“And then?”
The line sounded fuzzier, or maybe it was Kilmurray catching his breath. “The next day,” he said, “that was the earthquake.”
“Was the house damaged?”
“Guthrie’s sister’s house? Hell, I don’t know. The whole garage level of
my
apartment collapsed. Place was a total loss. I was watching the World Series and I went sliding into the wall. TV crashed. I had to go out the window. My neighbor’s leg was broken and the woman across the hall ended up with her ribs crushed.”
“What’d you do?”
“Got out of the city before things got worse.”
“So you and Ryan and Guthrie drove—”
“No, just me and Ryan.”
“Where was Guthrie?”
“I wasn’t thinking about him. After the roof bit, I’d had enough of him and his stupid vendetta. But if I had been, I’d’ve figured he probably stepped out of the fireplace into the hands of the cops that night and after the earthquake they’d’ve let him out. Much as he was always griping about his sister getting everything, still, you know, it was the family house in the earthquake. But Ryan was like me; he had no reason to stay. The Bay Bridge had collapsed, phones were dead, we didn’t know what was happening. We aimed to get out of the city before the whole place shut down. We lit out across the Golden Gate and drove north.”
“When did you talk to Guthrie again?”
“What?”
I repeated the question.
“No,” he said, as if explaining to an idiot.
“But—”
“Only in my dreams.”
His voice was fading.
He was fading.
“Wait! What about Ryan? What happened to him?”
“We got pulled over for speeding. How crazy is that, with the city in fucking chaos on the other side of the bridge, and there in Marin County you got the Highway Patrol riled up about ten miles over the limit. It freaked us out—we thought they knew about the burglary. Ryan had Guthrie’s license—”
“Ryan had Guthrie’s ID? How come?”
“Guthrie’d emptied his pockets on the roof, like he was going to slide down the chimney faster without ballast. Ryan could’ve waited for him to give it back, but when we heard the sirens, he split fast. So did I. And then, later, when we got stopped, he didn’t want to give the cops his own license. He handed the guy Guthrie’s—”
“What about the picture?”
“Close enough.”
“That’s a big chance.”
“Yeah, you know, I thought that.” There was a different tone to his voice, speculative, and I had the sense it was the first time some other feeling had crept in along with his guilt. “I don’t know whether Ryan planned to give the cop Guthrie’s license or if he just had it and that’s the one he pulled out. He was lucky, real lucky it was close enough. But, you know, once he had it in his hand, it wasn’t like he could say, ‘I just happened to have someone else’s license here.’ Whatever, the whole thing was the last straw, and when the cop pulled off I told him to drop me at the next exit. And that’s the last I saw of him.”
You have to know more than that!
“Where was he from? Did he mention family? What did he say?”
“I knew he wanted to get into the movies, to be a stuntman, but something happened. One time he said he’d been framed, but then he said he’d just been stupid, that he blew his chance.”
“What about parents? Other friends? Where’d he come from?”
“Dunno. He was like a little kid who wants to be a pirate. All he talked about was movies and stunts. It’s why Guthrie figured he was perfect for the job. Guthrie paid him, sure, but he flattered the kid so much that Hammond would have done it just for the thrill.”
“And you never heard from him again? Or even heard
about
him?”
His breath against the phone sounded like a storm. For a moment I thought he wouldn’t be able to speak at all. When he did, his voice was barely audible over the crackling on the line. “I’ve spent most of my fucking life away. I don’t hear from anyone. Why do you think I took your call? Just to talk about friends, about the city . . . I’ve been gone so long it’s like I don’t exist anymore.”
“Gone so long . . . like you don’t exist anymore.” I realized I was speaking out loud.
It sounded like he was clicking his tongue, like he was thinking. Maybe that was just the line. I glanced at Janice, or where Janice had been, but she’d left the room.
Gone so long, like you don’t exist anymore.
“I’m so sorry,” I said to him. But I was thinking of Mike. Tears poured down my cheeks. “I’m sorry.”
The phone made a gulping noise. Then I realized the phone had gone dead.
