But I could clean the mess later. For now, there was the basement; the dark, cobwebbed storage room. Gradually, with a rising dread, I’d begun to understand the reason for her errand.
I kicked the embarrassing pink slippers from my feet, then opened the basement door and descended. I pulled the chain of an overhead lamp to brighten more shadows. I pulled the lamp in the adjoining bathroom. I added some sun by drawing the miniature curtains that looked out, weed-level, to the garden.
A spoor of dried mud led to the little black door. The key was still in the lock. With a push, I opened the door on the room.
The boy was sitting on a foldout cot she had prepared for him. “Hey,” he said, and put his hand to the scarf around his neck. “I know I’m supposed to keep this over my mouth, but she didn’t make it tight enough.”
“Oh, my God,” I said.
He wore the tennis shoes from the day we’d found him on the road. He wore the sweatshirt with the overstretched sleeves. The shirt beneath was different—only a white T-shirt now, its neck frayed—but the name tag remained, the tiny OTIS at the bottom and the empty, nameless space above.
His eyelashes were damp, the lids heavy with recent sleep. His hair seemed curlier, messier. Above the ear was a spot where the barber had slipped. His face still showed the bored, bullying sneer; I wanted to push or punch him, to retaliate for our last contact. But I could only stand and breathe his smell. It was a humid, almost appealing smell, a sweet, adolescent sweat. With horror, I noticed his feet were tied with rope. His hands, dark with grime and balled in his lap, were secured with the silver KSIR prison handcuffs she’d always kept in the briefcase below her bed.
Beside the boy, at the foot of the cot, sat one of her quilted, bead-eyed rabbits. Scattered wrappers from the Cherry Mash bars, an empty carton of milk, and the missing pints of ice cream: black walnut, rocky road.
“She finally told you I was here,” Otis said.
“How long?”
“Don’t know. Two days, I guess. Just about three.” He kicked his roped feet from the edge of the cot, bumping the empty rocky road to the corner of the room. “She’ll get mad if you knock me around,” he said.
A numbness began spreading along my knees and thighs; to keep from folding to the floor, I leaned against the doorframe. “She’s in the hospital,” I told him. “She fell. During the night, she fell and hit her head.”
His eyes widened; his mouth opened like a trap. I could see the worry he felt was genuine. He asked would she be okay, and I told him no. I told him she was dying. She was incredibly sick, she was dying, and I didn’t know how much longer she had. “That’s the reason I left New York,” I said. “I came back home to help her die.”
I’d never said these words before. I spoke them with a detached, clinical quiet, and I knew the news hurt him. It thrilled me to see him hurt. I despised his sweating teenager’s body, now thrust like a thorn into our house.
He said he needed the bathroom. I let him shuffle to the cramped sewing-room toilet. Please don’t be mad kept repeating in my head as I waited outside the door.
When finished, he flushed, stood beside me, and let me lead him back to the room. He propped her homemade rabbit on his lap. He complained of hunger, but I told him that would have to wait. I had to think for a while. I had to return to her hospital bed.
“Aren’t you going to make my rope any tighter?” he asked. “Aren’t you going to put the gag back on?”
“No,” I told him. “Not now.”
But I found myself stepping closer to the cot. I found my hands moving over the ropes; over the knotted scarf, the paisley purple fabric she’d originally intended for one of the cancer newsletter’s patients but had used for him, this boy disappeared from a trailer park in a lonely town, this boy she’d taken. With surprise, I saw the gag was not just fabric but a fully finished product: she’d withdrawn a completed scarf for this sole purpose. In my trembling hands, I saw the intricate stitches she’d used, stitches made special for another dying woman like herself, the scarf she’d now used for him. I pulled the gag tighter around his mouth. I knotted it twice behind his neck. I pushed him, gagged and bound, back to the sweat-salty cot.
He tried to speak again, but I couldn’t understand. I shut the lights and left him in the dark. Before locking the storeroom door, before racing back upstairs, I took one last look at him. The burn and bore of his eyes on me. The calculated whimper from the back of his throat.
