Close Encounters Read online

  Audrey stayed on. But I worried about her, nonetheless. When she was on her cell phone, was she really ordering my French brie truffles, or was she lining up a job with America’s craft lady, Betsy Boodie? Was she confirming my appointment with my past-life analyst or booking a one-way flight to Prague?

  I began to have night terrors. What would I do without Audrey, Audrey who updated my Blackberry and bought that cheap, non-organic bubble bath I like from the discount store, who repaired my broken heels and scraped the excess cream cheese from my bagels in green room?

  It was a temporary arrangement. Audrey was to sleep in my bed with me until I fell asleep. Bobo and Shnitzy didn’t like it, but what had they done for me lately, except shit in my Italian stilettos? She was to sleep in my bed at home, and we had adjoining hotel rooms on the road. And, she was only to use her cell phone from the Sprigg compound so that all calls could be monitored. This arrangement seemed to ward off the nightmares for awhile. That and the supple back massages I had Audrey give me. But what if she took off in the middle of the night, one black suitcase and a heart full of secrets?

  My publicist had begun to notice little blurbs about me in the tabloids. None of which were true, of course, but it meant the sharks were close. After that, Audrey was not authorized to have contact with anyone I didn’t personally know; all media contacts were cleared through me. I gave Audrey her messages at the end of the day, after I had thoroughly screened them, even if I created more work for myself. After all, she was certainly understanding about my fears of media preying on her vulnerable, wholesome mind. There was nothing I wouldn’t do for my precious Audrey.

  But a stronger message needed to be sent, I felt, about the importance of loyalty. The National Daily would begin floating six-figure checks for just a “tidbit” about my sexual escapades or my bitchiness or the way I told that stewardess where she could stick her implants, and the next thing you know, Audrey could sent those unfertilized eggs in her ovaries to college without ever having to give me another manicure on a flight to Paris.

  So I decided on the macaw. Who the hell likes birds, anyway? Audrey’s macaw, Wilma, drove me absolutely nuts. It stank, it talked constantly, and the feathered fucker would outlive me by twenty years or more, probably. I let Wilma out of her cage to graze on all manner of plants poisonous to parakeets in my atrium before she finally dropped dead in the exercise room. I scooped her up and dumped her back in her cage.

  I wish I had turned off the cameras in the atrium. Some disloyal employee must have snitched to Audrey about my grand plan. I tried to explain to Audrey that I felt sorry for Wilma, all caged up like that and everything, feigning ignorance of our conversation when Audrey moved in regarding Wilma’s need to remain caged at all times for her safety. I have a busy life, I pleaded to her, how am I supposed to remember what’s best for Wilma, for Christ’s sake? I impressed upon Audrey the fact that I had been so, so distracted by the re-emergence of my name in the tabloids—when I am distracted by such rumors, wherever they may come from, accidents tend to happen, understand Audrey?

  I offered to buy her a new bird, but Audrey began acting strangely. One morning during our appearance at the local animal shelter, she went ballistic and publicly accused me of killing Wilma, insisting that I was no friend to animals. After whisking her away to the Spriggs limo and heading back to the compound, I asked her why she wanted to ruin me over a simple mistake, when I had done so much for her, for her family?

  I was not prepared for what happened next. Audrey grabbed Snitzy, just returned from his daily brushing, and began snipping off his beautiful Shitzu coif. After calming his delicate sensitivies with some Russian caviar, I set out to give Audrey her walking papers.

  But she was gone. I had security comb her usual haunts, to no avail. Her family would not take my phone calls; my offers of increasing her salary were rebuffed. It was rumored that she was in therapy three times a week at some inpatient clinic in upstate New York.

  That seemed plausible. Clearly, Audrey was unstable. How she got past my exhaustive interview process is a mystery, but I have been assured by my human resources consultant that more stringent screening will be used in the future to weed out whackos like Audrey. Besides, Tiara Brooks has come crawling back to me for half her salary, after some ill-advised appearances on reality TV shows.

