My favorite practice room at the Peabody Conservatory had windows that reached from the floor to the ceiling. I liked to open them all, though it was bad for the piano, and stand on the sill overlooking Charles Street and the George Washington Monument. Below, pedestrians walked along the cobblestone sidewalks: well-dressed people and homeless people pushing shopping carts, people holding the hands of children, people of different races and ages, people I would never see again and would not remember having seen. Even though we shared a city, a neighborhood, a street, we’d always be strangers. Sometimes one of them would look up, see me standing in the open window; once, a young man cupped his hand to his mouth and hollered, “Jump!” For a moment, I thought it was Sam; it could have been Sam. But by the time I ran down the three flights of stairs and out onto the street, he was gone. I saw Sam everywhere: in the grocery store, feeding seagulls at the harbor, waiting in line at the Morris Mechanic Theater, boarding a bus that wouldn’t wait when I waved my arms. Nights, I’d stand in the practice room window, the skyline lit up with orange-tinted pollution, and I wondered if he was out there somewhere, watching me back. Perhaps he was waiting outside my practice room, and when I came out he’d grab my purse, my watch, my portable metronome. You got anything else? he’d say, just as he had that night in Horton. Sometimes I imagined receiving an envelope with Elise’s ring inside. And a note, unsigned, of course: I’m sorry. The other boys made me. I can explain.
But no envelope came; no one was ever waiting outside my practice room door. In Horton, someone reported having seen Sam at the Laundromat in Fall Creek; someone else claimed he was in Milwaukee, hiding out from the law. There was a rumor that the police had enough evidence to charge him with Mrs. Baumbach’s assault, but that wasn’t true—there was no evidence at all, and Mrs. Baumbach could not remember enough about that night to make a coherent statement. In September, several weeks after I’d left for Baltimore, two of Sam’s Milwaukee friends were picked up for questioning. Though there was nothing to connect them to Mrs. Baumbach, they were eventually charged and convicted of robbing both Becker’s Foodmart and Dr. Neidermier’s house. Under oath, they swore no one else had been with them. My mother, jubilant over this new evidence of Sam’s innocence, sent me a clipping from our local weekly. When I saw the pictures of the two men, I recognized the two friends Sam had led into my room. I balled up the clipping and stuffed it in the trash. I tried to forget I’d seen it.
My parents had hired their own detective to look for Sam, someone recommended by a missing-children organization in Milwaukee. Saint John’s Church took up a special collection to pay for an ad that ran in newspapers across the Midwest. But by now he’d been gone for over two months, and the police said there was little more they could do. He wasn’t dead, but he wasn’t alive either. He was in limbo, in a strange purgatory, and I was in my own. Had something awful really happened to him? Or was he merely hiding out somewhere? Should I grieve, should I be angry? When people at school asked me, “Do you have any brothers and sisters?” I didn’t know what to say.
I called Horton twice a week, waiting in line for the pay phone at the end of the dormitory hall. My mother acted as if Sam would be back at any moment. She changed the sheets on his bed once a week so that they wouldn’t smell musty, and when athletic socks went on sale at Sears, she bought him a dozen pairs. “You know how he goes through socks,” she said. My father developed ulcers, and one day, stooping down to pick up a newspaper, he slipped a disk in his back. At fifty-nine, he’d decided to retire from Fountain Ford at the end of the year. “Ready to come home yet?” he’d say. “Want your old dad to come get you?” Each time I talked with him, he sounded more wooden, resigned.
He hadn’t wanted me to attend a school outside the state, but by the beginning of my junior year of high school, I had won several regional competitions, and my teacher, Mr. Robertson, believed I had a shot at attending one of the better conservatories: Eastman or Peabody, Curtis or even Juilliard. With my mother’s permission, he took me to see a pianist named Peter Kozansky. We met in Kozansky’s studio, on the east side of Milwaukee; it had two grand pianos, built-in bookshelves, and dozens of flowering African violets. I’d never been inside such a beautiful room. “Impress me,” Kozansky said, and he paced the hardwood floors as I played the first movement of a Prokofiev sonata. I wasn’t fully convinced I wanted to study music as a profession, even though everyone seemed to think it was my destiny. I was, according to Mr. Robertson, “big on emotion and short on intellect,” and I knew that further study would involve the dry mathematics I hated. So when Kozansky said, “Enough,” I was quietly relieved—until I saw that he was smiling. Would I do him the honor of becoming his youngest student? His lessons cost one hundred dollars an hour, far more than I could pay, but he brushed my concerns away with one expressive hand. He’d see me twice a week, and I would pay twenty dollars per lesson. If that was too much, I would pay less. I said I would have to ask my parents.
