Byrd Read online

  “You’re not old,” she says. “You’re middle-aged.”

  He takes classes called Introduction to Slots, Money Validation, Applications of Electricity, Slot Mechanics, Slot Electronics, Slot Microprocessors, and Troubleshooting. After six months, he gets a certificate. Elle frames it for him. She is trying to be happy.

  One night while she’s in the bedroom getting dressed for work, Roland walks up behind her and wraps his arms around her waist. They look at each other in the mirror. “You look good,” he tells her. Her skin is smooth and clear. Her hair is a single color now—a blond so pale it looks ivory, like a wedding gown—and she’s let it grow longer and she uses a lotion that makes it curly.

  “I do what I can,” she says.

  “You know,” he says, “things are going to be different this time.”

  She pets his arm. She wants to believe him. But besides having him back, and living in the duplex, not much has changed. She still spends her nights cocktailing, her mornings at her machine, her afternoons sleeping. Her aunt keeps Dusty after school and Roland picks him up in the evening. When they come home, Elle gets out of bed and cooks supper and they eat at the coffee table so that Roland can watch Wonder Years reruns on TV, the show that opens with Joe Cocker singing “With a Little Help from my Friends.”

  “Those were my years,” Roland tells Dusty.

  She slides her hands up and down the sides of her machine, where the brass plating has worn off. She closes her eyes and pictures her mystery man with his slicked-back hair. “Talk to me,” she says. “Talk to me.”

  The wind in Nevada is full of grit. Gold dust, Roland calls it.

  He lands a day job at a casino in Sparks. Every night he comes home with the casino smell—smoke, grease, stale cologne. Elle has it too, though she never knew until she smelled it on Roland. Sometimes when they lie in bed together she can’t tell his skin from hers.

  The duplex is small and looks dirty even when it’s clean. The sink clogs, the toilet backs up. Things break. One morning while Roland is showering, the nozzle flies off and hits him on the head.

  They talk about saving for a house. They’re both making decent money. Roland is over his cocaine habit—he quit cold turkey soon after Elle and Dusty left him—and he’s been turning over his paycheck so that he can’t ruin their finances again. He has turned everything over to Elle so that whatever happens this time can’t be his fault.

  Every day on her way home, Elle stops in the post office and collects the mail—bills, advertisements, bank statements. She knows how close to broke they are, but she doesn’t tell Roland. She doesn’t want him to know how much she’s investing in her machine.

  She needs to win. And not just for the money. For her, winning has never been about money.

  Dusty’s new teacher invites Elle and Roland to a parent-teacher conference. Roland takes the morning off, and he and Elle drive to the school together.

  Dusty’s teacher, Miss Sink, is younger than most of the waitresses where Elle works, with cleavage showing between the lapels of her dress. Roland looks her up and down. Elle knows what he’s thinking. I used to be a musician. There was a time when you would’ve stood in line to fuck me.

  “Dusty’s speech has improved dramatically,” Miss Sink says, her own enunciation so precise she sounds like she’s chewing the words. “He’s doing well in all his subjects. But we’re having a little problem with his conduct. He passes notes in class.” She hands Elle a page from Dusty’s memo pad. On it is a drawing of a skunk, very lifelike, except the skunk has Miss Sink’s face—her wide eyes, her clotted eyelashes, her snub nose, her pursed mouth. Under the picture is a caption: “Miss Stink.”

  Roland studies the picture. “This is good. Where’d he learn to draw like this?”

  Miss Sink tugs at her dress as if it’s suddenly too tight. “If this were Dusty’s only drawing,” she says, sniffing, “I wouldn’t have called you in. But he constantly disrupts the class with his notes. I had to confiscate his pad.”

  “He needs his pad,” Elle says, even though all she has to do is buy him another one. Fifty-nine cents. “It’s like a body part.”

  “Then he needs to learn to use it responsibly.”

  “We’ll talk to him,” Roland says. He puts his hand on Elle’s back.

