Among the Missing (18 page)

But I was very busy at the video store. I was going back to
college in the fall, and I had to decide what I was going to do. I had this enormous, virgin expanse of time in front of me that needed to be claimed, and colonized, and strip-mined:
My future
.

And there was a girl, too, someone I met. She was staying with her parents in a cabin not far from my mother’s—a recent high school graduate in the midst of her summer-before-college, eighteen years old. I think her name was Michelle. We made love on the beach, on the edge of the Morrisons’ watery grave. It was her first time, she said, and afterward I made a hole in the sand with my bare foot and buried my used condom—my seed, my potential sons and daughters sealed in their plastic coffin, earth tapped down gently over them with the palm of my hand. Michelle sat close by, shawled in a beach towel, silent and full of regret.

My mother, in her cabin bedroom, was asleep. She appeared in my mind, but I thrust her away. She was the one thing I didn’t want to think about.

To tell the truth, that last summer I spent with my parents was soon forgotten—just as the Morrisons were, moving from the front page of the paper to the back sections, and, finally, drifting out of the range and interest of journalists forever. I went on: I finished school, I took various jobs, I moved into different cities and apartments and shuffled through girlfriends. All through my twenties I kept thinking, My life would make a great movie! It wasn’t until I sat down to write it that I realized that it didn’t amount to much of anything. It was just a series of disconnected incidents.

Then, almost ten years after the Morrisons, my mother herself disappeared.

My mother vanished sometime in August. I had been trying to telephone her for a few weeks, and then I finally called the police—thinking, naturally, that she would be dead, rotting alone in the hallway between the kitchen and the bedroom, or sitting on the toilet like Elvis, frozen in a heart attack.

But this wasn’t the case. The cabin, they said, appeared to be abandoned, and when I drove out a week later this seemed to be true. Most of the furniture was there, but the closets were nothing but bare hangers, and the refrigerator was empty and unplugged. The front door had been left wide open.

In some ways, I suppose I wasn’t surprised. My father had died three years earlier of a sudden stroke, fifty-two years old, buried beside Teresa Joy’s tiny grave. Since then, I hadn’t been able to get any perspective on things she told me. She had been saying strange things lately—the cabin spooked her, she said, she felt like someone was watching her, and then she was sure of it, and finally she began to think that someone was trying to break in. Outside, she claimed to have found thin scrapes around the lock on the door—the new lock she’d put in—and on the windows, scuff marks on the wood, as if someone were trying to jimmy them open. “I get afraid,” she said. “Sometimes, I get really scared.” That was the last time I remember talking to her.

Her fears had not sounded that serious, I have to admit. They were buried in a long list of complaints and worries—from her
health to the new people who had moved next door—which had become the main topic of conversation when I called. I would tell her what I was doing, but I could sense her impatience.

Yet she didn’t seem crazy. That’s what I told the police when they asked. “Did she seem disoriented in any way?” one officer asked me, and I had to simply shrug my shoulders. “Not really,” I said. “Maybe a little.” I told them that last Christmas, when I visited, she had given me a bunch of old photo albums and memorabilia. “You might as well have this junk now, as soon as later,” she’d said. “Keep what you want and throw the rest away.” It was mostly pictures of us when we were a family—me, my father, and her—and old relatives I didn’t recognize, and gifts of jewelry and knickknacks my father had given her, and some of my old report cards and childhood drawings that she’d saved.

There was nothing of that sort left in the cabin: The closets, the drawers, the storage spaces were spotlessly empty and smelled of disinfectant. I found a nickel in one of the bottom drawers of her dresser. In another, I found an ant trap. The kitchen floor had been waxed. I opened the cabinet under the sink and found that she’d put a fresh garbage bag in the trash can.

I don’t know why, but it was at that moment that I was certain that she was dead. A sort of terror slid over me like a cloud’s shadow, and suddenly I was aware that it was night, and I was alone in the silent cabin. Outside the kitchen window, a certain tree looked like a human figure, standing there. The tree was at the very edge of the light from the kitchen, and for a moment it appeared to be a woman in a long robe—a nightgown, maybe. I let out a small sound and fled the house as quickly as I could.

•   •   •

There are times, lots of times, when I think that maybe she is still alive. They never found her car, or her clothes, and her bank account was nearly empty. I can picture her, driving through various landscapes, her eyes straight ahead, her driving sunglasses reflecting the road. I see her living under an assumed name, in New Orleans, in Fargo, on a beach in Florida. Sometimes, when the phone rings at an odd time, I have the quavering sense that it might be her. When there is silence at the other end of the line, I can’t keep from whispering, “… Mom?” And yet, I don’t think she would call me, even if she were alive.

There are times when I would like to tell this story to my father. What would he make of it, I wonder? Is it the story of a woman who fell out of love with her son? Is it the story of a woman who realized that love wasn’t that important, after all? Or is it the story of my failure—my failure to figure things out, my failure to interpret, my failure to need her?

What can you do with a woman like that, my father would say, and I would recall her wading in the lake one day, about a week before the Morrisons were discovered, knee deep in the calm gray water, running the tips of her fingers across the surface of the lake, wearing that blue one-piece bathing suit she had. “Water’s warm!” she called to me on the shore. And if I would have lifted my head from the book I was reading I would have seen her expression, I would have seen what she thought as she looked at her son—a grown-up man, now—I would have watched more carefully as she walked into the lake, deeper and deeper, until just her head was showing. I know the lake was glowing with the reflection of the sundown. I
know she was looking back at me. I know she was thinking something.

