Sorry to See You Go

Kevin Calder

Shortly after marrying Atlas Burden in the backyard of a stranger’s house in Beverly Hills, I became haunted by the ghost of Lucille Ball. It took me a minute to realize what was happening. I’ve never been famous for being the brightest bulb in the chandelier (falling more into the “emotionally intelligent” category), but the day finally came when I could ignore it no longer.

Atlas and I had just settled into a booth in a Mexican cantina in Burbank called Dos Amigos. It was a place neither of us had ever been before. We’d spent our one day off together exploring southern California in my car like we did almost every weekend since we’d met, listening to hula tiki surf music (Atlas, who proclaimed a preference for horses over cars any day, didn’t have a driver’s license and took charge of the music to compensate for my emotionally intelligent self needing to concentrate harder on the road than otherwise-intelligent people would). The sun lowered itself behind the mountains as we passed a sign for a restaurant near the highway. I pulled over and into the parking lot on auto-pilot, Atlas beside me in silent agreement. We were hopeful and starving to death as the cowbell on the glass door announced our arrival. 

“Oh, look,” he said after the server placed chips and salsa in front of us. “There’s your friend.” 

We were the only patrons in the restaurant and had commented on this fact in hushed tones as we followed the hostess to our table. I hadn’t heard the cowbell ring again but his eyes were transfixed upon the space behind me, as if someone I knew were walking up to say hello.

I twisted around in my bench. On the wall behind me was a large framed portrait of Lucy. She had one eyebrow raised and a big smile. The look on her face said: Together wherever we go. 

There were no other portrayals of movie stars anywhere else in sight, no other décor in the restaurant depicting anyone famous. Next to us hung an old painting of a red rooster standing beside a bushel of freshly picked flowers lying sideways in a basket on a dirt floor. 

It wouldn’t have surprised me if Lucy, trapped in her frame, were to have suddenly winked or blown me a kiss, then resumed her perfect, frozen posture. But she hardly needed to. I’d been under Lucy’s watchful eye for long enough now to be left with no doubts or dismiss it all as coincidences. No further convincing of her role in my life would be necessary. From then on, all I had to do was be patient and wait for her message.

“I’m down for the Enchilada del Cocinero,” I said, studying the paper menu on the table in front of me as if I weren’t haunted. “How about you?”

“You and Lucy have the exact same coloring,” said Atlas, continuing to stare at Lucy. He was goading me into elevating an eyebrow of my own. “Ginger.”

“So does this Rooster-Among-Cuttings,” I said. “You’re surrounded.” 

Over enchiladas, Atlas began telling me about how much he hated his new job at the Hollywood Museum. While he was describing the task of cleaning out and cataloging everything in a glorified storage closet that took up an entire floor of the old Max Factor building—that was his assignment, alongside another temp he had difficulty tolerating named Luther—I realized that this must have been somewhere around the fifth Lucy sighting since I’d married him a month ago. 

Before our wedding day, Lucy had simply floated around in the background, stomping on grapes every few years out of the corner of my eye, tormenting Ethel in some way or another. She occupied the same place she probably would in many an eye-corner around the world. I was neither her fan nor her hater. She was just Lucy and everybody loved her.

I first met Atlas on Valentine’s Day at Released, a support group/clubhouse near our apartment in West Hollywood for people who’ve been kidnapped. We got married after knowing each other for three months. Until that point, whenever my friends sat me down to tell me they were tying the knot, I felt like a time traveler beamed back to the distant and savage past, resisting an impulse to say, “Sorry to see you go.” 

By the way (and it doesn’t bother me to talk about it), those were also my kidnapper’s last words to me the day I came back: Sorry to see you go. That’s code for “It’s over,” not that it bears any relevance to anything now.

To tell you the truth, I only began attending Released meetings so I could meet a man and maybe have things pan out for a change. One already familiar with ancient history. Not the kind who’d ponder my grip on the steak knife, hover for dialogue I might utter in my sleep, count eyeblinks per minute, or say “penny for your thoughts,” if I looked vapid while folding the laundry, all because I’d sprung a weird story on him that I believed he was ready for. 