“Two lessons a week,” my father said that night at supper. “Do you forget what they tell you the first time?”
Sam wasn’t eating. He pushed the food around on his plate, breaking it up into little piles.
“Don’t tease her, Gordon,” my mother said. “This is a great opportunity.”
“Who’s going to pay for this great opportunity?” my father said. Once, that would have been enough to put an end to the discussion, but now that my mother had her own income, she could pay for my lessons if he wouldn’t—and all of us knew it. “Goddamn it, Sam,” he said suddenly. “Would you stop acting like a three-year-old and eat your food?”
“Can I have ten dollars?” Sam said. “It’s for school.”
“You can come to work for me, how’s that?” my father said. He wanted Sam to detail cars at the lot on Saturdays and Sundays.
“You spend all this money on Abby because she’s a girl,” Sam said. “If I have to work, she should have to.”
“We spend all this money on Abby because she’s a hard worker,” my father said, switching sides.
Now my mother jumped to Sam’s defense. “Sam’s a hard worker too.”
“Then he can prove it to me at the lot. This Saturday, sport, eight to three.”
“You can’t make me,” Sam said.
“Wanna bet on that, son?”
I excused myself from the table, cleared my dishes, and went into the living room to practice. Perhaps Sam and my father continued their fight; perhaps my father pulled Sam out of his chair, knocking his plate to the floor. Perhaps my mother was screaming, “Enough! Enough! Can’t we just once have a quiet dinner like a normal family?” Or perhaps not. As soon as I touched the keys, I wasn’t aware of anything but the music I created. It was the same thing I felt when I prayed, a warm feeling of purpose, completeness, rightness. My grandmother said it was a state of grace.
But at Peabody, all of that changed. I spent eight hours every day in a practice room, in addition to ensemble rehearsals, ear-training classes, more classes in composition, conducting, foreign languages. I’d sit down to play the piano, and instead of losing myself in melody, I identified sequences, fumbled notes, forgot passages. For the first time in my life, I doubted my ear and relied on sheet music; at night, when I knelt down to pray, no words came. I slept in on Sunday mornings. I skipped classes, missed rehearsals, failed to complete my weekly piano assignment. One night in December, I climbed all the way out of the practice room window and lowered myself down to the ledge, where I sat with my feet dangling over Charles Street. My breath left my mouth in dreamy clouds. Christmas trees and menorahs shone in the windows of the apartments across Monument Square; streetlights glistened with wreaths. I listened to the sounds coming from the other practice rooms—a frenzied clarinet, a stubborn bassoon, dozens of violins—and then, with equal interest, I listened to the drawl of traffic, the occasional blaring car horn, the voices of pedestrians, who passed briefly into my life and then continued out of it. I’d been raised to believe that every least thing in our lives happened for a reason, and these reasons were born like seeds within the infinite mind of God. But what was the significance of the woman who walked below me now, wrapped in a long purple coat, carrying a black satchel? What was the meaning of my brother’s disappearance, the long, bitter complaint my parents’ marriage had become, my own musical talent, which, I knew now, was neither extraordinary nor miraculous? I’d met lots of people who could play the piano as well as I did, and they didn’t have dead aunts to guide them. Some of them didn’t even believe in God. And at that moment, I realized two things: I no longer believed in the Church, and I didn’t want to study music anymore. The knowledge hit me with the same unquestionable intensity Harv had described when he’d talked about his vocation. I shivered, my hands gripping the ledge. What was I going to do??
“How’d it go tonight?” Phoebe said when I came back to our room. It was only midnight; I’d reserved the piano until one. She was lying in her bed, reading Arthur Rubinstein’s autobiography.
