*
In open spaces people begin to think about the world of possibilities, about things that might happen that they couldn’t have foreseen: possibly our daughter will grow up to be president, possibly swords will be beaten into plowshares, possibly we will all climb into spaceships and go live on the moon. The substance of things hoped for, an endless open field. But there’s another region in that realm, and it’s actually the biggest spot on the map: that place in which none of this will happen at all, and everything instead will remain exactly as it is—quiet, unremarkable, well ordered and well lit, just exactly enough of everything for the people within its boundaries. A little drab from the outside, maybe: slow, or plain. But who, outside, will ever see it, or learn the subtleties of its textures, the specific tensions of its warp and weft? You have to get inside to see anything worth seeing, you have to listen long enough to hear the music. Or possibly that’s a thing you just tell yourself when it becomes clear you won’t be leaving. Sometimes that seems more likely. It’s hard to say for sure.
Irene was up before everybody else. She had gone out to the street while it was still dark. Friday dinner had been fine: taco casserole; Lisa and Peter both loved it and said so. Lisa related the story of Bedknobs and Broomsticks excitedly for her father, entirely in the present tense, scene by scene: “And then they fly to an island on the flying bed, and they get to meet the King, and play soccer with him. But then they trick him and take the star necklace because they need it for the final spell. So he gets super mad and comes running, but Miss Price turns him into a rabbit and he hops away and they fly back home, but when they get there, the star is gone!” Irene watched Peter while he listened to their daughter, saw how attentive he was. The story of the movie went on until almost bedtime.
Every quiet house is different. Sometimes this one felt like it didn’t have enough air in it. She woke up a little after four, her mind wholly awake; it was Saturday. She lay in the dark for as long as she could stand it. She kept seeing the smile on the face of Lisa in the brown dress, Lisa from somewhere in Michigan now standing in front of an aging movie palace in Omaha. Irene was attempting to square that smile with the God talk and the end-times message-making—there was a through line to draw somewhere, a path, however long and wandering. But there were only the two coordinates. In the quiet of the dark, she considered these as they might appear superimposed on a map of someone else’s life: anybody’s. Peter’s, for example—the traces of fatigue at the corners of his eyes while he listened with visible pleasure to Lisa at the dinner table. The fatigue traced one arc, the pleasure another; they were impossible to hide. Place to place to place. Tama to Crescent. Where was the young woman who’d gone off to Ottumwa Heights College in 1957? Hiding around here somewhere: she has to be. People don’t just go missing. She got up, dressed quickly, and slipped out through the front door.
It was very dark; she’d turned on the porch light, but her restlessness extended as far as the steps leading down to the bricked walkway. She had her yellow cardigan on. She loved it even though it made her feel her age: she was thirty-five. Thirty-five is not old, but it can feel old.
She fumbled in her pockets, but there was nothing in them: she’d emptied them into the anything drawer when she got home. We are called as witnesses. The horizon began rippling with hints of the earliest blackish purple. There are witnesses to weddings, but also to crimes; it was a word that led to a number of places, she thought. The world apprehends it not. She wished Peter harbored a little more natural curiosity about church, just a little interest, but he mainly worried about whether there was enough money: “To keep this whole operation afloat!” he’d said once in his joking manner, never wanting to make anyone worry. But Irene, despite herself, had not been able to forestall a vision of their whole operation as a vessel losing its buoyancy, their modest ranch house sinking into the earth, rain gutters filling with dirt and then breaking away from the frame, the dirt covering all, the house and everybody who lived inside it, the noise and the squall and the panic all resolving into a patch of untilled ground that betrayed no hint of the life that had once gone on above it.