We Disappear

  The day after her Partridge trip, I received an Express Mail envelope on my apartment doorstep. Inside were clippings from five separate Kansas newspapers. To my surprise, they weren’t further articles about Henry. They were classifieds she’d placed in the Hutchinson News, Wichita Eagle, Salina Journal, McPherson Sentinel, and Emporia Gazette. Each of her ads read the same: “MISSING PERSON? Upcoming book about disappeared people. Conducting interviews w/loved ones left behind. Share your story!” Following that was my mother’s address and phone. Lastly, in boldface, “ASK FOR DONNA OR SCOTT.”

  My week had been reckless: two days at Pen & Ink, followed by five of getting high. My studio apartment stank of chemical sweat. Dust had settled across the piles of clothes, the glasses of water, and the framed photographs on the mantel, now facedown as though toppled by some surprise wind. The branches outside made shadows on my walls, and I watched their shifting blacks and grays. A headache was spurring at my temples, and my hands and feet were cold. I thought about my mother and Henry Barradale. About each word in the newspaper ads. Finally I rose and picked my clothes from the floor, sniffing to find a shirt clean enough to wear. I needed to leave, to get high again.

  I rode the grumbling subway into Manhattan. Random images layered in my head: Henry’s angle as he lay discarded, forgotten; the eyes gone gray as paraffin; his pale ears filling with sounds from the surrounding field and the woods beyond. Perhaps he hadn’t suffered long. Perhaps in death he’d heard the whispers of animals; the twist of night-bloom ivy; the rowdy struggle as the hands stopped his throat.

  The subway riders quietly crowded the train. There was the blank-eyed old man, reading and rereading a page of a movie-star magazine. There was the stout, ambiguously female Chinese vendor who shuffled between cars, amassing dollar bills in her fists, selling miniature plush penguins and bears, batteries and ballpoint pens, dainty bracelets and handheld face-fans that no one would need. And the little girl across the aisle, likely returning from some party or street fair, sitting apart from her mother and a man decidedly not her father. The adults traded bites from a white-pink whorl of cotton candy but offered the girl nothing.

  It was almost palpable—there within the old man and the luckless vendor and the marooned girl—this urban loneliness shared by so many, yet still distinct, so hers and his and ours. For months I’d been learning its nuances. All the dinners I’d botched or burned, amounting to more than a single plate, dinners dropped in the trash. All the soured bottles of wine. The drifts toward sleep while the TV droned, the quiz shows with easy answers, correct and correct until victory, with no one there to marvel or congratulate.

  Sometimes, to cut the underlying dread, my mother and I would joke about the loneliness. I’d hint at mine; she’d illustrate the facets of hers. She said she’d learned to recite nutrition facts from the panels of frozen dinners. She’d gotten skilled at imitating the voices of each late-news anchor; she’d dallied at her computer screen, reading through other women’s testimonials on the cancer-survivor Web sites. And as my mother reported these things, I’d realize my despair was minimal in comparison. All the radiation and chemotherapy had weakened her blood and taken her strength. Throughout the years of disease, she’d managed to endure the deaths of friends and family and, just months ago, her second husband.

  On my previous trip home, she’d asked about my addictions. She’d been drowsy and nauseous, just finishing another round of treatments, but seemed far more troubled by her son: my forgetfulness and mood swings; my itchy skin and bleeding, receding gums. The sleeping pills she understood, but the crystal meth she didn’t. Methamphetamine, I’d pronounced for her. I tried to describe the highs, the resulting smother of emotions. I avoided any specifics about the early days, when the drugs made me confident and seemingly invincible, when I’d used it to meet friends or go searching for sex. I could only explain how I felt now. The diminishment, the depression. I remember claiming how I no longer used because I wanted to; now, my body needed it to survive. At this, my mother stared without speaking, and then she grasped my hand.

  Through the subway window I watched the stations move in ribbons until the train reached my stop. I ascended to the street and headed for the target apartment. Gavin buzzed me in, and I hiked the stairs to the fifth floor. He stood waiting, squinting from his open door, certifying I was indeed one of his regulars.

  I let him lead me inside. “Two times in one week?” he asked.

  “I might be going away for a while. Can’t take the chance of not having enough.”