“All right,” I lied. I felt changed, brittle, empty. Maybe I was just tired, and I’d feel different in the morning. Maybe I should call Harv, now a seminarian at Marquette, or even Kozansky—although his advice had always been: “The moment the piano fails to exhilarate you, go into real estate.” I undressed, lay down on my bed, threw an arm across my eyes to block out the light.
“What’s wrong?” Phoebe asked.
“I’m sick of everything.”
“Me too,” she said, and she turned out the light. “Hang in there. It’s only two weeks till winter break.”
Whenever Sam and I came in from playing in the fields, from wandering through the pines, from riding our bikes up and down the long gravel driveway, it was always my mother we looked for. We were her children, the way the dishes in the kitchen were her dishes. If my father was there, we’d ask him, “Where’s Mom?” pushing past as if he didn’t count, as if we barely noticed he was there. Perhaps he was only trying to get our attention, to force us to interact with him, when he’d answer, as he so often did, “She’s hiding.”
“No, where is she?”
“I’m serious. She got sick of you both and ran away.”
“Da-ad.”
“She’s never coming back.”
“I’m right here,” my mother would call from the laundry room in the basement, from the bathroom, from her bedroom. “Gordon, you shouldn’t tease them like that.”
One day, we came home from school to find my father sitting at the kitchen table. This was odd; he rarely got home before suppertime. “Where’s Mom?” we asked. She’d recently started her job at the Sell It Now!, but we knew she wasn’t at work because it wasn’t one of her scheduled days. When my father, in an odd, wobbly voice, told us that she’d been taken to the hospital, we didn’t believe him. “No, really, where is she?” we asked, waiting for him to tell us she was hiding, to hear my mother’s footsteps coming from the back of the house, to listen to her scold, Gordon, stop your teasing.
“I told you,” my father said, and then he said that her appendix had burst, that she’d had emergency surgery and was very, very sick. Sam giggled nervously, because my father simply didn’t talk this way, with his face close to ours, with his voice nearly breaking. “C’mon, Dad, where’s Mom?” he said, and my father jumped up and spanked him, first with his hand and then with the decorative wooden spoon my mother kept hanging on the wall. “Don’t joke around with me,” he shouted. “I’m warning you kids, this is no time for jokes.”
In my room, we spoke in whispers. By now I believed my mother really was in the hospital, but Sam could not be convinced. “She’s here,” he said. “We just have to find her.” His eyes were red from holding back tears. He searched under all the beds, in the hall linen closet, in the big cedar chest filled with keepsakes that we were forbidden to touch. There was no sign of my mother anywhere; in fact, her nightgown and bathrobe were missing from the hook behind the bathroom door. Sam would not give up. He slipped down the stairs and made a stumbling run for the barn. From the window, I watched as he squeezed between the warped double doors, reappeared, then disappeared briefly into the smokehouse. By the time my father called us downstairs for supper, Sam was back in our room.
I couldn’t remember my father ever cooking before. He served us at the dining room table: toast, summer sausage, butter, milk, soft-cooked eggs, Cheerios, and two Flintstones vitamins apiece. Halfway through the meal, Sam excused himself and went into the kitchen. From the noises he was making, I knew he was still looking—in the tall cupboard that held the garbage pail, in the coat closet, in the mudroom. When he finally came back to the table, he was carrying the dull scissors my mother used for cutting garden flowers. His spanking had left him sore: I could tell by the way he moved, step by careful step. But something else was wrong: He looked different, older, deadly calm.
“What are you doing with that?” my father said. “Sit down and finish your supper.”
“Where’s Mom?” Sam demanded, and he raised the scissors over his head like a murdered in a cartoon. I felt everything I had eaten swim up into my throat and lodge there in a pulsing, sour knot.
My father blinked at Sam, then easily faked him out with his left hand while grabbing the scissors with his right. He tossed the scissors into the kitchen. “Jesus Christ!” he said, clamping Sam’s hips between his knees and pinching his arms to his sides. They were eye-to-eye, mouths hanging open. Sometimes my father would challenge Sam to a wrestling match, and Sam—knowing he would not be allowed to refuse—charged violently. My father would let him twist and grunt for several minutes before offhandedly pinning him against the carpet. “Uncle,” my father would say, until Sam repeated the word.
