In most lives, in most places, people go missing. This isn’t as true as it was in a less connected age; people see more of their high school classmates on Facebook every day than they previously would have in their entire lives after graduation. Lonely husbands or wives form secondary accounts to keep track of lost loves and secret prospects; short of catastrophe, these points of contact never wholly erode. They may go ignored for months or years, but they crackle away in the cables, never wholly out of reach.
In Iowa we had a head start on this whole process, because when we gather on the Fourth of July or at Christmas, we find joy in tracing movements. The habit travels with us; whether we end up moving to Worthington or Owatonna or to the Black Hills in South Dakota, we maintain keen interest in what became of whom, whether we knew them well or not. If somebody in upper management at Mahindra got to talking with Mike about smallmouth bass at the annual expo in Des Moines and ended up offering him a package with better benefits, then that was how Mike and his family ended up in Troy: we may never see Troy with our own eyes, but we’ll know where Mike and the kids are all the same. Bill went back to Ashton. Oh, is that right? Yes, he never warmed up to Storm Lake, he feels more at home when he’s near where the folks used to live. Yes, that’s what Davy said, too; well, but he goes by Dave now, I think he only ever spent two years outside of Urbandale in his life. From Ashton to Bangkok to Spirit Lake to Ventura, and onward, to points further west beyond the imagination, we keep track of our own. It would feel like putting on airs to call it our passion, but it’s hard to know what else to call it. It’s sufficient work until it comes time to part ways, which we always must do, too soon sometimes.
Did anybody ever hear from Stephanie? Yes, she’s teaching again; she was in Ames for a while at Fellows Elementary, they say she had a gift with the special needs kids, but she’s not there any more, I don’t think, when I saw her at the Wheatsfield Grocery she said she still missed Chicago. Just recently? No, it was a while back, Ezra was working the counter, he looks so different from when he was young and still limps a little from the accident. Do his parents still farm? Yes, his father will still be hauling beans to the Farmer’s Exchange in that antique tractor with the cart behind it until he’s ninety-three, it’s all he knows how to do. But didn’t Ezra go off to school in Nebraska? Well, sure, but how’s he going to just turn around and be a Big Red guy for the rest of his life, everybody knew he’d be back. You know that nice secretary friend of Steve Heldt’s was a Cornhusker, though. She came to visit in the hospital. But Steve never remarried, did he? No, it didn’t work out, I guess. He says they still get dinner sometimes, though. I think it’s nice.
It’s not that nobody ever gets away: that’s not true. It’s that you carry it with you. It doesn’t matter that the days roll on like hills too low to give names to; they might be of use later, so you keep them. You replay them to keep their memory alive. It feels worthwhile because it is.
*
What will you do now? Lisa asks Sarah Jane, off camera.
I guess I’ll just go back home, Sarah Jane replies.
You were putting the house up for sale, says Lisa.
No serious buyers, says Sarah Jane. The agent says it could take months.
Lisa’s throat convulses when she tries to stifle her sobs. Sarah Jane’s face, in the frame, shows compassion, empathy, and hurt. Her time with Lisa will seem like a strange dream of middle age in later years: some people take their savings and travel to Europe when they feel restless, but it costs so much to travel, certainly more than the monthly income from a single video rental store.
It’ll be all right, she says. We’ll both be all right. She reaches out with her right hand, but Lisa does not reach out to take it.
Lisa’s voice is desperate, lost.
Thank you for trying to help, she says.
Of course, says Sarah Jane, rising, walking with her arms open toward the tripod and then past it. If you look close you can see from the gentleness of her stride that she would have made a good mother.
The copy of Burnt Offerings onto which this scene was transferred is at the Goodwill in Ames next to the Hy-Vee on Lincoln Way. It was left there in the late summer of 2002. It sits on a shelf now next to several dozen other movies like it, back near the books; it’s an early VHS, housed in an oversized black plastic shell that’s grown old and is cracking along the edge. No one is ever going to take it home and watch it. It will probably be there forever.
*
There was no RV park in Tama; the nearest one was Shady Oaks, in Marshalltown, and people who parked there had no need to venture further than a highway stop for supplies. So Lisa was surprised to see the Greener Pastures coming, advancing steadily down the street. She stood at her window on the second floor and she watched; she couldn’t make out the faces of the people inside, but she could imagine them, how they probably looked. The vehicle itself, in the slow pace of the straight line it followed and the cheery tan and yellow of its camper shell, appeared like a seeker after something, certain of its quest but unsure of the path.
Inside the cab they were still arguing. “What exactly are you going to say?” Abby asked for the third time since leaving Collins.