“What kind of an argument?” My mother looked surprised, and it was true that Jack and I rarely fought anymore.
“Well, he didn’t want to go on the hike—you know—and he got angry and said we were spending our day in the middle of nowhere. Then when I told him to stop talking like that, he said something rude and I walked away and left him there.”
“That’s all?” My father shook his head, as if none of this was helpful.
“Yes,” I said, because I couldn’t bring myself to tell the rest. I’d left out the part about how I’d told Jack to get lost. Above all, I’d left out the part about how he’d said he might just do that.
“Do you think he could have gotten ahead of us, and maybe is still waiting out there?” My mother seemed almost pleased at this thought, although it wasn’t the first time they’d considered it.
“Impossible.” My father kicked the curb of the parking lot. “We were right on the trail the whole time. We would have seen him pass us.”
“Well, we’ve got to wait here for a while,” she said, and we did. We leaned against the car, we sat on the low wall at the edge of the lot, we walked around on the grass verge. This all seemed to last for hours, but I believe that after only another forty-five minutes my father drove to the lodge nearby and made a call. Even before he’d returned, three rangers arrived in different cars and began to question my mother and to scour the area; we could see them moving off the trail at various points to search in the woods. They carried walkie-talkies that fuzzed audibly on and off among the trees. They brought us reports of nothing.
“This happens pretty often with teenagers,” one ranger told my mother. My father stood with his arm around her shoulders now. “They get riled, go off. He’ll be back up here sooner or later, hungry and mad, or repenting, or he’ll come out on the Parkway a little farther down. We had one kid hitchhike from Pisgah all the way home to Boone the other day, scared his poor folks half to death. But teenagers are like that.”
Had Jack really become “like that”? I wondered. He was rebellious, but never stupid. I’d grown up roaming the woods and fields with him at our old house, and I thought he never would have been such a moron as to walk to another county just to show us. The Jack I knew would have stayed and argued about everything, even if he sometimes threatened to run away. Even, I told myself around the cold lump in my throat, when other people taunted him to get lost. Did growing up change people that much?
Despite the ranger’s assurances, Jack didn’t reappear that afternoon. By dinnertime I was as angry at him as my parents were, although I could no longer tell whether the pain in my middle was rage or fear or—my new companion—guilt. He didn’t appear at home that evening, after one of the Forest Service cars took me and my mother back to town to see if he’d arrived there alone and to call around asking all his friends if they’d seen him, leaving my father up on the Parkway to continue the search. He had not shown up in any of these places—or anywhere else—by early morning, when my mother’s face was stark in the light from the apartment windows and my father came home looking not much better. Watching them, I knew I couldn’t tell them the rest of my conversation with Jack. Besides, it would make no difference in the search—the rangers were looking everywhere, anyway. If they didn’t find him, knowing about our conversation would only multiply my parents’ pain a hundredfold. And they might blame me, although not as much as I blamed myself.
In fact, Jack didn’t appear to any of the teams that went out from the Forest Service and the sheriff’s department, or to their genius dogs, or to any of the volunteers who soon joined us. He didn’t turn up safely downstream—as we’d been taught from earliest childhood to do if we ever got lost—in any of the valleys of the National Forest or the tiny towns just outside it. He didn’t come walking into the Cradle of Forestry museum or a store on the main street of Brevard.
We waited at home, or drove up the Parkway again, now randomly. But Jack didn’t show up Monday morning for his biology class at school or Monday afternoon for the basketball practice he never skipped even if he had the flu. He wasn’t found, weeks later, sulky but triumphant, at some friend’s house in West Greenhill or in a grocery store in Tennessee or on a Greyhound heading west. No one recognized him in New Mexico or Oregon or southern Alaska from the “lost child” (although my father had insisted that he was growing up) campaign coordinated by my parents with the aid of every available authority. He never appeared on a boat to Russia or Honduras or Brindisi. And, perhaps mercifully—yes, I still think mercifully—his beautiful, young, strong body was never discovered broken at the foot of any Blue Ridge precipice.
At first I’d stayed silent because they might find him. Later, I didn’t tell anyone about what he had said to me because they hadn’t found him. The National Forest was enormous, as the rangers reminded us every day, and it was not unheard of for the person (they called him “the person” now) to die without being found, although some “people” were found years after. In addition to the cliffs above the forests, there were deep crevasses of rock; there were swift cold rivers that hurled themselves over waterfalls and vanished into caves underground. And when we held our memorial for him at last, more than a year later, there was no one to bury. My parents and I had only our tears and the emptiness of a field near our old house in the mountains, the too-young friends in awkward best clothes, the helpless relatives standing around us. That night, I dreamed of a black bear running over the long spines of the Blue Ridge, always far ahead of me and then passing out of sight.
For a long time, I still believed that Jack would never, ever have done anything to harm himself; he was too thoroughly bound to life, to the ordinary pleasures of the basketball under his hand, too temperamentally in favor of staying alive and losing his virginity. I knew it the way I knew that I would myself live to be very old. If he’d fallen, it was the slip of a moment, an error in the midst of irritation, a mistake in his footing. I knew also that even if he could leave our parents, temporarily, he would never have left me, not before it was time. He would have come back to us, dirty and defiant. But perhaps I’d tempted him to the edge of some danger. In time I came to doubt my very belief in his love of life. Whenever I looked at my parents or glimpsed any of Jack’s friends, I wondered if I should have said something more and then remembered I had vowed to spare them further pain.
