My mother. My junk-shop bargainer, my field trespasser. The Tired to my Wired. My sponsor and cook and chauffeur, my confidante, my prison guard. My morning alarm and bedtime story. Magnet and tape; scrapbook and scissors. My iced tea, my Tennessee whiskey. My farmhouse on the hill. My quiet Haven house at the end of the street. My vitamins and steroids, my Neupogen and Anzemet, disease and remission. Doll and rabbit and carousel horse. My yellow leaf, fallen in her hair. My scarf and my wig, my big switch and small switch, my Cherry Mash, my clawfoot bathtub, my thousand chandeliers. My pretty little pigeon. My Hansel and my Gretel, my plot at Rayl’s Hill, my newspaper headline, my photo and my story.
And then only blankness, a sealing of sound. I squeezed her hand, but there was nothing. I looked up into her face and, slowly, my mother’s eyes opened and I dropped the hand.
The room was darker now. I stayed with the body, curled against its chill. Eventually, I stood and arranged her arms at her sides. I brought the hands up to fold them over her heart. She looked more peaceful this way.
When I left the room, I went to the backyard garden to find Dolores. She was sitting in the snow, her back hunched, her hands nimbly working. Somehow I knew that she knew. “It’s over,” I said. She didn’t turn her head, but only sat, as focused as a bootblack, concentrating on some critical task. As I neared, I saw the thread and scissors and scraps of cloth: she was sewing one of my mother’s unfinished scarves.
After a pause, she glanced up from her work. “So that’s the way it happened, then? Everything you said is the truth?”
“I don’t know. Probably not everything. But I hope so. I hope it’s as close as I’ve imagined it.”
“I wonder how much she’d learned for herself. And how much she kept secret.”
I looked away, shaking my head. Perhaps we would never know. Dolores stood, picking the thread and scissors and scraps of cloth from the snow; I could feel her gathering the strength to go inside.
“There’s one more thing that still confuses me,” I said. “The stories she told you and Alice were so outlandish and false. But it seems the story she told me was real.”
“I don’t think she necessarily wanted us to believe her. Not me, and not Alice.”
“But why, then? Why only me?”
“You really don’t know? I think it’s obvious.”
“Tell me.”
Dolores looked down at my hands, at my tired body, and then back to my face. “With you, she had so much at stake.”
She smiled then, and suddenly I understood her meaning. My mother had hoped I would immerse myself: to step away from my world, the depression and drugs, to enter the mystery and join in her pursuit.
“Your mother wanted to save you,” Dolores said.
Now the wind had changed direction, wheeling along the streets in a secretive hush, the snow falling in thick, ashen lumps. We realized we hadn’t dressed warmly enough. Dolores began walking back to the house. Before reaching the door, she turned to let me know she would make the necessary telephone calls: first Alice, and then Kaufman, Mary McVickers, and the funeral home. And then, she said, she wanted a few minutes alone with my mother.
Dolores closed the door; through the glass, I watched her shaking the snow from her boots. I remembered her words: My best friend in this whole damn world. I saw her take a deep breath and make her way through the kitchen, toward the bed.
I don’t know how long I stood there, watching the snow. I don’t recall the thoughts that weighed heavy in my head. But after a time, Dolores opened the door again. With a wave, she beckoned me back inside.
I followed her into the kitchen, but saw instantly that the room wasn’t the same. The walls were entirely bare. The photographs—every face from the refrigerator door, from the space above the sink, from the sides of the antique telephone and cabinets and stove—had dropped and scattered across the floor.
“Look what she’s done,” Dolores said.
We stood and studied the room. I remembered the night I’d arrived home, the scrapbook I’d bumped and the pictures I’d strewn on her bed, how I’d drifted to sleep amid the missing. And I remembered sitting together with Otis—Allen—talking and talking, the photos spread around us in careless hills. Had it all been a dream? What had happened to that boy? Had I loosed him conclusively into the world? Was he brooding inside me still?
I knelt, and Dolores knelt. Our bodies touched at the stain where my mother had fallen and spilled her blood. And once again we joined hands. Their pictures were all around us: each ripped from its tape or tack or pin; each lying face-up on the floor. We remained like this for a long, soundless time, staring down at the photographs, all their last lost faces, until we heard the black car in the drive, the footsteps on the walk, the knock at the door.
(FADE)
FOR A WHILE, after everything was over and I’d returned to New York, Dolores tried to learn more. She spent random spring days driving to Sterling, alone, taking the winding, abandoned back roads in her car. She searched through thirty-two separate Kansas phone books—she kept a list of them, in a yellow notepad from my mother’s house—and one night, after too much bourbon, called all the families named Crowhurst, the families named Anders. But no one gave the answers she needed.
Another drunken night, Dolores returned to the Triple Crown stables. When she confessed this over the phone, she giggled like a teenage girl. Apparently, she spent two hours trespassing across the place. Then Pat Claussen’s husband, watching from a second-floor window, saw her stumbling through the backyard grass, the land where the fire had once burned. He waited until Dolores unlatched one of the stable doors and went inside. Then he woke his wife, and together they walked out with a flashlight and a cup of hot coffee. After an hour calmly chatting in the hay-scented dark, the Claussens sent Dolores home.