SEVEN
SOMETIMES IT SEEMED that everything she’d recently done—all her fraudulence, the hoaxes on the mourning families and friends, and now, her capture of Otis—was shameful, monstrous, vile. And I felt equally guilty; I’d allowed it all to happen. For three cold days, as I drove from the hospital to home and back again, I searched for possible solutions and remedies. Nothing, it seemed, could lull the racket in my head. The only relief was dreaming of worse. Sins more wicked than ours. Somewhere, in some shadowy bedroom of a leaf-strewn town, a father bolts the door to a child’s room, then steps closer to the bed. In a neighbor’s garden lurks a weed with a fumy, blade-petaled flower, its poison choking the red roses. Somewhere a car is crashing; a phone is ringing in the center of night. The spider waits poised in the slipper. The bird swoops headlong into glass it thought was farther air. The strangler envisions a neighborhood of throats. The head finds the noose; the foot kicks the chair.
After discovering Otis, I began to feel the onset of withdrawal. The sudden rashes and nausea; the paranoia and delirious bouts of grief. Nearly two years had passed since I’d endured even a three-day stretch without meth, and I wasn’t sure I could fight the symptoms. So, one evening, in desperation, I coasted through Hutchinson’s Carey Park, hoping to find a dealer.
I’d learned the secrets of the park one summer during my teens (close to Otis’s age, I told myself). Carey was more than just a duck pond and playground; more than a greenly sloping golf course. It was a park, I learned, where dealers sometimes sold acid and pot and cocaine. It was a park where men—older, fleshy men with downcast eyes and delusory wedding rings on their fingers—often cruised for sex. I never told my mother or my friends about these newfound secrets. Instead, I began driving there late at night. I’d linger in the gray moonlight, on the weed-snarled riverbank marred with desire lines and boot tracks, waiting for someone to approach or proposition me. Often, I stood alone in the woods that bordered the park, earphones in my ears and Walkman turned low as I watched the spangle and glide of the river, as I waited for anyone else to show. I’d feel feverish with the simple, primal fact of what could happen. Many times I’d chicken out. But there were other, rare nights when I accepted their offers, when I got high on whatever they gave me, when I fumbled through my first turns with anonymous sex. Those nights, in the shadows of the Carey Park trees, felt like waking from a lifetime of sleep.
But presently, it appeared that all the dealing had stopped. I saw three cars parked near the entrance to the woods, but my broken body wanted drugs, not sex, and I didn’t stop to investigate.
My only hope was Gavin. Finally, I telephoned him and, during a prolonged, pleading exchange, tried persuading him to send half a gram to the mailbox down the block. I promised he’d receive a money order by the end of next week. Pitifully, I used my mother’s accident to full advantage: recalling his squeamishness, I lingered on the blood, the stitches, the needles and curls of IV tubing.
Eventually, Gavin surrendered and agreed. Now all I could do was attend to my mother, to the boy in the basement, until the blessed package arrived.
During those first days, I brought Otis water, cookies, and sandwiches of dill pickles and processed cheese. I led him to the bathroom, then back to the cot. When I’d loosen the knots on the gag, he’d ask about my mother’s condition; he’d want to know what events she’d planned for him next. “Please don’t speak to me yet,” I said, avoiding his dark eyes. As I secured the cuffs and retied the knots, I’d think of Henry or Evan; of my mothe
r’s stories of Warren; even of myself, back then, a thin and grimy boy.
I’d been watching the news reports, waiting for some bulletin about Otis. Surely someone was hunting for him. Parents, teachers, friends. Somewhere he had a bedroom; somewhere a bed, its pillows and sheets still tangled. In a solemn schoolroom, his vacant seat was waiting. The principal, the janitors, the surviving students; everyone peeked into the room as they passed, one last glimpse at that empty space, the missing boy.
In my mounting paranoia, I worried Otis would escape and run to the police. I feared they’d arrest my mother or discover my addiction. And I feared the boy himself, remembering his fists, the scrape of his nails.
I have to release him, I kept telling myself. And yet, for some remote reason, it seemed he didn’t want to be free.
