“I’ll figure it out,” said James. “I figured out Jeremy Heldt.”
“I don’t know what you figured out,” Abby said. “He told you to leave him alone.”
“He knew where she was,” James said, and though his timing was in their usual fraternal block-and-parry mode, his tone was soft, nurturing. He was guarding something, Abby wasn’t sure what. “That’s the giveaway.”
“He told you not to come here,” she said.
“And then he copied and pasted the address from someplace on his hard drive right into the e-mail.”
“It’s right up there,” Ed said from behind the wheel, pointing. They all looked at the house: it was in a nice neighborhood, full of houses that had been built long ago, more ornately decorated than the farmsteads outside Collins or the red-brick duplexes that lined the new streets of Nevada. This one was yellow with brown trim.
“I wouldn’t trade the farmhouse for this,” Abby said. “I don’t know what’s wrong with people.” She looked through the passenger’s-side window of her father’s RV with her brow knitted, scrutinizing the little yellow house like something excavated from an archaeological dig. I wished I could have made it last forever: the great hulking machine drawing up to the curb, parking so slowly, not wanting to scrape up the hubcaps, aligning itself and then correcting the angle and finally coming to a stop; the young woman looking out the window, fixing her gaze; and then the whole family, spilling out into the daylight like moles from a hill blasted open, blinking in the bright sun, looking expectantly toward my front porch and then upward to where I stood, happy to have company, smiling and waving like a little girl.
From the window, I couldn’t hear what they were saying, of course, but I could see their lips moving. As a child I developed a habit of watching people’s mouths when they spoke. In restaurants, for example, with too much ambient noise to make out the words without some visual cue, my father busy with the menu, keeping his idle inventory of which towns called them hotcakes and which ones held firm at pancakes; but my eye would be on the old woman with her grown-up son two tables away, her eyebrows rising a little as she tried not to telegraph her worry. You should get a vacation, she was saying, I was sure of it. You can’t miss a word like vacation.
Our lives, of course, were in some ways like a vacation that never ended; Dad would find work at the local bank and diligently put in his forty hours, but as soon as he picked me up from school we’d be off on our expeditions: to the shelters, to the hospitals, to the college campuses and the storefront churches. When the options were all exhausted we’d just move on; there are banks everywhere, and if the bank didn’t need another accountant, the grain elevator might, or the hog lot, or the fish hatchery.
Wisconsin was where we stopped heading east: we’d spent time in Missouri, and in Kansas, and in Colorado and South Dakota. From there we’d tried Minnesota; Dad had word that the group was active around St. Paul. But Mom wasn’t in St. Paul, and she wasn’t in Rochester, and while Madison had looked promising—so many Jesus people on the college campuses back then, their feet bare in spring, long hair down to the middle of their backs—the trail had grown cold.
We stayed several years. I was young, but I’d already lived in so many places. Even as a very young girl, I’d known enough to say I was from Tama; it set me apart. Most of my friends had been born across the river at the big hospital in Omaha. They never treated me like an outsider, but I felt like one, a little.
Pulled along by Dad in his doomed pursuit of the stability he’d lost, I took this outside feeling with me; it accompanied me everywhere I went. I came to resent it. Wherever we were, it seemed, everybody else was local. Not me, not Lisa. There was a newness to every place that never wholly went away. It got worse every time we pulled up roots.