Читать книгу Trip Through Your Wires - Sarah Layden - Страница 8

Chapter 1

There is little protocol or fanfare for the replacement of a temporary employee by the person she replaced, but in Carey Halpern’s case, it meant a goodbye lunch at a newly-opened Mexican restaurant, because it was nearby and her temporary boss had a coupon.

She wasn’t being fired, no no no. She would be compensated appropriately, depending on the temp agency’s policy for these sorts of things. It was just that her assignment turned out to be more temporary than originally expected, see?

She did.

She was alone, driving from the improperly quotationed Westside “Office” Building where she’d worked for the last four months with an option to renew, option now denied.

You can take off the rest of the day, too, Senior Vice President Dave Appel had said, Paid, of course. So if you want to drive your car?

She did.

The Westside Indianapolis landscape scrolled by, empty big box stores at the anemic mall, burger joints, strip clubs, Burritos as Big as Your Head, and the faded springtime detritus ground into the roadside: McDonald’s cups and Coke cans and cigarette packs, windshield flyers and the occasional disintegrating diaper. This new Earth. This trash landscape.

Her boss had given directions: It’s called Casa Colmo—you like Mexican, right? Go about a mile past Don’s Guns. She was passing the big signboard now, with the owner’s properly-quoted slogan, “I don’t want to make any money, folks, I just love to sell guns,” which he’d recited on TV throughout Carey’s childhood. The sign depicted a brown cartoon handgun.

Now that her precarious temp status had been revoked, there remained the question of paying her parents back. She pulled into the parking lot beside Dave Appel’s Taurus and forced herself not to ding it. Not even as a fake accident. Progress.

She didn’t have to go out to a free lunch. She debated leaving, but where would she go? Home to her parents, with whom she’d been living since she ran out of money and options in Chicago? She’d stranded Nicole without a roommate and the rent was too steep to manage alone. Nicole, back in Indy, had refused Carey’s calls for months. Now she screened and sometimes called back.

The restaurant’s door was etched glass, an image from another time. Carey touched the hood of her car with her fingertips, as if for support. A Mexican church: one she recognized. One she had been to. The Westside was becoming repopulated in a way that felt like a memory of a dream. One bodega displayed in its window five different flavors of Jumex in colorful cans. The Kroger stocked its shelves with novena candles. “Now Hiring” signs at auto body shops and drive-thrus also read “Se Emplea.” And now this restaurant, showing her a place she’d once been.

Dave Appel was holding open the door for her, blocking the etching with his stocky body and gray London Fog raincoat. Light perspiration beaded his forehead.

“There’s our favorite temp!” he said. “Hey. Lunch is on me.” A fact he’d already noted before they left the “Office” building. Where she used to “work.”

Bob and Sue from accounts were already settled into a booth and crunching complimentary chips. Free on top of free. They were here for the meal, for the camaraderie Dave Appel attempted to cultivate in his team; Carey had worked with them in brief and insignificant ways during her assignment. Collating, faxing, copying. The pair sat in the booth’s interior, against windows where starched café curtains hung, the red, white and green mirroring Mexico’s flag. The thin carpet bore outlines of a manual sweeper. The air was thick with frying tortillas and the overpowering chemical scent of the new carpet.

“Nice,” Carey said.

It was 12:06 p.m. They were the only customers.

“Great news about Felicia,” Bob said around a mouthful of chips, as if Carey weren’t even there. Sue elbowed him. “Sorry,” he said.

Carey had filled in while Felicia had undergone chemotherapy for breast cancer. Now she was in remission and ready to reclaim her rolling desk chair and plain-paper fax machine. She would wear a headscarf, Dave Appel had told Carey while essentially firing her. The occasional hat. What could Carey say to that?

“No, it is great news,” Carey said. “I mean, how fantastic that she’s better now. Really awesome.”

