Hello From Nowhere

There was not going to be a funeral. On that point, Grady was perfectly clear.

When I got off the plane, he sneered. “Private jet?”

“No, bumfuck. A Cessna’s just the largest plane that flies to this mud pit.”

He was clutching one of those signs that limo drivers use, on which he had scrawled Becky in loopy cursive, just to piss me off.

I hugged him, efficiently, then followed him across the cracked asphalt, through the squat two-terminal airport, and into the lot where his burgundy Ranger sat at a tilt across the lines of the parking space, rust like a halo above each of the wheels. He lifted the slim, nondescript carry-on from my grip and slid it in the back. It was the smallest piece of luggage I owned, a physical marker that the excursion would be temporary.

“You look good,” he said. “Your girlfriend shops at Whole Foods?”

“We both do,” I said. “Incidentally, you look like shit.”

His lips curled into a smirk, triggering one of his dimples. “No I don’t.”

“We going to your place?”

“Dick’s,” he said as he jerked open the passenger door. “Just real quick.”

“Can’t I at least drop my stuff off?”

“After.” He crossed to the driver’s side and got in, twisted the ignition with a hard flick of the wrist. “He’ll be happy to see you,” he said. “They all will.”

“Christ. All?”

“Just Marnie and the boys. Maybe Arnie and Leo.”

“No Nancy?”

Grady licked and bit his lower lip as he backed out of the space. An old habit. He swiveled the wheel and steered the truck out of the parking lot. “No Nancy.”

“Rehab?”

“Jesus, Becky.”

“Rebecca.”

“Jesus, Rebecca.” He dragged a cigarette from the gutted rectangle in the dash where a cassette deck was supposed to be, then lit it with one hand. “Yeah, though. Rehab.”

He guided the Ranger onto the main road toward town, a long straight stretch slung through a gutter of swamp grass. Murky orange, late-afternoon sun slatted through the fields like the lights on a subway car. “Just be good, all right?”

“Good? I’m the best among us.”

“That’s exactly what the fuck I’m talking about.”

The night before, we’d spoken for fifteen minutes by phone. Delia, our aunt, dead. Blood found, teeth, but no body. Law enforcement no use. Suicide suspected. “Was there a note?” I asked.

“Well, yeah,” Grady said, “but a weird one. Not Delia’s style at all.”

“What kind of style do you expect from a suicide note?” I heard a twang in my voice, because it was late and I’d been drinking and Grady brought it out in me, and cringed.

“It’s murder. Sure of it.”

“Shut the fuck up, Grady,” I said. “That’s an in-person conversation.”

We agreed that he’d pick me up at the airport and clicked off. Outside, through the floor-to-ceiling glass, the lit-up windows of the Chrysler Building glittered like lightning bugs.

The diagonal silhouette of a crane sliced across the edifice. In a year, maybe less, the entire view would be gone.

Elise came in with a ceramic mug in each fist: one smelled of bergamot, the other peat. I chose the latter.

“Your aunt?” Elise asked, sitting beside me on the silvery, high-thread-count sheets. Evidence, like everything in the apartment, of her good taste.

“Half-aunt. Delia.”

“Your favorite.”

“Yeah.”

Elise trailed her fingertips along my back in long, gentle strokes between the shoulder blades. “That was your cousin on the phone?”

“Half-cousin.”

“When’s the funeral?”

“There won’t be one.” I drained the scotch. Elise, who had worked as a bottle girl at a swank club before we met at NYU, lifted the mug from my hand almost without my noticing and stood. “There’s no body,” I mumbled.

“What?”

“Bring the bottle,” I said, and she did.

Elise replaced the mugs with Glencairn glasses and poured a tight two ounces of Oban into each. “To Delia,” she said.

“To Delia.” We clanked the rims of our glasses and drank. Elise waited patiently, intently for me to speak again.

“There’s a train that runs through town,” I finally said, eyes fixed on the dark sliver of the crane. “It kills two or three teenagers a year.”

“That’s awful.”

“There are flashing lights and everything, warning signs, those rail things that come down—”

“Crossing gates?”