  Gavin lived in the dirty studio walk-up with his equally addicted younger brother Sam. Although we called one another “friends,” we clearly were not; they were only my dealers. Their place showed all the inattentive hallmarks of the addict: the piles of unlaundered clothes; the burn-scarred tables littered with glass pipes and tightly rolled bills; the unfinished, crudely painted walls, part blue, part gold, part antacid-pink. There was the smell of cheap vanilla incense and, beneath it, the acidic scorch of the meth Gavin and Sam smoked daily. They even stank of it. One night after I’d arrived, another fellow buyer had mentioned how much I resembled Gavin—the strawberry blond hair, the stubbly chin, the vintage button-down shirts—and I felt sick at the suggestion. I hoped my speech hadn’t assumed Gavin’s bleary slur, or my body hadn’t turned as feeble and pale as his.

  I pulled my wallet from my back pocket. Gavin opened his silver box; I said I wanted four times my regular amount. His fidgety hands prepared the order, the knuckles pink and scraped, the cuticles torn. As always, he coughed and swiped at his runny nose. He was so wed to the drug he’d started wearing a half-snipped straw behind his ear, the way my Pen & Ink cowriters wore pencils or ballpoint pens.

  “Where’s Sam?” I asked, the usual bit of small talk, hoping he’d offer a freebie, a jolt to get me high.

  “Don’t know. Don’t care.”

  I handed Gavin the bills, two weeks of freelance earnings. “And Ambiens—please, as many as I can get with all this.”

  He counted the sleeping pills and dropped them in an unmarked prescription bottle. He measured the right amount of meth with his shaky hands, then sealed it in a tiny black translucent pouch. “This stuff—it’s particularly potent.”

  The drug felt flawless in my palm. I held it heavenward, letting light catch the plastic and the shiny, promising grains. “Smoke or snort?” Gavin asked as always, and I chose the latter. At the table he prepared two thick lines; I felt my brain shudder with need (crush it now, arrange it now, breathe and feel its kick now). He slid the fast-food straw from behind his ear—stripes of yellow, white, and red—and delivered it to me.

  “If you’re heading all the way back home, you should take the bus,” he said. “Avoid the airport security.”

  I bent to the table and deleted the two lines, then smiled as the drug hit my brain. “Hadn’t thought about that.”

  He nodded. “You’re going back to care for your mom?”

  I couldn’t recall telling him anything about home or my mother’s health. I’d gotten high with Gavin and Sam countless times—we had never seen each other clean—yet I had to distance them, to distort any truths. I thought of the most recent lie I knew. “I haven’t told anyone this, but the big news is that she and I are writing a book. Accounts of missing people. These mysteries, all these unsolved cases. Tons of research we need to do.”

  “Really. Well, it’s terrific if that means her health is better.” Gavin scooped some meth with the straw, then tapped it into the pipe, its glass warped and blackened. “Have to do it this way. Too many nosebleeds.” He held the pipe over his lighter, waited as its tiny belly swirled with smoke, and gave it to me.

  I took a long pull and handed it back. He looks nothing like me, I told myself. As I pocketed the pills and the meth, I vowed to speak nothing more about my mother. Soon I would stand and leave, head down the street, board the subway back to my apartment. I wouldn’t go out tonight; wouldn’t call other friends to
see who else was high. Instead, I promised myself I would use the drug’s energy to prepare for the trip home. I would pack and plan the methods for helping my mother—how the two of us might outdistance the detectives as we discovered the secrets they’d missed. How, together, we might fill the fading parentheses of our days.

  In those childhood months after Evan Carnaby disappeared, Alice and I grew content believing that our mother’s strange hobby had generated simply from our small-town mystery. Later that winter, however, we learned that a deeper secret, even deeper than her stay at the mental hospital, might have been responsible for her recent behavior. We might never have learned this secret, had it not been for my own disappearance.

  As a boy I was perennially damaged: scabbed elbows and knees, chipped or loosened teeth, blooms of bug bites and poison ivy. I was scrawny and my eyesight was bad. At school I was constantly teased, and my mother, again like a detective, searched for some solution. The upcoming January 29 was Kansas Day, and when teachers pinned notes to our shirts—CELEBRATE OUR STATEHOOD! PLEASE DRESS STUDENTS TO FIT THE DAY’S THEME!—my mother saw my opportunity to make friends.