In the hospital room, I tried confronting my mother, but Dolores made this impossible. She became a loyal, ceaselessly chatting fixture, lounging in the chair beside the window. On the first morning, she’d brought a rowdy assortment of carnations, a tin of black licorice, and a silver Mylar balloon, now floating its cliché above the bed. She’d even snuck a pair of strawberry milkshakes past the nurses. When my mother couldn’t finish, Dolores drank them both herself.
This same crisp, cloudless morning, I met Doctor Kaufman. He walked into my mother’s hospital room as though he owned it, looking older and wiser than I’d expected. “Ta da,” my mother said when he appeared. He had wrinkled, impossibly long hands that protruded from his coat sleeves; rust-colored skin from too many tans; a frizz of white hair above each ear. His look was more professor than doctor. Only his eyes were lively, pale blue behind his glasses. He watched me warily, as though he knew, as Dolores already knew, the jittery escalation of my withdrawal.
“Well, ain’t this a party,” said Dolores. “All of us, here at last.”
Kaufman gave a faint, fake chuckle. “Weather’s starting to get wintry out there,” he said; the inevitable, unnerving small talk. I wanted to push him away, push Dolores away, to confront my mother with all the questions in my head. How did you muster the strength to steal him? Did someone see your crime? Won’t his parents call the police? How can I sleep with that boy, below me, cuffed and tied in that room?
For fifteen minutes, the three of them spoke more about the weather, about the doctor’s children. I nodded and nodded, waiting to catch my mother’s eye, but soon Dolores suggested it was time to let the patient sleep. Maybe the ladies could wait in the room, while the men (for once she called me man, not boy) could go to the lobby.
Dr. Kaufman led me to the receptionist’s desk, now newly decorated for autumn. The cellophane butterscotch candies; the husks of Indian corn and striped, warted gourds; the scarecrows and pilgrim dolls. He planted his elbow beside the cheap tableaux and coughed into his fist. “So we should speak,” he said. “I assume you haven’t been apprised of the full situation here.”
Behind the desk, the receptionist inched her chair toward the opposite wall, pretending not to listen. “If you’d just give me the specifics,” I said.
“Around the beginning of July, I knew we couldn’t do anything else. I told Donna this. She was supposed to let you know.”
“I thought she was still going in for treatments. I’ve been driving to your office most Fridays.”
He tilted his head, a deep, abstracted distance in his gaze. From down the hall, I heard the ping of an elevator’s door; the rhythm of a wetly thrapping mop. Around us, the hospital was being cleaned, but the clean had a stagnant smell, as though the same water had been used for every mop, every sponge.
And then he began his over-rehearsed speech. It was the sort of speech I’d remember all my life: the one that every son, every daughter, waits to someday hear. He began by generalizing all the familiar facts. The non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma or, specifically, the diffuse, large B-cell lymphoma. For years, her doctors had kept it localized; for years, different rounds of therapy had stopped it from spreading. There were the brief remissions, the shimmers and rallies. But afterward, unfailingly, the sudden returns.
“All this is familiar to me,” I said. “Tell me the things I don’t know.”
The doctor nodded. He went back to the blistering days of July, when the tests showed no improvement from her most recent round of chemo. Kaufman tried injections with what he called “a biological agent.” All this had further depleted her immune system. The bruises big as palm prints; the lumps and infections and sores. They agreed to stop the injections until her opportunistic infections ceased. In the meantime, her lymphoma spread. It no longer centralized in her nodes or the spot in her stomach. Now it moved through the blood, to the kidneys and liver. And maybe, after last night, he said, the spinal cord or brain.
“I remember she asked me how long she had,” he said. “I suppose the time comes when you have to be frank.”
“And what did you say?”
“Christmastime, if we were lucky.”
I thought of Christmas, only weeks away. As always, my mother planned to center tiny electric candles in the windows, to spray flecks of aerosol snow on the glass. She would construct her artificial tree in the corner beside the couch. As I pictured this, I saw its clumped green pieces on the basement shelf, so close beside the pair of binders with the photos of missing children; just above the cot and the hungry, handcuffed boy.