“Yeah, crossing gates, but people still cross the tracks when a train’s coming. Racing drunk, sometimes, or just driving drunk. And there are suicides, of course.”

Elise poured another ounce into each of our glasses.

“Sometimes, if a person’s on foot, part of the body gets destroyed and part gets dragged.”

Elise stroked my palm with her thumb but said nothing. This was her gift, knowing exactly what to do when every part of a story was terrible.

“They found a bunch of her blood. A couple teeth. There was…other stuff, bodily stuff, skin—I don’t know what all, but—anyway. Sometimes a body or…the pieces of a body will end up a ways away. I saw this video once where a cow got hit by a train and just….” I drank and felt a rivulet of scotch dribble down my chin. It was cold in the room and my shoulders convulsively bobbed, an involuntary shrug. “It happens.”

“That’s not normal,” Elise said softly.

“I didn’t say it was normal. I said it happens.”

Elise watched me silently. She never wore makeup these days, was staggeringly beautiful without it. She joked often about her “early retirement,” the purview of athletes and models, about the ideal moment to leave something being the moment just before you start to miss it. I stared out the window at the spiky gauntlet of midtown and felt a pang I felt from time to time, about the view and the bedding and the girlfriend. A life that was not only possible but magnificent.

“I could come. If you like.”

“I would like.” I shook my head. “But.”

Elise nodded. A conversation we’d had, not long ago, about my relatives’ anti-/pro- alignments had felt nastily quaint. “You don’t have to go either,” she said.

No body. No funeral. There was an argument to be made.

“I wish that were true.” Delia, aptly self-described as “the fun aunt,” had never had children. Grady and I were the closest. I would be needed.

Elise nodded. No fuss. This, the almost-too-easy acceptance of suffering, was the dark obverse of her gift. “I’ll call you a car in the morning. If you want, I can book the flight too.”

“That’s very sweet.”

“It’s regular.”

“Still.”

We sat for a long time. Elise cleared the glasses, pressed me backward, tucked the lip of sheet beneath my chin. She kissed each of my eyelids. “Sleep sound.”

I thought of the cow, strewn in streaks and bits over the western half of the state. A hoof wedged beneath a railroad tie. Some poor maintenance worker tasked with fishing it out.

“So long,” I said.

Grandpa Dick’s house was a grand three-story farmhouse five miles from town. He’d built it with his own two hands, according to local lore and his own recurrent oral autobiography.

Grady and I were the only cousins. Ours was a family that people often expected to have loads of kids—based on the not-inaccurate assumption of a cavalier relationship to birth control—but we were a family of only children. Grady’s parents quit after him; my mother died after having me. No one since Dick, our grandfather, had had more than one child.

As evidence upon our arrival, a lone toddler, Grady’s son, loped down the front steps, one tiny hand latched to the banister. Grady threw the truck into park and got out. “You remember Damon?” he asked.

“Only from photos,” I replied. “Misty was pregnant the last time I was here.”

“Shit, that’s right.” Grady made his way up the front steps, tugging Damon’s thumb from his mouth without slowing down.

I gave a little wave. “Hi, Damon.”

Damon flopped his now-freed hand, then shoved his thumb back between his lips. “He looks just like you.”

“Yeah, he’s a looker.” Grady made a clicking sound, as one might when summoning a horse. “C’mon, kiddo. Let’s get you a cheese stick.”

Inside the house, all was as I remembered. The high-pile carpet, a mottled pattern of creams and browns, was speckled through with splashes of cola, beer, and apple juice. Dick’s favorite ashtray, a souvenir from the Korean War, sat on the end table under a mothy lampshade. Expired butterscotch candies shimmered in gold wrappers in a Lucite dish of almost exactly the same hue. Beside a painting of the Virgin Mary hung a portrait of Grandma Judith, all polyester and curls, in the same pose. Her collection of porcelain rabbits was still atop the bureau, white islands in a lake of dust.

Dick was seated at the Formica kitchen table, dealing himself a round of solitaire. Damon waddled past him and smacked the refrigerator door. “Look who’s here,” Grady announced.

Dick plucked the cigarette from his lips and smiled. “Rebecca.”