Then there’s the I’ll-keep-it-a-deep-dark-secret-for-forever strategy. I’ve tried that one, too. Absolute worst idea. This contrivance invariably puts up an invisible wall and ends every time with me blurting it out during an argument. And it’s vamoose! as the Cowboys say. Nothing sends the whole thing out the window and into orbit for as long as ye both shall live faster than that. 

Furthermore, I never volunteered anything at those meetings. Just sat there and listened with the Wayfarers on. After all, I had no idées fixes, I scaled no daily wall, nursed no invisible lacerations. I slept a dreamless sleep. I’ve never been prone to catatonia. Nor panic. The flotsam lay at the bottom of a lake drained long ago, disintegrated, so I saw zero point in revisiting an experience so far away from me now, seeing as most of it felt just as far away from me back then, too, even as it unfolded—same as any event. My perspective on this distance includes the day right before it ever happened. I’d been tossing a Frisbee with Larry Fusco. Same as the day I walked into my first-grade class, years before I was taken—a day in the life of Leland Munro. Same as the day I came back. Same as the day after that, and not long after I reappeared, same as the day I stood in the spot where it all began, digging a hole with my big toe into the cold grass and looking at the sky. Same as the day I got married. Same as yesterday.

 Atlas, however, loved to hold the floor at Released meetings, which was fine; that’s what it’s there for. He kept most of it light, confined it to the present day and although he’d made it obvious that we were a couple, he never mentioned Lucy.

“Where’s Looney Ray?” I asked George, whose real name I learned years later was Isaiah Ellis Elrod, on the eve of what people who know the story have generously offered as being the most important day of my life, e.g., the day I came back. “He’s not in his cage.”

“He’s waiting for us in the car,” George said, barely audible. 

At this, I sat up. I’d only ridden in George’s truck once, on my way to captivity.

“Morning, Leland,” he added, still mumbling, without looking at me.

George stood about three feet away, staring at a collection of my belongings on top of the dresser. The sun had already begun washing the powder-blue wall around the edges of the curtains with its whiteness, just as it had every morning near the time I was allowed to leave the bedroom and sit at the kitchen table for breakfast. 

On the dresser were things he’d given me, notably the Shaker-Maker Hairy Monsters set, the batter of which we’d mixed up and let set in the plastic molds one snowy afternoon with the blinds drawn, then baked in the oven. I remember George lifting me up from under my arms a few times so I could watch them shrink and harden through a dirty window in the oven door. I felt his warm head next to mine. George might not have been much of a believer in Easy-Off, plus he was cuckoo, but he always smelled like soap.

The day before, one that began like any other during my sequestration, George left the house, leaving me locked in the bedroom, except this time for what felt like all day. It was freezing in the house and the book he’d given me to read was nowhere to be found. The book was called Able’s Island, about a mouse that got caught in a storm and swept away atop a leaf, transported to an island far away from his family, where, to fill the empty spaces, he would visit an old pocket watch on the forest floor that no longer kept time.

I was starving and furious when George’s pick-up truck finally pulled up on the gravel. He walked into the bedroom carrying what appeared to be a medium-sized, balled-up rodent inside a cage, similar in its wheat color to the description I’d given him of Looney Ray, the only pet my parents allowed me to keep, albeit inside a wooden pen on stilts in the backyard, except that the George variety had tiny ears, like him.

“Look who’s here!” he said, first holding up the cage in one hand, then a bunch of carrots with the greenery still attached in the other. “Safe and sound.” He set the cage down with the carrots on top of it. 

I crawled slowly to the edge of the bed and peered into the cage. “Looney Ray is a hare,” I said on all fours. “Not the Easter Bunny.” I sat back on my heels and let my shoulders slump.

George’s smile dropped from his face. “Okay then,” he said. “If it’s not him, I guess I better let him go.” 