  “That’s all I’m asking,” Miss Sink says.

  She escorts them to the classroom door and thanks them for coming. Elle pulls the door shut behind them, harder than she means to, hard enough to rattle the glass pane. She can’t believe she just gave up a morning at her machine for this.

  One evening when she is alone with Dusty, she asks him, “Would you like a little brother?”

  He is sitting on the floor, drawing. He doesn’t look up. “Not little,” he says. “Big.”

  Of course, Elle thinks. A big brother could take care of him, teach him things. Rescue him from his parents. From a mother who tries too hard to love him, and a father who tries too hard to love his mother.

  Elle has promised to take Roland and Dusty fishing. She buys them rods and reels. She packs a cooler with cheese sandwiches and navel oranges and water bottles. Dusty fills his CD notebook, Elle fills the car with gas, and the three of them head north on Highway 445, toward Pyramid Lake. The road is empty, the desert huge and pale.

  “This is where my parents died,” Elle says, more to herself than anyone else. “Somewhere out here.” There is no white cross to mark the place where her parents’ car burned.

  “What’s it like to die?” Dusty asks from the back seat.

  Roland says over his shoulder, “You’re too young to worry about dying, buddy. Let’s listen to some tunes. What’d you bring?”

  “When people die,” Dusty says, “they leave and don’t come back.”

  “Did you bring any Ry Cooder?”

  “Honey,” Elle says, “nobody knows what it’s like to die.” She watches Dusty in the rearview mirror. He is flipping through his CDs, his face blank, innocent.

  When her parents died, her uncle told her their time had come. She wonders if that’s true, if people carry their deaths inside them like flowers that know when to bloom.

  “Death,” Roland says in the loud, sure voice he uses when he doesn’t know what he’s talking about, “is like the desert.” He points out the window. “Like this. A whole lot of nothing, forever.”

  Pyramid Lake belongs to the Paiute Indians.

  According to legend, a man from the Paiute tribe traveled to the California coast where he fell in love with a “woman of the sea”—a mermaid, whom he was forbidden to marry. But he married her anyway, in secret, and took her home with him. They had clear weather for the first part of the journey, but when they crossed the mountains at Tahoe, it began to rain. Rain came down in torrents. It followed the couple through the Truckee meadows, all the way to what is now Pyramid Lake.

  The mermaid could not bear children, so—the legend goes—she stole babies from the Paiute women and took them to live with her in the lake. You can hear them even now, the Indians say: high, gurgly sounds that can’t be explained by the wind or any force of nature except the spirits of the stolen babies, crying for their mothers.

  Elle’s mother claimed she’d once heard the water babies. She was visiting a friend who lived by the lake, and one afternoon she and her friend heard small voices crying and water splashing. They followed the sounds to the lake and looked all around, but there was no one. In every direction, the lake—bright blue, a mirror of the sky—was empty. As soon as they realized what they must be hearing, they closed their eyes. “Bad things happen if you see them,” Elle’s mother said.

  Elle and Dusty and Roland fish from the dock at Pelican Beach. Dusty drops his line into shallow water and catches a small suckerfish, which Elle makes him throw back. First, though, he stoops down and pets the fish. “Good-bye, sucker,” he says. The words come out perfectly.

  Elle and Roland look at each other and laugh. Elle can’t remember when they last laug
hed at the same time for the same reason.

  In the summer there are wildfires in the desert. The sky rains ashes.

  The heat in the grocery store parking lot is brutal, but inside, the store is an oasis—cool and clean as a hospital, with wide aisles and fluorescent lights and waxy green-and-white checkered floors. Elle lets Dusty push the cart. He reads the grocery list aloud and she picks items off the shelves. This is good practice for him. He can pronounce all the words, but he still has trouble controlling his volume and sometimes sounds like a broadcaster.

  “PANCAKE MIX!” “APPLESAUCE!”

  “That’s good, honey,” Elle says, ignoring the people who stare.