“Now say Uncle Sam.”
“Uncle Sam.”
“Uncle Sam please.”
“Uncle Sam please.”
“Gordon, you’re hurting him,” my mother would say.
“Uncle Sam please with a cherry.”
“Uncle Sam—”
“Get off him, Gordon. I mean it.”
My father would get up then and call Sam a sissy who needed his mommy to rescue him. And Sam would cry with rage, his cheek a bright red smear where my father had rubbed it back and forth against the carpet.
But this time Sam wasn’t backing down. “What did you do to Mom?” he said, his face inches from my father’s. “Tell me or I’ll kill you!”
His voice was high, a kettle’s desperate whistle, and something in my father seemed to give beneath that sound. “Look, sport,” he said, releasing Sam’s hips. “You just calm down, OK? I’ll let your grandma explain it to you.”
He got up, dialed my grandmother’s number, and passed the phone to Sam. For a long time, Sam didn’t say anything. Then he began to nod. Yes, he would pray for her. Yes, he would be a good boy while she was gone. He hung up and went upstairs to our room without looking at either of us. My father sat back down at the table, rubbing his temples with the tips of his fingers, an oddly delicate gesture.
“What gets into you kids?” he asked. It was clear he did not expect an answer.
My mother came home from the hospital with gifts for Sam and me: neat bars of hospital soap, paper shoes, a handful of tongue depressors. She let us look at her stitches and promised we could touch her scar as soon as it healed. When I tried to tell her about the scissors, the spanking, she didn’t seem to hear what I was saying. Instead, she looked vaguely uncomfortable, the way she had the time my father sprained my shoulder, or the time he’d broken Sam’s finger roughhousing, or the time Sam left his bicycle behind my father’s car despite my father’s warnings, and my father had backed over it deliberately. “I’m sure your father did the best he could,” she said, and that was the end of it. Certainly my father never brought it up again. And so I doubted myself. Maybe I was exaggerating. Maybe I was making things up or misunderstanding what I’d seen.
In Baltimore, the night before I went home for Christmas, I packed everything I could carry: clothes, books, musical scores, stuffed animals, keepsakes, letters, folders of notes and completed assignments. “You’re just going home for two weeks,” Phoebe said. She was pacing wary circles around my matching faux leather suitcases, garment bag, overnight bag, and carry-on case.
“Two and a half,” I said.
The smallest of the suitcases was open; she knelt down to look inside. “Syllabi?” she said. “A campus map? Salt and pepper shakers—from the cafeteria? Nice touch. Oh, and six bars of soap. Of course.” I was busy trying to cram my second swimming suit into a side pocket of the garment bag. A glove popped out like a drowning hand. “Abby, your parents will have soap, don’t you think?”
How could I explain that I was afraid the past few months would disappear as soon as I opened my parents’ front door?
My last final was on the morning of Christmas Eve; my parents picked me up at the airport that night. I was shocked by the gray in my father’s hair. He hugged me briefly, awkwardly, before stepping back to let my mother throw her arms around me. Then none of us seemed to know what to say. As we went to get my luggage, I noticed how my parents didn’t look directly at each other, how they kept their bodies separate, distant. “How are you?” they kept asking me. “How are you?” I’d ask back. But when my luggage came down the conveyor belt, item after item, that finally broke the ice. “Good God,” my father said, restored to his own self. “I better go get a skycap. What did you do, bring the whole damn state of Maryland with you?”
“This isn’t just an overnight stay,” my mother defended me. “She probably had to bring a lot of schoolwork with her.”
My father’s back was clearly bothering him; still, he insisted on lifting each piece of luggage off the conveyor belt. I checked each one for my name. I hoped I had brought enough.
