“Did she ever stop so you could go inside and saddle up?”
“Never. I always thought maybe it cost too much, or she was worried we’d get hurt on the horses.” I paused, trying to focus the vague memories. “To be honest, driving past the place was never anything out of the ordinary—I mean, no more important than any other part of driving to Sterling.”
A slight draft shuddered the curtains. We turned toward the door just as Kaufman entered the room. I hadn’t seen him in days. His skin seemed less tanned, and he’d started growing a thin moustache. He moved closer to the bed, beginning his usual small talk.
Dolores’s distaste for him was immediately palpable, and she interrupted before he finished his sentence. “Any news to report?” she asked.
He nodded, still watching my mother. “We’re going to let her have her wish.” The doctor addressed me directly, as though unsure how to speak to Dolores; I felt a sting of privilege. “She was begging and begging to go home. So we’ve finalized things with the hospice, and I’d say two, three days, we’ll be ready to go.”
He unfolded some papers from his coat pocket and offered them to me. Dolores stepped closer and, just as she’d done with the letter from the stable, stretched to peek over my shoulder. The papers were promotional brochures from Hutchinson Hospice. On one cover, an elderly woman sat at the transom of a small boat, two towheaded grandchildren rowing from the hull, gliding along a shimmering river. All seemed contented in their orange life jackets and wide, white smiles. Just because she’s dying…doesn’t mean she shouldn’t be living.
“We all had a discussion yesterday when your sister was here,” Kaufman said. “She had a little bit of energy…Alice took her outside, and when they came back, we all had our talk.” He was enunciating carefully, as though addressing small, suspicious children. “We agreed it’s time to let her loose.”
“You agreed,” I said.
“Time to go home. She doesn’t have to fight anymore.”
Let her loose. Even now, it was so difficult to picture my mother surrendering. There would be no more Friday appointments, I told myself. No self-administered Neupogen shots. No routine anxieties over her hair, her blood counts, or the rigid port in her chest.
No missions. No days for just the two of us, only son and mother, aimless drives across the plains on her urgent, ravenous search.
The hallway radio stopped with an audible click. In its place, a long, glacial silence. And then, for the first time all day, my mother opened her eyes.
We stood without moving. She seemed much thinner, tinier than before: her frail, exhausted body bent into the bed like a broken arm in its sling. Suddenly I wanted to leave with her, to wheel her outside and watch as she felt the fragrant, always startling chill on her face.
She opened her mouth and whispered a single word, meant for neither Dolores nor Kaufman, but solely for me. Warren was the word she said.
I stepped closer to the bedside. My mother had shut her eyes again but was straining, it seemed, to open them. I could tell she wanted to speak further, and worried she might begin the random, muddled speech that had recently accompanied her late-night dreams: the half-strings of sentences, the incoherent flares of memory.
But this time her meaning was clear. She repeated the words of her doctor: “I don’t have to fight anymore.”
“Take it easy. It’s okay.” I sounded artificial, like a character from some afternoon drama on her damaged TV. Once, I knew, she would have teased me about this. I wanted her to hear her teasing me.
“Bend down here,” she said.
I took her hand and put my face close to hers. There were new bruises at her clavicle and throat; an arc of blood had dried on her bottom lip. Her familiar smell had diminished completely.
She lifted her chin, and I felt her breath against my ear. “Have there been any others?” she asked.
At first I couldn’t grasp her meaning, and shook my head in confusion. She tried to swallow; the attempt caused her obvious pain.
“Has anyone disappeared?”
Still I couldn’t give her an answer. I’d withdrawn from the game: no more tracking the news reports, no more library research or photographs pinned to the walls. So I moved even closer and started repeating all the false assurances, only faintly aware of my words. Everything will be okay, soon we’ll all be relaxing at home, you can slip into your nightgown and watch your own TV and I’ll pour you a great big glass of iced tea.
