Picture Me Gone

  Are you sure he tried to swerve, or are you just making that up?

  Gil thinks. Pretty sure. Most of my information came from Marieka, he says. I never had the heart to ask for more details. Why?

  Well, if you’re going to crash into someone, especially when you’re coming up from behind, you don’t skid first. Do you?

  Maybe it was icy. Maybe he was pulling over into Matt’s lane and didn’t see him.

  Those guys drive for a living. Would they make a mistake like that? And how often have you seen one of those huge tractor-trailers in the fast lane? And even if he did pull into Matthew’s lane, the truck driver would have been fine. Matt would have spun and crashed, not the truck. Can’t you see it in your head?

  Despite a thorough understanding of my father’s limitations, I feel impatient.

  Not really, he says. What about ice?

  Maybe.

  Or maybe he was tired.

  Tired or not, I can’t see how it was the truck driver’s fault. The picture in my head is clear now. I can see Matthew’s car brake or drift out of lane or do something that causes the guy behind him to brake so hard, he skids and flips over the central reservation, crushing the back of Matthew’s car with the fishtail. If Owen had been sitting in the front, he’d have survived.

  Strictly speaking, there’s nothing so strange about sitting in the backseat of a car when it’s just you and your father. But if you were having a fight, would you sit in the back? Wouldn’t you just hunch in the corner of the front seat staring out of the window, feeling wronged? And if you were tired, wouldn’t you also just slouch down in the front? Maybe Owen liked sitting in the back, or he’d hurt his leg in practice and wanted to stretch out, or there was a big bag of shopping in the front seat.

  I store the question in a file in my head marked M for maybe.

  fifteen

  The sign reads SCENIC DRIVE and points off to the right. Gil turns. I guess we may as well enjoy the view, he says, having come this far.

  I thought we were on a mission. Life or death.

  We are, Gil says. But Suzanne said it’s really beautiful.

  Am I imagining things or is everyone treating this trip like some kind of halfhearted holiday thing, like a treasure hunt to keep us occupied as long as we just happen to be in America anyway?

  I look at Gil. Seriously? The scenic route?

  He looks back. Would you rather stick to the motorway?

  OK. OK. I check the map. There appears to be a big long lake coming up on the right and lo and behold, the dense trees all at once give way to long views across a narrow bright-blue stretch of water with mountains beyond.

  Look! I say, and then regret it as Gil slows even more and in the mirror I can see the driver behind us, fuming. On the next clear stretch the guy passes us with a huge roar of his engine. From the cab of his insanely large pickup, he shoots us a contemptuous look. There are guns on a rack in the back window. Guns?

  Did you see that?

  Gil nods. They must be for decoration, he says. Hunting season’s October.

  I stare at him. Did you memorize the guidebook or what?

  You can’t shoot animals who’ve just given birth or are pregnant. Even in America. So, it’s autumn/winter for slaughter, just like at home.

  Great. Now I’m scanning the edges of the woods for bears and deer with offspring. Doomed, yes. But not right away.

  A couple of miles later, the view breaks off and we’re driving through a pretty little town balanced on the edge of the lake and the sun makes hard reflections on the water. We drive past a boatbuilder and a couple of big elegant old Victorian houses. Gil pulls in at an ice cream place.

  Without asking, he orders tall spirals of ice creams for us both, vanilla and chocolate mixed, and a cup of coffee for himself. We sit outside at a wooden picnic table. The air is cool and the sun warm enough to induce sleep. Neither of us feels any rush to get back on the road.

  Gil picks up a local paper that someone’s left behind and he’s reading it back to front, studying the classifieds. I break the bottom off my cone and feed it to Honey and then she and I head down to the water with my ice cream dripping down my hand. I sit on the grass and stare at the lake and the mountains with the sun on the back of my neck. Honey’s beside me. I give her my ice cream to finish. According to Gil, Native Americans once lived here. You can see why they chose it.

  Honey and I circle back to Gil.

