Pew(17)

Though Hilda’s face was completely still, she had begun to cry. She dabbed carefully around her eyes.
I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I can get so carried away. I can get so emotional. Even a good commercial for something like the army or life insurance—they always get me. She was almost laughing at herself. But I am very concerned about you. Everyone is. We just don’t know what to do. We’re just not sure.
All feeling left her face, like that final shift at the end of a sunrise. She sat up straighter, exhaled, cleared her throat. She pushed the wadded tissues between the seat cushions. A firm daylight came down. The highway stretched ahead. Hilda pulled out a little bag and unzipped it while steering the wheel with her knee. She opened a tiny jar and spread something around her eyes, then ran a tiny black comb through her eyelashes, blinking.
I’m not used to an audience, you know. You probably think this is silly. I usually get all this done in the morning but there just wasn’t time.
She ran a blood-colored lipstick over her mouth, then pressed her lips together. She put everything back in the bag, closed it, and tossed it into the back seat as if she wanted to forget the whole thing.
Paulina always said you had to make sure you were put together before getting into the car because if you’re in a wreck and have to get picked up by an ambulance, you don’t want to be looking a mess on top of all the rest of your trouble. Hilda laughed. Oh, probably everyone’s mother says that.
We pulled into a parking lot beside a huge gray building.
I just have to deal with these, she said, as she started taking her curlers out. I stared the other way. It somehow seemed wrong to watch. Someone in a pale green uniform was pushing a person in a wheelchair up a sidewalk. A row of ambulances were parked next to us, waiting.
As we walked toward the hospital, Hilda’s shoes clicked on the pavement, and though I had seen her only minutes before crying in the firm morning light, it now seemed she had never cried in her life, couldn’t cry if she tried.



YOU WAIT HERE, Hilda said, as I sat. I’ve just got a few papers to fill out before you can see the doctors—are you all right by yourself here?
I looked around. She nodded and went away.
There were seven televisions around me, all of them playing the same station. A crowd of people had gathered somewhere with signs that said ANSWERS, NOW! and BRING THEM BACK. A man in a suit held a microphone to the mouth of a woman, who spoke loudly into it—
We have reason to believe that the town council or someone in the government knows what happened to the missing. That’s what we believe, and we know we are right about what we believe. We’re asking for them to tell us what they know, and—to at least tell the victims’ … the families of the missing—
The woman’s shouting voice softened and her face fell apart and for a moment she no longer looked like a statue of someone screaming, but something more like a pile of papers left out in the rain. She regained herself and continued—My son, Vernon, he’s been gone two weeks, and it’s true some people here in Almose County underestimated Vernon, but I know he’s a good young man and there’s just no way he could just run off for no reason. I want answers. We all want answers—
The screen cut to a reporter interviewing a child holding a picket sign:
NO JESUS NO JUSTICE

KNOW JESUS KNOW JUSTICE

The child smiled and spoke softly into the microphone held at her face, one hand waving her wide skirt from side to side. I did not watch the television after that, though I felt all the televisions were watching me.
Nearby there was a man with hair and skin the color of a dead sky, his stomach and chest rounded out, like a whole small person sitting on his own lap. Beside him there was an older woman wearing an apron, her dark hair pulled under a small white cap. In her eyes I could see an intricate calculation was always passing through her mind.
Sad thing with those people in the television, the man said.
Yes, sad, she said.
It’s troubling to see. Very sad.
Hmm. Painful.
But they don’t have to be in pain and they don’t know it!
No, sir.
I figure we’re lucky to be here where we are. We may have other problems, sure, but nobody goes disappearing.
Yes, a nice place.
No one would leave here, no one would just leave.
I don’t figure so.
She cleared her throat very quietly and crossed her ankles. Indeed.
We’re not perfect, of course. No one is.
Yes.
We know we haven’t always been fair to everyone.
Certainly—no.
But we’ve always been fair to people according to what the definition of fair was at the time.
The woman nodded and fell within herself. It was somehow clear she and this man went along beside each other.
We’ve reckoned with it, he said, and I, for one, I believe we are doing good.
Good as we can be.
And ain’t that enough?
Ain’t it?
Yes, I’m so glad to be here, aren’t you?
Aren’t I?
Yes, aren’t you though?
She removed the wax paper from a small sandwich and held it to his mouth. His feet and hands, I now saw, were held down by leather straps to the wheelchair he was sitting in. He bit into the sandwich as if to kill it, then bit again and caught the woman’s finger. She yelped a little, dropped the sandwich into his lap, then picked it up and kept feeding him.
Beside me, a man with little wisps of white hair clinging to his head raised his cane to point at a television. On the screen a man was standing behind a podium now, his eyes calm and distant. Below the man a script—
Almose County Mayor responds to “Anti-disappearance rally.”