We Disappear

  “Wouldn’t he tell you if his grandfather’s name was Warren?”

  “Oh, but the poor thing doesn’t even know. He’s never met his grandfather. Remember, his father abandoned him—”

  “All of this is scaring me,” I told her. “It seems like you’re just believing what you want to believe, and you’ve let this go too far.”

  “Please,” she repeated, and then fell silent. Somewhere from the room came the full, fat tick of a clock, a sound I hadn’t noticed before. On the table, Dolores had left an empty can of Dr Pepper, its straw smudged dark red with lipstick; beside it, she’d started a crossword puzzle with ink an even darker red. I also saw my mother’s pink-handled hairbrush; tangled in its bristles, together with the real hairs, were the coarse, dark fibers from the wig.

  “Just tell me why you’re doing this.”

  “He can help me find that part of my past. Maybe we can help him find his father. Then, maybe, his grandfather.”

  This was all I managed to glean from her. Already we could hear Dolores’s boots in the hall. “Hush,” my mother said. Then, in a final whisper: “Please just take care of him ’til they let me out of this place.” She truly believed, I saw now, that this was so: very soon she’d return home, get back to her life.

  When Dolores entered, she helped me arrange the blankets and sheets. Once again, my mother feigned sleep, stirring slightly, lifting her head as we fluffed the pillow. Her movements were defenseless and weak, but at the last moment, so subtle only I could see, she winked.

  Outside, the sky had gone dark. Dolores reached to turn down the lights. We stood together at the window, listening as, in the bed behind our shoulders, my mother fell back into sleep. Through the darkness, beyond the poplar trees, lay the distant, serrate neon of town. Above the skyline were so many stars. I had never seen these stars while living in New York. I wanted to question Dolores—are there really so many? Is all this fatigue just tricking my eyes?—but I kept silent. Perhaps if we watched long enough, just watched and mutely waited, we would see an actual falling star. We’d watch it rip across the night sky, and then, like hushing a secret, seal it shut again. Suddenly I had the feeling that we could reach through the window and jostle all those stars, sweep them crisply away, and some presence would be waiting, some solace within all that black. Not God, I thought, but something private, comforting, meant solely for us.

  The black door with its chipped and buckled paint…the ancient key still shining in the lock…the dirty plate from which he’d eaten last night’s dinner. I stepped to the door, a new tray of food in my hands, and held my breath.

  Some mornings at the hospital, Dolores had been slipping me intermittent dollar bills; with the money, I found myself bringing Otis the things he requested. More pickles and lunchmeat and cheese; both mayonnaise and mustard; a thick, bland loaf of Wonder bread. Cans of grape soda. Chocolate-chip cookies, which I carried to the basement in my mother’s pink piglet cookie jar.

  As before, he sat waiting on the cot; it seemed he hadn’t budged since I’d last left. “I wondered where you’d gone,” he said when I clicked the light. “I’m starving to death down here.” The room seemed smaller, cramped as a coffin, with his sour, suffocating smell in the air. He’d managed again to loosen the gag, but a rosy welt now stretched across his cheeks.

  I presented the tray to him. “There’s more upstairs if you want.” I stood back against the door, careful not to distract him, and noticed how skilled he’d gotten at working his hands around the awkwardly clacking cuffs. He opened the jar of cookies and ate with a crude, doglike force. He guzzled one can of soda, then opened a second. Watching him was like deciphering some visual code: he’d devour a cookie, bite the sandwich, and swallow the grape soda, then start it all again. I saw the odd, slightly misshapen arc of his skull; once again I thought of Henry.

  Previously, I’d kept silent, simply standing back, the way a zookeeper stands back, until he finished. But today—after so many long hours in the truck, after so much frustration in the room with Dolores—I wanted to talk. I began with a story about the piglet cookie jar he’d placed beside the cot. I’d gone junk-store shopping with my mother, I told him, on the day she’d bought it. We’d found an old hay barn turned curio shop, some small town outside of Wichita. I remembered her opening the lid, seeing the price tag, and rolling her eyes. Soon she began bargaining with the dealer: she mentioned the preposterous prices of cancer drugs, and then uncovered her scarf, exposing her thinning hair. Like so many times before, this scheme had ultimately worked. She got the piglet for half its price.

