“They’re going to start thinking I’m weird down there. That waitress will see us coming and set a glass of iced tea at my favorite table. Hopefully they’ll leave us alone and let us do our interview.”
And so the classifieds had achieved their purpose. Perhaps I hadn’t fully grasped my mother’s determination. I wasn’t certain she understood the gravity, the possible danger: could she actually exploit these despairing family members or friends with all her promises, her false guarantees? Would she still discuss our fictitious research and resulting book? Her detective work, Dolores had called it. Whatever warped strategies she’d been planning, I knew I wasn’t yet prepared to join her. Before morning, I needed a bath and a warm bed; I needed Gavin’s sleeping pills to ease my heartbeat.
From the badge, the girl stared out at me, her eyes blank, her face expressionless. “She went missing months ago from up west,” my mother said. “Don’t know much about it yet, but we will tomorrow.”
“We’re meeting her parents?”
“Her grandpa.” She shifted, and the pain of it tightened her lips. The yellow notepad slipped to the floor.
“And he’s coming all the way to Haven.”
“For an interview.”
“He really believed you, then.” I tried to disguise my concern. “Don’t you think this could potentially wreck the man? Especially if he knows you can’t help him, and you aren’t writing a book?”
“But maybe we can help him. We’ll be very kind.”
“You won’t wear the button, will you? Won’t grandpa think that’s odd?”
“No, grandpa’s the one who sent it. We talked on the phone to set this up, and next day, registered mail, I got pictures of her and these little pins. Apparently the people in Lacey’s town go around wearing these. Maybe somebody will remember seeing her somewhere.” She slid her purse across the sofa cushions. “There’s an extra for you.”
I put my hand into the jumble of Lacey badges and selected one. My mother clasped it to my shirt, just above my heart. She patted it twice with her fingers, then lifted her chin toward the kitchen. “Now, I bet you’re hungry.”
“No. Sleepy, though. I just want to get some sleep.”
“But there’s more to tell. You need to be prepared for tomorrow.”
I stood, blocking the television light, and for a moment the room was shaded. “Don’t worry,” I told her. “We can wait until morning.” For a moment I considered what else she needed me to say. “Tomorrow I’ll do whatever you want. From now on, it’s just you and me.”
Already that first night, I thought about leaving. Maybe this had been an awful, imprudent idea. Her home felt spacious for one person, yet cramped for two. Despite years of illness, my mother still smoked; even though I’d sunken myself in sleeping pills and meth and would soon crave more, I’d always despised cigarette smoke, and cringed knowing it would permeate my clothes. She used the shaved-wood, apple-and-rose potpourri, but its syrupy smell, lifting from glass jars and vintage cookie tins, just depressed me further. The antiques sapped me, too. Each room was filled with them. She’d decorated the house in dull browns—chestnut-colored carpet, umbers and tans for each wallpaper and paint. Drawers, bowls, and random corners were clogged with dried flowers; the husks of tiny nocturnal spiders; old medals (Best Marksman—Women’s Division) and awards (KSIR 10 Years Service). She collected a host of antique dolls and faceless, flop-eared rabbits. Her walls were busy with Victorian pictures in antique frames, distressing, blue-hued prints she’d found at junk shops and estate sales. The lovelorn Lady of Shalott. Ophelia, adrift amid the lilies. But even more wounding than the prints were the photographs. She’d hung pictures of her parents, her brothers and sisters, and John, each face positioned carefully on the walls, in upright frames on cabinets and tables. Supplementing these were the newer faces, the disappeared people she’d begun to display. That first night, whether in the kitchen or bedroom or bath, I continually felt some lost spirit guarding me.
At her insistence, she made her bed on the living-room couch, giving me the oversize mattress and graying sheets of her room. I swallowed three of Gavin’s Ambiens, lay my head on the pillow, and waited. I tried picturing his slipshod apartment; his silver box of black-capped vials and rubber-banded twenties; the glistening, scattered grit of his unceasing drugs. I thought about my own empty apartment, and my empty cubicle at Pen & Ink, desk strewn with papers, notes toward assignments I’d never finish.
