Among the Missing by Dan Chaon Read Free Book Online Page A

means a cat,” Tobe said, and Evan’s face creased with puzzlement for a moment.
    “Oh,” Evan said at last. Tobe looked over at her and shrugged.
    Later, after the children were asleep, Tobe said, “I’m really sorry, honey.”
    “Yes,” she said. She was in bed, trying hard to read a novel,though she felt too unsettled. She watched as he chuckled, shaking his head. “Good God!” he said with amused exasperation. “Wendell can be such an asshole. I thought I would die when Evan said that.” After a moment, he sat down on the bed and put his fingers through his hair. “That stupid
Playboy
stuff,” he said. “We’re lucky the bird didn’t testify.”
    He meant this as a joke, and so she smiled. Oh, Tobe, she thought, for she could feel, even then, his affection for his younger brother. He was already making an anecdote to tell to Carlin and Randy, who would find it hilarious. She closed her eyes as Tobe put the back of his fingers to her earlobe, stroking.
    “Poor baby,” he said. “What’s wrong? You seem really depressed lately.”
    After a moment, she shrugged. “I don’t know,” she said. “I guess I am.”
    “I’m sorry,” he said. “I know I’ve been really distracted, with Wendell and everything.” She watched as he sipped thoughtfully from the glass of beer he’d brought with him. Soon, he would disappear into his office, with the papers he had to prepare for tomorrow.
    “It’s not you,” she said, after a moment. “Maybe it’s the weather,” she said.
    “Yeah,” Tobe said. He gave her a puzzled look. For he knew that there was a time when she would have told him, she would have plunged ahead, carefully but deliberately, until she had made her points. That was what he had expected.
    But now she didn’t elaborate. Something—she couldn’t say what—made her withdraw, and instead she smiled for him. “It’s okay,” she said.
    •   •   •
    Wild Bill had begun to molt. He would pull out his own feathers distractedly, and soon his gray, naked flesh was prominently visible in patches. His body was similar to the Cornish game hens she occasionally prepared, only different in that he was alive and not fully plucked. The molting, or something else, made him cranky, and as Thanksgiving approached, he was sullen and almost wholly silent, at least to her. There were times, alone with him in the kitchen, that she would try to make believe that he was just a bird, that nothing was wrong. She would turn on the television, to distract her, and Wild Bill would listen, absorbing every line of dialogue.
    They were alone again together, she and Wild Bill, when Wendell telephoned. It was the second day in less than two weeks that she’d called in sick to work, that she’d stayed in bed, dozing, until well past eleven. She was sitting at the kitchen table, brooding over a cup of tea, a little guilty because she was not really ill. Wild Bill had been peaceful, half-asleep, but he ruffled his feathers and clicked his beak as she answered the phone.
    At first, when he spoke, there was simply an unnerving sense of dislocation. He used to call her, from time to time, especially when she and Tobe were first married. “Hey,” he’d say, “how’s it going?” And then a long silence would unravel after she said, “Fine,” the sound of Wendell thinking, moistening his lips, shaping unspoken words with his tongue. He was young back then, barely twenty when she was pregnant with Jodie, and she used to expect his calls, even look forward to them, listening as he hesitantly began to tell her about a book he’d read, or askedher to listen as he played the piano, the tiny sound blurred through the phone line.
    This was what she thought of at first, this long ago time when he was still just a kid, a boy with, she suspected, a kind of crush on her. This was what she thought of when he said, “Cheryl?” hesitantly, and it took her a moment to calibrate her mind, to span the time and events