  Look, he says, we could buy an aboveground swimming pool for just four hundred bucks. Or a Nearly New Weed-Whacker. He flips pages and I look over his shoulder at a picture of a raccoon family caught on someone’s CCTV. They look furtive, like raccoon criminals.

  Honey positions herself in the sun and lowers herself down, head across her paws. She is a beautiful creature with a noble head, but I can see that under her thick white coat her body is gaunt. She is old, Gil thinks. My age.

  Ninety miles to go. On these roads that’s at least two hours, he says, and I suddenly wish we were making this journey for pleasure. I would prefer to be meandering at no pace at all, stopping and going just on the whim of the moment. But even the scenic route can’t stop me thinking about Matthew and the pieces missing from the jigsaw. Most of the pieces. All I’ve got so far is sky.

  Think, I think. Think of the facts: Owen died three years ago. In a collision with a lorry. It wasn’t Matthew’s fault. He was completely exonerated by the police.

  When you’re looking for answers, it’s the things that nag at your brain that count.

  Exonerated?

  Gil flips over to the front page, where there’s a large picture of the winners of the local ten-mile Fun Run. It’s mostly women with their arms around one another, grinning. At the bottom there’s a notice about hunting licenses and a list of regulations, with a big jolly headline that says HUNTING SEASON’S COMING SOON.

  I read more. The notice says you must be over the age of twelve to apply for a license, and a ten-hour safety course is required for new applicants. It also says that 189,000 deer were shot last year in New York State with only twenty-nine injuries to humans, none fatal. One hundred and eighty-nine thousand deer. And three hundred and eighteen bears. Who would want to kill a bear? You can’t even eat them. The thought of all those dead animals depresses me. A picture that goes with the article shows a happy guy holding up the lolling head of a dead deer. The caption says “Steve Wilson and a nice ten-pointer.”

  What sort of place is this?

  We flop back into the car. It’s hot, and once we get going I turn the air-conditioning on. Honey pants a little in the back. We’ve lingered and dawdled and it’s late afternoon before we finally leave the highway for a smaller road. Gil stops for petrol. He pays and returns to the car, but instead of driving off, he sits back, hands resting on the steering wheel, and turns to me.

  What shall we do now? he asks. We can get there tonight if we drive straight through.

  Let’s not, I say.

  It may just be nerves but I don’t like the idea of confronting anything in the half dark, whether it’s Matthew or not-Matthew. Plus, I don’t want our journey to be over so soon. What if we find Matthew and he’s furious that we’ve chased him all the way up to the Canadian border after he and Suzanne had a fight and decided to be apart for a while? Or what if we find him with a new girlfriend or some kind of contraband? Twenty-eight kilos of cocaine? What if he hates us for coming all this way after him like he’s some sort of criminal? What if he is some sort of criminal?

  I don’t say all this, but Gil nods anyway. Maybe he’s thinking the same thing.

  OK.

  I’m staring at the map. We could go to Lake Placid. It looks quite big on the map. What’s there?

  The 1980 Winter Olympics, Gil says and passes me the guidebook. Have a look.

  I read the entry, which reports that Lake Placid is a charming town with a delightful mix of restaurants, retail facilities (retail facilities?), antique shops and sporting goods outlets. ??
?You’ll find something for everyone in Lake Placid!” says the book in a grammatically annoying way, and with all that stuff going on and all those retail facilities I’m finding it hard to imagine that Lake Placid is actually very placid.

  I read some more and then look at Gil. Could we stay there tonight?

  They’ll have plenty of motels, anyway, he says, and pulls off the road to look at the map. Over his shoulder I see a picture of the ski jump built for the old Olympics.

  Christ, it’s terrifying, he says, following the direction of my gaze. It’s hard to imagine anyone actually skiing down that thing.

  I close my eyes for a few seconds and think what it would feel like to drop onto that near-vertical slope, fly down in the crouch position, then explode off the lip of the jump at two hundred miles an hour. I would land on the ice with a splat like a bag of baked beans.

  Half an hour later, we pass the real thing. We pull over and get out to look at it. Gil stares. Never in a million years, he says, and sounds like he means it. But at least it has a lift to the top. Not like a mountain. What about you?

