup of coffee and a television to vegetate in front of. I rubbed a finger over my eyes, which still felt sticky from sleep.

“Geez,” I said. “Does she have radar or what?”

My mother gave me a heavy look. “Well,” she said. “What could I say? They called me, and they were asking about you. They wanted to know if you were going to be home for Christmas. Should I have lied to them?”

“No, Mother,” I said. I had noticed that since my father’s death she had taken to using on me the same stern, combative
tone that she had once reserved for him. Deep down maybe she associated the two of us in her mind. “It doesn’t matter that much,” I said.

“I can’t help it,” my mother said. “I’m sorry, but I feel bad for them.”

“Of course,” I said. “So do I.”

I had just turned thirty years old. Once upon a time I had been best friends with the Ormsons’ son, Ricky. But over fifteen years had passed, which seemed like a very long time.

As far as anyone knew I was the last person to ever see Ricky Ormson. This might have made me famous, at least according to the Ormsons, who said that after the long article, “The Strange Case of Ricky Ormson,” appeared in the
Rocky Mountain News
, some producers who were interested in making a television movie had called. If that had happened I suppose that they would have had to hire an actor to portray me. But nothing ever came of it. It was a story with no hero and no obvious conclusion and I assumed (rightly, it turned out) that they would finally give up on it.

I had given up on it a long time before that. Thinking back, I guess that I had accepted the fact that Ricky was dead a few days after he had failed to return home, though of course hope continued for weeks and months, and, in the Ormsons’ case, years. There were searches and police inquiries and news articles. The Ormsons appeared on television, appealing for information about their son’s whereabouts. I myself was interviewed on several occasions—by the police, by reporters, by the Ormsons themselves, who wanted to hear the story over and over.
They wanted to see it as I did: their son vanishing around the edge of a lilac bush in the park, the shadows of leaves passing across his figure, the call of small children on the slides and swings echoing in the distance. They wanted to hear, again and again, Ricky’s last words as he turned to wave to me. “See you tomorrow, I guess,” Ricky had said.

Even then I might have known at some level that I would never see Ricky again. His words had that feeling about them, like they were a part of the shade he was moving into. I knew even then that there were ways to hide things. It did not seem so unusual that a body might not be recovered, that it might remain secreted, rotting, turning back to earth in some undisclosed spot. Really the only surprise was the Ormsons’ insistence, year after year, that there was still the possibility of Ricky’s return. I often thought that if there was a ghost haunting me, it wasn’t Ricky. It was them—Mr. and Mrs. Ormson.

They continued to trail me through my entire life. When I graduated from high school, nearly three years after Ricky’s disappearance, there they were in the audience, applauding with their sad, hollow clapping. As it turned out, I was the first recipient of the Richard Ormson Foundation Scholarship—not because I was Ricky’s friend necessarily, but because I had the highest grades and had shown “the citizen and leadership qualities that Richard Ormson embodied.” I had been in Band and Math Club, and was president of both Drama Club and the local chapter of the National Honor Society. I was also active in cross-country and track.

But it didn’t end with high school graduation. When I became treasurer of my college fraternity, the Ormsons sent me flowers. They came, as guests of my mother and father, to my
college commencement. They were present at my wedding and sent elaborate gifts after the births of my two sons. It seemed clear that, in addition to living my own life, I was also living the hypothetical life of Ricky Ormson.

“I really don’t understand why they bother you so much,” my wife, Patricia, had said on any number of occasions. She had always felt sorry for them. She listened respectfully, even at the wedding banquet, as Mrs. Ormson described what Ricky might feel about the occasion. “They are such nice people!” Patricia said when I would groan about the Ormsons’ inevitable appearance. “And so sad! Such a tragic thing!”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I can’t explain it. I mean I really do feel bad for them and everything, but they just drive me crazy. It’s like, every happy thing in my life I know they’re going to be there—infecting it. I know that’s wrong to say, but I can’t help it.”

“No,” Patricia said. “I understand what you’re saying.” But her eyes were puzzled. “We don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to.”