Her grip on my hand began to weaken, and, to compensate, I pressed hers tighter. Through the morphine she had flickered briefly: the glitter on the wave, inside the blank, black sea. But now she was sleeping again. She had turned her head, her delicate ear against the mattress. Dolores stepped beside me, and we stared down at my mother. With her fixed frown, her closed eyes, and her pinched, intent brow, she seemed to be listening for some imminent secret, her ear pressed close to the sheet. Her expression didn’t change. She was patiently, trustfully waiting, as though someone or something, soon, might speak to her, a voice that would rise through the coils and cotton of the bed, through the ceiling of the second floor below, or the ceiling of the first. Even a voice, perhaps, from the earth itself. So none of us moved. My mother did not move, still mutely waiting, still listening for that grand, unreachable secret. How badly I longed to join her there. How badly I wanted to hear it, too.
When I got home, I couldn’t find Alice or the boy. I went to the bedroom to smoke more meth, but, with a charge of panic, saw that Gavin’s recent gift was nearly gone.
From some part of the house, I could hear a voice: small and wounded, like a cry, or the noise made to stop a cry. It was a pale sound, a ghost’s sound, and I looked toward the pictures on the wall, where all the dead, my mother’s parents and sisters and brothers, continued their quiet surveillance. I put down the pipe, but now could hear only the heater’s electric chuff. A windowpane rattled; the wind combed snow from the roof. I cocked my head, believing the drug would sharpen my hearing: a precision, a squinting of the ear. Slow silence. And then, once again, the noise of someone crying.
I left the bed and moved through the house, passing the empty space on the couch, the mess on the kitchen floor. Reaching the basement door, I twisted the knob and descended.
The dirty cot had been dragged from the storage room to the middle of the basement. Beside it was the Christmas tree, now fully constructed, no ornaments or tinsel or spired star. Sitting beneath the tree, in the center of the cot, was Alice. She was alone, and she was crying. Upon seeing me, she tried to stop, hissing the breaths thinly through her teeth. Then she gave up and let the weeping unravel. I hadn’t seen her cry in years—ever since our mother’s first diagnosis, she’d stayed willful and defiant—and now the spectacle of it, the noise, was stabbingly brutal. I could only watch, unable to move, pinned in place by the thorns from her throat.
Behind Alice, behind the false evergreen shadows of the tree, the basement had been transformed. Sometime during the morning, while the boy was alone, he’d been stacking boxes and old clothes, shaping constructions from our mother’s unused mementoes and antiques. He’d made totems of various heights, some orderly, others jumbled: I recognized old suitcases, maple-syrup sap buckets, and a revolving gemstone globe with a splintered stand. Rain gauges and egg scales. A dented gas can (OGILVIE OIL); a wooden pop-bottle crate (MOUNTAIN DEW FLINT MICHIGAN). The boy had tied objects together with wire, with John’s neckties, with scraps of my mother’s scarves. I could see her stuffed cottontail rabbits, riding the backs of the carousel horses. The manual Remington typewriter on which she used to type letters, those days after I’d moved to New York, with their off-kilter K and L and comma keys.
By rearranging the room, he’d inadvertently brought back old images, focused so many blurred memories and moments. It was this renovated basement, I saw now, that had upset Alice: he’d exposed a history, the jumbled remnants of a life. I stepped closer and sat beside her on the cot. I noticed that to fight
the chill, she wore her yellow earmuffs and mittens; beside her, with closed eyes and a loud, reverberant purr, was Bones the cat.
“Why did you do this?” she asked.
I started to explain, to reveal the true culprit. Then I saw that the door to the storage room had swung slightly open, and beyond it, the cramped space was empty.
I realized then that the boy was gone.
Alice still knew nothing of him. I knew if she heard the truth, the account of the kidnapped boy, she wouldn’t believe a word of it. The events of the past days would seem preposterous, just as my mother’s carnival story had seemed preposterous, and she would blame the drugs. So I confessed to building the towers behind us. I told her that yes, I’d assembled the Christmas tree.