Inventing these things to bring you home, Dolores had said. These tactics didn’t seem typical of my mother. I knew that ailing people, when they sensed the end was near, often abandoned their obsessions. Instead, my mother was reviving hers. Something in her eyes, in the tone of her voice, evoked her drunken fervor, all those years ago, as she’d hunched at the kitchen table with her scissors and bottle. Had the sickness, as Dolores suggested, now affected my mother’s head? She just wants her kids back here with her.
Soon the pills began their soft heave and drag. I reached for the bedside lamp, but before I could pull its chain, I heard her tentative knock. She entered slowly, her head wrapped in a new, sky-colored scarf. She was gnawing on a splintered toothpick. Even before she sat on the bed, I knew what she was hefting in her hands.
“Your old scrapbook,” I said.
We opened it together. For so many years she’d been keeping it safe. The cellophane tape had yellowed, and certain clippings had crumbled or torn, but there they were, all her children, women, and men, now spilling across the blanket. She pinched some from their pages: “Do you remember her? Or her? And what about this one?”
Yes, surprisingly, I remembered: some more effortlessly, more bitterly, than others. Jack Smith Jr. and Rachel Mickelson. Brenda Lee Kilbey, Monica Donnerstein. Photographs from various Kansas newspapers, from old True Detective magazines. Burke Wandruff. Lisa Henderson. I knew that only the rare among them had ever returned alive.
She browsed the pages until she found a picture of Evan. She held it toward the lamp; in my drowsiness I had to squint. “Strange how much he looks like Henry,” I said.
“Henry, yes. But you know who he really looks like? Who they both look like?” She paused for effect. “You.”
“That’s not true.”
“Really. He really does. Look at the eyes, the brow line. And the hair.”
She wanted me to examine closer. But as she removed the picture from the light, her gaze lingered on the bedside table. She was staring at my travel bag, black vinyl with a picture of a grinning cartoon mouse. I remembered the last time I’d been home, when she’d caught me hiding the bag below the folds of clothes in my suitcase. Although she obviously knew what was inside, I tried sidetracking with a story about how Pen & Ink had received the bags as gifts from a children’s book company. “Surely you know you can’t keep secrets from your mother,” she’d said. “I’ve seen you with that speedy stuff. I’ve seen your little glass pipe.”
Presently I felt her stalking the subject again. She closed the scrapbook and caressed the underside of my arm. I didn’t want to fight. I hated fighting with her; it always seemed as though my resistance, all my volume and huff, could crush her fragile health.
It seemed she wasn’t certain where to start. When she finally spoke, she began at Dolores. “She was drunk tonight, right?”
“Seemed that way.”
“You don’t like her much, do you?”
“I guess I don’t know her enough,” I said. I’d always figured that Dolores resented my problems with drugs and the fact I rarely came home. Doubtless, she didn’t want to retrieve me at the station; she would have preferred her evening at home with Ernest, with further glasses of bourbon. Yet I knew Dolores thrived on doing favors for my mother. For years she’d stayed supportive, especially since John’s death.
Once again my mother looked at the travel bag. She removed the toothpick from her mouth and took a slow, steady breath. “You’re still struggling with it.”
“Can’t get
anything past you.”
“It isn’t hard to tell. What’s it called again?”
“Crystal. Or meth. Crystal meth.”
“That makes it sound pretty.”
“It’s not pretty.”
She moved closer on the bed. I continued, my words diminished with fatigue. “It’s made me paranoid and mean, and it’s made me lose my friends.” The pills were slurring my words. The leaden muscles and bones, the blankets pulling me partway into a dream. “At work the other day I was working on some kids’ textbook, and my nose started bleeding. Little kids’ books, all across the country, filled with stories written by some stupid drug addict.”
“Oh, hon,” she said. She placed her hand on my head, her fingers in my hair. I remembered certain childhood nights when she had scuffled into my room and run her hand along my younger forehead, my finer and redder hair.
“It’s done everything except make me hallucinate. I don’t think I’ve started doing that yet. So I haven’t quite lost my mind; not yet.”
She stood and smiled, pausing for the right moment. “See? Then maybe things aren’t all that bad.”
