“I’m Vivian,” she said, in case the woman didn’t remember. “You’re—”
“Helen, of course, of course,” the woman said. “Come in.”
Vivian followed her down the shotgun hall to a dining room where Helen refilled her glass, and asked Vivian if she’d like a drink and, if so, would she get another glass from the kitchen.
“Upstairs, straight back, top shelf over the stove, you can’t miss it,” she said.
Vivian started up the stairs, wondering what she’d gotten herself into. She’d found the ad in the classifieds, where would-be brides auctioned off their dresses like new. And here she was, because somehow, she’d allowed herself to come all this way—eight hours by train, out of the station before sunup only to break down near Nashville; coffee machine out of order; a lukewarm beer and stale sandwich for lunch; piles of cattle out the window, laundry lines flagged with shirts; then, closer to the city, the junkyards, the underpasses tagged with names like Retro Fit and Halo—without knowing what was going on.
The stove gleamed silver and untouched and the refrigerator shined blank, no postcards under magnets. A bowl in the sink. She stalled in the kitchen for a few minutes, the first pulse of dread swelling up, thinking what was she doing there, why had she come—
For a few minutes she just stood there, admiring the bell white geometry of the floor tiles and taking down a glass.
Vivian lived in strangers’ houses. The way some people are nurses. Or chefs. The way a nurse catalogues injuries and reads fevers, and the person in charge of the kitchen paces the stations shouting BLACKEN THE OYSTERS and ORDER UP. Taking up in strangers’ houses was just something she did, until by default it became her occupation. It suited her—she preferred departures to abiding. She preferred elsewhere over everywhere else. She enjoyed how noncommittal her existence seemed, how theoretical. Letters took months to reach her through the limbo of forwarding last known address to last known address. A locker at the Lost Mail Repository in St. Paul or Cleveland held old packages, bills, wedding announcements, et cetera, that never found her, all those obligations gone missing, and when she thought about that she felt relieved. Off the hook. Which made her the opposite of a nurse. She was not one to oversee anyone’s bedside. She did not dote. And when you got down to it, anyway, her life depended on solitude and the extended absences of other people. If no one ever left, she’d have no place to go, and she knew what to expect from these temp arrangements—hot water, a decent couch, someone else’s weather and fingerprints; someone else’s dust.
That first night she learned everything. Helen at the other end of the table, about to cry or beyond crying; the muscles in the face going the same either way, tensing then wilted. Vivian concentrated on the window just behind Helen. When the wind picked up, drooping branches gusted against the side of the house, tapped the glass.
“My husband’s gone,” Helen said, cradling her head with one hand like a headache. “Paul, goddamn it—he’s just, how do you—” She stopped to take a drink and shrugged.
Vivian tried to keep her face regular, tried to not look alarmed—though she was alarmed—because looking alarmed wasn’t going to help Helen, who was telling her how Paul didn’t come home from his office one night, where he still went twice a week even though that semester he was on sabbatical. How he was studying a certain kestrel of a certain northern region of some habitat off the Indian Ocean.
She said, “It wasn’t someone else, if you’re thinking that. We weren’t having trouble. The police ask about my marriage every other day, there’s nothing I haven’t answered twice already. It’s fucking humiliating. We were leaving that morning, the next morning, for Montserrat.”
Vivian pictured Montserrat: volcanoes. Currents like harp necks. Then sat there because what could she say, everything had changed. Now a man was missing. But she had no history here, no way to tabulate differences—see, that chair’s his favorite and the cat won’t budge.
“It’s been a month,” Helen said. “A month and two days.”
So she was going to Florida where her sister lived. Pensacola for the time being.
“And you will take care of this,” she said.
The table, the unopened mail, the empty bottle, the empty house. Said it with a casual sweep that included every forty-watt in every fixture, every chore, every joke souvenir from every pseudo-historical day trip they’d taken.
“You’re a saint for coming,” she said, “A saint.” She repeated it under her breath; she repeated it to the ceiling, her head swayed all the way back. She was drunk.
Vivian tried not to picture the chair tipping back, the crash of Helen breaking her head open, how she’d have to call an ambulance because she couldn’t drive stick. Vivian wasn’t a saint. Paul’s vanishing, which she could never tell Helen, meant she’d have a place to stay a few more weeks. If he returned tomorrow she’d be disappointed, not to mention homeless. Nothing about what she was doing there made her anything more than a short-term contract employee. There wasn’t even a dog to require walks and feedings and fresh bowls of water.
After some time had passed Vivian said, “Do you have any idea where he might be?”
Helen sat up in her chair then leaned forward, possibly surprised, Vivian thought, to realize she wasn’t alone in the room.
“I’ll tell you who doesn’t have a fucking idea, not a fucking clue,” she said. “Jenner and that idiot Maxwell—they made me wait a week to file the report when it was obvious the third night he was missing. They keep showing up with questions and the one with the mustache refuses to tell me a thing, he can’t tell me anything.”
She set the bottle down clumsy. “Like I’m just in the goddamn way,” she said.
“No, I don’t know where he is. It’s bullshit, it doesn’t make sense.”
Helen reached into the jacket draped over her chair.
“Do you mind?” She held up a sad looking pack of cigarettes, dumped the last three out on the table. “Want one?”
Vivian shook her head.
Helen smoked for a minute while Vivian tried to come up with something to say.
“They’re Paul’s,” Helen said, watching the cigarette between her fingers.
“He’s supposed to quit.”
Much later Vivian stared at the guest room ceiling, thinking about it. If she died in this city, it would be from drowning. Helen’s house wasn’t far from the lake and Vivian couldn’t swim. Late November afternoons always turned colder and darker faster than you expected. It would be tragic, sure, but barely publicized, because around here the half-hearted gang-crime dominated local news. She closed her eyes, held her breath and tried to imagine it. The pitch black, the thick water that pulled through her clothes, pummeled her arms her legs her face and burned sharp as it flooded her nose, mouth, throat, lungs—she’d choke hard before blacking out, which she knew would be painful but she wasn’t sure how, exactly; would she pass out before or after she felt her legs go numb, before or after her arms grew too heavy to lift. The cause of death would be logged in some med. tech.’s chart as Asphyxiation, not suffocation, but that’s all drowning was, a suffocation. What bothered her was how long it would take, would it be minutes or hours? How long would she drift like that in the water, jetsam? She would have to research death by drowning.
Then she remembered. And how did she forget, anyway. How did she lose track of the particulars enough to forget and then be reminded. Except how your hand forgets skin and skin forgets muscle. How it all just endured in the meantime, three entire days passed and she hadn’t called. It didn’t matter. Maybe her mother answered