“Then I took the joke a little further. I thought it would be good to get out of Sterling awhile. Not that anyone would notice. And your mom…she promised she would give me some money.”
The boy spoke this last bit of information in a humiliated hush. I could picture my mother cashing her disability checks, tucking bills into a special envelope marked Otis. Yes, this explained so much. Clearly, the money had empowered the boy to lie, to maintain the charade.
“But I feel awful now,” he said, hammering a fist against the bed. “I hate myself for lying. There’s got to be some way I can make it up to her—maybe help find what she’s looking for.”
“It’s too late for that.” My voice sounded harsh; I softened it to try and ease his mind. “Remember, though: while you were lying, she was lying too. These stories she’s been telling—she’s gotten to the point where she believes they’re true.”
He stopped to consider these words. Then he said, “I think she stopped believing that I’m only related to Warren. Now I think she believes I really am Warren.”
“You’re probably right.”
I was sticky from drugs and hours of sleep; soon I should try and eat, then drive to the hospital to join Alice. I was still filled with uncertainties and questions for the boy. I stared at him, again picturing his slow, slouching walk at the burned-black roadside, again striving to feel what my mother must have felt. It was easy to see how he’d fooled her.
As though he’d read my thoughts, the boy tentatively smiled, and for a moment I thought yearningly of myself at eighteen. “Allen,” I said. “Is it Allen with two Ls, or one? With an E, or an A?”
“Two Ls. An E. Why?”
“Because that’s my middle name. And that’s how I spell it.”
The boy swung his legs to the floor and began walking from the room, beckoning me to follow. I rose, shirtless and barefoot, from the bed, and went to join him on the living-room couch. Earlier, he’d been watching TV, its volume turned low as though he hadn’t wanted to disturb my sleep. On screen was an old western movie, the distorted picture showing brown grass at the top, then the black stripe, then the sky’s sky blue. And within that light, littering the floor, were my mother’s scrapbooks and photographs. The clippings from True Detective; the letters dumped from her keepsake boxes; her cassette recorder and interview tapes.
“I’ve been looking through these things,” he said. “Her picture albums, and her kitchen walls. And all these things here.”
We sat on the floor, taking opposite sides of the mess. Reverently he dipped both hands into the pile. This was the first time someone, besides my mother or me, had examined the collection. It should have felt like theft or desecration, but, oddly, I didn’t care, I wanted him to see it all. He began holding up individual photos, asking what I knew of each: the past missing children and adults, the notable details from letters she’d received. I surprised myself with how much I remembered. As the minutes passed, I told him the stories of Henry and Evan. Lacey Wyler. Even the recent Barbara Wishman (after the TV bulletin, I’d followed my mother’s instructions and printed a picture from the library’s Internet—Barbara’s crooked grin and glasses, her skin as russet-smooth as the underside of a Hershey bar).
As I spoke, he stayed quiet, nodding and listening, examining each photograph or letter. It had been months, I realized, since I’d experienced this kind of intimacy with anyone besides my mother. As my addictions had deepened, all my friends had gradually dissolved from my life. I’d almost forgotten that essential need to speak with someone, to get this unexpectedly close. Granted, it was only this boy, this Allen or Otis, this stranger who’d deceived my mother and taken her money. But he was enough. During these moments with him, I felt a welcome solace, I felt less broken. I wanted to hook my arm around his shoulders with the verve of an older brother. Or, better still, to exist through him, to live as that boy again.
Then he unearthed the forbidden pictures: those that had scared me as a boy, the ones she’d kept tucked into manila envelopes. Most were pictures and articles from True Detective, grainy black-and-whites of bloodstained bodies, macerated bone. He unfolded a group of pages and handed them to me.
I looked at the photos and immediately remembered. Abigail Mercurio. “Tell me about her,” he said.