“Why do people do anything?” my father would ask, and he would dismiss every moment I thought important. He would ask me if they’d dragged the lake for her body. And I would tell him, yes—of course. They trawled all along the line of beach, but as far as they could tell, she wasn’t there either.

T
here was a man Suzanne met at the library. He spoke to her back as she was standing in an aisle of shelves, staring at a book. She was lost in thought. “Excuse me … ma’am?” he said.

His voice was gentle and plaintive, almost on the verge of cringing. She turned, and he was standing a short distance behind her—a young man with shaggy dark hair, somewhat shoddy in his dress. He had a prosthetic arm, a hook instead of a hand. She registered this immediately but composed herself almost at once. She looked at his face, as if she hadn’t noticed his arm. Polite. Quizzical.

“Ma’am?” he said. “Could you help me, please?” And she noticed that he adopted a loping, submissive posture.

He held up a few napkins in his real hand. “I’m trying to … get a grip on these,” he said, and slipped them in between the two prongs of his hook, which he could pinch open and
closed, like mandibles. “I think I need to put a rubber band around them,” he said apologetically.

“Oh,” she said. He was younger than she, with a brown-eyed, scruffy handsomeness. “Of course,” she said. She took a step toward him, and he held up his arm. The prosthesis extended from the sleeve of a T-shirt. The upper and lower arm was made of plastic, like a mannequin, pinkish, in an approximation of the color of Caucasian skin. The hook emerged from the wrist and was silver and steely. She smiled as she guided the napkins into the pinchers, but her hands trembled. The smooth, cool metal sent a thrum through her fingertips. She dropped the napkins and had to pick them up.

“Sorry—sorry,” she said, and their eyes met.

It was said that her former lover had been badly disfigured in a fire. Suzanne’s mother had called to report the news, as she often did when something horrible happened in the small Iowa town where Suzanne had grown up, and this was how her mother said it: “… disfigured …” with a small pause before and after.

“You were friends with him, weren’t you?” Suzanne’s mother said, either oblivious or deliberately cruel. “He was in your class in high school.”

“Yes,” Suzanne said. She was at work, very busy. She had asked her mother before not to call her at the office unless it was important. Several times, Suzanne had been forced to speak sharply to her mother, and had hurt her mother’s feelings. Now, Suzanne’s mother would condense everything she said into mysterious, gnomic phrases. Then, claiming she had to go, her mother would hang up.

•   •   •

After work, because she could not stop thinking about it, she stopped at the library. In a medical book were photographs of people who had been severely burned. Horrible—yet she sat there staring for a long time, at the end of a long tunnel of bookshelves. A person coughed from some other aisle, a sound like a dog barking far off in the distance at night. She hadn’t known what fire could do to flesh; the things people survived.

When she got home, she found that her husband had cooked a special dinner for them—steaks, naturally, so that the house was full of the smell of it—and he had the children in bed and wineglasses and place settings on the table. He stood smiling as she disengaged her key from the door, hopeful and helpless in the stream of whatever had been happening to them lately. He did want to change things, or at least to slow what had begun to seem inevitable.

“Hey, sweetheart,” he said, and then, after a moment: “What? Is something wrong?”

“No, no,” she said. “I’m just tired, I guess.”

The burned man had not been her first. Really, he was not even one that she had been particularly attached to. Both she and her husband had had many relationships before they married. Her husband would probably recognize the burned man’s name, since they had gone through a period of intense self-disclosure
and examination when they first married. But her husband would not recall him as a person she had dwelled upon. Which was true, she had not. Sometimes, during the act of love, she would close her eyes and the image of that particular boy would occupy her for a moment. There was a certain way that her husband would touch his mouth against her ear that would particularly remind her.

The man who had been disfigured in a fire might have once made her pregnant. There was a time, during their senior year in high school, when her menstrual period was almost three weeks late. She had been regular for some years by that time, so it frightened her badly. She spoke to him, in a rush, after band practice. He held his glittering trombone loosely at his side. She almost started crying, but didn’t.

That night, on the pretext of going out to a movie, she had driven out to the farmhouse where he lived with his parents. He was waiting at the edge of the long dirt-road driveway that led to his house. He spoke hurriedly, distractedly. “If it’s in there, it’s in there loose,” he said. “It doesn’t have to stick if we don’t want it to.”

He led her out to a field where bales of hay were stacked up like blocks, almost as high as houses. He showed her a stairlike passage that led her to the top of the haystack and they stood there at the top. A half-moon glowed over them. The ground was about ten or twelve feet below.

“If I held your hand,” the boy said. “If we jump together,” the boy said. He looked at her and his eyes were bright with assurance. “Okay?” he said.

They leapt together. She felt his hand hardening against her
own, and then they were in the air, plunging, limbs flailing, a blur of stars and fields rushing past them. She landed hard on the soles of her feet and fell forward on her hands, crouched like an animal.

“Okay,” he whispered, as he pulled her up. “Again …”

The next morning, in her own bed, she woke up and she was bleeding. A cramp clenched just above her groin. The sheets were already dirty.

Her husband was concerned as he poured the wine. He could sense troubled thoughts in her expression and assumed that it must have something to do with him. She saw how his eyes attempted to find something underneath the vague, hedging conversation. He wanted the wine, the steaks with their crisscrossed grill lines, the delicate potatoes in their skins, to mean more than they did. Sometimes it seemed that he suspected life of holding some mysterious significance that he could not quite figure out. This bothered him more than it did her. He said her name, hesitantly, and when she lifted out of her thoughts to look at him, he wasn’t sure what to say.