Whereas kids Cait’s age make brutal actual choices. GIRLS CAN DO ANYTHING! her soccer team’s bumper sticker announced. Youngsters’ve been spared their mothers’ thickening ankles and slowing guilt. Today’s girls scrap harder midcourt than boys often dare. Gals stand seven feet tall, fearless. Black and white Athenas passing the ball, nobody “hogging” as many of your males will. I came to half-worship her almost-championship 4A team. Once I walked into their locker room to take Cait her chamomile thermos and, naked, they all looked so muscular and long, I thought I’d blundered into the boys’. I felt secretly faint. A hot flash? (Great decade to turn lesbian! Bit late for gals my age to retool, alas. Me? I am a one-man woman . . . without one!)
But Caitkins wasn’t just about being physically powerful; she was already promiscuous . . . with her heart. Indiscriminate. “Love!” the first word. Usually spells trouble. With some folks, Empathy itself becomes the disease.
It opened the world to her too suddenly.
• • •
AFTER AN UPSETTINGLY good school production of Sweeney Todd, I overheard the mom of one hefty girl-ceramicist ask Caitlin what her weight-loss plan was. I stepped over, answered for her, “Willful death by hunger after giving her food and mine to lepers.”
“Mom is a comedian,” Cait grinned both her dimples at the woman. “Only nobody has ever noticed.”
I laughed. Some mothers might’ve thought, Why, you little tramp, undercutting me publicly! Instead I admired my daughter’s thinking that up. I understood she’d said it just to cheer me. She knew I would find only a body-slam against myself truly comical.
Women’s work is never done.
• • •
PEOPLE SAY I have been short with her. If only she were traveling with some trusted girlfriend whose cell service I’d provide. Some gal who might monitor Cait while sneaking me concerned sisterly bulletins, some dear little snitch.
If I were still married to Cait’s dad, he might help offset my usual tensions. Eddie could once joke me past this small nightly fear or that. He’d begun our married life as one darling heat-seeking missile. Fast Eddie was I-won’t-take-no-for-an-answer wearing white socks and jockeys. Cait inherited that forward-leaning drive from my pretty Boy Scout. But Ed, in lieu of helping me with her, moved to sleek Republican La Jolla. He then signed every release that’d ship her over there beyond my aid and observation. By phone, Ed insisted I relax: Cait’s innocence protected her.
I shot back, “Tell that to the police. No, better, Ed, tell it to your Unitarian-Universalist God. You remind Him of her return flight’s date, umkay? I’ll hold you both accountable but will probably call you first.”
Till recently, her sweet belief in others did seem to shield her. But you scan your daily papers; you read about the latest folks whose innocence just failed them yesterday utterly and all at once.
MY SKINNY-DIPPER admitted hitchhiking, too. Across Africa. On weekends. In shorts. Probably halters. She did phone her California father; he’d later hint at little adventures never mentioned to the Warden, as she apparently calls me. What good did he think it’d do?—letting me know this? I’ll leave that to you. Ed heard something about Cait’s tagging along with the U.S. ambassador’s son into a mine where six underpaid boy-workers had been trapped. Essay subjects found her like birds homing in on Saint Francis. She was already a shoo-in for Radcliffe. They’d written her.
• • •
OUR HOME PHONE —usually a-jangle with the Caitlin Waif-Advice Line—male friends in crisis over her female friends—fell silent as the tomb.
Not even she called us now. See, I had criticized her skinny-dipping with every boy from Tarzan Country Day. I said that. She screamed I was a racist hag-witch. I told her how, in my time, Tarzan had been white: Anglo parentage, if reared by chimps. I reminded her of a concept often lost on certain publicity-minded do-gooders, little something we call Humor.
True, Cait’s swimming naked made me shrill by phone, and on her eighteenth birthday. I knew I shouldn’t have. I dearly missed her. I even longed for her Edward-like lists like the last I’d found wadded in a jean pocket on laundry day: “Turn away (her) anger. Read further Blake. Think ways to end world hunger. At least get Tori and Erick back together. (Note to self. ‘No one has ever loved anyone the way everyone wants to be loved’! —So get okay with that, you!)”
