When I came back to the room, the trembling had doubled. I’d never seen her so scared. In Kaufman’s hospice pamphlets I’d read stories of the submitters, the obeyers, the bedridden women and men who’d inevitably asked their doctor or God to “set them free.” But I’d also read the stories of those who wouldn’t relent. My mother had always been one of the latter: she’d remained stubborn, convinced of another eventual rally. And Dolores and I had always encouraged her. Part of me wanted to try this encouragement now, to remind my mother of the unfinished projects in the basement and garage, to extricate the passion from her dread and fear. But another part, the pragmatic part I’d so often erased through meth, knew I could no longer embolden her. Palliative care was the term explained in the pamphlets, and we understood that our job was to ease the symptoms, to abate the pain, to surround the bed and hold her hand.
“Maybe it’s time for more medicine,” said Dolores.
“According to Mary’s schedule, we should wait a little longer.”
“I don’t care about that schedule. She’s in pain, and she needs it.”
Dolores caressed her face, trying to calm her movements. I unscrewed the bottle of concentrated morphine, pointed the dropper between her lips, and squeezed, a brown plat, plat, two drops more than the recommended dosage. We watched as she struggled with it. The eyes squeezing shut, the involuntary swallow. I realized the irony of Mary leaving the morphine with us, the bleary-eyed alcoholic and the meth addict, the pair she called the “primary caregivers.” It was all so comically compliant, so Midwest. A New York nurse would never trust the bottle in our hands. My mother would have laughed about this; she would have devised a joke with a fractious punch line, and we would have laughed with her.
Now we could only wait, keeping her calm until the drug took effect. We gave her more water, and Dolores spoke soothingly in her ear. She seemed to know instinctively how to perform, to understand what my mother needed, and watching this skill made me sharply jealous. But I reached across the bed and touched Dolores’s hand, trying to convey my gratitude. I still hadn’t broken down, not yet. I’d seen my mother’s tears, and I’d seen the nurses at the hospital struggling. I’d even seen Dolores, even Alice. But something had stalled in me: I could feel the hovering weight, the compression.
Dolores described the snowfall, the latest soap-opera episodes, the women who’d asked “How’s Donna doing?” at last week’s Bingo. But nothing she said would steady the tremors. Sometimes it seemed my mother wanted to respond; she even made low, wheezing huffs from the back of her throat. We tried to understand, but the responses came too quickly, jaggedly, and when she stopped to swallow or breathe, the effect was like an enormous book snapping shut, shutting off the incomprehensible words.
“When I was sick,” Dolores said, “you know what I really liked? I liked when someone would read to me.”
Although I wasn’t certain, I could guess that this someone was Ernest. I could feel her straining to not mention his name. “Then let’s find something,” I said.
Dolores leafed through the magazine rack, while I went to the shelf of antique children’s books against the wall. Nothing seemed quite right. I remembered my mother’s request for Hansel and Gretel—she’d begged me, that evening in the hospital parking lot, to search the bookshops and antique stores—and now I longed to read that familiar story, escorting her through that dappled forest with the little boy and girl, following their footprints down the tapering path. But I hadn’t found Hansel and Gretel for her; I’d even failed at this.
Then I remembered the letters she’d received. The responses to her classified ads; all the articles she’d clipped from papers and magazines. I knew she’d saved a bundle in the kitchen cupboard, and I left the room to find them. When I returned to her bedside, Dolores leaned back in the chair to listen; I put the stack on my lap, unfolded the first article, and began reading to my mother.
In early May of 1998, Sharon Stevens, 36, of Lansing, Michigan, disappeared. She was last seen by a group of schoolchildren, walking along Main Street near the downtown area. Sharon was tall and had shoulder-length brown hair. She was wearing a gray Minnie Mouse sweatshirt. She had two tattoos: the letters ATN on one shoulder, a bright bluebird on the other.
Christopher Godlewski was twenty-five when he went missing from his parents’ home. A known abuser of heroin and other drugs, Christopher was last seen in downtown Kansas City. He was unemployed, although he used to serve in the marines. Since that cold January day in 2005 when Christopher disappeared, his younger sister has given birth to twins. His family has never given up hope, and they wait patiently for the day when he will return to meet his nephews.