  The week before the celebration, an uncommon conviction seized her. Together we unwrapped Hershey bars, gifts I could deliver to my classmates. We nibbled their upper right corners, then held them toward the kitchen light: rows of chocolate miniatures of our state. Next, she opened a library book filled with costume ideas: boys dressed as bison, girls decked out as shocks of wheat, a flock of yellow meadowlarks with black-bibbed chests. These ideas, she decided, were just too complicated. Instead she fashioned stiff yellow petals from rag-rug fabric and wire. She dyed my white corduroys the green of a stem. In our bathroom mirror, I watched her unwrap chocolate kisses and glue them to my cheeks and chin, studding me with the fragrant seeds. “The world’s loveliest sunflower,” she announced. The glue stung my skin, but I didn’t care. My mother had remodeled me; she had proven herself.

  The next afternoon, the Kansas Day party was crowded with kids. To my disappointment, I saw eleven, then twelve, other sunflowers. None of my teachers or friends seemed to notice my costume. Did this make my mother a failure? Did it make me a failure?

  I retreated to a corner of the room. The day was nearly over; from a window I watched the hood of clouds that covered our dismal town, the church steeples and wind-worn grain elevators, the patches of snow across the dulled wheat fields. I fingernailed the kisses from my face and swallowed them, glue and all. I knew that if I slipped out the door, not a single soul would notice. I could shuffle petal-and-stem from school. I could simply disappear.

  That evening I took a different route home, plodding through the muddied snow, wasting time. Would anyone notice if I failed to return? I made my way along the roads that bordered town, the barbed-wire fences and flat, windy fields. I waited for the shadowing skies, the soft buzz of streetlamps, keeping my gaze at the ground whenever a car slowed or braked. It was nearly seven thirty when I reached our house, three cheerless hours later than my usual arrival.

  When I stepped into the hall, both Alice and my mother were waiting. My sister seemed frightened; I couldn’t pinpoint my mother’s emotion. She was, however, undeniably drunk. She grabbed Alice and me by the hands and led us to the living-room couch. “Neither of you will make me worry like this again,” she said.

  She went to the kitchen for her bottle, then stumbled back and knelt before us on the floor. “The time has finally come to tell the story,” she said.

  To this day I remember each detail: perhaps it was the lamp’s fiery gold on her face, perhaps the frenzy in her eyes as she spoke. We couldn’t interrupt, she said; we couldn’t ask a single question. Just listen.

  When my mother was a little girl, her parents were much too busy to bother with her. She was the fifth of six kids; along with her younger brother, Dan, she was forever finding trouble. Together they’d throw rocks at neighbors’ windows. Roses uprooted from trellises; hand-dug holes in the city park. And then, one afternoon, my mother said, something bad happened. Something terrible. A black car pulled close to the Hutchinson park playground where she and Dan were playing. She stood to investigate, still holding her crayons, her coloring book with its pictures of dinosaurs. A tall man in dark clothes got out of the car. She said she couldn’t remember his face. Yet she remembered the way he smiled, the way he hobbled toward them. Dan panicked and ran, but my mother stayed calm, standing at the playground’s edge, waiting as the man lurched closer.

  “But here’s the funny thing, the horrible thing. I don’t remember what happened after that.” She took a sip from the bottle. “Maybe the man drugged me or hit me over the head. I don’t know. It’s just empty now, it’s all a big blank. An entire week later, I woke on the front porch of our house. I didn’t know where I’d been. Didn’t know what happened to me. I’d just disappeared, and to this day no one knows who, or how, or why.”

  Alice stammered, wanting to speak, but our mother raised her hand. “Don’t say a word,” she said. “Shush. I’m telling you this because I was lucky. I could have been killed. Strangled or stabbed or something worse. Whatever happened during that week, I was lucky enough to survive it. Others aren’t so fortunate. Others turn up dead—just like poor Evan Carnaby might be dead.”

  For a moment it seemed she would cry. She tipped the bottle to her lips and spoke again. “Now think about this. Do either of you want that to happen to you?”

