I tell her about all the times, in the grocery store. Mom would have twenty bucks and we’d fill a basket with stuff we needed: milk and bananas, a box of cereal. At the register, it always totaled more than twenty bucks, though we tried to do the math in our head. And there, we’d have to pick—the cereal or bananas—while some prick in line sighed and told us to hurry up. I remember one time, some asshole from school was in line behind us. I heard about it for the next two weeks. About how Thatcher’s mom didn’t have enough money for fucking bananas.
I’m quiet and she doesn’t say a thing. Any other girl would offer sympathy. She’d say she was so sorry. She’d say how it must have been so hard. But this girl doesn’t. Not because she isn’t empathetic, but because she knows it’s not compassion that I want or need.
I never told anyone else about my father.
I never told anyone about my mother. But I do. Maybe it’s the boredom, I don’t know. We’ve run out of things to say. But somehow I think it’s more than that, something about this girl that makes it easy to talk, makes me want to tell her, makes me want to get it off my chest. Because then maybe I’ll be able to sleep.
“When I was five or six, she started to shake,” I say. Her hands first. She started having trouble at work. She kept dropping things, spilling shit. Within a year she was shuffling around. She couldn’t walk right. She’d barely move her feet, didn’t move her arms. People would fucking stare, tell her to hurry up. She stopped smiling, stopped blinking. She became depressed. She couldn’t hold a job. She was too slow, too clumsy.
“Parkinson’s disease,” the girl says, and I nod, though of course she can’t see. Her voice is close enough to touch, but I can’t see the expression on her face. I can’t make out the sensitivity in her blue eyes.
“That’s what the doctors said.” By the time I was in junior high I had to help my mom get her clothes on, always sweats because she couldn’t handle a zipper. By high school I had to help her pee. She couldn’t cut her own food. She couldn’t write her name.
She took drugs to help with the symptoms but they all had side effects. Nausea. Insomnia. Nightmares. So she stopped. I started working when I was fourteen. I made as much money as I could. It was never enough. My dad was gone by then. As soon as she got sick he took off. I turned eighteen, dropped out of high school and left home. I thought I could make more money in the city. I sent her everything I made to pay the medical bills and have food to eat. So she wouldn’t wind up on the street. But there was never enough money.
And then one day, I was washing dishes in a restaurant. I asked if I could get some extra hours, said I was tight on cash. My boss said to me, “Aren’t we all.” Business was slow, but he knew somewhere I could get a loan.
And the rest is history.
Gabe
Before
I track down a next of kin in Gary: Kathryn Thatcher, Colin Thatcher’s mother. We had found a cell phone stashed in a drawer in Thatcher’s kitchen—registered to a Steve Moss, a.k.a. Colin Thatcher—and pulled the records. There were many calls, almost every day, to the middle-aged woman in Gary, Indiana. The other thing that caught my attention were three calls made to a prepaid cell phone on the evening that Mia disappeared as well as about ten missed calls from the same number in the early hours of the following morning. I have the techies dump the voice mail and when they do, we all hover around and listen to the messages. Some guy wanting to know where the hell the girl is, the judge’s daughter, and why Thatcher missed the drop-off. He doesn’t sound happy. In fact he sounds really, really unhappy. He’s pissed.
It’s then that I realize Colin Thatcher is working for someone else.
But who?
I try and track down the owner of this prepaid cell phone. I know it was purchased at a convenient store in Hyde Park. But the owner of the store, an Indian man who barely speaks three words of English, doesn’t have a clue who bought it. Apparently it was paid for with cash. Just my luck.
I decide to question the mother myself. The sergeant wants to use his clout to have a guy in Gary do it; I say no way. I’ll do it myself.
In Chicago, Gary, Indiana, isn’t spoken of highly. We like to think of it as a hellhole. Much of the population is poor. There is a large African-American population, and it’s home to massive steel mills that sit along Lake Michigan and puff obnoxious smoke into the air.
