We Disappear

  When I returned, I noticed instantly that something had changed. My mother was leaning away from the table, both hands dropped to her lap. “Like I said, she sure loved candy,” the man was saying, but now she seemed abstracted, even angry. She wasn’t replying or watching his face.

  As I took my seat, Mr. Wyler continued: “There was this place back in Marysville, where she used to live. She only moved to Goodland with us when she was sixteen. This place used to make those big jawbreakers and those big chunks of taffy. You could get all kinds.”

  “Sixteen, then,” said my mother.

  “Peppermint taffy, sour lemon taffy, hot-fire flavor. Lacey sure loved that hot-fire flavor.”

  I thought of the girl pulling it, leaning her head, letting it curl into her mouth. But something in the man’s words misconstrued this picture. Sixteen. In the button on my shirt—the same pinned, I saw, to the side of his John Deere cap—Lacey Wyler seemed much younger. Twelve, perhaps eleven, perhaps ten.

  My mother had noted the discrepancy, too. Suddenly I realized that this was the reason for her swift spite. She turned the scrapbook completely around to face me—the cover bumped the tape recorder, but she didn’t notice—and tapped a fingernail against a photo of Lacey. “Did you hear this, Scott? He said ‘sixteen.’”

  “Almost eighteen when we saw her last. You should use the button picture, though. In case you’re using pictures for your book.”

  My mother wasn’t listening. “Just look at these,” she said. Throughout the final series in the album, in snapshot after snapshot, the girl—or rather, the woman—looked nothing like the button. The Lacey of these photos dressed exclusively in black. Black stockings and boots; black sweater and pleated skirt. In some, she wore elbow-length black gloves with open fingers. Her hair had been cut, straightened, and dyed the same dark as her clothes. Her bangs were tipped purple, fringing her heavily mascaraed eyes. In nearly every picture, Lacey pouted at the camera, lipstick so thickly red it seemed she’d kissed ketchup. She reminded me of friends I’d had in high school or college, girls who’d worn patchouli oil and read science fiction and Sylvia Plath, the girls I’d dragged along to my first gay bars. Lacey was like those girls, but she bore no resemblance to the man at our table.

  “We didn’t care much for those,” said Mr. Wyler, exhaling a breath of coffee and nicotine. “The way she looked, the things she said—that just wasn’t her.”

  “Rebellious, then,” my mother said. She found the pen and drew a star on her notepad, writing REBEL beside it, as though this held some special meaning.

  “She was very young.”

  “But not as young as I’d imagined her. Not as young as the picture on the pin, or as young as you made me think when we talked on the phone.”

  He paused, blinking curiously at her. “After she moved with us,” he said, “there was bad influence from kids at her new school. We think it’s because of them that something happened to her.”

  He began a story about the terrible school, but my mother’s absorption had faded. I couldn’t look at either of them. Instead I advanced through Lacey’s photographs, lingering on an extreme close-up—a different shade of lipstick, a phony mole speckling her cheek. In another, she posed beside someone else, their arms entwined. This time, however, the picture had been ripped in half. Lacey’s companion was much taller and heavier, very likely a male. Only his arm and shoulder were visible. Like her, he was dressed in black. I couldn’t see his face but noticed a change in Lacey’s, something new, a glimmer like love.

  “We believe she’s out there somewhere,” he was saying. “Probably being held against her will.”

  My mother put her hand on the sweating glass of iced tea, then dropped it again. The interview was a bust. She knew that Lacey had not disappeared at all, not in the way she’d wanted. Most likely Lacey was a quiet girl, a girl who loved music and autumn nights and long, maudlin poems, yet despised her new life, her small town. A girl who slumped in the back row during every spiritless, wounding class hour. A girl who finally escaped her grandparents—I could picture her speeding away in a car, her hand on his knee, this boy no longer torn from the photograph but here now, hers—for some city where her black would glitter instead of gloom. From the photos—likely taken by the boyfriend, then stashed secret-secret in her room—I felt I knew more about Lacey than her grandparents did.

