Among the Missing (Ballantine Reader's Circle) by Chaon Dan

Author:Chaon, Dan [Chaon, Dan]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780307481443
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2009-11-03T16:00:00+00:00

But back then, whatever puzzles my mother’s inner life presented were not nearly as interesting as the mystery of the Morrison family. I called my college friends and talked to them about it, feeling a little indignant that it hadn’t been picked up by the national news. “It’s pretty amazing,” I told my friends. “It’s almost like there’s no rational explanation, you know?”

I walked down to the site of the accident and examined it for myself. Here was the place where the car had inexplicably gone off the road. They must have been going fast down that curving dirt road—in the dark, one would assume, though no one knew. They had to have been going so fast that the young, man-high saplings didn’t slow them down. They flew over an embankment—since surely, if the tires had hit the strip of sand between the low cliff and the water, they would have stopped, merely bogged down in an unpleasant but eventually hilarious situation. Somehow, the car sailed over the sand. It hit the water and sank. The lake was shallow for several yards before it dropped off swiftly. Somehow, the car got past that, too.

“But don’t cars float for a while before they sink?” one of my friends asked. He was sure they did. And even then, there would have surely been time to roll down the windows, even while they were submerged, there would have been time for at least some of them to escape.

When I walked along the edge of the road, there were no signs of any accident—no tire marks at the edge of the ditch, not even a broken sapling. Of course, almost two months had passed; the elastic trees had straightened, summer plants had grown wild, rain had smoothed the ground.

As I came back to the cabin that day, walking along the line of shore, I saw that my father’s work van was parked in the driveway. He had probably stopped in for lunch. I came up the beachside steps—which my father had built many years before—padding barefoot, quiet though I didn’t necessarily intend to be. I could hear them talking in the kitchen. The sliding glass door that led from the kitchen to the deck was open, and their voices floated out, clear and disembodied as I approached.

“Call her up,” my mother was saying. “Tell her that if she doesn’t pay you this week you’re going to take her to court.”

“I have half a mind to go out there and take down the whole damn addition, two-by-fours and all.”

“You should.”

He laughed. “Can you see the look on her face?” he said, and my mother chuckled deeply.

“I’d like to be there to see it,” she said.

I sat down at the top of the steps to listen. They were always at their best when they were talking business, making plans and strategies. I couldn’t help feeling sad, hearing them. It could be like this, I thought foolishly, we could all be friends, sitting around, joking, talking easily. That’s what it could be like.

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