I looked up from my lapful of envelopes and clippings. My mother seemed peaceful now. Dolores held out a hand; I surrendered part of the stack to her. Previously, she’d frowned on my mother’s collection of the missing—on what she’d called “her morbid obsession”—but now she submerged herself, reading the articles with dramatic inflection and finesse. Nadine Schroeder…Jane McCandless…Richard Rose. We alternated reading them, more ages and dates, their distinguishing shirts and hats and coats, the desolate cities and streets where they were last seen.
After fifteen minutes, her muscles relaxed and her breathing steadied. She was sleeping at last. We could hear the insistent wind; the sleet-sharp branches against the gutters and eaves. Dolores found the clipboard and pen to chart the morphine dosage, the precise time. Then we gathered my mother’s collection and walked to the kitchen.
Dolores poured two glasses of tea. We drank through the bendable hospice straws. The tea was cold and lemony, and it roused me slightly. “It’s really happening, isn’t it?” I asked.
“I think so. Are you afraid?”
“I don’t know.”
“When you were in the tub, I asked Mary how long she thought it would be. Her guess was sometime this week.”
“But I want to solve this—this mystery. We still need to connect with this Sporn woman. I feel like we’re getting so close now.”
“We can’t leave your mother alone like this. You’ll have to drive to Sterling on your own.”
In my pocket was the business card with Pamela’s name, and the number I’d found for Sterling’s post office. “Maybe she’s free tomorrow. I’ll call first thing in the morning.”
Dolores leaned against the fridge, hesitantly sipping through the straw. She turned to watch my mother, and, after a long pause, looked back to me. “When I walked in today,” she said, “I could hardly stand it. Seeing her lying there, looking nothing like her old self. Even her smell was gone—her soap and shampoo and perfume.”
“I know. I know.”
“I wanted things to be the same for her here. I guess I thought that once she came back home, we’d get to have her again. The same Donna as before.”
She slid her arms around my shoulders and pulled me toward her. It was a clumsy hug, like the hug of two aging men. The tea splashed from my glass, onto our shoes and the floor.
Then Dolores pulled away. She was staring over my shoulder, at the gallery of the missing on the kitchen wall. “Well, look at that,” she said. “Another picture of that boy. His aunt must have sent more…Henry Barradale, right?”
Shadows had darkened the room. We moved closer to examine, and she tapped a fingernail on the specific photo. But the face she’d noticed wasn’t Henry at all. It was my own face, the picture I’d pinned there as a joke. The snapshot my mother had taken when I was seventeen: the pimples and brooding scowl, the earrings and coal-black clothes.
I removed the picture from the wall and folded it into my pocket. “Yes,” I told Dolores. “It’s the dead boy.”
ELEVEN
AS IT HAPPENED, Pamela Sporn was expecting our call: Cindy, the miserable, popcorn-crunching girl from the stable, had dropped by the post office to forewarn her of our visit. On the phone, she expressed her sympathy over my mother’s health. “Please, call me Pammy,” she said. She c
ouldn’t wait to meet me, but was “swamped with work” until Friday. She gave the address for a Sterling bar and grill, which I copied onto the Triple Crown business card. “I’ve never been interviewed for a real-life book,” she said before hanging up.
In the three days before Friday, the withdrawal symptoms grew sharper, more wounding, than before. I tried staying vigilant at the bedside with Dolores; tried assisting Mary with her daily two-hour duties. I helped them with the sponge baths and morphine and meds. Even helped with the Foley catheter, which Mary said would decompress the bladder and relieve unnecessary pressure. They lifted the nightgown and swabbed her with a gleaming yellow jelly. I saw her stomach and Cesarean scar; I saw the dense, surprisingly blond patch of hair. “You don’t have to watch this,” Dolores whispered. When the catheter entered, my mother’s eyes fluttered open, but she still couldn’t speak, couldn’t truly recognize my face.
