“Did you find out if Anna is dating guy?” my dad says, finally, in lieu of an explanation. “You know how young girls are. Remember Nick? He made you… what is word? Goth.”
“He did not make me goth,” I say, stifling a laugh. “First of all, it was punk, and secondly, no one made me do anything. I liked it and Nick just happened to be around.” I pivot toward the real issue. “So… who is Zoya?”
My dad ignores me and continues along. “She’s very impressionable. If she’s gone, she’s with the guy.” He turns off the car but continues to sit there, silently, while AM 620 plays around us, staring ahead into the garage; several large packages of bottled water, shovels hanging from hooks, bikes and toolboxes that haven’t been used in years.
“But why did you mention—” I start, but am interrupted by my phone ringing. Hoping it’s my mom, or David—or maybe even Anna—I don’t hesitate in answering.
“Hello? David?”
Usually, an unknown number means David. But if it is David, he would be saying something. I think I can hear breathing on the other end of the line, but no words. In that case, it’s probably not David. I open the passenger-side door and cover my mouth with a hand when I get out. I whisper, “Anna?”
But I never learn who it is that’s calling. Whoever it is drops the receiver, and when I try calling back I only get an error, like the number doesn’t really exist. The only time that ever happens is when David calls me from internet cafés in Europe. The program he uses automatically creates a fake number in order to connect via phone line and not Wi-Fi. If it was David on the other end, and he had encountered technical difficulties, then he would call back. There’s no reason to worry, or panic. And yet, my stomach begins turning in knots. Maybe my dad is right and Anna is with Tristan, like I originally thought. But maybe there’s something else going on altogether. What if she’s in trouble? Or worse?
“Who was it?” my dad asks, getting out of the car too. He goes to the backseat and removes my bags, dropping them on the cement floor beside some dusty work boots. “Was it Anna?”
“I think I’ve answered enough questions for today,” I say, in barely a whisper. The conversation we had has drained me of all energy required to talk, or move, or do anything. “It’s your turn.”
“Hmm,” is all my dad says before taking my bags inside. I know asking him a third time won’t help, because if he doesn’t want to tell me something, he won’t tell me. So I go inside too, and head straight for the shower. I spend an enormous amount of time in there, closing my eyes and letting the hot water run over me. I stay so long my skin turns bright red and prunish and yet I still don’t move. I’m too tired. I think I’m possibly more tired than I’ve ever been in my life. I’m so tired I don’t even know what to think anymore, and possibly I finally understand why it took so long for the human race to come up with all the complicated words they have for emotions. They were too exhausted to feel guilt, shame, nostalgic; or at least too tired to know what it was. You can follow the complexity of emotion arising at the same time as more and more color words became part of the vocabulary; in ancient Biblical times, there were mostly only words for dark and light. Now we have the entire rainbow. We have cultures crossing and vocabulary continually shifting, languages dying (Latin) or emerging (texting). Some languages, like Russian, have so many variations of color words that they use several different words for blue, while others, like the Dani language, spoken in Papua New Guinea, have only two color words: one used for darker, cooler colors, one for all the lighter, warmer tones. Which makes you wonder: if you don’t have the words for something, can you still see it? Can you still feel something if you don’t know what it is you’re feeling?
In some ways, I might have to admit you cannot. But this is the beauty of our global culture: if there’s not a word for what you want to say in your language, then most likely, you can find it elsewhere. In this moment, for example. I can channel the Germans; I am the epitome of Lebensmüde, which, roughly translated, means weary of life. Part of me wants to go back to sleep, but I know I won’t be able to sleep in this house. It’s too weird; the energy is all off. And it’s not only because there’s nothing to look at outside besides a vast array of flat, dry land with trees planted in perfect little rows. Houses so far apart you will never see your neighbors. It’s too quiet. It’s the exact opposite of Israel, where everyone is on top of each other, and it’s impossible to ever feel alone. In Israel it’s never quiet. Here, I can hear every single creak in the floorboard, every sneeze and cough from another room.
Once I’m dry and dressed again, I feel like a new person. I take a walk around the house, looking at how my mom has rearranged everything she moved from our previous house in Hartland. Even though she has the same hand-painted vases and custom mirrors and Kandinsky prints, it all looks so different here in the vast emptiness of the wide-open single-floor design. I can’t really pinpoint why. But something is staler. Maybe it’s the actual building, or maybe it’s just that no one is here but us.
Finally, after several tours around the house and finding nothing of interest, I go to Anna’s room. I’d figured they would turn it into a guest room or an extra office or something by now, but it looks like no one’s been in here since she moved out. It’s still totally filled with her stuff. There are piles of old canvases and art supplies and textbooks, even some old dolls. Her bed is there, unmade, like she could return at any moment, and the closet is full of clothes, thrift-store items, full of holes and stains.
Next, my glance falls on Anna’s desk, adorned with more paintbrushes than I can count and a small tabletop easel held together by duct tape and two lamps. And a computer that looks as though it’s been hastily dropped off, not even plugged in.
Then it hits me. That’s my computer. The one I gave her before I left. Surely, as her only computer, she had taken it to school with her? Which means she must have brought it here along with all her art supplies before she left town. That’s why there’s so much stuff in her room. Wherever she was living before she disappeared, she is no longer living there, that’s for sure. Which means everything she owns is basically in that room.
I plug the computer in and wait for it boot up, hoping she hasn’t changed the password, and ideally, that some of her logins are saved. If I could get into her emails or maybe her MySpace account, there might be a chance of finding some kind of clue. A nineteen-year-old girl, in this day and age? Her whole life would be on this computer.
I’m so used to laptops that for a moment I think the computer might be dead. Apparently it’s just slow, because eventually it starts to make a very loud whirring noise and text begins to appear on the screen. There’s not even a password required to login and the house Wi-Fi automatically connects, so in seconds I’m all set to go. I open an internet browser and open MySpace. A message prompts me to update the browser, which I decline. I write in Anna’s screen name, then wait to see if the password bar is populated automatically. But no, it remains blank. Crap.
I try the same password I used to use, buffy1983. I get an error in red: incorrect password. I try another version, with her birth year instead of mine. No go. It makes sense, I suppose. Anna was never as big of a fan of Buffy the Vampire Slayer as I was. What is Anna into? I can hardly remember; it’s been so long since we had any sort of innocuous conversation about TV or anything really. I look around the room for clues. There’s a Salvador Dalí calendar hanging on the wall above the desk; I try combinations of Dalí with our birth years or her favorite number, 23; at least, what I remember her favorite number being in school. A stack of DVDs on the floor ignites five more minutes of password combinations; characters from Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter and X-Men. I’m about to give up when I have the idea to try my own name. Masha23, I type.