“He locked them up somewhere,” Dolores said. “Some kind of cellar under the earth, in the cold. I remember her saying they could hear animals above them, cattle or horses, clomping past. The light was weak in the cellar, but they could see shelves and shelves of Mason jars, all filled with peaches. And the awful man barely gave them food—just things like moldering bread and canned vegetables, still cold and in the can. And he was terrible to them. He’d scare them and kick them and punch them in the ribs. Your mom says she was certain the man would kill them both. He carried a long jump rope for tying them up, and a knife with a serrated edge and red tape on its handle. He’d sneak out from the cellar shadows at all the worst unexpected times to scare the life out of them. And she wasn’t too specific on this, but sometimes he’d start touching them where he shouldn’t be touching. If they’d cry, they’d get a beating with his rope.”
“No,” I said. “That’s not the same story at all.”
“Remember now, I don’t believe a word of this nonsense. I mean, why would she keep this hidden ’til now?”
“I keep thinking that, too.”
“But your mother—she insists it’s the truth. She claims that she and this Warren boy eventually ran away. They escaped from the horrible man, but they got lost. Lost in some town they didn’t know, and scared he’d find them again. They stole a bunch of those cherry candy bars from a department store, and then they went hiding in the woods until they were saved.”
Shamefully, I turned my head to the emptied field. Across the yards of chalked and trampled grass, I saw random, fluttering shadows; and then, cocking my head toward the towering lights, saw a brood of autumn-night bats, ecstatically feeding, their bristly bodies plunging and circuiting through the lush insect fog.
Dolores squinted up at the bats, then back at me. “I don’t know what to think anymore,” I said. I tried focusing on the girl in her story, this fresh, distressing portrayal of my mother, but, like Dolores had warned, the story seemed more madness than truth.
“Your mom needs to pick one of those tales and stick herself to it,” said Dolores. “She should know better than to tell crazy fibs to the both of us.”
But which were fibs, I wanted to ask, and which weren’t? My mother had been so specific when she’d confessed to me. Yet so much of this alternate tale—the jump rope and the spoiled bread, or the serrated knife, its red handle in the kidnapper’s fist—seemed equally credible. What confused me were the coincidences in each story. Peaches. Cherry candy bars. Even something from her long-ago tale about her father’s punishment: Hiding in the woods. Now I could sense my mother’s threads of memory, intertwining and knotting, both the distant past and recent. All her uncertain truths and partial, changeable lies.
Initially, I’d planned to ask Dolores about Otis. She still hadn’t mentioned him, and I wondered if my mother had chosen to keep the boy her thrilling secret. But I felt too exhausted to ask anything else. Soon I’d have to fix the missed appointments with Kaufman; I’d prepare the house for Alice. And soon I would confront my mother.
For now, I sat soundlessly with Dolores, our shoulders against the fence, heads still lifted toward the lights and the swirling, ravenous bats. When we stood to leave, we brushed the muddied bits of leaves from our jeans. “Back home,” she said. Her boots thudded on the cobblestone, but my shoes made no sound at all. During the hour we’d been outside, the air had chilled considerably. Soon, the start of pheasant season; soon, Thanksgiving and the winter solstice.
After walking half a block, we turned to watch the bats a final time. Now, on the football field, we saw an even stranger sight: beneath the goal post’s wide yellow Y, two children were playing tag. We couldn’t see their faces; only their mittens and hooded jackets, their home-team blues and golds. They moved like tiny, unsupervised ghosts, raising their blue-wool hands, innocently touching, then fleeing, then circling back to touch again.
“Well, would you look at that,” Dolores said.
I nodded, relieved that she could see them too. “But where are their parents?” I wondered aloud. “Don’t they know how easily they could lose their kids?”
Dolores hooked her arm in mine, pulling me back toward home. “You sound just like your mother,” she said.
In the deepest hour of night a noise roused me from sleep. It was a thick, reverberant thud, some unseen corner of the house. I sat up in bed, leaning forward to listen, knowing it wasn’t a dream.
