Stem set the boys’ backpacks on the breakfast table. “Like what?” he asked.
“She wouldn’t say. Well, not like an accident or anything. The car looked fine. But she came home and said she’d given up driving.”
“Came home from where?” Stem asked.
“From driving Petey to his play date.”
“Jeez,” Stem said.
He and Red looked at each other for a moment.
“I was thinking we ought to sell her car,” Red said, “but that would leave us with just my pickup. Besides, what if she changes her mind, you know?”
“Better she doesn’t change her mind, if something happened,” Stem said.
“Well, it’s not as if she’s old. Just seventy-two next week! How’s she going to get around all the rest of her life?”
Stem crossed the kitchen and opened the door to the basement. It was obvious no one was down there—the lights were off—but still he called, “Mom?”
Silence.
He closed the door and headed back to the sunroom, with Red following close behind. “Guys,” Stem said. “I need to know where your grandma is.”
The boys were just as he’d left them—sprawled around the Parcheesi board, jackets not on, Sammy still in his socks. They looked up at him blankly.
“She was here when you came downstairs, right?” Stem asked. “She fixed you breakfast.”
“We haven’t had any breakfast,” Tommy told him.
“She didn’t fix you breakfast?”
“She asked did we want cereal or toast and then she went away to the kitchen.”
Sammy said, “I never, ever get the Froot Loops. There is only two in the pack and Petey and Tommy always get them.”
“That’s because me and Tommy are the oldest,” Petey said.
“It’s not fair, Daddy.”
Stem turned to Red and found him staring at him intently, as if waiting for a translation. “She wasn’t here for breakfast,” Stem told him.
“Let’s check upstairs.”
“I did check upstairs.”
But they headed for the stairs anyway, like people hunting their keys in the same place over and over because they can’t believe that isn’t where they are. At the top of the stairs, they walked into the children’s bathroom—a chaotic scene of crumpled towels, toothpaste squiggles, plastic boats on their sides in the bottom of the tub. They walked out again and into Abby’s study. They found her sitting on the daybed, fully dressed and wearing an apron. She wasn’t visible from the hall, but she surely must have heard Stem calling. The dog was stretched out on the rug at her feet. When the men walked in, both Abby and the dog glanced up and Abby said, “Oh, hello there.”
“Mom? We’ve been looking for you everywhere,” Stem said.
“I’m sorry. How was the party?”
“The party was fine,” Stem said. “Didn’t you hear us calling?”
“No, I guess I didn’t. I’m so sorry!”
Red was breathing heavily. Stem turned and looked at him. Red passed a hand over his face and said, “Hon.”
“What,” Abby said, and there was something a little too bright in her voice.
“You had us worried there, hon.”
“Oh, how ridiculous!” Abby said. She smoothed her apron across her lap.
This room had become her work space as soon as Denny was gone for good—a retreat where she could go over any clients’ files she’d brought home with her, or talk with them on the phone. Even after her retirement, she continued to come here to read, or write poems, or just spend time by herself. The built-in cabinets that used to hold Linnie’s sewing supplies were stuffed with Abby’s journals and random clippings and handmade cards from when the children were small. One wall was so closely hung with family photographs that there was no space visible between one frame and the next. “How can you see them that way?” Amanda had asked once. “How can you really look at them?” But Abby said blithely, “Oh, I don’t have to,” which made no sense whatsoever.
Ordinarily she sat at the desk beneath the window. No one had ever known her to sit on the daybed, which was intended merely to accommodate any excess of overnight guests. There was something contrived and stagey in her posture, as if she had hastily scrambled into place when she heard their steps on the stairs. She gazed up at them with a bland, opaque smile, her face oddly free of smile lines.
“Well,” Stem said, and he exchanged a look with his father, and the subject was dropped.