I’m certain my mother never behaved this way. I’m still not sure why she didn’t.
On my birthday, I receive a card from Dolores; inside is a handwritten note and a photograph of her new Manx kitten. Her stationery smells of the perfume she’d worn that night when she retrieved me from the bus station, when she forewarned me about my mother’s health.
In the note, Dolores claims she’s giving up her search. It happened too many years ago, she says. No one will ever know the answers. Any final secrets were lost when we lost your mom.
The autumn passes. I go to meetings, I relapse, and I go to more meetings. I call Alice twice a week, and I reveal the details of Pammy Sporn, the Crowhursts, the tornado and the fire and Jesse and Jill. One night, I even divulge everything I can remember about the boy in the basement. The burned ditch, just outside Sterling…the handcuffs and cot and cramped storage room…the hallucination in the woods at Carey Park. At first, Alice laughs uneasily, certain I’m telling an extravagant joke. But then she remains silent, only making the occasional nervous murmur, until my story is finished.
For days I’d been preparing this speech, brooding carefully over the wording of my questions. I ask Alice if she believes the boy was real. Perhaps he was only a dream, created by our mother to represent a past she wanted to reclaim. Alice thinks before she answers. Then she says, “Of course the boy was real. He must have been. Remember, she wasn’t the only one who experienced him. You did, too. Why would you invent him? What did he represent for you?”
October, November. Nearly a year after my mother’s death. Throughout these months, I hear nothing from Dolores. And then, one day, as I sit behind my desk at Pen & Ink, she calls again.
It seems that Pammy Sporn has tracked Dolores down. She’s been asking questions around Sterling, learning secrets we might have missed. She gives directions to an abandoned graveyard, two miles from Sterling’s cemetery, an hour’s drive from my mother’s stone at Rayl’s Hill. “You and Donna’s son might want to go there someday,” Pammy says. “I think you’ll be content with what you find.”
Naturally, Dolores couldn’t wait. She has located the graveyard without me. A dreary, tr
eeless plot of land: a field of wheat on the left, field of milo on the right. If she hadn’t been driving that dusty road to specifically find the graves, she’d never know they were there.
It seems that Raymond wasn’t able to afford headstones. There are only markers, chipped square plaques obscured by the tangled, frozen weeds. But Raymond assured their names were proudly listed. Their birthdays, the dates of their deaths. Dolores has made charcoal rubbings of Margaret’s stone, of the smaller markers for Jesse and Jill. She will send them to me in the mail.
I ask her to read the words on the stones. It’s just as I expected: Jill’s birthday in February, and Jesse’s in September. I remember Adele’s ring from my mother’s stories, the violet amethyst and blue sapphire, the birthstones of her lost grandchildren.
And there’s more, Dolores says. In an antique store five miles east of Sterling, she has found a copy of Hansel and Gretel with page after page of illustrations, like my mother had requested. Dolores can’t wait to show me. She will keep it on her bookshelf in her little house. It isn’t clear who previously owned the book. But of course we imagine Adele. We see her holding it in her sturdy hands, lamplight spilling across its pages, as she reads to Jesse and Jill, and, later, to Warren and my mother.
And finally, Dolores has been searching the library. In the microfilm reels, from the years before and after my mother’s disappearance, she has found recurring classified ads for a business called “Adele’s Kitchen” that specialized in “pickling/canning.” A number with a Sterling prefix is listed, but there is no address. Would we be wrong to assume it’s the same Adele?
We picture the woman in the kitchen, channeling her grief. She must have gotten so good at it. The jars of pearl onions, the cloved apples, the jellies of mulberry and sandhill plum. And, of course, her famous peaches. We like to imagine Raymond secretly entering them in the county fair. Maybe they won Adele the first-prize ribbon. Row after row on the basement shelves, buoyed in their jars like the slumbering heads of babies. Peach preserves stirred into the breakfast oatmeal. Spiced peaches for dessert, served warm with scoops of ice cream, taken to the basement for Warren and Donna in matching blue bowls.
But of course this all is speculation. One of many things we may never know. We’ve never found the peach orchard. We’ve never found Warren.
How comforting it would be, after all these years, to know the truth. The deliverance. The utter peace of it.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
FOR THEIR ASSISTANCE, patience, and understanding, I’m grateful to Michael Lowenthal, Dorian Karchmar, Alison Callahan, Jeanette Perez, James Ireland Baker, Maura Casella, Christophe Grosdidier, Tamyra Heim, Carolyn Price, and Michael Borum.
I’m also indebted to John Hampson and the London Arts Board for assistance during the early work on this book, and to Abraham Lowenthal and Jane Jaquette for granting me necessary time and space to finish.
About the Author
The author of two novels and a volume of poetry, SCOTT HEIM has written for numerous publications, including The Advocate, Village Voice, and Nerve.com. He lives in Boston.
WWW.SCOTTHEIM.COM
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Also by Scott Heim
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Credits
Cover design by Milan Božić
Cover photograph by Deborah Raven / Getty Images
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
WE DISAPPEAR. Copyright © 2008 by Scott Heim. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Epub Edition © JANUARY 2008 ISBN: 9780061861758
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Scott Heim, We Disappear
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