He was simply gone, and he took all our peace with him.
Alexandra slid out of the back seat, her purse over one shoulder and the bag with the urn balanced in her arms. She made her way along the block and then up four concrete steps. In the lobby of the building, she found two guards sitting inside a glass cubicle, with a nicked wooden desk next to them and a counter around the outside. One of them was pouring hot water from an electric kettle into a cup. The other, who was younger, opened his window and looked her over with little visible interest.
“Dobur den,” she said, and it tasted odd in her mouth. “Do you speak English?”
He shrugged toward his colleague, who had turned from the tea to look at her.
“No,” said the tea guard.
“A little,” said the younger one, as if he had suddenly remembered this.
“I’m an American—teacher—visiting Bulgaria. I arrived in Sofia this morning and I accidentally picked up someone else’s luggage.” She tried to stand very straight as she produced her passport. “I would like to find that person and return it to him.”
The younger policeman took her passport and propped it open, then scratched the back of his neck. He wore a blue uniform shirt so carefully pressed that it made his bulky trunk look like a mannequin’s. “Probably you must ask at Sofia Airport. We cannot help with luggage here.”
She set the bag between her feet, squeezing it with her anklebones; she didn’t like to put it on the floor, but it grew heavy so quickly. “It isn’t airport luggage. I mean, I met this person at a hotel and accidentally kept one of his bags.”
“At a hotel?” Suspici
on or perhaps contempt flickered over his clean-shaven face and she saw she’d said something wrong. “A person? Do you know his name?”
“No—but I do have a name that might help. I think the bag contains human ashes.” She felt a sudden resurgence of her desire to cry, and quelled it.
The policeman’s older companion moved closer, as if he had nothing more urgent to do than listen to a language he couldn’t understand.
“Ashuss?” said the young one. “What is that?”
“Ashes,” she said, a wave of despair beginning again in her tired feet. “From a person, after he is dead—cremation. I mean, dust.” She tried to remember the word the taxi driver had taught her. Since they stood frowning, she got out her paperback dictionary and laboriously looked it up. “Prah.” She showed them the page.
The young policeman said something rapid to the older, who shook his head. Did that mean yes or no, in this case? Alexandra wondered. Next the young policeman rubbed the top of his very short hair, as if embarrassed for her, or for the person whose ashes she’d stolen. “Show me.”
She lifted the black bag and set it on the counter. “It’s in this, but I would rather not open it here.” Then she realized they might think she was carrying something dangerous—a gun, a bomb. The two policemen stepped out of the cubicle, and a couple of women walking into the building turned their heads to gape at her.
“You must to open the bag before we can help,” the young one said firmly.
Alexandra unzipped it for them, showing the velvet inside and then the lid of the fine wooden box. She hated this. A life, exposed to ruthless bureaucratic staring.
“See, there’s a name on the box.” She uncovered the etching and pointed it out to the young policeman, who pointed it out to the older, whose lips moved as he read. Then she carefully covered the box again and zipped the bag. The plane trip seemed so long ago that she felt she had arrived in a different year, rather than earlier in this one long wobbling day.
“Okay,” said the younger. “You must come with me and we will see somebody for missing peoples. They have a computer system to find missing peoples. Come with me.”
The older one had lost interest; he returned to his tea at the battered desk. Alexandra thought to herself that Stoyan Lazarov was not so much missing as dead, but she followed the young policeman’s muscular, neatly pressed back toward an elevator. She couldn’t help feeling uneasy, after her taxi driver’s remark about police who still beat people up in a democracy; this particular policeman could have broken her neck with a casual gesture. What if they concluded she’d stolen the ashes—or just stolen someone’s bag—and decided to put her in a cell? She probably didn’t have enough money for bail, or whatever it was she might have to pay to get out—a fine, a bribe. Would the English Institute even let her teach, after that? Perhaps, she thought, she should have gone to the American embassy instead, but it was too late now.
The policeman held back the elevator door for her and then stood beside her rubbing his neck and watching an antiquated needle search for the right floor.
After Jack’s disappearance, I plowed through high school, graduating early, and went on to college, where I studied English literature. I dropped my first name, which my family had always used for me, and took my middle name, Alexandra. It was less painful; Jack had never uttered it. In college, I began to write poems and stories outside of my classes, although I never wrote about dead boys, and to prepare myself in the blind way young writers do for the work they will later undertake. I washed dishes in the college dining halls and worked at the college library, where Jack seemed sometimes to be working beside me. And I tried, haltingly, to teach myself my new craft.
