Afterlife - Julia Alvarez Page 0,23
they always do when they depart a scene, parsing the meat off its bones, analyzing, judging, exclaiming over the different personalities, a kind of sisterhood digestive system.
Come on, you guys, be fair, Antonia reminds them from the back seat.
How can you say that? He was a total idiot! Mona has turned around to face Antonia. The interior of the car is too dark for Antonia to see Mona’s outraged expression, but she knows it’s there.
Back at the house, the three sisters commandeer Kaspar’s laptop and spend the hours until dawn visiting all the missing-persons entries from Massachusetts to Illinois. Several times they have had to consult Google to figure out which states neighbor each other on the way to Tilly’s. The only geography they were taught as children was of their half island.
Do they post a profile? Or would that bring on el fukú of bad luck? Maybe Kaspar is right? Maybe they’re doing the familial overreaction and they just need to calm down? Officer Morgan said most times, especially with adults, these “disappearances” work themselves out. And Izzy loves the shock value of turning up when you least expect her.
As they scroll down the profiles of the missing, Antonia catches herself lingering among the entries. Maybe she’ll spot a familiar face, Samuel Sawyer, 71, last seen on the way to his favorite restaurant one evening in late June to celebrate his wife’s retirement.
Mona is the first to break down. She blames herself for not insisting earlier on an intervention. She has long suspected that Izzy was not well, and it’s only gotten worse in the last couple of years. Izzy with her grandiose plans of saving the world, wildly ecstatic during her manic phases, then plunging into dark moods during which, like astronauts behind the moon, she cannot be reached. But they’ve gotten used to it, inured to Izzy’s chronic craziness, even at times amused at how outrageous she can be. Bottom line, they’ve not wanted to be their sister’s keeper. Living your own life is a full-time job. Mona bewails the fact that she doesn’t even have a single photo of her sister on her iPhone, but dozens of shots of her dogs.
Your dogs are important, her sisters keep reminding her. Come on, Mo-mo. You can’t blame yourself. It’s nobody’s fault.
Or everybody’s fault, Antonia thinks, remembering the times she counseled Izzy to take care of herself so as not to become a burden on anyone else, code for I’m overwhelmed by your needs.
But Mona won’t be comforted. She’s on a roll, bending over, swaying and wailing, grieving in a way that feels ancient. She wants to know where her sister is! Izzy, who hasn’t been in touch for now going on forty-eight hours, not even texting happy birthday to her momentary twin sister; Izzy, who called from somewhere in Western Mass, on her way to Ill-y-noise, after she took care of some business having to do with buying an abandoned motel to house her migrant artist revolution.
How crazy it all sounds. Antonia runs her hand over her face, recalling Officer Morgan’s gesture. Three kids. How can he manage if he is divorced or widowed? Especially when he’s on the night shift? Antonia’s heart is momentarily heavy with his load.
The narrow path, the narrow path, she keeps pulling herself back. His burden is his, Mario’s and Estela’s theirs, and hers is hers. But Antonia is having trouble keeping everybody separate. O, that way madness lies; let me shun that, she reminds herself. It has always worked, a guardrail of the best that has been thought and said. Culture is a great help out of our present difficulties; she recalls a discussion over Matthew Arnold’s essay. Her senior seminar looked doubtful. Kids raised on medications for attention deficits, anxiety, mood and behavior disorders. Meanwhile Antonia has read her Arnold; taken daily doses of her favorite poems, novels, plays; practiced meditation on and off for years.
But even so, she can’t seem to ward off the dragons of the world. An ongoing problem, which is why she tends to be reclusive, constructing the firewall that others must have inbuilt as part of their healthy emotional operating system. She thinks of Officer Morgan on his night shift, calling home to check up on the kids, making sure they’re not doing something they shouldn’t be doing: visiting forbidden websites or watching naughty videos; reminding the oldest to heat up the macaroni and cheese in the fridge, feed his younger sibs, do the dishes. Good