“Good idea.” My mouth was talking on its own. “Can I be next?”

George squatted very slowly without lifting his gaze from me, gripped the top of the cage through the carrots and carried it down the hall with his head lowered as if defeated.

“Wait, George,” I said. When I caught up to him in the kitchen, he stood holding the cage with the back door open, looking out into the overgrown, white backyard long enough to allow a generous amount of snow to fall past him and into the house. 

“He’s cute,” I said to George’s back. “And I want him.” 

The day before this, I’d made up a story about needing to go home in order to protect Looney Ray from a fictitious maid modeled after one I’d seen in a horror movie about voodoo in New Orleans I’d accidentally watched one New Year’s Eve when the babysitter fell asleep. I told him the maid kept a special knife for sacrifices underneath her bed in the attic. “It’s going to happen soon,” I sobbed into a pillow. “I just know it.”

In the kitchen, George turned around and set the cage down in the doorway. With snow accumulating on the rabbit, he stared at me as if he hated me. It was the only time I ever saw this look on his face. “You know what?” he said. “I listen to every fucking word that comes out of your little mouth. And you never ever used the phrase ‘hare.’” 

“Let me keep him,” I said. “Please?” 

He pointed a finger down at the cage. “That’s Looney Ray,” he said. Then he poked the air with the same finger at me. “Got it?”

“Got it,” I said.

This was the only rift between us in my memory.

That last morning, I watched him at the dresser as he packed my mittens and a rescue inhaler he liked to corner me with four times a day (saying I wheezed when I was asleep) into a new, green backpack, without deliberation. He held up the other objects on the dresser one by one, studying each for a few moments, then either tossing it into the bag or setting it back down where I’d left it.

Something had come to an end during the night, I knew. Somehow and already, what remained in this room belonged to a person George only remembered. I was going home.

I felt weightless at breakfast but it began to wear off when we got in his truck. I wasn’t scared, though. I trusted George by then. He’d followed through on a long list of promises he’d made on Day One (while blindfolding me simultaneously), things that he’d for sure do or for sure never do while we were together. He said as long as I saw how hard he was trying to make me happy, we’d both be just fine. I don’t remember any of the things on the list, just that it all came true.

I was blindfolded again for the first few hours of the way home but this time with a soft, velveteen eye shade, the kind I sometimes stole from my current job and gave out to friends who were traveling, not the pair of painted pool goggles I’d worn on my way to captivity. I even put the blindfold on myself. He told me to pull up the hood of my sweatshirt to make it look like I was wearing sunglasses. When he finally said the coast was clear, I removed the mask. A blue sky had slid in place of the snowy one. Everything out the windows was powdery and white, so white it hurt, so I looked at George driving the truck in his threadbare Boston Red Sox baseball cap.

Then, he was sitting opposite me at a picnic table, looking nervous. We were in a park I’d never been to before but which ended up being a thirty-minute drive from the house I grew up in, the house I’d disappeared from in front of sixteen days ago. I was holding Looney Ray II in my lap and there was a box of Nilla wafers on the table between me and George. That’s when he told me he was sad to see me go. He stood up and walked away. 

It was getting dark. I scanned the few people left in the park. If I told anyone I was alone, maybe they’d confiscate me, follow the same path as George, only to realize in the end that I’d been almost-but-not-quite what they were looking for. And this time, maybe they’d kill me for it.

Then blue and red lights were flashing everywhere and a policeman was prying the rabbit from my arms and more of them arrived and two policemen helped me walk over some rocks to the patrol car because for some reason I wasn’t wearing any shoes. After that, it was daylight again and I was looking at the real Looney Ray, set free from his pen. He was sniffing the side of my bed. My room was decorated with notes, enlarged photographs, balloons and two plates of unmatching size with cookies covered in Saran Wrap.

I don’t remember much else about those sixteen days other than what I’ve stated. Later on, the police would tell my parents and me in our living room that I’d been three states away as if it were the edge of the universe.

