Hindsight is a remarkable thing. When I look back on that night I tell myself I knew she was going, but I don't know that I knew anything, really. I didn't see the lights of the blue Dodge as she pulled it out of the little shed my father had built for it when I was still a baby. I didn't see them turn onto the road or which way they went. The only thing I knew for sure was that when I got up the next morning, my mother was gone.
5
I WANTED TO LOOK for her, but where do you look for someone in the world? It's such a huge place, and I thought of all of it. Interstates and highways, four lanes down to two. Rural routes and back roads and streets and alleys. There were so many places to drive. So many places to get out of the car and go inside. Every city and town, every field. Every house in each of those cities and all the rooms in those houses. My mother could be in any one of them. She was lost, like a ring you swore you'd never take off but did, put it in your pocket, and the next thing you knew it was gone. The places to begin looking are as many as the breaths you took in a day. More than that. She could be anywhere, and by the time I got there, she could be someplace else again.
I called the police. They asked me, were there any signs of a struggle?
No.
Any indications of foul play?
No.
Had she been depressed lately, moody? Was there any reason to think she might be leaving?
She was my mother. There were always signs she might leave.
Was there a note?
Yes. Two actually. The first was more of a list.
July 3d. Breakfast: Oatmeal, toast, strawberries (use the ones we have, they're getting soft). Lunch: Chicken salad with al monds and white grapes (in blue Tupperware, bottom shelf), carrot and celery sticks, black olives, sponge cake. Dinner: Catfish (broil it), red new potatoes with parsley, steamed spinach, cornbread, tapioca pudding.
July 4th. Breakfast: Banana walnut waffles. Be sure to put out cold cereal too.
It goes on, a full two weeks, complete with assignments of who should do the cooking. It's pretty long. You don't need to read all of it. There was a lot on the Fourth of July. She wanted there to be fried chicken, potato salad, baked beans, apple pie. The stuff she always made on the Fourth.
The other note was to us, everyone together, her husband and daughter, Sister Evangeline, all of Saint Elizabeth's. All on one note.
Everyone,
I am sorry that I am leaving so suddenly, without saying good-bye. I'm doing a bad job with this and at the same time don't know another way to do it. I won't hope that you'll forgive me, or even that you'll understand. I only hope that you will find it in your hearts to wish me well and love me as I love all of you.
Rose
Not to sound bitter or anything, but part of it isn't true. The part about her loving everyone. She just didn't.
The police took this down, but they told me there was nothing they could do. I could hire a private investigator to find out where she was, but they couldn't make her come back. Unless the car wasn't in her name. We could track her down for that, they said.
But of course, the car was hers.
My father sat on the front porch of our house, his hands folded between his knees, and watched. Maybe it was for her to come back but maybe he was just watching in general.
"Hey," I said.
"Hey," he said.
It had only been a day, not even twenty-four hours, but it seemed pretty goddamn clear that hope was not in order. "What do you think?" I said, and he must have thought I said, what are you thinking? What I meant was something else entirely.
"I was thinking about this girl I used to know when I was growing up and how she was in an accident and died. It was terrible, you know? The worst thing that could have happened." He kept on watching the field, at least the piece of the field that was right in front of him. "The whole town had their hearts broken. Everybody loved this girl. We all thought we'd never get over it. But we did, because she was dead." He stopped, as if he was trying very hard to figure out the point of all this. "Your mother's not dead," he said to me finally.
With all my heart I wished I could have comforted him. I wished I could have put my arm around his shoulder or sat on his knee and told him that we'd get through this. I wished I even could have lied to him and said I thought she'd come back. But I didn't do anything. I just stood there until I couldn't stand there anymore. Then I went down the steps and across the field without saying a word.
It was getting to be dinnertime. Someone would be putting together the meal she'd mapped out. I hadn't eaten all day. When my father came back from breakfast and woke me up to tell me about the notes, I lost my appetite. I wasn't looking forward to going to the old hotel, for all the obvious reasons: I didn't want to be reminded. I didn't want sympathy. I didn't want to hope that she would suddenly be there the way people are in movies. But I'd put enough together to know that Sister Evangeline was the person I needed to talk to. Dad said he hadn't seen her, that she was spending the day in her room. So I went down the hall and knocked on her door.
"Sister?" I said. "It's Cecilia."
It was quiet and I thought she might be sleeping, but then a voice came from the other side of the door, telling me to come in. She was sitting up in bed, fully dressed, her legs straight out in front of her. It was the room I used to take naps in when I was little. My mother would put me there while she cooked because it was so close to the kitchen. "You already know everything," she said.
"I know she's gone."
She looked like a doll, propped up in bed. She looked like someone had left her that way and she had no choice but to stay there. "I begged her not to go. I told her it was the wrong thing to do, but you know your mother. She has a mind of her own about things. You can't tell her anything."
"How could you not have told me?" I said, knowing perfectly well how. It was my mother she loved first. It was my mother whose confidence she would never break.
She looked at me, as sad as my father. "How could I have told? You make a promise to someone, you have to keep it. Nobody could have made her stay, pet. Not once she'd made up her mind."
