“I started thinking, making the connections in my head. So much like Warren. Just think—maybe Warren grew up, had a little boy of his own. Maybe that boy was Otis’s father. It was possible! And a few days later, I went back to Sterling and found him again. Pretty soon, little by little, I started telling him all the things that happened to me.
“Scott, don’t you see? Maybe he’s just another ghost, sent here to haunt me. But I think it’s so much more than that. I believe—and I really do believe this—that he’s the grandson of my Warren.”
“And you’ve told him this.”
“Yes. And he’ll help us find out what really happened back then. Help us find that boy who started it all.”
After this, we were silent for a long time. The sleeping pill had settled into my bones, but I was hungry and tried to fight it. Neither of us had eaten since lunch. I headed to the kitchen to cobble together another meal. I searched for anything remotely nutritious from her cupboards of dime-store foods, settling finally on our recent favorite, the cheese ravioli from cans, heated quickly on the stove then spooned into twin blue bowls.
When I returned, she was sitting before the TV. On screen was the nightly, post-newscast Missing Children report. The featured photo was a little black girl, thick glasses, her hair secured with barrettes. My mother took the spoon and bowl from me, then aimed the remote for volume. The girl was Barbara Wishman. She wore a purple sweater and a blouse with lace at the neck. Even through the TV’s damaged picture, she already looked lost. A baritone voice said, “Have you seen…Barbara?” Under the photo scrolled her name, along with the date she had disappeared (July 14), the place (Springfield, Missouri), and a scatter of statistics. In fifteen seconds we learned her 4’8” height, her 90-pound weight, her age 12; we learned, too, other vitals that did nothing to describe the realness of her, the Barbara-ness of her, this child who no doubt had played hopscotch in her yard, had laughed at silly knock-knock jokes, had eaten canned cheese ravioli and ridden the morning bus to pencil her answers on math tests.
“Poor thing,” my mother said.
Together, in the quiet darkness, we began to eat.
SIX
ACROSS TOWN, FRIDAY nights, the local high school hosted its autumn football games. My mother’s house stood just five streets south of the ragged field—“the gridiron,” she called it—and at seven o’clock we opened the living-room window, pausing to listen in the dark. The hum and hiss of loudspeakers…the cheerleaders’ rhyming screams…the flustered, bickering fans. The noise carried effortlessly through Haven. “One of these nights we’re going to walk over there and watch the game,” my mother said.
We both seemed to sense this would never happen. In the days after Otis, she’d fallen alarmingly sick, much weaker than before. Her migraines intensified; her lips were cracked and sore; she couldn’t hold down food. She decided to postpone her appointment with Dr. Kaufman. Although she wanted to try another drive through Sterling and its surrounding towns, I suggested we wait until her health improved.
I wanted so badly to believe her story. And yet, so many inconsistencies; so many red flags. I asked her question after random question, longing for more particulars, and she answered as best she could. Did they ever let you outside? (No.) What food did they give you? (Lots of meat, with mashed potatoes on the side. Lots of ice cream and candy.) Didn’t you miss Dan? (Just a little bit.) What kind of car did they drive? (Not exactly sure—it was a sky-blue color, something like an old Imperial.)
During these days she spent long hours on the couch, stone-hard naps with hardly any movement. Nearly every time she slept, I’d shut myself in her bedroom, sit on the bed, and pull the glass pipe from my travel bag. Lately the grains of meth, together with the dry air of the house, had given me nosebleeds, so I was using the pipe. Smoking had always felt dirtier than snorting, more criminal, but the dirty smoke in my lungs and brain seemed to effectively cap the recent events, her confusing flood of revelations.
And then the meth was gone. I’d smuggled so much onto the bus home, but my supply had swiftly diminished. By now I’d spent all the cash I’d brought from New York. We could barely scrape by on her monthly social security and disability checks. Still, I told myself, I had to coerce Gavin into sending more, to support me a few more days.