“Hi, Grandpa Dick.”

“Glad you could make it.” He put the cigarette back in his mouth and gestured for a hug with the full curve of his arm. His skin had become more slack, a shade more yellow. “How’s New York?” He’d always said it this way, with a sort of cynical grandeur, as through he’d believe it when he saw it.

“Same as ever.” I indulged him in a side hug, inhaling a cocktail of weathered flannel, Marlboros, and Vicks. Viewed from above, what little hair he had was meticulously combed. “I’m so sorry about Delia. Couldn’t believe it.”

Dick slapped a red five onto a black six and grunted. “Your cousin here thinks she was murdered.”

“Or kidnapped,” Grady offered, as if this were a reasonable compromise. “Some Hannibal Lecter–motherfucker could have Delia in a pit in his basement right now.”

“That’s Buffalo Bill, dumbass.” Dick’s voice was rough, sclerotic. I cringed at the exchange, but this matter-of-factness, gestures of mourning no more pronounced than a snort or a shake of the head, was how things had always been. Dick had buried children before, first my father, another son the following year. No death had ever been unavoidable—pills, collisions, a spate of organ failures—but each was couched in an aura of fate. As though this place and its tragedies were quicksand into which the best thing one could do was sink with dignity.

Grady opened the refrigerator for Damon. “Where’s your mom?”

“She and Marnie went to the store,” Dick said. “Thought we could do chili tonight.”

“That’s a good idea.” Grady handed a cheese stick to Damon and another to Dick. He held one up in my direction but I shook my head. “Leo around?”

“Upstairs, sleeping it off,” Dick muttered. He glanced toward the ceiling, apparently deciding whether it would be worth it to wake him. “And Arnie got called in for a shift.” He clacked the edge of a stray eight on the table. “Sorry Nancy’s not here.”

“That’s all right,” I said. “Meth’s a hard drug.”

Dick looked up sharply, perhaps unsure whether I was making fun, then nodded once. “That it is.” He ashed the cigarette and slid a black four onto the red five. “Basement’s yours if you want it.”

“Nah, Misty and I’ve got the guest room at our place,” Grady said. “Anyhow, Becky here’s a heavy packer. You don’t want all that around.”

“We got space.”

“Thanks,” Grady said. “We’re gonna go check out the site, then drop her stuff off and come back.”

“Dinner at six or thereabouts.”

Grady tousled Damon’s hair and kissed the top of his head. “Be good, kiddo.”

“And take that box,” Dick said, gesturing with his cigarette like a conductor’s baton.

Grady and I followed his sightline to a vinyl barstool, atop which sat a massive corrugated box, bowed at the sides, stuffed with layers upon layers of photographs. “Can’t stay here.” He returned to his card game. Even at a distance, I could make out the shape of Delia’s sun-damaged perm, etched into the neat squares of polaroids.

“You got it.” Grady hefted the box into his arms. I helped him with the screen door.

At the truck, I got into the passenger seat and Grady slid the box onto my lap, the only place it would fit. There were hundreds, maybe thousands of photos, none organized. Many were of Delia, but not all. Marriages and baptisms were thrown in alongside divorce parties and community-college graduations. More recent photos showed Delia in sundresses and puffer jackets, posing outside roadside motels and the entrances of state parks.

I looked through the photos while Grady drove. There were a few, I thought, that might correspond to postcards she’d sent me. That had been her habit over the years, documenting her solo vacations. She was always off, she’d say, to find the next little frontier. When I got to college, I chastised her for the word frontier, preaching how nothing’s a frontier, how Ursula K. Le Guin called it an interface. But Delia was undeterred by her proselytical eighteen-year-old niece. She kept sending me flimsy photo-style postcards wherever she went. An unmarked gas station outside of Tuscaloosa. A miniature frog in a Florida swamp. A trio of petroglyphs found on tribal land in Tennessee. One postcard I remember was just grass, acres upon acres of grass. Not even a location name. She’d always write the same message on the back: Hello from nowhere, signed with two X’s.

“Almost there,” Grady said.

“Can we please just go drop this stuff off?”

“Keep your panties on.”

