Universal Harvester(36)
“Well, I can’t figure how you’re going to find out unless you can ask her directly,” said Harold without a trace of malice: it just seemed to him like something worth bearing in mind.
“I just can’t understand it,” said Peter.
“Well, I can’t either,” said Harold, this being the absolute best he could do, given the circumstances.
“I’ll call tomorrow,” said Peter.
“Yes, please do,” Harold Colton said from the old house in Tama where Irene had once lived as a child.
*
It had taken Michael Christopher six months to groom Irene for departure; there was some question about whether the preacher’s last name was Christopher or Christophersen, but Christopher seemed to be the consensus after calling around to various churches in Council Bluffs and Omaha. The storefront next to the army surplus had been abandoned: there was a vase of sad flowers on a folding table near the lectern when the landlord opened the door for Peter and they both walked in. The folding chairs were still set up in rows. The cross on the wall was gone, though Peter’d never known it was there and the landlord hadn’t taken any note of it; it was an unrecordable absence. “His rent’s current,” said the landlord, keys to the place still in hand. “They might still show up one Sunday.”
But Peter looked around the room: all the life had gone out of it. This landlord was only putting a good face on things, trying not to say what was obvious. It made no difference to him either way: the rent was paid up. But to Peter it meant several things, if services weren’t being held here anymore, if the congregation was truly gone.
In the weeks since she’d gone missing, he’d taken a leave of absence from work: he stayed home with Lisa, calling everyone he could think to call, asking if they’d heard from Irene. He called the local police of every nearby town, alerting them to the existence of the missing-person report he’d filed on the third day of her absence. Then he’d called them all again, one by one, to remind them: first on the next day, and thereafter at least twice a week.
Pastor Brian at Church of the Redeemer told him what little he knew about the Michael Christopher group (“I heard about a traveling preacher, but they get those types coming through Omaha all year. This one brought his church with him, I guess. They all dressed more or less the same. Like ragamuffins”), and he tried to give comfort, to be helpful. He passed along a few names, pastors from bigger churches in Council Bluffs or Omaha. “They’d know better than I would, I guess,” he said, shaking Peter’s hand at the church office’s door. “I know Irene loves the Lord. She knows the Lord’s plan for her life is with her family, I just know it.”
“She loves coming here,” said Peter. He’d slept badly every night since first waking up alone.
“Well, now,” said the pastor. “There’s got to be a good answer to this. Everyone here is praying for her.”
“I don’t know what I’m supposed to do,” said Peter.
“We have to be patient, especially when it’s hard to be patient,” said Pastor Brian. “I know the answer will come in time.”
“I don’t—” Peter stopped. The thought was terminal, inconsequential. There wasn’t anything on the other side of it. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do.”
*
The school in Crescent was very small and when the children came back after winter break everybody knew. Peter walked in with Lisa and called Mrs. Rethmeier aside on the first day back. “Most of them probably know already,” he said. She nodded sympathetically. There was no one in town who didn’t know about Irene Sample by now. Everybody had an opinion.
At school that day and through the weeks that followed, Mary Rethmeier kept an unobtrusive eye on Lisa; she’d been a teacher for many years and knew how to watch without being seen. At recess, everything seemed fine: Lisa and Sharon and Gail and Liz all jumped rope together in the auditorium, or, after the snow had melted, swung from the jungle gym bars out on the playground. Lisa did not look like a little girl whose mother had suddenly disappeared just after Christmas, and of whom no trace had been seen since.
In class she seemed distracted. She began to draw in the margins of her addition notebook, lines connecting to one another in different colors, suggestive of shapes but never fully relaxing into a single picture. The line segments followed one another out into the middle of the page: chain links and spirals morphing gradually into kidney or heart shapes, ballooning. Between segments she traded crayons, alternating colors, crossing the page from right to left and back again and then looping around to the reverse, dropping dragons over both sides of the paper until they covered the entire assignment.
If you work with or around children, you often hear a lot about how resilient they are. It’s true; I’ve met children who’ve been through things that would drive most adults to the brink. They look and act, most of the time, like any other children. In this sense—that they don’t succumb to despair, that they don’t demand a space for their pain—it’s very true that children are resilient.
But resiliency only means that a thing retains its shape. That it doesn’t break, or lose its ability to function. It doesn’t mean a child forgets the time she shared in the backyard with her mother gardening, or the fun they had together watching Bedknobs and Broomsticks at the Astro. It just means she learns to bear it. The mechanism that allowed Lisa Sample to keep her head above water in the wake of her mother’s departure has not been described or cataloged by scientists. It’s efficient, and flexible, and probably transferable from one person to another should they catch the scent on each other. But the rest of the details about it aren’t observable from the outside. You have to be closer than you really want to get to see how it works.