I think I understand now. I think I know what happened when I disappeared.
After the message replayed, I picked up the phone and dialed Pen & Ink. “I won’t be coming in to work,” I told the receptionist. “Not sure how long. An emergency back home.” I hung up before she could question me. Next, at Gavin’s suggestion, I reserved a weekend seat on the bus. One way, New York to Wichita: 159 dollars; 1,517 miles.
Then I made my final call, but my mother wasn’t there. “Well, you’re getting your wish,” I said to her machine. “I’m leaving everything behind. Meet me at the Wichita bus station, Monday night at eight. I’m finally coming home.”
As she left the truck, she found the night air swooning with pre-rainstorm mosquitoes. She didn’t bother swatting them, allowing their sting and lilt and lift as she headed for the dirty restroom doors. The women’s room was bolted and locked, but the door to the men’s was open. Cautiously, she pushed it with her purse. She heard a cricket greeting with its black armor. She smelled the heavy antiseptic, the urine and mold. The lightbulbs had been shattered, but bright blue from the security lamp was oozing through the mesh-wire windows. My mother saw the sinks, the clouded mirrors, the urinals on the wall like limbless, blood-drained bodies.
She turned a faucet, and the cricket ceased. She splashed water on her face. Then she turned, moving toward the stalls, their broken-hinged doors.
She lowered the toilet seat and sat. Within the silence and the cold blue light, my mother thought of Henry, picturing his life as though he were her own. She thought of my sister and me, miles away in our separate cities. She thought how the ditches and roofs would soon be sleeved with snow. How winter, in months or even weeks, would blanket the other bodies, the possible roster of missing boys and girls from which Henry had risen.
My mother reached inside her purse. Deep in its lining, below her checkbook and keys and unpaid hospital bills, she found an ink marker, permanent blue.
On the stall partitions, men had drawn pictures and scribbled graffiti, a maze of limericks and jokes, knife-grooved phone numbers. She did not read the words. Instead she began to write, the oversize H and oversize B, each consecutive letter. Such a melodious name, Henry Harris Barradale, a line from a ballad. Again she thought of his picture: the sandy hair fringing his eyebrows, hair so long only the earlobes showed; the smile both harmless and handsome.
Then she wrote more names. She filled the wall’s length with them, spelling all she remembered with her fragile hand, her thrill trembling the letters. She continued in slanted calligraphy, covering the rest-stop poems and dirty drawings and offerings of sex, until finished.
She leaned against the opposite stall. Aligning neatly:
HENRY HARRIS BARRADALE. EVAN CARNABY. SUSAN JONES. PENNY paulette myers. ruby bailey. ray dean hunsinger. And others. And others.
At the bottom of the list, in letters large enough to be easily seen, was donna kaye blake.
Not my mother’s first married name, and not the name she took when she married John. Her girlhood name. Her name when she’d disappeared.
Outside the restrooms, the night had gone gloriously dark. Her special funeral shoes slipped in the mud. It had started to rain; no drivers were braving tonight’s roads. My mother looked to the poplar trees, their inky dripping leaves. Within the stutter of lightning were more clouds, moving closer, and beyond, not yet invisible, the million-and-one stars. She held her arms to them, but this time no insects bothered her skin. Perhaps she had only dreamed them. Perhaps imagined them as I imagine her now, standing patient as though in prayer. The lightning and endless sky. The stars.
TWO
I SLEPT THROUGHOUT the trip, avoiding the hoard of Gavin’s drugs. For twenty hours I’d maintained my willpower. But during a passenger stop at the St. Louis station, I’d seen a lanky woman sitting cross-legged on a bench, hugging a mud-flecked backpack, waiting. She was obviously high. Somehow I knew it was meth, and knew she was waiting for more. She seemed completely taken by it. Months, or even years. Her T-shirt stained and torn, her hair matted with sweat, the teeth gone tan and soft. Yet no matter how repellent these details, the woman was filled with the drug, shuddering with its force, and this recognition consumed me. I rummaged through a station trashcan until I found a McDonald’s fast-food straw like the one behind Gavin’s ear. Then I reentered the bus, eager to crouch in the cramped bathroom.
