Sarah Jane Read online

  KC was backing out of my driveway as I turned the corner at Sycamore. He stopped the van, got out, and came over. Didn’t give me time to get the door open. I rolled the window down.

  “Been looking everywhere for you.” No smile, no greeting. Minutes past six in the morning. “I need your help.”

  “And I need coffee.”

  He followed me inside, talking the while, much of it at first failing to pierce the fog of my lack of sleep and shadowed thoughts.

  Daniel Hopf, fourteen, had gone missing, twenty hours and counting. He’d attended a church function—at the vacant field by the Lutheran church? Saturdays, they host pick-up ball games and other such events—and as usual was to walk home after, but he never showed up there. The mother, divorced, father living in Austin, Texas, had called the church, talked to parents of the boy’s friends, driven by the field and by the old newsstand where he sometimes stopped to browse through magazines. Then she’d called us.

  I let that us go without comment.

  So far, KC said, he’d followed in the mother’s tracks. Church, friends, regular route. Then the hospital. Registered offenders. Came up empty.

  Changing his mind, KC poured a cup of coffee. He tilted his head toward the wall by the sink. “You have mice.”

  Scratching. Which I’d got so used to, I didn’t hear it anymore.

  “Never lonely,” I said. “Never without friends.”

  “That’s true, even if you don’t believe it. Great coffee.”

  “What can I say? I’m a cook. We know things. Secret things. Put sauce on Spam, smash it all together, call it paté.”

  KC looked tired. Or maybe I was tired and seeing it in him.

  “Ever feel like everything’s broken, Sarah?”

  “Oh yeah.”

  KC rinsed his cup and put it on the rack by the sink. “So what else can we do?”

  First us, now we. I’d been conscripted. And truth to tell, I was bone tired of second pots of coffee, third goes at Jane Austen or Brontë novels, and bowls of cassoulet that could have fed a family of four.

  Back during college days I read a story about an artist who, following yet another failed affair, opens the veins of her wrist with an Exacto knife and in the afterlife finds herself in a vast commons room like those of state hospitals and prisons, thousands of souls tucked into chairs along the wall watching old shows on TV, doing crossword puzzles, reminiscing, napping, zoned out—thousands upon thousands with their own fogs, their own confusion, their own feeling that somehow they’ve been profoundly cheated or betrayed. Given the choice of staying there as she is or returning to life as an insect, she imagines herself as some kind of beetle, a cockroach maybe. At the end of the story, either in actuality or in her imagination, she’s lying on her back, feet paddling at the air for a purchase that will forever elude her.

  20.

  A lot is made in novels, American novels in particular, it seems, of the notion of redemption. Something someone’s done lurches up out of the past, or that someone does it as we watch, and the next 160 or 800 pages show the scrambling back to balance. That’s what my college teachers kept pointing out, anyhow. Maybe it was a sign of the times, the nation’s common soul flashing guilts it needed to pick up and put down elsewhere, teachers finding redemption in books because that’s what they were looking for. Or maybe I’m overthinking this whole thing.

  At any rate, clearly I was still thinking not only about what I’d been reading but also about my own patchwork past.

  All that as I followed up leads on fourteen-year-old Daniel Hopf, which felt like double vision. I told KC I’d help, with the understanding that such help was temporary. And while I was weary of hours stretching out like southwest mesas, flat, bare, endless, I also demurred at giving up my . . . my what? Freedom’s definitely not the word. Safe harbor, maybe. Refuge.

  Daniel seemed to be one of those kids whose friends were all circumstantial. Some from his church, others from community events sponsored by the Lutheran church though it wasn’t his, those with whom he shared classrooms at school or knew from his neighborhood. None of them particularly close as far as I could tell, none he hung out with.

  One name did come up, that of a boy two years older, Malcolm, who sounded to be as fundamentally disconnected as Daniel himself. I was shown to his room apologetically—to myself and Malcolm in equal parts—by his mother. White butcher’s paper covered the lower half of windows, itself half-covered with words and figures from a flat carpenter’s pencil nearby. Decorative ledges along the top of each wall had been subverted to bookshelves. A vintage electronic organ sat propped off plumb on a side table with one short leg.

  “Sure, I know him. Skinny kid, thick middle, walks like he’s wearing snow boots. He’s a weird one. Why?”

  I had to wonder what might score as weird in Malcolm’s world. He was feeding something in a cage, a ferret from the smell, standing in front such that I couldn’t make out what it was.

  “He’s missing.”

  “Missing what?”

  “As in, he never got home on Saturday and no one knows where he is.”

  “Not good.”

  “That’s our feeling as well. Not to mention his mother’s.”

  “Sorry for her. But it’s not like the boy and I are buds, ma’am, just neither of us stays up on the latest thing, you know? So, two outriders, we have to be tight, right?”

  “Then you don’t have any idea where he might go? A favorite place, some activity others wouldn’t know about . . .”

  “I know he has a friend, someone older. Talked about her once when we ran into each other at the library. We’d both got interested in fungus, me for about ten minutes, him a lot longer, and were by the same shelves reading up on it.”

