Universal Harvester(57)

We stayed several years. I was young, but I’d already lived in so many places. Even as a very young girl, I’d known enough to say I was from Tama; it set me apart. Most of my friends had been born across the river at the big hospital in Omaha. They never treated me like an outsider, but I felt like one, a little.

Pulled along by Dad in his doomed pursuit of the stability he’d lost, I took this outside feeling with me; it accompanied me everywhere I went. I came to resent it. Wherever we were, it seemed, everybody else was local. Not me, not Lisa. There was a newness to every place that never wholly went away. It got worse every time we pulled up roots.

So when our first year in Madison ended and a second began, I allowed myself to begin feeling the pull of some small attachments I’d formed, and to stop forgetting things as soon as they happened. To let my heart begin the assembly of a new scrapbook. I still remember my friends from that time: Carol, whose mother was a professor at the university, and who was a transplant like me; Elsie, who knew how to swear in Norwegian; Damon, who I asked to the heavily chaperoned sixth-grade Sadie Hawkins dance, and who said yes. It felt like we’d finally come to a stop at last, but then somebody from the network of parents Dad had unearthed in Sioux Falls found our Wisconsin address somehow and sent a letter by registered mail saying there’d been a confirmed sighting of Michael Christopher at a former shoe store in Decorah. The records on the property were public and showed him taking out a year’s lease. They’d been doing surveillance for two months to be sure. They were planning an intervention.

Dad took me with him; I waited in the car in the dark while the other families stormed the Wednesday evening Bible study, the deprogrammer from Chicago coordinating the abduction, his assistants emerging from the building two at a time, dragging parishioners by their arms, roughly slipping pillowcases over their heads and throwing them into the van. They got three out before the Christopher clan managed to barricade the door.

It was the climax of our seven-year search. I was twelve years old. The deprogrammer’s van sped off, the remaining worshippers visible through the shoe store’s glass door, crying and holding one another, unbathed, dressed in thrift store castoffs. Dad came back to the car and got in and started the engine, but he didn’t say anything; I was a big girl, I could see for myself. Mom wasn’t there.

After he died, years later, back in Crescent, I saved the surveillance tapes he’d gotten from the private investigator. They weren’t hiding in a high cupboard or in a lockbox; he’d kept them in the entertainment center in the living room, like something you might watch on any idle evening. His clothes I drove across the river to the Goodwill on North Seventy-eighth; they might have gone to a vintage store in the Old Market by then, and fetched a decent price. They were so well preserved, relics of a simpler time. Surely they were worth something, but I felt a need to empty the house, quickly and methodically. It wasn’t the house I’d lived in as a child. But Crescent is small. The house my mother’d left behind forever one Christmas was only a few blocks away. I stood in my father’s room sorting his things into piles and tried to remember what our family had been like. But clear memories wouldn’t come; everything blurred. I couldn’t even make out their faces. It was like someone had scribbled over them in black marker, or wrapped them in shrouds.

The rest of his effects went to people from the church: old ladies who’d known my father when he was young. I thanked them for making it easier, and they helped me find boys from the high school to help with the furniture. I stood by while they worked, watching the house grow empty, the last remaining traces of my family vanishing into the gleam of things swept clean. It felt strange to be helping this work along, but the drive within me was instinctual, as natural to me as the brownness of my hair and eyes. When we had finished I headed back through Iowa alone.

At my apartment in Nevada, and then, later, at the Collins farmhouse I bought by pooling Dad’s life insurance money with the proceeds from the Crescent house, I watched the surveillance tapes, night after night. They were hypnotic. They calmed me somehow, kept me centered. The anonymity of the people at the bus stops and around the bonfires at the trash dumps or behind the bowling alleys … there was a sort of hope in it, a gathering of possibilities that could never be dispelled entirely, because the names of the faces in the frame were lost forever. They could have been anybody. There was no way to say who they were or were not. They were free.

In their untrackable freedom I located a place to store something I had carried with me since Christmas of 1972, something whose need for space grew greater every year. I found a second VCR at a yard sale and began collecting moments from the endless time-stamped hours of my father’s fruitless search. If you learn to look hard enough, you can find stories in seemingly impenetrable tableaus. Street scenes. Parking lots. People waiting for a bus.

I made a few friends: people who were drawn to me, to my steady strength, to my knack for making any place I stood feel like a permanent shelter. I preserved their stories, and when they had no stories, I gave them stories they could call their own, stories I trust they have carried with them in their travels beyond my reach, and I made of these stories a permanent record on tape. I filled in the parts I couldn’t know or needed to change with bits and pieces of other people’s stories: from the movies, I mean. But they all seemed to lead me to the same place. No attempt to change the outcome found purchase, however adept I became at splicing and cutting and smoothing transitions.