  But I still have her followed. Audrey, that is. Never mind that once she got out of the clinic she did little more than rent books on tape from the library and cry at public parks. I know one day when she’s homeless and needing money from the Dara Robinsons of Entertainment Today TV or the editors of Daily People that I’ll be there. And I’ll offer her the job back, at half salary. After all, being the assistant of Diana Spriggs, America’s housewife, should be reward enough, right? And I do offer dental.

  ALGORITHM

  MY MOTHER USED TO DRESS IN RED SHOES and yellow socks, or vice versa; not only that, but my father and I had to wear them as well. Otherwise, my sister Tara would have no idea who we were. She was born with some kind of brain damage that affected her vision—she could see people, but not tell them apart. She also had trouble with depth perception, things like stairs and grasping objects, and also with motion. In her mind, our dog Pepper would be at the gate of our yard and, in another instant, at the back door, with no in-between. And Tara only saw yellow and red really well and preferred feet, hence the emphasis on shoes.

  Of course, we tried some experimentation so that people wouldn’t think we were total freaks—red shoelaces and mustard socks were as normal as we could get. It was strange to go, for instance, to the Baltimore Zoo or Eddie’s Market and watch Tara walk around, her head down, a curtain of light blonde hair falling forward about her face, as she followed Mom’s shoes from one place to another.

  My parents tried to send Tara to a normal school, but it was just too hard. She couldn’t make any friends because she could never tell them apart, and she bumped into things and tripped and turned her head to the right to use her left eye mostly. So she wound up, when she was eight, going to Kennedy Krieger, where kids with learning disabilities went. My mom dropped her off every day and then picked her up and drove her back to our house on Charles Street.

  Mom was worried about living in the city—she was always worried about Tara getting hit by a car—but she and my dad loved our three-story brownstone and so did I. Dad worked downtown as the head of psychiatry at the University of Maryland Medical Center, and my mom saw patients in the parlor on the first floor of our house. So, aside from Tara, everything was normal, and even Tara was normal, even if she couldn’t tell me from my friend Joshua when we had our shoes off, which was kind of fun. But, once you tricked somebody like that, somebody who was just so defenseless, you really couldn’t do it again. Even if she was being an annoying little sister. And she was like every other little sister in that regard.

  And then she was gone.

  I always rode with Mom when I got home from school to pick Tara up at Kennedy Krieger. I liked going over to the dangerous, east side of town near Hopkins, where the people dressed loudly and talked loudly and ate things that smelled loud—fried chicken, cheesesteaks, ribs—stuff we never had at our house, unless it was Fourth of July or something. Anyway, my mom drove a canary yellow Volvo with tan leather seats—she traded in the green one after Tara’s condition became apparent—and she listened to NPR. She put her straw-colored hair up loosely in a clip and wore big plastic sunglasses, even when it was cloudy. She said that her eyes were sensitive to light; I’d always wondered whether Tara’s eye problems were inherited from my mother.

  Anyway, it was strange that day to see my calm, harmless mother run frantically from the school without Tara.

  “Paul!” She yanked my door open. “Tara’s missing.”

  With that, she pulled me out of the car.

  “You check the playground over there and meet me inside.” Although I’d always loved coming to this area, I had no desire to actually experience it outsi
de the cushy leather seats of the Volvo. I rolled up my pants slightly so that the gold of my socks poked out from my red chucks and slowly entered the playground, where a bunch of kids ran and tumbled about. I looked for a thin girl with jeans and a purple sweater with pink hearts among the strange faces, realizing that the strange faces were strange to Tara every day, no matter how many times she saw them. My heart felt tight in my chest as I thought of Tara lost in the world; would she even realize it? I looked for Tara’s Ronald McDonald sneakers among the Nikes and Keds and Adidas. I looked at the ground so long I didn’t see my mother come up beside me.

  When I looked up from her yellow Reeboks to her face, I realized she was crying.

  “I’ve called your father.” She took my hand. At thirteen, I was much too old for this protection, but I guess she wasn’t taking any chances.