  “A friend. That’s what he said?”

  Malcolm stepped away from the cage. Two ferrets. Busily scarfing up food while watching him closely, ever alert to the possibility of better or, barring that, more. “Not like what you’re thinking. Someone who helped settle things down when they got runny, is what he said. No name, no. But she must have lived near him, from the way he talked.”

  I thanked Malcolm and his mother and was off to criss-cross Daniel Hopf’s neighborhood. Generally when neighborhoods go down they do so on an ever-steeper decline, and stay. This was a rare one, visibly on its way back up. Considerable care had been turned toward restoring and maintaining the original mid-level housing. Well-worn and webbed with cracks, streets and curbs were clean of debris. Ambitious real estate agents might find the area lacking in their beloved curb appeal, but it all looked good to me as I went house to house.

  The fourteenth door I knocked at, 1534 Pell Street, four blocks from his home, was opened by Daniel Hopf himself. I asked for the owner.

  “I’m sorry, Rebecca’s unavailable. Could I help you?” He had on a windbreaker and watch cap. Inside, I understood why. It was maybe 65 degrees in there. Curtains drawn closed all around. Light came from a single table lamp with something on the order of a 40-watt bulb.

  I told him who I was, why I was there, and was told in turn that his friend had been having a bad time of it, an especially bad time, that there was no way he could leave her alone like this, and that he’d just phoned his parents, which he’d not done before because they would have made him leave if they’d known, to say he was sorry and would be home soon, now that Becky was over the worst of it. Sorry about the cold, he said. It helps, she feels better this way. Heat gets to her. And light hurts her eyes. He hoped everyone would forgive him all the bother and worry he’d put them through.

  Rebecca Post had cancer. “Just your ordinary, garden variety, boring, shared-with-eight-million-other-people cancer.” After multiple runs of chemo and radiation and two operations, she made the decision to call it quits, signed up for hospice care, and had been living at home for five months. Meals on Wheels brought foo
d daily, not that she was able to eat much of anything. Specialist nurses visited weekly. She had okay days and really, really bad days. These last were some of the worst. And Danny was a blessing.

  “I asked him to go home. Told him to, more than once. But he has a mind of his own, that boy.”

  A humidifier in one corner pumped away so heartily that you felt the dampness as you entered, like stepping into a cold rainforest, and caught your breath. A sour, bitter smell hung in the room, maybe from the machine, maybe from Rebecca herself. Urine in the bag at bedside was a dark yellow-brown, so the smell could be from meds as well. Worn or off level, the humidifier’s fan ticked with each round.

  They’d met at the library, she told me, while she was reading up on everything she could find about cancer and he was looking for information about yurts because he wondered what home meant in different cultures. Had a curiosity to match his stubbornness.

  I explained that the library was where Daniel had met Malcolm, the young man who sent me her way, as well, and that Daniel at that time had been researching fungus.

  She asked if I’d ever seen the movie Harold and Maude and when I said I hadn’t, told me it was a little like that, the most unlikely of friendships between a far older woman and a young boy, set apart by their character types as much as by age. He started coming over almost every day after school on his way home, sometimes dropped by in the morning just to be sure she was okay.

  By then KC was there, thanking me far too effusively and telling Daniel how worried his mother was.

  After KC and Daniel left for his home and I’d told Rebecca to call if she needed anything, I got in the rattly old Chevy pickup I’d bought when my city car left me and was halfway to the office before I realized it. One of those form and content things. Do the work, go through the motions, switches get thrown. Act like a sheriff, you start thinking you are one.

  I shook my head at old habits, turned around, and went home. Back to the yurt.

  Eight in the morning, no one should be knocking at the door. Of course, as far as I was concerned, no time was good for knocking at my door. I’d disconnected the doorbell weeks ago and decided that any such knocks belonged to a woodpecker doing its thing somewhere. Of no concern to me.

  But this woodpecker wouldn’t stop. So I pulled on enough of yesterday’s clothes to get by, opened the door, and stood there letting my displeased expression serve as greeting.

  Young man in bad suit. Probably not that young, but everyone was beginning to look that way to me. Nor was the suit out of line with what people wore on Sundays hereabouts. In bright sunlight it was either dark blue or gray. I was trying to make out which as, oblivious to my displeasure, he went on talking, having begun, I’d swear, before I could get the door fully open.

  Sentence by drawling sentence I came to realize that not only had someone broached my door at eight in the morning, and not only had I foolishly answered the door, but I had opened the door to, of all things, a lawyer. One who wished to represent me in a lawsuit against the city, well-polished phrases such as wrongful termination and lack of due process stumbling over one another in their haste to leave his tongue. One who would not be redirected, even slowed, by my declaration that I had no complaint against the city nor, insofar as I knew, the city against me.

  Did he actually say Power is never given up, it’s always taken, or am I cutting to fit? Memory loves a good story.

  Dead certain that’s when I started laughing, though. Power in this context being laughable. Or worse. A groaner.