  “Then she’s been sick for a long time,” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “She’s been searching a long time, too. For my grandfather. Right?”

  “But we don’t really know it’s your grandfather, do we?”

  “She says it’s true. So maybe it is.”

  His voice seemed more indifferent than convincing. It seemed he might be deceiving my mother: toying with her frailties, charming her with his strange teenage acquiescence. But I wasn’t sure why. I watched him put down the sandwich, fingerprinting the slices of bread. He took another draw from the soda can. His hair had cowlicks from sleep; a pimple had swollen on his cheekbone; even his T-shirt showed handprints of grime.

  “Aren’t you going to take off that name tag?” I asked.

  “She said I should keep wearing it. That I should stay Otis.”

  I could hear her singsong voice, commanding him with these words. How long had she sat with him, whispering and plotting, perhaps even while I slept upstairs? What rules had she imposed, what secrets and fictions had they discussed?

  “It’s about time we got rid of those silly cuffs and ropes and drove you back home,” I said. “But first, you and I need to talk.”

  Otis sneered at the suggestion. Already he’d grown so accustomed to defying me, so skilled at his antagonism. Now, I saw, he was only refining the gestures. He finished the final chocolate-chip cookie; I watched his thin, veiny wrists and the muscles in his jaw. And then he spoke: in an effeminate, stereotyped lisp, he repeated my last sentence, mocking me.

  It had been years, even decades, since I’d been taunted like this: high school, back when I was Otis’s age, the stabbing shouts of freak and queer at my crazy thrift-store shirts and circus-colored hair. Now, part of me wanted to push him to the floor, to put my hands around his neck. A separate, weaker part wanted to pull him close, to examine the color of his eyes, his pimples, his unshaven scruff. I figured he was a failure at school. Very likely the punch line to jokes: a sneak-looker at others’ tests; a shadow on the sidelines; a target during Bombardment or pin guard. Maybe he’d tried for the track team, not speedy enough, not strong, lasting four miserable practices before quitting. Or high-school marching band, rehearsing in his room on a borrowed trumpet, spit ricocheting in the valves, wrangling every broken note.

  I decided to try again. “I don’t want to be your enemy,” I said.

  “Fine. So you’re not.”

  “But I want to know some things. She won’t tell me, so I’m going to ask you. First I want to know how she got herself back to Sterling. How she managed to drag you all the way here.”

  “She didn’t drag me. I came on my own.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s what she wanted. I guess it’s what both of us wanted. It could make you believe her. And she thought it would help her remember things.”

  Now he was repeating my mother’s words verbatim, his mouth careful on each grape-stained syllable. Again I pictured their joined hands, the alliance of their bodies in the truck. It seemed she’d known this boy for weeks, even months; as though I, not Otis, had become the impostor. “You act like you’re in this together,” I said. “Like you’re playing a joke. But you’re not fooling me.”

  He thumbed the tab on another soda can, tipped it to his head with his handcuffed hands, and drank. A satisfied, comical sigh. Oh yes, he seemed to say, we are foolin
g you. Maybe he wasn’t a failure at school after all, I thought. Maybe he was smart, just as I had been smart. I could easily imagine him excelling at some sideline craft: maybe Woodshop, maybe Drawing 101. His hands furiously sketching, the charcoaled pages filling with faces of dead, decaying animals; red-chambered hearts dripping lovelorn blood.

  “She’s got it stuck in her head that she knows who you are,” I said.

  “What’s wrong with that?”

  “Don’t you understand? If she’s wrong—if you keep up this charade—it’s going to devastate her. I won’t let that happen, not now. I want her to be comfortable and happy. So we should end this before it begins.”

  I said these words slowly, forcefully, and as I spoke I could sense a shift in him, a softening. He put the empty plate on the floor, sliding it beneath the cot with his foot. Then he said in an uneasy voice, “But it’s already begun.”

  I looked at his OTIS name tag. The connection to Warren, she’d said. Somehow he’d come back to her: some recent night she’d waited until the sleeping pills had numbed me, and then she’d heard his footsteps on the porch, struggling to the door to let him inside.

