Close Encounters (7 page)

My parents were both psychiatrists, and very good ones, I'd heard people say, but it's a little different when the tragedy is your own. Mostly they sat at the dining room table discussing “the situation,” the telephone ringing constantly in the background. I was not allowed to discuss the situation with them, although they usually sat with me in my bedroom at night.

“In many cases, when something this stressful happens, parents often get divorced,” my father began one night, stroking his neatly clipped beard. He sat at my desk while my mom sat at the foot of my bed. “Their grief is so terrible, that they're not available for their spouses—or even their children. We just want to let you know, Paul, that this is not going to happen to us. Or to you. We are here for you, and each other. And we're going to find Tara. We just have to be patient and let the police do their job and stick to our plan.”

The plan consisted of canvasing the neighborhoods surrounding Kennedy Krieger after dinner and knocking on doors with more flyers. My parents hoped that by connecting a human family to the face of the missing girl that someone with information would come forward. We visited so many Northeast Baltimore rowhouses in two months that people thought my parents were running for election. Or that we were religious fanatics. Because of my mother's canary yellow Volvo and posters, we were affectionately referred to as “the Looney Birds.” Entire rows of homes would descend into darkness the moment we hit their street, apparently having been warned that we were badgering people about a little white girl.

“They're just…horrible, horrible people.” My mom leaned against the Volvo in her best Annie Hall attire, smoking a cigarette. It was a habit she recently picked up again, not having smoked since before I was born. My father's habit was to just look like hell. Speckles of grey began appearing in his beard, and his shirttails began to hang out, looser, underneath his sweaters and sport jackets. “No help at all. No compassion. And they're supposed to be such church-goers.”

“We can't condemn a whole race of people just for the actions of a few,” my father answered, wiping an egg from our windshield with a fast food napkin. “Look at how nice that family was on Collington.”

“One family out of how many? We're not accusing anybody of anything. We'd just like a little help!” She shouted to no one in particular. “And stop making it into some racial discussion, Peter. I really don't need to have a sociological discussion right now.”

“I'm not making it a sociological discussion, Marta,” my father answered, tossing the napkin on the sidewalk. As a symbolic gesture or absentmindedness, I wasn't sure. “I'm making it about setting a good example for Paul.”

“What do you think, Paul?” My mom asked, her eyes reddened, her hair falling out of its clip. “Do you think this neighborhood has set a good example for
us
tonight?”

I stopped participating in the plan after awhile, citing impossible homework demands. Not because I didn't want to find Tara, but because I knew the plan was futile and I was tired of seeing my parents become increasingly hostile toward each other.

I had my own plans. They involved some dope that my friend Joshua had stolen from his brother, Mike. That day in the playground at Kennedy Krieger, among all those strange faces, had really unnerved me, had brought the surreal nature of my sister's life into focus. And I knew that the only way to find her was to try to see things as she did.

So when my parents went out on their ritual, Joshua and I walked to an abandoned house on St. Paul and smoked in the backyard among weeds that towered over our heads. Sometimes Joshua would throw a handful of change just to see the rats scatter about our feet. We'd sit on the soft, wooden steps of the back porch, and I'd replay Tara's walk from the bathroom that day. Shoes, brown and black and blue, an occasional white. Not Mom. Not Mom. Not Mom. Then, a pair of yellow shoes—perhaps not the correct shoes, but something similar. Perhaps Mom got a new pair today. Or maybe Tara didn't make it from the bathroom. Or maybe she got lost going to the bathroom. Or maybe, just once, she wanted to go somewhere without Ms. Wilson, who lost her job as a result of Tara's disappearance, maybe Tara really had to take a shit that day and wanted to be all alone in the big, cold bathroom with the shiny, industrial stalls and leaky faucet. Or maybe she ran ahead, telling Mrs. Wilson her mother was right there, right at the end of the hall, when really those red shoes were someone else's.