  From the kitchen came an earthy, peppery smell, like potato pancakes. The smell made me faintly nauseous, and I wanted to leave and head home. With a finger I traced the gold flecks on the Formica tabletop, still unable to look at Mr. Wyler. Yet he rambled on, huddling closer to the machine as though he wanted each word sunk, dead-target, into the pages of our book. “The last time we saw her she was chewing gum,” he said. “Somebody must have given it to her. I don’t recall giving her that gum, and neither does Hannah.”

  “What a sturdy memory you have,” said my mother. Now she sounded scornful, almost mocking. “But she was eighteen when you saw her last.”

  “I don’t think it was bubble gum, because it smelled like cinnamon, and they don’t make cinnamon bubble gum, do they?”

  “I’ve never heard of it if they do.” Beneath the table, her foot found mine: cue that she, too, wanted to leave. The cassette tape, at some point, had finished its track; but neither she nor I had bothered replacing it.

  “Funny how your mind works,” he said, “when someone you love goes missing. Like that gum. Some nights I lie awake and think, what if someone done something awful to her, would they want that gum in her mouth? What if they put their dirty fingers in her mouth and took out that cinnamon gum before they did what they did. Maybe there was some sort of fingerprint left on that wad of our Lacey’s gum somewhere. Why couldn’t the police find that?

  “Imagine what it’s like to lie awake hours, and all you think about is prints on that piece of gum. Hours! That’s the sort of hell you think about when you’re put into this situation.”

  Mr. Wyler’s final words were pierced by the ringing cowbell above the door. The town librarian entered, removed her jacket, and selected a booth. She sat and opened a hardbound book, her page marked with an orange fallen leaf. But she was clearly more interested in us. I could see why my mother disliked her: her scowl, her intrusive dark eyes, and her heavily hunched back, as though she’d spent her days crouched at tiny keyholes.

  “It must be getting late,” my mother said, and I could sense her using the librarian’s interruption as our way out. She patted Mr. Wyler’s hand and quickly improvised an excuse. We had to field a phone call between two thirty and three, she said; the call would mean more essential information for our book.

  He seemed puzzled at our haste. “That book’ll be such a help. Let us know if there’s anything else we can do.”

  “Well, Scott and I are grateful for this. We should thank you for coming all this way to meet with us.”

  As we stood, once again Mr. Wyler extended his scarred hand. “God bless,” he said.

  We gathered the cassette recorder and notepads and pens, and I helped my mother from the booth. But before we could turn to walk toward the door, she paused. She put her materials back on the table, then took a single breath. “I’m not sure this disappearance will be right for us,” she told him. “We were under the impression Lacey was a younger girl. We thought she was kidnapped from her home.”

  His expression changed: a sullen, set-adrift sort of look. “No. I’m sorry, but no.”

  They were speaking too loudly. The librarian was watching us, watching me, and now I noticed the rubbery droop to her face, aftereffects of a stroke. With a slight pull I tried to persuade my mother toward the door, but she only slid back slightly, her shoes scraping the floor.

  The rest of her words rushed forth in a high, excited surge, emphatic so the whole room could hear. “When I was a little girl, something happened to me,” she said. “I was kidnapped. Kidnapped and held in a basement with a boy, another kidnapped boy. A man and a
woman did it. It was a very old man and an old woman, and they held us there.”

  Mr. Wyler put his hand to his mouth: his clenched jaw; his furrowed, questioning brow. “That’s terrible,” he said. “No. You didn’t tell me this before. How terrible.”

  “But maybe it wasn’t. I remember they paid so much attention to us! They gave us candy and told us stories and sang beautiful songs to us, sweet songs we’d remember our entire lives.”

  Stunned, he looked away, slipping backward into the booth. And I was equally dazed. “It’s time to go,” I said. I grasped my mother’s wrist as though to tug her free: not from Mr. Wyler but from this impulsive, implausible story she’d left lingering in the air.

  The morning’s weather had shifted: the breeze now sharper, the clouds low and heavy, as though clogged with pearls. The overhead leaves rippled alternate brown and gold, and then the wind heaved stronger and colder, enough force, it seemed, to crumb the cement. God bless; my face burned with shame. Along the telephone lines, the town’s crows trained their diseased eyes on us. Down the street, early Halloween candles glowed from the store windows: alone or in rows, fluttering within the crudely carved jack-o’-lantern eyes and wreck-toothed grins.