  Her story was finished. We waited, but she only closed her eyes and kept her hand in the air, prolonging the room’s stillness. Something bad. Alice looked at me, and then toward the floor. We weren’t allowed to wonder about Dan or her parents. No pressuring questions about her absence at school; the possible organized searches; the involvement of police. Why couldn’t that little girl remember the face of the man, the make of his car? Who was that girl, and what had happened to her?

  Later that night, after the bourbon shifted our mother into sleep, Alice snuck to my room. She sat at the corner of my bed to tally our reactions. We still weren’t sure how much we could accept as fact. Maybe, if parts of the story were true, it could explain her obsession with Evan and the others who’d gone missing. And maybe—the maybe that scared us both—the story was the cause of her awkward eccentricities, her lifelong melancholy, and that secret history of hospital stays.

  Or maybe, we reasoned, our mother told the story to scare us: only that. She didn’t want us rebelling or running away from home. A foggy, rather generic yarn of adolescent danger to keep us obedient, attentive, safe.

  Yes. Alice and I agreed to settle on this final answer. She was dizzily drunk, after all, and she’d never mentioned any piece of the story before. Together, we decided that the story was our mother’s well-meaning but drunkenly misguided lie. We swore we’d never speak of it again.

  After returning from Gavin’s, I discovered one last message on my machine. First, the click of the phone; then a snag of static from her line. I heard her clear her throat. And finally, my mother’s voice: a little hoarse, a little weary, but confident and clear.

  “I think I understand now,” she said. She paused for a breath, and then: “I think I know what happened when I disappeared.”

  Henry’s funeral was scheduled for the afternoon, late that Friday so his classmates could come. She saw Dr. Kaufman in the morning, and afterward drove to the service. She must have been sitting there, prim and immobile in the cramped pew, while simultaneously I’d sat in Gavin’s room, filling my lungs and head with meth.

  In the casket he seemed peacefully sleeping. He was wearing his letter jacket and holding a small black Bible. My mother nodded, hummed the hymns, and rumpled the funeral program in her hands. It didn’t seem right to speak to his parents or his bewildered, perfumed sisters. She avoided Henry’s classmates and his football friends. At last she summoned the courage to approach an aunt: a steel-haired nail-biter named Sunny, the only woman wearing white instead of black. In fifteen whispered minutes after t
he service, before the drive to Rayl’s Hill, my mother learned specifics from Sunny, details she’d later report to me.

  Some were curious and random as miracles. In an aquarium in his room, Henry had kept a hognose snake. He’d been allergic to penicillin, but refused to wear the identifying bracelet. The week before he’d gone missing, Henry—new license placed proudly in his wallet—had accidentally sideswiped his father’s car into the front-yard mulberry tree. And the murderer, according to Sunny, didn’t use his hands on Henry’s neck after all. He’d actually used the missing belt, looping around the boy’s throat to tighten, to stop the final breath.

  At the grave she stayed inside the truck. A hunched pastor murmured stock blessings; the friends and family nodded. She drove along the cemetery’s edge, noting John’s grave and the space beside it. Then she followed the winding road to the gate.

  Halfway home, some curiosity, some desire for her day to matter, must have seized her. The funeral hymns echoed in her ears, melodies holding some coded command, and she wanted to search for the place he’d been found—that brambled field, the secret acre gone suddenly holy. She didn’t care that the truck’s clock read 7:15 or that, according to the article, the field lay miles and hours away.

  But my mother got lost. She couldn’t recall the names of the roads or towns. The pickup’s feeble light tricked her eyes, and she couldn’t decode the map, the skinny blue and red veins leading toward home.

  She unrolled the window to breathe the air, the fields of fermenting milo and oats. A storm was coming. Lightning shot the sky in streaks that revealed the barbed-wire fences, the columns of poplars. She listened to the bump, below her feet, of another unknown road; the radio’s flow of love songs. Finally a sign glittered faintly in her lights. REST AREA, it said, with an arrow below. Perhaps she should stop; she could study the map until the storm passed, then find her way home. The road curved inward, and her lights illuminated the splintered planks of a picnic table; a silver trash barrel, overturned; the dried seedpods of yucca plants. My mother parked, buttoned John’s jacket higher at the neck, and looped her purse around her arm.