I went back to my mother’s early obsessions with the missing. One evening, I remembered, she’d returned from a long shift at the prison with another forbidden True Detective. On the cover, a girl lay bound on a pool table; at the frame’s corner, one meaty hand visible, lurked her attacker. Back then I wanted so badly to understand my mother’s offbeat fascination, and later that night I snuck the magazine to my room to read the lurid story. Abigail Mercurio, seventeen, had failed to return from a local bowling alley. Her mother, Josephine, waited an hour past curfew, then two. Then she called the police.
The True Detective told how her friends, in sworn testimonies, retraced Abigail’s route. They’d dropped her at a convenience store, twelve blocks from home. They’d last seen her through the windows, gliding along the glowing aisles. In the succeeding days came anonymous telephone tips: near Route 17’s bridge, a woman saw a man corralling a young girl, then pushing her into a black car. A sobbing teen with a blood-flecked blouse was spotted in the restroom of the city zoo. But these leads amounted to nothing. By spring, Abigail’s purse surfaced, emptied and smeared with mud, in the city park. Inside were Abigail’s driver’s license; a lipstick and nail polish, both strawberry-red; wallet-sized pictures of friends, her pet cocker spaniel, and Abigail herself, grinning, arm-in-arm with her mother.
While the boy listened, I explained how much these photos had meant to me. I told him how, later in my teens, I’d even used these same pictures of Abigail to my advantage. When boys at school first attempted dating, bringing girls gifts of cheap candy and perfume, I disclosed my own secret: my girlfriend, gorgeous and shy, lived two states south, in Texas. Her name was Abigail. She wore long pigtails and had bright red lips. She pitched for her softball team, expert at hurling windmill, strike after strike. She collected stuffed monkeys; I’d even sent her one, a goofy, mutely grinning toy made from sweat socks and buttons for eyes.
I held up Abigail’s school photo, taken weeks before her disappearance. “This was the picture I taped inside my locker. And everyone believed me.”
“But I thought you didn’t like girls,” the boy said.
So my mother had divulged this, too; maybe he’d simply figured it out. Still, it was an honest question, free of judgment or scorn. So I told him he was right. I’d used the pictures as protection, the bulwark against my true desires.
“When I was a teenager,” I said, “I used to go to Carey Park in Hutchinson. Out there, I could get drugs whenever I wanted, and I could even get anonymous sex. Those nights in that park, I knew there was no going back. My old self faded away…out there, I became someone new.”
“But you didn’t want anyone else to know. So you told them about this girl from the magazine instead.”
“I was a liar. I wanted them to think I was someone else. Someone they’d talk about with pride instead of scorn…maybe I said these things so they’d always remember me.”
Now he was eyeing me critically. I knew what he was thinking: these words, these admissions, could have been describing any of us. My mother, myself, and the boy: we’d all told these kinds of lies.
“That’s the one thing I always shared with her,” I finally said, “even when I couldn’t understand her obsession. Both back then, and recently. I loved helping her make up the rest of their stories.”
It seemed he didn’t understand, so I explained. “We’d see these pictures on TV or in magazines. But it was always just the basics: the ‘missing person’ sign, with the smiling picture beneath it. We wanted more than that. So we got really good at inventing the rest. It made us feel like we knew these people. If we could give someone a little history, like a favorite food or a favorite song, some secrets no one el
se knew—that’s what made them real.”
He reached across the pile and took the True Detective pages from me. He looked through each photo, settling on the final frame: a model of Abigail’s body, a recreation of the crime. The picture revealed no face—just a shoulder, an arm’s inelegant curve, the rest obscured by shadows and weeds—but I could tell he imagined the skin as Abigail’s. She lay beside a mud-stained mattress. Above her the trees, damp with recent rain, dropped leaves like kisses. The roots took tangle of her hair. Her legs were covered with earth, and the body’s twist gave the appearance of struggle—as though she had strained, even in death, to free herself from the shallow grave.
The boy stretched out, lying back against the floor, his shaggy hair scribbling across the rug. “I wonder where her family lives now,” he said. “Wonder where she’s buried. Wonder how often they still think about her.”