Dave Appel, a man Carey scarcely knew, eyed her. In the months of working as his office assistant (the term “secretary,” he’d told her, was demeaning), she hadn’t learned how to read his gaze: there was hunger there, or longing, or maybe he needed new glasses. Perhaps he was searching for Felicia in her face and gestures and expressions and wardrobe, and always coming up short. Carey instinctively knew “really awesome” was not a phrase Felicia would have uttered, and Carey’s skirt, a wool blend that both looked and felt lumpy, was not an item Felicia would have worn. She stuck to “tailored business casual,” Dave Appel once confided, miming air quotes, and was a “real team player.” The phrases stuck in her mind. The lumpy skirt had been a mistake. But since she’d spent the money, she made herself wear it. “Not the most flattering,” her mother had said. “But once you get a job you actually care about, maybe you’ll start caring about your appearance.”

The hostess, a young woman with dark hair hanging loose down her back, brought menus to the table. “Gracias,” Carey said by rote, her accent perfect. The woman smiled and bowed, then gave the workers standing around the bar—all men—a look that said Get to Work. They moved into various nonessential tasks: rearranging salt and pepper shakers, re-wiping spotless surfaces, straightening a chair.

“Muy bueno,” Dave Appel said to Carey. “Mucho talent. You’ll get a new job-o in no time.”

Bob snickered, but Dave Appel wasn’t making fun. He was making an effort. “Trabajo,” Carey murmured. “Job is trabajo.”

Their waiter stood before them with a pad of paper and a pen, grinning broadly. His ears stuck out like butterfly wings. His features identified him as the hostess’s kin.

“Ready?” was all he said. Ray-deee?

They ordered specials by number, and their burritos and tamales and plates of tacos appeared in ten minutes. The waiter brought the items on a large tray, and another waiter carried pitchers of water and pop to refill their empty glasses. His floppy dark hair fell over his dark eyes, drawing attention to them.

“Gracias,” Carey said, trying for eye contact. Both men only nodded and smiled and walked back to the bar to join the rest of the underworked staff. The one with the hair glanced back at Carey, but only for a moment.

Sue took a bite of refried beans and moaned. “I’m not on a diet today. It’s settled.”

“You should think about our company Wellness Plan,” Dave Appel said. “Never diet again!”

On two televisions fixed above the bar, the local newscast played, the volume low. The Pacers were in the playoffs. Something menacing about manure lagoons. The murder rate was lower than last year at this time. And speaking of murder, the male anchor said, handing the story over to Maria Cortez, who was broadcasting live in front of the justice building downtown.

You knew it was serious because Maria Cortez, known for her bubbly on-air persona, wore a suit and a frown. She still exuded her usual nonthreatening aura that lured American and Latino viewers in equal numbers.

In her manicured hands was a blue U.S. passport. Her tomato-red nails raked the pages. The hostess who had seated them lifted the remote control and raised the volume. She swung her blue-black hair over one shoulder, standing straighter.

“I think you would have enjoyed working with Felicia,” Dave Appel said. “She’s very motherly, very kind.”

“Shh,” Carey said, rude enough for her whole table to quiet and follow her eyes to the TV, where Maria Cortez held court.

“Fifteen U.S. passports were found inside an abandoned suitcase in the Phoenix airport,” she intoned. “But Indianapolis authorities weren’t prepared to discover one belonging to an area man.”

The news anchor opened the passport cover, revealing Ben’s full name in all caps. BENJAMIN CURTIS WILLIAMSON. Carey’s pulse and adrenaline surged, and she believed for just an instant that this had all been a mix-up. There was Ben’s passport, there was his name. The document proved his life.

She’d never seen his grave or headstone, but she knew they existed, his name there likely in all-caps, too. Every reminder of Ben’s life brought a reminder of his death.

Maria Cortez was here to remind her, too. “I’m holding the passport of a man whose senseless killing seven years ago remains a mystery to this day,” she said, eyes gone sad.

Her fingers, previously covering the passport photo, moved gracefully away. The photo showed a Mexican man with a thin face and rictus grin, perched atop Ben’s name. So clearly not Ben that Carey could see little else.

But Maria Cortez wasn’t done. Illegal, she spoke, and immigration, and murder, and Guanajuato, and unsolved, and 1996. She worked one sharp red nail beneath the photo, making eye contact with the camera. A sheriff’s deputy hovered at her shoulder, ready to grab the evidence she probably shouldn’t have been holding anyway. Maria Cortez turned her shoulder slightly to block the deputy from the shot.

