“I didn’t believe it for a long time,” she said in a reflective tone. “There are days when I don’t believe it yet. I can understand those MIA families, I really can. Until you have something to bury, you don’t believe. It doesn’t seem real, does it? Someone is young and alive without a problem in the world and then — he’s gone.”
“An auto accident?” Michael asked.
She shrugged her shoulders and something about the gesture made him think that she must once have been attractive, desirable. “I don’t think it could have been an auto accident. Those are reported. No, he disappeared years ago on a cross-country trip. He’d been camping out, hitching from one town to the next. It was the thing to do then, backpack, hitchhike, ‘see the world.’ Perhaps you did the same yourself.”
Michael nodded before he could stop himself. “I traveled around a bit after my senior year.”
“You’d have been seventeen,” she said very definitely. “You might have been at the same campsites. It’s a small world. When I travel, I meet so many people...” The waiter appeared with a coaster, a napkin, a little bottle beaded with condensation, and a glass garnished with a slice of lime; he laid them out smartly and was gone with a flourish. “...who might have known Mark,” she resumed without a break, “who might have seen him, who were the right age or in the right place. Over the long run, that has become comforting.”
“There was an investigation, of course...”
“No ‘of course’ about it,” she said sharply. “It was strictly after a fashion. You know that was also the time for running away, dropping out. It was hard to convince the authorities that Mark would never just have disappeared.”
“You did not accept that.”
“Never.”
“I suppose you searched, yourself...”
“Searched, hired detectives, put up posters, leafleted the entire area. It was in northern Arizona — not a very populous place. I don’t think I left anything undone. That’s a bad thought, the thought of having left something undone. I still wake up sometimes at night, sit up in bed with my heart pounding, thinking, ‘I’ve forgotten something. What was it I was supposed to do? Where was it I was supposed to go?’ But I haven’t forgotten anything.” She took a sip of her mineral water and looked around the cafe and then back at Michael. It was impossible to see her eyes behind the sunglasses. “I can assure you I’ve followed every lead, every clue.”
“I’m sure you have,” Michael said. He put his hand on his briefcase, ready to get up, ready to leave.
“Twenty years,” she said. “A lifetime. It’s been a very curious life. But you’d have a different perspective. Twenty years ago, you’d have been seventeen, and twenty years later my son would have looked like you.”
“It’s a very sad story,” Michael said and shifted forward in his seat. He looked around with his hand half raised, but the alert and efficient waiters were all inside.
“There was a grove of aspens,” she said, and as soon as she spoke, Michael felt the shift of some inner tide. “There was a small lake, too. When I first went there, the aspens were turning; I remember little pale gold leaves shivering in the wind and, behind them, mountains the color of lead.”
“But you said he ‘disappeared,’ ” Michael said. “No one was to blame, was there? There was no suspicion, no evidence? You’ve said as much...”
She studied her glass for a moment. “There was evidence,” she said, “if you looked hard enough. What was hard was to convince the authorities to do something. To convince them that Mark would never have...”
“It’s hard to be sure sometimes,” Michael said abruptly. “It’s hard to know what anyone will do in a given situation.”
“But some people you just know,” she said. “In extraordinary circumstances, yes, that’s true. In extraordinary circumstances, who knows what we would do. I look at those poor Bosnians and Romanians sitting in the arcades...”
“Some of them are professionals,” Michael said. He prided himself on knowing a scam when he saw one. “They’re refugees today, Gypsies tomorrow, pickpockets the day after.”
“They look miserable enough,” she said, “wherever they come from. That is a drawback to Bologna.”
“As an ‘important secondary destination’?”
Like so many determined and energetic people, she was immune to satire. “What would we do in their place?” she asked in turn. “In their place, with poverty and disaster? That is one thing. But on a camping trip in the West?”
“Sometimes extraordinary things find us in ordinary places.”
“That was what I said! I said something terrible must have happened. That’s why I believe he must be dead.”
“Other things can happen,” Michael began. “People have been known to—”
“No, no, you don’t understand. Let me tell you...”
“I’m sorry. It’s been good talking to you, but I really must be going.” Even to himself, Michael found his voice unconvincing. “I’ve got this meeting.”
“Not now, surely,” she said, imperturbably, relentlessly. “This is the hour for cafes, for aperitifs, for reflection. Especially for reflection. I see you are the sort of man who reflects, who remembers. As soon as I mentioned the lake and the aspens, I saw that you were a man who remembers.”
Michael laughed and gathered his forces. “You made me think about camping in the mid-seventies. Evenings in a sleeping bag, listening to Jimi Hendrix, the Doors, and the Stones.”
“Yes,” she said eagerly, “all that wonderful music. All that loud, wonderful music. Generation-breaking music, but not for us. Mark and I grew up together. Was that an advantage or a disadvantage, do you think?”
Michael shrugged. “My parents were older than average. Quite a bit older.”
“I had Mark when I was eighteen. So, you see, I understood him. I understood his generation. The wanting to get away, to experience life, to see the world. Our town was small. The button factory and the cloth mill were still running then. ‘Make something of yourself or you’ll end up in the mill,’ that was what I was told as a girl. And then the sixties came and the new electronics plaint and the real-estate businesses and it wasn’t as hard for a woman to earn a living anymore.”
“And Mark’s father? What did he do?” Michael asked abruptly, although it was rude, although it would surely delay his departure.
“That’s what Mark always wanted to know.”
“He didn’t know?”
“It was irrelevant, completely irrelevant.”
“Perhaps not to him,” Michael protested.
“Mark’s father was like me, young and foolish. But he didn’t have any staying power, and so he became irrelevant.”
“Boys need a man in their lives.”
“Of course, you had a father. A conventional life. But Mark had his grandfather. My parents were very kind. I had a wonderful life when Mark was small. I had a part-time job with the local travel agent. Twenty-five hours a week. The rest of the time I took care of Mark. We went fishing and on picnics along the river; we went to the swings in the little town park. We never missed the children’s matinee at the movie theater or the special programs at the library. That was the happiest time of my life.”
“Then he grew up,” Michael said. “He got too old for the park and picnics and being perfect.”
She took a sip of her mineral water and ignored the implications. “It was an adjustment when he went to school. Though I had to work, so I was away part of the time anyway. And then he did so well, no one could say I hadn’t done a good job with him. No one. He started the trumpet in elementary school, then played with the high-school band. Do you play an instrument?”