The next morning, I woke up at dawn, and for a moment I couldn’t remember where I was. I listened for the traffic noise of Charles Street, but all I heard was silence. Then I remembered I was home. It was Christmas. I groped for the nightstand lamp; it was gone. Lots of things weren’t where I’d remembered them to be: the owl-shaped wall clock in the kitchen; the collapsible TV trays in the living room; the portable TV in the kitchen. I assumed that my father had taken them to the shed, which was where, for all practical purposes, he was living. After coming home from the airport, he’d surprised me by saying good night at the kitchen door. Not knowing what else to do, I’d simply watched him cross the snowy yard to the shed. “I’ll see you tomorrow, then,” I called suddenly, and he waved before going inside.
“Do you eat separately too?” I’d asked my mother.
“Oh, goodness no,” she said. “He just sleeps better there. Our bed irritates his back. By the way,” she said, changing the subject, “I told Father Van Dan you’d sing the offertory at noon Mass.”
“You did?”
“Just the Ave Maria. He only called yesterday to ask. Serina Oben was going to do it, but she’s ill. I didn’t think you’d mind.”
Aside from chorus practice once a week, I hadn’t sung all semester; this morning, I’d have some serious warming up to do. I got dressed by touch, my eyes gradually adjusting to the darkness, which was not darkness, I realized, but a vague, grainy dullness. There was light coming from somewhere. But who could be up this early? I opened my door and followed the light down the stairs and into the living room, where my father was standing by the mantel, clean-shaven, neatly dressed in corduroys and a button-down shirt and his leather bomber jacket.
“Good morning,” he said, as if I still came down these steps every day. “I’m glad you’re up.”
“Hi,” I said. “Merry Christmas.”
“Yeah,” my father said, and he made a wry face at the bare room. “Not much of a Christmas, huh?” There were no decorations; there was no Christmas tree. The house was the most orderly I’d ever seen it. The last of our cats, a battered gray tom, had died, and now there were no pets, no children, no family to clutter rooms that had seemed so much larger when I was young. “Say, look what I found,” my father said. He held up a small orange ashtray made of coiled clay, an old school project of mine. I reached for it, but he put it on top of the mantel, carefully, as if it might crumble away.
“Sam was just five when he made that.”
“I made it,” I said.
He smiled at me the way adults smile at a child who is telling a lie.
“My initials are on the bottom.”
“Those are Sam’s initials,” my father said. “Your mother can have it, if she wants.”
“That’s nice,” I said. Perhaps Sam had made it. He’d had to make ashtrays in art class too.
“Tell her it’s a Christmas present,” my father said.
“You can tell her yourself,” I said, and then I teased him, saying, “So where’s my Christmas present?”
“I thought I saw a bag of coal outside,” he teased back. “Have a cup of java with your old man,” he said, and I followed him into the kitchen, where the coffee was already made.
“What time did you get up?” I said. He filled two mugs that had the Fountain Ford logo on one side and a slogan on the other. One said I’M THE BOSS; the other said DON’T BLAME ME. They were Christmas gifts from his staff. Each year, he got a new mug, a new slogan.
“Oh, fivish,” my father said. “I want to be on the road by six.” The mugs steamed madly in the chilly air. “Choose,” he said, and I took I’M THE BOSS. “Your mother’s daughter, aren’t you?” my father said.
“Where are you going?”
He seemed genuinely surprised that I would ask. “Didn’t your mother tell you?” he said. He sat down at the kitchen table, pulled out a chair for me, and worked an oversize brochure from the inside pocket of his leather jacket. I looked at a series of glossy pictures: palm trees, boats, a fountain. Neat rows of trailers, identically landscaped, with tiny screened-in porches. “‘Pleasant Acres Adult Community,’” my father read aloud. “‘Pineland, Florida. Live the life of leisure in a mature environment.’”
“Are you going to live there?” I asked stupidly.
My father nodded. “Friday was my last day at Fountain. Got my gold watch, plus they gave me a pair of sunglasses. Ray Bans.” He went through his pockets. “I guess they’re already out in the car. They gave me a couple of those plastic flamingos too.” He laughed.
“What about Mom?” I said.