But I believed I could have. Me, who never talked to my mother outside of a car, who she never came to for anything. I really thought that I could have made the difference. "Why did she go?"
Sister Evangeline sighed. "Your mother's a good woman. No one ever brought me the joy that she did. But everything with your mother was a secret. I used to tell her, if you tell another living being, you won't have that weight to walk around with all the time. It'll be easier. But she thought her life was a house of cards, you know, you take one card out and the whole thing comes down. She didn't tell me. There were things I knew, just from knowing. I knew she didn't like to think of everything she'd put behind her. If you get everything wrapped up just right and you leave it alone for a long time, then one day a little piece of it breaks off and comes back to you, it's seeing the dead. I think your mother thought she'd seen the dead, and it scared her bad."
"What dead?" I said. "What are we talking about here?"
"I don't know the details," she said. "I just have feelings."
I was so angry just then. Angry at Sister and my father, but so blindingly angry at my mother that I couldn't stand it. I wanted to scream. I wanted to scream at her for leaving me but she was gone.
"Come sit here with me," Sister Evangeline said, patting a place on the bed beside her.
"No," I said.
"Cecilia," she said. She had a way of saying my name when she was trying to coax me into something. She said every syllable as a separate word. She almost hummed it. Sa-ceel-lee-a.
"I'm going to go now," I said.
"No," she said. "Come here."
I went and sat down on the edge of the bed, the very edge. She reached over and took my hand and squeezed it, but I wouldn't squeeze back.
"I'm not being a very good nun today," she said. "Other days, I'd tell you how God works, how we don't always understa
nd His ways, but that they are always for the best. I know it's true, but today, it isn't in my heart and it shames me." She held my hand tighter. It hurt a little. "Today I'm a selfish old woman and I'm as sad as I've ever been because I want things that I can't have. This isn't what I want, and so I hate it. There's not a thing in the world I can do to get Rose to help me because she's already gone, but you're here, pet, and I'll tell you, you're going to have to help me. I know you're torn apart, but I can't have you go away from me too, especially not now, because I just couldn't stand that." She took my chin in her other hand and turned my face to hers. "This is what you're going to have to do: you're going to have to be the one to remind me how God works, how He gives us what we need. You're going to have to be that thing for me and I'm going to be it for you. I can't miss Rose and miss you too. It's too much. It's too much for anybody."
I felt like crying, but I was so tired and so hurt that I knew if I started I wouldn't be able to stop. So I put my legs up on the bed and put my head in her lap and Sister Evangeline ran her fingers through my hair while she looked out the window. "What is today?" she said.
"July third."
"Then God has told us something after all," she said. "This is the feast day of Saint Thomas, doubting Thomas. He didn't go with the other apostles to see the empty tomb of the Lord, and when they told him, he didn't believe. He said, 'Except I shall see in His hands the print of the nails, and put my finger in the place of the nails, and put my hand into His side, I will not believe.' So when Christ came back, and they were all alone, He said to Thomas, 'Put in thy finger hither, and see my hands; and bring hither thy hand and put it into my side. And be not faithless, but believing.' And Thomas fell to his feet and cried, 'My Lord and my God.' But you know what Jesus said to him, pet? Jesus said, 'Because thou hast seen me, Thomas, thou hast believed. Blessed are they who have not seen, and have believed.'"
Later that night, after someone had made dinner and someone had cleaned it up and put the plates away, I went to my mother's house. I don't know what I expected, exactly. I thought something would be different, but it was all the same. I hadn't been to my mother's house very often, and I was never there alone, unless she sent me over from the kitchen to pick up a recipe book she had left on her nightstand. Of course, I knew it all from living there when I was young, and she hadn't made any changes since my father and I had moved across the pasture five years ago. I remembered it as being a wonderful place when I was growing up. I loved the smallness, the way the kitchen and living room were just one big room together. The way you could sit on the couch and see everything. It was exactly the opposite of Saint Elizabeth's, which had a hundred places to be lost in. The little house made us close, if only because we were always right next to each other.
But now I saw it as my mother would have, coming home alone night after night. It was just a place she slept. A place she brushed her teeth and read her books and waited for time to pass. My mother didn't have a television or a radio. She kept a phone in, in case Sister Evangeline needed something in the night, but I doubt she ever called anyone. I don't remember her ever calling us, or that I called her. All those years, but she hadn't done anything to make it her own place, no framed pictures or little, stupid things that people kept on tables beside couches. It could have been a cabin that people rented over the summer, it could have been anyplace. It didn't bear her marks, and now that she was gone it was like she'd never been there at all.
I went into the kitchen and opened the cupboards. There was a jar of instant coffee, a jar of sugar, a box of saltines, peanut butter. There wasn't a full set of anything: two glasses, one cup, four spoons. In the drawer next to the stove I found an open box of Marlboros. I never knew my mother smoked. How could I not know that? I took one out of the pack, turned the front burner of the gas range on high, and lit it. I had smoked once or twice before, after school, at a slumber party. I never liked it. But this one I drew in and held until it made me cough, and even then I kept on smoking it.