My sister had walked back into the room. She didn’t come to me, didn’t put her arms around me as she’d done when I was a child. She, “the nice one,” didn’t offer me a tissue or comfort. She looked like she was about to speak but couldn’t. She didn’t look devastated; she looked scared.
I stared at her, taking this all in. For a moment I couldn’t believe it, and then it all made sense. “What was it you said about Mike yesterday? ‘Does he sound like someone who’d stumble into a seedy bar in Matamoros and swallow whatever he was offered?’ Janice, you know what happened, don’t you? You’ve always known.”
She looked like the world had crumbled around her.
28
“JANICE?”
Her face had gone ashen. She was looking at me, but she wasn’t seeing me, wasn’t seeing anything.
“Janice?” I repeated, in a softer tone. I was afraid to move toward her. She looked like she’d crumble to dust at one touch. I sat, still holding the turned-off phone. It was night, but outside I could hear street noises, a bus accelerating, a car alarm whirring. For an instant she seemed to snap out of it. She looked at me,
saw
me, and recoiled.
Before she could move I was up and reaching for her. She pulled away, started toward the outside door, froze, and then sank down against the wall.
“Mike came here, didn’t he? Back then?”
When he ‘disappeared,’ he came here, sat here, when we were waiting in Mom’s living room, terrified that he’d been in an accident, injured, dead!
“He came here because . . . For the same reason I called you to come get me today. He came because he knew he could trust you.”
She was sobbing too hard to speak, but I knew I was right. All these years she’d let us wonder—I could have strangled her.
Stop! Focus!
I couldn’t go there, not now. I had to stay with what happened, only that. “He needed someone he could talk to, someone who would listen without
interrupting every third sentence to tell him why he shouldn’t have done what he did or what to do about it, like Gary or Gracie would.”
Her lips quivered. At a better time she would have smiled at that.
“But he knew you’d be there for him, that you’d take care of him like you did when he was little and—”
She mumbled something and it took me a moment to make it out: “All along.” She looked at me pleadingly. “Both of you.”
“Like you did all along,” I said. How had I never realized that? I’d never thought of Janice being anything special to Mike, or to me. I’d never thought of Janice . . . period. Like the rest of the family. “He came here and . . .”
“He . . . he said he just needed to get away a little while. I thought he’d be gone a week. I never dreamed . . .”
“Of course you didn’t. How could you have imagined he’d disappear forever? Of course you didn’t.”
But he didn’t come back. Why didn’t you tell us you’d seen him? How could you not have told us! Told
Mom
!
I sank down beside her and pressed in close.
Because we’d have squeezed you dry, every one of us, year after year, one of us after another after another.
My head was spinning. I took a breath, willing myself to stay focused.
Even so, how could you watch Mom year after year after year—
“Where’d he go?”
“I had friends . . . in Mendocino . . . logging protesters, you know. He left in the morning. I”—she swallowed—“I packed him a lunch and gave him forty-five dollars. It was all I had in the house. I wanted to go to the bank, but he was in a hurry. He just needed to get away, he said. But I never imagined . . .”
“Of course. But didn’t you start to wonder?”
“Yes!” she snapped.
Whatever I did, I knew I had to stay still and not lose contact with her.
“I called and called, but one of my friends had gotten arrested and the others were protesting that and no one was home with their phone. No cell phones then. And then Gary called me, and Gracie—you know what Gracie thinks of me—and John, and then Gary again because he was sure he could find out something when John couldn’t. I kept saying I didn’t know anything. Finally I took the bus to the closest town up there and spent a week hunting up my friends and, of course, they had no idea where Mike was. He hadn’t meant much to what they were into. I had to really poke before they remembered he was there. They just weren’t paying attention. They had their own stuff to worry about.”
“That’s it? He walked away and vanished?” Why was that such a slap in the face? We’d always hoped that was what he did when he ambled out of the house that Thursday after the earthquake. It was the best possible outcome. But now . . . I felt—but I didn’t dare let myself feel at all. “What’d they say?”
Didn’t you fucking ask?
