The Long and Faraway Gone (30 page)

She tugged on the rope. The trapdoor creaked open, and the rickety wooden steps unfolded themselves,
thunk-­thunk-­thunk,
dust puffing each time. She climbed up into the attic. The box she wanted was at the far end, and heavy. She dragged it across the planks and then let it slide back down the steps above her.
Thunk-­thunk-­thunk.
Julianna could hear the old cassette tapes rattling in their plastic cases. There was nothing breakable inside the box—­just the cassettes and some photo albums, some scrapbooks and yearbooks, letters, paperbacks, a braided leather belt that their mother thought made Genevieve look like a hippie.

The box was too heavy to lug all the way into the house and then back out again, so Julianna sat down right there, cross-­legged on the cold cement floor of the garage. It had been a year or two since she'd looked through the box—­all that remained of Genevieve—­and the tape came off easily when she pulled. She folded the cardboard flaps back. At the top of the pile inside was a single tube of Bonne Bell Lip Smacker lip gloss, Dr Pepper flavor.

Julianna dug around until she found Genevieve's diaries. There were three of them, each with a floral-­patterned fabric cover and a cheap metal lock. She selected the last one. Genevieve had written
“1986”
on the spine with purple Magic Marker ink that once upon a time had smelled like grape pop. No longer. Julianna sniffed to make sure.

She flipped at random to an entry near the middle of the book. July 19:

“I have decided to learn a foreign language, Dear Diary, so I may broaden my horizons. I know that the process will not be easy, but nothing worth doing ever was!”

Genevieve had wild, terrible handwriting, as if she wrote while slamming around in one of the bumper cars they used to have at Crossroads Mall. And all the coke she'd been doing didn't help either. Some words were in cursive, some not, with no rhyme or reason as far as Julianna could tell. When Genevieve wrote in her “secret” diary, she made a point to dot the occasional
i
with a fat cartoon heart.

February 4:

“My first kiss! It was as magical as I had hoped. Bertram's lips were like snowflakes falling on my lips. Afterward we held hands in the park and picked up litter.”

April 12:

“Why am I so lucky, Dear Diary, to have the
best
little sister in the world? She is my hero and my inspiration! And Martin Luther King, too.”

Genevieve's efforts to learn Chinese became the running theme in August and early September. In between building houses for Jimmy Carter and staying home on Saturday nights to brush her hair one hundred times, Genevieve took classes at the (“renowned”) Francis Tuttle Vo-­Tech School of Extremely Difficult Languages. She also met with a private tutor, an ancient and mysterious Chinese woman who told hopeful fortunes and tried to teach Genevieve how to roll her
r
's.

The last entry in the last diary was dated September 16, 1986, four days before Genevieve disappeared.

“Dear Diary, fall is my favorite time of year.”

That was true, actually. Julianna knew it for a fact.

She closed the diary and set it aside. The rest of the box awaited her. Was there something in there—­a hint, a clue, a wink, a nudge—­that would guide her to an answer? Any answer?

No. Nope. Julianna had gone through the contents of the box a hundred times over the years. Nothing there had changed or ever would. She'd reread every line of every diary, she'd scrutinized every photo in every album and every yearbook, she'd memorized the photocopied flyers for frat parties and the smudged song titles handwritten on the liners of mix-­tape cassettes. The contents of the box belonged more to Julianna at this point than to Genevieve.

Why did Genevieve do it? How could she do it? How could she leave Julianna alone on the curb outside the rodeo arena, dusk falling fast, and never come back?

Julianna would never know. She had nothing and understood that would never change. She understood, clearly and piercingly,
she
would never change.

 

T
he first available flight back to Las Vegas didn't depart Oklahoma City until three o'clock on Monday. Wyatt slept in, stopped by the front desk to arrange for a late checkout, and then drove over to his uncle's house to say good-­bye. His uncle was sitting on the porch, as usual.

“Mikey!” he called when he saw Wyatt.

Wyatt shook his uncle's hand. “How are you, Uncle Pete?”

“As good as can be expected under the circumstances.”