He swerved the truck onto a gravel road. The box wobbled heavily on my knees. I fished my phone out of my pocket. Elise had texted: Thinking of you. I texted: Miss you like mad.

Grady drove on. Straw-blond farm plots gave way to a grayish quilt of land, property lines like rough stitching, wormed through with silt-dark creeks. Finally, ten yards shy of a rail crossing, he pulled onto the shoulder and cut the engine.

“Here.”

I wriggled out from under the box and joined Grady on the road. We were a mile or so outside of town, where a stretch of railroad track cut across the country road like a scar.

“This is where Delia was murdered.”

I looked around. One had to admit, it looked like a pretty good place to murder someone. Both crossing signs stuck crookedly out of the gravel. A weepy grove of bald cypress trees skirted one side of the road. Overhead, the sky looked drained. The ground, gummy and damp, sucked at our shoes.

I realized, slowly, that I recognized the place. A girl in the class ahead of me had died here, driving across the tracks. The cracked spike of a cheap white cross—probably not hers, likely a newer one—jutted out of the soil.

“This is where they found the finger.”

“Christ, Grady, you didn’t say anything about a finger.”

He strode toward the tracks, then leaned over and dragged his hand through the jagged stones of the ballast. “Look, there’s still a bit of blood.”

“Delia’s?”

“Course it’s Delia’s, dummy. They tested it.”

“I’m just saying.” I heard the same twang that I’d done my best to bury. “There’s a lot of blood here.”

Grady stood upright. A tendril of sweat had found its way down the angle of his cheekbone to his jaw. He looked up, and I could see that his eyes were the same wet, grim gray as the sky.

“Listen, Grady.” I was unsure whether a better moment would come. “Whether it was murder or suicide or the fucking rapture, we have to have a memorial.”

“Not until we know what happened.”

“What makes you think it was murder?”

“First off, I’m sure it was murder.” His voice cracked, and I didn’t know whether to take a step toward him or away. “The evidence, Bec. The fingerprint, the hair, the blood, the teeth—all hers. But not like it was suicide; like they were taken.” He raised his index finger. “Severed clean off, like it was cut, not ripped. Same with her hair.” He gripped a fistful of his own dirty blond crew cut. “If you look at a human hair, there’s a kind of knob on the end, like a root.” He tugged a single hair from his scalp and held it up like Exhibit A. “They found a whole chunk of her hair, but it didn’t have that, not from what I could tell in the police photos.”

“You think some backwater police photographer is going to capture the nuances of the human hair follicle?”

“Her teeth—her teeth, Becky, they were just loose. Like they’d been pulled. Are you listening to me?”

“I’m listening.”

“Some fucker is out here trying to make it look like a suicide, so he doesn’t get caught—”

“Then why not leave the whole body?”

“The whole body? Are you fucking retarded?”

“Don’t say retarded.”

“Don’t be retarded. If she’d stepped in front of a train, it wouldn’t be this neat. You saw the video of that cow.”

I was angry now, first that Grady had dragged us out here to conduct amateur forensics, second that we were talking about a person we’d loved in bits and pieces. But he was raking his hand through his hair like a man who was lost, and my heart broke a little.

“Maybe she’s not dead,” I offered. “Maybe she was kidnapped, like you said.”

“It’s possible.”

“It is.”

“She could be in some Buffalo Bill’s basement right now.”

“He’d be lucky to have her.”

The sky had begun to take on the first shade of a bruise. I thought of Delia at my father’s funeral, telling me a body’s nothing. That it’s just part of a person, not the whole story. “Tell you what,” I said. “Let’s skip dinner. Let’s say I’m sick.”

“Really?”

“Sure. Jet lag or some shit.”

“It’s the same time zone, dum-dum.”

“Exactly. They’ll either not realize that or think I’m stupid.”

“No one thinks you’re stupid.”

“There are all kinds of stupid,” I said. “You should know.”

The corner of Grady’s mouth flinched into a smile. “All right,” he said. “Then what?”

“I don’t know.” I honestly didn’t. “All I know is Arnie’s open-mouthed chewing does not have to be part of our night.”

