We Disappear

  The interior of the Ford still carried my stepfather’s evidence: his smells of loose-leaf tobacco and spice-brown aftershave; three pheasant feathers jammed into the windshield’s corner; and a warp-edged photo of John himself, in hunting gear, taped to the glove box. But the dashboard also showed newer pictures. A gallery had been taped across the truck, steering wheel to passenger door, the wood-grain panel now decorated with faces. MISSING, some of them said. Exactly like our kitchen walls, all those years ago. Before Dolores steered from the lot, I saw, in a stripe of streetlight, the newsprint names beneath the faces. Audrey Plumly. Ben Kent. George Johnson Lloyd. And yes, Henry Barradale.

  “You never know where she gets the energy,” Dolores said as she approached the highway. “She’ll be real, real sick one day, but then the next she’s different. Yesterday she made me take her to the library. She held a pair of scissors in her hand the whole way there. Next thing you know, snip-snip-snip. She’d done up the truck like that. And just wait’ll you see her kitchen walls.”

  I leaned to squint at Henry’s face. “Then this is what you wanted to tell me?”

  “Not exactly, no.” She frowned as though unsure where to start. I saw her working her jaw, gnawing the hollow of her cheek. I saw the rhinestone bobby pins, parallel above each ear to secure her hair. Dolores used to be a beauty queen, my mother had told me once. Queen Dolores. She could get absolutely any boy she wanted. And believe me, she sure did want a lot of them.

  “I have my doubts that she’s been completely honest,” Dolores said. “You know, that she’s filling you in on things.”

  “What things does she have to fill in?”

  “Health things.”

  I felt the flutter of worry. “Lately, when she’s called, we’ve mostly talked about the body.”

  “That murdered boy of hers.”

  “And other missing people. Cases she’s been following.”

  “I know all about it,” Dolores said. “She wants you to get back into your detective work. That’s what she called it yesterday, your detective work. I have to tell you, I think it’s just plain strange.”

  Some disturbance in her eyes made me look away, out to the stark sandy roads, the harvested fields. “But it’s good to hear her so excited about something again,” I said. “For once she’s excited by something other than—oh, I don’t know, whether her insurance is paying the doctor bills, or whether or not her platelets are strong.”

  Dolores had slowed the truck, and now other drivers were speeding past—the hay trucks, the horse trailers and rattling semis. She was watching me more than the road. “On Friday she made me drive over to that kid’s funeral to meet her,” she said. “Don’t you think that’s strange?”

  I corrected a bent corner on one of the taped photographs. When I didn’t answer, Dolores continued: “You should’ve seen that funeral. Pretty classy, overall. Except someone brought a bouquet of orange carnations in the shape of a football. Everyone’s clothes and the rest of the flowers and the way they dressed him up—all very classy. Then out came that horrible ball. I left before it was over.”

  I tried to imagine them in that church, watching his family and friends, stilled by the organist’s “In the Garden” and “Amazing Grace.” But as Dolores spoke, I couldn’t focus on the casket or the flower sprays or the mourners in the family room. I could only see my mother, rooted in her back-row chair. Her alien, satisfied smile; her wig, pinned back; her black sweater and both hands clamped in her lap. Surely she kept the next seat empty, as though waiting for me.

  “You said ‘health things,’” I said. “Does that mean it’s gotten worse?”

  “Scotty, don’t tell her I’m telling you this. It’d make her furious to think I was worrying you kids.” She paused to take an unsteady breath. “But I have to say it. Your mom just isn’t fighting anymore. I think it’s happening now.”

  “Happening? Tell me exactly what you’re saying.”

  “It’s so much worse than when you saw her last. She’s hardly worked in her garden. Remember last summer? That’s all she did. But this year, no. And she’s tired all the time. She can hardly get around by herself.”

  With a slow swerve, Dolores moved from the highway to a narrower road. “I wanted her to call you and Alice,” she said. “I told her, ‘Donna, call those kids!’ But she wouldn’t. Now she won’t tell me everything Kaufman’s said, but apparently there are new tumors. I think she’s reached that point. I think there’s no remission left.”