She gave a solemn nod, lifted the small square photograph, and beneath was a picture of Ben, with short hair and a serious expression and something of a smirk in his eyes.

Next to her in the booth, Sue, mother of three teenage boys, crossed herself. The gesture reminded Carey of Lupe, her host mother, who was in near-constant conversation with God. “That boy’s poor mother,” Sue said. Carey gave her a withering glance. What about her? Carey Halpern, whose heart was stuck in her throat like a flapping bird, whose ears thrummed with pumping blood. The low din of the restaurant workers cut through her brain static.

“Yo lo conozco,” they whispered. “Es el fotografo.” The young woman told them all to shut up, and the bartender grabbed the remote control from her and clicked. Carey envied the ease with which he shut it off.

Dave Appel telegraphed an expression of concern, which Carey ignored.

“Change it back,” Carey said, once in English. And then again, in Spanish.

Nobody did.

She veered onto the exit ramp near the auction house, the I-65 stretch named after famous son Kenneth “Babyface” Edmonds, the musician. All of Indianapolis was in quotes, as if it could not decide what it was or wanted to be. It was not so hard to declare her old building an office, or herself an employee. Either one was or one wasn’t. The highway, “The Babyface,” ought to have had a bit more dignity.

She was not panicking. This was not hyperventilation.

It began raining; the April sky dropped low. Bad news on a clear, sunny day makes less sense. Almost two years ago, that September morning when the planes were launched into buildings like bombs, the blue sky was spotless, stretched tall as a movie backdrop. That had been a tragedy. And this? She did not know how to categorize what she’d learned at the restaurant.

She drove down College Avenue, where two Hispanic men loaded a brown plaid couch onto a pickup truck. She knew, instinctively, that they were Mexican. Most of the city’s new immigrants were. Four more men filed out of the row house with the cushions on their heads, like a line of ants with bits of leaves.

Her goodbye to Dave Appel, Sue and Bob was awkward, flailing, un-Felicia-esque. There was a form she was supposed to sign for her last paycheck and she had not signed it, did not want it. She’d barely eaten her enchiladas. The waiter asked if something was wrong with the food. She shook her head, trying to find answers in his eyes.

Driving the wobbly ring of I-465 could waste an hour or more, but she was low on fuel. The Circle City, they called it, for the brick road around downtown’s Soldiers and Sailors Monument. She had lived here all her life, not counting her abbreviated year in Mexico, or her Chicago experiment with Nicole. Here in the Circle City: a place that repeated itself. A car scene in a low-budget film, endlessly looping the same increasingly obvious background.

Driving distracted her. The glaring neon signs and the boom box of the Dancing Man at 38th and College, the jangle of his purple velvet Crown Royal tip bag. She locked her doors.

The radio played an old song, something by The Doors. She remembered all the words. She loved The Doors, so much that she could not listen to them. She pushed a button and a new song played.

Eventually she was heading north, the car pointing home. North always led to home. The guiding light of the north star. El Norte, the film about horrifying border crossings to the U.S. She had been so sure, all those years ago, that traveling south would lead her somewhere. Her compass was off.

Home. More specifically, Brian and Gwen Halpern’s home. Carey’s father planted himself in his study each night, legal briefs cluttering the desk, “catching up.” But Carey could see the computer screen reflected in the window behind him, the colorful pixilated cards of a solitaire game. Her mother frequently was out, as if “out” were a named location.

Many nights, most nights, Carey lurked in online chat rooms. Occasionally someone would see her screen name, “La mujer,” and try to start a conversation. Usually in Spanish. Her language had rusted over, clunking through her head. She watched the scrolling text of flirtations.

Benson689: Mujer, you there?

La mujer: Yep.

Benson689: How you feeling tonight?

In a matter of minutes, maybe two back-and-forths, she’d be propositioned, asked to join a private conversation. The Internet had rooms and rooms, dark corridors she could barely picture. Sometimes she went, knowing better. Sometimes she logged off, left them hanging in the middle of their fantasies.

Benson689: I’m in Tucson. So what do you do there in Indy?

La mujer: Office temp. For now. Not very exciting. You?

Benson689: Tell you what I’d like to do. Lick you raw til you scr—

A clean break, easy as clicking a button.