• • •
IN OUR LAST upsetting call, I’d explained receiving certain strong premonitions. She interrupted, “Little reality check here, Mom? I can be in AP Calculus three blocks from home, with my desk seat belt buckled (if school desks even had those), and you’d still be pacing the kitchen tying up my cell during my one lunch break with your getting more bad signs. A miracle any of your loved ones has outlived your pessimism by a week. You, especially.”
My new irregular French verb, studied at soccer games: Moudre: To grind, pulverize. I longed for her. It was becoming a huge nostalgia of the kind one feels for a place, for one summer at the best waterside resort ever. And yet I seemed only able to express that via warning, scolding her. Caitlin had coolly stated how skinny-dipping with one boy might be considered “invitational,” whereas forty . . .
I tried not to let her hear my choking. Nine days after her birthday I’d received not one more call. No way to reach her, either. The school was so rural, drums must still be their idea of Internet. Tribe2tribe.com.
As usual, I blamed myself for her letting seven more days of stillness pass. Weeks! Torture. It was the silent treatment I’d perfected on her father, now turned full-blast against me.
Without her, for the first time since her conception, I washed our kitchen walls. I’d go to bed red-handed, bone-tired and glad to be. As if to spite me, earlier than most, menopause set seriously to work: no Halloween details, please. I even took up knitting a sweater for Cait—maroon, one abandoned three years back—only to ditch the thing again. Irritating how metal needles clicked in my own lap like some slow and spastic clock.
• • •
USUALLY FOR INTERVALS of up to three or five months, for sanity’s sake, I’ve been strong enough to stave off one particular memory. But, during her endless silence from the veldt, it seeped back now, esp. come three a.m.
I’M PUSHING THE Baby Cait, newly five, in a grocery cart. After asking her to choose her favorite cereal from among the ninety displayed, I pop one aisle over (for paper towels, smoked oysters, I remember). I come back that fast just as one short old man goes leading my blond bonbon girl away by the hand. He’s carrying an unopened package of lollipops. Hasn’t even paid for the things yet. And she? just smiling up at him.
Don’t they say molesters try resembling most anybody else so they’ll blend in? Well, but this one was almost a midget and looked like that Three Stooges stooge with the greasy bangs, Moe? Moe, I think. Not Larry. The Shriners’ Carnival was opening that same day in Falls. So here came the dreaded carny molester with a very good eye and the luck to match. When I shove him into a display of bottled grapefruit juice, much glass breaks with all the racket I’d hoped. Moe runs like holy hell just as the manager appears. “Thank God you’re here,” I yell. Moe has fled. Cait looks terrified of me, not Moe.
Manager says that, even if I actually did just thwart whatever alien abduction I imagined, I’d made far too much noise. I had left my fellow shoppers wading. Mr. Manager claims he’ll have “the juice surcharge” ready whenever I get to the register, so take my time. But I am on my knees in a zone kicked clear of broken glass; I’m pressing Caitlin’s springy shoulders in my hands and begging her why.
“Why? After all Momma Jean’s lectures about following weird little men, Caitkin. Why’d you just go off with that old clown? Literally.
—Why?”
“’Cause he looked so sad, Mommy. And Bongo said he needed me in more ways than you do.”
“‘Bongo’? Fast worker!”
As usual, on both counts, Cait was technically right. A lesser kid would’ve lied, claimed the old
guy’d forced her. But even months afterward, I would hear my butterscotch-baby sigh. She might be playing with Cookie when the point in her chin would start its killing little tremble as she asked, “Maybe he’s some happier, Mom? Maybe Bong’s found somebody else to play with?”
One cannot map out for a kid of five in terms too surgical what vile creeps like Bongo want her for. (That’d mean your doing violence to your girl-child preemptively; defeats the purpose, right?) I’d told and told my bonnie-blue darling, “Don’t go with strangers.”
But for her, you see, there are none.
IV
WITH OUR PHONE USELESS, I LIVED EVEN MORE ALONE. I grew even more overtalkative around my adorable identicals, Patrick and Nicholas.
