“Don’t you think he might be the one?”
I rested my head against one of the slim rubber wheels. “Oh, Mom. What will happen if he’s not? If ultimately this isn’t what you’re searching for?”
“But this has to be right—like I was destined to find the link. I’ve waited so long for Warren. Even if I never see him again, I just want to know what happened back then.”
We looked to the west, where the sun, a wet and scalding red, had slipped beneath a ripple of clouds. I thought about the mother I’d dreamt in yesterday’s dream: her strong legs marching through the orchard sand; her mouth against the dripping peach; her chin thrust forward to clear the juice from her blouse.
“I know you told a completely different story to Dolores,” I said.
“But I haven’t told her about Otis at all.”
“I don’t mean Otis. I’m talking about the old story. Your disappearance.”
I expected her defiance, or even an admission of guilt. Yet she only sat and stared, the gown’s edges fluttering in the breeze, distracted as though I’d accused her of some wicked, unsolvable crime. She blew another stream of smoke; I watched it float and dissipate. In the distance were the final reddened leaves, blurring against the bloodied horizon. When I looked back, she’d turned toward the hospital, watching it with composed but cheerless resignation.
At that moment I understood what I should do. Alice would arrive tomorrow. I would tell her to visit the hospital alone, without Dolores, without me. Alice would ask our mother what really happened when she disappeared. She would get her own version of the story.
My mother coughed and noisily sighed. “If I’m not going to make it,” she said, “will you keep trying for me? Trying to find Warren?”
Not going to make it. A distinct tension had set into her muscles, and I reached to touch her arm. She relaxed a little, but the temperature and texture of her skin almost shocked me: so cold and pale and hard, like a plaster cast without signatures.
I wanted to see her laugh again, so I tried our little nicknames. “Tired,” I said.
I hoped she would answer “Wired.” Instead, she looked at me and simply nodded: yes, she was so, so tired.
“You know what I’ve been wanting?” she asked.
“Tell me.”
“An old book about Hansel and Gretel. Really old, with lots of old pictures. If you have the time, I want you to try and find one of those books, and bring it back and read to me.”
Lately, in her boredom, in the white cotton of her bed, she’d been dreaming such random, childlike dreams. Now I knew she’d been thinking of that little boy and girl, banished to the cold, crowded forest, yet another version of her Warren and her Donna. She wanted me to lead her there, to help her find the trail of crumbs so stale even the lice-laden birds wouldn’t eat. We could call out to them together, Hansel, Gretel, two nimble voices threading through the green shadows, the obsidian trees.
“Will you find a book like that for me?” she asked.
“Of course I will. I’ll look through the antique stores, and I’ll find you one.”
“It would mean a lot. Especially now.”
She was still staring toward the hospital. I felt the breath catch in my throat, but I had to stay strong for her. For many minutes I could only watch the back of her head: the dry, peeling skin; the wide patch shaved in her thinning hair; the stitches fixed on her wound like the blue-black footprint of a bird.
Now I looked to the hospital, too. I lifted my arm and, with a finger, began counting off each third-floor window. “Five, six, and that one is seven. That one’s your room.”
“No, it’s not,” she said. “My room’s back in Haven.”
She had finished smoking, and she folded her hands in her lap. I still felt the disturbance from touching her arm, and, as I stood and looked down, even her hands seemed wrong. The skin around the nails, the knuckles, even the webs between the fingers had been rubbed raw, now flaked and peeling and rough.
It was almost time for the hospital’s dinner rounds. Time to steer her back to the room. Gradually, above us, the parking lot’s lights flickered on; higher up, the poplar leaves shivered in the wind. “Listen to that,” she said. “What a sound. Like a tinkling sound.”
Her voice had gone so quiet I could hardly hear it. “Tinkling like glass,” I said.
“Like a thousand chandeliers.”
We descended the slope, moving back to the pavement. Ahead were the sliding-glass entrance, the gift shop, and elevator, the long third-floor hall with its dialysis lab and solemnly shut doors. Soon I would pair with Dolores to once again hoist her onto the bed; soon I’d take my place in the chair.