I waited for the noise again, but heard nothing. In the dark, I remembered those nights when Alice and I would wake to our mother stumbling drunkenly through the rooms. It was never the stubbing of toes or crashing of glass that woke us, but rather her subtle shuffling of feet: the right the left, the right the left. Wide-eyed, barely breathing, the two of us lay waiting for the moment when the shuffling stopped and we could sleep again.
Now there was no noise, but instead the worrisome absence of it, swelling. “Mom,” I whispered to the half-open door. “You awake?”
Earlier, after Dolores had left, I’d arranged my mother’s blankets and sat cross-legged in the rocking chair beside the couch. Her breathing had been ragged; she didn’t seem to be dreaming. As I watched her sleep, I’d analyzed the stories she’d told, all their quirks and contradictions. I felt utterly powerless: it seemed nothing could prove or disprove her, and nothing could save her health.
Presently, there was only the purr of the heater, the swaying leaves against the window. As I moved, my socks slashed the carpeted floor, hurrying toward the sound.
When I saw the empty couch, I called to her again. And then, from the kitchen, came the smell: rich and sweet, like soaked cake.
Before I could hit the kitchen light, I saw her. My mother lay motionless on the floor. Within the clock’s 4:27 glimmer, her arm bent awkwardly from her gown, white and bare like the neck of a swan. She had fallen beside the refrigerator. In the fall, she’d swiped a hand against the door, strewing the photographs and vegetable magnets. She’d toppled the garbage pail, scattering the trash. I rushed to sweep the pictures aside and shake her shoulder. Loudly I cleared my throat, hoping to rouse her—the cough edgy and alto from my mouth, like a child’s—and I breathed the smell of blood.
She had struck her head on the fridge, the sharp corner of its handle. The door was slightly ajar, and when I tried to wake her, it opened wider, spilling light across her face. Radiant in its yellow was the back of her head, its queerly clumped hair. A wound had opened above her ear. The blood pulsed slowly along her forehead, across her brow, to the rug.
Her skin had gone pale. Her hand in mine was wet and soft, like a sponge. Carefully I jostled her, tapped her face with two fingers, repeating Mom, Mom until it billowed into one unbroken word. I stroked her hair, smoothing it from the blood, pressing my shirtsleeve against the wound.
At last she fluttered back to me. She turned her head, light fixing in her green eyes. The motion seemed to cause her pain, but she muttered, frailly, “Are you my pretty little pigeon?”
“Try and get up now,” I said. “You have to get up. We need a doctor for this.” The blood had smeared my sleeve and knuckles. I was striving to keep calm, but my panic was palpable, a current between us.
“Don’t call the doctor. Did I only hit my head?”
“We are going to the doctor.”
I helped her sit, helped her steady the dizziness, and then guided her to the living-room couch. She lifted her hand to her head, but I lowered it back to her lap. The blood was more conspicuous now, three streams glistening down her cheek in a red capital M.
She was cold. I ran to find her coat: my panicked ankles; my blurred, sleeping-pill vision. As I moved, I shouted to her: “This time, you’ve got to listen. That cut on your head is big and it’s deep and what you need right now is a doctor and some stitches.”
In a bathroom drawer, beside John’s aftershave, I found a gauze bandage and a wrap for the wound. Briefly she protested again—First just let me clean up that m
ess—but she stopped when I touched the bandage to her head. To save the awkwardness of seeing her bare body, I left her nightgown on, and eased her into sweatpants and a shirt. I wrapped the gauze tighter, but the blood still beat from her scalp.
She put her arm around my shoulders, and we stepped into the night. Sometime during my sleep it had rained; the moon shone white through the sodden leaves, smearing her face like milk. Our movements were wobbly as we labored into the truck. On the late-night oldies radio, a chorus of guitars faded in, faded out; the female deejay tried to soothe us but failed, her voice more fire than air.
In my panic, I couldn’t remember our favorite off-road route. I followed the signs that loomed in the Ford’s headlights, each paved road gleaming its slick ribbon. “Hope you don’t mind me driving so fast,” I said, desperate to make her better. I hated myself for letting this happen, hated the way I’d yelled when she protested the hospital. As I sped toward Hutchinson, I silently swore I’d atone for the rot in my heart. I’d build an arsenal of good deeds, correcting all my stupid moves, my mistakes. I swore I would make her proud.