  How badly I wanted to get high again. I kept my shameful head to the ground and opened the passenger’s side door. When I got in beside her, she glanced at me as though our last hour had been harmless. “Cinnamon bubble gum,” she said. “Precious Memories.”

  I put the key in the ignition but didn’t start the truck. Waiting, I watched her; as the seconds passed, she only stared, peacefully amused, at the row of dashboard photographs. Finally I raised my voice. “When I said you should do all the talking, I certainly didn’t mean that. Why would you say those things? Is this what you’ve remembered? What you were supposedly saving for me?”

  “Oh, shhh. If you want, we can talk more when we get home.”

  “Of course we’re going to talk more. You’re going to tell me everything. You said you remembered what happened back then, and I want to know now before you go telling anyone else. Nothing like that will happen again until I know everything.”

  She slipped a hand into her sweatshirt, reaching into its cottony underbelly. “But take a look at this,” she said. “I’m so bad! I’m nothing but a thief!”

  She dropped something on the seat, beside the tape recorder, notepads, and pens. I raised it and saw that my mother had stolen a picture of Lacey. It was one of the little-girl images: the smocked rust-red dress, the buckled shoes, the shyly joyous curve to her mouth.

  My mother’s grin and gleaming eyes made me uneasy. It felt like the panic that had gripped both Alice and me, years ago, as we’d sat listening to her portentous warnings, to the tale of her own disappearance. I thought, too, of Dolores’s worries from the previous night. I still wanted my mother to confess her memories, but this moment didn’t seem right, not here in the truck. “You’re horrible,” I finally said.

  “I know.”

  I started the pickup and shifted into reverse. Before I backed from the parking space, I braved one final look through the café’s gauzy curtains. I could see the waitress in her paper tiara and yolk-yellow apron, shuffling from the librarian’s table toward Mr. Wyler’s. I saw her drop something beside his plate. And then I realized our mistake.

  “We forgot to pay the check,” I said.

  I kept the truck idling and dashed back toward the café door, silently rehearsing my apology. A few bills remained in my wallet; I decided I would unfold them on the table and leave. Through the window, Mr. Wyler still sat at the padded booth, hunched over his coffee and untouched coconut cream, his scrapbook of pictures.

  And then I stopped. Even through the tarnished glass, through the scrim of curtain, I saw every detail: the man now stranded and wearied, grandfather to the lost girl, old man so lost himself, at this table in this strange town. He was alone, and he was weeping. Our interview had ended; we had left him with the check, but still no Lacey. I couldn’t yet see his tears, but I saw the twitch to his lower lip, the shuddering shoulders, the lewd thread of drool on his chin.

  A noble man would have stepped inside to ask him more, would have paid the pale green check and somehow soothed his spokes of pain. But I was weak, not noble, and the weakness restricted me. I stood immobile at the door, unable to reenter the café, that space gone sour with his grief. I could feel my heart straining toward it, but my bones were too faint to follow.

  At home she claimed she was tired again. This wasn’t merely an excuse to avoid our discussion; I heard the fatigue in her breaths, and saw her body’s awkward angle as she lazed beside the TV, her eyes half-closed, little movements making her wince. She asked for her robe and a “great big glass of iced tea.” She unfolded the gold-and-green afghan, a gift from Dolores during a particularly long hospital stay, and spread it over her legs.

  I stood above her, promising I’d let her rest if only she’d answer some questions. With a hand she shielded her face as though from sunshine. The words through her fingers were muffled: “Can’t this wait until later?”

  “Please stop playing games with me. I did not come all the way home, all the way on a smelly bus so cramped I could hardly move, with all those hideous people, just to have you play silly memory games with me.”

  “I’m not playing games.”

  “Just tell me one thing. Why would it matter that Lacey was so much younger? Why?”

  My mother raised the remote and muted the afternoon news. “When Lacey was a little girl,” she said, “she looked just the way I’d looked. But not when she grew up. She didn’t resemble me at all.”