Teachers claim they’re impossible to tell apart. But their talents differ bunches. Nicholas can draw like a young Raphael, though his chosen subject is as yet X-treme dirt bikes. He has an edgy metallic scent, whereas Patrick smells like sun-cured straw all over. Sadly, Nick got his dad’s temper. But both boys also inherited Edward’s big hazel eyes and ash-blond hair so thick I can only trim and thin it with a currying comb I buy in Grooming at PetSmart.
It’s odd I speak of them so little here. But they still lived safely disguised as ordinary stay-at-home boys, unlike their Missionary Field Service of a platinum sister. With Cait gone, we three invented fun expeditions, or the boys did. I loudly seconded their every pleasure, all while fretting about her.
I championed their favorite professional teams with a spunk that first excited but soon tired them. (Like father, like sons.) I never missed one of their home-soccer games. Somehow their league put my twins on different teams playing at separate fields miles apart. Sometimes I’d be racing across Falls to cheer their alternate game quarters. IQ 161 used thusly.
• • •
I LATER TOLD myself I had felt it, the sec my firstborn and I lost contact. At Nicholas’s semifinals soccer match, I was seated high in the stands, shouting encouragements.
The day contained a huge amount of weather. Splendid as only a golden bonus in cloudless late summer can be. You sit guessing this’ll be the year’s last sweaterless afternoon. Everything good rears up inside you. Almost makes your stomach ache, resenting this farewell to warmth. And where, on the spiky veldt, had my little girl gone? Chill silence from there.
I still wore summer’s zinc oxide to protect my Cait-fair skin. My sons objected, calling it “Mom’s clown paint.” But I use it only on my nose, forehead and certain new sunspots across the backs of either hand.
I sat surrounded by other parents’ ugly Styrofoam beer coolers, listening to their cell-phone inanities: “I have an itch for green beans tonight, hon, you too?” Pul-lease, as my daughter often said.
But, like the parents nearby, I cheered my son for simply taking the field. Nick’s just standing there in blond profile seemed so much immature perfection. Calling, “Looking good, Nicky,” I hushed. First I pressed my midsection, then realized: a crucial sound had stopped.
Her daughterly dial-tone gone.
The new silence felt different from Caitlin’s not having actively phoned these past ten days. No, this seemed forced, a kind of breaking-off. The parent simply senses things. Don’t ask me how. Mothers know.
Despite Cait’s phone strike, I’d still felt tied to her “current” in both senses. “Up-to-date” and linked by some steadying electric force binding us across oceans, language groups, continental storm systems. We were also joined via her menstrual cycle just warming at its start while mine became a burnt-out case, losing interest in itself.
Atop her brother’s bleacher, I tried deciding: It’s simple. For the first time ever, she is just not thinking of you, Jean. Your girl isn’t hurt, much less dead. No, it’s the reverse, see? Your Cait is so original. With her, everything runs counterintuitive. She’s half again too alive! There’s your prob. She’s so completely with them now. She could probably still broadcast on your frequency. But—about two minutes back—you just got checked off her psychic friends’ list. Unlike Goodwill, you no longer rank among Caitlin’s frequently called. Deal with it. As she often instructs her mom, “Get a life!”
Still, I checked my watch for later reference. I’d felt my tie to Caitlin Mulray stop at 4:51 p.m., my time. Later someday ahead, we would laugh over this. Wouldn’t we?
I’d felt one womb-floor pang. Was this, in fact, the moment of her death? Or just the second Cait herself, bored of me, slashed our cord? The emotional cable hookup still seemed looped to her, joining us round the earth’s curve. She hadn’t even bothered coiling up her severed end. Just left it attached to me via a long-suffering lower opening; she simply hiked on across the veldt. She left the thing drying, raw, in white African dust—stretched across dirt and grass for any hungry old hyena to chance upon, choke down.
Or was I overdoing?
• • •
FINALLY I TOLD myself: You will be free and clear, Jean, only when (if) you can return her surly favor.
Tell yourself you are a woman who once had a child—a healthy somebody who, right on time, achieved her majority then opted out of thinking of you, even once per day.
Nicholas got the ball. He danced one excellent kick toward another boy admittedly more talented. I gave one great deranged Medea shriek. Too loud? It made others up here smile, then wince, then resmile wider, goggling back and forth. A fat woman beside me shifted her cushion one yard away, pulling over her ice chest’s 24 Bud Lights just past my contagion.