One thing from my kidnapping did, however, pop up out of nowhere after I met Atlas but I never told him about it. Late one night, I’d been lying in bed, mentally following George’s movements around the house with my eyes closed. The television in the den was always turned up and whenever there was a lot of channel-surfing, it meant that George was getting sleepy. The last thing I remember hearing before the house fell silent, just before his socked feet came thumping down the hallway, was Lucy saying, “Oh, Ethel! For crying out loud, not this again….”

So now I found myself in a situation with Atlas oddly similar to what I just described, the one that landed me in the fold-out chair at the Released clubhouse: someone wanted something from me and I didn’t understand why. The reasons were outwardly basic and human enough, but something else was in operation behind the scenes, a lying-in-wait of sorts, and it was weighing me down. I’ve been almost-but-not-quite everything for as long as I can remember and when and if I couldn’t produce the goods (whatever they were) when the time came, it would all come to an end. Why would that change because of Atlas Burden?

The proposal came one night after we’d been fucking for what seemed like an exceptionally long time. I was half asleep, turned onto my side facing the wall. “Well, why not?” Atlas said at my non-response. He told me I was his all-time favorite fuck buddy, his little ginger unicorn and that he loved me. “What’s a Lone Ranger without a Tonto? Aren’t those reasons as good as any?” 

That last morning of my freedom, the morning of our ceremony in the lady’s backyard with just her in a prairie skirt and clogs as our witness, he added, “This is part of your taming,” to his list of reasons. 

“My what?”

“Your taming.”

Atlas stood in front of a full-length mirror in the hallway wearing his one suit, adjusting his black cowboy hat, the one he wore with everything.

“I don’t feel like being tamed,” I said in the car a few minutes later.

“Sure you do.” He turned up I’ll Take the Rain, by R.E.M. on the stereo as we drove to the lady’s house.

After Dos Amigos, I began keeping my relationship with Lucy a secret. A couple of times, Atlas had caught me watching I Love Lucy on television. When this happened, he’d mumble something along the lines of, “She said anything interesting yet?” as he passed through the room. He’d also begun referring to Lucy as “more of your fiction,” “a hallucination,” and sometimes, “The Invader.” I wondered if Atlas himself weren’t more of those things than Lucy could ever be. He continued to indulge me whenever I did report the various sightings, inquiring as to their nature, time and place, but deep down he was stonewalled by my haunting.

After all, Atlas was a cowboy from North Carolina and not much of a believer in spirits except for the kind that came in bottles. He’d quit his job as a field engineer to become a movie star. He played out his cowboy role for the world’s benefit every day, exactly the type you see in movies, except despite attending constant auditions, he wasn’t really in any movies (plural) except one, where he was allowed to basically play himself. In the film, which has yet to see a release date (his scene has, however, been screened on his iPhone a million times to anyone who’ll watch it), he steps forward from a crowd of other extras—villagers who live in a wind-swept valley that’s being forcefully colonized by aliens—and pronounces his one line: “You can trace the history of all moral decay back to invaders.” He stares at the alien commander threateningly for a few seconds then moves out of view. 

Over the next several days, I began doing everything I could think of to get Lucy to talk. I ordered an Ouija board off Amazon. When it came, I set it on the coffee table and, having no real partner in this misadventure, put both my hands on the teardrop-shaped antenna connecting the spirit world to ours. I waited a long time for the needle in the tiny window to spell something out. It didn’t move. 

I somehow knew that obtaining Lucy’s otherworldly message worked concordantly with tying up loose ends, of leaving things behind, of illuminating the road ahead. So why not kill two birds with one stone? I took the Ouija board upstairs to my neighbor, Aaron. 

Every time I saw Aaron — luckily it was rare — he looked like he was sucking on something sour. He’d once written me a long letter I never responded to about how I shouldn’t do laundry after ten PM, referring me to the building’s rules posted in the laundry room. He said he had trouble sleeping and that he found “noises that echo” disturbing. He’d snuck down during the wash cycle and taped the note to the lid of the machine, adding in post scriptum: By the way, everyone in the building can hear you and your boyfriend’s activities.

