I don’t know why I did it. I tried to ignore the idea. I wrote down that I shouldn’t do it, like that would vanquish the urge. I made some tea and drank it. I made many valiant efforts to read my mystery. But the mystery I really want to solve is not in the pages of that book. I want to know whatever it is Zoe knows. That must be why I dialed the number, pressing each big button on my old phone slowly, as if to give myself time to change my mind. One ring, then two, and the girl answered. Her hello was abrupt, clipped, reluctant. Or did it just sound that way to me? At any rate, whatever I might have said snagged on its way out. I breathed into the phone, and then I hung up. I sat for a moment with my hand on my heart, like a startled old lady on a TV show. When the phone rang shrilly a moment or two later, I’m glad no one was there to see me jump. I answered. I tried to say hello, but I hadn’t spoken a word aloud since I talked to Lucy yesterday, and the sound emerged a whisper.
“Hello?” an answering voice said. The girl’s voice, of course. I can’t really say more about it than that—not the sound of it, not her tone as she said the word—because I noticed little beyond my own confusion. “Is someone there?”
I didn’t speak, but neither did I hang up.
“Who is this?” the girl, Zoe, asked. “The least you could do is say something.”
I hung up.
Sometimes I forget the basic facts of what the world is now. Of course I know that there is no longer such a thing as an anonymous phone call. Of course she’d seen my number on her telephone. I should have anticipated all that. But many things have been true and then no longer true in the years that I’ve been alive. The years and years, the many, many years. Surely it’s no wonder I sometimes forget.
She called back. I didn’t answer. My answering machine picked up—a robotic voice, announcing my number. A beep. Her voice: “Pick up.” A silence. Then: “I just got a call from this number. Is anyone there?”
“Yes,” I said aloud to the machine.
There was a long, whirring silence. Then she said, “Mom? Is that you? I don’t know why you would call me if you didn’t want to talk to me.” Then she hung up.
Dear girl, I don’t know why either.
I thought that would be the end of it. But she called again. This time she didn’t wait for the machine but hung up midring. Silence. The clock ticktocking. Then she called again. This has gone on ever since. The phone is a live creature. I have woken a beast.
Now it rings again. The persistence of this girl, the utterly terrifying persistence. Is it anger or desperation that drives her to insist again and again on my attention? If I were indeed her mother, and if I were to answer, what would she want me to say?
Why did I call her? I’d be hard-pressed to explain my behavior, even if you put me on the witness stand and I swore to tell the truth. Which I’d take seriously, as my civic duty, and not because I think there is a God to help me.
We all want to satisfy our curiosity, and the little voice that tells us it’s wrong to peep and pry is one trained into us from childhood, and nothing natural about it. We will all satisfy our curiosity when we can, which is any time we think no one will catch us.
The phone rang for the last time at midnight, but I can’t sleep. I just lie here, waiting for it to come again and break the silence.
Mountains
Suspended animation. That was her condition. And then the phone call woke her up. It’s not particularly rational to feel that way, Zoe knows that. And it certainly wasn’t rational to call back so many times. Sometimes Zoe is glad she has no friends, as she’d hate for anyone to be paying attention to some of the shit she does. It could’ve been a wrong number. But then wouldn’t the person have just said so when she called back? Instead of breathing in a frightened way and refusing to speak? There was too much weirdness for a simple mistake. Also in favor of Zoe’s theory is the pure clarifying conviction she feels. In the grip of it she couldn’t stop herself from calling again and again.
There you have it, folks. Zoe’s private, personal craziness, from which she’s spared you, her resolute unfriendliness a kind of martyrdom. Even without evidence, she is certain that it was her mother who called. Her mother has never tried to contact her before, not since Zoe moved in with her grandmother in the wake of her father’s death. After Zoe went to the police, she heard nothing from her mother. No accusations, no self-defense. No apologies. She saw her only the time when she and her grandmother came by to see Milo. Then her mother and Milo vanished.