She anticipated as she arrived that her parents would be enmeshed in their private, individual cocoons, and she could retreat to her bedroom with a bag of chips. She rolled into the garage’s third bay, beside her mother’s Jetta and father’s Cherokee. She entered the house and walked into a steamy gust of air: broth and wine and chicken and herbs. On the rare occasions Gwen Halpern cooked, she cooked with wine.

Gwen and Brian sat across from each other at the table, chewing silently, politely. Her father, in jeans and a sweatshirt, must have gone running before dinner. Flushed cheeks, his mussed blond hair darkened by sweat, the slight gray prominent as tinsel. Her mother still wore work clothes: a long, flowing skirt of iridescent purple, a fitted black sweater, and looping silver chains from her store, Finer Things. Despite never exercising, Gwen Halpern remained naturally slim. Carey had gained a few pounds in the years since she stopped running. She had competed for years at cross country and track, and in college she ran almost every day. Even in Mexico. But she gave it up, after. Her runner’s body was hard to remember. She’d hidden the bathroom scale in the linen closet. She self-consciously tugged her sweater away from her stomach.

A place was set for Carey at one end, her usual seat on the rare occasions the family ate together.

“Am I late?” Carey asked. “I didn’t know you were making dinner.”

Gwen acted surprised. “Really? Guess I should feed my family more regularly,” she said, glancing at Carey’s skirt.

“Bet you had a busy day,” Brian said. “Usually I can set my watch by you.”

Something folded within her. Dismissed from her clockwork job: unsprung. She worked on establishing a neutral face, the kind of mask her mother had been wearing for years.

“I was pulled in to help on a big project,” she lied. “Sorry I didn’t call.”

Her parents exchanged a look. “You’re an adult,” her mother said. “No need to call. It’s helpful in the sense that keeping dinner hot is helpful. But that’s what microwaves are for. Convenience. I wouldn’t want to inconvenience you.”

Her mother smiled with exaggerated patience. “The chicken’s probably a little dry.”

Carey smoothed her skirt with both hands and sat down at the end of the table.

“Forget all that,” her father said. “You’re a go-getter, kiddo, getting the hang of the working world. That calls for a toast.”

Gwen snorted into her glass of pinot grigio. Brian ignored her, filling Carey’s empty glass. Her mother held out her own goblet for a refill; she drank, made a face, then took another sip.

“To Carey,” her father said. “Our little girl is all grown up.”

“She’s twenty-eight,” her mother said. “So, yes, she is, isn’t she?”

Carey barely listened. Her mind circled back to her lack of job, to the restaurant, to Ben’s passport, to Ben, to herself in Mexico, to Mike. Where was he now? Had he seen the news? She rose slightly from her seat, as if to call him, though of course she didn’t have his phone number. She had told him, years ago, to stop calling. Her parents mistook the gesture and lifted their wine glasses. Carey followed suit.

“Cheers,” she said, clinking glasses. “And thanks. You’ve helped me a lot.”

Gwen’s gaze softened. “We’re glad about your job, honey. Really.”

Carey sat down and launched into a too-detailed story about the project she’d allegedly been working on as Dave Appel’s assistant. Databases, spreadsheets, coding, line items. Her mother’s expression glazed over, probably running mental inventory of her stock at Finer Things, and her father nodded at each description, reaching for seconds of chicken. Carey said she’d most likely be home late all week, so they shouldn’t wait on her for dinner.

“You can help us celebrate tonight, then,” her mother said.

“Oh?” Brian asked. “What are we celebrating?” His wife’s eyes registered hurt, disbelief, and seconds later she slipped on the invisible mask.

“Would you believe I forgot the vegetables,” she said. “Excuse me.” Her tone indicated that this was the social gaffe of the season. She carried her nearly full plate to the kitchen. The lid of the stainless steel garbage can clanked open and shut.

Carey took in the tablecloth, the white tapers lit and gleaming in silver candlesticks. Cloth napkins instead of paper. Usually they dined separately, in shifts on the stools surrounding the kitchen island. If they ate together, the meal came from boxes and bags: pizza, rotisserie chicken, sandwiches in butcher paper. Gwen, an excellent cook, had catered to her husband and only child for many years. Once the gift shop took off, she rarely touched a pan. In junior high, Carey mastered the art of microwave cooking. Microwaved scrambled eggs for dinner were her specialty.