There’s a tactic sometimes mentioned in Released meetings known as the Rescue Ruse where sequestered people attempt to coerce the enemy/captor into participating in the resolution of a terrible problem, usually of a personal or confidential nature that has befallen them, one that can only be resolved by setting the hostage free. No one at the meetings had ever produced an example of this method where it had been successful, including my own un-shared, infantile gambit implicating George in the demise of a hare for possible use in voodoo rituals. At times, I wondered if the exercise wasn’t purely for comic relief, given some of the nicknames bestowed upon the hostages, sobriquets that sometimes stuck for years.

Nonetheless, I decided to try out a variation of this formula on Aaron, just as a sort of refresher in case it was ever needed, by getting him to help me conjure the spirit of Lucy, on the premise that it was something I was unable to do without his assistance. 

He didn’t answer my knock. 

“Some of us only need to be set free from ourselves,” I said loudly to Aaron’s front door. “Asshole.” 

I went home and hid the Ouija board on the top shelf of the bedroom closet, placing inside the box an Italian silk handkerchief Atlas had stolen from the storage closet at the museum for me. It had a tiny paper tag hanging from it by a thread that said: L. Ball (boudoir). 

A few days later in the breakroom at LAX, my colleague, Dolores Hidalgo, asked me if I could please, please, please do her a favor by escorting Naomi Campbell to her seat on the airplane. Every Air France passenger traveling in La Première gets an escort. I’d recently been promoted to Station Supervisor, so this type of assignment no longer really fell within my purview, but Dolores was visibly rattled. She showed me her schedule on a small piece of paper, pointing out where it said: CAMPBELL, NAOMI ELAINE AF 69—DOLORES. 

“I don’t want her to throw a cell phone at me,” Dolores said. “Besides, you’re a guy. She only beats up on other girls.”

“Advanced payment is a Randy’s donut,” I said. “The Texas Glazed. You have until three o’clock to procure the goods.”

“Deal,” said Dolores. 

“And just FYI, you’ve got it all wrong about Naomi. She’s a changed woman now, thanks to a little thing called personal evolution.”

Dolores stood up from the table and opened her locker. She bent down and reached under the table. She lifted a large canvas tote that said I ♡ LUCY across it and slid it into the locker.

“Wait a second,” I said. “That bag….”

“Isn’t it cute? My tía from Guadalajara is visiting. We Mexicans love Lucy. She bought it for me the other day when she was out sightseeing.”

“You know what, Dolores?” I said. “You see so many married people who’ve let themselves go. Forget the donut. I got your back.”

“Only the French,” Naomi said softly as she floated along next to me, “would assign a flight the number 69.” She laughed. “Forgive me.”

I had walked Naomi to her Paris flight many times. I loved hearing her deep, chain-smoker voice. That day she was wearing a turban. We were approaching the VIP security line when she stopped suddenly and said, “Wait, wait,” and started digging through her purse. “Sorry, I just… my emerald ring. I can’t find it.”

“Where was the last place you saw it?” I asked her.

“I’m pretty sure it’s…. Aha!” Naomi held up the ring. “You little bugger.” She dropped it back into her purse. “He’s raging today,” she said. “Absolutely raging.” She placed her purse into a plastic bin and sent it through the X-ray machine. I met her on the other side and we resumed our walk through the terminal. “And I, unfortunately, must travel,” she continued. “What luck.”

“Who is raging?”

“Mercury, darling. Who else? Everything goes to Hell when Mercury goes into retrograde. Surely you know about this.”

“I guess I never really paid attention. I do read my horoscope, though. They mostly get Libra right. And my lover’s horoscope.” You could use words like “lover” around Naomi because she understood them.

“It’s no joke, Lee. When Mercury’s in retrograde, anything can happen.”