Alice had lowered her head, bent as though crumpling from inside. I placed a hand on her shoulder, and softly, steadily, the trembling and weeping ceased. She wiped her nose with the left-hand mitten. “If you’re going to stay here during the final days,” she said, “then please, please try to stay away from the drugs. Please be yourself—not some nervous, hallucinating addict. Do it for her. Please just be Scott.”
Unlike the previous day, her words carried no anger or tart, scolding tone. “I’ll try,” I said. Clearly, this promise wasn’t enough for her, so I amended it: “Okay, I will.”
We sat surveying the towers and stacks. Eventually, I remembered the letter. I took it from my coat pocket and dropped it on Alice’s knee. In the dusky basement light, I watched her read the florid sentences. At first it seemed she’d cry again: her eyebrows trembling, her lower lip tucking between her teeth. But she remained calm. She finished the letter, read it a second time, then folded it back into the envelope and closed her eyes.
In her lap, the cat purred ceaselessly. Alice said, “Maybe you’re right, after all. I think something really did happen back then. Something she’s kept from us, all these years.”
“What makes you say that now?”
“Because of this letter. The riding stable. You don’t remember me telling you that story?”
“What story?”
“The one about the dolls,” she said. “Years and years ago. You know—that time she drove me out to the horse stable in the middle of the night, and we buried the dolls.”
“Really, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
I apologized for not remembering, then begged Alice to tell the story again. She took me back twenty, almost thirty years. As a girl, she said, she’d had an impressive collection of dolls. Remember? She kept them in a corner of her bedroom, their bodies assembled in a heavy hope chest, lined with crushed crimson velvet, secured with a gold escutcheon and its own set of keys. But when she was thirteen or fourteen, she decided she’d grown too old for dolls. She simply didn’t want them anymore. Our mother said it was fine; if she wanted, they would take her collection to one of the downtown thrift shops and give them away, “so some other little girl could love them.”
Alice paused. “But a few days later, she said she’d changed her mind. She had an even better idea.” She lifted Bones from the cot, cradling him against her chest. “It was a winter night, probably not too different from tonight. When we lived in the old farmhouse on the hill, way out on Plum Street.”
“Would this have been during the time she was drinking? Around the time of Evan Carnaby, when she first got so interested in missing people?”
Alice thought for a moment. “Yes, probably around that time.”
“I had a feeling you’d say that. But keep telling the story.”
“She said if we wanted, if it was true I’d grown too old for dolls, then she and I could ‘lay them to rest.’ I wasn’t sure what she meant. But we put on our scarves and our hats, and she got two big shovels from the work shed. We crammed their little bodies in a laundry bag, and out we went. You must have been asleep in bed, but she didn’t seem to care. We got into the car, and she started driving. After a while, the snow was falling fast and heavy. And I remember being scared—such a horrible feeling, a girl scared of her mother like that—scared because she drove so fast, and she wasn’t saying a word, just staring at the road.”
Alice spoke of the gathering snow, the slickly dangerous ice. She remembered their black coats and boots; the shovel blades clanging in the backseat. They’d arrived at the Triple Crown stable, parked at the end of the dark drive, and then gotten out of the car. “Follow me, as quiet as you can,” our mother had said. They brushed plumes of snow from the fencerows before helping each other over. They moved with sly, tiptoed steps, hiking farther through the field with their shovels at their sides.
As I listened, I tried pursuing my sister and mother as they walked: the shelterbelt of juniper trees, frozen broom-weed tangling at their ankles, clouds creasing the high white moon. I could hear the croak of snow beneath their boots. I could see the palominos and the single appaloosa, snuffling neck-to-neck for warmth.
At last our mother stopped and leaned against her shovel. “Right here’s a good enough spot,” she said. She checked east toward the stables, then west toward the rows of white-tipped evergreens, assuring they couldn’t be seen. “Let’s hurry and finish.” The ground was hard and obstinate, but she cut at it, Alice told me, digging just enough for a shallow mass grave. And together they unloaded the dolls. Alice lined them up, fussily tucking each body into the pockets of dirt. She smoothed their plastic faces with her mittens (I imagined their yellow, as her mittens now were yellow, the soil crumbling like gingerbread against the wool).