  “Oh. Well, then . . .” Upon which he stopped talking and looked around, as though wondering where he might be and how he came to be there. A man who, venturing out near the break of dawn on a fool’s mission, must have as precious little to attend to as myself.

  I suggested that coffee would be a boon to both of us.

  “Well, sure . . .”

  And who was every bit as decisive.

  He stood surveying shelves, no doubt wondering why anyone would have six kinds of coffee makers, while I, busy with beans and grinder, watched in the window over the sink wondering yet again how men can look in mirrors day after day and never notice eyebrows beginning to resemble jungle undergrowth and hair sprouting out of their ears.

  “So, what? Keeping the world a just and honorable place is going slow right now?”

  He laughed. Not a very committed laugh, but it found its way out. Good. I’d been worried for him.

  He looked back at the shelves. Colanders of every size, a mandoline, pasta maker, choppers, a stack of rolled silicon mats. “I don’t know what half that stuff up there is. But you’re sure as hell neat.”

  “Tools—I used to be a cook. My father was the sort who could build a house, wire it, do the plumbing, brick up a sidewalk or entryway, drop in doors and windows. Had every tool he needed, every one of them with its place. ‘The socket wrench lives here,’ he’d say when I wasn’t much taller than one of his handsaws. ‘And the crescent ought to be right next to it, but it slipped over there and settled down one day when I wasn’t paying attention.’”

  “So you got that from him.”

  “Like so much else. What about your family?”

  The coffee was ready. I put a cup before him, which he tried before responding. Nodded in appreciation.

  “Standard issue small-town. High school sweethearts, married after graduation, bought a house half a mile from where they were born. Went to work, stayed in place there too. Not much evidence they ever considered anything else.”

  “They got you off to college, though. Law school.”

  “Something did. Restlessness, maybe.”

  “Yet you came back here.”

  “I did. Why’s a big question.”

  “Always.”

  He ran his finger along the table’s edge. “Don’t know when I last saw one of these.”

  “We had one just like it when I was a kid.” Oval shaped, moss-green formica top, corrugated aluminum band around the side, chrome legs. “It was second- or third-hand even then. Couldn’t tell if the top was stained from use or supposed to look like that. Took this place the minute I saw the table.”

  “Some the worse for wear.”

  “And still earning its keep.”

  “Right. Could I?” Holding up his cup.

  I got the carafe, poured for us both. We sat quietly, one of those rare, flickering moments of peace closing about us.

  “My girlfriend and I, Nanor, we’ve been together nine years. She works for the newspaper, writes up whatever needs doing. Most of it’s anonymous. Club luncheons, school sports events, city council meetings, court reports. She says you’ve done a lot for the town—”

  “Not really.”

  “—and for women.”

  “Even less.”

  “She’d disagree.”

  “She doesn’t know much about me.”

  “Only what she’s seen day to day.”

  “What people see has as much to do with themselves as with what they’re looking at. But I can tell you how it feels. For every gain you make, there’s slippage somewhere else. Sometimes the slippage is bigger than the gain.”

  “True enough.” He finished his coffee and stood. “Best I go look to foment some slippage myself. Thanks for seeing me. It got to be important to me—for reasons I don’t particularly understand.”

  “You’re not trolling for a client, then.”

  “There’s no way you’d consider bringing action against the town.”

  “Despite that grand opening spiel.”

  “I went over it four or five times on the way here. Hoping it would keep you from slamming the door in my face. If you opened it at all.”

  I held out my hand. “Your name?”

  “Oh. Sorry. I was so intent on . . .” He laughed, closer to the real thing this time. “Horace Tan
ner.”

  “Not exactly a standard-issue small-town name, Horace.”

  “Epic, huh? And I don’t have a clue where it came from.”

  21.

  Dr. Balducci once spoke of one of his teachers, quoting an editor that teacher admired, who’d said of words when they played well together: “There is a small revolution going on in that sentence.”

  In class it brought on a period-long discussion of what language could do, its undertows and subterfuge, and now had me thinking over documents from my life: diary, court records, service discharge, letters and emails, job applications, legal papers, Cal’s notebook. From anybody’s life. How some documents bolster what we know and believe, some fly in the face of it.

  I mean, you’d think the whole life would be in there. But take all those documents of a person’s life and put them in a line, connect the dots, what are you likely to wind up with? How many images, and how different? Like artists’ sketches in TV crime shows. One witness squints at it and says Hell, that could be anybody, the next says it doesn’t look like anyone at all.

  In short, each sentence, each document, is a small revolution, tearing into the one before, reshaping it.

  “There’s no way you needed my help,” I told KC when he came calling later that day. As usual I’d filled time with—now that I think of it, I can’t say what I’d filled time with. Nothing much that I can recall. But hours fell away and KC was at the door as light softened and cicadas started up. Most cicadas sing during the day. These were Northern Dusk-Singers, they love twilight, and we had droves of them. “You and Brag were good to go. Hell, Daniel wasn’t even missing, he’d just stepped out of the room. Ploy comes to mind.”

  “What smells so good?”

  “There’s a pear tart in the oven. Come on out, I’ve got coffee brewing to go with.”