Universal Harvester(39)
None of this is true, or maybe some of it is. I don’t know. Irene Sample was never seen again. Several private detectives reported leads and rumors to Peter until his money ran out; once, Patricia Lumley saw a woman standing in the alley behind the post office and thought it was Irene, but she didn’t get out of her car to check. It could have been anybody, she told herself when she got home: and besides, wouldn’t Irene be much older by now? Of course she would. It had been years.
2
He nodded goodbye at Sarah Jane while backing down the long driveway, in what felt like the first moment of real substance since leaving the house that morning; everything from then to now had already begun to seem like a weightless vision. The exhilaration of the highway out from town; the blunt trauma of the flipped Citation in the ditch with Ezra’s unconscious body out in front of it; the dream of arrival at the Sample house, the return to the site of the crash: they all folded rapidly into one another, light fading down and back up between individual moments in a hurried preview of the familiar scene now growing smaller and more concentrated on the other side of the windshield. The cornfield to the left, that work shed at its edge. The empty driveway in the sun. The house down at the end. It all looked different with light on it, but there could be no doubt. He had seen it before.
The fuel indicator was nearly red by the time he got back to Story County. He pulled off the highway at a Casey’s in Colo to get gas; at the counter, paying, he saw the foil-wrapped hamburgers under the bright heat lamp, all that shiny false promise. He knew they would be dry, bland, barely worth eating, but he was suddenly ravenous. The huge bites he tore off with his teeth as he drove, burger in one hand and steering wheel in the other, felt like the most nourishing food he’d ever eaten, like something from the potluck at a wake. The point isn’t how healthy the food is, he thought to himself, crumpling the sad silver wrapper. The point is how hungry you are.
His father hadn’t come home from work yet. Jeremy went back to his bedroom, taking his shirt off and tossing it into a corner of the room as he entered. He felt like calling Stephanie to tell her what he’d learned; he imagined her excited voice on the other end, making plans for the next move, sorting through possibilities. It might restore a little light to the scene, breathe some air into it. But he wanted to lie down first, just for a minute; and, of course, as soon as he did, his body began to feel heavy, like an old tree. His thoughts grew less coherent, following an instinctive pattern of connection and reference as he drifted into a deep sleep—gathering, as he went, images of Stephanie’s maps and printouts, blue ink fresh on the paper spread out across the table at Gregory’s, brighter days of the fairly recent past.
*
“Where do you get them all?” Sarah Jane said. They were in the cellar; Lisa was hunched over an editing block at a worktable, razor in hand. She felt afraid asking; if their conversations approached this subject, it was only to circle it from a place high above, like a flock of starlings shading a field.
“Get what,” she said.
“The tapes,” Sarah Jane said, not impatiently. Lisa at her work was someone you might think you envied: her focus clear and steady, somehow removed from the object of its scrutiny. There were only the motions of the work, their total care, her steady hands.
“Some you make yourself,” she said, not looking up, “and some you already had.”
Sarah Jane laughed a small laugh. “‘You’?”
Lisa turned now to look over her shoulder; she, too, was smiling. “You know what I mean. Besides, who knows?” She reached for a tape atop a five-high stack, held it up: it was unlabeled. It might have been blank, but it could have been anything. “There’s so many of them now. Some of these could have been made by anybody.”
She turned back to the table to resume her cuts and splices; Sarah Jane could see the yellow grease pencil on the loose lengths of master tape. It was easier than she might have guessed, regarding the process while trying not to dwell on its ends. She didn’t like to think of the tapes shot on the property, the ones with identifiable signposts. But these others seemed benign. By themselves they were nothing: long static shots. It was kind of neat how different they felt when Lisa got done with them.
“But you made most of them,” she said, the dread returning, not meaning to be rude but wanting to help as much as she could.
“A fair number of them, yes,” Lisa said, again without looking up, absorbed in her labor. The soft spots in her armor were hard to see, but you meet a lot of lonely people working the counter at a video store. You wish you could do something for them. There might be some mutual benefit in it, who knows, if there were only some readily available point of contact.
There was no reason to press the point. She watched Lisa’s fingers nimbly working at the plastic sprockets and hinges, the warm quiet of the cellar returning. “Is there a specific word for the little thing you push in to make the housing open?” she asked when the moment had passed.
“The release lever,” Lisa said. “I used to have a printout of the schematic right on this wall.”
*
Even if you’re all grown up, the sound of a parent’s voice calling you awake from sleep can make you feel like a child—like there’s somebody who wants to make sure all’s well with you, who cares enough to ask.
It wasn’t dark yet—the days were getting longer—but it wouldn’t be long. Steve’s voice was gentle, coming in through the haze: “Hey, big man. Hey, big man.”