Yet I still couldn’t describe these scenes to Alice. I sat rocking and holding them secret, just as the boy, eight feet below us, on the shadowy cot, was still secret.
Gradually, I tired of her silence, her disparaging stare. “I hope you aren’t mad at me,” I said.
“Do I have a reason to be mad?”
“I took so long to tell you I’d come home. I shouldn’t have waited until her accident.”
“Well actually, it was Dolores who called, not you.”
“Nosy, drunken Dolores.”
Alice lifted the peanut-brittle tin from the floor and offered it, but I refused. “I used to think Dolores was nosy,” she said. “And loud, too, and rude. But now, with all this Ernest drama, I feel sorry for her.”
“Ernest? What drama?”
“Just a few weeks ago. She hasn’t mentioned it? He went off with some younger woman. Totally vanished. On the phone she told me all about it—not that I’d asked. He even took their dog. And a huge chunk of her money.”
“You’re kidding. Really? I had no idea.” Now my face felt newly hot with shame. All these recent days together with Dolores—the white afternoons beside my mother’s bed as she slept, the trips across town to buy magazines or strawberry milkshakes or secret cigarettes—and she hadn’t alerted me, hadn’t mentioned Ernest or the dog? I thought of her cowboy boots, very likely his. Or her sweaters, still flecked with blond fur. Why had she confided in Alice instead of me? Had she even told my mother?
“When you asked if I was mad,” said Alice, “I thought you meant something else.”
Momentarily I wondered if she’d learned about Otis. Then I saw her looking me over, examining my forearms, stomach, and legs. I remembered all the arguments from the last time we’d come home, and knew precisely what was coming next.
“You’ve been sitting there, wide-eyed and shivering and grinding your teeth, the entire time I told her story. I knew you wouldn’t want that peanut brittle. You’re skinnier than ever. Is this what it’s done to you?”
I let the question settle, then rolled my eyes and sighed. It was a gesture our mother, when confronted with a problem and unsure of its solution, often made. I wanted Alice to recognize this; when she didn’t, I answered, “You know perfectly well that’s what it’s done to me.”
Beside the rocking chair, in the blanked TV screen, I could see a miniature reflection of myself. Alice was right: the drugs had sallowed my skin, whittled at my bones. “I read somewhere that eventually you lose touch with reality,” she said. “That you see things, or it makes you have psychotic episodes.”
“That isn’t always true.”
She paused, smirking, and gave a soft laugh. “Maybe it could explain why you believe her silly stories.”
She wanted me to laugh with her, but I couldn’t. Slowly she leaned closer, searching for any evidence on my face. “You’re on it right now, aren’t you?”
Her question seemed more genuinely curious than accusatory. I moved toward her, too, further widening my eyes, and said a simple “Yes.” Admitting this felt thrilling, a crack across a long glass window of lies. Now I could relax, settle back into the chair.
“What does it feel like?”
“It used to feel terrific. Now it’s not so terrific anymore. But being high is better than not being high.”
I’d explained all this to Alice before. Once she’d even sympathized, and claimed she understood. It was true that in that first year, the drugs had been terrific—the all-night parties with friends, the clubs, the anonymous one-night-stands—but at some stage the feelings had gone vacant. The highs got less exciting, yet I tried to maintain them, frantic attempts to avoid the lows. I remembered telling Alice about all the despair over Pen & Ink and other fleeting freelance jobs; the abandonment of so many articles I’d wanted to write; the series of failed relationships. “Eventually the meth obliterated everything,” I’d said.
On the stereo, the orchestra finished its crowning song. We listened to the wind ripping branches from the trees and, from the kitchen, the thick drop of refrigerator ice. “I want to watch you do it,” Alice suddenly said. “Go get your travel bag. Go get your little striped straw.”
