The Invisibles (3 page)

She sat against the silent furnace, cradling Luke in her arms. Darkness hid his face, and she wondered whether he slept, or if he stared into shadows, too. She adjusted her arm, and he pressed a cheek to her ribs, conforming to shape and body warmth. They had only to last the night. The minister would arrive in the morning. Even if the Saturday service was cancelled for weather, and she suspected it would be, someone would come by to check on the building. And maybe they would be lucky, and a policeman would drive by before then, planning to hide on the job
for a while, and see the lights on in the building and come close enough to see the body in the snow. Or, if the killers had moved it, there would be a lot of blood. Unless new snow had buried it. She imagined Hank Osmond driving back in the morning to check on the school, to ensure she had locked up properly. She could not put it past him, though she did not wish this discovery on him. However it went, things would go differently between them now.

A loud bang sounded within the furnace, and the pilot light flared up. Luke started, and she moved her hand to his head, lightly rubbing his scalp, letting him know she was there, watching over. The air warmed and he began to relax. She thought of her quiet apartment. In her bar, they were shouting over the music and each other's voices. A few miles away, in the house where she'd grown up, her father was drinking, listening to forty-year-old songs. How unbothered he would be, were he to call or find her not home and go days without hearing back. He would make this a gift to himself, a new reason to blame himself, a fresh cause to seek oblivion.

The boy whimpered softly, and when she touched his head and he sighed, she knew he was asleep and dreaming. She was glad he was able. He had a mother somewhere, but more likely the grandparents he sometimes talked about would take him. She supposed he would never return to this school, that after tonight she might not see him again, except to glimpse him around town and track his story as he claimed whatever space he could, a loner or a drinker, a criminal, a nobody, a bungler like his dad. Or maybe he would beat the odds, materialize triumphant from the cloud bank of the past, stun her and everyone else. Or maybe just everyone else. Whatever he became, she would not hold it against him. It was a long way off.

The basement was getting warm. For the first time since being locked down here, she felt the exhaustion in her neck and shoulders. She knew she must be hungry, but her stomach had clenched shut. She was almost comfortable. She would sleep through some of this, maybe all the way through, and in the morning she would find a way out. The furnace fired steadily. It was strange to think, down there in the dark, how lucky she was.

The end of my fifth summer singled it out forever in the stream of my childhood. Many days my mother and I cooked canned soup on a toy stovetop in our basement, pretending bombs had ruined the upstairs world. And one afternoon at the zoo, surrounded by wild animals in cages and tamer ones in trees, my mother confiscated my snow cone and yanked me behind a hedge. She crouched down and directed my attention to a small, gray-haired woman standing in front of the lions. Her face was wrinkling, rendered sexless by neglect. Families passed without the faintest interest in her.

“Cynthia, see her. She's more or less invisible, except to the lion, who sees lunch. She's not really invisible, but she might as well be. Wipe away that smile, little girl. We're exactly like her.”

My fascinated mother drank from the snow cone until her lips were stained purple. She scowled and jerked her head toward the woman — the invisible, a person who is unnoticeable, hence unmemorable. Mother knew all about invisibles and kept her eyes open in public. She brought home reports: a woman licking stamps at the post office, an anguished old man in line at the bank, a girl crying by a painting in the museum. The library crawling with them.

“Remember, Cynthia, you're an invisible, too,” she said. “Just like me. We're in it together. Forever.”

That summer I collected her sayings and built a personality with them. I mastered my bicycle and braved the creeks and abandoned barns that lay within an hour's journey of home, never doubting
that if a bad guy appeared, he wouldn't see me and, if he happened to be an invisible, that I moved in the aura of my all-knowing mother. Then, one August day when the corn crop was blowing, giving glimpses of sweet ears ripe for the picking, she disappeared from our house.

Over a decade after she vanished, a strange van appeared in the old parking lot at the Great Skate Arena. At once I knew an invisible drove the thing. Around the corner, in the main lot, honking cars inched forward. The grouchy cop waved his ticket book at drivers seeking a place to release excited children. No one had noticed this van, faded maroon with a custom heart-shaped bubble window on the passenger side near the back. Scabs of rust clung to the lower body, over new tires. It wasn't the sort of car you liked to see outside a skating rink or anyplace where the typical patron was twelve years old.