I soon realized that a bus heading toward Wichita was the worst place to be high. I hoped my mother wouldn’t notice. I thought about my Pen & Ink coworkers, three gossipy girls who’d surely question my empty cubicle and chair. I thought of my landlord sliding the envelope flap to find three months’ worth of rent, all twenties and tens, paper-clipped to my note of lies. But New York had fallen behind me. For now there was the engine’s cough; the wind at the windows in a thin shear. Already the drug was making me clammy and claustrophobic. I closed my eyes and decided to think of Evan. From one of the seats ahead came a melody, seeping from some passenger’s headphones: a ballad, surely meant to be heartbreaking. But I couldn’t hear the words, and my heart felt nothing.
Evan Carnaby had been a thin, blond boy with wire glasses and a cough like knocked knuckles, who rode our afternoon bus, backseat always. Alice and I had secretly loved him. Together we stared and stared, slinking low in our seats when he glared back. We loved the loop of baling twine he wore around his wrist; the ripped knees of his jeans, twin explosions of denim. We loved his shirt pockets loaded with candy: cinnamon disks, butterscotch, anything he could unwrap to spark our craving. And we loved his sing-alongs to the music played by Susie Mayhew, our driver in hoop earrings and a red bandanna headscarf, whose tattooed husband drove a bus route, too. Susie played eight-track tapes on the rides after school—those windows-down trips with sunflowers shaking in the ditches, each thunderstorm a doomy promise toward the north—and while the bus kids enjoyed the music, even anticipated rides home, no one seemed more engaged than Evan. He sang Elton John, Steely Dan, and, in failed harmony, Simon and Garfunkel. From our seats, Alice and I crouched to listen as he belted them out. Verse, chorus, chorus. God had tuned Evan’s vocal cords slightly flat, just slightly, but his fingers against his seat kept prudent, bafflingly apt rhythm. Evan.
Then one day he stopped riding the bus. At first we barely noticed his absence. He could have fallen ill, could have skipped a day. But four days passed, five, and that following Monday we heard the news.
Back then, we’d always listened to the morning radio—the novelty songs helping to wake us in the shower, the disc jockeys volleying their jokes. But that particular morning, their tone turned serious. They stopped the music for a special report. Evan’s mother, Nancy Carnaby, had somehow nudged her voice through our radio. We heard her sobbing through the staticky waves. I remember Alice’s eyes, their green gone dim; I remember my mother, egg yolk dripping from the whisk in her hand, as she cocked her head to hear. Evan had taken an early-evening ride on his bike. Evan had headed for the woods near Scudder Creek, to search for bluegill and bass and sapphire-backed turtles. Evan had never come home.
“The world’s not right,” a teacher told my class that week, and we all believed her. “Don’t leave home. Never, ever get into a car if you don’t know the driver.”
We’d heard this lesson many times before but suddenly, dreadfully, the words carried an accompanying illustration. At bedtime, I pictured Evan sliding into the backseat of a dark Cadillac. Imagined him squinting from behind his glasses; tugging the twine at his wrist. But I couldn’t imagine more. No gags or knives or nakedness, no degradation or annihilation. I was too young to know what might have transpired after that skidding bike, that sudden surprised cry.
I watched the roads unravel from the bus window. By now my mother’s telephone message was a continuously echoing loop in my ears. I know what happened when I disappeared. If the kidnapping she’d described on that long-ago night—her drunken reprimand, her warning we’d disregarded and tagged as fak
e—if that story were actually true, then why had she kept it buried all these years? How did the news of Henry Barradale relate to my mother, and how did it make her feel? How had she felt back then, during Evan?
And why, after so much time, was she remembering?
Across the aisle, two women had been talking since Topeka. Something in their tone invited my eavesdropping. The older woman’s voice was harsh; I guessed the lingering rosewater perfume as hers. “I give her good advice after good advice, but she just doesn’t learn,” the woman was saying, referring to a granddaughter whose picture she had pulled, from a maroon purse, to show her seatmate. “Those tops she wears. And you should see those little skirts! Boys that age don’t know how to handle themselves. And it’s not the ones her age I worry about.”
