Forgotten Country Read online

  I called Hannah that night. She was spending the summer in Chicago. I said, “Who knew? Dad’s getting mushy.” I felt like a traitor as soon as I said it, but I had to put the sarcastic note in to get her to listen.

  “Not interested,” she said.

  Hannah had called me a couple days before she disappeared, crying because the baby of a woman she worked with had died the night before. I’d suddenly hit a wall in my dissertation, and when Hannah called I hadn’t slept for days, and had spent the morning pacing, swiping at a blackboard I had put up in my living room.

  “He’s dead,” Hannah wept as soon as I answered the phone.

  “Who’s dead?”

  “The baby,” Hannah sobbed.

  “What baby?”

  “Marjorie’s, a woman from work.”

  A wave of relief passed over me. “Jesus Christ,” I said. “Are you trying to scare me to death?”

  “Her neighbor’s children threw her baby out the window while she was at work.”

  “Holy shit,” I said. “Who was watching it?”

  “His brother.”

  “How’s your friend?”

  There was a sharp intake of breath. “How do you think?” And then a pause. “I’m not really close to her. I tried to find her phone number, but it’s not listed.”

  “Oh, Hannah, that’s awful,” I said, and wrote What the fuck? on my blackboard, quietly so she couldn’t hear the chalk.

  On cue, Hannah started to cry again.

  “Stop,” I said. She didn’t even know these people.

  “They were only twelve years old,” she said. “I don’t know how to deal with this.”

  I didn’t respond, outraged somehow that she could take this woman’s tragedy and try to make it personal. As though the world hurt her in particular and no one else. Some people have real problems, I wanted to say. That woman whose baby died, she has problems.

  “Hannah, please don’t cry,” I said, but that only made her cry harder. I waited for her to stop. I could think of nothing to say that would help.

  A couple months after Hannah disappeared, the kids who had thrown the baby out the window went on trial. I followed the case out of some perverse loyalty. It turned out Marjorie wasn’t a colleague of Hannah’s, but a cleaning lady who worked in her building. She lived not in Hannah’s trendy North Side neighborhood but in one of the South Side housing projects.

  Her surviving son’s name was Kevin. He was ten years old. The neighbor’s kids had been giving him trouble for some time. The lock on his door had been broken for weeks, and they had come to rifle through the things in his house, to eat his mother’s food. When they came he was sitting on the sofa watching cartoons; his baby brother was in his lap.

  Roadrunner was outwitting Wile E. Coyote, whose Acme mail-order products never quite got the job done. Boulders, buildings, pianos hung suspended in air a beat too long. Roadrunner zoomed fearlessly beneath impending doom, but Wile E. Coyote, always too slow, was flattened on the desert landscape.

  That day his neighbors asked Kevin for candy. They pulled his baby brother out of his lap and pushed him. He began to cry, but he had no candy. So they held his brother, dangling him by his legs out the window. His brother loved it, gurgled with laughter, held seventeen stories above the ground.

  Kevin’s eyes met the boys’ who held his little brother. There was no sound when the boys let go. Through the open window they saw an empty sky.

  Kevin turned and ran out the door of his apartment. His feet pounded one hundred separate steps. He didn’t know about the laws of gravity or physics. He imagined his brother hung suspended in the air. He thought if he could just make it down in time, he could catch his little brother before he hit. He ran down the stairs and out the door: his gaze aimed at the sky, his arms outstretched.

  . . .

  After the trial, I couldn’t sleep at night. I stopped working on my dissertation and stopped answering phone calls from my friends. I stayed up thinking how I should have done things differently. When Hannah called, I should have taken a movie over to her place, and some tea, and told her our old jokes until she laughed. At night I should have lain in bed next to her and stuck my feet between her legs and asked if she remembered how mad she used to get when I did that. I should have wrapped my arms around her and talked about places we’d lived and games we had played until she was wrapped up in the comfort of who we used to be. Where was she? I wondered. In those days I lost weight and watched my parents suffer. I should have spent that night with her, I thought. If I could have done it differently, I wouldn’t, no matter what, have said nothing and let her go.

  2.

  In the first anxious days after I realized something was wrong, I drove to Hannah’s apartment and knocked on her door. I asked her neighbors if they’d seen her. I searched desperately for my extra key to her place, which she had given me months earlier to hold on to in case she lost hers, and which I had promptly misplaced. I called the police and the hospital; I called her school and her friends whose names I knew. There were no leads. Meanwhile, I missed classes and canceled meetings. I told no one I knew what had happened.

  Hannah had never cut me out of her life before. With a growing sense of dread, I called my parents. I had to explain to my mother three times before she understood, and then she moaned in a low voice and said, “Not again.”

  After that, I went to the police station where I formally reported my sister missing. While my parents drove down to Chicago, I met a policeman in front of Hannah’s apartment, and with the key I had finally found buried in a bowl of loose change, we entered her place together.

  When we entered the apartment, the place was clean and already bare. The rugs on her hardwood floor had been rolled up and propped against a corner. I slipped off my shoes and looked around. Wherever she was now, she had left this place intentionally.

