Vanishing Girls

Dr. Lichme used to say that maybe I liked it, just a little. He used to say that maybe helping solve other people’s issues kept me from thinking about my own.

That’s the problem with therapists: you have to pay them to say the same dumb shit other people will tell you for free.

I thud down the stairs, not bothering to be quiet this time. My left knee is killing me. I must have banged it on something.

When I come downstairs, Mom is just emerging from the bathroom, towel-drying her hair, wearing nothing but work pants and a bra. She freezes when she sees me.

“Were you in Dara’s room?” she asks, watching me closely, as if she doesn’t trust me not to morph into someone else. She looks awful, pasty-faced, like she hasn’t slept.

“Yeah.” When I go into my room to get my shoes, Mom follows me, hovering in the doorway as if waiting for an invitation.

“What were you doing?” she asks carefully. As out of it as she’s been, there’s no way she hasn’t noticed that Dara and I have perfected the art of circling around each other without touching, vacating rooms just before the other person enters, alternating patterns of wake and sleep.

I shove my feet into my sneakers, which have over the summer become deformed, distended into shapelessness by water and sweat.

“It’s her birthday,” I say, like Mom doesn’t know. “I just wanted to talk to her.”

“Oh, Nick.” Mom hugs herself. “I’ve been so selfish. I never even think about how hard it must be for you to be here. To be home.”

“I’m okay, Mom.” I hate it that my mom gets like this now: one second, fine; the next second, all mess and crumble.

“Good.” She holds the back of her hand against each eye in turn, as if she’s pressing back a headache. “That’s good. I love you, Nick. You know that, right? I love you, and I worry about you.”

“I’m fine.” I shoulder my bag and edge past her. “Everything’s fine. I’ll see you tonight, okay? Seven thirty. Sergei’s.”

Mom nods. “Do you think—do you think it’s a good idea? Tonight, I mean? All of us sitting down together?”

“I think it’ll be great,” I say—which, if you’re counting, is already the third lie I’ve told this morning.

Dara’s not in the den, although the blankets are all balled up on the sofa and there’s an empty can of Diet Coke lying on the ottoman, suggesting that she did spend part of the night downstairs. Dara’s like that, mysterious and undirected, always appearing and disappearing at will and never noticing, or maybe just not caring, that other people worry about her.

Maybe she went out last night for an early birthday celebration and wound up sleeping on some random guy’s couch. Maybe she woke up early in one of her rare bouts of penitence and will come through the front door in twenty minutes, whistling, makeup-free, bearing a big paper bag full of cinnamon doughnuts from Sugar Bear and a trayful of Styrofoam cups of coffee.

Outside, the thermometer is already at ninety-eight degrees. There’s a heat wave due this week, a massive, record-breaking blast of oven-temperature air. Just what we need today. Even before I get to the bus stop, I’ve chugged through my water bottle, and even though the air-conditioning on the bus is on full blast, the sun still seems to beat through the windows and turn the whole interior the murky, musty warm of a dysfunctional refrigerator.

The woman next to me is reading a newspaper, one of those obnoxiously thick ones packed with flyers and coupons and pamphlets advertising sales at a nearby Toyota dealership. The headlines are, no surprise, still given over to the Snow case. On the front page is a grainy picture of Nicholas Sanderson leaving the police station with his wife—both of them walking head down as though against a driving rain.

Nicholas Sanderson just moments after he was cleared of involvement in the Snow disappearance, reads the caption.

“It’s a damn shame,” the woman says, shaking her head so that her chin shakes, too. I turn away and look out the window, watching as the coast and its commercial clutter come into view and beyond it, the ocean, white and flat as a disk.

The FanLand sign is partially obscured behind a gigantic mass of balloons, like a multicolored cloud. A short distance away, the owner of Boom-a-Rang, Virginia’s Largest Firecracker Emporium, stands outside, smoking a thin brown cigar, looking doleful. In my nine days at FanLand, I have not yet been able to determine the reason for Boom-a-Rang’s hours, which seem whimsical to the point of insanity. Who shops for fireworks at eight in the morning?

Inside the park, it’s chaos. Doug is herding a group of volunteers—none of them older than thirteen—toward the amphitheater, yelling to be heard over the constant thrum of preteen chatter. Even at a distance of twenty feet, I can hear Donna shouting into the phone, probably telling off some food vendor who forgot to deliver a thousand hot dog buns, so I steer clear of the office, figuring I can drop off my bag later. Even Mr. Wilcox looks miserable. He passes me on the footpath leading down to the Ferris wheel but barely grunts in response to my hello.

“Don’t mind him.” Alice skims my back with a hand as she jogs past me, already sweating freely, a long sheath of napkins tucked under one arm. “He’s a stress case this morning. Parker called in sick, and he’s freaking out about staffing.”

“Parker’s sick?” I think of the way he looked last night in front of the wave pool, with the colors patterning his face and transforming him into someone unrecognizable, with the light throwing up fingers to the sky.