The sergeant wants to go with me, but I talk him out of it and go by myself. We don’t want to frighten the poor woman into silence, after all. I made the mistake of telling Mrs. Dennett that this was on my schedule for today. She didn’t ask to go, but she did hint. I laid a cautious hand on her arm and promised, “You’ll be the first one I call.”
It takes about two hours. Only fifty some miles, but for the mass amounts of semis along I-90, I lollygag around at about thirty miles per hour. I make the mistake of picking up coffee at a drive-through, and have to nearly piss my pants by the time I arrive. I run into a gas station in Gary, grateful for the arsenal hiding beneath my clothes.
Kathryn Thatcher lives in a pale blue ranch. The home is dated, straight out of the ’50s. The lawn is overrun, the shrubbery overgrown. Potted plants lie dead.
I knock on the screen door and wait on a concrete stoop that desperately needs repair. The day is dreary, a typical November day in the midwest. It’s just blah, the forty degrees feeling cold, though I know in a month or two, we’ll pray for a forty-degree day. When there’s no answer, I open the screen door and knock on the wood door, beside a wreath that hangs from a rusting nail. The door is open. It gives with the slightest touch of my hand. Damn it, I think to myself. Maybe I should have brought the sergeant. I reach for my gun, tiptoe in and call, “Mrs. Thatcher.”
I walk into the front room, so outdated I have to remind myself I’m not in the home of my grandmother: shag carpeting, wood paneling on the walls, peeling wallpaper and the furniture—everything mismatching, torn taupe leather beside flowered upholstery.
The dull sound of off-tune humming from the kitchen puts me at ease. I slide the gun back into its harness so I don’t scare the shit out of the lady. And then my eyes come to a standstill on the image of Colin Thatcher, and what I presume to be Kathryn, dressed to the nines, in a small frame atop a 27-inch TV. The TV is on and muted, a soap opera filling the screen.
“Mrs. Thatcher,” I call again but there is no response. I follow the humming to the kitchen and knock on the frame of the open doorway, only after watching for a moment as her trembling fingers try once, twice, three times to peel back the plastic covering from a TV dinner. The woman herself looks old enough to be the grandmother of Colin Thatcher and I wonder if we’ve made a mistake. She wears a robe and fuzzy slippers on her feet; her legs are bare and I’m trying not to believe that there’s nothing on beneath the robe.
“Ma’am,” I say, my feet crossing onto the vinyl floor. This time when she turns, nearly jumping out of her skin at the sound of my voice and the presence of a complete stranger in her home, I hold out my badge to reassure her she’s not about to be killed.
“Good Lord,” she stutters, a shaky hand finding its way to her heart. “Colin?”
“No, ma’am,” I say, stepping closer. “If I may,” I say, reaching across her fragile frame to pull the plastic from the TV dinner. I drop the moist wrapper into an overflowing wastebasket beside the back door. It’s a child’s microwave dinner with chicken nuggets and corn and a brownie.
I hold out a hand to steady Mrs. Thatcher. To my surprise, she accepts. There’s very little stability whether walking or standing still. She moves with painstaking movements, her face void of expression. She stands stooped, her feet shuffling before her; I’m certain at any moment she might fall. Saliva drips from her mouth.
“My name is Detective Gabe Hoffman. I’m a policeman with the—”
“Colin?” she asks again. This time sh
e begs.
“Mrs. Thatcher,” I say, “ma’am, please sit.” I help her to a nearby breakfast nook, where she sits down. I carry the TV dinner to her and fish a fork out of a drawer, but her hand shakes so persistently she can’t get the food to her mouth. She gropes the nugget with a bare hand.
The woman looks old enough to be seventy, but if she’s Colin Thatcher’s mother, chances are she’s only fifty or so. Her hair is gray, though in the not-so-outdated photo in the front room, it’s a chestnut-brown. She appears to have dropped a dress size or two as her robe hangs around her like a garment bag and the flesh I can see is all sticks and bones. There’s a display of medicine bottles across the countertop, and rotten fruit in a basket. And of course there are the bumps and bruises scattered here and there across Mrs. Thatcher’s skin, reminders, I’m assuming, of recent falls.