We passed the final parked car in the lot, and I pushed her up the carpeted ramp. The automatic doors swept open to let us enter. Suddenly, once again before the doors could close, came the song of wind in the trees. “Stop,” my mother said, so I stopped the chair. Held in place, both she and I, tricking the doors from trapping us inside. We listened. We heard the sound again. The wind like glass, the trees and leaves like glass: a thousand chandeliers.
EIGHT
ALICE DROVE HOME on the morning of the winter’s first snowstorm. As planned, she called me from the hospital. She was standing at the telephones in the lobby, she said, steeling herself before entering our mother’s room. She needed to ask once again what specific information I wanted her to gather. “Well, anything,” I said. “Whatever she remembers about her disappearance. The kidnappers…the boy named Warren. Any details you can get.”
I sat alone in the spindle-back rocker with a cup of hot tea, the blanket pulled to my chin, watching the snow through frosted windows. Wind rattled the gutters, the backyard trellis of withered ivy. The bare trees, black against the sky, were like veins of ink in ice. This was the storm that the weatherman, from the TV bolted above my mother’s hospital bed, had so theatrically foretold. It was the storm she’d imagined falling over Rayl’s Hill cemetery and Henry’s grave, over all the discarded, undiscovered souls.
For the first time in days, I was high. Earlier that morning, I’d tromped through the drifts of white until I reached the phantom house. I’d opened the little gray mailbox and found, finally and blessedly, the package Gavin had promised. Then I’d sprinted home, the wind rouging my face, my footprints dusting at once with swirling snow. I’d run to the bedroom, and I’d fetched the straw and the glass pipe.
After the drug hit my blood, it was time to deliver Otis his breakfast: leftover pepperoni-and-mushroom from Pizza Haven, bought with yesterday’s ten-dollar bill from Dolores. Although I suggested he come upstairs—a comfortable pillow and bed, maybe a nice hot bath in the clawfoot tub—he ultimately declined. He was worried about Alice’s visit. Finally, we compromised: I unlocked the black door, insisting he roam the entire basement as he pleased. “But I’m not supposed to come upstairs, right?” he asked. “That’s one of the rules, right?”
His voice had gone shrill with doubt or despair. It no longer mattered, I said; there were no more rules. He placed the half-eaten slice of pizza back in its white cardboard box, turned his face toward the dirty floor beneath the cot. I left him, returning to my mother’s bedroom to smoke more meth.
Presently, I sat at the window, rocking. For days, I’d anticipated feeling livelier, more confident, on the drug. There was certainly the speediness—the grinding teeth, the familiar red surge in my pulse—yet the speed was insufficient, only superficial, and deep inside I felt no different than before.
When Alice arrived, I rose to greet her at the door. Her shoulders and hair were tufted with silver. She wore a fur-collared coat with glittering black buttons, yellow earmuffs, and matching wool mittens: items, I knew, from the little vintage store she owned, four hours away in Lawrence. She bent to shuck her snowy boots. “Those roads are nothing but ice! I almost skidded into the ditch.” She went to the couch and, with a sigh, collapsed on its middle cushion.
I helped her with the rest of
her things. Alice had brought Bones, her Siamese cat; when she lifted the hinged door of his carrier, he began his mute, slinking inspection of the room. She’d also brought two overnight cases, a small one for makeup and a large one for clothes, and a tin crammed with what she called “that great peanut brittle recipe.” (In truth, I couldn’t remember Alice ever making peanut brittle—that was our mother’s holiday specialty, not hers—but when she spoke the words, peanut brittle, I imagined Otis stealing the tin, the crunches from his mouth like a complicated argument.)
I’d expected a brief, tense-shouldered embrace, but Alice seemed snug on the couch, and touching felt too awkward. “You look different,” she said. “And you’re still biting your nails.”
I looked down at them. “Habits.”
She reported that the first drive from Lawrence, and then the second from the hospital to home, had been equally awful. Her car had a faulty heater. Her stereo stopped working, and “nothing but country bumpkins” polluted the radio. The snow had piled thick in the ditches, and yet she’d seen a surprising amount of roadkill. Skunk and possum, a young deer with stunted antlers, and even, oddly, an armadillo.