Most likely, someone met her. But who? How did Tara slip beyond Ms Wilson—perhaps not so difficult, considering how many kids were in her class—and into a stranger's arms? Or was Tara wandering through the school as I sat staring at the stars, taking one wrong turn and finding herself in the boiler room, forced to eat rat feces to survive?

Nothing made sense, but something about being stoned appealed to me. I felt as if I could communicate with Tara's essence, even if I could not see her, and I assured her I would find her. I would just have to go deeper into her world, into her visual space, and everything would melt away except for me and her. The city would ooze into lava, and she would appear across town, an effervescent light of red and yellow.

Everything did seem to be melting away. My grades, my parents' relationship, my relationship with them. It'd been a year, and we'd all presumed Tara dead. But presuming something and proving it are much different, and because no body was found, we could not bury our brief glimmers of hope. Glimmers that would come up as regret or blame during dinner or while playing board games, something my father had instituted to keep a familiar routine. An algorithm that moved toward an unprovable theorem.

“I bet if we had made the police question suspects earlier…” my father began and trailed off as my mother pushed herself away from the table and went outside, presumably for a cigarette. “They never did their job. We had to do everything. We still have to do everything.”

“David Sarna got expelled from school for bringing in his father's hunting rifle,” I said, patting the scoop of mint chocolate chip ice cream with my spoon. I liked to eat ice cream when it was very soft, almost melted.

“We pay their salaries, and they were content to let us do all that work.”

We still wore red and yellow. I don't know whether it was because we were used to it or that we hoped, beyond reason, that Tara would be roaming the streets somewhere, looking for the red or yellow shoes that would lead her home.

Me, I took to wearing entire ensembles of red and yellow and skipping school, heading over to the Northeast neighborhoods via the subway, eating fried chicken and cheesesteaks for lunch, smoking dope or popping the Xanax Joshua skimmed from his mother. I would walk through the streets in a daze, the images of passersby blurring, forms of flesh that moved and talked around me. The only things that captured my attention were young blonde-haired girls (scarce in the area), and the slow-moving canary yellow looney bird that sometimes came looking for me. I'd jump behind abandoned sofas in empty lots while a frazzled, sunglassed woman craned her neck at each intersection while the young black kids would nudge each other and laugh, having witnessed the legend of the looney bird firsthand.

I discovered crack on those afternoons, too. I bought some from this kid on Fairmount, when I couldn't find any pot, and we smoked it behind City Springs Elementary. Wow, that was all I could say. I knew this was the drug that would lead me closer to Tara. I shot into a hyper-realistic, dream-like state in which the algorithm became crystal clear. I knew then that I needed to ascend the reality that was placed on the neighborhood, the grid of distraction, to find the wormhole that would lead me to the plane underneath, on which Tara lived. She sent me signs repeatedly; a yellow streamer would blow up Patterson Park Avenue, beckoning me to where she was held captive; a crumpled red-and-yellow McDonald's bag would tumble down an alley and land at the house in which I needed to infiltrate.

“Just what the hell do you think you're doing?” My father slapped me the night I was checked into detox. “We are always here for you—you know that. And what do you do? You smoke fucking crack!”

“Bullshit. You're never here for me.” I answered back. “You're never even there for each other.”

“That's not true.” My mother folded her arms, which I knew, from living in the presence of psychiatrists all my life, was a defensive, closed gesture. “You can talk to us about anything, honey. All those nights I looked for you…I wasn't doing it for my health!”

“If things are so great, then why did I hear you and Dad talking about separating?”

That night, my parents packed me into the Volvo for the drive to Greenspring Hospital. This was not the way Tara would have wanted it, I knew. Nothing seemed more real—school, my parents, my friends—than the space in which Tara and I had been interacting, the dreamlike world of symbols and patterns and hope. At the traffic light, I jumped out of the car and ran as fast as I could toward the abandoned house on St. Paul, zigzagging through yards and alleys until the sound of my dad's voice tapered off. I knew I could sneak through the back window and sleep in the old dining room. Over the months when I was still hanging out with him, Joshua and I had stashed his old sleeping bags and a kerosene lamp there. That night, among the dirt and broken glass, I dreamt that Tara visited me. She touched my face, looked into my eyes. Hers were as red as burning coals.

