Sightings (22 page)

And then it's morning. Mary's mother has not slept and her father has managed only an hour or two. No one attempts breakfast, though what concerns Mary's sister is that she's given permission to stay home from school.

She thinks:

Somebody must be sick.

She thinks:

But there is no understudy for Stoat #2!

The officers have multiplied. They are in every stairwell and closet, each of them gripping a Styrofoam cup in one hand and a bear claw in the other. One of the officers offers a bear claw to the father. He declines.

“You know, we get these calls all the time,” an officer says between bites. “Nine times out of ten they're just out blowing off steam.”

Mary's father nods because it is easy and his head remembers how.

He wonders:

What kind of steam?

Two policemen walk into a high school.

The first one says, “We'll need to have a look inside her locker.”

And the second one says, “Yes, indeedy we will.”

Inside it: books, a dried flower, a mirror.

One officer gets it in his head to examine the flower, as if implicating it. It's a purple flower, its petals brittle, though the officer is uncertain in placing its time of death.

And then, a breakthrough:

“You know, she
was
having trouble with valence,” admits Mary's science teacher upon questioning. “I think his name was . . .”

They pull Tim from Spanish class in the middle of conjugating
jugar.

“Heard you and the girl were study partners?” “No,” he tells them. “We were supposed to meet at the library but didn't.”

No, he wouldn't consider them close friends.

No, he hardly knew her.

“Then why did she approach you?” they ask. “You of all people.”

He shrugs, reminds them it's not a crime to be good at chemistry.

“You two fool around, Timmy?” an officer asks.

He says no; that was the chemistry he wasn't good at.

They can't find a body. They refuse to call it murder.

Sometimes people just . . . disappear.

Some nights Mary's mother imagines Mary living beneath an oak tree in a faraway woods. She imagines baskets overflowing with ripened blackberries and glass bottles of milk kept cool in the streams. It is not a leisurely life she imagines, but it is a good life, and in it, her daughter is always well fed.

Mary's father's faith is different.

“It'll be easier the sooner we come to terms with it. We just need to try to bear it.”

There's an inquest, witnesses lining up in their finest attire as if it's picture day. There is a surplus of boys, many of which describe themselves as former boyfriends or former acquaintances or “just some guy from a party.”

Every last one of them touched her,
Mary's father thinks,
or at least they know who did.

The only one he doesn't blame is the pale boy from Mary's school. He can't remember all the names, but the shaky one, the pale-faced chemistry kid. The boy is a ghost or almost, his eyelids drooping, and Mary's father can't imagine him being capable of much of anything, let alone making his daughter disappear.

“And the last time you saw her was beside your locker, is that correct?” a suited man asks, tapping a fifty dollar pen against a table.

“Yes, sir.”

“And she didn't show up at the library as planned?”

“No, sir,” he agrees. “She did not.”

Tim is free to go. They thank him for his time.

“Sir,” Tim says, standing, and the suited man turns.

“I don't know if it's important or not, but . . . she needed help with the periodic table.”

“Is that so?”

Tim nods dutifully.

“I don't know if it's important,” he repeats, “but I wanted to tell someone. In case it means something.”

In a scratchpad, Mary's father writes: Periodic table.

The suited man thanks him, and Mary's father peeks up from his pad to watch the pale boy mouth, “You're welcome.”

The mystery rattles the town until it doesn't. One day, the newspapers just find better things to write.

There is a problem with the city's waste management. Later, a corruption of the city comptroller.

The police chief tells Mary's family that the investigation “has run its course” and the clues are “few and far between.”

“But let's never lose hope,” he says, clutching Mary's mother's hand the way he's clutched dozens before. “Things just have a way of . . . showing up.”

But she is not a lost sock,
Mary's mother thinks.
She is not a set of keys.

Mary's name is forgotten (though, remember, that's not even her real name), and since there is no indication that she is dead, the newspaper refuses to run an obituary – sparing itself the correction if she is found living.

Nor does the school hold a memorial in her honor.

After holiday break the principal clutches the microphone in his office and announces that grief counselors are available to students. He isn't implying anything, he informs them, it's just an announcement.

It's spring, and a fisherman whose name isn't important stops his motorboat at the edge of a shore. A burlap sack half buoyed in the water. He almost continues on, but stops.

Please refrain from speculation.

For whatever reason he kills the engine. Leans over the boat and pulls it toward him. Everything shifts.

Probably a deer out of season, avoiding a fine.

It is not her, not a deer, just garbage.

She is not in the sack, and she is not in the quarry. Six months later, she is not in the Dumpster, either. She is not in the chemistry lab or the library, nor is she (or her sister) backstage at the elementary school.

A few years come and go like principals.

There are no sightings – not even glimpses – and everyone who remembers Mary soon forgets.

Her friends, her teammates.

Even Tim. And that's all there is to say about him.

The police chief notes what appear to be bone fragments from the insides of burlap sacks and quarries. They are never Mary's.

Over a Thanksgiving break, one group assembles in somebody's basement where they sip a few beers, snack on stale chips.

Around midnight, somebody says, “Hey, remember that one girl?” and someone else says, “Who?”

They are talking about the girl who got pregnant their senior year.

Nobody anywhere is talking about Mary.

Eventually, even Mary's parents forget – as much as parents can – which is to say they don't forget at all. They cannot even forget the way she once tucked herself tightly inside a sleeping bag. And how each movie stub she ever saved marked a time and a date from her past. To Mary's parents, everything in the world seems to be rubbing it in: a hairbrush, a nail file, a music box, a bra, the ant farm in the back of her closet. Worst of all, in Mary's sock drawer sits the skeletal remains of a bouquet caught at her cousin's wedding – another prophecy unfulfilled.

Meanwhile, Mary's younger sister searches for her in the crawl space and the attic and the closet beneath the stairs. Once, upon discovering a pair of pink earmuffs, she begins to understand that her missing sister is everywhere and nowhere all at once. Yes, of course, she is the stain on the hallway carpet and the half-full bottle of perfume, but also she is neither of these things.
A memory,
Mary's sister decides,
is only a memory for as long as you care to remember.

Years later, as Mary's sister sits silently in chemistry class, science will give her an answer:

My sister has simply turned soluble.

A moment there and then gone.

“The Clowns,” previously published in
Flying House,
2010

“Dixie Land,” previously published in
The Barcelona Review,
2009

“Indian Village,” previously published in
Berkeley Fiction Review,
2011

“Line of Scrimmage,” previously published in
Annalemma Magazine,
2009