  “Tell the truth,” I said. “Tell me who you really are.”

  He wiped his mouth with his sleeve, pausing as he debated an answer. I smelled his sweat and the mustard on his breath and his rusty, oily hair. I listened closely to the world above us, but heard no owl or sparrow song, no passing tires on the street. Only the bustle of leaves; the inevitable sighs from the creases of the house. Otis brought his knees to his chest and hugged them. His breaths were finer, more stable than mine.

  As he stared, I realized there were various possible answers, and he was reviewing them all, silently testing the consequences. My heart beat hard against my ribs. I feared he’d answer Warren. I feared he’d answer Evan or Henry or maybe, worst of all, Scott.

  Instead, he spoke in an even softer voice: “I’m only Otis. Grandson of that kidnapped boy. I’m whoever she wants me to be.”

  We stared without speaking. His expression didn’t change. Gradually, I began to comprehend his intention, his desperate sincerity. His voice and the look in his eyes reminded me of Dolores, that recent night at the football field, when she’d confessed her devotion and love. Perhaps, I thought, this boy wasn’t trying to deceive my mother at all. Perhaps he’d seen the illness, the dementia, and now only wanted, as I wanted, to keep her happy. True, I hadn’t yet learned his real name or age or history; I didn’t know why he’d arrived here, why he’d accepted this ratty, rickety cot or offered his hands for the silver prison cuffs. But steadily, over the recent days, he’d revealed glimmers of compassion, some empathy that pushed for my mother’s recovery or, if not that, at least her happiness. Whoever she wants me to be. I saw that it no longer mattered whether Otis believed my mother’s theories and claims. For whatever inscrutable, delinquent reason, he simply wanted to provide that link, to be the descendant to her mystery.

  He needed the bathroom, and I let him go on his own. Upon returning, he shifted to make room on the cot, indicating the space beside him with a hammer-like thump of his cuffed hands. I stepped away from the door and took the seat. With our bodies so close, Otis seemed edgy, fidgeting like someone newly famous. To cut the awkwardness, I said, “It gets so quiet down here, doesn’t it?”

  “Yeah. And you know what I’ve been thinking? If you add one letter to Haven, it becomes HAVEN’T. I guess that sorta sums this place up.”

  I looked at him, at his tilted, softly arrogant grin, aligned with the red welt from the gag. And I began to laugh. His joke had come randomly, perfectly timed; I wanted to keep composure but couldn’t help myself.

  When I stopped laughing, he reached for the can of soda and offered me its last swallow. Then he asked, “Is she going to get better? When’s she coming back home?”

  I told him I wasn’t sure. The situation, I said, was much worse than we’d initially believed. But these were only the first of his questions, his surprisingly earnest worries. He asked further about her disease. He asked if there had been many visitors; if she had good books to read, or a decent TV. So I answered him as clearly as I could. I began a recent history of my mother, winnowing the basics from the details I held private and dear, but soon discovered she’d already revealed many things to him: the styles and demeanors of her doctors; her lymph nodes and the spot in her stomach; all the recurrences and remissions. She’d even told Otis the names of her pills. As we spoke, the concern grew increasingly evident in his eyes. I saw how much he’d warmed to her; somehow, with her dirty-mouthed jokes, her stuffed rabbits and pints of rocky road, she had won him.

  “She wants me to keep you here. She wants me to promise you’ll be here when they send her home.”

  “Then I should stay.”

  “But there’s a problem. My sister will be here in a couple of days.”

  He couldn’t offer a solution. I’d begun to sense his weariness, and when he yawned, I yawned in response: I needed sleep as well. When I stood from the cot, I expected him to ask to leave the basement room, to graduate to a more comfortable bed upstairs, but he stayed silent, as though obeying, still, my mother’s orders.

  “Just tell me one more thing,” I said before I left. “One final thing.”

  “Okay.”

  “I know she’s told you about Warren. This boy she thinks might be your grandfather.”

  “Yes.”

  “I want to know what else she told you. About the kidnapping, or the people who did it. Did she mention the sweet old couple? Or was it just one mean, horrible man? What exactly did she say?”

