How Lucky: A Novel Read online

  He remains awkwardly standing, shifting a little from one foot to the other, as he scans the room, and it occurs to me just how young he is. He is in his mid-twenties, tops—is it possible he’s younger than me?—and once you get used to him and his uniform being in your house, and you adjust for his size, he stops becoming all that physically imposing. He’s just a kid. (With a gun.) A kid who thought he was walking into one kind of situation and has found himself in another one and isn’t exactly sure what to do with himself right now.

  He takes off his sunglasses, and his eyes are darting—even a bit scared. I am used to this look.

  “Uh, yeah, is Travis home?” he says, looking down, toward me but not at me.

  I type into my speaker.

  “No. Travis does not live here. I live here.”

  He looks down at his notepad. “Oh, uh, I got a call from a Travis at 764 Agriculture about a tip about, uh, a missing person. Do you know a Travis?”

  I nod at him, but it takes him a while to register that I’m saying yes rather than having some sort of spasm. He is extremely young.

  “He is my friend. Would you like to sit down?”

  I see him scan the front room, into the kitchen, to my bedroom, through the back door off the side porch. He shifts his weight to his left side again and bumps into my cough assist machine, which is beeping slightly. It’s doing that because it’s charging, but to him it must sound like a bomb about to go off. “Oh, excuse me,” he says, and then, realizing he’s just apologized to a robot, mumbles something to himself. He clicks his tongue to the roof of his mouth, like a nervous boy on a first date that is not going well.

  He is not going to be in this house for long.

  “Well, um, could you tell Travis that I came by?” he says, and I realize that I may have only a few seconds to tell him what I know.

  “Yes. But i can yellow he wandered.”

  He looks at me, confused and still scared. Godforsaken autocorrect. It’s hard enough to type without that.

  He starts to turn his head toward the door. “All right, um, look, I’m gonna leave my card, I’m Officer Wynn Anderson, when Travis gets here, why don’t you have him call me?”

  He turns around, grabs the doorknob, and begins to turn it. I have so much to tell him. And he is on his way out the door.

  “Waaaaaaaaaaaaait,” I yell with all my energy. He turns around, startled, and looks at me. I know what I just said to him was a word. But he doesn’t know that. He only knows it as air, coming from the mangled man in the chair beneath him, and that he has seven other tips to follow up on before dinnertime, and that none of them involve this current situation, whatever this current situation is.

  “DANIEL,” my iPad speaker says, meekly.

  He looks at me sadly and frowns. Catching himself, he instead gives me a smile that is probably intended to be sympathetic. “Thank you for your time, Daniel.” He points to the business card with the Athens Police Department logo on it that he’s placed on the kitchen counter. “Have Travis call me if he wants to, uh, talk, you know, any further.”

  He pauses. “And, um . . . you take care of yourself, OK?” And then he walks out the front door, and that is what happens when the police come by my house, and no one is home but me.

  15.

  Wednesday is the slowest day for our airline, during the day shift anyway. The poor guy who has the night shift, who I’m pretty sure is in prison somewhere in California, gets hit hard later: we’ve got a Nashville-to-Charlotte flight that gets canceled half the time. Otherwise, it’s a good time for me to sneak in a few video games. A bunch of guys I know from the old disabled camp I went to as a kid like to get online and shoot zombies and monsters and (increasingly) Nazis all day, and they always invite me to join them, but those games aren’t really my bag. My fingers and hands aren’t strong enough to keep up with all the button mashing you have to do. I’m more of an old-school Nintendo player, the left-right, left-right, up-down, up-down, B-A-select-start Contra type of business. You can even play those straight out of your browser window rather than have to fire up a PS4 or an Xbox. Sure, you have to deal with flashing ads telling you how to expand your penis size in your peripheral vision, but if you’re focused enough, you can still knock out Mike Tyson or save the princess without breaking much of a sweat.

