Patrick found me cross-legged on the floor of the office, walled in by photo albums and boxes of books and papers. My mother’s things. I’d spent all that afternoon avoiding him and busying myself away from the treadmill replay of Angela’s phone call. She hadn’t contacted me again, and every hour of distance from our chat was working that strange thing that is only the privilege of time to do—the rewriting of history. In this case, time managed its trick by sketching down the memory of my moderate reaction from what it had been into something abstract, a concept of a reaction instead of the reality of what I’d said to Angela.
With two days of real life for a buffer, what embarrassment there had been, and the odd wallow of sympathy I’d felt for Patrick, was faded more to watercolor than photograph. Now the surges of insult were so scalding I’d have to revisit the conversation, word for word, just to remember what I’d said to bring back even a shade of my measured calm.
But guilt had me thinking I had to make amends by being forgiving of a comparably weighted offense. The trouble is, betrayal is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside. However bad it looks, there are no scales to measure a pair of loyalties against each other. I couldn’t tell which one of us was worse.
I wanted off the carousel, even for just a while. What I really wanted was to talk to my mother. Killing time rifling through the cartons of her things and remembering the stories behind the flotsam was a second-rate substitute for her electric presence and artful guidance, but it wasn’t third-rate, and it wasn’t nothing. I took up the task of scanning her photos and letters into the computer for safekeeping.
The ongoing project had been meant as a layman’s reach for permanence, a way to thumb my nose at fire and flood and tornadoes until electromagnetic pulse do us part. But in the drudge work of sorting all the snapshots, I’d swung into distraction at intervals and bent to the call of the laptop, and listless Internet searches for more information. I typed in variations of her maiden and married names with addresses or snippets of person, place, or thing that I recalled from my troll through her papers. Secret money, secret job. I knew the drill. I always had. But now more than ever, so much less stays secret. I looked for her in the immortal mountain of ones and zeros available to my every clickable whim.
“What are you doing?” Patrick asked, sitting down on the far side of my fortress of memorabilia.
“I don’t know. Making some progress on our scanning project, I guess.” Patrick and I had stacks piled up, intended for the electronic archive, but it had turned out to be somewhat of a one-mountain-forward, two-mountains-back endeavor. “With Paul coming around again and us getting the money in and just—you know, all the stuff that’s going on. . . . Anyway, it made me think of her. I thought I only wanted to look at her pictures, then I thought I’d go ahead and get some of it scanned in. Next thing you know, I’m in here all day.” I pulled out a postcard from the stack of pictures. “Hey, see this one?” The postcard was a once-glossy photo of a golden-rayed sunset on a beach, with a raw and wild jungle backdrop, nothing but green and shadow just past the umbrellas and lounge chairs of the resort. Safe and relaxing so close to wild and not safe at all, the picture was mesmerizing. The edges of the card had frayed to white fuzz, and the message space on the back had been left blank except for a smudged postmark from Thailand.
“This was the spider-catching card,” I said. “My mother never crushed a spider. She always caught them with a glass and this postcard and then put them outside.”
Patrick laughed. “You would think she could’ve just stared down even a tarantula and told it to scram and it would have gone straight for the door all by itself.”
“You’d think.”
“You okay?”
“Yeah,” I said without conviction. The back of my throat tickled with tears. I hated crying and hated myself when I did it. I dared my eyes to water up, teeth hooked into the meat of my cheek, pinching what had been a vague sadness into a smoldering anger—at a show of weakness, at Patrick, at myself.
Patrick lifted a small stack of old-style, orangey, square photos off the pile and rotated through them without really looking. “It’s not surprising, I don’t think—the money, I mean. I wondered about that when the estate settled out. I always thought she would have had more.”
“You always thought that, huh? Bold much?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Nothing. It was just a weird way for you to put it is all. Like she owed us or something.”
“I didn’t mean anything by it, Dee. God.” Patrick lurched up from the floor. “Nice little sucker punch, though.”
“Pat, I’m sorry.” A thrill of dread bloomed between my lungs and squeezed my heart to fluttering. If I picked a fight now, it would come out. I wasn’t ready to talk about Angela, and in no small part because I hadn’t decided how upset I might or might not be over it. The lay of our land was strewn with hidden traps, and not just mine.
“I should have known better,” he said. “You’re so touchy whenever your mother comes up.”
“I know I am. I’m sorry.”
“Never mind. It’s fine.” Patrick kissed the top of my head with a loud, mocking smack and walked away.
• • •
My mother’s games kept time in me like a second heart, the lessons thrumming away in the background, unnoticed, just like a pulse. I sensed the world the way she had taught me to without feeling the mechanism of it.
Something startled the galloping of blood and alertness through my veins. I felt eyes on me, but whoever owned the gaze had dropped it back into the crowded bustle of the mall’s wide hallway before I was able to pin down the watcher.