“I’m sure they think about her every single day.”
He closed his eyes. The light in the room was dusky and frail, like the light in an old home movie. I got two pillows from the couch, sliding one beneath his neck for comfort, using the other for myself. And then, just as my mother and I had always done, the boy and I began to embellish and revise the story.
Perhaps, that night, Abigail Mercurio had trounced her friends at bowling, scoring 144 to their 120, 95, and 62. Perhaps she had used a blue marbled ball, and the next night, at the alley, another bowler found a red fingernail in the thumbhole, chipped on Abigail’s attempt at a strike. We guessed that maybe, in that store, she had shoplifted a chocolate cupcake, waiting until the clerk glanced away from the ceiling’s mirror to transfer it to her purse. Maybe she’d been softly singing as the car pulled into the lot; and maybe she was licking the cake’s vanilla filling when she heard his voice, catching just then, in the lowered window, those asterisk eyes that already saw her death.
My mother would have been proud at our skill at reinventing the story. After we finished, we stayed motionless for a long, quiet minute. Then, in a whisper, Allen asked, “Was she always so cool?”
At first I thought he meant Abigail. Then I realized. “She was a great mom,” I said. “Unlike anyone else’s. She always wanted us to do things no one else got to do.”
“What things?”
“She’d make up weird games. She’d find old cookbooks in junk stores, and she’d help us with the recipes. She’d take us places no one else had seen. I don’t mean foreign countries or resorts or anything like that. I mean places like abandoned houses that were supposed to be haunted. Like rock quarries. Catfish ponds. Once, we found this field with wild blueberries growing everywhere. Places we weren’t supposed to trespass.”
By now it was very late. I’d told the boy so much about my mother; I’d revealed stories from my childhood, and admitted long-held teenage secrets of Carey Park. I could have revealed even more, but the fatigue and grief had altered my voice, forcing me to stop. Once again it was time to leave, to join Dolores and Alice and my mother. I headed to the bedroom for a clean shirt and jeans.
The boy pushed himself from the floor but went in the opposite direction, moving through the kitchen, toward the basement door. “Yes, she was a wonderful mom,” I said as he walked away.
NINE
OUTSIDE THE HOSPITAL windows, the storm became a sermon. Slow drifts were settling across the parking lot; the deserted, frosted football fields; the edge-of-town liquor stores and filling stations with their fractured neon lights. One clear-sky afternoon last week, Dolores had stared from the window and pointed out Hutchinson’s distant city-limits sign, perpetually vandalized with spray paint and bullet holes; yet when she looked there this morning, she saw nothing but white. From the hall drifted a song from an intern’s radio, the static crackling like shook tin, and when the music stopped, a female newscaster’s voice—perhaps the same we’d heard in the truck, the night of the accident—reported the snow would continue all weekend.
The room, once smelling of lemons, was now only sour liniments and dripping medications. Alice sat at the foot of the bed; Dolores took the chair; I stood and occasionally paced. My mother was sleeping, and I could sense the comfort the morphine gave her: the richness, the smudging of tension. I realized this was supposed to relieve me, too.
Before noon, Alice decided to return to Haven. “I should feed the cat and catch a few hours of sleep.” Later tonight, after one last visit to the hospital room, she would drive back to Lawrence, to her own home and little vintage shop. She had learned so much during her brief time with our mother: the padded bedside chair on which Dolores and I had frequently drifted to sleep; the wheelchair’s faulty wheel; the nurses named Elva and Danny and Pearl. She’d learned all the bruises from the needles and the port in her chest. Alice had even gotten Kaufman’s requisite briefing, the same he’d given me. And yesterday, during the short, single interval our mother had been awake and lucid, Alice had taken her outside to smoke, and therefore knew the scenes we could see from our hill in the hospital lot: the sunset over Hutchinson’s trees, the long, white grain elevators, the desolate evening train with its echoing whistle.