I know there’s a name for this. It’s on the tip of my tongue.
“Have you seen Colin?” I ask.
She says that she hasn’t. I ask her when she last saw him. She doesn’t know.
“How often do you see Colin?” I ask.
“Every week. He mows the lawn.”
I peer out the kitchen window at a yard covered in shriveled leaves.
“He takes care of you?” I ask. “Mows the lawn, gets the groceries...” She says that he does. I see the fruit rotting on the counter, swarming with an abundance of fruit flies. I allow myself to peek inside the refrigerator/freezer and find a bag of frozen peas, a carton of expired milk, a couple of TV dinners. The pantry is as inadequate: a few cans of soup that Mrs. Thatcher likely can’t open by herself, and crackers.
“Does he take out the garbage?” I ask.
“Yes.”
“How long has he been helping you? A year? Two years?”
“He was a child. When I got sick. His dad...” Her voice trails off.
“Left,” I finish.
She nods.
“And now Colin...lives with you?”
She shakes her head. “He comes. To visit.”
“But not this week?”
“No.”
“Or last?”
She doesn’t know. There are very few dishes in the sink, but the garbage is an abundance of paper plates. He encouraged her to use paper—easier than cleaning up after herself—and takes the trash to the curb every week he comes.
“But he does the shopping and the cleaning and the—”
“Everything.”
“He does everything. But he hasn’t been here for a while, has he, Mrs. Thatcher?”
A calendar on the wall points to September. The milk in the fridge expired on October seventh.
“Would it be okay if I took out the garbage for you?” I ask. “I see that it’s full.”
“Okay,” she says.
The tremors are hard to watch. It makes me uncomfortable, to be honest.
I grab the wretched bag of trash and lift it from the bin and head out a back door. It reeks. I jog down three steps and toss the garbage into the trunk of my car to deal with later. I make sure no one’s looking, and I peek into the mailbox and grab what’s there, a stack so high it practically overflows onto the road. There’s a slip tucked inside from the USPS, requesting the resident pick up additional mail from the post office. The mailman crammed in what he could until there was no more room.
Back inside Mrs. Thatcher is fighting with the corn. I can’t take it. Nobody should have to work so hard to eat a damn TV dinner. I slide into the nook across from the gaunt woman and say, “Let me help.” I take the fork and serve her a bite. There’s a moment of hesitation. God knows the day someone has to spoon-feed me is the day I’d rather be dead.
“Where’s Colin?” she asks.
I offer the food slowly, only a few kernels at a time.
“I don’t know, ma’am. I’m afraid Colin might be in trouble. We need your help.” I find a photograph of Mia Dennett and show it to the woman. I ask if she’s ever seen her before.
She shuts her eyes. “TV,” she utters. “I saw her on TV...she’s the... Oh, God, Colin. Oh, Colin.” And she begins to sob.
I try to assure her that we know nothing. It’s only speculation. Mia Dennett may or may not be with Colin. But I know she is.
I explain that I need her help to find Colin. I say that we want to make sure that he and Mia are okay, that he isn’t in trouble, but she doesn’t buy it.
She’s lost all interest in her dinner. Her deformed body droops before the table and over and over and over again, she says, “Colin,” an out-of-place answer to every question I ask.
“Mrs. Thatcher, can you tell me if there’s any place Colin might go if he needed to hide?”
Colin.
“Can you provide me with contact information for family or friends? Anyone he might have contacted if he was in trouble. His father? Do you own a Rolodex, an address book?”
Colin.
“Please try and remember the last time you spoke. Have you talked to him since he was here last? By phone, perhaps?”
Colin.
I can’t take it. I’m getting nowhere.
“Ma’am, is it okay if I look around? I’m just going to see if there’s something here that might help me find your son.”
It’s like taking candy from a baby. Another mother would lawyer up and demand a warrant. But not Mrs. Thatcher. She knows what will happen to her if Colin doesn’t come home.
I leave her crying on the breakfast nook and excuse myself.