I tried to return the smile. The lamplight seemed to wobble and fade; it haloed my mother and moved with her, moving as she cocked her head and smiled, crooked and silly, the style she always used, back then, before bedtime. “Sleep now,” she said. “Clear your head of all the bad stuff. We’ll talk more tomorrow.”
Tomorrow. I wanted to say that all I really needed was a solid rest, but I could no longer speak. My mother understood; she pulled the lamp’s chain and stepped back toward the door. She was still speaking to me, but in the darkness her voice fell to a murmur, the consonants blurring with vowels. I thought I heard her singing softly; I thought I heard a whisper and a giggle. Perhaps she was explaining more about tomorrow. Perhaps she was repeating her good-nights and pleasant-dreams. But something told me she was remembering now, those memories I’d been hoping she’d unveil, teasing me because she knew I was slipping away, teasing with the details of her disappearance.
The oncoming dream tugged harder and now the angles of the bed seemed awkward, wrong. With a shift, I recognized what was cramping me: she had left the scrapbook on the bed. I tried to move, but the pills had paralyzed my muscles, and I could only bump the book, carelessly kneeing its cover, scattering the random photographs and clippings.
My mother left the room. I fell asleep among the disappeared: the chipped newsprint paper, the tape and browning resin, all their lost and lovely faces.
THREE
HAD I BEEN alone, I could have walked to the Haven Café in minutes. But as her usher, I opted for the pickup, helping her off the porch, clasping hands like a stirrup to hoist her into the passenger seat. She wore my New York City sweatshirt, dirty gray and two sizes too large. She wanted to drive, but I objected. On the seat between us were her notepads, her cassette recorder held together with silver electrician’s tape, and the pens she’d collected from Dr. Kaufman’s, each advertising a different medication.
“He’ll be impressed at how prepared we are,” she said.
I wasn’t so certain. With the new morning, I’d begun to feel a simmering distress over my mother’s intentions: maybe she would seem overwrought or unruly; maybe Lacey Wyler’s grandfather would expose her sham. “I hope you don’t mind,” I said, “but I’m going to let you do all the talking.”
Main Street was red cobblestone flanked by dingy storefronts, all dust and broken bricks and milky windows. There was a library, a bank, and a filling station with a short-order grill featuring cheeseburgers for two and a quarter. “Their food’s horrendous,” she said. “Once John brought some home for us, and…just horrendous.” She pointed out the overused town name, the stores and their unsurprising signs: Gas Haven, the maroon-roofed Pizza Haven. In my weariness, I wanted something stately or quaint, like chimneys heaving smoke, the green-white copper of monuments. Instead there was only the muted street, the sun half-hidden by clouds.
As we parked, I noticed an orange-jacketed woman staring from the nearby sidewalk. “That’s the library lady,” my mother whispered. “Always sticking her nose into everybody’s business. Usually I just tell her lies. She’ll be asking a load of questions after she sees you!”
“Don’t say anything. I don’t want anyone to know who I am. Pretend I’m not even here.”
I shut the engine, took Lacey’s button from my pocket, and pinned it to my shirt. With held breaths, we hesitated before the café. Starting today, she’d told me earlier that morning, we’d be doing important deeds. We’d be making something of ourselves.
Again I linked my hands to help her outside. I felt sleepy and sore, having woken dreamless in her bed. The power of the pills had dissipated after four hours. I’d also gotten a nosebleed, routine after crystal meth, droplets smudging the newspaper clippings. I’d pinched my nostril and canted my head against the pillow, the silence sharpening around me, daybreak bluing the windows to reveal her backyard garden with its doomed rosebushes and militant weeds. When the nosebleed finally stopped and I rose to leave the room, I’d found her posted on the couch, overanxious for our scheduled meeting.
During the night, her scarf had slipped; the patches of hair were damp and flattened on one side. Within the TV’s varicolored test pattern, her face gleamed with slow trickles of sweat. “Are you feeling okay?” I asked. “Think maybe we should cancel?”
“Don’t worry. Mornings make me look this way. Now hurry and get ready, so we can go.”