“There was a tree sit farther north that needed a support crew. He’d gone with them.” She was shaking.
As gently as I could, I said, “How’d you discover that?”
“It took me weeks, finding out who-all was there. You don’t give out that data when you’re doing stuff that could land you in jail. I had to prove myself to each person, explain about Mike, about me, go to protests that weren’t my thing at all. I got arrested twice. That was good. Lots of time to talk in the lockup. People are happy to talk.”
“Holy crap!” I looked at this sister whom I didn’t know at all. “You were in
jail
and none of us ever knew about it?”
She nodded.
“And then what?”
“I went farther north and did it all over again. Only then I had some cred because, see, I’d been arrested.”
“He was gone?”
“And they were glad. One guy’d figured him for a company spy and they were all freaked. They were really relieved when I vouched for him.”
“And then?” I could have cut to the chase, but I was afraid.
“He’d headed south. There was a hot springs sort of hostel in Mexico. Turns out he’d cooked there. Who knew, eh? But it did a winter business, and by the time I tracked it down it was already May. He’d been there all winter.”
It was too much! She’d been gone looking for him all that time and none of us even wondered about her! What did
that
say about the Lott family? “What’d they say about him?”
“They liked him.”
“Of course.”
Janice almost smiled. People always liked Mike. “But that place didn’t work for him, long-term. Nothing did. They said . . . How they put it was, ‘He stayed alone in his soul.’”
I pressed my arm tighter against hers and we sat like that a moment.
Then she said, “And one day at the end of the season he hitched a ride north and that was that. It took me another year to get word of him.”
“How’d you do that, Janice? I mean, get yourself to the off-the-grid place? Coming back here only to get some new lead and drop everything to go off?”
Now she did smile. “It made me what I am today. The family thinks I’m a flake. Don’t bother trying to deny it. To John I’m irresponsible. Gracie thinks I’m lazy. Gary—he’d never say this straight out—but he wonders if I’ve got brain damage from too many drugs. And Katy keeps saying, ‘You have a master’s degree; you could get a teaching job. Why are you sitting around, doing gardening jobs, running errands, doing all this half-assed stuff?’”
“Because you had to, right?”
Her eyes widened. It was a moment before she said, “Yes. Because I had to go to meetings, to marches, spend hours on the Net, call sources in India or Nepal in the middle of our night. I couldn’t keep any job with regular hours.”
I nodded. “For years I’d spot guys on the street I thought were Mike. I’d go racing out of cafés without my coat, forgetting my purse, totally abandoning whomever I was with. I’d only have to chase for a block or two. But you did it big time.”
Her mouth quivered. For a moment I thought she’d cry, but she didn’t.
I couldn’t put off asking any longer. “And now? Where is he now?”
“I don’t know.”
No!
“He was in Maine two years ago, working on a lobster boat out of the Stonington Co-op. But lobster fishing’s way down. And now I don’t know. It’s funny, it’s as if he and I have walked through these last twenty years hand in hand, but separated by a year or so and by geography. As if we’re not going anywhere, but together.”
“But you think he’s still alive. Still in good shape?”
“Oh yeah. I mean, why wouldn’t he be?”
Why wouldn’t he be?
She could have been talking about okra! Okra’s in the store, why wouldn’t it be?
Why wouldn’t he be?
My hands were knotting into fists.
Focus! Damn it, focus!
I exhaled slowly, then said, “Okay. It’s got to end. You have to tell John and get him on it. It won’t take him a year; it’ll take him a week. It’ll—”
“I can’t.”
“You can’t
not.
”
“I promised Mike.”
“He’ll get over it.”
“John wouldn’t take me seriously.”
“Surely—”
“That big family meeting you set up, the last-ditch effort? No one even called me.”
“Oh.”
“I’m not complaining. I’m not this distant from the family by accident. I can’t see them. I’d have to be lying all the time. I don’t care much anymore, except about Mom, but most of all I can’t see her.”
“Oh, God.” Now I did wrap my arm around her. “All this time. I’m so sorry. Listen, I’ll do it. I’ll get John on this.”