Wyatt smiled and sat next to him on the porch slider. It was sunny but chilly, a brisk wind shaking the leaves up and down the block. Pete was wearing a short-­sleeved plaid shirt.

“Aren't you cold?” Wyatt said. He wondered now if that was the same shirt his uncle had been wearing at Candace's house two days earlier and if his uncle had changed it since. “Do you want a jacket?”

“Do I?” Pete said, and chuckled.

They sat and watched the squirrels make daredevil leaps between branches. Wyatt didn't know how much longer his uncle would be able to live on his own. Probably he shouldn't be living on his own right now.

Pete and his wife had never had children. His only surviving relatives, other than Wyatt, were distant.

“Remember Old Man Mooney and his old dog?” his uncle said.

“Who?” Wyatt said.

“Old Man Mooney. You remember. He lived just up the block from us when we were boys.”

“From you and my father,” Wyatt said.

His uncle turned to look at him. His eyes floated and then steadied. “That's right.”

“Tell me about him. This Old Man Mooney and his old dog.”

“No.” Wyatt's uncle lifted a hand and then dropped it back into his lap. “Who cares about that?”

“I care,” Wyatt said. “And don't say I don't.”

He thought that would get a chuckle out of his uncle, but it didn't.

“I remember that dog like it was yesterday,” his uncle said. “I can smell him. How do you like that? But I can't remember the first time I saw your aunt. First time I kissed her. I can't hear her laugh or cry.”

Wyatt didn't know what to say. What was there to say?

A squirrel leaped from a tree next to the house onto the roof above them, landing with a thud and the furious scrabble of claws. Wyatt and his uncle both looked up and waited. They heard the squirrel scramble up and away across the shingles, a close call.

“I'm heading out today,” Wyatt said. “Heading back to Las Vegas.”

“Las Vegas!” his uncle said. “How do you like that?”

Wyatt thought he could probably talk his uncle into moving to Las Vegas. Wyatt had plenty of room in his house, an extra bedroom. But he couldn't say for sure how much longer he'd be there. He could feel the familiar tightness in his chest, the screw turning. There was nothing to keep him in Vegas, not really. There was nothing to keep him anywhere.

He stood. He could get in touch with a local senior-­care ser­vice and set up something for his uncle.

“I'm going to give you a call every week, Uncle Pete,” he said. “I'm going to keep my eye on you.”

“Very good,” his uncle said. He stood, too, slowly, so he could give Wyatt one last handshake, grave and formal, as if they'd just concluded negotiations that would bring peace to the continent. “Take care of yourself, Mikey.”

W
YATT STILL HA
D
hours to kill before he needed to pack and head to the airport, so he cut over to Twenty-­third Street and stopped by the place he'd discovered when he first got to town, the coffeehouse located in the old 1920s bungalow. The pretty baker in the flour-­dusted apron greeted him as if she'd known him forever. Wyatt appreciated that.

She showed him a tray of cupcakes on the counter.

“Fresh from the oven,” she said. “How can you resist?”

Wyatt decided not to even try and bought a salted caramel cupcake to go with his coffee. He made his way from the counter to what had once been the bungalow's living room. College students had staked out all the tables. Every student seemed to be studying either a medical textbook, sheet music, or a Bible. Wyatt supposed that covered most of the important bases.

He found a nook with a pair of empty easy chairs and sat. The tightness in his chest was like a finger plucking a guitar string. Wyatt wondered if he'd ever made a decision worse than the one that had brought him back to Oklahoma City. On the other hand, though, maybe he was confusing cause with correlation. Did he, right now, truly feel any shittier than he'd felt a week or a month or a year ago? Or was he just more aware of how shitty he felt? He couldn't say for sure.

He wished he'd been able to help Candace. He didn't think he'd ever forgive himself for blowing that.

A woman sat down in the other leather chair. She looked familiar, but Wyatt couldn't place her right away.

“How's the palm?” she said.

It clicked for him then—­she was the emergency-­room nurse who'd stitched him up.

“Is that all I am to you, Julianna?” he said. “A damaged extremity?”