  I shook the snapshot in her face. “So that’s why you stole this earlier Lacey, instead of one from now. Because she looked like you.”

  “Be careful not to tear that; it’s going up on the kitchen wall.”

  “Why did you say those things?” I asked. “This stuff about your disappearance—we have to talk about this. Did you say those things to hurt him? Because if you did—and it’s pretty awful if you did—well, I think it worked.”

  “I didn’t say those things to hurt him.”

  “And this is really what you’ve remembered.”

  Again she guarded her eyes with her hand. After a sigh and a pause, she answered an exasperated “Yes,” her attempt to decisively seal the conversation.

  “I won’t let you fall asleep,” I said. “I’m going to stand here until I know more.”

  “Well, you’ll be standing there a long time, then. Because I’m not quite ready to tell you the rest.” She seemed momentarily agitated, but then her expression eased, as though she’d untangled an impossible knot. “You’ll see what I mean,” she told me. “The time has to be right…the surprise. But soon. The surprise will happen soon.” Then she turned away, facing the sofa cushions, drawing the afghan over her chest.

  Defeated, I went to her bedroom and sat on the bed. My face felt hot, as though it retained the scald of shame from our interview. I breathed the dried-apple air and dead flowers, shadowed by four walls of pictures in their cracked, flaked-paint frames. None of it ever really happened, I told myself. She’s making it up as she goes along. Certainly Alice would agree with me; I wondered whether I should call to tell her I’d returned. Again I remembered Dolores’s voice, almost taunting: inventing these things to bring you home.

  From the window I could see, in a rare stripe of sunlight, her crowded backyard garden. There were so many things she’d taken from ramshackle houses, from roadside sunflower prairies, all the wrought-iron pieces, the chipped crockery and antique flowerpots. She’d dug holes among the dead roots; she’d tried growing zinnias inside a rusted spittoon. A tassel fern clung desperately to its spike, but instead of spearing the seed packet to the wood, she’d speared an old snapshot of John. I moved closer to the window. The picture of John should have been sad, but it was oddly comical. To fight the laugh, I remembered the chance abruptness of his death: the sleepless isolations
of his trucking-company job; his four a.m. stroke on Interstate 70; the way she’d stayed strong at his funeral (But I was supposed to go first, she’d said. Me, not him).

  I huddled at the window, the black travel bag only an arm’s length away. I swore I could resist the urge; I could suffer the day without meth. My gaze wandered over the graveled driveway and garage, the broken earth and browning grass, and then, at the small porch that surrounded the back door, I paused.

  The porch was littered with random red scraps, perhaps breeze-blown garbage from a neighboring house. I stared but couldn’t figure it out. I left the room, moving quietly past the couch so she wouldn’t wake, and when I opened the back door, I saw it wasn’t trash at all. Lined neatly across the steps, along the floorboards and balusters and weathered handrails, were rows and rows of candy bars. Thirty, maybe forty or more: a hard-to-find brand called Cherry Mash, square-shaped chocolates in bright red-and-white wrappers. Cherry Mash: my mother’s favorite.

  Earlier, the porch had been empty; before we’d left that morning, I’d gone to lock the back door (no need for that, my mother had said: nothing bad ever happens here), and I’d seen nothing. Now, as I stepped out, I felt no stranger lurking in the garden; no glimmery eyes spying from across the adjoining fences or yards. I stood surrounded by the candy, my shoulders tense with a faint wave of fear. Above, the elms dropped their leaves; the darkening clouds tumbled dismally along. I bent to gather the chocolate bars, all that could fit in my pockets, in my outstretched shirtfront, and I went back inside.

  In one of my mother’s favorite stories, told intermittently to Alice and me during our childhood, she and her younger brother, Dan, were notorious adolescent thieves. They loved stealing candy, stalking the town drugstores, candy shops, and, best of all, the sparkling soda-fountain counter at Moynihan’s Department Store. Cinnamon disks and jelly beans were simple; what they really wanted, the true treasure, was the chocolate bar called Cherry Mash.