What you do on New Year’s you’ll be doing all year long, people claim, and certainly Abby’s disappearance set the theme for 2012. She began to go away, somehow, even when she was present. She seemed to be partly missing from many of the conversations taking place around her. Amanda said she acted like a woman who’d fallen in love, but quite apart from the fact that Abby had always and forever loved only Red, so far as they knew, she lacked that air of giddy happiness that comes with falling in love. She actually seemed unhappy, which wasn’t like her in the least. She took on a fretful expression, and her hair—gray now and chopped level with her jaw, as thick and bushy as the wig on an old china doll—developed a frazzled look, as if she had just emerged from some distressing misadventure.
Stem and Nora asked Petey what had happened on the ride to his play date, but first he didn’t know what play date they were talking about and then he said the ride had gone fine. So Amanda confronted Abby straight on; said, “I hear you’re not driving these days.” Yes, Abby said, that was her little gift to herself: never to have to drive anyplace ever again. And she gave Amanda one of her new, bland smiles. “Back off,” that smile said. And “Wrong? Why would you think anything was wrong?”
In February, she threw her idea box away. This was an Easy Spirit shoe box that she had kept for decades, crammed with torn-off bits of paper she meant to turn into poems one day. She put it out with the recycling on a very windy evening, and by morning the bits of paper were lying all over the street. Neighbors kept finding them in their hedges and on their welcome mats—“moon like a soft-boiled egg yolk” and “heart like a water balloon.” There was no question as to their source. Everyone knew about Abby’s poems, not to mention her fondness for similes. Most people just tactfully discarded them, but Marge Ellis brought a whole handful to the Whitshanks’ front door, where Red accepted them with a confused look on his face. “Abby?” he said later. “Did you mean to throw these out?”
“I’m done with writing poems,” she said.
“But I liked your poems!”
“Did you?” she asked without interest. “That’s nice.”
It was probably more the idea Red liked—his wife the poet, scribbling away at her antique desk that he’d had one of his workmen refinish, sending her efforts to tiny magazines that promptly sent them back. But even so, Red began to wear the same unhappy expression that Abby wore.
In April, her children noticed that she’d started calling the dog “Clarence,” although Clarence had died years ago and Brenda was a whole different color, golden retriever instead of black Lab. This was not Abby’s usual absentminded roster of misnomers: “Mandy—I mean Stem” when she was speaking to Jeannie. No, this time she stuck with the wrong name, as if she were hoping to summon back the dog of her younger days. Poor Brenda, bless her heart, didn’t know what to make of it. She’d give a puzzled twitch of her pale sprouty eyebrows and fail to respond, and Abby would cluck in exasperation.
It wasn’t Alzheimer’s. (Was it?) She seemed too much in touch for Alzheimer’s. And she didn’t exhibit any specific physical symptoms they could tell a doctor about, like seizures or fainting fits. Not that they had much hope of persuading her to see a doctor, anyhow. She’d fired her internist at age sixty, claiming she was too old now for any “extreme measures,” and for all they knew he wasn’t even in practice anymore. But even if he were: “Is she forgetful?” he might ask, and they would have to say, “Well, no more than usual.”
“Is she illogical?”
“Well, n
o more than …”
There you had the problem: Abby’s “usual” was fairly scatty. Who could say how much of this behavior was simply Abby being Abby?
As a girl, she’d been a fey sprite of a thing. She’d worn black turtlenecks in winter and peasant blouses in summer; her hair had hung long and straight down her back while most girls clamped their pageboys into rollers every night. She wasn’t just poetic but artistic, too, and a modern dancer, and an activist for any worthy cause that came along. You could count on her to organize her school’s Canned Goods for the Poor drive and the Mitten Tree. Her school was Merrick’s school, private and girls-only and posh, and though Abby was only a scholarship student, she was the star there, the leader. In college, she plaited her hair into cornrows and picketed for civil rights. She graduated near the top of her class and became a social worker, what a surprise, venturing into Baltimore neighborhoods that none of her old schoolmates knew existed. Even after she married Red (whom she had known for so long that neither of them could remember their first meeting), did she turn ordinary? Not a chance. She insisted on natural childbirth, breast-fed her babies in public, served her family wheat germ and home-brewed yogurt, marched against the Vietnam War with her youngest astride her hip, sent her children to public schools. Her house was filled with her handicrafts—macramé plant hangers and colorful woven serapes. She took in strangers off the streets, and some of them stayed for weeks. There was no telling who would show up at her dinner table.
