Afterlife - Julia Alvarez Page 0,25
taken, put up posters at service stations and rest stops along the way. She has already taped one to her car, a shock to see Izzy’s face blazoned on the side of Tilly’s Toyota, as if their sister were running for office or advertising her arts center.
Since the sisters are dispersing, Antonia feels she can finally disentangle herself, go home and continue the online search from there for now. As Officer Morgan said, these disappearances usually resolve themselves. Izzy has to be somewhere! Same line of argument she has tried for Sam, with no positive results. The truth is, to quote Tilly and their mother, the truth is there is no truth she can rely on at all.
What else to do now before they part? Last on the Missing Person Checklist is: hire a private investigator. They interview several retired detectives whose names keep cropping up on the missing persons websites. None inspire confidence, though it could just be how Skype distorts faces, makes everyone look like they’ve been caught by a surveillance camera. The minimum charge is a hundred bucks an hour, about eight hundred a day, not including travel expenses, more for multiple state searches. Yikes! But this is no time to save for a rainy day. The downpour has come. Every day is critical, as Private Eye Kempowski reminds them. He wears a white shirt, a tie, gives off the vibes of an undertaker, Antonia can’t help feeling. But Kempowski does have a 90 percent success rate for all missing persons he’s been hired to find. Even Mona has lost her contentiousness and doesn’t ask him to prove it.
To tell you the absolute truth, Kempowski says in a mournful tone—a phrase Antonia finds even more suspect than Tilly’s telling truths—the absolute truth is that it’s the 10 percent I haven’t found who haunt me still.
It seems to Antonia that a haunted private eye who deals in absolutes is not the best candidate to discover Izzy’s whereabouts. But then, stranger things have been happening. The world is crazy. Mona is absolutely right.
On her way home from the airport in Burlington, Antonia’s spirits plummet. The drive has beautiful views of the lake, the Green Mountains, the Adirondacks, rays of light filtering through breaks in the clouds, creating radiant spotlights, God highlighting some beloved patch in his creation. But who to turn to and say, Look at that? Better to note the sad, dreary things she wouldn’t want to share with anyone. The trees have not yet leafed out, forlorn clumps of abandoned nests visible in their skeletal branches. The birds are few and far between—they probably know not to head north until they can be sure their birdfeeder stops are stocked. The lake looks glassy, reflecting a gray sky. But even that can be deceptive. The thin ice. Children skating on a pond at the edge of the woods. Maybe Antonia herself will go missing, drive south until the hills turn emerald and the sky a tender blue that triggers wonder wonder wonder.
Hello, Sam! she hollers inside the sealed car. Come on! Give me one little sign: a cloud in an arresting shape, a tiny plane with a thick, satisfying contrail, to let me know you’re there. Any sign will do.
That way lies madness. Antonia pulls back from the edge, reminding herself to think of the positive. For one thing, it is a relief to get away from the hothouse of the sisterhood. But she also misses them, Tilly and Mona, and oh God, Izzy. Antonia has already texted them, including Izzy. Landed Vermont. Missing you all. Good thing about texting, simple, easily communicable, emoticon-friendly sentiments. No mixed feelings.
She takes the turn off the highway, winds her way to her dirt road, past houses whose residents she knows after thirty years: ancient Mrs. Gaudet, lost her own husband decades ago (nights, when Antonia’s coming home late, she notes the forlorn little light at one window—kitchen, bedroom, bathroom?); the former French teacher and her live-in companion, their two Adirondack chairs like sunflowers in the summer, shifting across the lawn over the course of the day to face full sun; the rundown house with its flagpole and raggedy flag and a cranky lady in a cardigan who never says hi; the rental house whose shifting tenants always seem to have kids who leave their cheap plastic toys strewn on the dirt yard; the spiffed-up house the gay couple surrounded with a high hedge, probably to shield themselves from the sight of