  I looked across the seat at her. Really, I thought, I hardly know this woman. I knew she owned a fancy snowmobile; she had a good recipe for chocolate-chip cookies, which my mother often borrowed. She had a much older husband, named Ernest, whom I’d never met, and a Pomeranian, named Fred, whom I had. Reached that point. Since the time I’d last seen Dolores, her voice had become less chirpy, less childlike. No remission: so grave and deep. I remembered my mother relating a story of Dolores after she’d beaten the cancer: her immaturity, her girlish dresses. “She showed up at the flea market in something like a ballerina outfit,” my mother had said. “Only one breast left, and a ballerina! Idiotic.” That Dolores didn’t seem the same as the woman beside me now.

  I felt a sudden, stinging guilt as I realized I hadn’t questioned my mother enough about her health. I’d been snared by her excitement over Henry, our upcoming days together. Before, there were only the misty, enigmatic words, non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a vague cancer at vague crossings of her blood. But now, according to Dolores, the disease had a tangible shape.

  “I have to tell you more.” She pulled a cigarette from her purse and lit it with the truck’s lighter. “I’m worried it’s affecting her head. I know at one point Kaufman said something about possible mild dementia. But I think it’s started to progress.”

  “Dementia? Isn’t that a little extreme?”

  “She’s been telling me lately about this business when she was a girl. It’s like this murdered boy has stirred something up in her. Do you know about all this?”

  “Her disappearance,” I said softly. “Yes.”

  “You know these things she’s apparently kept secret all these years?”

  “Alice and I always thought it was an exaggeration. Just something to scare us. It never seemed quite so important, really.” I looked away from the window and back to Dolores. “I’ve only thought of it lately because she’s brought it up again.”

  “And do you believe her now?”

  “What has she been saying?”

  “She’s been telling me things—oh God!—these awful things. I can’t fathom how she thinks them up. She told me about some horrible man who kept her locked in a cellar. Some other boy, kidnapped in the cellar with her. It’s just crazy! All our years and years as friends, and she’s never mentioned any of this craziness? What am I supposed to believe? Now I want to call Kaufman, because I’m worried that the sickness went to her brain. She’s been following that boy’s case too much, and watching too much scary TV. She’s starting to think things like this really happened to her.”

  Dolores adjusted her glasses and sighed, releasing a cloud of blue, unfurling smoke. A horrible man…a basement…another kidnapped boy. I wished the spillage would stop, but knew the silence would be worse. “So you don’t believe these things she’s been saying,” I said.

  “Honestly? No, I don’t.” She paused. “Have you called your sister to let her know you’re home?”

  “I haven’t.”

  “You should. I know it’s hard to hear, but I think your mother’s inventing these things to bring you home. She doesn’t want you to know the real reason. There’s no time left, and her doctor’s given up hope. Right now she just wants her kids back here with her.”

  The headlights cast arcs along the road, the ditches with their fringes of weeds and stagnant rainstorm pools. Ahead, at the railroad tracks, the crossing bars had lowered: the flickering strobes of red, the bands of white and black. Dolores slowed and stopped th
e truck. I wanted to open the door and walk away from her words, passing the upended tree roots snarled with strips of clothing and plastic cups, with the crumpled newspapers and their indistinct headlines. I wanted to walk the final miles home to be with my mother, to hear her voice and hold her hand.

  Dolores remained idling at the tracks. There were no other cars, and there was no train: no oncoming light, no whistle coldly slitting the air. Yet the crossing bars remained in place, the lights blaring red. I unrolled my window and breathed. From the dark distance came the sounds of geese: the door-hinge creak of their throats, carried closer by the wind.

  Dolores lowered her own window and looked out at the night. She was still drunk. I was still high. We were less than five miles from my mother, but we weren’t ready, not yet. Together we listened until the geese were gone, and then we listened longer. “It gets so quiet out here,” she said at last.

  “Please, just stop. Let’s not say another word until we’re home.”