  But not today. I’m in Ai-Chin land. I’ve been refreshing the Reddit about her disappearance all day, and new bits of information keep popping up. Her family just landed in America; they’re apparently quite wealthy. One poster said she thinks she had a class with Ai-Chin, but she was quiet and never talked and you know how they can be. (That’s a quote: “You know how they can be.”) Another said Ai-Chin stopped going to class the week before the disappearance, but a response to that said she never missed a class, and then there was a response that called that response fake news, and then someone called someone a fascist, and then I stopped checking that thread.

  One thread, though, catches my eye.

  VIGIL TONIGHT AT REDCOAT BAND PRACTICE

  Hey, Melissa Lei, Ai-Chin’s friend here. We’re going to have a vigil tonight at the Intramural Fields. People will be out there for the Redcoat Band practice, so we’ll set up a circle of people to spread the word, to see if anyone knows her. I’m going to make a press release and send it to the Banner-Herald and all the TV stations to get them to come. We need more people looking for her. I’m trying to get a hold of her family so they can show up too. Anyway, we’re going to be there around 5:30 and will be there all night. Tell everyone.

  “Are we stopping by this?” Marjani has let herself in, sneaked up behind me, and is reading over my shoulder again. This happens far too often to be an accident.

  She wipes down the back of my neck. “I have noticed these late nights of you playing around on these sites,” she says. “You need to get outside. You need some sun.”

  I nod to her and move my head in the language she is always sure to understand.

  Missing Girl. Vigil Tonight. Intramural Fields.

  She stands up and begins folding a dish towel. “Yes, yes, Travis already told me about this. You two really got yourselves worked up this morning, didn’t you?” She’s flitting about the kitchen, barely paying attention to me. Travis left soon after lunch to do whatever it is he does all day, but he should be back any minute: this is our Wednesday-night activity, after all, and he doesn’t even know about the vigil yet.

  “I suppose it is important for boys to have hobbies,” Marjani says, and I notice that she is packing picnic baskets, big ostentatious wicker almost cartoonishly Picnic Basket picnic baskets, along with two blankets she’s stashing under my chair. The oven beeps, and she pulls out the Dinner Porridge, which is actually just macaroni and cheese, but Travis called it Dinner Porridge one time, and the name stuck. She puts the bib around my neck, and as she feeds me, I look her in the eye.

  Are you coming with us tonight? Why are you packing all the food and blankets?

  She comes this close to blushing, though I have no idea why.

  “I thought I might go with you and Travis, just to get the, how does it go, the cobwebs out of my hair?” She smiles. I have a feeling this has something to do with football. It never fails to amuse me how much Marjani loves football. Just seeing the band makes her excited. “Also I am curious what you boys are up to. You have the look of mischief.”

  As if on cue, Travis comes barreling through the door. “Sorry I’m late,” he says, even though there was no set time for him to be here, and we have no particular deadline we have to hit. I think he says this out of habit, always assuming he’s late to something, somewhere, somehow. I nod to him, beckoning him to the computer, to tell him about the rally, the vigil, our first real chance to be right there in the middle of all of this.

  Travis looks at my screen and actually jumps. “Shit, dude, we gotta go to that. We have to tell somebody there what you know.”

  A cop came by.

  What?

  Yeah. He
came here looking for you. He was confused that I wasn’t you. I told you you should have said my name.

  What did he say?

  He was all freaked out by me. Anderson was his name. His card is on the kitchen table. I don’t think he’s much help. You should call him anyway. I think we might need a different cop.

  Well, I bet there will be a cop there. It’s a vigil! There are always cops at vigils.

  I do not think you understand what a vigil is, Travis.

  Travis pockets Officer Wynn Anderson’s card, giving it a frown first.

  “Let’s just check it out,” he says. “This is the most exciting thing that’s happened around here in years.”

  “I am glad you are having so much fun with this family’s misery,” Marjani says, but not harshly. “Now let’s go before someone takes our picnic spot.”

  “Look at you, see,” Travis says. “Feisty minx.”

  16.