  Me? I shake my head. No way. Do you miss those days? I ask, thinking of mountain climbing.

  Gil shakes his head. No.

  Why did you do it?

  I don’t know, Mila. I was young. And Matt was so convincing. If he said climbing was the thing, we climbed.

  God knows where they’d have ended up if they’d lived in different times. I’m imagining my father and Matt as highwaymen or in the French resistance, taking terrible risks. As Hitler Youth.

  Would Matthew ski down that?

  Gil smiles. He’d probably try.

  Didn’t you like climbing at all?

  I don’t know, Gil says. Of course I did. I don’t think I’d have started on my own, but I got addicted to the kick.

  Adrenaline, I suggest and he nods.

  We climb back into the car, drive into town and park. It’s pretty and well tended, and though I’ve never been to Switzerland, it looks like my idea of Switzerland—quaint little wooden shops and restaurants facing the lake with the mountains beyond. Minus the guys in lederhosen. And the mountains aren’t very big, not like the Alps.

  While Gil looks for a real newspaper, I try texting again.

  Matthew. It’s Gil’s daughter Mila again. We need to find you. Pls txt me when you get this message.

  After some consideration, I take out the line about needing to find him. And the Gil’s daughter bit too. The world is not filled with people called Mila.

  Matthew. It’s Mila. Txt me when you get this.

  I wait for some time but there’s no reply, so I text Marieka just to say hi and then Catlin. Neither of them answers either.

  We shop around town for a while, looking at things in windows. There’s an old wooden sleigh in the antique shop next to some blue-and-white jugs, and a bookshop with a beautiful view of the lake.

  And then, in the window of the deli, I find the Easter egg of my dreams. The pattern on it is cowboys—cowboys with lassos, cowboys riding cow ponies and bucking broncos, cowboys herding cows, cowboys with cowgirls. It’s such an incongruous theme for an Easter egg that I burst out laughing. And to top it off, it’s enormous.

  Oh my god, it’s perfect! Catlin will die of happiness, I say and Gil rolls his eyes, no doubt thinking of the price.

  But when we go in and ask how much it is, the deli man says it’s not for sale.

  I can’t sell it in all good faith, he says. It’s left over from two years ago, so it’ll be stale. Lots of people have asked to buy it, but I’m afraid it’s staying right here. Hi-ho, Silver!

  I can understand his point but I want this egg so badly I’m running a whole series of silent scenarios that include breaking into his shop in the dead of night and stealing it.

  I don’t suppose there’s another one?

  He shakes his head.

  Does it bring in more business for the other eggs? I ask, determined to blind him with the logic of getting rid of it.

  He shakes his head again, mournfully this time. I have no idea. It’s kind of a folly, he says. But it looks good in the window, don’t you think? Lured you in, anyway.

  The other salesperson laughs.

  See? he says. They all laugh at me. But everyone loves my cowboy egg. Hi-ho, Silver!

  I’m wondering what’s with the Hi-ho, Silver, but what I say is, Please could you at least consider selling it? I have a friend at home whose parents are getting divorced and she’s really upset and depressed and this egg would definitely cheer her up. I sneak a peek at him to see if my story is working. She’s desperate, I say in my saddest lowest voice.

  Well, he says slowly, shaking his head. That’s a pretty sad story. But I’m afraid it’s out of the question. It’s not for sale. And besides, it’s two years old. It won’t even taste good.

  I think of Catlin. She wouldn’t care what it tasted like. It’s something else she wants, from me. A sign. This egg is a great big blinking sign that says, we are friends forever and we laugh at the same things.

  You’d be asking me to disappoint a whole town, says the child-hating deli guy. Maybe next year.

  I know it’s only an egg but I feel like crying. Maybe another amazing egg will appear somewhere on our journey. Maybe America is full of them. But in my heart I know it isn’t. And then I try to convince myself that the perfect Easter egg doesn’t matter, especially when Matthew might be dead, and how on earth would I have managed to get it home anyway? But the egg would matter to Catlin. I know it would. It would make her happy, even just for a minute.

