The second binder held similar contents, but here, all the faces were boys. Although I didn’t recognize most, I did find a photo of Evan Carnaby and, at the top of the stack, the recent Henry Barradale.
As I sat looking through the clippings—some of them yellowed and unmistakably old, even older than Evan’s—I felt a disarranging panic begin to rise in my chest. For days I’d been worrying about my mother’s health, about her possibly troubled mental health, and this discovery only heightened my fear. What was so special about this particular hoard of photographs? Why had she chosen to hide them away, and why hadn’t I seen them before?
When my mother, on that first night I’d arrived home, had brought her relic scrapbook to my bedside, I’d easily recognized the smell of its pages. I’d remembered her drunken slump at the kitchen table, all those years ago…her daintily snapping scissors…her white fume of glue. But the leather books I now held in my lap were different. I could sense the significance in their orderliness, some restricted secret only my mother knew.
Then I considered the possibility that she’d actually intended to lead me downstairs, to her little storeroom, to the Moynihan’s box. So many details from recent days—the pinup photographs and Cherry Mash; her improbable avowals and recollections—seemed part of some code she wanted me to unravel and solve. And because of her health, because it seemed the right thing to do, I was playing along. Perhaps she was upstairs now, anticipating my response, ready to reveal the details of her previously mentioned “surprise.”
From outside came the drum of thunder; the swelling, enraged rain. I unfolded the Kansas map, flattening it against the pillow. Certain areas and towns had been circled with various inks; in the feeble light I noticed Hutchinson and Haven in blue, other towns in black, and the only one defined in red, Sterling.
Although I hadn’t been there in years, I remembered Sterling from my childhood. The town lay along Highway 96, just northwest of Hutchinson, even closer to the Barradales’ community of Partridge (which, as I looked closer at the map, had also been circled in blue). When Alice and I were young, our mother had often taken us there. She’d shopped for school clothes in their tiny secondhand store. Frequently she’d driven to the Sterling park and unleashed us on its playground, sitting at a picnic table or among the piles of toast-colored leaves while we alternated slippery slides and swing sets. Our family had no relatives in Sterling. Nothing about the town was especially striking or unique. Yet I remembered driving there, time after spontaneous time, on several boyhood afternoons.
As I folded the map and returned the photos to their decal-covered binders, I noticed another detail. Among the collection of little girls was an early picture of my mother. She stood in monochrome on a sunny lawn of clipped hedges, wearing Mary Janes and a circle skirt, a wide bow in her hair. First I saw how closely she resembled Alice. Then I saw how all the girls in the binder had similar hair, similar dresses and smiles. My mother fit distinctly with them, a member of this long-faded family.
I remembered what she’d said after meeting Mr. Wyler. When Lacey was a little girl, she looked just the way I’d looked.
Then I reopened the binder of little boys and studied the stack of pictures. As with the girls, I now could see the links, the resemblances. Henry and Evan. All the boys before and between.
And for the first time—perhaps due to the shadowy light, or my bleary restlessness—I saw what she’d meant when she said I looked like them. At that moment, I could have been holding pictures from my own childhood.
It was nearly four a.m. I returned the Moynihan’s box to the center shelf, lay back on the cot, and threw the blanket over my legs. While I listened to the rain, I thought about the houses and streets and trees of tiny, red-circled Sterling; about Moynihan’s and Old Faithful and the Alamo. I thought about my mother, Evan, and the freshly buried Henry. I wasn’t sure what to believe, but maybe it didn’t matter. This was home, after all—I had nowhere else to go—and I would indulge my mother through this crucial, confusing time that Dolores had called that point. Hers was a different world: a place of desperate inventions, of incongruous actions and reasons, separate from New York and its lonely, instant thrills. I would stay inside this world. I would keep her happy.
