The Missing Person Read Free Page B

nostalgia. “I’m going to France,” he said. “Want to come?”
    â€œWhat are you talking about?”
    I stood at the window and watched the psychic sit at a table in her window, reach down, and then set something in front of her on the table, staring at it intently. Tarot cards, I thought, or runes. She started to move one hand over the other, rhythmically, as if performing some incantation. After a second I realized that she was painting her nails.
    â€œIt’ll cheer you up. Maybe get you excited about work again. In two weeks. I’ve got an extra ticket.”
    â€œMarianna’s ticket.”
    â€œShe has to go to Venezuela instead.”
    â€œYou want me to go to France using your wife’s ticket.”
    â€œI want to offer you an all-expenses-paid trip to Paris with a man whose company, based on recent evidence, I’m fairly sure you enjoy.”
    â€œWell, when you put it that way, it doesn’t sound so bad.”
    â€œThat’s what I like to think,” he said. “So you’re coming?”
    â€œI’ll think about it.”
    And I did. I lounged around my apartment for those two weeks, committing several issues of
People
to memory and thinking about the two of us holding hands as we walked along the Seine by moonlight, et cetera. Then I thought about Melinda, the visiting assistant professor from Costa Rica whose year-long appointment in our department had precipitated our breakup and who I guessed had gone back home. I also thought about New Mexico, the blank astringency of the air and the bleak sunny streets sprawling with gas stations and chain restaurants. Finally I thought about my brother and his fervent midnight e-mails demanding, “How do we live decently in an indecent world?” It was true that I hadn’t received any messages for a while, but knowing Wylie, he was probably just too busy writing his manifesto or picketing butcher shops or getting drunk with waiters or whatever else he did with his time.
    In the end, I told Michael I’d meet him at his apartment— I wanted to picture him there, petty in my revenge,
waiting for
me
—and boarded a plane to Albuquerque instead.
    Long hours afterwards I stepped into the hushed boredom of the small, clean airport. My mother stood by the gate wearing a blue sundress, her hair clipped and neat; she was smiling broadly, as she always did when she’d gotten her way.
    â€œHow was the flight?”
    â€œFine.”
    â€œHow was Minneapolis?”
    â€œI only connected there.”
    â€œBut was it efficient?”
    â€œMy flight was on time.”
    â€œThat’s what I mean,” she said. “They’re very efficient in Minneapolis. I think it’s the cold weather. They have no distractions like we do here.”
    â€œIt’s June, Mom,” I said.
    We walked through the uncrowded hallways alongside men in cowboy hats and boots embracing their children and wives, their tight jeans cinched even tighter at the hips with large-buckled belts. Passing the airport restaurant, I smelled green-chile stew. I felt like I was on a different planet, in a separate, contrived dimension; a place created for vacations. The air outside was cool and dry, the lights of Albuquerque gleaming on a miniature scale against the blackness of the desert. Everything seemed very small. My mother drove through the familiar streets, past the gaudy neon, the Pop ’n’ Taco, the Sirloin Stockade, then the brown shadows of adobe houses. Pink rays of cosmos and tall, nodding sunflowers bloomed in the yards. Everything was exactly the same, shabby and plain, as if I’d never moved away, as if New York were only a dream I’d had, an ongoing dream every night for years.
    Lynn: We cannot return to the elemental things. There is no
way to go back. But how to move forward when so much has
been lost? How can we even think about the future when we are
burdened by such an