Sometimes, before my mother fell asleep, she’d find a little money in her purse, and send me off to Hutchinson for errands. She wanted ginger ale or strawberry milkshakes; she wanted peculiar things like tube socks or hunting magazines. Driving back from the errands, I’d search the roads for repair shops; scan the horizon for peach orchards. I kept remembering her voice: “Let’s get him.” Remembering her eyes’ discolored glint, warning of wrong in her head. Most of all, remembering their fingers, intertwined.
And so, that Friday night, I returned with her milkshake, her cigarettes, her chewable antacids and vitamins. I told her not to budge from the couch. I took the opposite end and lifted her feet into my lap.
The Haven football game had paused for its halftime show: a marching band, with its military snares, its brass trumpets and trombones. As we listened, my mother sipped noisily through her straw, her lips dotted pink with foam. Earlier I’d dampened a hand towel and pressed it to her forehead, but the towel had gone warm, and now, as the band finished its final Sousa march, she peeled it away and tossed it to the floor. I saw the pain each movement caused her. Eventually, she pulled the pillow from under her head and drew it over her face.
“Good night,” I whispered. She whispered something back, but the pillow muffled her voice.
And then, a distant echo of whistles: the third quarter, set to begin. V-I-C-T-O-R-Y, that’s the Wildcats’ battle cry. I imagined the cheerleaders’ gold boots; their ribbons and war-painted faces; their pom-pons, blue-and-gold shreds thrust at the spotlit sky. Yes, it would be good to take my mother to a game. It crushed me to see her so sick. Gently I put my hands on her feet and began to rub. From practice I’d learned the precise amount of pressure. Her heels were solid pink as school erasers; the prednisone gave her rashes and edema, but I was careful and slow.
Outside, the Wildcats chanted their battle cry, louder, then softer; then silent. My mother kept the pillow over her face. We remained this way, quietly listening, my hands kneading her feet until she fell asleep.
By now, the everyday aspects of the house were unnerving me. What I wanted most were bright colors: all the antiques and darkly varnished pieces of furniture, even the towels and oven mitts, were various shades of brown. More than anything I hated her refrigerator, a chugging, dented brown beast with a side compartment that yielded its own ice. It always seemed to wait until I neared to drop its interior tray; teasingly, the crescents would hit the bucket with a soft, crowded clunk.
That night, on opening the refrigerator to disable the ice maker, I saw what might have been the real reason for my mother’s poor appetite. Just yesterday, on my Hutchinson errand, I’d bought two pints of ice cream—black walnut for her, rocky road for me—but now they were gone.
I stood in the cold light, thinking of possible jokes, ways to pester her about the missing ice cream, when I heard a noise on the porch. I went to the window, dreading another visit from Otis. Instead it was Dolores who stood before the front door. She’d restyled her hair; she wore an oversize yellow John Deere jacket that seemed too warm for the weather. Before she could knock and wake my mother, I rushed to let her inside.
At once I smelled the bourbon. I sensed the heat of her temper. For the past week, I’d been avoiding all contact with her, switching the telephone ringer off, even erasing her answering-machine messages. I hadn’t informed my mother about her calls, and now I scrambled for an adequate excuse, a way to persuade Dolores to head back home. “She’s fast asleep,” I said.
Under the heavy jacket, she wore one of my mother’s old sweatshirts. She wore tight jeans and her husband’s polished cowboy boots. “You’ve been avoiding me,” she said, “and I don’t like it a
t all.”
With a nudge, I moved her back to the porch, shutting the door behind us. “Let’s go walk around for a while.”
“But I miss your mom. We haven’t talked in days.”
“Really, she’s very sick. We should let her sleep.”
Dolores leaned against the porch rail, a post my mother had looted, years ago, from an abandoned roadside barn. She glared at me over her glasses and crossed her arms at the chest. The streetlamps revealed the clumps of mascara on her lashes; the mismatched hoops in her ears. She couldn’t quite focus on my face, and I saw how drunk she truly was.
“You’re ignoring my calls!” she said. “I know how sick she’s gotten…you can’t just swoop in from the city and expect to shut me out of your lives!”