At noon I woke again and went upstairs to join her on the couch. She had opened a pull-top can of salted peanuts; I wasn’t hungry but helped her pick at them. She didn’t seem surprised that I’d slept in the basement. She stared unblinking at the TV, but instead of watching her regular shows, she’d switched to the local noonday news. From every acre of Kansas came all sorts of terrible things, larcenies and arsons and murders, delivered by newscasters with smiles like seared sugar. But already they had forgotten Henry. I sensed how this pained my mother: she still brooded about the day he’d gone missing, the day he’d been found. I knew she wanted to understand how it felt for those church-group girls, their stunned, tranquil circle of discovery. To understand the grief of Henry’s parents. To understand his sisters, or the laughing friends he met for root beers after school. And I knew that sometimes—although she wouldn’t admit it—my mother wished for the one who caused that disappearance, that glint of eyes in the shadows, that sinister grinning mouth.
I’d been rehearsing all the right sentences; I waited for the cheery opening melody of a commercial. “I found the things you left for me. I’ve decided to play along.”
She didn’t take her eyes from the TV. “Play along how?”
“I don’t know how much of these things are true, and how much you’re making up. But if this is what’s keeping you happy right now, I’ll play along with it. I’ve got nothing better to do, and God knows we could both use a little nonchemical excitement and happiness in our lives.”
My breaths were timid and quick; I couldn’t guess how she might respond. She looked at me—I could tell she sensed my discomfort—and gave an exaggeratedly puzzled grimace and shrug. “Okay,” she said.
“So today we’re going on another mission. I hope you’re feeling up for it. Take a guess on our destination. Sterling.”
I waited for any reaction to show on her face. Finally, she smiled and said, “Give me a few minutes to call Dolores. We were supposed to do something today, but I’ll cancel. Go clean up and change clothes, and I’ll give her a quick call.”
The afternoon was chilly, the roads still glistening from the morning rains. She wore her wig and the oversize New York sweatshirt, which she’d apparently now claimed as her own. She’d brought one of her maps, and the notepads, pens, and battered casette recorder. Sandwiched between the notepads—presumably to read aloud during the drive—were some of the newer mailed responses to her newspaper ads, as well as a yellowed, dog-eared copy of True Detective magazine. I remembered how she used to sneak new issues home from the prison, where it was forbidden to inmates; its pages detailed real American crime, lurid exposés on assassins, hijackers, rapists. She used to stand before Alice and me with True Detective in her hands, reading the biographies of vanished women and children, the sensational reports with frequent misspellings and off-focus pictures that smudged her fingers like moth dust.
To avoid one of these recitations now, I asked her advice on the best route to Sterling. “I thought I’d know it from memory,” I said. “But I obviously don’t.”
“If you gave me the keys awhile, I could take you there.”
“Absolutely not.” After years in New York, my driving had its shortcomings—the truck’s unexplainable noises confused me, and I faltered at traffic rotaries—but I knew, even after days of drugs, my hands were steadier than hers.
“Then let’s take the prettier route.” She gestured toward the windshield with the eraser end of a pencil. “Up here about a mile, then make a right.”
Deserted roadside tractors…skies of waxwings and crows and the occasional red-tailed hawk…the sunlight in white shatters through the fast-passing trees. Two miles down the road she’d recommended, this scenery abruptly changed: alo
ng both sides of the truck, the ditches were charred black, evidence of recent brush fires. When we rolled the windows down, we caught the thick and scorchy smell. The truck moved between the burned lanes, axles humming, into this world of charcoal earth and clouded sky.
“Let’s stop here a minute,” she said.
“Don’t you want to keep going? Not much longer before Sterling.”
“But it’s nice here—black instead of all the yellow and brown.” She reached for her purse and brought out a wadded bloom of tissue. “Besides, I have to pee.”
Ahead was an isolated oak, its trunk charred black, poised in its towering loneliness. Its leaves shone in glaring yellow-orange, as though the recent fires had settled in its limbs. I eased before it and parked. The black strip of ditch segregated us from long cords of barbed-wire fence, and beyond, a field scarred with cattle hoofprints. When I helped my mother out, she carried her purse, shuffled toward the brilliant tree, and crouched. “Just yell when you’re done,” I said, and turned away.
After two minutes she yelled, and I went to take her place. Dust and pollen had powdered her clothes. She’d tossed the tissues to the ditch and straightened the creases in her shirt. A yellow oak leaf, sawtoothed and dazzling, had fallen in her hair. With a wave of dread I realized no, it wasn’t her actual hair, but the wig—and yet these phrases ( yellow leaf; my mother’s hair) seemed so lovely, I repeated them in my head.
