“You would have stopped me.” Her mouth forms a loose grin she can’t help. It shape-shifts into apology.
I deny this. “Maybe. I’d like to be involved, though. How will we go back to the cave now that a bunch of police are swarming the area?”
Julie’s face flashes between regret and indifference. “We can still hike up there. Maybe the police can tell us more about what’s going on in the cave. They must know about it already, or if not, they should. Maybe this will help us make some progress.”
“You think they’re going to share what they find with us? You have a lot more trust in law enforcement than I do, I guess.”
Julie winces. She has never had a run-in with the law. She has never been targeted because of her looks. She has never felt betrayed by a lack of action. To her, calling the police is the right thing to do. She doesn’t question it.
I hug her. I apologize. This is the Julie I love. She tries to solve every issue immediately. She calls her clients to tell them the problem will be fixed before they even know it exists. She is always a step ahead. I know waiting even this long to call the police or to return to the cave herself has required a gargantuan patience of her.
“But you’d like some answers, too, right? That’s what you said. It’s not just me?”
“Yes,” I admit. “But I don’t know if I can trust the answers coming from someone else. I want to find our own.”
“And if that’s not possible?”
“Then maybe I can live with the questions.”
51
THE POLICE GIVE some of Rolf’s bedsheets to a hound. It turns up nothing. A day later, a neighborhood dog returns home with the last two joints of a pinkie. The dog’s owners call the police. The process starts again. The hound hunts through the woods. It finds a patch of matted blood and protein left behind in a hollowed tree trunk, covered in insects. The police set up lights inside the tree to photograph the clump of evidence. They move carefully around the area looking for clues. If it were a case of Rolf’s having been disoriented or drunk, they’d have found him by now. If he’d been attacked by a dog or another animal, they’d have found him. They would have found him in his house or at a hospital or sprawled somewhere in the woods. All they find, though, are these meager traces.
We knock on the window of the car and the plainclothes detectives who never leave our street now listen to our questions. “Seems like Mr. Kinsler doesn’t want us to find him,” they say. We ask them if they need anything: drinks or snacks or a clean bathroom.
The police think in pictures. They think of guns and rope and wire and knives. None of this can be determined with so little evidence. They reenter the man’s home. It presents a smell and suggestion of its own. This man had worked his way to the bottom of his quality of living: a slump.
52
I SIT SOLID, hands in my lap, head down, as the sorrow wraps itself tighter around me. If they find Rolf, it won’t be a solution so much as a red herring. The questions we ask are breeding. It’s hard to focus on just one. My hope dips again. My mood sketches itself on the wall in primitive, toothy grins, as James tries to draw me out of myself, but I am reluctant to go. I am accustomed to being prepared and solving problems. I am starting to think this mess will not transform into memory. I feel envy for people with ordinary lives. My analytical mind ties itself in knots trying to reason through our situation, almost as if trying to understand what’s happening is making it worse.
I hear something below James and me, something like a thump and a creak. A muffled thud and then the slide of metal against metal. “Did you hear that?”
James pours cereal into a bowl. “This?”
“No, something downstairs, like furniture being moved or a hinge flexing.”
“Do you want me to take a look?”
I don’t want him to put himself in danger, but I want to know. “Yes.”
I listen to him open the door to the basement and head down the stairs. I brace myself for the sounds of a struggle or a scream. I hear another creak and then his footsteps are climbing again. The door to the basement closes and James enters the room. “I think that metal cabinet down there needs a new handle and maybe a new shelf. The door was open and some of the stuff had fallen out. I put it back, but the door doesn’t properly close. I’m not sure it will hold.”
I can’t help but think about The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. I want to ask if James checked to see what was behind the cabinet, but I stop myself. “Stuff fell out of the cabinet on its own.” I don’t add a question mark to the sentence. I speak it like a fact. I try it out.
“Weirder things have happened.” James spoons cereal into his mouth.
“And they do, all around us, every day it seems.” I look into James’s cereal bowl, almost empty, all milk until a piece of wheat surfaces from nowhere and James captures it with his spoon and fits it into his still-full mouth.
“Julie, do you want to move?”
That is not a question I am expecting and I feel myself start to speak, but I am still on the ground and I would need to drift above myself to get the words out.
There are times when saying nothing means nothing, and then there are times when nothing holds an answer. Pathetic distractions pull James away from me, and he thinks my silence is without substance, but I think it means the world.
This house is sapping us, pulling out our cores. Our filthy roots expose themselves, but our faces are clean and wide. “Maybe we could stay somewhere else for a little while. Even a night or two,” I say. I am reluctant to give up my vigil. Staying seems like self-inflicted distress, but I also don’t believe I’d be able to leave for good. With all the financial gymnastics we’d have to perform, favors to ask, possible habits that could reawaken, the defeat of it feels larger than the threats we face if we stay. I know the bulk of the work will fall on me. I stare at the middle distance between those points.
James says, “Tell me when and where.”
Normally I flare at having a task to tackle, but today I wear down. I sag. I sully.
53
THE DETECTIVES KNOCK on our door this time. Some new questions have come up around Rolf’s disappearance. The minutes feel smooth when they are out of our control.
The officers settle themselves. Julie brings us all cups of coffee. “I’m so sorry,” I say. “I don’t remember your names.”
“O’Neill and Poremski,” the taller detective says pointing first to himself and then his partner. He’s the only one who ever talks. “How well do you know Rolf Kinsler?”
I’ve told Julie not to say too much. Risk wraps all of our stories.