The Missing Person (24 page)

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

Alix Ohlin was born in Montreal and studied at Harvard University and the Michener Center for Writers in Austin, Texas. Her fiction has been selected for
Best New American Voices 2004
and
Best American
Short Stories 2005
. She has received awards and fellowships from
The Atlantic Monthly
, the Sewanee Writers' Conference, the MacDowell Colony, and Yaddo. She lives in Easton, Pennsylvania, and teaches at Lafayette College.

FIRST VINTAGE CONTEMPORARIES EDITION, AUGUST 2006

Copyright © 2005 by Alix Ohlin

Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks and Vintage Contemporaries is
a trademark of Random House, Inc.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the
product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to
actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:
Ohlin, Alix.
The missing person: a novel / Alix Ohlin. —1st ed.
p. cm.
1. Women art historians—Fiction. 2. Brothers and sisters—Fiction.
3. Albuquerque (N.M.)—Fiction. 4. Environmentalists—Fiction.
5. Fathers—Death—Fiction. 6. Missing persons—Fiction.
7. Ecoterrorism—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3615.H57 M57
823'.6—dc22
2004048879

www.vintagebooks.com

www.randomhouse.com

eISBN: 978-0-307-42900-1

v3.0