Presently, Alice bent over the bed, kissed our mother’s forehead just below the scar, and rubbed the kiss with two fingers. “Be back this evening,” she told us. The final time, we all were thinking, the final visit. She still seemed upset with me, and I didn’t try to stop her when she left the room. If the time had come for her to discover the boy, I could do nothing more to prevent it.
Dolores stood at the window, watching Alice exit the sliding doors and cross the icy parking lot. Then she said, “I have something you need to see.”
On the bedside table, beside her deck of cards and gossipy tabloids, was the stack of my mother’s mail. Almost daily, I’d been bringing it from home, but, since securing my own treasured package from Gavin, hadn’t bothered opening the letters. And since Kaufman had prescribed the morphine, my mother no longer had the strength to read them, either.
As Dolores showed me now, the mail consisted of more than the usual bills. She’d received two belated responses to her missing-persons ads: one from Salina, another from Lyons. But Dolores wasn’t interested in those. She held out a small white envelope: “Here’s the one I want you to read.”
My mother’s name and address were written in a florid, fat-looped cursive on the front. In the upper corner, the return address was The Triple Crown Riding Stable, Rural Route 2, Sterling, Kansas.
As I unfolded the letter, Dolores stepped closer to look over my shoulder. “I didn’t know if Alice should see this or not,” she said. “I’ve been saving it for you. Go ahead—read it.”
Dear Donna,
How nice it was to get the note you left for me. I’m very sorry I missed you when you were here. My brother in Goodland has been ill with leukemia, and my husband and I were away both times you came to the stables. (That is also why it has taken me so long to write this reply!) Perhaps we’ll get to meet someday soon, though!
I’m sorry my assistant was unable to answer your questions. Unfortunately I’m afraid I won’t be much help to you, either. But I’ll try my best.
Before we bought the stables, they were owned by a family named Barton. They’d only been running things for a few years. I know they’d bought the place from a man named Robert Lockridge (hope I’m spelling that right!). Robert had inherited everything—land, house, horses, all of it—from his family, after his mother and father passed. But before the Lockridges, your guess is as good as mine!
I do know that the Triple Crown has been in operation for many, many years—probably more years than either you or I have been alive!
I’m wishing you the best of luck in finding out more information. Please do let me know if there’s any way I can help with all the research for your book. It sounds like something I’d very much like to read when it’s all done!
Sincerely,
Patricia (“Pat”) Claussen
When I finished, Dolores took the lette
r from me, sliding it back into its envelope. “Right away I thought of her stories,” she said. “Remember in my version, what she’d said? A sound like horses, clomping on the ground above that cellar? And then there was your version—how the man smelled like horses and hay, and how there was manure on his boots.”
“Alice said the man from the carnival was a horse trainer.”
(And in my head, kept secret from Dolores, were the boy’s words from the previous night: We drove her pickup around Sterling. Around the whole county, out by the salt mines and then the old riding stable. We parked and just sat there, watching.)
Dolores thought of other connections, details I’d previously told her. “Sterling Repair,” she said. “And that red circle on her little map.” She turned toward the bed, directing a perplexed smile at my mother, and then looked back to me. “Do you know this Pat woman? Have you heard of these other folks mentioned in here?”
“That letter is all a big surprise.”
“I suppose there’s a chance it doesn’t mean anything. Only a nice reply to some random note she left out there. Maybe we’re grasping at straws. Could be this is just another part of her great big delusion.”
“But I think we should drive out to the place. Don’t you? We could take a little trip. Just the two of us.”
The suggestion seemed to warm Dolores. I was reaching out; I was including her in the plan. She grinned like a child who’d made a first friend, and, with a sharp, sudden woe, I recalled Alice’s story about Ernest.
“Have you been out there before?” she asked. “To the riding stable?”
“I remember driving past when we were kids. She’d take us out to Sterling sometimes, and yeah, there were days she’d take that route. Triple Crown—yes. I remember they’d sometimes braid the manes or tails of their horses. Mostly palominos, but they had some Shetland ponies, too, and one tall appaloosa that Alice loved.”