The bus clattered along, passing a sleepy unincorporated town, the usual farms and silver-topped grain silos, the roadside barns and churches. It passed forgotten railroad cars on a forgotten track, then an orchard where overripe apples bent the trees. The gathering shadows nearly obscured the lanes peaked with sand, the patches of scrub, an abandoned apple-ladder. From the bus, all these scenes seemed artificial, like pictures from a child’s book. They were places I imagined children might have recently played. Where my sister and I would have played, or, years before that, Donna Kaye Blake and her younger brother, Dan.
In the window reflection, my face looked thin, and my eyes showed more pupil than iris. She shouldn’t see me like this. Yet I had to follow through with our arrangement. I hadn’t rented a car; hadn’t yet informed Alice, or anyone else, of my return. Only my mother, meeting me in the Wichita station.
The woman wrapped up her story about the granddaughter. “I never let my kids leave my sight,” the younger woman said. She pointed to two boys in the seat ahead. They were somewhere between eight and twelve, obviously brothers, clearly not twins. Both held miniature video games, yellow plastic and red; both were sunk inside their realms of asteroid and rocketflash.
The boys’ names, I decided, were Henry and Evan. The older (Henry: yes, more like Henry) had buckteeth and braces; he grimaced at some handheld catastrophe as a tinny warning echoed from his game. His brother’s hair (Evan’s hair) was darker and flawed with a cowlick slicked down, rather ineffectually, with glistening grease. The boys wore jackets, even in the swollen bus heat. Henry’s left shoelace had loosened, and Evan’s jeans were unbelted and baggy. As I studied them, the passengers and seats fell away; I thought of the real Henry and real Evan, the real Mrs. Barradale and Mrs. Carnaby, never let my kids leave my sight, they surely said, and with the drug in my veins I watched the brothers, the messy-haired backs of their heads, and the fingers on their sputtering games, until at last the driver announced the turn toward our final exit.
The real Evan, our Evan, had been so beautiful.
After his disappearance, the city paper printed his seventh-grade picture, awkwardly posed, taken two years earlier. It was on the front page, adjacent to a snapshot of Evan’s cherry-red Schwinn, the bicycle he’d steered that evening toward Scudder Creek. I remember looking closely at the bike, its particulars blurry within the newsprint. I imagined his lanky ankles straining on its pedals; his knuckles gripping ownership on its handlebars. Then I looked longer at Evan and his lopsided grin. The scar on his right cheekbone. The teeth slightly big for his mouth. Evan was staring beyond the polished O of the lens, at the photographer’s face perhaps, his expression making the picture sadder, crueler—as though he’d seen, hovering in the shutter, something terrible waiting two years away, and just then had flinched from that future. At the time I had no language for my reaction to the photo. I only shuddered and stared and asked my daily questions: have the officers heard any news, have they found him yet, could he still be alive.
Even with her job at the prison, my mother knew very little. A mailman, or so she’d heard, had found two broken bicycle spokes along his route near Scudder Creek. In a nearby ditch, police had picked up wrappers from Evan’s favorite brand of black licorice (sticky prints, however, proved from fingers not his).
Nights, I remembered the Evan I’d see when I watched him on the bus. The pimples on his forehead and chin. His hair, hay-blond and oily, still tracked from the drawn comb. The delicate chain with its featherweight cross at his throat. And Evan’s throat itself, so often bruised with kisses I couldn’t understand.
Songs on the bus weren’t the same anymore. Susie Mayhew granted our requests for a new round of eight-track tapes. Some mornings, she idled before the graveled Carnaby driveway before realizing her mistake. Alice and I saw the space, near the porch, where Evan once anchored his bike. The upstairs window; the dust-drawn sailboat curtains; the abandoned basketball net above the garage.
After Christmas that year, an ice fisherman snagged a T-shirt from the creek where Evan had traveled, that evening, hunting turtles. The shirt was medium, his size; it was Fruit of the Loom, his brand. There were no bloodstains or bullet holes. His parents tacked more posters around town; they reappeared on the radio spots, the public TV shows. Their temporal hope seemed to have dissipated: wearied crack in the voice; head lowering slowly from the camera.