  “Huh,” Officer Morris said, looking around and folding his arms. “Was she moving?”

  “No,” I said. “Not that I know of.”

  While he took a cursory look around the place, I ransacked Hannah’s bedroom for clues of where she’d gone, for any note. I looked behind her bare desk and under her swept-out bed. In the kitchen, there was a note on the refrigerator, written in her loopy, crooked handwriting. Anything left in the apartment is free to take.

  The refrigerator itself was empty. I’m not sure what I expected when I opened the door. A pizza, a half-eaten can of peas, a carton of milk, maybe. It was when I saw the blank insides gleaming out at me that I knew she wasn’t planning on coming back. She had even polished the trays.

  Before we left, I went to the kitchen and took Hannah’s note. I wondered who she’d expected would find it. She’d been so deliberate, so thorough in leaving that I stopped worrying she’d had a breakdown, or that something terrible had happened to her. Instead, I began to be afraid of all the ways in which she would hurt us when we found her.

  My parents met Officer Morris that evening in my living room, and he told them not to worry. He said the case seemed straightforward and that he was confident that no foul play was involved. Still, he took everything my parents had brought: her dental records, her medical history, and a list of physical identifiers, including a description of a constellation of four moles on her cheek that exactly matched the diamond pattern of moles on my shoulder.

  “Why haven’t you started a search party?” my mother asked. “She’s in trouble. Someone might have kidnapped her.”

  “Most missing person cases are solved within seventy-two hours without police intervention,” Officer Morris said. “The person in question almost always returns or makes contact of his own volition.”

  “It has been over seventy-two hours,” my mother said. “According to her professors, she’s missed classes for over two weeks.”

  “Ma’am, I’m a parent, too. And I feel for your situation, but I’m afraid there’s nothing more I can do. A daughter skipping class is not a job for the police department,
and frankly, it’s no crime to drop out of college.”

  “We’re paying the tuition. We’re her parents. We have a right to know what is going on in her life.”

  “Well, legally, that’s not exactly true.”

  “There are killers out there,” my mother said. “They’re in the news all the time. Someone might be hurting her right now.” Her voice broke.

  “Ma’am, do you have any evidence that she was being threatened by anyone?”

  “You don’t understand,” my mother said. “She’s sensitive. You have to help her.” She turned then to my father. She hissed, “Tell him.”

  I wasn’t sure what she was talking about. While it was true that Hannah was sensitive, I’d begun to think her disappearance was more an act of selfishness than a cry for help.

  “Are there any medical records proving that she might be a danger to herself?” Officer Morris asked.

  My mother took my father’s arm. “Tell him,” she insisted.

  This, more than anything, confused me. What was there to tell? My father seemed equally lost: he took a step back and lifted his hands up in the air. I don’t know why he did that, why his first reaction was to show her his empty hands.

  “Listen,” Officer Morris interrupted. “All evidence shows she left without coercion or violence, and of her own volition. This is about as straightforward as these things get.”

  “It’s your job to make sure she’s safe,” my mother said. “Isn’t that what you do?”

  “Mom,” I said. I was worried if she alienated him, he’d drop Hannah’s case altogether. She turned to me and flashed what Hannah had always called The Look of Death. I was quiet.

  “This is your job,” she repeated firmly, stepping toward Officer Morris. “Bring my daughter home.”

  He shrugged. “I’ll see what we can do,” was all he said.

  As soon as he’d left, my mother turned to my father and me. “How could you not tell him about her problems?” she asked. “How could you just stand there like that?”

  I didn’t know exactly what my mother was referring to, but Hannah had always been sensitive and had often succumbed to fits of hysteria as a child. As a baby, Hannah had had this trick. Right before she started to cry, she made a spit bubble with her mouth. If my parents or I could get to her before the bubble burst, she would be comforted and remain quiet. But if the bubble burst, there was no way to quiet her down.

  I had been the first one to notice this. Every time the bubble burst, Hannah would descend into a fit of crying that didn’t stop for hours. Her fits lasted so long that her doctor kept her in the hospital for observation once, convinced no healthy baby would cry that much. It turned out she was perfectly fine, and we took her home, but it took two straight days after that to quiet her down. At some point in my childhood, it became my responsibility to watch for the spit bubble.

  “She’s a very good baby,” my parents often said back then. “She is always so happy as long as we catch her in time.”

  I was the one who had to catch her in time. And Hannah could reach a point beyond comfort, a point beyond which we could do nothing to bring her back. I was the official spit-bubble monitor until she was about eight years old. It was at that age that it first occurred to me that Hannah knew exactly what she was doing, and was in complete control of the reaction she created in the rest of us.

  It became clear in the following days that Officer Morris was not going to do much to look for Hannah. So at my parents’ request, I assembled a list of Hannah’s classmates and closest friends, and sent out mass e-mails. When there was little response, I began systematically calling them. No one seemed to know where she was: for the most part, they sounded truly shocked to hear that she’d vanished. It made me wonder. Hannah had always had more friends than I did: I’d always been more of a loner. There was no one, for instance, with whom I felt I could talk about Hannah’s disappearance. I told my thesis advisor what had happened only when it began to affect my work, and while he was sympathetic and encouraging, we only talked about it in terms of how it would impact my productivity.

