Three days had passed and she hadn’t called. Her mother wouldn’t notice. She didn’t remember Vivian, Vivian’s brother (Seth), or what century was dawning (it was 1989). But unless she called and hung up, Vivian couldn’t stop thinking through the desperate scenarios. A broken wheelchair; rats in the kitchen; a man with a rifle pounding through the trailer door with the blunt of it. She felt guilty, thinking about her mother alone, out in the middle of nowhere, even if she’d chosen exile. That almost made it worse.
Vivian sneaked out of her room, skirted the kitchen, and ducked into the office. She closed the door until it was almost flush with the threshold but not caught; a strand of light fell through from the hallway. The phone was an old cordless and dull static buzzed through the reception. She punched in the numbers and waited. She could make out some books on the shelf above the desk, mostly unfamiliar birds and geographies. Birds of the West Indies by Houser. Three rings, four rings. White-Bellied Emeralds and Red-Legged Honeycreepers of Belem. Six rings. All those wires traipsing the skies from anywhere to anywhere else, crossing fields, eight rings, and highways and irrigation canals and rivers and mountain ranges and deserts and parking lots and glaciers, erected, nine rings, against great spaces in hopes of a voice on the other end, signals and waves arranged into a recognizable pattern.
“Hello,” the voice insisted, “hello, hello, who—”
Vivian hung up. She could never bring herself to say anything. And what was there to say? She couldn’t bear to introduce herself.
As she slipped back down the hall, she looked over at the stairs, down to where they curved to the foyer, and hesitated. Helen was down there, sitting on the bottom step, her forehead bent to her knees. Vivian watched, kind of frozen in place. Grief was a thing that filled every air sac of your kidney-shaped lungs but all it left you with was a hollow, defeated posture, kind of a weakness at the ribcage. To ache for someone, every brutal hour with no news—Vivian would rather be the one who was lost, distracted by efforts to get found, not the one back home, left to deconstruct conspiracies and post fliers. As she stood there, she realized Helen was crying. First her shoulders then her whole tucked-over body shuddered. Embarrassed to see her like that, to think that Helen could know she’d seen her like that—crumpled up, a little out of control—Vivian held her breath as she crept back to her room, careful not to make any noise. She closed her eyes and pretended to sleep and practiced drowning.
Helen was still drinking when she left the next morning, quick sips from a mug that said SAVE A MANATEE on one side and COW OF THE SEA on the other above a manatee face. Vivian helped her to the cab with her bags, shoving them into the backseat while Helen repeated last-minute reminders. Emergency phone numbers, spare keys, instructions for the mail. Vivian watched the taxi as it disappeared down the street. And then, as per usual, she was alone with what she had temporarily inherited.
Ronny Stoger was not a career man nor a tradesman nor a man with management potential, per se. Ronny was a peddler. He worked at the quarry off Graverton is what he’d tell anyone who asked. Meaning he worked at the gift shop and junkyard adjacent the quarry, Concrete Jungle, a place that salvaged claw foot tubs, pinewood church pews and broken desks, but specialized in the sale of concrete squirrels and deer meant for gardens. For example, concrete birdbaths, concrete pigeons. Concrete giraffes, rabbits, monkeys. The whole lot was bland, stationary, stony—of course. But the stillness bothered Ronny some days more than others. Why domesticate cement?
The town Ronny lived in was a town of lesser-known fast food restaurants and colored glass repositories. There was a minor college, and for those kids there wasn’t much more than the pool hall, which had two pool tables, a mechanical bull that was mostly out of order, and dollar pitchers after eight. There was an old movie theatre downtown, a dry cleaner’s, a post office. Must be more, but that seemed like most of it as far as Ronny could tell—not much had changed. He’d been back at his father’s house for almost three months, out of juvie, done with service hours. Anyhow, his mother wanted him out, not stuck there after everything. Because Ronny set fires. Small fires, sure, but left to their own devices—caught on the wind, for example—small fires might forge a remarkable blaze.
On days this foggy, the quarry disappeared. The clouds filled in the gap so you could walk right up to the edge before you realized you were standing over the pit, a 250-, 300-foot drop. Days like this no one came around. The camps got off for zero visibility but Ronny still had to man the yard till dusk. He brought in six-packs to pass the time; he propped his feet on the desk, leaned his head back against the wall, thought about how he was too old for this. Most everyone he’d known was out of Central by now, if they’d gone, or done with hair dresser school or auto repair or refrigeration or funeral services training. Whatever people did, they were doing it. Cutting hair, fixing cars, pressing shirts for dead bodies.
This line of thinking got him restless. What the men at the quarry did was actual work, work that required safety gear and callused hands. He knew because the foreman owned this place too and he stopped in sometimes near end of day, with his hardhat and vest and roughed up grip.
Ronny stood, finished his beer and lined it up with the other cans on the desk. The office was too small to pace. He half-kicked the trash bin, toed it to the wall. He pulled at the dime store bell yarned to the door handle that rang for customers. He looked out and made sure. No customers. He pulled at the filing cabinet drawers for no reason. They were rusted and shrieked open to reveal office supplies mostly, envelopes, old paperwork. In the third drawer down he found the bank deposit bag, right there on top, bingo. His boss hadn’t turned it in. He unzipped it, it was pretty slim, pulled out a bill without looking, slipped it in his back pocket. Not a big deal but his heart beat faster, slightly, because it was an asshole thing to do, to steal from your boss for no reason except you were shitty bored. He sat back down at the desk and opened another beer.
It started with an average procedure. Vivian had a French professor and the French professor had a sister; the sister was having throat surgery and would be a l’hopital pour une semaine. Vivian had an ear for almost silent endings. A week became a month. A minor complication; another surgery. The month lingered. Vivian tried not to think of the body and all its soft organs but she did what she could: watered the plants, sorted bills, fed the fish. House one: single-family condo, well maintained.
Posted at the local video rental place was a flier: parents seeking a house sitter while they moved their son out west, References From The College Required. The Douglas family—dried eucalyptus wreaths on every window, a damp basement, a freezer full of low-sodium TV dinners. Vivian watched game show reruns and flipped through albums of old family photographs, page after page of weddings and birthdays. Yellow dresses, yellow cakes. House two: split-level, two-bedroom, detached garage.
One week in July: a friend of a friend’s cousin, just married. The newlyweds were going on holiday and Vivian had nowhere else to be. She took in the paper, smuggled whiskey from the bar. The cousin’s name was Kitty. Music from the strip mall’s Mexican restaurant accessorized the neighborhood all night, like colored lights strung on Christmas trees—tinny and cheerful and relentless. House three: suburban ranch, wall-to-wall carpet, beige.
House after house after apartment. Bedrooms and kitchens and back doors and deadbolts. How similar they became, all the different rooms in all the different towns, each one as familiar as it was strange. Every oversized breadbox. Every welcome mat. All the guitar cases in all the closets stashing ordinary porn.
When