  We reached the sandy road into Haven. The roads were silent, flanked by cottonwoods and elms, their shadows wavering in the streetlights. Dolores made a final turn, steered into my mother’s drive, and parked.

  I left her and headed for the house. Stepping onto the porch, I sensed at once that something had changed. Before, whenever my mother heard the car in the street, she would rise to greet me at the door. Now, even with the ruckus of the Ford, she hadn’t yet appeared.

  I leaned from the porch and looked into the living-room window. Through the curtain I could see the television’s greenish light, its defective picture. My mother had never sent the TV for repair—for years, both Alice and I had smacked it ineffectually with the hocks of our hands—and it still projected its images in queasy thirds: the bottom section of picture mistakenly at the top, the top at the bottom, a black stripe separating the two. The picture wouldn’t straighten or unite. Yet my mother kept the TV going, its sound turned low, often drifting to sleep in its aqueous, nerve-numbing light.

  “Go on in,” Dolores said from behind me. She reached to open the screen door, and together we stepped inside.

  As always, when I first arrived home, I stamped my shoes on the mat, took them off, and peeled away my socks. In my drug-heightened state, the carpet felt plush and soothing on my feet. To our right, the TV displayed its marred picture of the evening news, the maps of a weather report. And within its glow was my mother. She lay on the couch, one arm crooked across her face.

  “Asleep,” said Dolores. And, as though that proved something, “See what I mean?”

  Her breaths were labored and dense. She was wearing her scarf, but in sleep it had shifted to reveal the threads of hair, the dry, mottled patches of scalp. I stepped closer, dizzy with sudden love, breathing the sharp chemical smell, the residual Rituxan and Neupogen injections that I knew, from her explanations, now filled her sweat. I remembered that smell, even across the eight-month gap since I’d last come home.

  “Mom, it’s me.” I leaned to touch the bare skin between her scarf and ear. She woke, drawing the arm from her face. At once I saw the truth in Dolores’s words: clearly her health had gotten worse.

  For a moment it seemed she didn’t recognize me. Then she smiled. “I found you,” she said.

  “No, I found you.”

  From behind us, Dolores jostled the keys in her pocket. “I should get moving,” she said. “Getting late.”

  My mother dug at the cushions, pushing herself to stand. She hadn’t inserted her lower plate of teeth; I saw her trying to veil the exertion on her face. “No, stay awhile,” she said. “At least have some iced tea.”

  Dolores said no, but my mother began moving haltingly toward the kitchen. It had only been eight months, yet at that moment I saw, more precisely than before, her aging and her illness. The deeper bend to her back, the random patches of steel-colored hair, the apprehensive dart in her eyes.

  Dolores made an exaggerated sigh. Her cheeks seemed newly flushed, as though she’d secretly snuck more bourbon. She peeked to the kitchen to assure my mother couldn’t hear. “Remember what I told you,” she whispered as she went to the door. “Whatever you need, just call.”

  Any form of agreement would feel like a betrayal. I didn’t want to hear any more admonishments or warnings; I couldn’t wait to close the screen on her. From the fogged window glass I watched her stumbling slightly, stumbling toward her own car. I delayed until she’d driven down the street, her single unbroken taillight dissolving, and then I locked the doors.

  The bronze chandelier with its drops of glass…the old firkin sugar bucket, clumped with dried roses…the Dazey butter churn. Most of the antiques had remained in our family for years. Others I hadn’t seen before, her recent discoveries from junkyards and auctions. I stepped around the room, straightening the picture frames, examining the rows of dolls in the glass china cabinet. Already I was toughening to my mother’s smell, the mix of medicines, the yellowed cigarette smoke, the bowls of apple-peel potpourri.

  She returned, her smile realigned with the lower teeth, two mismatched glasses in her hands. “We have an appointment at the café tomorrow.” And, just noticing: “Oh, I thought she was going to stay.”

  “Rushing to get back home or something.”

  “Ernest goes crazy if she’s out too late. What all’d she make you talk about on the way here?”

  “More about the funeral.”

  My mother sat again. “I thought you quit biting your fingernails.”