Less than three weeks ago, on one of our missions, my mother and I had seen an armadillo, too. I didn’t tell Alice this. “Snowplows will be out by tonight,” I said. “The roads should be fine before we head back to the hospital.”
She removed the earmuffs and mittens and, as though only noticing now, said, “It’s way too dark in here. Why were you sitting in the dark?” She looked to the TV: the power was on, but the screen showed only raspy gray static. “That screwy thing? Let’s put on music instead.”
She turned on the lamps, switched off the TV, and crossed to the stereo at the side of the room. I worried she’d discover one of the secret cassette tapes, perhaps our blundered interview with Mr. Wyler. But Alice merely pushed the play button, and through the speakers came the sounds of the most recent tape our mother had played: big-band music, antique trumpets and trombones, so saccharine and drowsy. The song had no lyrics, but instantly I recalled my mother’s story, all the scratchy vinyl records, the basement melodies she’d shared with Warren.
The music relaxed us slightly. I breathed and recognized our mother’s scent, as though she’d just breezed through the room. Alice sat again; with the earmuffs removed, I could tell she’d stopped reddening her hair (at John’s funeral, it had been artificially darker than mine, but now was the same dull red, dulling with age). She seemed uneasy and unsure, and instead of starting the inevitable discussion, she again mentioned the weather, the troubles with her car; finally, she began a story about the regular customers at her shop.
I had to interrupt. “Tell me everything she told you,” I said.
On the stereo, the orchestra played its final notes, leaving a silence between songs. We could hear the phone lines creaking outside, the ice snapping against the glass. The music began again; lured by the serenade of horns, Bones reentered the room and leaped into Alice’s lap.
“Her story was preposterous,” she said. “It’s nothing like the ones she told you or Dolores. Honestly, I don’t believe a word of it. It’s like her brain’s gone backwards. And the morphine can’t be helping.”
“Just tell me.”
Alice leaned back on the couch and took a deep breath. “Okay. Here it is.”
When our mother was very young, her parents were like strangers to her. They’d already raised older daughters and sons, guided them through elementary school and high school and beyond, and therefore could never afford enough energy, enough time, for Donna or Dan. So, one day the two children decided to run away. They packed a bundled cloth with clothes and a few days’ worth of food. A scatter of green plastic army men for Dan; a coloring book, filled with pictures of dinosaurs, for Donna. At the last second, they added some cherry candy bars and a cake of pink soap. Then they knotted the top of the bundle and began walking down the block.
After half an hour, Dan grew anxious, concerned about their father’s doubtless punishment. He decided to turn back. But our mother forged ahead, damp from the sweltering afternoon heat, determined to reach the highway at the city’s easternmost edge. She marched along the ditches, the sack slung defiantly on her back. Two separate cars stopped for her, two friendly, concerned families asking if she needed a ride, but our mother turned both families down.
Then a third car eased to the roadside. A sky-blue Imperial: shabbier than the others, its front fenders dented and rusty, a splintery crack across its windshield. Inside, a woman was driving; in the backseat, a young boy. The woman was pretty, with long, auburn hair. She offered the girl a ride, and this time, our mother accepted.
The car radio played jaunty, outdated songs. (At this point, I almost interrupted Alice—songs like “Jeepers, Creepers,” maybe, or “Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree”?—but I kept quiet.) Taped across the dashboard were newspaper photographs of strange-looking people: clowns, dwarfs and giants, ladies with misshapen bodies or shaggy black beards. One of the photos, the woman said, was her husband: she pointed to the man wearing a sinister rubber mask, his head tilted back, preparing to swallow a long, brilliantly blazing stick.
“He’s the fire-eater,” said the boy in the backseat.
The woman explained that she and Warren—the red-haired, bony boy, who, surprisingly, wasn’t her son—were driving south to meet her husband. The man was integral to the operation of the traveling carnival. First of all, he trained all the horses. He also did repairs for all the trucks and the elaborate machines. And yes, he was the fire-eater in the sideshow. The carnival had just finished its week at the Kansas State Fair, and was now headed to Oklahoma. “Wouldn’t you like to meet my husband?” the woman asked our mother. “Wouldn’t you like to see him perform?”