Christmas. I tried imagining her face as he’d spoken the appointed date. Surely she wouldn’t accept this conclusion. There were still so many things to do. Still Christmas dolls to make. Still, the rabbits and Santas and holiday elves; the handmade scarves to mail in carefully wrapped boxes. And soon afterward, the spring planting; her summer garden.
But I had heard Kaufman’s words. I had listened well and absorbed his news. For a doctor—the lifesaving doctor she’d told me so much about—the man was unexpectedly imperfect; his breath was oniony and there were scalp flakes on his collar. I sensed the currents of power in him, yet I knew that in his imperfection, he could only save my mother so many times.
He posted his hand on my shoulder as though to steady me. “It’s good of you to come back here. I know she doesn’t want to worry you, or Alice.”
“Alice checked out of this a long time ago,” I said. “She got tired of hearing ‘your mother’s sick, she’s going to die.’ And then a remission. And then another, and another. For Alice, after the first few years, it was like crying wolf.”
“Alice needs to know,” he said, “that we’re no longer crying wolf.”
Kaufman sighed, and I could sense his impatience, his need to finish the discussion. Then he said, “We’ll need to keep your mother here awhile. But after she goes home, would you like a hospice caregiver to start visiting? What about a pastor—would she appreciate that?”
I doubted I could endure a stranger in our house, some woman tarnished with countless previous deaths, bathing my mother with a sponge in the clawfoot tub. I certainly couldn’t handle any starch-collared apostle, speaking in sentences peppered with angels and Christ. But “Yes” was what I told Kaufman. “Yes, those would be nice.”
He reached across the desk and found a pen. “I forgot to bring my cards. But please—whenever you need me.” He wrote his telephone number on the back of a medication pamphlet. On its cover were the words If you’re often tired and want to GET BACK INTO LIFE. In the photograph, the powdered, genially grinning women looked nothing like my mother.
In the days before Alice arrived, I kept my reluctant promise and tended to Otis. Otherwise, I stayed away from home, from him, as much as possible. I patrolled the “phantom house” down the block, shuffling cautiously past to check for my package in its mailbox. But there was nothing; not yet. I tried calling Gavin for an update, but he wouldn’t answer his phone.
Sometimes, driving to the hospital, I’d make impulsive detours to Sterling or Partridge or beyond. I discovered the Barradales had removed Henry’s tire swing from its tree. I discovered that, indeed, among the list of nam
es on my mother’s rest-stop wall, was a single, looming WARREN.
But I heard nothing about a newly missing boy. Not in Sterling, not anywhere else. No alerts on the pickup’s reedy radio; no thumbtacked posters with the boy’s leering face.
Gradually, the withdrawal was getting worse, making me tremble and grind my teeth, making me pace the hospital floor like a cat in its cage. One evening in particular, Dolores visibly recoiled from me; I could see her concern in the creases around her forehead and eyes. Once again she refused to leave the bedside chair, even when I proposed relieving her by taking one of her nightly shifts.
“Absolutely not,” she said. “Seems what you need is a good strong sleep.”
Beside us, my mother looked peaceful in her blue robe, the blankets pulled to her chin. “Don’t you need to tidy up at home?” I asked. “Go shopping, feed the dog?”
“This is what matters to me now.”
“Then maybe just leave us alone a few minutes. Go out and smoke in the smoking lobby. Go get some coffee.”
She waited with a suspicious frown, stood from the chair, and walked to the door. I listened until her footsteps stopped and I heard the hallway’s pinging elevator. Then I sat on my mother’s bed and said, “I know you’re awake.”
She opened one eye partway, then both of them together. “Thought I was fooling you.”
“I can’t go through with this Otis business.”
“Please don’t set him free.”
“Alice will be here in two days. What the hell am I supposed to do then?”
“I’m just getting to know him.” She was whispering now, as though one of the ceaselessly lurking nurses might hear. “And he likes me. I just know he’s the connection to Warren.”
“But you don’t know that. How could you know that?”
“I told you—he looks so much like him. It all makes sense to me. I can just feel it.”