Nights, I’d stand for hours in the dark room, watching. Sometimes I’d touch her neck for a pulse, the delicate way a blind boy touches a face to determine rage or joy. Sometimes I’d simply listen to the rise and fall and breath.
By Friday, the snow had stopped but the cold was bitter, soundless, permanent. Dolores arrived at sunrise, and, minutes later, we heard Mary’s station wagon turning onto our street. I walked outside to help her with the medical bags. On her car seat were two cans of the evergreen spray, a stack of hospice pamphlets, and empty prescription bottles. Hanging from her rearview mirror was a tiny, sun-faded teddy bear, clutching a valentine with the words I LOVE MOMMY.
“We’ve scheduled the pastor’s visit for later today,” Mary said. “I hope that’s okay with you.”
“That’s fine. Anything—fine.”
Back inside, I saw Dolores checking her watch, and knew it was time to drive to Sterling. I found one of John’s old jackets and a pair of his gloves; I gathered the notebooks and pencils and tape recorder. “Lying about this supposed book still doesn’t feel right,” I told Dolores. “But if it means getting some answers, I’m going to do it.”
“Too bad I can’t come along.”
“I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
“Maybe you should make a day of it. Don’t you need a little time outside the house? After you talk to that woman, go drive somewhere! Go clear your head for a while.”
“There’s nothing else for me to do.”
“Drive around Hutchinson. Get your mom a strawberry milkshake. Hell, get us all strawberry milkshakes. I’ll give you some money.”
Mary looked up from her clipboard. The lamplight glinted on her crucifix, the pink plastic of her hearing aid. “They opened some new stores at the mall,” she said. “There’s one of those outlet shoe stores, and a Mexican restaurant.”
“Ooh, Mexican,” said Dolores. She turned to Mary and, as though I were a child, said, “He really likes Mexican.”
“No, I’d rather just come right home,” I said. In truth, I was achingly hungry, but knew I couldn’t hold it down; all the years of crystal meth had corroded my stomach lining, and the spicy food would make me sick for days. But Mary and Dolores couldn’t quite comprehend this, just as they couldn’t comprehend how difficult it was for me to leave here. This house—our immediate, encompassing world—was all I had left. This room and blanketed bed; these final glimmers and movements that composed my mother. I couldn’t extend myself beyond these last days, and I hadn’t planned for anything else.
Dolores saw me to the door. Before I could protest, she stuffed a grimy wad of bills into the pocket of John’s jacket. “Now go find out any answers that woman might have,” she said. “But honestly, I bet your mom would want nothing more than for you to take a break. So do the things you did when you were young. Go out and be a kid again.”
Pammy Sporn was waiting at a green vinyl booth, the lone customer before the lunchtime rush. She’d already ordered a plate of French fries and a pint of pale beer. The sight of the food brought the nausea back to my throat, but I swallowed and deeply breathed, I took the opposite seat and placed the recorder between us. When Pammy smiled, I instantly liked her better than the women from the Triple Crown. She was tall, with a wise, wrinkled face, yellow teeth, and tarnished yellow hair. She even wore a yellow shirt. Like an ear of corn, I thought, and wished my mother were here to note the weird resemblance, too.
The walls of the bar and grill were covered in vintage Kansas license plates. The air smelled of sawdust and beer. Above the bar, a television was softly playing, but its picture, like the TV at home, was a formless snarl of colors. I saw that each table had been fitted with a dainty chrome jukebox, chiefly country-western standards. On ours, Pammy had chosen incessant Elvis: “Don’t Be Cruel” was ending, and “Heartbreak Hotel” came next.
The waitress emerged from the kitchen to take my order. I asked for a glass of water, no ice. Pammy ordered another Old Milwaukee. As I shrugged free from John’s bulky jacket, I realized I’d been wearing the same soiled shirt for days; the SCOTT name tag remained stuck to its front.
“I’m so excited to talk with you,” Pammy said. “People at work are always saying I should tell my stories to somebody writing a book.” She lowered her fork to touch the tape machine—two tines on play, and two on record—and our interview began.