“First of all it should go without saying that a guy drives that thing. But mainly I wonder how he it got into the lot.” Randall was our tall, brainy boy. He lived for logical problems like this one; the old parking lot where we smoked was separated from the new parking lot by a row of massive iron blocks with thick cable handles that only a crane could have lifted. The back of the old parking lot was closed in by a tangle of vines and meager trees. Beyond this dark thicket, from below, came the sounds of the highway.

“He must have come from down there.” Brianna squinted at the wall of vegetation. I'd put the purplish paint around her eyes. “There must be a bare patch we can't see.”

“I would bet that a pervert drives that baby,” Randall observed of the van.

“Vans are too obvious for pervs these days.” Brianna took a stance in her vintage black and white stockings. She was little, hot,
and adept at finding killer vintage clothes in thrift stores. “He's probably some poor escapee from the psycho ward.”

They turned to me to decide, these two kids who didn't know what invisibles were, even though they were in the club. They bore the symptoms of invisibles in denial, dying their hair black, punching steel through their lips and nostrils, wearing shirts that pictured corpses. They hung out with me. We hung out at a skating rink with junior high schoolers. No one ever caught us smoking. The list went on. Rather than try to explain our metaphysical plight — I'd never been comfortable talking about my mother — I shrugged, faked a smile, and ignored the sickening presence I sensed in the van's heart-shaped window. The mind I detected in that window was that of an all-knowing bully waiting for you to contradict him. “I don't know, but he's probably sleeping in there, and either way we don't want to wake him up. Can we go inside now and skate?”

I puffed at my cigarette between breaths, trying to hurry things along, confident that under the dome of the skating rink I'd shake my fear that a knife-swinging but otherwise unremarkable oddball lurked behind one of the dormant air-conditioning units lined up behind the skating rink.

Randall absentmindedly played with his recent nose piercing. “Look at that creepy window. If he's in there he's probably watching us right now.”

Through the dusty window we could see the surface of an opaque space. In our own ways we acknowledged the disadvantage of the unknowing souls we'd spied on from behind unlighted glass. Our spines all twitched a little.

“You think he's in there?” Brianna pinched a cigarette above the filter, breaking it as she sometimes did when she was nervous. She let it fall on the cracked lot. Her voice grew quiet. “Why would someone want to sleep here?”

Randall walked over to the van and knocked three times on the heart-shaped window. Against the thick, curved glass, his knuckles made a hollow sound that echoed in my chest. Doing a good job of looking unafraid, he stood looking up at it, then smiled at us. Brianna and I watched the window for a terrible face.

Randall threw back his head and laughed like a cartoon villain who has just tied a woman to train tracks. Even at his most raucous he couldn't draw attention from the main parking lot. He cackled until Brianna snapped another cigarette in her shaking hand, and I put my arm around her tiny shoulders. She looked so helpless, her lip shaking, her stick palm dotted with tobacco.

“You're such an asshole,” she blurted. “I'm not going to couples-skate with you if you don't come back right now.”

“Okay, okay.” Randall returned to the little field of safety we seemed to occupy between the brown steel door and the dormant air-conditioning unit. Above our heads, a light snapped on, and I could see how pale my friends looked, how afraid, and knew they could see it in my face, too. Randall squeezed between our bodies, with an arm for each of us. “Shall we?”

As if he could make us forget the unknown behind the dark window in the maroon travel van, he ushered Brianna and me toward the entrance around the corner, where, if she recognized us each Thursday night, the obese woman in the ticket booth would give no sign.

My mother had bad habits which arose as a result of being an invisible. She stared at strangers. She burst into laughter. These were marks of her frustration. She liked to tell cashiers that she'd already paid and make them admit that they hadn't been totally attentive. Then she'd give the money back.