  “I tried, but I gave up.”

  She took a sip from the smaller glass. “Did she tell you about the football?”

  I nodded, reaching to cup my hand on her knee. Even this close she seemed to be retreating, reluctant to let me sufficiently see her. This wasn’t the vitality I’d imagined when I pictured her driving toward Partridge or watching Henry’s house. Until now I’d vowed to be forthright and firm, to stare directly into her eyes and ask point-blank about her memories. But I couldn’t stop thinking of Dolores’s warnings, and that terrible word, dementia. As I watched my mother, I forgot all the words I’d planned to say.

  “While you were on the bus yesterday, I arranged a little meeting with Sunny.”

  “Sunny from the funeral?”

  “She doesn’t live all that far away, and she plays bingo where John and I used to go. I found her name in the book and called.”

  Relating this seemed to perk my mother; she grabbed her purse from the floor and produced a yellow notepad. “She actually came to Haven! I wasn’t feeling so hot, but she took me to the café and treated us to butterscotch sundaes.” She opened the pad, and I saw scribbled notes from their conversation—“goodies,” she called them, more pieces from Henry’s life that she claimed I needed to know. Loved swimming at Kanopolis Lake. Loved seafood—esp. shrimp—ate em crunchy tails & all.

  “That’s nice,” I said. “Butterscotch.” I imagined them together in the lustrous leather booth. I pictured her taking notes on Henry’s clothes, Henry’s room, his love for swimming and shrimp, as all the while Aunt Sunny spoke, woe-wrecked, directionless. Perhaps these details, these “goodies,” were essential clues toward Henry’s murder. Perhaps they weren’t. I didn’t know; neither Sunny nor my mother knew. None of the “goodies” would bring Henry back.

  She squeezed my hand. “You haven’t given me a hug.”

  I’d been thinking the same thing. Somehow she could tell I needed the solace, the balm of her. Dolores’s arms, back in the station, had been a poor substitute. Her skin the wrong warmth, her hands clasping at my back. So I leaned closer and wrapped my arms around my mother’s shoulders. With the embrace, new fear fluttered through me. Her muscles, once taut like a carpenter’s, had thinned and atrophied. She’d grown fleshier in the stomach and back, yet I could feel her brittle collarbone and ribs. I could feel the rubbery ridge of the surgical port, implanted in her chest, where her doctor injected the meds. When I looked at her again, really looked, I saw her stained, oversize pink sl
ippers; her lavender nightgown with its neckline of purple beads. I saw the tracks and brown bruises where the needles had hit. These, I understood, were all the expected aspects and manners: a woman, sixty years old, with cancer. She’d surrendered to the pattern and mold.

  For now the memories of her disappearance could wait. “You know what I’m going to ask,” I said. “Any recent health things I should know about?”

  “Oh, not really. I don’t know. Last week the blood work didn’t look so good.”

  “Be specific.”

  “He says I have to give myself shots again. It’s all that anemia crap.”

  She had always used this word. Her favorite throwaway word, her breezy signal that the world was still trivial and subtly ludicrous. I remembered, as a boy, feeling a baffling pride whenever she said the word. My classmates had thought my mother slightly nutty: she worked at the prison, after all; she’d remained a widow for so many years; she always said crap or some further curse where other moms would have stayed silent. But Alice and I didn’t mind crap or her other choice language. Crap, for us, came to mean we didn’t need to worry. Our lives hadn’t progressed toward anything critical or urgent. Not yet.

  “But anemia—that’s common, right? If the chemo makes you lose red cells and get tired, then it must be working on the bad stuff.”

  “I guess so. Hope so.”

  She relaxed against the arm of the couch, and for the first time I noticed the badge pinned to her nightgown. I looked closer and saw, just above her heart, the laminated photo of a preteen girl. Immediately I understood: it was another of her researched missing children.

  She pulled the tiny picture forward, looking down at the grinning face. “Lacey Wyler,” she said. “That’s what I meant about tomorrow. I’ve set up a meeting at the café.”

  “Tomorrow? Already?”