Somewhere on those roads, just once, she sleepily spoke. She remembered how she’d woken, feeling sick and knowing something wasn’t right; she’d stumbled dizzy to the kitchen for a drink. I sighed and shook my head—oh, Mom—and asked if she remembered more.
But she fell quiet again. I thought she’d drifted back toward sleep. When I glanced across the seat, I saw her eyes had closed; the gauze around her head showed its dark grume of blood. Then suddenly, a corner of her mouth rose in an abstracted grin. In a weak, childish voice, she said, “What’s wrong—you never saw a little girl bleed before?”
I stared, uncertain how to answer, and eventually gave a nervous laugh. Lately she’d uttered so many strange, unsolvable sentences. Some note in her voice wasn’t right: a disharmony, as though she weren’t addressing me but some other, invisible soul.
In fact, I told her, I had seen her bleed. I reminded her that many times, years ago, she’d been quite clumsy when washing dishes. Her butterfingers often slipped on knives, and the steam-hot water split her wineglasses, her bourbon glasses, into lethal shards. I remembered sobbing at the sight of her blood. I remembered trembling beside the sink as she bandaged herself, the suds foaming white to pink.
“And what’s this ‘pretty little pigeon’?” I asked. “Is that what you used to call me?”
No answer. In the hush, I moved my hand to calm her, reaching across the space where Otis had sat only hours before. But once again, she’d slipped into sleep. The wrap on her head had loosened. Her chest and arms were frigid, as though she’d been cradling a doll made of ice. I looked back to the road, the sky softening steadily to gray, and I drove.
A nurse wheeled my mother to a third-floor room, while I stayed in the eerily empty lobby, my pulse still thudding, to finish the hospital forms. It was just past seven a.m. Around me, the emergency room shone a bright, pervasive white, much worse than the brown tones at home. The white reception desk…white lamps and vacant armchairs…the white-bloused, perfumed intern.
From previous visits, I recognized floor #3 as the cancer ward. I’d illogically assumed that Kaufman would arrive, suave and savior-like, exuding his graces and recommendations. Instead there was a slouching, listless doctor with rolled-up sleeves and a loosened lime-green tie. He scratched a patch of flaking skin on his arm and asked if I would kindly sit and wait, reassuring me that she would be “in good hands.” Someone would come for me soon. “I’ll stay right here,” I said.
I chose the largest waiting-room chair, its fabric rasping my skin like burlap, and scribbled more answers on the forms. My mother’s insurance and disability benefits; a rough schedule of her trips to Dr. Kaufman; the dosages of Decadron and other pills I could only describe by colors or shapes. On the room’s central table were one fake plant, one real, and a stack of outdated magazines: Field and Stream, Highlights for Children. The covers wore labels addressed to various names. Leland Armstrong, c/o Hutchinson Hospital; Laurie Hildebrand, HH 3rd Floor. I wondered where all these Lelands and Lauries were now. Whether they remained in Hutchinson or Haven or Sterling, healed at last; whether they lay cold in Rayl’s Hill cemetery.
Twice I’d been to similar ERs for my own scares (the first time, for a fractured right wrist; and just last January, a misguided coronary fear after a five-day binge of crystal meth). I’d also visited my mother here, this same hospital, during various shifts of chemo. But tonight I had no Alice, Dolores, or John to accompany me. Tonight I sat alone in the rank and wrinkled shirt I’d worn to bed, the blood smears on my sleeves and jeans. I looked down and noticed, with wide, humiliated eyes, my mother’s conspicuous pink slippers on my feet.
After completing the forms, I rode the elevator to the main lobby. The gift shop had opened for the morning: the stuffed monkeys and pandas and penguins; the dainty porcelain birds with secret keys to tinkle their melodies. In the adjoining aisles were fellow early-morning visitors, anonymous family and friends, all bleary and smelling of soap, all in varying degrees of shell shock. I felt their eyes on me. I stopped at the revolving racks of get-well cards, but couldn’t decide which one she’d prefer. With the last six dollars in my pocket, I bought my favorite three: white horses congregating in a meadow; a trampoline with laughing children; an army of cartoon viruses, torpedoed by pill-shaped ships. WISHING YOU WELL! HERE’S HOPING YOU BOUNCE BACK SOON. ZAP THOSE GERMS AND GET BACK TO WORK!