  You know how when you go somewhere with a little kid, you spend most of the trek there exhorting him to hurry up and then, right when you’re about to arrive, he takes off ahead of you, like a puppy jumping from place to place, sniffing everybody’s butts, peeing on anything he sees? That’s Travis anytime we go anywhere. He stares at his phone the whole walk, head down, occasionally whistling or chuckling at some dumb video of a baby, and then as soon as he sees people who aren’t Marjani and me—specifically people who are girls—whoosh, he’s gone.

  It must have rained a little bit last night, because the intramural fields are damp and slightly muddy. I have to spin my wheels to gain traction, and at one point I spray some puddle water on Marjani’s scrubs. I nod to apologize to her and notice that she’s got a spatter of blood on the scrubs, near her left shin. What was she doing before she came over today? Marjani has so many jobs and wears so many hats that it’s impossible to keep track of all of them. It also warrants mentioning that the blood could be mine. Every couple of weeks I’ll wake up and either my sheet or my pillow is speckled with blood spots. I have no idea where they came from or why they are there. I used to find this unnerving, but eventually you stop. What can you do, you know?

  Marjani finds a spot she likes and lays down our blanket, an old St. Louis Cardinals giveaway my mom got free at a baseball game twenty years ago that has somehow followed me to Athens and smells thickly of beer, cigarette ash, and peanuts. I do not like this blanket, but I keep it. It reminds me of Illinois, and Mom, and all kinds of tall adults. Marjani waves to Travis, who’s already a football field away, talking to someone he’s never met before like they grew up together. He nods, motions to the random lady he’s talking to to hold on a second, and then sprints toward us like we’re on fire.

  “Hey, hey, hey, lemme pop open that wine.”

  For reasons I do not understand, my mother, when she comes to visit, stacks my kitchen with bottles of wine, even though I’ve never drunk wine in my life and it’s against Marjani’s religion. (Though boy, it would do her some good sometimes.) Travis is the only one who drinks it, and he’s always coming over to grab bottles and take them home with him, or just stay and drink while hanging out with me, and I think I just figured out why my mom is always stacking my kitchen with wine.

  “Dude, check it out,” he says, pointing off into the distance. All I see is that Redcoat Band, carrying their instruments and wheezing. What a strange instrument a tuba is. I wonder how many different shapes they twisted that metal into until they realized that a tuba’s shape was the exact one they needed to make that exact sound.

  I shake my head at him. “No, no, next to the band,” Travis says. And there, I realize, is the vigil.

  This might have been the worst possible place to have a vigil. First off, there are tubas. It is difficult to conjure up the precise level of moroseness and quiet tragedy that a vigil requires when there are college students wearing big red hats blowing into brass instruments while stoners loll around drinking wine and children run around screaming. I mean, you are having a vigil next to a freaking marching band. You might as well hold it at a six-year-old’s birthday party.

  But if they wanted attention, they got it. The woman from the Rook & Pawn, the woman I almost ran over twice and then couldn’t find as I terrified poor downtown Athens passersby, is sitting at a folding table with a huge stack of papers, many of which threaten to blow away. Next to her is a massive photo of Ai-Chin, the same one I’ve now seen thousands of times online, with a phone number to call with any information you might have about her disappearance. (Travis will soon call this number, get a busy signal, and roll his eyes at me.) There are three people sitting at the table with the Rook & Pawn woman, two Chinese and one an older white woman who instantly looks like every professor I’ve ever seen. (They must all buy their glasses at the same store.) They are handing out flyers and, it appears, trying to get everyone popping by to sign some sort of petition.

  And next to them, I see Ai-Chin’s parents.

  They must be her parents. They look exhausted, first off, the sort of look you might have if you’d been up all night flying and then landed in a strange country you’d never been to with everyone speaking a language you don’t understand. They are both wearing far too many clothes for a warm October evening in northeast Georgia, and thick sunglasses even though it’s dusk. They are talking to no one.

  Seeing them makes me feel ill. I am sorry that they are here. I am sorry any of this is happening.

  “Let’s gooooooooooo!!!” Travis says, and he bounds off toward the vigil, beckoning me to follow. I look at Marjani. She waves me on.

  What’s he doing?

  Why else are you here, Daniel, if not to go over there?

  Marjani always understands a lot more than she lets on.

