The Missing Person by Alix Ohlin Page B

training now,” I said. “I, um, know things.”
    This shut her up. “Well, I’m sorry I can’t tell you more.” Then she went into the kitchen and changed the subject. “What about Wylie? Have you made any progress on figuring out where he is?”
    â€œWell,” I said, and sighed. “I’ve decided that progress is a lie.”
    She came out of the kitchen to pick up my ice-cream bowl and carry it back in there, a gesture I interpreted as laden with reproach.
    â€œDon’t do that, I’ll take care of it.”
    â€œYou will?” she said.
    â€œEventually.”
    She picked the bowl up anyway, and I followed her to the sink, where she started scrubbing away as if at years of accumulated dirt. Still in her work clothes, a navy-blue skirt and a light-blue blouse with short sleeves, she looked like the head attendant on an exhausting flight. The flesh of her arms bounced and shook a little as she washed.
    I opened the fridge and took out a bottle of beer.
    â€œLynnie,” she said.
    â€œThe thing is, Mom, if you’re so desperate to find Wylie, why don’t you look for him yourself?”
    She set the bowl gently in the drainer and turned around, water from the sink stretching across her abdomen, like a smile or a scar. “Do you think I haven’t?” she said.
    So in the morning I set off again in the Caprice, the radio turned up loud, and drove through the sun-addled streets. The city looked criminal: dust blew across the windshield, men leered at me from corners and from behind the wheels of their pickups, working girls paced beneath the bleached neon signs of fleabag motels. The Sandias were brown in the distance. The houses were brown. The highways were brown. Everything was brown. The car’s wheezing air-conditioning blew a stream of tepid air over my right shoulder. I was sweating and cursing by the time I pulled up at Wylie’s place.
    No one answered my knock. I sat down in a slice of shade on the landing outside his door and waited for someone to come back. A stray dog ambled down the block, head down, marking its territory here and there in the brown lawns. In this neighborhood dirt and weeds were fighting a winning battle against all grass. The dog lifted its head, sniffed the air, and looked at me.
    When we were kids Wylie and I had a dog named Sycamore—Syc for short, which my parents thought was funny— that we took on hikes in the Sandias with my father. Hiking was our main activity together. During the week he got home too late for us to see him much, but on Saturdays or Sundays my mother would send the three of us packing so she could clean up or chat with her friends or talk to her mother on the phone. My father always wore the same thing, brown shorts and those too-high socks and a broad-brimmed hat, and he almost always took us on the same trail. It led to a cave, where we ate a lunch he’d carried for us in his knapsack. Sometimes he invited a friend, another scientist from work, and they’d walk too fast, talking shop and ignoring me and Wylie until we turned on each other and had to be yelled at. Other times, though, alone, he’d talk about his own childhood in Chicago, a place that sounded dramatic and foreign to me, with snowdrifts higher than I was and hot dogs as long as my arm. For years I dreamed about going there in winter to skate on the streets to my father’s school, the way he’d done when he was a kid.
    On one of our hikes, Syc came bounding back onto the trail, his tail wagging like crazy, with something in his mouth. My father bent down, sweat loosening his glasses from the bridge of his nose, and said his name softly. Syc just stood there, wagging. My father gently pried his jaws apart and a pale-gray rabbit dropped onto the ground, shiny ropes of dog saliva coating his fur. Wylie and I stood there looking at it. Then my father put the rabbit behind a tree and shooed Syc away.