Old Junior thought Red had married her to spite him. This was not true, of course. Red loved her for her own sake, plain and simple. Linnie Mae adored her, and Abby adored her back. Merrick was appalled by her. Merrick had been forced to serve as Abby’s Big Sister back when Abby had first transferred to her school. Even then she had felt that Abby was beyond hope of rescue, and time had proven her right.
As for Abby’s children, well, naturally they loved her. It was assumed that even Denny loved her, in his way. But she was a dreadful embarrassment to them. During visits from their friends, for instance, she might charge into the room declaiming a poem she’d just written. She might buttonhole the mailman to let him know why she believed in reincarnation. (“Mozart” was the reason she gave. How could you hear a composition from Mozart’s childhood and not feel sure that he had been drawing on several lifetimes’ worth of experience?) Encountering anyone with even a hint of a foreign accent, she would seize his hand and gaze into his eyes and say, “Tell me. Where is home, for you?”
“Mom!” her children protested afterward, and she would say, “What? What’d I do wrong?”
“It’s none of your business, Mom! He was hoping you wouldn’t notice! He was probably imagining you couldn’t even guess he was foreign.”
“Nonsense. He should be proud to be foreign. I know I would be.”
In unison, her children would groan.
She was so intrusive, so sure of her welcome, so utterly lacking in self-consciousness. She assumed she had the right to ask them any questions she liked. She held the wrongheaded notion that if they didn’t want to discuss some intimate personal problem, maybe they would change their minds if she turned the tables on them. (Was this something she’d learned in social work?) “Let’s put this the other way around,” she would say, hunching forward cozily. “Let’s say you advise me. Say I have a boyfriend who’s acting too possessive.” She would give a little laugh. “I’m at my wit’s end!” she would cry. “Tell me what I should do!”
“Really, Mom.”
They had as little contact as possible with her orphans—the army veterans who were having trouble returning to normal life, the nuns who had left their orders, the homesick Chinese students at Hopkins—and they thought Thanksgiving was hell. They snuck white bread into the house, and hot dogs full of nitrites. They cowered when they heard she’d be in charge of their school picnic. And most of all, most emphatically of all, they hated how her favorite means of connecting was commiseration. “Oh, poor you!” she would say. “You’re looking so tired!” Or “You must be feeling so lonely!” Other people showed love by offering compliments; Abby offered pity. It was not an attractive quality, in her children’s opinion.
Yet when she went back to work, after her last child started school, Jeannie told Amanda it wasn’t the relief that she had expected. “I thought I would be glad,” she said, “but then I catch myself wondering, ‘Where’s Mom? Why isn’t she breathing down my neck?’ ”
“You can notice a toothache’s gone too,” Amanda said. “It doesn’t mean you want it back again.”
In May, Red had a heart attack.
It wasn’t a very dramatic one. He experienced a few ambiguous symptoms on a job site, was all, and De’Ontay insisted on driving him to the emergency room. Still, it came as a shock to his family. He was only seventy-four! He had seemed so healthy; he climbed ladders the same as ever and carried heavy loads, and he didn’t weigh a pound more than he had when he’d gotten married. But now Abby wanted him to retire, and both the girls agreed with her. What if he lost consciousness while he was up on a roof? Red said he would go crazy if he retired. Stem said maybe he could keep on working but quit going up on roofs. Denny was not on hand for this discussion, but he most probably would have sided with Stem, for once.
Red prevailed, and he was back on the job shortly after being discharged from the hospital. He looked fine. He did say he felt a bit weak, and he admitted to getting tired earlier in the day. But maybe that was all in his head; he was observed several times taking his own pulse, or laying one palm in a testing way across the center of his chest. “Are you all right?” Abby would ask. He would say, “Of course I’m all right,” in an irritated tone that he had never used in the past.