All the volume and drama made me uneasy. Attempting to bridle her anger, I hooked a chivalrous arm in hers and began leading her down the block. Her grip was strong, her arm feverishly warm. The wind shuddered the trees with a suspicious hiss; dead leaves had collected along the sidewalk cracks. We walked down the shadowy streets toward the football field, its bleachers still brightened by the towering, humming lights. With each minute I felt her temper receding.
Halfway to the field, Dolores stopped and pointed. “There’s the phantom house. That’s what your mom and I call it.” She was pointing to a yard with scrubby forsythia bushes; a gravel drive with a rusting Lincoln Continental. Behind the bushes stood a house with dark-curtained windows, the address 426 on its door.
“Some batty old lady lives inside. But we’ve never seen her—not once! We call her the phantom lady. She’s got a fat son-in-law with a jacked-up truck and a triple gun rack in his back window. He comes once a week to deliver groceries and take the junk mail out of her mailbox. Your mom and I chatted with him once, and man, what a lunatic.”
I stepped farther into the yard. The place was comparable to any other small-town spookhouse: its peeling paint, its broken shutters, its unassuming steel-gray mailbox beside the tiny luminous doorbell. When I saw the box, I knew what I had to do. Silently I repeated the four two six, memorizing it for later. Tonight, after sidetracking Dolores, I planned to dial Gavin’s familiar number. I’d send as much money as I could, instructing him where to mail the package, and I’d watch the house until it arrived.
We reached the chain-link fence that surrounded the field. The game had just finished—disheveled players loaded into the buses, shiny blue helmets under their arms—but I couldn’t gauge whether Haven had won or lost.
“I know something’s wrong,” Dolores said. “It’s like I told you, isn’t it? Something’s wrong in her head.”
The lights glittered on her glasses and exposed the blond dog hairs on her shirt. She turned to lean against the fence, away from the field, until her face was only a shadow. “I know you’ll say it’s none of my business,” she said, “but I found your sister’s work number and gave her a call. I couldn’t wait any longer. Told her to come home as soon as she could.”
“You didn’t.”
“And that’s not all. I was so concerned, I called Kaufman, too. And you know what his secretary said? Your mom hasn’t been showing up for her appointments.”
“That’s not true. I drove her there myself, just last week.”
“Have you been keeping her from treatments?”
“What? Of course not.” This had to be some miscommunication, some mistake. Where had my mother hidden, these recent Fridays, when I’d left her at Kaufman’s office? Where, after entering the gleaming glass doors, as I’d waited in the truck? Had she ducked into a restroom, had she slipped out the side exit?
“You’re making matters worse,” Dolores said. Her face twisted into a sour, reproachful sneer. “You have no right to just swoop in—”
“I have every right to ‘swoop in.’ I’m the son, remember?”
“Away in New York for years doing God knows what, and all the while I’ve been right here.”
I paused to stare at her. It was unclear what she meant by God knows what, but I didn’t like it. Still, I tried to avoid arguing; from experience, I knew the unpredictable, wounding venom that the meth often injected into a fight, a venom that Dolores wasn’t fit to see or hear. I looked beyond the bleachers and exiting cars, the edge of the field, past the houses and shifting silhouettes of trees. Finally, Dolores said, “Your mother’s told me all about the drugs.”
“Oh, please.”
“I can tell you aren’t sleeping. And how skinny you’ve gotten.”
“You don’t know anything.”
“I know plenty. I warned Alice so she won’t be shocked when she sees you. Your eyes’ve gone all crazy, and you’re nothing but bones! You’re an addict.”
Finally I glared at her. “And you’re a drunk. A drunk, nosy bitch.”
She smiled, her face flushed with triumph. Immediately, I regretted my words. Her expression brought me back to a photograph I’d seen, the post-recovery card she’d sent, long ago, to her family and friends. That same self-satisfied smile. I CONQUERED IT, her card had read. I remembered my mother posting it to the refrigerator door. Dolores’s card had stayed there for months until Alice, home for a visit and visibly disgusted, took it down.
“I didn’t really mean that,” I said.