  In the frozen food section, Dusty sneaks a box of ice cream sandwiches into the cart. Elle pretends not to notice. This is a game they play every week.

  They find the shortest checkout line and Dusty arranges their groceries on the conveyor while Elle sorts her coupons. The cashier calls out the total, Elle writes a check, and the cashier feeds it into her computer. After a few seconds, a message appears on the screen. The cashier calls for her manager, a man so young he still has pimples.

  “I’m sorry, ma’am,” he says to Elle. “We’ll need another form of payment.”

  Elle pulls out a card.

  “Not an ATM card,” he says. “Cash or credit.”

  Elle fishes through her purse. She takes out her credit card and tries swiping it. The card is declined.

  “What would you like to do?” the manager asks. “Is there someone you can call?” His voice sounds like it might break if he’s forced to keep talking.

  Glorified bag boy, Elle thinks. “I’d like to talk to your supervisor,” she says.

  “I’m sorry, ma’am. I’m the only manager on duty. We can hold your items for a few minutes if you like.”

  People are lining up. The conveyor is already loaded with the next person’s groceries.

  Dusty is at the end of the counter, rattling through the bags in their cart. He digs out his box of ice cream sandwiches. “I’ll put these back,” he offers.

  “It’s okay, honey,” Elle says. “It’s not your fault. Put your ice cream down and let’s go.” She grabs his hand and marches him out of the store, leaving their groceries behind.

  Outside, the air feels like fire. Ashes have coated the car.

  Elle wasn’t allowed to see her parents after they burned. She had to imagine their bodies. The image, stronger than a memory, still sickens and fascinates her. She wonders what her own death will look like. If it’s taking shape in her even now.

  She puts her key in the ignition, turns on the windshield wipers, pushes the washer button, and the ashes on the glass turn to mud.

  III.

  Missing

  Other Mothers’ Sons

  Addie is paying the cashier, not paying attention to her groceries, and the bagger hands them to a young boy who’s loitering at the end of the checkout aisle. “He isn’t mine,” Addie says, though looking at the boy, she realizes he could be. Dark haired, dark eyed. He even dresses like Roland used to, in a collared shirt and corduroy pants. He’s clumsy like Roland, too, and spills one of her bags when he sets it down.

  “Uh-oh,” Addie says in the singsong voice she uses with children.

  The boy blushes and runs to his mother, who is in line behind Addie. Addie tries smiling at him, her most reassuring smile, but the boy doesn’t smile back. He burrows under his mother’s arm, hiding.

  “Do you need a hand with these?” The bagger has repacked her spilled groceries.

  “Thanks,” Addie says, still smiling uselessly. “I think I can manage.”

  She can’t help talking to them, all the boys who could be Byrd; she can’t help wanting to know them. What do they like to read, what are their favorite subjects in school? Do they play sports? How old are they? When’s their birthday? They give clipped, offhand answers. Sometimes their mothers are gracious and encourage them to talk. Some mothers tilt their heads, sorry for Addie. Some are nervous and possessive, moving closer to their sons, owning them.

  Addie takes nothing personally. They’re just acting on instinct, like her.

  Dear Byrd,

  Say I looked for you. Say I found you. What then? You belong to someone else.

  The Internet lists a local group with an acronym that, if you saw it on a license plate, you would read as “trouble.” Or “turble,” the way some people say “terrible.” You wouldn’t think Triangle Region Birthparents Liaison. She calls the number, and a woman picks up on the first ring. Dotty Waters, her voice chirpy and hopeful.

  Dotty’s organization—“Tribble,” she pronounces it, like something you’d wipe off a baby’s chin—has had “phenomenal success” connecting parents with their children, “which as you know,” Dotty says, “is not an easy thing to do in this backwards state. In North Carolina, two grown people who want to meet each other can’t.” Dotty started by finding her own daughter, then helped a friend find her child, then decided to open her own voluntary registry.

  In the background Addie can hear a television. Every now and then Dotty stops talking to make clucking noises—at a dog or a cat maybe, or a caged bird.