“Like what?” I asked. “Tell me so I’ll be ready.”

“Sign no papers, make no decisions, don’t travel, and if you do, even if it’s only to the mailbox, take nothing with you except your keys. Just ride it out, like a storm. The one good thing that comes during retrograde is that the spirit world opens up. Communication with guardian angels and the departed becomes easier. Were it not for the watchkeepers, I think we’d all perish in the crossfire.”

I had to tell her. “Naomi?” I said. “I think maybe a spirit is trying to contact me. I also think it’s no coincidence that you and I are having this conversation.”

“There are no coincidences.” 

“It’s just, well, there’s like an… interference or something and I’m not receiving the message.”

“It will come. They always do. Let’s see….” She raised a hand to her chin and looked from side to side. “Is it by chance a relative? Are you able to visit a place the spirit once lived? Sometimes, they’re trapped because of unfinished business on Earth. I put a whole chapter about this in a novel I wrote a thousand years ago called Swan.”

“Oh my God,” I said. “That’s a fantastic idea.”

“We’re in Phase Three this week, so you’d best act fast. Phase Three is also known as Mercury Cazimi. And watch out because there’s another period following retrograde where….” 

“I am being haunted by Lucille Ball,” I blurted out. “Lucy’s the ghost.”

Naomi stopped walking and looked down at the floor. The Red Cross had installed a Resusci-Annie CPR mannequin in Terminal B so that passengers could learn CPR while waiting to board their flights. They could practice bringing Annie back to life by performing chest compressions and rescue breathing on her. She was programmed to say, “Congratulations! You saved a life!” if you were successful. A group of kids huddled on the floor around Resusci-Annie. They were poking her and kissing her and laughing so she stayed quiet.

“That’s Resusci-Annie,” I explained. “She never gets a moment’s peace.”

Naomi remained transfixed on Resusci-Annie, fastened onto her platform. “How weird,” she said, almost in a whisper. “Imagine the diseases they’ve given her.” 

That voice was a mixture of true Londoner, keeper of odd fascinations and soothsayer. She relayed nothing further about Mercury as I accompanied her to her seat on the airplane.

The appearance of 1344 Ogden Street, flagged as “Former Residence of Lucille Ball” on my GPS, had been one of the early signs. I was in the car with Atlas when it came. It was our wedding day. Everything else on the map that morning was things like Target, Sammy’s Mattress World, Chick-fil-A.

The night after Naomi had explained it all to me, Atlas stayed home watching YouTube videos about the Apocalypse in bed. He had the volume turned up so loud I could hear it in the living room. In one of the videos, the Apocalypse was being plotted by the Freemasons who were going to live inside a giant bubble on Mars.

Atlas avoided sleep because of a recurring dream he was prone to having about the man who kidnapped him when he was seven years old. Sometimes, he woke up crying. When this happened, I’d put my arms around him and say the only thing I knew to say, the only thing I’d found that had worked for me: “The past does not exist.”

I was glad to have him near me. He’d recently begun hanging out at go-go clubs in West Hollywood until the early mornings. He said he was afraid of having the dream. The night before, he came home a little earlier (and a little tipsier) than I expected and busted me watching another episode of I Love Lucy. He sat down next to me on the sofa. “You could make a lot of money stripping nights at The Eagle,” he told me. “Make full use of your recessive pigmentation instead of chasing ghosts.” 

“You’re the only person I know who wants to discuss pigmentation in the middle of the night,” I said. “Please let me watch this.”

He stared blankly at the television. “Better than waiting for a dead movie star to tell you what you should do with your life.” He stood up and started walking towards the bedroom. “I’m fine with you stripping,” he added. “I mean, it’d be kinda hot. Just don’t let them put you in a porno.”

“I’ll try not to,” I said. 