And so she’d remembered the travel bag and its cartoon mouse. She’d even remembered the straw. Earlier conversations, when she’d asked me to elaborate, my stories had been hazy—the losses of money and friends, the subtle withdrawals, the crying jags and sleeplessness and hospital scares. I’d always made these stories abstract, but Alice hated abstraction. It was so like her to remember the bag and straw: the tiny, the specific.
In the bedroom I found everything I needed. From the window, the snow was blanketing the backyard garden. The pouch of meth that Gavin had sent was iridescent black, and, as I held it to the window’s light, I saw the crystals inside, faint occluded gleam within the black, mesmerizing as an elephant’s eye. I was still so lost to it.
When I returned, I showed Alice the drug, my credit card, and the fast-food straw. “This better not be your attempt at intervention,” I said. I sat on the floor and searched for something level, any surface where I could perform the pathetic scene she wanted. Beside the rocker was an old hickory trough, repainted in my mother’s careful hand, now used for stacks of magazines. Stuck between the usual gardening and furniture titles was an outdated collection of crossword puzzles. Many were solved in others’ faded-ink handwritings; our mother must have found the magazine at a junk store and, fascinated by what others hadn’t finished, added the missing solutions. On one page, the borders of a puzzle were shaped like a valentine heart. She’d solved the hidden words inside (Ta-da, I could imagine her shouting, There’s another!) and afterward used a crayon to redden the love of the heart.
This page seemed so appropriate, so obvious. I scattered the drug across the heart, crushed it, and sniffed twice.
“Happy now?” I asked.
“Don’t know if ‘happy’ is the right word.”
“How about ‘satisfied’?”
“Maybe.”
I cleared each nostril with my forefinger and thumb, then licked the residue. Alice wasn’t fazed. Perhaps if I’d used the pipe; perhaps if I’d told reckless stories of Gavin and our other addict “friends.” Perhaps if she knew I’d once tried injecting myself with a friend’s borrowed needle; when the needle pricked my skin, I’d shuddered and swore my usual “I quit” lie.
She reached to squeeze my arm, as though proud of my performance. Her skin smelled faintly of patchouli soap; in the subdued gold light, I could see her strong resemblance to our mother. The pale green eyes; the slowly nodding head; the antique glimmer of her teardrop earrings. I thought of her cramped, curtained store, up north in Lawrence: the vintage veiled hats and lace-up boots, the rows of exquisite dresses. Alice had become obsessed with finding old valuables, then reselling them at her store. Although she’d never acknowledge it, it was clear she’d inherited this nostalgia, these bent aesthetics, from our mother.
From her strained smile, from her hand still touching mine, it seemed she expected gratitude at this, her acceptance of my actions. Instead, I felt the bitterness spread to my throat: another sudden, unstable emotion, so quickened by the drug. “She would never try to humiliate me like this,” I said.
“Humiliate? This isn’t about humiliation.”
“You’re trying to knock me down. It’s because you feel guilty.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Because she’s dying. She’s dying, and you haven’t been here for her. You’re trying to gain power over me.”
“That’s ludicrous.” She made a low, obstinate cough. “First, there’s one good reason I haven’t been here: because I wasn’t allowed. You deliberately kept this from me. And second, I don’t feel guilty. Years and years of near misses, doctors giving her this or that diagnosis, years of pretending things were worse than they truly were. How was I ever supposed to know what was real and what wasn’t?”
?
??We didn’t deliberately—”
“And get this through your head,” she continued. “I am not our mother. She and I are not the same person. Not now, not ever.”
“You’re right. She would never ask me to do this in front of her.”
“There are lots of things she’d never do. She’d never have the nerve to get the hell out of these horrible backward towns, like you and I did. And she’d never get addicted to some embarrassing, disgraceful drug, like you did.