  “If you’re ready,” Dotty says, “we’ll get you registered and start to work on your reunion. Let’s start with your son’s date of birth.”

  “The fourteenth of September, nineteen eighty-nine,” Addie says. “But I’m not interested in a reunion. I just want to locate him.” She uses that word, “locate,” because it sounds unintrusive, like something one does from a safe distance.

  “Oh, sweetie,” Dotty says, deflating. “I’m so sorry. He’s only ten. There’s nothing we can do yet.”

  “I’m not trying to meet him. That’s what I’m telling you. I just want to know where he is. I want to know he’s okay.”

  “This is only a registry, sweetie. We don’t do investigations.”

  “I need an investigator?”

  “No. Not yet. There’s nothing an investigator can do until your son turns eighteen. Which is not to say there aren’t people out there willing to take your money. All those guys listed in the yellow pages? Retired cops. Oh, sure, they know a few tricks, but they don’t know a thing about adoption. They’ll be just as lost as you are.” She clucks again and says sharply, “Down!”

  Addie checks the yellow pages anyway, out of curiosity, and calls the first investigator listed. He admits that this particular kind of search is outside the scope of his experience, but says he’d like an opportunity to try.

  “So how would you go about it?” Addie asks. “Specifically? I mean, you can’t unseal the records.”

  “No, ma’am. I would generate a list of candidates using all available information. Then I would use investigative techniques developed over my career to narrow the list. I have a national network of retired law enforcement investigators. I have contacts in every state. If we need to look in Texas, for example, I have contacts.”

  “Texas.”

  “Just a for-instance. Of course, we’d start in state. It’s entirely possible your son is living close by.”

  “I’ve heard of that happening,” Addie says. “Parents and children seeing each other without knowing it.”

  He has no idea how long the search will take. A retainer of two thousand dollars should be enough to get him started.

  “I don’t want to give false hope, ma’am,” he says, “but it’s entirely possible we’ll get lucky.”

  “Thanks,” Addie says. “But I don’t have two thousand dollars’ worth of luck.”

  Warren Finch is still in Greensboro, still living in his mother’s house. Still wearing his big wristwatch, his plaid clothes.

  “Your timing coming here today is very interesting,” he tells Addie. He is holding a book the size of an unabridged dictionary, The American Ephemeris of the Twentieth Century. “Because of the transit of Uranus”—he pronounces it your-ann-us—“both you and the child are undergoing huge revolutions. For y
ou, this is a time for expansiveness, for taking action, taking risks.”

  They are sitting in Warren’s mother’s rickety chairs, Warren with his giant book in his lap, fumbling through the pages. The house smells the way Addie remembers, like incense and cat litter, though she has never seen a cat.

  “There’s a karmic relationship between your chart and the child’s, a reverse nodal situation. This suggests that early in the child’s life you created a sense of unpredictability for him.”

  “Which we know,” Addie says.

  Warren glances up, his chair teetering slightly. “The child,” he continues, “has entered a volatile emotional period in which he feels himself at the mercy of mysteries that date back to infancy. His family and surroundings feel insecure and unpredictable. And this is just the beginning. A longer-term life change is underway. There’s a lot of conservative energy in his chart—he’s a Virgo with three planets in Capricorn—so the part of him that wants safety and structure is feeling out of control. He could overreact, develop somatic problems because he’s trying so hard to figure everything out during a period that calls for a different kind of response.”

  He closes his book, waits for her to talk.

  She has nothing to say. She can’t even look at Warren. She looks at the pictures of Buddha taped to his wall. Most of the Buddhas are seated in the lotus position, hands in their laps, fingers lightly touching. One is standing with both hands raised. He is laughing, but not serenely. He looks deranged.

  “I’m sorry,” Warren says. “Would you like a cup of tea? I forgot to offer.”

  Does he do this on purpose? Addie wonders. Upset her just to have the chance to comfort her?

  “I’m fine,” she says, and tears a check out of her checkbook.