  “What is wrong with him?”

  It is a relief to have someone asking me this about Travis for once, rather than the other way around. For some reason, all this sadness and tragedy has registered with Travis’s malfunctioning empathy synapses not as “morose” but as “unspeakably thrilling.” He will not stop asking everybody in the vicinity of the vigil about Ai-Chin.

  What was she like? When did you last see her? Was she a good student? Did she ever hang around by the graduate student housing in Five Points? Was she impulsive? Was she shy? Did she, say, like to get stoned?

  Travis has sense enough to avoid the parents, but everyone else near the vigil, and this is a growing crowd of people, is getting an earful of questions.

  The young woman in front of me is less bemused by Travis than everyone else is, and she’s asking me, of all people, if he’s OK. It is incredibly rare that someone seeks my opinion, let alone looks to me as a character witness, so I like her already.

  I wag my eyebrows up and down in a way that I hope says Give me a second, I have a speaker box and not I’m currently having a seizure, and she understands enough to wait it out.

  “He’s okay. He just likes to talk.”

  She doesn’t seem terrified by all this. Another advantage of not using the Stephen Hawking voice.

  “That’s cool,” she says, and I like her instantly, for no clear reason other than I just know it. “I’m Jennifer.” She instinctively holds out her hand, then pulls it back, and I nod, Happens all the time, don’t worry.

  “Daniel.”

  “It’s really terrible, isn’t it?” she says. She’s wearing a T-shirt that’s about three sizes too big for her and has her hair pulled back, so she’s obviously a college student. Only college students, new moms, and disabled people go out that haphazardly dressed to an event where there will be hundreds of people. I nod.

  She looks me up and down.

  “Do you have SMA?” she says. This is the first time I can remember a person asking me this in the wild. I’ve been asked this at charity events, 5Ks, benefits, all the galas we’re paraded out for so everyone will feel guilty about how good they have it and write big checks that I never seem to see any of the money from, now that you mention it. But no one has got it
cold like that.

  I must have just shown this entire interior monologue on my face, because she jumps a little, like she just guessed which hat the ball was under on the video board at a baseball game. “I knew it! I used to work with some kids with my Young Life group who had SMA. That’s some bullshit, right?” She grimaces, but only slightly. “Your chair kicks ass, though.”

  Without even quite realizing I’m doing it, I give my chair a little spin, a full 360, my little catwalk, and I do an exaggerated head bow when I’m back facing her. She squeals, delighted. A sound comes out of me that isn’t close to the sound that she just made, but it is intended to and she gets it and thus our transaction is successful. We all squeal in delight differently, but we all squeal in delight the same.

  At this point, Travis sees the hullabaloo and bounds over, because Travis is gravitationally drawn to hullabaloo. “Looks like you two are having too much fun over here,” he says, and makes a mock grave expression. “This is far too serious a situation for tomfoolery.”

  This seems to click something with Jennifer, and she straightens herself and turns to Travis. She looks at him like she’s mad—at him, at someone. Then her face falls, and she bursts into tears. For the first time since we got here, Travis seems to understand the enormity of what’s going on around him, and he puts his arm around her as she sobs into his shoulder. The two of them have never met. He holds her for a full minute.

  It turns out Jennifer lives down the hall from Ai-Chin at the graduate student housing complex. She didn’t know her well, but nobody did. They had class at the same time in the morning and walked there together the first couple of days of the semester, until Jennifer added a second class later in the day that required her to start driving in to campus. Ai-Chin struggled with English, Jennifer said, but was trying her best and improving. She was very confused by the wide streets of Five Points; no matter how many times she walked to her classes, she’d always get turned around. Ai-Chin listened to Chinese-to-English tapes on her walks to school because she wanted to understand her new town better and because “Nobody here will want to hear me tell them their dog is dying in Chinese.” (Jennifer laughed a little at that one, shooting out a snot bubble that landed near my leg.) All Jennifer really knew about Ai-Chin was that she was nervous about being in America, that she wanted to make her parents happy, that they weren’t excited about her coming here but trusted her to do well, and that she deeply loved animals.