“And what’s more”—she paused, as though unsure how to go on—“I doubt that you or I would ever spend years and years pretending that a disease was ten times more serious than it probably actually was, milking it for everything we could, like she did. And I doubt that you or I would then someday realize that the disease had finally won the battle but not tell the people who were supposed to matter most to her, until it was way too late, like she did. And I highly doubt that I would do what the two of you have been doing—and don’t think for a minute that Dolores’s blabbing mouth didn’t tell me about this—driving around the entire state of Kansas, telling people you’re writing a book just to satisfy some screwed-up curiosity from years ago that I never understood in the first place.”
Her voice had lifted to a shout; the cat had bolted from the room. Instinctively I’d coiled into the chair, rocking like a child. The meth was constricting my throat, but I had enough strength to speak. “Oh, Alice,” I said. “We lost you long ago, didn’t we?”
We both stared, unblinking, our breaths slowly steadying, the chair creaking as I rocked. Inside this house, the arguments were always whispery and shy. No voice had ever risen so powerfully. I wondered whether the boy downstairs had absorbed our furious words.
At last, Alice stood, reaching toward my face. “Your nose is bleeding,” she said.
I wouldn’t let her touch me. I hurried for the bedroom, closing the door, locking it behind me. Then I found the bottle of sleeping pills and swallowed three without water.
In the dark, I heard him moving through the house, the carpet hissing under his lazy shuffle. Somehow I knew it was Otis. I shut my eyes in an obstinate, counterfeit sleep, but he soon came slinking through the doorway. He stood near the bed, waiting for my reaction; then he reached beneath the blankets and scratched my foot. When I opened my eyes, I saw he’d removed the knotted scarf, and his jaw was busy with a wad of gum.
“Your sister left a note. She’s staying with your mom tonight.”
I reached to pull the chain on the lamp, squinting against its metallic light. On the nightstand were two sodas, both tabbed open, the smell leaving a synthetic grape smear across the room. I took one, sat up in bed, and drank. I was shocked to see the time was nearly nine o’clock; I’d been sleeping the entire day.
“Did she find you down there?” I asked.
“I waited until I heard her get in her car and leave. I was starving, so I came upstairs to eat. That peanut brittle. And that salami with the peppercorns in it.”
“Sorry I was sleeping. I should’ve already been downstairs with dinner.”
He shrugged; the look on his face convinced me that he’d snuck upstairs many times before. Yet after all this time, he hadn’t escaped. “I’ve been watching TV and walking around,” he said. “Your mom sure has some cool old stuff. And out back, too.”
So he’d nosed around the rooms of the house, the backyard garden and garage. Imagining this, I looked down to his wrists, then lower, to his ankles. The handcuffs and rope were gone. “You found the key,” I said.
“Aw, come on. You know I’ve had it with me all along.”
“Actually, I didn’t know that.”
Otis sat at the foot of the bed. He seemed peculiarly solemn, no longer smirking or averting his eyes; even the way he chewed his gum now seemed more man than boy. Yet I noticed his boyishly bad haircut, his wrecked complexion, and the unshaven fuzz above his lip, butter-colored and fine.
“I’ve been lying to you,” he said.
“About the key?”
“No, about everything. This was all my idea.”
His meaning still wasn’t clear. Then he took a deep breath, and his confession streamed forth: “I’m nothing like I said. My name isn’t Otis. It’s Allen. I just turned eighteen, not fifteen like I told her. I’m not even in school anymore—dropped out, this past spring.”
He watched me as though expecting astonishment or fury. In fact, I wasn’t so surprised. For the past two days, he’d seemed distressed by my mother’s prolonged absence, by my sobering reports about her feeble health, and I’d sensed a simmering of guilt in him. “And I bet you aren’t related to her Warren, either,” I said.
“Not at all. My real mom and dad are in Nevada. Same with my grandparents. I never go visit them; we don’t even talk much. But I can tell you I’ve never known anybody named Warren.”
“Your grandfather isn’t the man she wants him to be.”
He lowered his eyes in shame. “And I’m not, either.”