  Dad buys a bottle of local organic hand-squeezed artisan apple juice and I glare at him because I hate the idea of giving this man any of our money.

  A collar of reindeer bells on the door rings as we go out. Hi-ho, Silver! the man calls, but I don’t look back.

  sixteen

  It’s starting to get dark, so we park at one of the motels, and the receptionist tells us they’re full because of Easter vacation. Try the Mountain View Motor Inn, she says, it’s a half mile down the road.

  We get back in the car and because the road is so curly, it seems a long way till we find it. But there’s a little dog symbol next to the credit-card stickers on the office window, so we’re in luck. I tell the guy behind the desk that my dad is parking the car and he says he likes my accent, am I Australian? When Gil comes in he offers us a family room for no more than a regular double.

  So now I have my own room attached to his with my own TV. I like this. Private but connected. There’s a snug corner in my bit that’s perfect for Honey’s bed and she curls up there like it’s where she’s always lived.

  She doesn’t need much exercise at her age, Gil says, and I think how strange it is that at nearly the same age, she’s old and I’m young. He takes her out anyway and I text Catlin.

  No sign of our missing guy I write.

  Boo bloody hoo comes the text in return, and I’m shocked and upset because I thought we were friends again. But the phone bleeps a second later.

  Dad’s moved out. Mum cries all day.

  Oh. I’ve known Catlin long enough and can hear her voice, small and furious.

  Oh Cat, I text back, I’m REALLY sorry xxxxxxx

  It takes a while for the next one but I know what it’s going to say before it arrives.

  I don’t give a shit.

  Which is more or less definite proof that she does.

  Love you loads I text back, but she doesn’t answer.

  Gil returns with Honey. Temperature’s dropping, he says, then gives her one of the dog chews Suzanne packed and pours some dinner for her out of the box. She sniffs it and turns away. No leftover bacon, no French toast, no ice cream, no deal.

  We leave Honey and walk next door to a big square restaurant done up to look like a cartoon version of Thailand with huge carved pillars and a pointy roof painted all over red and gold. My Thai, it’s called, and it’s nearly empty. The waitress says to sit anywhere and
we do, and then when she comes over again we order pad thai and green curry and she says she likes my accent which I never know quite how to answer. I get up to look at the big orange fish in the tank near the register while we wait for the food to come. I’m really hoping that any fish in our meal don’t come from this tank.

  The food arrives and it’s not too bad, though the pad thai is quite sticky. Gil orders a Thai beer, drinks it and asks for another.

  What will we do if we find Matthew at the cabin? I ask.

  I guess we’ll talk to him, Gil says.

  What will we do if we don’t find him?

  Gil shrugs. One step at a time. At least we’ll have had a genuine American experience on the way, eh, Perguntador?

  As we eat, the restaurant fills up and I can’t help gathering facts about the people who eat here. Tourists, mainly. Some speak a weird-sounding French, which Gil says is French-Canadian. The American families don’t talk to one another much, though some of them shout at their children. I catch one father saying grace before starting to eat while his teenage son looks around, mortified. One man knows the waitress. He’s either related to her or a friend or he comes here a lot. A few people don’t bother with the menu. They know what they want. Two boys come in and when they order beers the waitress asks for ID, which they don’t have. But she’s nice, acts like it’s no big deal and brings them Cokes instead. People order huge plates of food and if there’s anything left over, they ask for doggy bags. I wouldn’t give this food to Honey; it’s not healthy.

  At last we go back to our hotel room and I watch TV with the sound turned off while Gil reads, but it’s mostly ads for losing weight or gigantic pizzas. As usual I don’t remember falling asleep but wake up in the middle of the night with the TV off and the neon glow of the motel sign seeping in through the blinds. In Gil’s room, the reading light is still on.

  A girl at school told everyone the story of a murderer who hid the body of a dead woman inside the box mattress in a motel. For ten days, people slept in the bed and the body wasn’t discovered until the hotel investigated complaints about a foul smell in the room.