Now Carey chewed the chicken, which was in fact dry from reheating. She drank more wine to wash it down. Her father was doing the same.

“Mom’s in a good mood,” Carey said.

Usually sarcasm made her father laugh, but he didn’t answer. His eyes were on the kitchen door, awaiting his wife’s return. His face drooped like a basset hound’s whenever he was tired or upset. It looked that way often, she’d noticed since moving home.

“Brian?” Carey stage-whispered. She often called her parents by their first names and had for years. “Are you in the dog house, or am I?”

He tousled his own hair for a long moment. “That’s a good question,” he said.

Gwen’s high heels drummed on the polished hardwood floor, and she swept into the room wearing her beige trench coat with the oversized black leather belt. She carried a Tuscan-style bowl filled with fingerling potatoes and fresh green beans. Out of season in April. A product of—where? Mexico? She set the bowl in front of Carey.

“I have lost my appetite,” she said. “But no sense in letting perfectly good food go to waste.”

Carey attempted and failed to catch her father’s eye; he was staring after his wife’s retreating form as if willing her to turn around. But he said nothing, and returned to his meal with studied interest. The kitchen door slammed, and the garage door rumbled upward.

“Potatoes?” he asked Carey, offering the bowl.

She shook her head, waiting him out.

“I seem to have forgotten an anniversary,” he finally said. “That’s the only thing I can think of.” Their anniversary was four months ago, in December. Carey was still in Chicago then, failing to convince Nicole, her oldest friend, that she’d find a way to make rent.

“I’d be mad, too. You’re four months late, and the woman can hold a grudge. Believe me.”

“I got her a card,” he said, waving his hand. “This is the anniversary of when we met. No, wait. Not today, yesterday.”

“Then she forgot, too,” Carey said.

Brian forked more potatoes into his mouth than was polite. He chewed and chewed as the Jetta’s engine revved, the noise fading in the distance. He swallowed his food and took a long sip of water, not wine. Finally he looked at his daughter as the house’s silence covered them both like a layer of dust.

“And then she remembered,” he said.

Carey wasn’t hungry but brought a bag of potato chips to her room, anyway. She logged on to her usual chat room, where Benson689 and three other users were idle. She searched for the ad she’d noticed a few days before. TheOldSchool.com, a high school reunion website, offered a free trial for chat room users. Carey clicked “yes” to the offer, “yes” to the terms of agreement. Yes, yes, whatever you say. Next screen.

She went to the University of Wisconsin reunion page and scrolled to Ben’s year and name. She searched these types of sites for him occasionally, as if to confirm that he actually was dead. Like his murder had been a mistake, it had never really been him, and here he was listing his likes and dislikes and current career and family if applicable.

His name was listed with a parenthetical shushing: (Deceased.)

Carey exhaled hard and fast, like she’d been punched in the gut. What did she expect? That his email would be linked, that he’d want to get in touch with classmates and talk about the old times? God. She was as bad as people who earnestly used Ouija boards.

She moused up the alphabet. Since she was here, she rationalized. Since the chat room was quiet. Since she had to, she did not acknowledge, not fully.

There was Mike Gibley. His name was highlighted, hyperlinked, an active user. Mike was Ben’s classmate, roommate, best friend. After Mexico, Mike continued to email her, though she’d stopped answering. He’d kept calling until she told him not to.

His profile said he lived in Chicago. Business degree, cum laude, minor in computer science. He liked artisan pizza, whatever that was, and craft beer, ditto. The band Counting Crows was high on the list of favorites. He was single.

SEND MIKE GIBLEY A MESSAGE? She clicked the button. Before contacting him, she had to create an account. Under Profile Name, she opted for her chat room moniker: La Mujer. She filled in Indianapolis, IN for location and added nothing else.

In the blank message box, she typed:

Mike,

I hope you remember me, though Mexico was a long time ago. I need to talk to you. Ben was in the news today—they found his passport. Maybe you heard about it, or saw the photo stuck on top of Ben’s. This is totally surreal.

Write me.

