The Missing Person by Alix Ohlin Page A

sighed. Nobody seemed to care that he wasn’t around, except for my mother and me. I felt annoyed, and concerned, and lonely—whenever I came home, Wylie was supposed to be there—and tired from the combination of it all. “I’m worried about him,” I said to Irina.
    She shrugged and ran a gentle finger under Psyche’s fat sleeping chin. “Why? I think he is happy enough.”
    â€œHappy enough? That’s not exactly a ringing endorsement.”
    â€œIt is probably more than most people can say.”
    I didn’t answer this statement, which struck me as true. We made another turn and walked back toward Wylie’s apartment. Ahead of us, a group of people was coming down the stairs of his complex. One of them stopped and blew his nose in a visible spray over the street. “That was no dog,” his friend was saying. “It was a goat!” Then they all got onto bicycles and rode away.
    I went back inside, hoping against all realistic hope that Wylie would be there, waiting for me and ready to talk. But the apartment was empty, and he wasn’t.

Four
    Life at my mother’s house settled into a shaky routine, the tenuous reestablishment of an adult child come back home. It didn’t feel right, but it didn’t feel exactly wrong, either. In the mornings as I slept my mother left me notes, assigning me various chores—defrost the fridge, take out the trash—that I consistently ignored. She came and went day and night, to work and to go bowling or to the movies with David Michaelson, like some roommate I’d found through a classified ad. Neither of us mentioned his wife.
    Daytime television kept me sane. During the long, bright days I closed the curtains and lay on the couch, eating ice cream and learning about celebrities’ drug recovery programs, also their wedding plans, decorating styles, and diets. Sometimes I fell asleep to the Weather Channel, the calm swaths of cold fronts in the Rockies, the monotony of drought in the Southwest.
    One evening, when my mother came home from work, I turned off the television and brought out Eva Kent’s two paintings.
    â€œWere you going through my room?” she asked.
    â€œSorry,” I said quickly. “I just wanted to see some of the old things again.”
    She shrugged. “I don’t care for those paintings.”
    â€œI like them. I think they’re pretty good, actually.”
    We both glanced at the paintings—I’d set them against the living-room wall—as if they might have something to contribute to the conversation.
    My mother raised one eyebrow, briefly. I could tell she put stock in my judgment, even though it contradicted her own, which was touching, if probably a mistake.
    â€œWell,” she said, “you would know.”
    â€œWhere did they come from?”
    â€œOh, your father came home with them one day. My birthday present, I think.”
    I was surprised to hear this, and couldn’t remember it happening. Then again, if he’d given them to her around the time they were painted, I would’ve been a baby. Still, my father always gave abstract and wildly impersonal presents: board games, magazine subscriptions, T-shirts. The popularization of the gift certificate was the best thing that ever happened to him, birthday-wise.
    â€œProbably his secretary picked them out for him,” she went on. “I hated them all along, to be honest with you. Those naked, unhappy-looking people. And what’s happening in that second painting, with the woman lying on the man’s lap? I don’t even want to know. But I didn’t want to hurt your father’s feelings, so up they went.”
    â€œDo you know anything about her? Eva Kent, I mean.”
    She studied my face for a moment. “The artist? Why are you so interested in her all of a sudden? You never showed one bit of interest in those paintings before.”
    â€œI have more