Now it was nearly noon. The day had brightened her slightly. She took my arm, and we stepped toward the café, her weight straining my shoulder, my legs still cramped from endless hours on the bus. Surely we looked like a pair of crazies, but I didn’t care, I was doing this all for her.
She pushed at the door, jostling its rusted cowbell with a loud, sunken clup. Immediately, we saw Mr. Wyler. He was waiting in a central cushioned booth, a stock-character farmer in his overalls, grinning in his blue button-down shirt and green John Deere cap. He’d already ordered from the grease-stained menu, a coffee mug steaming on the Formica tabletop. As we approached, he stood and held a toughened hand toward us. “You’re Donna, then? And you must be the son. The writer.”
“He writes books for a place in New York,” said my mother. “But now he’s focusing his energy on this.”
I wondered what other lies or exaggerations she’d told; whether she’d fumbled through needlessly brazen explanations about the freelancing and temping, the disillusion and drugs. Times before, I’d heard her speak these things to people she barely knew. Perhaps she thought introducing her son as a New York writer could justify our “research,” could convince these people of our legitimacy.
Mr. Wyler kept offering his hand until I shook it. “I’ve never met a writer,” he said.
Only two neighboring booths were occupied; the customers gave us backward glances but continued eating. Mr. Wyler ordered another coffee, cream but no sugar, and my mother ordered two iced teas. His shirt was finely ironed and smelled slightly of popcorn. He seemed daunted by the notepads and the tape recorder. As he idly clicked the trigger of my mother’s pen (PROCRIT, it read), I noticed the man’s forearms and hands: old farmwork scars, puckered and jagged and pink.
For the opening five minutes, they chatted and smoked, both spicing the air with ardent small talk. Mr. Wyler sounded nervous and gruff; if his voice were a drug, I thought, it would be crystal meth. My mother’s voice, in contrast, was muscular and thriving. It seemed less tired and made me shrink in my seat. She thanked him for sending the buttons, for traveling all the way from Goodland. She asked him about the wife he’d mentioned in his letter. Was she enjoying her retirement? Were they planning any upcoming vacations? I felt her encouraging the man, nodding her head to nudge the pauses in his sentences. I wondered how she planned to ease the conversation toward Lacey.
The waitress arrived with the drinks, and Mr. Wyler ordered a slice of coconut-cream pie
: his jagged teeth; the drawl of his vowels. “Coconut’s my favorite,” he told us.
“Scott likes peach,” said my mother. “Or strawberry rhubarb.” On the table below, she furtively pressed the tape recorder’s button; its tiny looping circles now advanced the tape, advanced the tape.
“Lacey liked cherry pie,” he said. “Plain and simple. But really, candy was what she liked best. All kinds.”
My mother straightened: Lacey, at last. “Can’t say no to candy,” she said. “Please, tell us what happened.”
He reached to his seat and produced a scrapbook fancier than my mother’s. Printed on its black-leather cover were the photo-developer’s name and, in fussy script, the words Precious Memories. My mother found her tortoiseshell glasses, rotated the scrapbook partway, and together they turned its weighted pages.
“Just so you get it right for your book,” he said, “we don’t agree with the police. Like I said on the phone, we don’t think Lacey just left. Hannah and I think somebody took her.”
With each new second I was feeling fidgety, progressively ashamed. From the street I heard tires grumbling along the cobblestone. A group of children running past; a single warbler, repeating its lonesome note. Mr. Wyler answered my mother’s over-rehearsed questions, and they continued to scan the photographs, savoring Lacey’s poses, the chronological flashes and fanfares of her life.
I saw the scrapbook as a way to escape, and excused myself for the bathroom. I locked the door and lingered in the cramped space, wanting meth, cupping my hands under the faucet to slap cold water on my face. Already I had registered the old man’s hopelessness, his palpable dolor. But oddly, troublingly, it seemed my mother had not. This wasn’t like her, and it frightened me. Perhaps I should stop this before it really begins. Let her speak about Henry and all the others, but stop this business of interviews, of the book. I leaned against the bathroom wall, examining each month’s picture on the wall calendar. A covered bridge in winter. An abandoned railroad car; an oriole weaving its nest.