She checked the skyline for cars. “Completely deserted. Like a place where somebody’d dump a body.”
“And I suppose you want to go searching for one.”
“I would, but I’m too tired.”
It was my turn, so I stood beside the tree and unzipped. I heard her walking back to the truck, slamming the passenger door. At my feet was the snuffed-flame smell, and above, the acrid, dampened leaves. I tried and tried, but couldn’t release: the unstable systems of my body, those days between binges. I zipped again and tightened my belt. Soon I’ll quit. It’ll be good for me to quit. But even thinking this, the craving surged bitter to my throat. I knew that unless I took a break, my supply would run out in a week, maybe two. I’d have to call Gavin for help.
I heard her start the Ford’s rumbling ignition, and then I heard the radio, her country station’s fiddle and pedal steel guitar now leaking from the seams of the truck. When I turned, she was speaking to me through the windshield. I tried to read her lips. “Look there,” they slowly said. She lifted a hand and pointed.
Less than a mile ahead, a figure was walking the burned border of ditch. It took me a moment to realize the person moved not closer but farther from us; as I watched, my mother tapped the horn and jerked her head to hurry me.
I got in and lowered the music; she returned to the passenger seat so I could drive. “Let’s creep up real slow and take a look,” she whispered.
As we neared, I saw the figure was a boy. He was frowsy-haired and thin; he kept his gaze at his feet. He kicked at the stretches of rubble and fire-singed grass, then continued shuffling along, both hands pressed in his jacket pockets. We passed him cautiously. The boy didn’t raise an arm or offer his thumb; he glanced up only after we’d eased by. Framed in the rearview I could see his pale skin. I could see the smirk on his mouth. I accelerated, slowed again, and at last braked so abruptly my mother caught the door’s silver handle to keep from lurching forward.
She squinted at the road, searching for the spoil of another car. When none emerged, she turned to me. “Did you see his face? Did you see who he looks like?”
Her eyes and smile were huge. It was an expression I remembered from childhood, the savage face she’d sometimes worn while pinning me down, while tickling my stomach and ribs. She hadn’t shown this face in years and it frightened me. “I’m not so sure he wants us to stop,” I said.
Already in the rearview, the boy was marching toward us. “But I think he does,” she said.
“We shouldn’t stop.”
“But we already have. We’re waiting here, for him.” With two quick motions of her head, she checked the reflection of the boy, then looked back to me. She tucked her bottom lip below the false white rim of teeth: a coy, flirting girl. Her wig was positioned wrong, but the leaf, still snagged at its side, was exquisite as gold.
“Let’s get him,” my mother said.
I began to nurse the truck backward, the boy’s fierce face looming closer in the mirror. He seemed clumsy, bantamweight, and, as he walked, he alternately cocked his head left side to right as though clowning for a camera. He had long, oily, gravy-colored hair and a bored, angular face. Beneath his open jacket, he wore an oversize sweatshirt, the kind with a bunched hood and kangaroo pockets and a gleaming median zipper, and he transferred his hands—or, rather, his fists concealed by overlong sleeves—from jacket pockets to jeans. I could see his pimples; his upturned nose. His miniature headphones, wire-tethered to a portable cassette player at his belt. And his eyes, lost dreamily in his music, reminding me briefly of my own youth: head in the heavens, feet on sturdy earth.
Before he could reach my door, I clamped my fingers on its handle. But my mother wouldn’t let me protest again. She ordered me to lower the window, and I followed her instruction.
He stopped, looking inside to scrutinize the truck, my mother, and, finally, me. “Hey hey,” he said loudly. I could hear his headphones, music like the tinny tongues of hornets.
“Hey hey, yourself,” said my mother.
The boy leaned into the window, arms and shoulders and head, so brazen I shrank against the seat. Up close, I saw his eyes were damp brown. Above his lip was a tentative, whiskery fuzz. I guessed him fifteen, sixteen at most. He grinned with a crooked mouth, and with fascination I saw a crust of dried blood in one nostril. I risked my first breath of him: a muddy, stormy smell, a hint of unwashed hair and, oddly, of peppermint. Maybe he could smell us, too—our smoky, sweaty clothes, our individual drugs.