It was time to call Alice. At the lobby’s bank of pay phones, I dialed with a queasy anxiety, but she didn’t answer the early-morning ring. On the message, I told her nothing about Otis. I ignored the worsening details of my mother’s illness, or Dolores’s insistence that the cancer had spread to her brain. I told her only about the accident, and asked her to come as soon as she could.
When I returned to the third floor, the doctor explained I could go to her room. “Kaufman should arrive shortly.” He checked his watch, and again scratched the spot on his arm. “Around noontime, I’d guess.”
When I saw her asleep in the hospital bed, I looked to the floor to compose my breathing. The tiles were white and flecked with lemon-yellow. The room even smelled of lemons. When I looked back to the bed, I saw they’d dressed her in a baby-blue robe. An IV streamed slowly into the veins in her arm; another, into the surgical port in her chest. She no longer wore the gauze bandage (Wish they would’ve let us keep it, I imagined her saying, it could’ve been our memento), and the doctors had shaved a section from her hair. The cut on her head was purple, crossed with waxy black stitches.
I leaned closer to see the wound. Soon, I knew, she’d flaunt it proudly. She’d ask us to blow on it, to touch it with cold crescents of ice. I imagined myself doing just as she asked.
On a television bolted to the wall, a weatherman was pointing to a storm’s splotched colors on his radar screen, but outside my mother’s window, the sky was white and clear, its sun lifting bloated and red. I placed the get-well cards, unsigned, with no envelopes, on the bedside table, propping them against her untouched glass of water. Then I sat beside her in the white vinyl chair.
Eventually, she opened her eyes. The sedatives had slowed her movements, and her throat struggled to form the words. “Kaufman,” she said.
“He’ll be here later. Everything’s okay.”
She was trying to swallow. I dipped a straw into the glass of water, and lifted it to her lips so she could drink.
“You’ll finally get to meet him,” she said.
“Finally, yes.”
“And they’ll let me go home, right?”
I shook my head no, and instantly saw the panic in her eyes. “I think you’ll have to stay a few days. A few more tests. They need to find out why—”
“Then listen.” She was louder now, emphatic and fully awake. “You have to do something for me. Right away.”
I sat closer on the bed. “An errand? Anything you want.”
“Just pl
ease don’t be mad at me.”
“You’re being silly.”
“Promise you won’t.”
Yes, I promised, although I couldn’t understand her distress. She shifted slightly to hold my hand, bumping the IV; through the gown’s blue sleeve I saw the taped cotton where the needle had jabbed, a bruise already spreading beneath it.
“You have to go back home,” she said. “Right away. Downstairs to the basement. Oh, please don’t be mad.”
“I’m not mad! I won’t be mad! Just say what you want me to do.”
“The basement. My little storage room. Please, take care of everything.”
In my haste after the accident, I’d forgotten to lock the front door. When I stepped inside the house, I noticed the lingering odor, and thought once again of cake (red velvet cake, one of Alice’s specialties, dark chocolate batter and blood-red food coloring).
I entered the sunlit kitchen, the scene of her fall. The floor was littered with garbage and random newspaper faces. The spray of blood formed an alarming arc, almost a complete circle, across the kitchen, as though someone had sliced the tip of their tongue and, openmouthed, spun a perfect pirouette.
A sob was rising damply in my throat, and, to fight it, I began to clean. She kept the paper towels above the sink on an antique red-maple rolling pin. I knelt and covered the blood with the towels. I dabbed the spattered newspaper clippings; the refrigerator magnets, tiny carrot and pepper and onion. Amid the trash was the straw from her earlier milkshake, and beside it, a silver key from a tin of sardines, one of many frivolous gifts I’d bought my mother on an errand. The sardines were her favorite, the kind soaked in mustard (on special, I remembered, at eighty-nine cents a tin), and when she’d briefly forgotten her sickness and ate them, the look on her face—dipping a saltine cracker, then lifting the flaked, coppery flesh to her mouth—had been sheer satisfaction.