For many minutes, I let her dominate the conversation. I breathed slowly, trying to will my sickness away. Eventually, I knew, I’d find some strategy for steering her toward the town’s history, the riding stable. I wanted any possible knowledge of a peach orchard, an Imperial, a Warren. But for now I let Pammy talk about her job at the Sterling Post Office (“Twenty-two years and counting!”); I listened as she confessed she’d never wanted children or a husband (“Believe me, I suffer enough headaches sorting mail every day!”)
Then, although we were alone, Pammy lowered her voice and raised a hand to her mouth. “But that doesn’t mean I can’t submit a good story for your research,” she said.
She wanted to tell about a boy she’d known in high school, back in the fifties. His name was Bill McCoy. Pammy had developed a crush while watching him sink free throws during basketball practice. Her junior year, she’d sat behind Bill in concert band: he was first-seat alto sax, and she a red-faced, reed-squeaking beginner. She wanted him to notice her, she said. Only that. All the gossipy oaths, the secret pursuings. She’d even been paired with Bill, one lucky afternoon, at the local hospital’s First Aid fair. She still remembered his clipped, manicured nails. Still saw the crown whorl on his scalp when he hunched to resuscitate the airless mannequin: tilt head; clear mouth of debris; breathe, rest, breathe.
I found it hard to pierce questions through her reverie. I let her ramble for five more minutes, then ten. Bill had been so sweet, his eyes were the prettiest blue, and my, was he ever a gentleman. “He was like our town’s movie star,” she said. “He could’ve been someone.”
But Bill McCoy, I knew, had no link to the information I needed from her. Finally, I interrupted with a nod. “That’s quite a story,” I said. “Any theories on what happened to him?”
“Nobody knows. Not long after graduation, he just left town. Didn’t tell a soul. Just took off…gone.”
The waitress returned to set our drinks on the table. No further customers had entered the bar and grill, and the TV’s images hadn’t aligned. With a silver flood of quarters, Pammy re-fed the miniature jukebox: Elvis, ceaseless Elvis. She finished her first beer and began the second. She’d stopped eating her lunch, but now used the table’s squeezable ketchup bottle to trace a lacy mess of stars across the fries. With her head lowered, I could see that the blonde was artificial. I could easily picture her in bed, the faded dye stains on her pillow, each soap-opera heartache washing her with its television wave. The peeling red-rose wallpaper, the framed Bill McCoy photograph on the nightstand.
“Do you think Bill’s story might be something you’d follow for your book?” she asked.
“Maybe later. Right now, I need to ask you some import
ant questions. They might seem strange, and they might not make much sense. But I’ve heard you’re the one who knows the most about this town, and I hope you might supply some answers.”
The one who knows the most. Pammy grinned and nodded at the acknowledgment. On the table surface, my hand was shaking: a combination, I knew, of the meth withdrawal and the worry over the things she might reveal. Or worse, the things she might not reveal. Pammy had noticed my shaking, too; it was strong enough to shudder her beer. Beside her glass, the tape machine’s wheels made their wee, rhythmic creak.
“We’re looking for a person named Warren,” I said. “He would have been five, maybe ten years younger than you. Do you remember anyone by that name?”
“Warren as a first name, or a last?”
“A first. Anyone here in Sterling, or somewhere near here.”
“I know a family with that last name. They live just south of town. Wheat farmers. They moved from Saskatchewan…they’ve only lived here a couple years.” She closed her eyes, thinking. “Can’t say I know anybody with Warren as a first name, though.”
“Then what about this: do you know any family who might travel around with the state fair? Either now or in the past? Town-to-town carnivals, that sort of thing?”
“Carnivals? No, not carnivals. But quite a few people moonlight at the state fair for a couple of weeks every fall. Don’t know anyone who travels with it, though.”
“What about a business called Sterling Repair? Surely there’s a Sterling Repair in town.”
“Used to be. Earl Borders ran a shop called Sterling Maintenance and Repair—radios and televisions and whatnot—but he closed it down a few years ago. People were going to the new computer repair places in Hutchinson, and his business went belly-up.”
“Do you know how long he’d been running the shop?”
“Oh, a good ten years at least. I’d say ten, eleven, maybe twelve.”