I took the cigarette into her bedroom and turned on a light. The bed was made, everything was put away. I lifted up the bedspread and looked underneath the bed. There wasn't a slipper, an earring, a Kleenex. There wasn't even dust. It made me wonder if she'd ever been there at all. I sat down on the bed and smoked, flicking the ashes onto the cupped rim around the base of the lamp. I should have gone and gotten a saucer, but it didn't feel that important. I set the cigarette down and went to look in her closet, her drawers, and was so relieved to see her clothes there that I nearly said something aloud. I was the private investigator and this was my proof. She had left behind everything she didn't think she'd need. I took dresses off the hangers and held them to my face. I could smell her in the clothes, even though I'd never really thought about my mother smelling like anything before. She didn't wear perfume or lipstick, but she was there just the same, sweet and floury, a little bit of laundry detergent. I pulled out a dress I knew, one that was cotton with a pattern of green leaves so small that from a distance it didn't even look like a pattern. She'd made it herself. She'd made almost everything here as a way of passing the time when she came home. The dress would have been too big for me. My mother was so much taller than I was. But I set it aside anyway. I took sweaters and a beige slip. I took a pair of stockings. There wasn't much there, and after ten minutes of trying to make choices I put it all out on the bed. I would take all of it. Even then it would fit into one shopping bag.
In the bedside table I found a blue ballpoint pen, a stack of unused postcards with generic sunset pictures, a roll of stamps. I added these to my pile. I thought for a minute about putting it all back, leaving this house exactly as she had left it so I could come back for the rest of my life and touch her things and smell them where they were. I decided that was sick. I wanted them with me. I wanted to shorten the dresses and wear the sweaters too big. I wanted to wear everything until they turned into things that were mine. I found a bag in the kitchen, folded all of it up, and put it inside.
I didn't find anything with writing on it. Not even in the trash cans, which I went through carefully. My mother checked her books out of the little library in Habit and returned them all promptly, so there wasn't a book to see if she'd underlined anything or written, How true! in the margin beside her favorite passages the way the sentimental girls in my high school did.
I went into the bathroom and opened up the medicine cabinet. There was even less there. A bottle of aspirin, an unopened tube of toothpaste, a jar of hand cream. I took these, too.
I'll say this much, she took the things I gave her, or she was careful to throw them all away awhile ago or take them out in the woods somewhere and bury them. The tin charm bracelet I bought her for Christmas when I was nine, the giant blue mixing bowl, the cashmere scarf I'd saved for, all of those things were gone. I was grateful. I think it would have killed me to find them.
I couldn't help but think there would be something for me, even if there wasn't something from me. There would be a note hidden carefully in a place where only I would find it. She wanted it that way, so she wouldn't hurt anyone else's feelings. Or maybe it wouldn't even be a note. Maybe there would just be some sort of cryptic message that I would have to put together. It would tell me where she was or why she'd gone, but even though I went over the place, slid my hands between sofa cushions, looked beneath the ice cube tray in the freezer, I found nothing.
I was in the hall closet, trying to see in a shelf above my head, when I heard the door open. I spun around so quick I nearly lost my balance and saw my father there, both of us surprised to be caught, both of us disappointed because we thought it was someone else who was surprising us.
"I saw the light on," he said. "I thought I should come over and check—"
"I'm just going through some stuff," I said.
He came in and sat down on the couch. I didn't know what was happening between us, why grief had made us so awkward all of the sudden, but I couldn't bring myself to ask. "Did
you find anything?" he said.
"Nothing, really. Some clothes, some bathroom stuff. I'm going to keep the clothes, if you think that would be all right."
He turned to me. "Of course," he said. "All of this is yours. You don't need to ask for anything."
"It feels strange," I said. "Like I'm stealing things."
"You're not," he said. "Don't be silly."
And then we were just quiet for a while, looking around. "I lived in this house for more than thirty years," my father said finally. "And now I feel like I've never been here before. It's the damnedest thing."
"Come on," I said, picking up the bag. "Let's go home."
We were careful to turn out all the lights so that if we were to see them on, later, we would know something had happened.
But nothing happened. Lorraine took over in the kitchen. Sister Bernadette gave it a shot, Sister Loyola, even Mother Corinne went in a time or two to try and make a sauce, but the girls seemed to do a better job. My mother had left files of menus, recipe books tagged with white slips of paper. Sister Evangeline kept her place in the kitchen and as it turned out, she'd been watching all those years. She could direct the girls fairly well, telling them what to do next. At ninety she had reclaimed her kitchen.
I went there to see her and to see Lorraine, but I wouldn't have anything to do with the food. It would've been too easy, me stepping into the spot my mother had left. Too easy for Mother Corinne, who had never given her the time of day to begin with. The kitchen was not going to be my fate in life, and I knew this was a place that could swallow you whole and never let you out. So when I could stand to be there at all, I only watched, kept people company, and sat on my hands.
Three days after my mother left, Lorraine came to my house early in the morning. She just came right in and woke me up, took hold of my foot and shook it until my eyes slit open.