Or wait, maybe it was just Cait’s hymen! Mais oui! zut alors. I cackled then: Maybe I just felt that give way. Maybe what just stopped is not the dial tone I’ve known in here since I first conceived the little minx. Maybe it was just my daughter’s virginity getting properly sacrificed to some big African chieftain’s chiseled son?! Yeah, she just got flourished once. That all? I have nothing more to fear than that. She’s alive but sexually active. But why did I not know this? See how I hurt myself?
“Come right here, Kiernan! Go directly to the car and lock it, son. NOW!”
Dear God, had I said all that aloud? How funny is that!
The upper bleachers were all mine now. This struck me as hilarious. What harm to laugh now, to chortle like some zinc-caked Bongo clown-witch, if she’s a freak with one still-living daughter?
Jean’s local fan base, it’d just dwindled further.
• • •
NO MAN HAS been in the picture since my Edward took up with his night-school ethics instructor. Now, during Cait’s absence, our phone might’ve been unlisted. The twins lived so near pals’ homes, they’d rather skateboard three blocks than bother texting, that young.
Even telemarketer fund-raisers shunned us, seeming to guess our one somebody was off-line. Gents have not exactly been besieging ole Jean here with cocktail party invitations and sexual demands, put it that way. Not even a “Bongo” type.
Here, you see, I am setting up the part where the phone actually does ring at three a.m. By then Caitlin had been in Africa just under two months, forty nine days. —This particular night, the twins are sound asleep, I’m feeling feverish even as I dream how my daughter is just out spreading good cheer across downtown Falls.
I’m dreaming that Cait is due back any minute, that all will be well. The phone starts so loud.
V
EVERY PARENT KNOWS HOW MUCH IT HAS ALREADY COST us: this sound incoming. To stop the phone’s ringing we’d hack off any part of our body and feed it between the brass bell and its pig-iron hammer.
You pray this is a wrong number. But at first brrr-ring, the very oil in your either ear knows better. One hand cupped defensive between my legs, I sit bolt upright in bed. I answer, already panting.
• • •
STATIC GIVES THREE clicks. Sensing urgent foreignness, I hold on anyway. At last, through pulsing scratches like those of some old 78, a formal preacher’s sort of voice asks, “Is this the mother? Of a girl named . . .” (And I hear what sounds like her pink backpa
ck dumped onto a metal table, its chained name tag pulled jangling closer.) “This . . . the Caitlin Mul-ray mother?”
“This she. What? Sir, whathappenedtomychild? Please say it fast.”
“Is somebody, madam, is somebody there with you?”
I’m thinking it odd, all this courtesy from what sounds like south of Saturn. “Yes, my sons. Many friends. Put her on. Is Cait’s passport lost? Her money getting low, that it? I’m good for more. —Oh Christ do please tell me it very quickly, sir.”
“The boy got ashore all right, madam,” this man’s diction is very missionary school. But phone-reception’s rotten. First, his bass goes blurred as if behind giant choirs of crickets, then it siphons back to being coolly crisp again. “The boy we yell for him and kept him headed our guard post’s way. But current, madam, very strong that part our river this time year. She got more pulled, then under, and afterwards no more, harder to see, just the head, then we—we pull the boy in. He fine, fine swimmer. They found her more toward Tongaville on Tuesday, is today? yes, Tuesday. The braids are like a tiny girl’s. Sorry to be the one telling. Lovely child. Have her here. It must be taken care of soon the body. Even nights here, over one hundred degrees, your way measuring. Considerable the spoilage. Send her to people this address? you are being at the one-ten Milford Cul-de-Sac? Falls? You are wanting it go there?”
With the terror of an animal bleeding from its head, I am instantly awake and very clear. As he talks, I find a pen, the back of Patrick’s soccer schedule, some dimestore bifocals with one lens. Finally he tells me he can either await my money-order but to use card’s faster. Speed being best given the heat. Into darkness I sit quoting our American Express number aloud. I chant it aloud as I once knew by heart only the Pledge of Allegiance and 1928’s Book of Common Prayer.