She sipped her coffee and gazed out over the tables filled with college students. A long moment passed. The nurse appeared to be finished with the conversation. Wyatt felt relieved. Sometimes, like now, playing the role of a lifetime took too much effort. It drained your power cells bare.

“I wonder who used to live here,” Julianna said finally. “When it was just somebody's house. What they'd think about all this now.”

Wyatt took a bite of his cupcake, then set it aside. He hadn't wanted it, he realized, in the first place.

“I don't remember your name,” Julianna said. “I'm sorry.”

“How old are you?” Wyatt said.

“Thirty-­eight.”

“So you probably knew Rainbow Records. The record store that used to be just up the street, on the corner of Classen?”

“Yes.” She tucked her legs up beneath her. “Do you remember a place on Classen called Moon Breeze? They sold New Age crap. The woman who owned it was a witch. A Wiccan? That's what everyone said.”

Wyatt laughed. “She always wore black.”

The woman in black had been a regular at the Pheasant Run's bargain matinees. Other times she brought her toy collie to be groomed at the pet shop on the second floor of the mall.

“Rings on every finger, even her thumbs,” Julianna said. “She claimed she was psychic.”

Another long moment passed.

“When I was in high school,” Wyatt said, “none of us, none of my friends, had a swimming pool. So, late at night after we got off work, we'd find an apartment complex that had a pool and we'd hop the fence.”

Julianna smiled and nodded. “Sure. Yeah. My older sister did that all the time. My older sister and her friends. She took me along a few times, when I begged. I was always scared to death.”

“It was harder to pull off during the day,” Wyatt said. “During the day the ­people who lived there used the pool. They'd ask you what apartment you lived in, what your father's name was. But late at night was usually okay.”

“I remember one night. It was August and so, so hot. My sister and I were in the pool, some random apartment pool. A guard had come around earlier and tried to kick us out, but he didn't stand a chance against my sister. You should have seen her.” She smiled. “Anyway, all the tornado sirens started going off. You know how they sound. Really loud, but like they have to take a big breath every now and then.”

Growing up, there had been a siren on the corner of Wyatt's block—­a beehive of yellow horns at the top of a telephone pole. Every Saturday at noon in Oklahoma City, the tornado sirens sounded and all the neighborhood dogs would howl along.

“Yeah,” he said.

“It had started to rain a little, big fat drops, but we didn't worry. It was August. Tornadoes happen in the spring, everyone knows that. My sister said something like, ‘Oh, it's just a test or whatever.' So we kept swimming. The raindrops felt nice. It was really dark out. The pool didn't have any lights, and the moon must have been behind the clouds. And then there was this intense flash of lightning, and I saw it, the tornado. It was so close, almost on top of us. It was right there. It had been there all along, and we didn't know it.”

Suddenly it was night, not day, August, not October, and Wyatt was outside, not in. He could feel the hum and electric bristle in the air, he could feel the raindrops whipping against his face, he could see—­when for an instant the flash of lightning lit the whole world up—­the elongated snout of the tornado, nosing across the lake.

“Holy shit,” he said. “I remember that, too.”

The clarity of detail was a shock, the richness of color and texture. Wyatt realized he hadn't thought of that moment since the day he lived it. The memory was original, fresh, intact—­not a photocopy of a photocopy, the way most memories were.

Wyatt's shift had just ended. He'd just stepped outside. The sirens wailed. He'd taken off his orange blazer and slung it over his shoulder, one finger hooked through the label sewn inside the collar. He smelled the rain and his own sweat and the heat still baked into the asphalt of the back parking lot.

Where were the others? Scattered. The crew hung out together often that summer, but not always. One or two nights a week, Wyatt clocked out and walked home alone, his blazer slung over his shoulder. Those were the nights, he realized, he didn't really remember.

That night, Wyatt was pretty sure, Theresa had clocked out around seven so she could attend a cousin's rehearsal dinner. Mr. Bingham had sent Wyatt home early, too, before the ten-­o'clock shows ended, because he'd received a call that morning from corporate telling him to cut weekday hours. O'Malley had stayed behind to do the auditorium trash sweep. Melody had stayed behind to finish cleaning the concession stand.

