Universal Harvester(35)
He handed the card back to Peter Sample. “This really isn’t much to go on,” he said.
6
Peter’s demands on life had been, up to this point, extremely modest. He lived in the town where he’d been raised, and was satisfied; when times had grown lean, there was enough in reserve to keep the wolf from the door. His wife had been his partner through the lean times, gardening and sewing and restricting leisure to things that were free—church on Sundays, thrift store shopping, Bible study. He had a beautiful daughter and a steady job and a Chevrolet and a television. These were the things you worked to get; they represented success. He’d made a home like the one his father had made for him to grow up in, embellishing it with his own personal touches: he spent time with his daughter in a way men of his father’s generation often hadn’t with their own kids, and he liked the way that husbands and wives seemed to talk to each other more now than they had in his parents’ time. The house felt warm even when it was drafty. It was a comfortable life. There is much to be said in defense of comfort.
Out in his driveway on the morning of December 29, 1975, he stood in the spot where the car ought to have been. He had a cardigan on over an undershirt; it was too cold to stay out here like this for long, but his body was sending him all kinds of unfamiliar panic signals and he couldn’t think straight. Irene hadn’t gotten him up for breakfast; it was Lisa who woke him up, running into the bedroom and pushing him with both hands, the way you might roll a log, until he woke up. “Where’s Mommy?” she said.
He didn’t know. “Church?” he said.
“Church was yesterday!” said Lisa, scowling.
Church was yesterday, he thought in the empty driveway, wondering if the church in Council Bluffs had some special holiday services going on that she’d maybe mentioned while his attention had been elsewhere, special services she’d left for in the quiet cold of the early morning without waking him, without setting anything out for breakfast, with only a note on the dining room table that didn’t say she was taking the car and didn’t say when she’d be back and gave no indication that anything unusual had happened or was about to happen or would continue happening without interruption in the days to follow.
*
He didn’t know how to tell her parents. He reached for the phone, reflexively by this point, then put it back down: he was still steady enough to imagine what it might feel like to the person on the other end of the line. To have your son-in-law call out of the clear blue sky with news like these. It was unthinkable. But it was also unthinkable not to call—what if she stayed missing? They’d want to know why he hadn’t called earlier, just to let them know.
He’d been making calls all morning. Patricia Lumley’s name was one of several on a sheet of notebook paper taped to the refrigerator with phone numbers next to them in case of emergency; he’d known Chuck Lumley since childhood. Chuck wouldn’t know, but his wife might.
But she hadn’t heard anything, though she sensed, immediately, the discord of the moment. Irene Sample’s husband calling, not to talk to Chuck, but to her, on a Monday morning, asking whether Irene was over there for some reason. It didn’t add up.
“Gee, I don’t know,” she said when Peter asked the next question, the obvious one: Did she know where Irene might be, what might have happened, did she know anybody else he might call. “Do you want me to look after Lisa today? Sharon’s not doing anything.”
Sharon was sitting on a pillow on the living room floor, watching game shows on TV. Everyone was ready for winter break to be over. “Tell her to bring Gold Medal Barbie!” she yelled without looking away from the screen.
“Bring her on over,” Patricia Lumley said. “It’s no trouble, really.”
But all the stray signals searching for ground inside Peter’s chest found it now. He’d called the wrong person. There was no right person to call. No matter who he called, it was going to get to this point fairly quickly every time, and then they’d know. There wouldn’t be any way around it. Best to just get it over with.
“She took the car,” he said, his voice catching.
Patricia cupped her hand over the mouthpiece before she raised her voice. “Sharon, get your shoes and coat on!” she said.
Peter was quiet. An unwelcome clarity was settling in.
“We’ll be over in a minute,” Patricia said.
*
In any case it was the Coltons, not Peter and Lisa, who received the letter from Irene: the one that came about two weeks later and began This will be the only time you hear from me. They called right away. They were very worried, and they wanted to be told what to do, but it was clear from the way Harold Colton’s sentences kept trailing off into nothing that he was out of his depth: that he didn’t know what to make of it, out of any of it.
“She says she’s being taken care of,” said Harold on the phone. “What does she mean?” Pressing the earpiece against his temple in Crescent, Peter patrolled the space between question and answer, watching for silence and trying to shore up the gap. Nearby, on the floor, Lisa was playing Drop a Dragon alone. In the one-player version you finish the lines yourself, still trading out crayons to make a colorful dragon.
“Well, I intend to find out,” he said weakly. Irene’s letter hadn’t really left any place for questions about what she meant. She had gone to await the coming of the Most High with His people. The Lord who sees in secret will reward you. She knew they would all meet again.