My mother had grafted us, Simon and me, to a braided lifeline of intuition, tricks, and her stock of truisms. There is nothing supernatural, she’d say. There are only the things in this world that we understand, the things that we don’t understand, and made-up crap. The last part of that saying was always the best bit. Pray at the altar of each of these things, my darlings. She would be smirking by then. They all work in their own way.
Why, exactly, we should go through our days harnessed to a lifeline at all, she never quite explained.
I scanned the bustling food court for the source of my ruined appetite. The trouble with top-of-the-line keenness (that my mother would never let us call paranoia) is that out of context, a pointed look could mean that I was being groomed as some sort of a target or merely that my sweater reminded the beholder that his wife’s birthday was this weekend and that he’d best get a gift right quick before he forgot again.
I scanned the room and didn’t see anything or anyone worth evaluating.
I sighed and forced down two more rounds of spicy tuna roll before tipping the rest of it into the garbage. The soft tingle of being watched tracked through my hair again, and I whirled to its call faster this time, half expecting to find a bristling woman with ANGELA tattooed across her forehead spotlighted somewhere in the crowd. But instead, my glance was tugged by the shoulder of a man turning away from me—tall with dark, wavy hair, and a jacket almost too nicely cut to be paired, as it was, over jeans. I looked back over the rest of the midday melee—munching, chatting, texting. None of them pulled crosshairs over my eyes the way Mr. Walking-Away did.
He didn’t see me look again, but I double-checked to note whether his retreating stride still matched up with the humming compass in my brain. The doors to the parking levels turned him back in my direction, not full on, but even through two layers of insulated glass and nearly twenty years of time, I recognized his face.
• • •
I remember once drifting into my mother’s office to find her studying the photograph of a man: blond, with nearly invisible eyebrows. He was clean-shaven and had a dent in his chin deep enough to look as if it might have had an ax buried in it at some point. The man’s two-pronged jaw would have been interesting enough, but my mother’s absorption was too intense, the whole scene unreal, as if maybe I were asleep in my bed and walking around only in my dreams.
She was motionless, staring at the picture, but with the image turned upside down.
“What are you doing?” I was little, maybe eight years old, and the only thing to make sense of it was to think of how I liked to watch my brother, just barely out of being a baby, talking upside down. We’d take turns dangling over the arm of the sofa, reciting rhymes to each other face-to-upside-down-face. It was good fun until the giggling made it all nonsense and somebody got spit in their eye. And even when it was fun, it was still a little creepy—the smile that was clearly a smile but all wrong with the big teeth bared below and the tongue tapping down instead of up. The fascinating deformity made the words look out of sync, as if they should sound wrong. But they didn’t sound wrong. The singsong verses would play in Simon’s clear little-boy ring. He always laughed first.
My mother looked up from her work, scanned me, and tallied up the sum of my discomfort with a speed and ease that, even then, I knew was disconcerting. But her smile put me one level closer to fine.
“It’s a trick.” My mother pulled me close and righted the photo. The room snapped back into plain old Saturday morning. “Your brain is amazing, Plucky. You can make it do fancy things that it doesn’t normally do. Like if you study a person’s face, like this guy’s face for instance, upside down”—she inverted the photo again, much less disconcerting with her warm arm around me—“then it doesn’t matter what he does to change the way he looks. I’ll remember him if I ever see him again. He could change his hair color and it wouldn’t matter. He could cover his eyes with glasses. He could wear a hat or grow a beard or get old and I would still be able to recognize him right away.”
“Why would anyone change their face?”
“Now that’s a conversation for an older and wiser day.”
She often steered away from certain kinds of questions with that little word-rudder, sometimes to be revisited and sometimes not. If this one had ever come back around, I couldn’t remember it, and I don’t know if my mother ever crossed paths, or swords, with the blond man.
But, watching the glass door to the parking garage sweep closed, this particular day achieved instantly older and wiser status. I recognized Special Agent Brian Menary in the ridiculous food court of the equally ridiculous local shopping mall, and I’d only ever studied his face upside down once, almost two decades earlier on the night my mother left me twice—first by sending me into a lashing rain with my bawling little brother in tow, then later, in the foyer of our house on the worst night of my life.
• • •
The night my mother left us for so long, something in a storm had woken me. A sound had been running under the thunder as I slept, a sound I wasn’t sure I had actually heard until I played back the end of my last dream. In it, my track coach had been talking to me about double-knotting my laces and the importance of pressing the balls of my feet against the starting blocks. He was sitting in a pile of autumn leaves raked up into a high hill in the corner of the gymnasium where we would run practice drills whenever the weather was too lousy to train outside. Then, to match the ambient noise of the house’s waking reality, Coach Wells inexplicably slammed a door to nowhere that hadn’t been there a second before.