“Or Leo’s hangover.”

“Or Marnie’s story about the grocery store. You know she has one.”

“Or Dick’s soliloquies.”

“I’ll be damned. You know the word soliloquies.”

Grady grinned. “Don’t tell anyone.”

Of all the photos, the images of Delia were objectively the best. She had a way of standing, truly model-like, to suggest that she was separate from a place. There was a vacancy in her eyes, evidence that she was either elsewhere or on her way.

Grady sent a couple texts and we drove to his house, making a quick stop at Rick’s Liquors en route. He picked out a rye, laughed as I blew the dust off a bottle of Campari. Couldn’t pronounce boulevardier if there were a gun to his head.

At the house, he hauled the box of photos to the den while I carried my small suitcase to the second-floor guest room.

I made drinks. We looked at photographs. Outside of core family members, I recognized almost no one. Elise had often said that she’d made her money by remembering every face, treating everyone as an individual, but I could hardly tell my own relatives apart. Changes in haircuts threw me for a loop. I wished everyone had worn the same outfit since 1989.

Grady handed me a photo. “Remember Hunter?” I didn’t. The image was of an inlet along the gulf, one of those marshy pockets where the water’s clawed its way inland. A handful of tanned blond boys—one of whom was Grady, another who apparently was Hunter—roughhoused in the gray water. Off to one side, Delia and I sat on a rotting picnic table amid the murky reeds. She had her hand on my arm, ostensibly to keep me out of the mud, but almost with the grip of a guide, as though she were trying to steer me someplace else entirely. “He’s still in town.”

“Who isn’t?”

Grady smirked, but his gaze was hard. “I suppose that’s true,” he said. He rattled his glass for a refill; I obliged. “No one ever gets out.” I waited for the cliché. “Except you.”

It was something I’d heard (and said) often enough. “You ever think about leaving?” I asked.

“And doing what?” Grady drank. I did the same. “Delia was like that too,” he said. “She always wanted to leave, had her little trips and such, but never quite made it out for good.”

“Maybe death was the closest she could get.”

We sat quietly for a moment. “That note they found, it said: Don’t mourn for me. Death is just the next little frontier.” The ensuing silence was broken by the jittering of Grady’s ice. His hand was shaking.

“Listen, Grady,” I said. “There has to be a memorial. There just has to be.”

His jaw tightened. “Maybe.”

“How come you’re in charge of the proceedings anyway?”

“I loved her, dumbfuck.”

“I mean, yeah, we all loved her.”

Grady was quiet. “Anyway, you saw Grandpa Dick; he can’t even deal with a box of photos.”

“It’s a lot of photos.”

“And why not me? I was closer to her than anyone.”

I felt a pang of envy, then pity, so quick I could hardly tell which was which.

The front door clattered open and Damon’s tiny footsteps thudded through the front room, down the hall, and into the den. Grady scooped him up with one hand, sliding the bottle of rye out of reach with the other. His wife, Misty, appeared in the doorway, and I felt a flash of guilt about skipping dinner. “Sorry you’re not feeling well,” she said.

“Thanks.”

Misty looked exactly as I remembered her, stilted and pretty. I was put in mind of Wall Street telephone operators during the Crash of ’29, lipsticked and poised, helming the switchboards while their bosses plummeted to the curb just outside. “I’m going to put Damon to bed,” she said.

Grady hugged Damon, then nudged him toward his mother. “I’ll be up in a bit.”

We continued to sort through the box, passing photos back and forth across each other’s knees. I made more boulevardiers.

I lingered on a photo of the two of us as teens, Grady looking like the McGraw-Hill definition of an all-American youth, me looking miserable in braces and paisley. “Ah, yes,” he said. “Your ugly-dykeling phase.” He plucked another photo from the box and waved it in my direction. The whole image was pink: pink tile, pink tub, and two pink little bodies in the bathwater: mine and Grady’s.

“Look at your teeny tiny titties,” he laughed.

“Look at yours,” I shot back. I snatched the photo and stuffed it back in the box. “Every time I see a picture like this, I think, what idiots have toddlers bathe together?”

“I think it’s just easier,” he said. “A single bath’s more efficient.”

