I missed Angus, his quick smile, his skin, how happy he always was to see me. I wished I could have stayed with him forever in a world without New York or Bisbee, without consequence or regret; a world of cheap motels, cable television, gin, and sex. I tried to picture what he was doing now, where he was, who he was with. Lying in bed one early morning, just past six, I asked myself what seemed like the most important question: how does anyone get used to the ends of things?
I got up and took a cup of coffee outside. The days that week had been hot and windless, but in the early hours the air was cool, almost chill. I decided to go for a drive. The streets were still empty, and the first chile-roasting stands were setting up along the major boulevards. Everything looked washed out and pale, under a kind of brown cloud, and fighter jets from the base boomed overhead, two by two.
I pulled up in front of the Michaelsons’ house. Since my last visit, the people who lived in our old house had painted the shutters purple and added a stained-glass dragonfly to the display of butterflies on the front wall. A few tiny humming-birds were dive-bombing the red sections of the dragonfly, thinking they might find sustenance there. David came out wearing a blue bathrobe and leather slippers. His hair was a mess. He bent down stiffly to pick up the newspaper lying folded on his front lawn. As he straightened up, he saw me sitting there in the car, lifted a hand, and waved.
I got out and started up the walk.
He stood there without looking down at the paper, which impressed me; most people can’t just stand in one place and watch somebody walk up to them. He didn’t move a muscle. Beside him, in the unmanicured front yard, a prickly pear cactus spread thick and purple with fruit that was starting to rot. Another pair of fighter jets came roaring overhead and disappeared into the cloudless horizon.
“How’s your mom?” David said once I was standing in front of him.
“She’s all right, I guess,” I said, noticing there were circles beneath his eyes. I’d assumed that she saw him during the day, or at the very least spoke to him on the phone. “You haven’t talked to her?”
“She said she needed some time with her family.”
Nestled somewhere inside the prickly pear an insect was buzzing angrily. I put my hands in the pockets of my jeans. “Aren’t you her family too?”
David looked surprised and amused. “Ha,” he said. His robe was falling open in the front, revealing thick chest hair. He stuck the newspaper under his arm and readjusted the robe.
“I came to say I’m leaving,” I said.
“Is that so,” he said.
“Yes, it is.”
“Well,” he said, “don’t be a stranger.” He laid a hand lightly on my arm, a brief but deliberate touch, then stepped back inside his house.
When I got back to the condo, my mother was drinking coffee in her neatly pressed work clothes. She smiled when she saw me, a haggard, joyless smile.
I sat down at the table opposite her and watched her make toast. “I just got back from David’s.”
My mother, applying butter to her toast with a knife designed specifically for that purpose, seemed intent on spreading it to a scientific degree of evenness. Her face was still frozen in a dazed smile that looked even more bereft than the contorted features of grief.
“Did you hear what I said?”
“I heard you.”
“How come you haven’t been talking to him? You can’t just act like he doesn’t exist.”
She sat down and started to eat, taking small, neat bites that reminded me of somebody, although I couldn’t at first place it. Then I realized: it was David. I watched as she chewed, swallowed, and sipped coffee.
“I’ve been busy,” she finally said.
I made a snorting sound and contemplated that dazed smile, wondering if she’d had that same expression in the aftermath of my father’s death. But of all those days and weeks I could remember nothing at all.
Wylie came out of the bedroom, poured himself a cup of coffee, and sat down next to me at the table. Hairs from his long braid were frizzing all around his head, golden in the morning light. He looked older and terribly, wrongly thinner.
Our mother stood up and wiped her lips, and I thought she was leaving for work, but instead she moved behind Wylie, unfastened his braid, and spread his hair over his shoulders. Slowly, as I watched her, she rebraided his long, fine hair, smoothing out all that was loose and errant, and refastened the elastic at the bottom. And Wylie let her do it; he let her.
Days passed, and Irina began to move about the house during the daylight hours and sleep through the night, and there grew a semblance of regularity to things. She and Wylie took evening walks around the neighborhood, moving at the slow pace of invalids and holding hands. I saw that heartbreak wasn’t going to kill her, any more than running away from home to live on the street of a foreign city had, and that behind her smiling tenderness, her misleading innocence, was hidden a hard determination to survive. I saw, too, that Wylie was there whenever she reached out her hand, to catch it. He would not let her drift away, the way the three of us had after the death of my father, and I admired him for that.
In the end I asked my mother to go with me to my father’s grave. She nodded and said, “I usually go before work.” It was cool the morning we drove to the cemetery, the light still silvery and weak. Albuquerque was just waking. The city’s few junior skyscrapers rose up against the flat expanse of suburbs; cars shot fast along the broad freeways; houses stood low and solid in their lots. The world was going on.
We passed the emerald fairways of a golf course, where men were already out playing, and turned into the cemetery, an altogether paler green. We stopped first at Psyche’s grave, where fine shoots of grass were beginning to come up through the fresh dirt, then walked slowly over to my father’s.
“Does David ever come here with you?” I asked.
My mother looked surprised, and for the first time in days that numb smile left her face.
“Why would he?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe he’d like to.”
“I never thought about it.”
“Well, it’s up to you,” I said.
She handed me a flower to put on the grave. On the power lines ringing the cemetery small birds sang a little two-note song. A thin fingernail of moon still hung in the pale sky, the Sandias blue in the distance. I thought of my father hiking with Wylie and me in the mountains, his big hands and hairy knuckles moving quickly as he built a fire, the tilt of his head and the flicker of his eyes and the low, unmistakable rumble of his laughter, and Psyche’s voice whispering above and below it all. My mother and I held each other until it was time to leave.
It was my mother, also, who took me to the airport a few days later, after I’d said good-bye to Wylie and Irina. We drove past the pine trees along the university streets, the reflective windows of strip-mall stores, the freaks and fanatics on Central Avenue. In Brooklyn, I knew, the psychic was waiting, busy at work, the neon hands of her sign shaping a symbol meant to represent the future, but I was in love with Albuquerque then: the sun shone indiscriminately over the city, its kaleidoscope of color and noise and car exhaust and trash, the mix and din of the present day. As the nose of the plane lifted, shifting us all back in our seats, I watched the small, receding jewels of lawns and swimming pools and the vast brown wash of the mountains. The woman beside me opened the slick pages of a fashion magazine with an audible snap. We flew east, toward the green of the Midwest, our connecting flights and final destinations, and quickly, quickly, the desert disappeared.
Alix Ohlin. The Missing Person