I pass a dining room, a half bath, the master bedroom, and end up in the bedroom of seventeen-year-old Colin Thatcher, the navy walls and White Sox—egad—pennants and high school textbooks that were never returned. In the closet still hang some clothes: a football jersey and a pair of ripped jeans, and on the floor a pair of dirty cleats. There are posters of 1980s athletes thumb-tacked to the walls, and hanging in the closet, a discreet pullout of Cindy Crawford where his mother won’t see. There’s an afghan Kathryn likely crocheted when her hands still could, folded across the end of the bed, and a hole in the wall where, in a fit of rage, Colin might have thrown a punch. There’s a radiator lining the wall beneath the window and in a small frame beside the bed, a very young Colin, a beautiful Kathryn and a quarter inch of a man’s head, the rest ripped off and tossed.
I take the scenic route on the way back. I mosey into the master bedroom, the unmade bed reeking of BO. There are dirty clothes in a pile. The blinds are shut, the room dark. I flip on a light, but the bulb has burnt out. I yank a cord in the closet and a scant amount of light enters the room. There are photographs of Colin Thatcher in every stage of his life. He doesn’t look that different than me. Just your typical bundle of baby fat, turned football jock, turned America’s Most Wanted. There are dandelions pressed behind glass; he might have collected those for her when he was a child. There’s a stick figure drawing. His? And a cordless phone that’s been knocked to the floor. I pick it up and return it to the base. It’s dead. It will take hours for the battery to charge.
I make a mental note to get telephone records. I consider a phone tap.
In the front room, I run my fingers across the keys of a dusty piano. It’s out of tune, but the sound beckons Mrs. Thatcher, who hobbles into the room. There is corn on her chin. She misses her footing on the way and somehow I manage to catch her in my arms.
“Colin,” she says for the umpteenth time as I lower her onto the couch. I encourage her to lie down and prop a pillow behind her head. I find the remote and click on the volume to the TV. God knows how long she’s been watching on mute.
There are scrapbooks lining an oak shelf, one for every single year of Colin Thatcher’s life until the age of thirteen. I take one and fall into a leather armchair. I flip through the pages. Boy Scouts. Schoolwork and progress reports. There
are leaf collections, picked up on afternoon walks and pressed in the pages of a massive encyclopedia. Newspaper clippings. Miniature golf scores. A Christmas list. A postcard to Ms. Kathryn Thatcher from Grand Marais, Minnesota, a fifteen-cent stamp stuck crookedly in the corner. The date 1989 is printed on the card; the image is of a forest, a lake, nature. There’s a simple inscription: Dad sucks. Miss you.
There are photographs up the wazoo, mostly older ones that are yellowing and beginning to bend.
I stay with Kathryn Thatcher as long as I can. She needs the company. But she needs much more than that; she needs something I can’t provide. I’ve said my goodbyes and promised to be in touch, but I don’t go. The TV dinners will be gone in no time, and all it takes is one good fall to give her a concussion that will end her life.
“Ma’am, I can’t leave you here,” I admit.
“Colin,” she whispers.
“I know,” I say. “Colin takes care of you. But Colin isn’t here now, and you can’t be alone. Do you have family, Mrs. Thatcher? Anyone I can call?”
I take her silence as a no.
This makes me wonder. If Colin had been taking care of his ailing mother for so long, what would make him leave her?
I remove a few things from Mrs. Thatcher’s closet and place them in a bag. I collect the medicine bottles. There’s a nursing home in Gary. For now that will have to do.
I tell Mrs. Thatcher that we’re going to go for a ride. “Please. No,” she begs as I lead her to the car. “Please. I want to stay here. I don’t want to go.”
I have a coat draped over Mrs. Thatcher’s robe. On her feet remain fuzzy slippers.
She’s protesting as vehemently as she possibly can, which isn’t much. I know that she doesn’t want to go. She doesn’t want to leave her home, but I can’t leave her here.
A neighbor steps onto a front porch to see what the fuss is about. I hold out a hand and say, “It’s okay.” I show him my badge.
I help her into the car and reach across her to secure the seat belt. She’s crying. I drive as fast as I possibly can. In a few minutes this will all be through.