You Remind Me of Me by Dan Chaon Read Free Book Online Page B

the wall of the garage, is her small garden plot: two tomato plants, two zucchini, four rows of yellow wax beans, a cantaloupe vine she is experimenting with. There are some hollyhocks along the side of the house. But mostly it is open yard. A few of Loomis’s toys are scattered there—a Batman doll, a blue rubber ball with yellow stripes, a plastic bag full of dinosaur figurines and soldiers and matchbook cars.
    “Loomis?” she says. There is a moment of disorientation, eyeing the yard again, when she thinks somehow he
must
be here, that there’s something wrong with her perception, her vision.
    ——
    He could have climbed the fence, she supposes, though that seems so unlike him. Maybe he tossed something over the edge by accident and went to retrieve it? The wire of the fence crisscrosses in a diamond pattern, easy enough for him to fit his tennis shoes into the holes and hoist himself over. It seems foolish—he is not a particularly athletic or adventurous child, not liable to run off.
    Still, she walks across the yard toward the north end of the fence, her thongs snapping under her bare feet in the warm grass. Here is the narrow alleyway that separates the rears of the houses on her block from the rears of the houses that line the block to the north, just wide enough for the beeping garbage truck to lumber down on Monday mornings. She looks to the right and left—nothing, just trash cans of varying shapes and sizes, plastic and corrugated metal, a few with stuffed garbage bags beside them. Weeds breaking through the cracked cement. Trees and poles, the branches and wire lines interpenetrating. At the far end, where the mouth of the alley opens into a street, a red truck drives past and vanishes. No sign of Loomis.
    She is aware, for the first time in many years, of the way the world might look from the point of view of a small child. The largeness of it, the way a common alley might seem to be a mysterious tunnel, the way the back fences and gates of houses have an ancient, abandoned quality. She notices—remembers—the narrow strip of space between the fence and the rear of her garage: another tunnel, but one that doesn’t seem maneuverable even for a child, since logs are piled up there—pieces of an old tree that she’d had removed several years ago. For some reason she must have thought the wood would be useful, though now she can’t remember why. Now it is spotted with lichen and shelf fungus, wet, rotten, perhaps full of termites or ants.
    “Loomis!” she calls, raising her voice for the first time, now not embarrassed for the neighbors to hear her. She lets herself bellow, once: “Loomis! Where are you?” And the dog in the neighbor’s backyard to her left begins to bark. He wouldn’t have gone there, of course. He hates and fears the dog, a moody and thickly muscled pit bull named Pluto. Nevertheless, she goes to the edge of the fence and peers over, and Pluto runs at her. He is leashed to a clothesline, and the eyelet of the leash makes a hollow sound, like a marble rolling down a pipe, as it passes along the length of the clothesline rope. At the sight of her, Pluto lets out a series of angry, territorial barks, his ears pinned back and eyes bright with outrage.
    “Shut up!” Judy says sharply, and claps her hands, a gesture she remembers from childhood, from her mother, when they lived on a farm outside of town and sometimes encountered strange stray dogs. “Git!” she says, and claps her hands again. “Go on now!” And Pluto, impressed, stops barking and watches her warily. The neighbors, the Woodwards, are a childless and cordially unfriendly couple of whom she knows little. They are perhaps in their thirties. The woman, Bonnie, a secretary at the courthouse; the husband, Sherman, a worker at the feedlot outside of town. He is a hunter, and nearly every fall will bring home a deer that he skins and dismembers in the backyard. Beyond this, she knows little about them, and she is glad