But we did talk about it—much more frequently than I’d expected. After our first son was born, she’d had a long period of postpartum depression during which she spoke of them obsessively: “I know how they feel, the Ormsons. Oh, God, it must be so horrible for them. I’m just so scared for us. I mean, you can’t protect your children from the world forever. There is so much danger,” she said. “It’s terrifying.”

“Yes,” I said. But I didn’t say any more. I couldn’t explain it, but something in her attitude was infuriating—her depression, her terror, seemed willfully childish, like someone who flirted
by using baby talk. I could feel an angry scoff rising in my chest, a shameful sarcasm twisting its way through my thoughts. When I went outside, I threw down the cup I was holding and it bounced once against the cement before it shattered against the edge of the sidewalk. That calmed me, and I bent, reasonably, and began to pick up the shards.

The sound of Sharon Ormson’s voice always had the same effect on me. It was a round voice, round as her dumpling-cheeked, high-colored face, echoing with sorrowful vowels. “Hello, Tom?” she said, and the
o
s had a sad well underneath them. “How are you?” and I could picture her immediately, her golden hair permed into some kind of glowing shape, the careful, neat suburban woman’s suit, the sensibly short high heels. She was a realtor, and there was always the sense that she wanted to quietly sell you something. In my case, she wanted to sell her earnest, endless grief. She walked me through its many rooms with an air of eager respect, but at the same time it was clear that she felt that the house was probably beyond my means.

“It’s good to hear your voice,” she said. “How long are you in town for?”

“A while,” I said vaguely. “I don’t know for sure how long we’ll be able to stay.”

“Well, I sure do hope that we’ll have time to get together. It’s been quite a while!”

“Yes, it certainly has!” I said.

“How are the children?”

“Oh, fine.”

“Growing every day, I’ll bet!”

“Yes, indeed.”

“And Patty?”

“She’s fine, too.”

“That’s good.”

“Yes.”

In the deadly pause, I looked across at my mother, who sat at the kitchen table peeling potatoes for supper. She stared back at me grimly.

“Well, anyway,” Sharon Ormson said. “I certainly hope we’ll get the chance to visit with you while you’re home!”

“Yes,” I said, and watched as my mother stripped an excruciatingly long piece of skin from a potato with her peeler. She was pretending not to listen. “Let’s plan on it,” I said, and my mother plunked another naked potato into the colander.

This was the second Christmas after my father’s death, and, if anything, the place seemed even sadder and more foreign than it had last year. The last traces of my father had vanished: The mail had stopped coming in his name and there were no more stacks of unread
Outdoor Life
and
National Geographic
sitting next to his chair; his ashtrays were gone, too, since my mother had quit smoking; the little shelf of the refrigerator that once held his brand of beer was now simply another storage place for leftovers.

I experienced all of this as an almost visible absence. It was as if I could feel the things that weren’t there when I walked into a room. I had a similar feeling when I drove through town. Every new building, every changed storefront, every repainted house seemed like a blot, an attack on the town I held in my memory.

I had been away for over ten years by that point. My two younger brothers had somehow escaped the teenage selves I most associated them with. Matt was twenty-seven, a truck driver with the thick torso of a regular beer drinker; Bryce, a sullen outlaw when I left home, was a twenty-four-year-old policeman and had managed to marry and divorce a pale blond woman whom I’d met only once, whose face I couldn’t remember. Even my mother didn’t much resemble the mother I had in my mind. She was an aged and hardened version of the person I’d known—an understudy who would be portraying my mother for the duration of my stay.

It was strange, because only the Ormsons remained as I remembered them. They had grown older, of course, but they still looked like themselves. Mrs. Ormson retained the smooth, heavily made-up expression of a person who has undergone several face-lifts (though I don’t think she
had
, really); Mr. Ormson, though grayer, remained permanently boyish and dazed, still stumbling around in the tweed jackets that Ricky and I used to mock. Ricky used to call him “the Nutty Professor,” though actually he was, and continued to be, the county judge.