  Otis paused to remember, one finger absently rattling the tiny chain between his cuffs. Then he shook his head. “She didn’t talk much about any of that. Maybe she couldn’t remember that part.”

  “That’s strange. She said she’d told you everything, every little bit of her story.”

  “I don’t think so. She only talked about Warren, and how much she liked him. How special he was to her.”

  I watched him closely for a wavering, some subtle flinch, but it seemed he was telling the truth. Eventually, I collected the remains of his dinner. Yes, it was time we both got some sleep. “She’ll need me at the hospital early,” I said. “I’ll come back down before I leave.” He didn’t ask about the wrap around his mouth, and I didn’t bother retying it. I shut the black door but left it unlocked. From my wristwatch, I discovered I’d been downstairs, this shadowy basement room with the boy, for over an hour. I felt strangely, pleasantly blue, as though I’d been visiting a ghost.

  In a dream, I walked through an orchard with my mother and Otis. I took her left hand, and he took her right. Above us were the interlocking trees, their branches thick with perfect peaches. We pulled our shirtfronts forward, making baskets for the fruit. The sun was white with crackling gold spokes. The peaches were bursting at their seams. When we’d picked all we wanted, she selected one and began to eat. Otis ate, and I ate. Then the three of us stretched out against the grass, lying silent with our hands linked, reaching our fingers up, up, a thirty-petaled flower.

  When I woke and saw her beside me, she wasn’t the same healthy woman as in the dream. There were fresh bandages on her head, darker bruises on her arms. She opened her eyes and said, “I need to be home for Otis,” as though she’d been dreaming him, too.

  “Shh,” I said, so Dolores couldn’t hear. Then, in a whisper: “He misses you. You’ll see him soon.”

  Under the blankets and tubes, she’d been turning increasingly stubborn. I’d brought the lower plate of teeth, two of her wigs, and her tortoiseshell glasses. She wouldn’t bother with any of these. She picked at her scar and wouldn’t listen to nurses. She begged them to please, please send her home.

  Kaufman had confirmed a new tumor on her spine. When he told my mother this, her expression didn’t change at all. It wasn’t yet safe, he said, to restart another round of treatments; her body still held too many unhealed infect
ions. He’d called the local hospice but hadn’t decided on a date when she could leave. For the first time, he prescribed morphine: limited doses at first, which clouded the pain but let her speak and occasionally stay awake.

  Dolores’s flowers wilted and dropped their petals. No one brought replacements. The balloon placidly collapsed; its air escaped, allowing me to read its opposite face. BEE WELL, it said. What I’d thought were polka dots were actually bright bumblebees. The dead balloon didn’t seem right for the room, and after helping my mother to the toilet, I snuck it to the trash.

  The nurses provided a wheelchair; its right wheel sometimes stuck with a caustic squeak. At first, we used it only to wheel her to the restroom. She’d lean over the toilet while Dolores or I hugged her close for support. The shining porcelain burnished each detail: her stained blue gown; her stubbly head without scarf or wig; her mouth without its lower plate.

  Eventually she saw the chair as her chance to smoke, to turn her face from all that blinding white. “Take me out to the fresh air,” she told me.

  The withdrawal made me sluggish and weak, but I helped her out of bed and into the seat. At last I could speak to her, separate from Dolores. “This strange man is kidnapping me,” she told the receptionist as I wheeled her down the hall.

  Once outside, I maneuvered through the parking lot, over the browned grass, between the parked cars. The day had turned windy. Ahead, at the lot’s northeast edge, was a slope thick with sandburs, where we could watch the setting sun. Grunting, I pushed her to the top. I locked the wheels of the chair, sat on the ground beside her, and watched her fumble with the forbidden cigarette pack. The smoke that lifted from her mouth was blue, almost beautiful, and, for the first time in days, she tried to smile.

  I’d waited so long to speak to her in private, but now that we were alone, I didn’t know where to start. I wanted to admit discovering she hadn’t actually kidnapped the boy; I knew they’d been toying with me, and now it was time to stop. But then I considered her fragility and Kaufman’s warnings of dementia—I pictured her bleeding on the kitchen floor—and instead of arguing, I kept my voice calm. “I’ve been making peace with him,” I said. “He told me he wants to stay where he is.”