  No one knows exactly what happened to Tara. Sometime between her occupational therapy class and waiting to get picked up, she went to the bathroom. And no one saw her again.

  It made all the news stations—2, 11, and 13—and Kennedy Krieger came out looking really bad, especially in light of my parent’s lawsuit. Some speculated that maybe custodial staff or someone else, who knew of my sister’s history took her and did things my parents didn’t want to discuss with me, but it could never be proven. But we made up posters—hundreds of them on gold paper—and plastered them all over the Hopkins campus, Northeast Market, and the surrounding Upper Fells Point community. Tara was even on the milk cartons for awhile. And Baltimore Magazine wanted to do a story, but my parents refused. Hundreds of children went missing every year, they explained to the reporters. Don’t focus on our family because of Tara’s special circumstances.

  My parents were both psychiatrists, and very good ones, I’d heard people say, but it’s a little different when the tragedy is your own. Mostly they sat at the dining room table discussing “the situation,” the telephone ringing constantly in the background. I was not allowed to discuss the situation with them, although they usually sat with me in my bedroom at night.

  “In many cases, when something this stressful happens, parents often get divorced,” my father began one night, stroking his neatly clipped beard. He sat at my desk while my mom sat at the foot of my bed. “Their grief is so terrible, that they’re not available for their spouses—or even their children. We just want to let you know, Paul, that this is not going to happen to us. Or to you. We are here for you, and each other. And we’re going to find Tara. We just have to be patient and let the police do their job and stick to our plan.”

  The plan consisted of canvasing the neighborhoods surrounding Kennedy Krieger after dinner and knocking on doors with more flyers. My parents hoped that by connecting a human family to the face of the missing girl that someone with information would come forward. We visited so many Northeast Baltimore rowhouses in two months that people thought my parents were running for election. Or that we were religious fanatics. Because of my mother’s canary yellow Volvo and posters, we were affectionately referred to as “the Looney Birds.” Entire rows of homes would descend into darkness the moment we hit their street, apparently having been warned that we were badgering people about a little white girl.

  “They’re just…horrible, horrible people.” My mom leaned against the Volvo in her best Annie Hall attire, smoking a cigarette. It was a habit she recently picked up again, not having smoked since before I was born. My father’s habit was to just look like hell. Speckles of grey began appearing in his beard, and his shirttails began to hang out, looser, underneath his sweaters and sport jackets. “No help at all. No compassion. And they’re supposed to be such church-goers.”

  “We can’t condemn a whole race of people just for the actions of a few,” my father answered, wiping an egg from our windshield with a fast food napkin. “Look at how nice that family was on Collington.”

  “One family out of how many? We’re not accusing anybody of anything. We’d just like a little help!” She shouted to no one in particular. “And stop making it into some racial discussion, Peter. I really don’t need to have a sociological discussion right now.”

  “I’m not making it a sociological discussion, Marta,” my father answered, tossing the napkin on the sidewalk. As a symbolic gesture or absentmindedness, I wasn’t sure. “I’m making it about setting a good example for Paul.”

  “What do you think, Paul?” My mom asked, her eyes reddened, her hair falling out of its clip. “Do you think this neighborhood has set a good example for us tonight?”

  I stopped participating in the plan after awhile, citing impossible homework demands. Not because I didn’t want to find Tara, but because I knew the plan was futile and I was tired of seeing my parents become increasingly hostile toward each other.

  I had my own plans. They involved some dope that my friend Joshua had stolen from his brother, Mike. That day in the playground at Kennedy Krieger, among all those strange faces, had really unnerved me, had brought the surreal nature of my sister’s life into focus. And I knew that the only way to find her was to try to see things as she did.