  I would have expected Hannah’s friends to either be worried or in the loop: at least to have noticed when she went missing. I’d always been a little jealous of how easily she seemed to surround herself with people who liked her. This made me wonder if I’d been wrong all this time: if she’d been lonely as well.

  In those first months, my parents expected to hear from Hannah at any moment. At dinner in the living room in front of the television, they would look up at the slightest noise outside. They sat with their bodies tensed, as if she might be at the doorstep already and all they needed to do was rise and let her in.

  After a couple months of this, a friend of Hannah’s admitted that she’d heard from her recently, but didn’t know where she was or how to reach her.

  I drove home to tell my parents the news in person. “She’s okay,” I said. “I don’t know any more than that, but her friend has heard from her, and she’s all right.”

  My mother burst into tears.

  “Where is she now?” my father asked. “Is she in Chicago? Michigan?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What’s her phone number? What is her address?”

  “Her friend didn’t know.”

  He stepped toward me. “That’s the crucial information. Next time, get the facts!” He turned away and started to walk up and down the length of the room.

  “This is progress,” I said. “I drove all the way over to tell you—and I got as much information as I could.”

  “Bring me that girl’s number,” he said. “The one who talked to Hannah.”

  “What do you think she’s going to tell you?”

  “Just get it.”

  When I brought it to him, he punched the numbers into the phone. Until now, he had not done much in the process of searching for Hannah, content to grill me instead on what progress I had made. Now he gripped the phone impatiently, waiting for the girl to answer.

  “This is Hannah’s father,” he said. “Where is she? What do you mean you don’t know?”

  His voice was too loud. “Doesn’t her number show up on your caller ID? Can’t you get it from the phone company’s records?” The knuckles stood out in his hand. I wondered when he’d gotten so gaunt. He paced back and forth, jerking the phone with each word. “I can call the police,” he said. “You’re refusing to cooperate and withholding information.” His voice rose louder and louder.

  “Dad,” I said, but he waved at me to be quiet, one quick, furious dismissal. “Do something,” I hissed at my mother. She rose from the sofa and pulled the phone from his hand.

  “Hello,” she began, but her voice broke. She wept into the mouthpiece. My father moved forward and took the phone back. He held it to his ear. “Hello?” he said. “Are you there?”

  “She hung up,” he said, turning to me.

  I nodded. “Yeah.” I felt embarrassed for him.

  “I wasn’t finished.”

  “Well, you were kind of rough on her.”

  “I’m calling her back.”

  “Maybe that’s not such a good idea.”

  My mother raised her head. “Whose side are you on?” she asked.

  “I’m not on a side,” I said. “But that girl isn’t our enemy.”

  My mother’s voice was like cracked glass. “Since we’re so clearly an embarrassment to you,” she said, “and this stranger’s feelings are so much more important than ours, why don’t you call her yourself and handle it however you think is more proper. You can do it the elegant way.”

  I flinched. “That’s not fair,” I said.

  “Give her the phone,” my mother said, and my father handed me the handset.

  “You can at least ask me nicely,” I said. I made the call.

  When the girl answered the phone, she was angry and impatient. “I don’t want your family to harass me anymore,” she said. I tried to apologize, but she insisted, voice
rising, that she had no information about Hannah’s whereabouts. “Stop calling me,” she said, and I did not push her. I hung up, and shrugged at my parents. I’d tried.

  A month later, someone else who’d gone to high school with Hannah told me she’d moved to California. This time, I was able to get my sister’s number. It was my mother who made that call, my father clutching the other phone to his ear while she spoke. “Haejini?” she said. “Is this Hannah?”

  There was silence.

  “Is it her?” I asked. My mother waved at me to be quiet, nodding her head.

  “How have you been living?” she asked. “Do you need money?”

  “Are you okay?” my father jumped in, unable to wait. “Where are you?”

  And then Hannah hung up on them. I knew it from the way both my parents pulled their phones away from their ears and stared at them.

  My father recovered first. “You call her,” he said, turning to me. “She’ll talk to you.”

  I shook my head. “No.”

  “She will,” he repeated. “She always does.”

  “I don’t want to,” I said. I looked at my parents: they looked so old. My mother was clutching her phone to her chest.

  “I’ll call, but not in front of you,” I said.

  I went to my room to do it. The phone rang and rang. “Hannah,” I said into her voice mail, “I don’t know what’s wrong. Tell me what I can do. If you’re in trouble, I’ll help you. If you tell me to leave you alone, I will. Just call. I’ll give you whatever you need.”

  I hung up and waited. I was sure she would call me back. I kept checking my phone every ten minutes to see if I’d missed her call, to make sure the ringer was on its loudest ring: I checked my voice mail, my e-mail. I waited a day. Two. A week. She never called back.

  Meanwhile, I went back to school, and the days kept passing. My parents kept calling Hannah, keeping vigil, leaving messages she always ignored.

  One day, my father called me and said, “Come home. I have something to tell you.”