Free Hungry Ghosts by Susan Dunlap Page B

advice.
    â€œSure. She’s living at home. I’ll write it down for you.”
    â€œThen how about serving up the lunch? Feel free to start. Pretend it’s the freshman trough!”
    I didn’t look at her as she made her way to the front door and on outside. Had she always had that self-control, or was it a side benefit of learning to hide pain? I remembered her at that long freshman lunch table in school,tossing back food like everyone else to grab a few extra minutes to gossip, flirt, or take a last scan at test notes—and before the hard and important tests, I remembered her laughing.
    The serving bowls were ready so I shifted them to the table and began scooping out salad. It would be hard for her—for anyone—to understand my family’s attitude toward Mike’s disappearance. I could remind her that John was already a patrol officer at the time and his colleagues had interviewed us all. And then there was the reporter. I added a slice of garlic bread to each plate. But still, there were always reasons. At first Mike’s being gone was unbelievable, an alternate universe that had settled on ours and would certainly lift any minute, leaving us crowded in the kitchen like always. It wasn’t possible at first that he could be gone.
    Then possibility seeped in and I felt like the biggest traitor in the world. I couldn’t mention it; I couldn’t be near anyone who mentioned Mike’s name. I couldn’t read, study, hold a conversation, do anything but run track, take gymnastics classes because they were so hard with my tight track muscles, and try out for basketball, soccer. I never rode the bus in those days, but bicycled or roller-bladed. I moved fast, as if I could outrun the truth. I was too busy avoiding to wonder how anyone else was handling things.
    But John had been thorough enough to find an acquaintance of Mike’s as distant as Tia. And, years later, Gary had been looking, double-checking. I sank back into one of the padded dining chairs. It let out a huh! The briny smell of calamari mixed with the overly sweet freesias. In the kitchen the refrigerator groaned on. My stomach roiled and I thought I wouldn’t be able to eat and that that would be so rude after all the trouble Tia had gone to. Learning my brothers had been looking for Mike for years, I should have been relieved, but I wasn’t. What did it mean and how could they be doing more than I had when I was the one who cared the most? Sweatcoated my face. How could they have searched for Mike and not told me? Gotten leads, hopes, and not let me have them?
    I saw John sitting at the dining table holding out his plate for a slice of ham the Easter after Mike’s disappearance, asking about the traffic detour on 46th Avenue; Gary showing off his new Mustang when I came home at Christmas my freshman year in college. Now they seemed to me entirely different men, as if strangers had hijacked my memories. Rational explanations, common sense were way above me and I could only feel the small, poorly weighted anchor of my family being hoisted out of the water and flung aside. Thoughts swirled, emotions, recriminations, more emotions. I felt fifteen years old, not thirty-nine. I wanted badly to get out of here, and I was equally desperate to know what Tia had recorded in her diaries.
    Finally, I got up, went into the bathroom, and flung cold water on my face, leaving a great circle of damp on Tia’s yellow towel. I saw my watch face: 12:35. I’d gotten here exactly at noon. Tia and I couldn’t have talked more than ten minutes. What had happened to her? Had she gotten distracted by a neighbor? Fallen in the garage? I opened the front door and raced down the steps. “Tia? Tia, where are you?”
    No response. “Tia!” The garage doors were closed, locked. The courtyard was empty. I spent the next five or ten minutes pulling at the garage doors, running down the walkway between