He had hearing aids now, but he claimed they were no help. Often he just left them sitting on top of his bureau—two pink plastic nubbins the size and shape of chicken hearts. As a result, his conversations with his customers didn’t always go smoothly. More and more, he allowed Stem to deal with that part of the business, although you could tell it made him sad to give it up.
He was letting the house go, too. Stem was the first to notice that. While once upon a time the house was maintained to a fare-thee-well—not a loose nail anywhere, not a chink in the window putty—now there were signs of slippage. Amanda arrived with her daughter one evening and found Stem reinstalling the spline on the front screen door, and when she asked, offhandedly, “Problem?,” Stem straightened and said, “He’d never have let this happen in the old days.”
“Let what happen?”
“This screen was bagging halfway out of its frame! And the powder-room faucet is dripping, have you noticed?”
“Oh, dear,” Amanda said, and she prepared to follow Elise on into the house.
But Stem said, “It’s like he’s lost interest,” which stopped her in her tracks.
“Like he doesn’t care, almost,” Stem said. “I said, ‘Dad, your front screen’s loose,’ and he said, ‘I can’t keep on top of every last little thing, goddammit!’ ”
This was huge: for Red to snap at Stem. Stem had always been his favorite.
Amanda said, “Maybe this place is getting to be too much for him.”
“Not only that, but Mom left a kettle on the stove the other day, and when Nora stopped by, the kettle was whistling full-blast and Dad was writing checks at the dining-room table, totally unaware.”
“He didn’t hear the kettle?”
“Evidently not.”
“That kettle stabs my eardrums,” Amanda said. “It may have been what turned him deaf in the first place.”
“I’m beginning to think they shouldn’t be living alone,” Stem told her.
“Really. Shouldn’t they.”
And she walked past him into the house with a thoughtful look on her face.
The next evening, there was a family meeting. Stem, Jeannie, and Amanda just happened to drop in; no spouses and no children. Stem looked suspiciously spruced up, while Am
anda was as perfectly coiffed and lipsticked as always in the tailored gray pantsuit she’d worn to the office. Only Jeannie had made no effort; she wore her usual T-shirt and rumpled khakis, and her horsetail of long black hair was straggling out of its scrunchie. Abby was thrilled. When she’d seated them all in the living room, she said, “Isn’t this nice? Just like the old days! Not that I don’t love to see your families too, of course—”
Red said, “What’s up?”
“Well,” Amanda said, “we’ve been thinking about the house.”
“What about it?”
“We’re thinking it’s a lot to look after, what with you and Mom getting older.”
“I could look after this house with one hand tied behind my back,” Red said.
You could tell from the pause that followed that his children were considering whether to take issue with this. Surprisingly, it was Abby who came to their aid. “Well, of course you can, sweetie,” she said, “but don’t you think it’s time you gave yourself a rest?”
“A dress!”
His children half laughed, half groaned.
“You see what I have to put up with,” Abby told them. “He will not wear his hearing aids! And then when he tries to fake it, he makes the most unlikely guesses. He’s just … perverse! I tell him I want to go to the farmers’ market and he says, ‘You’re joining the army?’ ”
“It’s not my fault if you mumble,” Red said.
Abby gave an audible sigh.
“Let’s stick to the subject,” Amanda said briskly. “Mom, Dad: we’re thinking you might want to move.”
“Move!” Red and Abby cried together.
“What with Dad’s heart, and Mom not driving anymore … we’re thinking maybe a retirement community. Wouldn’t that be the answer?”
“Retirement community, huh,” Red said. “That’s for old people. That’s where all those snooty old ladies go when their husbands die. You think we’d be happy in a place like that? You think they’d be glad to see us?”
“Of course they’d be glad, Dad. You’ve probably remodeled all their houses for them.”