“And it’s efficient to take a picture?”

“Nah, that’s cause we were cute kids.”

Of all the photos, the images of Delia were objectively the best. A floral bikini and galoshes during a hurricane. Smoking a cigar on a roof—not a rooftop lounge, but a shingled rooftop in what appeared to be a suburban neighborhood. Stationed, with an expression conveying the utmost seriousness, outside the grand opening of a carwash. She had a way of standing, truly model-like, to suggest that she was separate from a place. In group shots, it always looked like she’d been added later. There was a vacancy in her eyes, evidence that she was either elsewhere or on her way.

With the rye bottle nearly drained and the Campari not far behind, I suddenly felt extraordinarily tired and a little sick. I pushed myself up off Grady’s shoulder, leaving him on the carpet with the box. “I need to sleep,” I said.

Grady caught me by the hand. “Will you come back to the tracks with me tomorrow? Just to look around.” His voice, even with its low drawl, sounded fragile. “I don’t want to go alone.”

“Sure, I’ll come.”

He let go of my hand. “Thank you.”

I went upstairs and changed into a camisole and sleep shorts. Real silk, a gift from Elise. I tried to rest, but my sleep was shallow, troubled. Half-recalled dreams cut through at intervals, images of oil and sludge, bodies of goldfish half-sunk in wet earth. Rusted chassis like carcasses. The florid pink of a lung, still alive, thrashing against a bleach-white cage of cartilage.

I woke at two a.m., furious that so little time had elapsed. Through the floor, I could hear the mumble and whir of the TV in the den. I got up and went downstairs.

Grady was sitting on the floor in the dark, head tilted back against a couch cushion, surrounded by photographs. The television was on very low, casting splashes of blue over the room. His head lolled in my direction as I stepped through the doorway. A flash of light on-screen revealed that he’d been crying, hard.

I sat beside him on the floor and wound my arms around his shoulders. His tears slid damply through my hair and onto my collarbone. He clutched my back. I pressed the pads of my fingers to the ridge of spine beneath his shirt collar.

From this angle, I could see what was on TV: a jaunty promo for tourism in the region. Grady’s jaw, no longer wet, shifted from my hair to my cheek.

He began to kiss me. I kissed back.

He slipped two fingers under the edge of my camisole. Ran a thumb over my nipple. He worked his knee between my knees.

As he gripped my hair and bit my ear he was silent, but I imagined a slew of slurs in his voice.

Dummy.
Dyke.
Cousin-fucker.

Residual bitters pooled around my tongue, a mess of orange and iron, and I felt myself being pulled downward into something very deep and dark.

I woke early. The sky, pale as ever, had taken on a ruddy blush, just visible through the lattice of tree branches off the back deck.

I sat at the kitchen table, my suitcase at my side, and labored over a note. In the end, I simply jotted:

HAVE A GODDAMN MEMORIAL

He wouldn’t, but I felt better having written it.

At JFK, I headed straight for the lounge and showered twice. Then I poured a scotch and sat by the window till my hair dried.

The apartment was empty when I arrived. Through the floor-to-ceiling window, the crane was at work against a vivid blue sky.

When Elise returned home, she found me in the kitchen, scrubbing the mud out of the rutted soles of my sneakers. She kissed me twice, then held my face in one hand, the gesture of an appraiser willing an object to be excellent.

I conjured a smile. “Didn’t think I’d make it out alive?”

“I knew you would,” she said. “You have before.”

She’d brought the mail up with her, and sorted it with one hand. “For you,” she said, handing off a postcard and envelope.

I set the latter aside. My pulse raced.

The postcard was homemade, just a simple color printout on stiff paper. Wildflowers.

No return address. I could trace the postmark, but the location would be days old, irrelevant by now.

I pictured Delia somewhere, nowhere, with missing teeth, blood in the grooves where her molars used to be. Nine fingers. A lump of Band-Aids over what used to be the tenth. A tuft of hair, crudely cut, just above the nape of the neck.

My hand shook, fingers bone-pale where they pinched the corner of the postcard. I didn’t flip it over.

I knew what it would say.