By then our mother’s drinking had ceased completely. Alice and I could disregard her erratic behavior; we could almost forget her suspicious story. Spring, then summer, the days before my fifth-grade year. I gained eighteen pounds, placed runner-up in a countywide spelling bee, and launched into an urgently doomed, unrequited crush on a hurdler on the school track team. And through it all, I still thought of Evan. I dreamed him in some heroic world, wandering, windy-haired, his eyes pale pieces of sky. Maybe, somewhere and someday, the policemen would find him. Maybe even my mother would find him, presenting all the pictures she’d saved, all the newspaper tales from the tattered scrapbook she’d now retired to a dark basement shelf. And Evan would take them and smile, he would laugh his lopsided laugh, no longer vanished, now alive and delivered, dirty from midday wind and midnight rain, sleepy as a breather of poppies.
The driver announced the Wichita stop. I joined the crush, debussing to retrieve our bags from the stowage compartment. In the stagnant air of the station, I parked my backpack and suitcase, while the others hurried for the vending machines, the pay telephones, the warm embraces of family or friends.
Soon I would see my mother. Soon, her expectant, hesitant grin. I swallowed and sniffed, steadying my face to erase its evidence.
For a moment—maybe because I’d been away so long, or needed a familiar face amid the strangers—I thought I saw her. In that flicker she didn’t seem so sick. Her hair was busy with curls; her back had straightened from its hunch. I almost yelled to her. Then I realized my mistake: the woman in the crowd was not my mother, but instead her best friend, Dolores.
Years before, the two had worked at the prison together. They’d sometimes go out drinking, back in the days when my mother drank. They shared a love for Willie Nelson and Tennessee whiskey. Dolores later left the prison for another job, but through the years they often crossed paths at yard or estate sales, antique shops, the grocery’s checkout aisles. Their friendship rekindled three years ago, one afternoon when they saw each other at a health food store. “Do any of those help?” my mother had asked, pointing to the wire basket Dolores had crowded with amino acids and fish-oil capsules. Dolores shrugged: just that week, she’d begun breast cancer treatment. “It’s lymphoma for me,” said my mother.
Later, both had stayed on the west wing of Hutchinson Hospital. Dolores had gotten my mother hooked on crossword puzzle magazines. She’d given her patterns and sewing supplies, and helped her make the decorative headscarves she now sewed and sold and mailed to other chemotherapy patients. Together they, as my mother said, “endured all the hospital crap.”
Ultimately, Dolores’s breast-cancer treatment had worked. She’d been the luckier.
She still looked relatively healthy now, I thought. She’d remained free of it. She wore the same pink-framed glasses; h
er hair had silvered slightly but still hung to her shoulders. I watched her sip from a can of Dr Pepper and chew her gum with a steady jaw, and I watched her straight, clean teeth, and then I hollered her name.
Dolores rushed to me, scrambling through the crowd; her smile widened as I bent toward her hug. She muttered something I couldn’t hear. She’d always called me Scotty and I’d always secretly hated it. As she pulled away, I saw her smile had changed, disarranged by my shirtsleeve. “She didn’t come with you?” I asked.
“We have a lot to talk about,” she said. I could smell her bourbon scent, which answered a question I’d planned to ask my mother.
The parking lot had darkened. Dolores led me through it, shuffling in her unlaced shoes, shaking her keys like a maraca. She dropped the Dr Pepper can and crushed it beneath her heel. “I drove John’s truck,” she said. “Your mom insisted.” When she pointed, I could see freckles of mud on the tires, bumper, and license plate—evidence, I guessed, of my mother’s prowls through the rain-smeared roads and NO TRESPASSING fields.
Dolores opened my door, then circled the truck to take her seat behind the wheel. Before turning the key, she lifted her wrist and held it to my face. “Smell,” she said. “My new perfume.”
“Very nice,” I said. She was definitely drunk, but I wasn’t any further fit to drive. I put my bags at my feet. In the lot, the boys from the bus, my Henry and Evan, were herded into a Buick’s backseat by a man presumably their father.