One day my father and I came home from the farmers market to a house that bore all the signs of her presence. The garage
door was open, revealing the backside of her blue sedan. In the oven, cooked blueberries pushed through the flaky crust of an un-watched pie. Suspecting she was hiding in one of her usual places, I parted the dresses in her closet and looked under my parents' tightly made bed. Outside my father walked the rows of the well-tended vegetable garden, and I balanced myself on the patio rail and stood, searching for her face in the field of swaying cornstalks that enclosed our house. Hiding was a game we played together, and with each shift of my eyes I expected to find her grinning among the rows.

When we grew tired of shouting for her, we went into the house, set the pie out to cool, and waited for her to emerge. I was excited to learn what new hiding spot my mother had found, but my father was upset over her absence. He slumped beside me on the couch and pinched the bridge of his nose. A fidgety, bald-headed man who knew numbers and tax laws, he was always forcing himself to keep his mouth shut around his wife.

The detective we spoke to offered no answer.

“Sometimes people disappear out of their lives,” he said. He kept a neat steel desk with a rectangular wire basket on one corner beside his computer monitor. Beneath a glass reading lamp he'd arranged a scene with cast-iron miniatures, an eyeless, large-chinned policeman interrogating a tied criminal who glared up with red eyes. “They just vanish, you know what I mean.”

“Not like this,” said my father. The very suggestion she'd left infuriated him. “That's on the highway, on long road trips. Hitchhikers disappear.” He didn't quite look at the policeman, directed his ire internally. His entire forehead seemed to throb. He held my hand with incredible gentleness.

The detective tried to disguise his pity with a perplexed smile. He looked at me as if reading my thoughts, then reached for a
Rolodex. “I can direct you to someone who's good at talking about this sort of thing.”

My father flinched away from these words, said no, thank you.

Early that winter my father told me not to expect her to come home. I stopped asking him about it but continued to watch milk cartons and mail flyers for her face. I'd just begun kindergarten and wanted to tell her she had been right all along. I was an invisible. My new teacher couldn't bring herself to remember my name. Other children never looked at me and seemed to avoid the spaces where I played at recess. I was stuck wearing my name written on a construction paper label strung around my neck with yarn, long after the teacher had memorized my classmates. For weeks I felt like a unit of space in which a sign floated: “Cynthia invisible here.”

My mother would have laughed. But by then it was just me and my noninvisible father and the noninvisible woman who had begun to hang around, in a restored farmhouse out in the cornfields that ran to forgettable stretches outside the city.

After the rink let us out with a drove of children to waiting parents, Brianna and Randall left in his car to go screw in their latest secluded spot. With a mild case of virgin's blues, I drove off alone, with a scentless, yellow, leaf-shaped air freshener swinging above my head. My drive toured the well-lighted streets of suburbs, and no headlights followed long enough to make me more than a little cold. For a few years now my fear of the dark had been completely relocated to a fear of people and especially to the signs of them in the dark, like the headlights of solitary cars and the sound of footsteps on a sidewalk. The full, rustling fields of corn I drove among on the road to my township had long been reassuring company. Though I'd seen enough horror films to envision the
travel van pulling out of the vegetables, I'd ceased to think much about it.

Before leaving the rink I'd checked the old parking lot and seen only weeds bent to the gravel by new autumn winds. I'd asked the police officer who oversaw Great Skate's traffic if the van had been towed. A tall, sour-mouthed man with a crab-red face, he considered me as if I'd claimed to have seen a
UFO
.

“What van?” he said. “I've been here all night, and there hasn't been any van. Believe me, I would have noticed a van like that.”

“Never mind,” I told him. “I must have it mixed up with a creepy van in another abandoned parking lot.”

The memory of this snappy comeback kept me happy while I drank a chocolate malt in a booth beside a tinted diner window and watched drunk older kids come blaring in to devour large sandwiches and plates of chili cheese fries. They spilled food on their faces, shirts, and arms while getting most of it into their mouths. It was disappointing that the boy my imagination blessed with charm and intelligence stood up to belch with greater force than he could muster sitting down. Completely unseen, I made my careful exit through a fray of shouting and reckless gestures. It was after three by then, and I felt snug in my sleepiness and invisibility.