At around 4 AM, I slid quietly out of bed. I opened the closet and set the Ouija board on the dresser. I withdrew Lucy’s stolen paisley scarf from the box, tied it on my head commando style and set out on foot in my pajama bottoms into a night enshrouded in June gloom. According to the GPS on our wedding day, Lucy’s house was about a fifteen-minute walk from ours.  

On silent, pitch-black Ogden Street, my phone was kind enough to yell YOUR DESTINATION IS ON THE RIGHT loud enough to wake the dead. I turned it off and stood on the sidewalk, facing number 1344. 

“Lucy?” I whispered. “Lucy?” I waited for what seemed like forever for an answer. Nothing. I stood in the darkness, gazing at the oddly modest house, the large black tree in front of it. I caught a glimpse of no specter, saw no darting translucent image, no floating luminous nightgown, no one moaned, I felt no draft of icy air, there was no sudden cloud of mist, none of my hairs stood on end.

“We’re in Phase Three,” I said anyway. “Mercury Cazimi. I hope it’s not too late.” I’d rehearsed the scene following Naomi’s guidelines wherever possible in order to receive Lucy’s message without static. “I’m going to assume that you can hear me.” 

Still nothing.

“The eve of every departure brings an excitement,” I began. “A type of weightlessness at a verge or on a precipice. The weightlessness occurs in the singular period just before an event or an occasion takes place. And it’s so amazing. What mortal doesn’t live for that? It’s just the aftermath that always kills me. Because in the aftermath comes the gloaming, and in the gloaming, a despair, and in the despair, the beckoning of an eve of something new — the sifting of objects before decampment, the steps before turning to wave goodbye. And when the eve seems too far off to be real, the plotting of one, which I am guessing brings me to the reason for your surveillance.” 

…Sound of crickets…. 

“I thought of a new name to use after I go,” I went on, “keeping it Scottish, in any event. I think it’s okay to leave one obvious clue behind, don’t you? Find out who matters in the end.”

A car came down the street and slowed as it passed me. Then, it drove on by. I moved further into her landscaping. “I’ve done this before,” I said. “The first time I had no say in things, it was forced on me. Another time, I only realized I’d even left when there I was, on a bridge overlooking downtown Miami, with two changes of clothes in my bag and a stray dog I’d been calling Negrita for days. It was easy. Less to lose than now. Then, once, in Mexico, I stopped some people for directions to the beach. They laughed as if I were joking and kept looking back at me. Over time, I gradually began to hear the sea outside my window, caught glimpses of blue from the balcony through the interspaces of buildings. Experiments in distance, I guess you’d call my disappearances. A life-long study of things near and far away.” 

I was lying on Lucy’s grass by then. I looked at the nighttime sky through the black branches of the tree spanning over me in silence, giving her a chance to ponder these findings before responding. 

Alas, she did not.

“Leave it for another day, Lucy,” I said, finally. I gathered myself up from the lawn and brushed myself off. “Anyway.” I started down the sidewalk.

I took my time walking home. It was the hour of lost souls, post-apocalyptic L.A. with only a stray survivor here and there, sheltered by the orange glow of streetlamps for a few steps, then stumbling into the darkness again, a darkness where anything could become of us.

When I neared our apartment, Atlas was sitting in the driver’s seat of my car parked on the street, looking at his phone. He spotted me approaching. “What the hell are you doing?” he said, bounding out of the car.

“She wasn’t home,” I explained.

“Not possible.”

“I would tell you if she was.”

“There’s no way you walked all the way there and back again in an hour.”

“It’s right over there.” I gestured with my arm. “Not far. And where are you going? You told me you can’t drive.”

“I said I didn’t have a driver’s license. Tell me where you went. You hooking up on Grindr? Is that what’s going on here?”

“I told you where I went.”

Atlas held his phone up so I could see it and pointed at the screen. He had programmed his GPS for 1000 North Roxbury Drive in Beverly Hills. 

“What’s that?”

“Your buddy’s house. Good thing I didn’t go chasing after you, seeing as that’s not really where you went.”