(At this point in her retelling, Alice paused to gauge my reaction. Her voice was nearly furious: “A carnival. Where’d she come up with that? Does she really think she’s fooling us?” I begged her to please continue; we could discuss the details later.)
According to our mother, she was so enchanted by the prospect of the carnival that she didn’t mind traveling far from home. And, oddly, as the woman pointed out, Donna so strongly resembled Warren they could easily pass as younger sister and older brother, the children in the traveling-carnival family. Right then, it seemed like destiny: perhaps our mother was meant to be walking down that edge-of-town road; the woman and Warren were fated to stop their car. Without much hesitation, our mother agreed to join them on the trip.
And the week at the Oklahoma fair was magical. She spent each day and night with Warren. They observed the fire-eater’s performances from the intimate backstage shadows. They helped feed and groom the horses. Again and again, free of charge, they rode the Ferris wheel and red-armored Tilt-a-Whirl. They ate frivolous, sugary meals: my mother’s Cherry Mash bars, plus the fair’s cotton candy, its funnel cakes, its candied apples. They also had their nightly fill of peaches, preserved in Mason jars by the fire-eater’s wife, kept cool in the trunk of the rattletrap Imperial.
But the carnival only lasted seven days. After Oklahoma came the Missouri State Fair, and the man and woman and Warren ultimately had to take the little girl home. They drove the Imperial back across the border, back to Kansas and our mother’s town, and, finally, to the end of her block. Oh, Donna, we’ve had such a wonderful time. Someday we’ll surely see you again. They handed her the clothes and pink soap and book of colored dinosaurs. They opened the door; they blew kisses good-bye.
Our mother understood that the kidnapping was wrong, even criminal. But she longed to someday see them all again. Therefore, she wouldn’t betray them. She claimed not to remember those seven days, resolving never to tell her parents, or any other adult, about her disappearance. She’d never forget the man’s funny mask, or the flames erupting in hot white spikes from his mouth. She’d never forget the woman’s calm, compassionate voice; her silver ring with one sapphire stone, one amethyst; or her pea
ches, glistening gold inside their cool, mysterious jars. Most of all, she’d never forget her Warren.
After she finished the story, Alice left the room for a glass of water. I heard her exaggerated sigh and realized the kitchen was still a mess: the scattered photographs, the overturned garbage, and the paper towels, splotched brown with dried blood.
Our mother’s stories were a series of knots, each so ornamented and individually complex, impossible to fully unravel. When Alice returned, her lips pinched in a frown, I tried translating my feelings into words. “There are still some coincidences,” I said. “Things keep popping up, every version she tells.”
“Surely you don’t think any of that could be true.”
“But the peaches. That ring with two gemstones. Candy bars. And of course Warren. Part of me still needs to know if anything, even the slightest possible piece, might be real.”
“But how could we know? Her mind’s changed so much. You’ve been here awhile now, seeing her every day, so you can’t really tell how much it’s changed. I haven’t been home in months. It’s terrifying how different she is.”
Again Alice sat on the couch, watching me closely. I wanted to say she was mistaken; indeed, I had noticed the change. Both Dolores and I had witnessed so many escalations, these recent days: shifts of body temperature and skin tone; a gradual inability to sit in the wheelchair or even move from bed. We’d seen the constant tremble in her hands, up to her shoulders and chest, the tremble building to a labored shudder. The nurses had brought bedpans and shallow sickness pails. They’d followed Kaufman’s instructions for morphine, adding and subtracting from the IV drips as though mixing intricate cocktails.
Could Alice, with all her months away from home, understand any of this? During daylight, our mother had been sleeping with her hands and jaw muscles clenched. At night she relaxed slightly, yet seemed possessed, speaking throughout her sleep. Disconnected murmurs; barely intelligible words and half-sentences that seemed directed to John, to her deceased brothers and sisters. “This behavior is normal at the end,” Kaufman had told Dolores. On one of her yellow notepads, behind pages of notes from her interview with Sunny Barradale, I’d been writing the random things our mother said as she slept. For John and me. Get the platelets up. Back there, deep in the forest. Sometimes I couldn’t link the words with any possible meaning. The wheat fields. A sweet baby boy. Other times, I understood whole sentences: That feels so nice when you touch my face.