“I screamed so loud,” Julianna said. “My sister did, too. We ran back to the car in our swimsuits, screaming and laughing, soaking wet. When the lightning flashed again, the tornado was gone. It just . . . it must have just lifted away.”

The wind shifted. The rain stopped. The sirens wailed for another few minutes, and then Wyatt started walking home. He thought about going back inside to tell O'Malley and Melody about the tornado he'd seen, but he didn't. He knew he could tell them later. Had he told them about the tornado the next day? Surely he had.

It was an unsettling sensation, a kind of vertigo, to suddenly remember a part of your past you never realized you'd forgotten. Wyatt closed his eyes and stood there on the steps outside the Pheasant Run Mall, smelling the rain, listening to the tornado sirens.

He opened his eyes. Julianna sipped her coffee. In profile she looked a little like Theresa. A little like Theresa might look now. Who could say?

Wyatt understood he'd been enslaved, his whole life, by a love that had never really existed. If Theresa hadn't been murdered, she and Wyatt would have stayed together a few months more, maybe less. He was fifteen years old, she was seventeen. It was a brief summer fling that would have burned brightly and faded almost instantly. It was a cool three-­minute song you heard once on the radio. If Theresa hadn't been murdered, Wyatt couldn't say for sure he'd even still remember her. He was absolutely sure Theresa wouldn't still remember him.

But understanding that, understanding all that, didn't change anything.

“Did you ever go see movies at the Pheasant Run Twin?” Wyatt said.

“Where everyone was killed? No. I grew up on the Southside. We went to the Southpark. Or the Apollo Twin in Midwest City.”

The Apollo had been in the Monarch chain of theaters, which meant you could use the movie passes there. Wyatt didn't remember how many Monarch theaters there had been in Oklahoma City. At least six or seven. That's what made the trafficking of the movie passes so lucrative.

“We left our clothes at the pool,” Julianna said. “I don't know if we ever went back for them. But I remember the knob of the gearshift in my sister's car. Her old Cutlass. The knob was black leather with red stitching.”

“It's funny, the things you remember.”

“Yes.”

“My uncle stopped drinking and joined AA the day after the bombing downtown,” Wyatt said. “His wife was supposed to be at the Murrah Building that morning but wasn't. He remembers that. But I don't know if he remembers
her.
He remembers the neighborhood dog from seventy years ago. I don't know if he remembers anything that matters. Maybe he does.”

“Our cousin was in AA. My sister used to make fun of it, all the slogans they had. Instead of ‘Let go and let God,' she'd say, ‘Let go, God! You're hurting me!' ”

Wyatt finished his coffee and set the cup on the saucer. He still had a long time before his flight, and this was as agreeable a place to pass it as any. But he thought he might as well jack up one last shot at the buzzer. Maybe he could do at least a little good before he left town. Maybe he could get Chip an answer.

He stood. “Have a nice day,” he told Julianna.

She looked up at him. A second later she saw him. “You, too,” she said.

Wyatt drove up Western to Nichols Hills Plaza and parked across from A Snip in Time. He entered the salon. The receptionist was applying bloodred lipstick. She popped her lips and smiled at him.

“Help you?” she said.

“Do you have to ask that?” Wyatt said. “Look at my hair.”

The receptionist smiled and reached for an iPad.

“What day were you thinking?” she said.

“Today,” Wyatt said. “Now. It's an emergency situation, and I'm willing to pay a premium.”

His hair wasn't bad at all, actually. He'd had it trimmed a few days before he left Vegas. But Wyatt wanted thirty minutes in the chair with Chip's wife. If she was the chatty sort, if Wyatt was at the top of his game, if the conversation broke just right, he might be able to find out if she was cheating on her husband or not. No, the chances for success were not good. Under normal circumstances he would never have tried this approach. Blow it and you're blown, you're off the case, and you've screwed up your client's life even more than it was already, presumably, screwed up. This approach, though, and the thirty minutes were all Wyatt had left if he wanted to put Chip's mind at ease, one way or another.