He reached for the grape soda, mistakenly choosing my half-finished can instead of his own, and then finished it with three hard swallows. “I live with my uncle and aunt,” he said. “But I’m hardly ever there. I take off in my car all the time. It’s an ’89 Mustang but it still runs pretty good. I parked it down the block, that night I drove here. I just checked, and it’s still outside.”
“Aren’t they worried? Looking all over for you?”
“They probably haven’t noticed I’m gone.”
I drew my legs to my chest, freeing more space on the bed, and he relaxed slightly. “Okay, then no more secrets,” I said. “Tell me how you first met my mother.”
He took me back to that day—just weeks before I’d boarded my New York bus—that late-summer afternoon he’d first seen her. “I was stocking shelves at the store where I used to work,” he said. “She’d been watching me a long time before I even noticed. I thought she was weird but there was something about her I liked.
“Later, when I was finishing up, she came back. She said I looked like someone from her past. She said she was very sick, and she needed to find this person before she died. I didn’t think she was serious. I mean, I could see she wasn’t so healthy—but I didn’t think it was supposed to happen so soon.
“Then she wanted to know, did I have time to go driving and talk a little? And I thought, why not? We drove her pickup around Sterling. Around the whole county, out by the salt mines and then the old riding stable. We parked and just sat there, watching. The whole time she kept talking about this boy—this Warren. How they’d been kidnapped as kids, and she’d been searching for him her entire life.”
I sat listening to Otis—Allen—continue his recollection of that day. He tried to remember all she’d initially told him, mentioning most of the now-familiar aspects: the peaches and candy bars; the old records and the board games they’d played. He recalled her painstaking descriptions of Warren’s clothes and hair and eyes. But I couldn’t quite decode, based on the boy’s memory, which version of her disappearance she’d given that day she’d first spoken with him. Perhaps her memories hadn’t quite solidified. Or perhaps—the more likely possibility—she hadn’t yet concocted the elaborate stories she’d later tell Alice, Dolores, or me.
“We talked on the phone, every other day or so. I kept playing along, letting her think I might be connected to Warren. She really wanted it that way, you know? She’d been searching so long…so maybe I could be the one to make her happy.”
“You felt sorry for her.”
“At first it was kind of fun. Didn’t think there was anything wrong with it. I memorized what I could from the things she’d told me. She said he didn’t like to sing along to those records, so I pretended I couldn’t sing. He loved that candy bar with the pink center, so I took some money from my aunt’s purse and went and bought a load of those. And the peaches—she’d mentioned them eating peaches. I was going to get peaches that day you picked me up, but when I went to the st
ore, all I could find was tomatoes. I don’t even like tomatoes.”
“You even lied about that.”
“I guess so, yeah.”
With the boy so close on the bed, crouched in the yellow lamplight and speaking his steadied, penitent words, I saw that indeed he was much older than his professed fifteen. Allen. He’d so easily fooled me, too. He still wore the ragged canvas shoes, my mother’s beaded bracelet, and the sweatshirt, rumpled with the cozy remoteness of sleep. Only a single difference: he no longer wore the name tag with its blank white square.
Then I saw the marks on his neck, raw and faintly red. It was clear the marks were from a belt: the strangling leather, the red stain of the buckle. Like Henry. When I moved closer to examine, he flinched before I could touch his skin. “It didn’t hurt,” he said. “I just wanted to see how it felt.”
Once again I leaned back against the headboard, staring into the boy’s face until he looked away. He was still so frightening and foreign and strange. He’d finally left the basement room, removing his ropes and locks, to reveal his lies and gallant guilt. Yet still so many questions remained.
“So what made you come back here? Why have you stayed, all this time?”
“For her. I knew she really believed I was the connection. Now she had to figure a way to get you to believe it, too. Maybe I said it as a joke—you know, ‘You guys should kidnap me and put me in your basement.’ We planned it all out, and then she’d eventually tell you about Warren and all that time she’d gone missing. We decided you’d pick me up from the road. We’d pretend we didn’t know each other. That she was kidnapping me.