Along the way, I fell more deeply in love with books, although I had trouble falling for people, even when I wanted to. My few relationships with men—or, rather, undergraduate boys—involved attraction, conversation, and sometimes birth control, but no lasting affection. I realize now that what I most enjoyed was breaking up with them, the look on their faces when I asked them not to call me again, the light going out of their eyes. At home, my parents split up as well—felled by silence, I could tell, not by fighting. I knew about silence; I knew the symptoms. They informed me together, both red-eyed, during spring break of my freshman year, and then divided my time equitably between their two smaller new apartments. They knew it was unfair to me, they said, since none of this was my fault. Each was kinder to me than ever; when they talked on the phone to each other they were kind, too, and I wished I could ask Jack to set a fire in a living room or kick a hole in one of their tidy separate kitchens.
After college, I lived at my parents’ apartments in Greenhill and worked at the library shelving books. That left me a few hours a week to volunteer at a local Montessori school, in case I wanted to teach children later on—a vague notion—and to write short stories, and to read. I knew my parents both worried about the fact that I was “not moving on,” but I avoided their eyes at our breakfasts and dinners. On summer evenings, I sometimes went out with friends from high school who came home to Greenhill to visit. The friends never asked about Jack and I never talked about him, which is maybe why they never asked—a perfect arrangement.
I remember those nights as well as anything in my life. My friends and I would drive up the Parkway before sunset and sit at an overlook until it was too dark to see the trees along the tops of the far ridges. They drank beer and I elected myself to drive the car back to town, sober. As I watched their faces and listened to them laughing and talking about not very much, they always seemed to me less real than the boy on the trail, his big hairy sixteen-year-old arms, his handsome scowl. Sometimes I sat on the grass looking at the fading peaks and digging a sharp stick into the side of my leg, where no one could see it. One evening I realized we were all seated at the top of a very steep slope, a vertical slope, wooded but perfect for the plunge of a car to complete destruction. The sound of it, hitting, shattering against tree trunks, was more real to me than my friends’ faces—yes, and for a minute more real to me than my image of Jack.
Later that night, in the second bedroom in my mother’s apartment, I drew a kitchen knife slowly over the inside of my upper left arm, hard enough to give the skin a deep furrow of red. The pain I’d longed for brought me no relief, except that it jolted me to my senses: the ugliness, the cliché. It took time to clean up the blood, and the thought that I might have to call for help made me light-headed with shame. But I managed to stop the flow, binding my arm tightly for a night. I didn’t do it again, and I always wore sleeves after that; even my parents never saw. Light as it was, the scar weighed and tingled on my arm. Strangely, it also made me stop writing, as if the stories and poems I’d tried my hand at for years had trickled out and been lost.
I stayed in Greenhill almost three years after the night I’d carved open my arm—working, reading, lingering there for my parents without understanding that my own sadness couldn’t comfort them. I wasn’t ready yet for graduate school, but one autumn morning as I walked to my job at the library—now tediously full time—I realized that I wouldn’t be able to stand my memories much longer. Soon after, I began to apply for positions to teach English abroad: in Bulgaria, for example, which caught my eye online because it was our secret, the pale-green mystery that Jack had loved, that Jack would now never visit himself.
The upper corridors of the Sofia police station were lined with polished granite in gray and beige—walls, floors, stairwells, ugly square columns, and benches where a few people sat reading newspapers. Alexandra thought they looked as if they were waiting for a bus that might never arrive. Along the walls ran a row of black-and-white photographs of men’s faces with names and years on plaques beneath them; these dates seemed to be their terms of service, perhaps as precinct chiefs: 1961–1969, for example. The years wandered backward as she followed the policeman down the hall—farther on, she saw 1934–1939, 1932–1934.
Alexandra thought of the history she’d read in
her guidebook, on the plane: 1878, the liberation of much of Bulgaria from the Ottoman Empire and the beginning of the modern Bulgarian monarchy, which had persecuted communists and anarchists and sided with Germany in two world wars. Then 1944, the advent of the communist regime, which had persecuted non-communists and a lot of communists, as well. And, of course, 1989—the fall of the Berlin Wall and the beginning of the regime’s collapse. Since then, a parliamentary democracy, frequent economic chaos, the early return of many former communist leaders or their children to new positions of power, the occasional election of a progressive government. The men in the photos looked important, as if they’d been directors of everything, not mere policemen. As the years fell backward, their faces sprouted dark mustaches and they wore slicked-down hair and old-fashioned high shirt collars. She wondered if the end of the hallway would take them all the way back to 1878.
But the young policeman knocked on a door that interrupted the photographs from the early 1920s. He paused a moment, then ushered her in ahead of him. Inside, she saw a drab room full of bookshelves and file cabinets, a dingy rug, long windows backlighting a woman at a computer who looked up at them and pressed her cigarette into an ashtray. “Da?”
The muscular policeman seemed to Alexandra a little cowed by this woman; he bowed his head and gestured at the illegal bag, explaining something about it in Bulgarian; she caught the word amerikanka. The woman pursed her lips and got up, frowning at Alexandra. She wore a black skirt to midthigh, black pumps, a ruffled pink blouse. Her dark-red hair curved in a plastic sweep to her chin, and inside its frame her face was elderly, with winged blue eye shadow. She seemed offended by Alexandra’s youth and appearance—her jeans and sneakers, her unwashed hair. Alexandra wished she could explain that her last shower had been on what now seemed to her another planet.