Finally, our mother refilled the hole to bury the dolls. Alice watched them disappear. Cold Kansas earth in their hair, in their plastic nostrils and nails, the sockets of their skulls.
I lay back on the cot. “I can’t believe I have no memory of this,” I said. “Really, you’ve told me before? Maybe it’s the drugs. A story like that, and I didn’t remember?”
“It doesn’t matter now. What matters is that something happened to her, something connected to that place.”
“You think she kept her memories buried, and only now they’re floating back? I’m not so sure I buy that idea.”
“Then maybe she has remembered. Maybe all this time, for years and years, there were only scattered pieces, a picture here or an impression there. And she’s never been able to figure out the truth of it all. Maybe she’s been going back, to Sterling and God knows where else, to find some kind of answer. Some way to make things clear again.”
Alice gave the letter back to me. “Well, for some incomprehensible reason,” I said, “she’s always kept her search from us.”
“Until now. It’s like she’s asking us, after all this time, for help.”
Before returning the letter to my pocket, I reexamined its return address. “Dolores and I are going out there tomorrow. We’re meeting at the hospital. We’ll wait until the morphine makes her completely quiet and calm, and then we’ll drive out to the Triple Crown.”
“Please find out anything you can. If you learn any answers—anything—I want you to call me right away. Promise.”
“I promise.”
Alice placed the cat on the floor. She leaned back, resting her head next to mine, the cot’s legs creaking under our weight. Only hours ago, the boy had been sleeping here. The canvas still reeked of his sweat and breath and ragged clothes; I wondered if Alice could smell him too. As she relaxed, auburn curls of her hair fanned across my face, but I didn’t brush them away. We stared into the wired boughs of the tree, at the asymmetric angles of the boy’s constructions, and higher above, the basement’s black, cobwebbed ceiling. We could hear the storm, the snowflakes laced with rime, the wind swinging its gray rage against the windows.
“You’re not going back to Lawrence tonight, are you? In this weather?”
“I have to. I’ll go by the hospital for a bit, but then I’ve got to hit the road. Tomorrow morning I have to open the store.”
“Just a while ago, when I was driving home in this mess, I was w
orried you’d already decided to leave. Then I came inside and didn’t see you anywhere…so what made you come downstairs, anyway? Was there a reason you came down and found all this?”
“I’m not really sure,” Alice said. “I was napping, but then something woke me up. It was strange—I thought I heard a noise down here. Like someone singing. It sounded a little like you. Like you were directly below, singing some old song. I didn’t think you were back from the hospital yet, so I came down to investigate.”
From the eastern edge of town came the remote rumble of snowplows, agilely clearing the streets. We waited, listening, but instead of moving nearer, the plows were driving farther away. Alice sighed; then, for a long while, neither of us spoke. In recent years, she and I had grown progressively deficient at articulating our emotions, and now, through the silence, I tried to convey how badly I wanted her to stay. I needed her here with us. Alice checked out of this a long time ago, I remembered telling Kaufman, that morning in the hospital lobby. But I’d been wrong about my sister. I could see that, all along, she’d truly wanted our mother to get well again, to be utterly healed of it. Her optimism wasn’t as transparent or easily bruised as mine; and yet it was precisely this hope that had tugged Alice along, through all our visits home, through summer hospitalizations and autumn remissions, the past ten years of both good news and bad. Only now had she fully, finally grasped the irremediable loss. In the last two days, she’d experienced our mother’s clenched fists during sleep, the garbled dream conversations, the wounds she’d reflexively bitten into her lips and tongue. The resignation in Kaufman’s eyes; the drops of morphine from the amber bottle.
Around us, the room was shrinking and dimming. When Alice spoke again, she returned to that snowy field, that secret expedition to the riding stable, her memory of the shovels and dolls and fluttering snow. “You know what I’ve always remembered most about that night?”