All that was three years ago, I think. Sometimes I pick up the
City Paper
to see what the date is or to use it for toilet paper. Every now and again, I see the yellow Volvo make its passage through Orleans Street, Fayette, Patterson Park Avenue, but I don't recognize that woman inside. She is too old, I think, to be my mother. Sometimes I wish she would get out of the car so I can see what color shoes she's wearing, or maybe if she wore sunglasses instead of those bifocals I would know for sure.

It's hard to believe three years have gone by, that I grew out of my shoes and clothes like the Hulk, that the face I see in the bathroom mirror of Popeye's is angular and long and that my voice, when it's used, is deeper, coarser from smoking, its opinions more jaded. But I've learned to survive here. When you're living day to day, one has to stick with a plan, and the plan that's easiest for me to follow is to find food, find money, find drugs and, hopefully, find Tara. There's no time for reflection, for choices, what could have been. It's just you and a Hail Mary pass every day.

I live in the abandoned houses mostly, but sometimes a man who's picked me up feels sorry for me and lets me spend the night. After I give him a blow job, he makes me something to eat, and I stuff candy or snack-size potato chips into my pockets. Sometimes they offer me clothes, thinking the color schemes I've chosen are more out of necessity than a plan. One night I called my parents from this guy's house on Lombard Street, but I hung up after I heard my mother's voice. I wondered if they were still together, my parents. I couldn't imagine, after losing both of their children, that they still would be.

This girl came up to me one day. I was eating Bar-B-Q-flavored Utz potato chips. I always buy them because the bag is yellow and orange. Usually, I would walk up and down Patterson Park Avenue looking for tricks and looking for Tara, keeping an eye out for the cops and the looney bird. Or else I would be lying in a stupor on a park bench in Patterson Park, seeing glimpses of Tara in the trees. And sometimes myself. Sometimes we are together, and my parents live up there, too. But we can never be together again, the four of us, all of us have been found.

So the girl comes up to me, she's young and blonde, and she asks for a chip, says she's hungry. She's maybe twelve or thirteen, about Tara's age, but she's so wan, so broken and, to be honest, I can't even remember what Tara looked like. I look at her shoes. They're pink jellies. I give her the bag, ask her where she's staying.

“With my mother over on Bank Street,” she answers, and I ask her to turn around. Because I want to see, want to see how she looks at me. But she doesn't turn around, she's suspicious, who the hell is this boy in red and yellow telling her to do shit?

“I lost my sister,” I explain. Last year, maybe six months ago I still had a picture of Tara. It was taken in Ocean City when we were on vacation or something. I think I left it at some guy's house when I was washing my clothes. When I went back a few days later and knocked on the door, some woman answered. Probably his wife. I told her I had the wrong house and beat it out of there before she called the police.

“Oh. Do you want me to help you find her?” The girl asks. She hands me back the bag of chips.

“Keep them.” I push them toward her. “She's been missing for a long time. Not like five minutes ago. Like four years.”

“Oh,” she answers, lighting a cigarette, and I'm almost crying, for my mother, my sister, I don't know. “She run away or something?”

“No… I did,” I say, and she stares at the sky. It is not pity or embarrassment; it's not even boredom, her reaction. It's as if I said the weather was nice or something. “Your name's not Tara, is it?”

“Nope. It's Chrissie. Listen, you wanna go with me?”

“Go with you where?”

“Like, go out with me?”

“Go out with you?” I laugh. I had forgotten what laughing sounded like. I laugh so hard I'm crying almost, and everything hurts, the way it does every day, but in a good way today. “You don't even know me.”

“But you seem nice. I mean, you let me have your chips.”

“You're too young.”

“Well, so are you.”

“Maybe you can be my sister or something.” I compromise, and I'm starting to get itchy, ‘cause I haven't had anything today. “Listen, you got a couple of dollars? I'll be your boyfriend if you give me a couple of dollars.”