Once my eyelids snapped open, the dark of my bedroom was immediately more solid than the bright nonsense reel I’d been playing in my sleep. I strained at the ears to hear the voices buried in the din of the rain on the roof. The runoff from the gutter spattered against the pane, and the wind hooting around the corner of the house snatched away the words, but the whispered whir of urgency slipped through the air. I picked out my mother’s voice and also a man’s, their conversation just a two-toned murmur under the sounds of the storm. At the top of the stairs, I heard her more clearly: “Nuh-unh. Not a chance. You’re not taking them anywhere. I’ll handle it.”
Her usually light step was betrayed on the hardwood floor. I almost never heard her walking indoors. She was as silent as fog in the house, in her bare feet, missing every nail-rubbed spot in the boards without trying. She just seemed always to know where to step. Her strict policy was no shoes in the house, but that night she had her boots on. The clock read 1:12 a.m. It was just barely Friday.
My heartbeat thrashed at my eardrums before she slipped into my bedroom, trailing no light behind her. She and the man had been talking in the dark.
“I need you to do something for me, Plucky,” she said. “I need you to take Simon out the back door. Take the path to the stock pond. Sit under the dock and count to one hundred.” She laughed, a sound so disconnected from the scene it might as well have been another dream. But it was a real laugh, not a forced thing. Something in all of this was funny to her. “Then I want the both of you to sing ‘American Pie’—the whole thing, all the verses—very quietly.”
“What? Why are you sending us down there now? I was sleeping. I don’t—Mama, it’s raining.”
“I know, baby. But it’s not cold outside. You’ll get dirty, but that’s okay, and you’ll be fine. But I need you to go, now, quickly. Now when you get back, if that truck”—she pulled back the bedroom curtain and tipped her head to send my glance out to where the streetlight cast the long shadow of a boxy, black Suburban over the lawn—“is still in the driveway, don’t come in. If it’s gone, then come around back and come on inside. If it is there, or if any car for that matter is in the driveway, go to Mrs. Anderson’s house—the back door—and ring the bell.” She tapped her teeth with her thumbnail, thinking. “And here’s the second thing: if there aren’t towels for you two on the back bench under the awning, same thing, even if the truck is gone—go through the yards to Mrs. Anderson’s back door.”
“You’re scaring me! What’s going on? Who is that out in the hall?”
“Don’t worry, baby. He’s fine. He’s here to help. But it’s almost surely a mistake. Probably nothing that has to do with me. And certainly nothing that has to do with you and your brother. I just need you to take him and do as I ask while I sort this out.”
“Mama, I can’t.”
“You can’t what? Walk? You can’t count? You can’t sing? Plucky, all of those things are easy. So is being scared—it’s very easy. But being scared doesn’t nail your feet to the floor any more than happiness makes you fly out the window. So go on, baby, scared or no. ‘Can’t’ isn’t very useful to us just now.”
“Will you tell me later?”
“Not if you don’t do what I say. Be a good girl, a brave girl, and who knows?” Incredibly, she winked. “I just might.”
Her fingers trembled as she reached for the bedroom doorknob. Knowing that my mother was frightened flipped a switch in my middle. Suddenly, I didn’t mind the thought of being far away from the house. Suddenly, it seemed like an excellent idea. I snatched Simon from a deep sleep and hustled him into his sneakers and raincoat, and we set out of the house as if the place were on fire.
I ran over the slick carpet of grass with Simon’s hand in my grip, his sniffling sobs a high hum under the clamoring applause of the rain.
We did what she asked. We hunkered down in the squelchy mud by the last landlocked post of the pier. The fast, dull clatter of rain on the planks sang with the hard drumroll of my heartbeat. The two strains of staccato pounding raced each other, one over my head and one inside it. It might have been easier to tame the fear if it had been quiet, but in the quiet I would have been bending every nerve back toward home, toward my mother and the stranger and whatever they were waiting on inside our house. Maybe this was better. Tonight, no sound could hurdle the blanketing hiss of the rain. But at least there were our instructions.
The why of it was so far out of reach that we didn’t even question it or wonder over the task list laid out to distract us from what was happening inside our house. Counting seemed right, seemed solid. One, two, three, four . . . In the farthest reach of the streetlight, I could see the fear-shine of Simon’s eyes tamp down to just the glint of concentration as he tried not to lose track as we got into the higher numbers. Counting put the time of our return trip into focus. We were going home just on the far side of triple digits. Not far at all. Not long. We could do that. I could do it.
The singing was stupid enough that we eventually ended up sputtering rain as we laughed, which was exactly to my mother’s plan. It put the heart back in us for the walk home. She knew we’d be scared.
We came up to an empty driveway with the secret-message towels stacked on the bench on the back porch. Inside, my mother’s hair was curled with sweat and she was speaking low and fast into the telephone as we turned the corner of the living room. When she saw us, she tucked the phone against her shoulder and touched our faces with her hot hands. “I’ve got to go,” she said to her caller, and without allowing time for a reply dropped the phone back into its cradle.
A very young Brian Menary huffed through the front door, red-faced and panting. He started stacking my mother’s things in the foyer.