  So when my parents went out on their ritual, Joshua and I walked to an abandoned house on St. Paul and smoked in the backyard among weeds that towered over our heads. Sometimes Joshua would throw a handful of change just to see the rats scatter about our feet. We’d sit on the soft, wooden steps of the back porch, and I’d replay Tara’s walk from the bathroom that day. Shoes, brown and black and blue, an occasional white. Not Mom. Not Mom. Not Mom. Then, a pair of yellow shoes—perhaps not the correct shoes, but something similar. Perhaps Mom got a new pair today. Or maybe Tara didn’t make it from the bathroom. Or maybe she got lost going to the bathroom. Or maybe, just once, she wanted to go somewhere without Ms. Wilson, who lost her job as a result of Tara’s disappearance, maybe Tara really had to take a shit that day and wanted to be all alone in the big, cold bathroom with the shiny, industrial stalls and leaky faucet. Or maybe she ran ahead, telling Mrs. Wilson her mother was right there, right at the end of the hall, when really those red shoes were someone else’s.

  Most likely, someone met her. But who? How did Tara slip beyond Ms Wilson—perhaps not so difficult, considering how many kids were in her class—and into a stranger’s arms? Or was Tara wandering through the school as I sat staring at the stars, taking one wrong turn and finding herself in the boiler room, forced to eat rat feces to survive?

  Nothing made sense, but something about being stoned appealed to me. I felt as if I could communicate with Tara’s essence, even if I could not see her, and I assured her I would find her. I would just have to go deeper into her world, into her visual space, and everything would melt away except for me and her. The city would ooze into lava, and she would appear across town, an effervescent light of red and yellow.

  Everything did seem to be melting away. My grades, my parents’ relationship, my relationship with them. It’d been a year, and we’d all presumed Tara dead. But presuming something and proving it are much different, and because no body was found, we could not bury our brief glimmers of hope. Glimmers that would come up as regret or blame during dinner or while playing board games, something my father had instituted to keep a familiar routine. An algorithm that moved toward an unprovable theorem.

  “I bet if we had made the police question suspects earlier…” my father began and trailed off as my mother pushed herself away from the table and went outside, presumably for a cigarette. “They never did their job. We had to do everything. We still have to do everything.”

  “David Sarna got expelled from school for bringing in his father’s hunting rifle,” I said, patting the scoop of mint chocolate chip ice cream with my spoon. I liked to eat ice cream when it was very soft, almost melted.

  “We pay their salaries, and they were content to let us do all that work.”

  We still wore red and yellow. I don’t know whether it was because we were used to it or that we hoped, beyond reason, that Tara would be roaming the s
treets somewhere, looking for the red or yellow shoes that would lead her home.

  Me, I took to wearing entire ensembles of red and yellow and skipping school, heading over to the Northeast neighborhoods via the subway, eating fried chicken and cheesesteaks for lunch, smoking dope or popping the Xanax Joshua skimmed from his mother. I would walk through the streets in a daze, the images of passersby blurring, forms of flesh that moved and talked around me. The only things that captured my attention were young blonde-haired girls (scarce in the area), and the slow-moving canary yellow looney bird that sometimes came looking for me. I’d jump behind abandoned sofas in empty lots while a frazzled, sunglassed woman craned her neck at each intersection while the young black kids would nudge each other and laugh, having witnessed the legend of the looney bird firsthand.

  I discovered crack on those afternoons, too. I bought some from this kid on Fairmount, when I couldn’t find any pot, and we smoked it behind City Springs Elementary. Wow, that was all I could say. I knew this was the drug that would lead me closer to Tara. I shot into a hyper-realistic, dream-like state in which the algorithm became crystal clear. I knew then that I needed to ascend the reality that was placed on the neighborhood, the grid of distraction, to find the wormhole that would lead me to the plane underneath, on which Tara lived. She sent me signs repeatedly; a yellow streamer would blow up Patterson Park Avenue, beckoning me to where she was held captive; a crumpled red-and-yellow McDonald’s bag would tumble down an alley and land at the house in which I needed to infiltrate.

  “Just what the hell do you think you’re doing?” My father slapped me the night I was checked into detox. “We are always here for you—you know that. And what do you do? You smoke fucking crack!”

  “Bullshit. You’re never here for me.” I answered back. “You’re never even there for each other.”