“Wait a second. How is that Lucy’s house? My phone said it was in West Hollywood. It just popped up one day. You remember? The first sign?”

“I googled it. The Ogden Street house was the first place she lived when she came to Hollywood. She only rented it. The house you want is way over here.” He spread out his fingers to enlarge the map on the screen. “Right in front of the house that lady married us in. This is where Lucy really lived.”  

“Oh, God,” I said. “Give me the keys.” 

“Nope,” said Atlas. “You’re in no state of mind to operate a vehicle.”

“I’m fine.”

“Just last night, didn’t you watch an episode of I Love Lucy where she and Ethel go to the wrong house?”

“Fuck you, Atlas Burden.”

“I’m driving this time.” 

Halfway down North Roxbury Drive, Atlas slows the car as we come around a curve in the home stretch. In the distance, Lucille Ball stands alone at the edge of her front yard near the driveway. She’s wearing a printed sundress with a black cardigan sweater draped around her shoulders, holding it closed near her neck with one hand.

“Oh shit,” I say. “There she is.”

“Where? I don’t see anyone.”

 She begins wringing her hands when she sees us approaching. Atlas is almost in front of the house now. It is neither dawn nor twilight on this street. The sky is the color of a large purple grape.

“Give me a minute.” I get out of the car.  

“Are you from the police?” she asks me. “Did you find him? He didn’t wait for me. He should have waited for me but he never does.”

“Find who?” I say. 

“He ran off to go trick-or-treating and he hasn’t come back yet. It’s been too long, everyone’s gone inside. It’s getting dark and…,”

 She sits down in the grass and begins to cry. I untie her rightful scarf from my head and hand it to her. She blots her eyes with it.

“Desi’s away fucking one of his girlfriends down in Mexico,” she sobs. “No one can help me. And for some idiotic reason, every time I start down the street to go looking for him, I end up right back here, where I started.”

Lucy in Purgatory. 

“Go looking for who?” I ask her.

“My son. He’d be so easy to spot if he’s not being held for ransom, or… I can’t even let myself say it.”

“I’ve never heard of any child of yours being taken or going missing,” I tell her. “Now that I think about it, I’ve seen him on TV, he’s an actor.”

“You’re thinking of Keith Thibodeaux,” she says. “He plays Little Ricky on my show. This is my son, my real son. On top of everything else, I’m locked out of my house. I can’t open the door. Can you please go get the police?” 

“He comes back,” I say, trying to remember. “He must have.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I know him. I know him at nine and at sixteen, I know him at twenty and in his mid-thirties, too. He’s not young anymore now. And….” I glance back at Atlas sitting behind the wheel of my car. He opens the door, walks around it, and stops on the sidewalk. He’s looking at us like we’re the family he never talks about.

I turn to face Lucy again. “I came back,” I tell her. “Does that offer you anything?” I gesture toward Atlas with an open palm. “The man standing on the sidewalk, he came back, too. He married me.”

Out of nowhere, a small boy wearing a tan cowboy costume with fringe and turquoise beads, a black hat and shiny spurs on his boots comes running at us, carrying a plastic pumpkin. He crosses the lawn like lightning towards Lucy. On her knees in the grass, Lucy takes the boy into her arms. She clutches the scarf in her hand behind his back. Atlas’s tiny paper label dangles from a corner. 

“Oh, baby,” she says, not letting him go. “You’re okay, you’re okay, you’re okay.”

“’Course I am, Mama.” He wriggles himself free.

Lucy stands up and meets my gaze. She seems to see me for the first time. She studies Atlas, too. He moves close to us. 

Yesterday, as I was combing my hair before leaving the house, Atlas paused on his way down the hallway. His reflection stood briefly looking at mine in the mirror. He said that no one had ever come looking for him until now.

The three of us form a triangle around little Desiderio Alberto Arnaz IV, who sees no wrong in the world back then.

“Look, everybody,” he says, his head bent down to inspect what’s inside his plastic jack-o’-lantern. “Look what the ghost gave me.”