“No, it’s true,” she said through the smile. “I’m a bitch, and I always have been. Your mom never would’ve wanted to know me if I wasn’t. It’s exactly because I’m such a bitch that your mom sticks with me, and it’s why she’s my best friend in this whole damn world. I’m the only bitch who’s willing to help, and to stay right by her side. I wouldn’t have it any other way.”
As she spoke, I felt my resentment dissolve. She was right: she loved my mother fiercely. Proud, well-meaning, fustily tipsy Dolores. Where would my mother be without her help? All summer long, she alone had witnessed the evidence I’d only recently seen: my mother’s aberrant gestures and manners and mistakes, each intimate clue across the house. Stacks of unfinished basement projects…the oily ooze of post-chemo vomit on the bathtub rim…new bruises on her arms and the backs of her calves. Perhaps, I thought now, after this day so unsettled by Otis and my mother’s stories, what I needed was a confidant, an understanding ear. Until I could convince Alice to return home, Dolores was likely all I had.
“I’m sorry,” I said again. “But you’re wrong about the doctor. Honestly. I drove her there last Friday.”
Dolores shook her head. In an oddly graceful motion, with her back still squared against the fence, she slid slowly down to the grass, the crisp brown scatter of leaves. She sat, hugged her knees with her arms, and said, “Then I’m sorry, too. What in the world’s gotten into her? I’ve been worried sick.”
By now, the last cars were steering from the football parking lot, and we watched the scarlet pairs of taillights diverge across the dimming streets. It was time to confess to Dolores. “Earlier tonight,” I began, “she told me everything. All about the disappearance. A long flood of memories, back from when she was a girl.”
“Oh, I can’t bear to hear any more of that. I thought maybe she’d give that up once she got you home.”
“At first I thought like you. I thought it was mostly for attention, or that this obsession with that Henry boy had made her—you know, like you’d told me before—that Henry made her pretend things had happened to her, too.”
She reached for my hand, pulling me down to where she sat on the rough, rusting grass. “Don’t tell me she’s figured out some way to make you believe.”
“After today, I think I’ve changed my mind. Her stories don’t sound false anymore. She’s been giving all these new specifics, things I don’t think she’d make up. And I found her photographs. This coloring book she’s been talking about. Everything, just the way she said. When I looked through it, there was a picture colored fancier than the others. At the bottom, it was signed ‘Warren.’”
“You don’t think she could’ve done that herself?”
“
All these things about the basement and the farm…the sweet old man and woman. It all seems real.”
I waited for her advice. Instead, Dolores seemed puzzled, her face pinched in an almost comic grimace. “You’re confusing me. I know all about this Warren—she’s told me about him. But what’s this other mess you’re talking about?”
“Their kidnappers. The people who took them, then treated them so nice. Like they were their own children.”
“This isn’t making sense. Tell me everything she told you.”
Possibly, in relating her story to Dolores, my mother had condensed the events. I was concerned about breaking her fragile trust, and wondered whether I should continue. Yet I couldn’t stop now. I recounted the parts I could remember. The dinosaurs and peaches; the scratchy, scratchy records; the ring with its blue and purple jewels. The woman and her hymns; the man in his gloves and mask. Board games and candy and Warren, Warren, Warren. Each time I’d pause to recall some feature or slant, Dolores would quietly urge me forward: a validating nod; a fluttery, sparrow’s-wing motion with her hand.
When I’d finished, she said, “I think she’s toying with us. Oh, your naughty, crazy mother!”
“I’m not so sure.”
“Well, this certainly isn’t the story she told me.”
“It’s not?”
“Far from it. Some things are similar, but mostly it’s real different.”
Dolores began relating the version she’d heard. I listened, filled with fluster and awe, nearly gasping at each discrepancy. Even her introduction differed from mine: instead of my mother and Dan in the local playground, her version starred only Donna, alone, in her parents’ backyard. Instead of the sky-blue Imperial, the car in the version she’d told Dolores was a sinister, coal-black Cadillac with clouded windows and crumpled newspapers on the seats. And there was no old woman at all—just a terrible man, violent and mean, who’d kidnapped Donna and the boy named Warren.