She smiled a broad, face-sweetening smile. “Are you hitch- hiking out here?”
He swiped the headphones from his ears, necklaced them, and thumbed his tape player off. “Not really,” he said with a rasp. The peppermint smell, I saw, came from a clump of gray gum in his mouth. “But yeah, I could be hitchhiking. Are you stopping?”
“Surely you realize,” she said, “that we’ve already stopped.”
“I guess you’re right.”
She reached for the steering column, then shifted into park. With the same hand, she patted the space between us, daring him to get in.
“No,” I said. “It’s time for us to head home.”
But my mother wasn’t finished. “Don’t you think this could be dangerous? Walking alone out here, down this deserted road?”
“Nothing dangerous about it.”
“I saw the way you were walking. We both saw it. Don’t you see you’re just asking for trouble?” She clenched her fist, and this time pounded the seat. “Don’t you know the sorts of people who drive these roads?”
The gum snapped in his mouth. “Aw, I’m out here all the time. I never see nobody.”
“But we know those sorts of people. Kidnappers and killers! They don’t operate in the cities anymore. These days they patrol places like this!”
“Mom,” I said. “Stop.”
“Haven’t you heard about that boy from Partridge? Just about your age. You even look alike.”
“Nope,” he said.
“The killers wait until the right forbidden moment. Right when your school lets out. When darkness isn’t far away!”
Now I recognized this voice: ingratiating and girlish, like an overzealous actress, with all the lilting, artificial volume and tone she’d used while teasing Alice and me. Back then I’d adored the mother of that voice. Now I didn’t trust it, and I wanted her to stop. “Shh,” I said.
“Shh, yourself.” And then, to the boy: “Get in.”
“Only a couple miles ’til Sterling,” he said. “I can walk there myself.”
“We’
ll drive you. Get in.”
“He doesn’t want to get in,” I said.
She knew I wouldn’t budge or offer my door to him. All afternoon, like other afternoons, we’d been shielded from the world. Together in the Ford, our pencils and pads and recorder, our coded secrets and jokes. I couldn’t allow our air to escape; couldn’t let him corrupt it with his skin and blood and his knobby, graceless bones.
“We’re going to stay parked right here until you get into this truck,” she said.
I tightened my grip on the wheel and wouldn’t look at either of them. But then, in a startling surge of energy, my mother opened her door and stepped out. In that moment she didn’t seem sleepy or sick. She reached back into the Ford and, with a lone sweep of her hand, cleared the seat: our map, our pencils and notepads, and Dolores’s luckless lottery tickets, all spilling to the floor.
Still, her teasing voice: “Now come and scoot your scrawny butt between us.”
Without hesitation, the boy made an arc around the face of the truck to the passenger side. He folded his shoulders and head inside, sliding next to me. She followed him in and slammed her door. Now we’d snared him like a fox. I could feel and smell his heat. I looked to the floor, where his feet began edgily tapping: two black high-top sneakers with the canvases frayed, shoelaces frayed, their rubber toe pads darkened with ballpoint-blue ink. He’d scribbled stars and zigzags of lightning; fat dollar signs; one smiling face, one frowning.
“I live up here a ways, just the edge of Sterling,” the boy said.
“You shouldn’t be out walking,” she told him. “This could be one of those forbidden moments.” I knew she’d memorized this phrase from one of her missing-persons stories, from True Detective, perhaps a perfumed letter from some abandoned family.
“Nobody’s going to hurt me. I’m tough. I’m lucky.”
“We don’t believe in luck,” she said.
The sun was falling in the west, and storm clouds had clustered in the sky. I began to coast along the burned road, moving slowly as though acceleration would spur the boy to violence. He sat only inches from me, our captive. Whatever scheme or pattern I’d wanted from the day, this certainly wasn’t it. The boy raised his hand, touching the dashboard’s photographs and newspaper clippings with two suspicious fingers. I saw his skinny wrist, its pale skin and single blue vein, its fake pen-ink tattoo of a five-pointed star. His hand was callused, the fingernails grimy, the cuticles ripped and gnawed raw. But the hand was powerful and young and for a moment I wanted to touch it, wanted to know how it felt to hold a hand like that, this busy, carelessly roughened teenager’s hand.