Carey

Soon, she thought. Now. She clicked around the site for a few minutes, learning Nicole had completed her profile with very sincere, paragraph-length responses, and included a glamour-shot picture of herself dancing in a black leotard and flimsy skirt. She left Nicole’s page and hit refresh multiple times but there was no reply. She switched off the computer and pushed the warm laptop to the other side of the bed.

She slept, dreaming of nothing. Or dreaming of Ben, who cradled her head in his hands, gazing down at her. Her sleeping mind, more present than waking life. The dreams happened like real time. Her arms moved as if underwater. Her hair blew like a fashion model’s in front of a fan. He stood there with a camera, wearing a once-white T-shirt coated in what looked like blood, but he reassured her: No, it’s only ketchup. Taste. She leaned forward. Licked.

The next morning, a smattering of her own blood speckled the pillow and crusted beneath her fingernails, the back of her head a small mess of scrapes. This happened every few months. Her scalp stung under the hot water of the shower. Eventually the water rinsed clear. Seven years of these dreams: often enough that they felt routine. Each time, she tried to remember the plot of her sleeping stories, made hazy and polluted by her waking mind, but she couldn’t. Wouldn’t.

After throwing on jeans and an old track t-shirt, she meandered downstairs and stepped on the nail sticking out of the loose floorboard at the bottom of the stairs, which made a small red dent in her insole but didn’t break the skin. The coffee percolated, frozen waffles sprung from the toaster. Out the kitchen window, small buds populated the forsythia; a robin perched, placid, on the empty feeder. She’d lost her job, but she didn’t have to pay rent. She had a window to look out of. An empty, quiet house, now hers for eight hours.

The Halperns’ house had been built in the late sixties, and the neighborhood abutted the marshy area near Eagle Creek, in the suburbs on the city’s far Northwestside. Despite weekly visits from a cleaning woman, a damp, moldering smell remained. The décor was impeccable. Even the old items in her parents’ house appeared new, a catalog home. Things to be admired but not touched, as she’d been admonished her entire life. She twined her bare feet on the stool’s rungs, glancing over the newspaper’s comics, her horoscope. “Taurus: No matter how intense the mood between you and a loved one, courageously communicate your feelings.”

Carey had taken the phone off the hook in case the temp agency called before her parents left for work. Daytime TV shocked her with its dullness; the suspense of game shows displayed only the guilelessness of the contestants. The second Iraq war, now one month in, had not hampered Americans’ right to compete for valuable prizes on national television. Solitaire on her father’s computer lasted an hour, his high scores unbeatable. She took the want ads to her room. Rather than read them, she spread the newsprint on the carpet and painted her neglected toenails a deep crimson. Still no reply from Mike Gibley, and though it had been less than twenty-four hours, she resented his silence, assigning it meaning and weight.

In the early evening, to keep up the ruse of gainful employment, she changed into work clothes: black pants, a cream mohair sweater, and nylon trouser socks. Her toenail polish had not fully set and the socks kept sticking. No family dinner that night, just the low rumblings of her parents’ voices, a quiet fight in her father’s office. She made a sandwich with leftover chicken, spooning globs of mayonnaise to counter the dryness. She waited for someone to bear witness to her office apparel. The sweater shed its fur. Her lap was covered in a fine coat of cream fuzz; she’d have to borrow a lint roller.

The house was silent. A parental impasse. She grew tired of waiting. At the foot of the stairs, she snagged her sock on the loose nail in the floorboard. Carey lifted her foot to check for a wound, and tore a gaping hole through the thin material.

In her room she lifted the laptop lid for the thirty-seventh time that day and refreshed TheOldSchool.com’s website.

Carey,

Do I remember you? Jesus H. Christ. I actually looked you up but didn’t realize I needed a secret code. La Mujer, then. OK. Yes. Sure. Anyway, Carey (or cruel joke-playing person), I’m coming down to Indy this weekend to visit Ben’s parents. We’ll talk then. No excuses, mujer. Pretty please.

I want to see you.

Gibs

He left three different phone numbers where he could be reached. Carey’s heart thudded in her ears. Through the computer, Mike Gibley appeared in her room, floating in the air, in her memory. She’d found him. He’d returned.

All that we long to suppress does.