My father drained his coffee cup and stood up. “Your mother isn’t going anywhere,” he said. “Your mother is going to stay right here and wait for your brother, for Sam…” His voice faltered. “You know, the goddamn cops aren’t even looking anymore,” he said, and he wiped his nose with the back of his hand. Then he handed me the brochure. “You can keep this, OK? And give your mother the ashtray. Don’t forget.”
He started to zip up his jacket. Then he stopped. “Hell,” he said, looking down at it. “I sure won’t be needing this where I’m going.” It was an old bomber jacket I’d admired for years. “You want it?” he asked.
“Sure.”
“Put it on,” he said, and I did. The cuffs came to my fingertips; the shoulders were big and boxy. It was perfect, and I thanked him. “Merry Christmas!” he said. “There, something you like! I must be an OK father after all! One of you kids survived me anyway.” He laughed bitterly.
“You were OK,” I said. I didn’t know what else to say.
He ran his hands through his hair. He looked at me, a quick, grateful glance, then looked away. “Well,” he said, “you be careful. Take good care of yourself. Let me know if you need anything.” He tugged affectionately at one of the jacket’s lapels, turned, and left the house. It was starting to get light. I watched from the kitchen window as his Ford coasted down the snowy drive, the back seat packed to the roof. I wondered which pieces of his life with us he was taking along, which things he’d chosen to forget, to leave behind. It occurred to me that I might never see him again—too late, I wanted to run after him and tell him to stop. His wheels spun briefly at the bottom, where my mother was always getting stuck, but then the car lurched forward onto the highway, taillights glaring north.
I put the brochure in my new jacket pocket and wandered uneasily from room to room, sipping at my lukewarm coffee. I thought about the lamp that had disappeared from my bedside and imagined my father moving through the house, fingering this, deliberating over that, distilling the past into whatever fit best inside a four-door sedan. Already, the rooms were reshaping themselves, swallowing his absence the way they had swallowed my brother’s. Soon there would be no clue, no sign, that either of them had ever lived here.
Except Sam’s ashtray. I picked it up, enjoying the good firm weight of it in my hand, before flipping it over to read the underside. AES/1970. My own childish scrawl. I put it back on the mantel. I wanted to smash it. The stairway creaked, and I turned to see my mother coming down the stairs in her robe and a pair of glaringly new pink slippers.
“Where is your father going this early?” she said. She yawned, then covered her mouth after she’d finished. “You look good in his jacket.”
“He gave it to me.” I managed to keep my voice from shaking. “He’s gone.”
“Gone where?” she said. She came over to the mantel and picked up the ashtray. “My goodness, I haven’t seen this in a while! Did Sam make it? I can’t remember.”
“I did,” I said, my voice rising. “Dad left it for your Christmas present. Mom, did you know Dad was moving to Florida?”
My mother looked at me. “Is he leaving today?”
“Mom,” I shouted. “He just left!”
“Oh,” she said. “Oh. I had asked him to wait until after Christmas.”
“What’s going on?” I said. “Why hasn’t anybody told me anything? Are you getting a divorce?”
“I don’t believe in that sort of thing,” she said. “I’ve been telling him that for weeks.”
I knew that if I didn’t leave the room, I would grab her and shake her until her teeth rattled. “Can I get you a cup of coffee?” I said. I was amazed at how calm I sounded. “Dad made some before he left.”
“That would be lovely,” she said politely, and I knew that, at that moment, I could have offered her anything—a glass of cold water, a box of crayons, Sam’s safe return—and she would have replied in the same way. “Look in the bread box too, if you would,” she said, still gracious and lost. “There’s a wonderful fruitcake from Thillie in there somewhere.”
We wound up splitting the fruitcake, which was heavy with rum, and to help along my father’s weak coffee, my mother brought out the bottle of Old Grouse he kept in the cupboard above the refrigerator. For a while, things started to look better. I turned on the radio, and we sang along with the Christmas carols. “Let’s celebrate!” my mother said giddily. “I’m a bachelor now—I mean, a bachelorette!” And we made Christmas pancakes with walnuts and peach preserves; we ate strawberry ice cream and cold mashed potatoes and cherry Jell-O avalanched with Cool Whip topping. It was such a disappointment to discover all the Old Grouse was gone. But there was an unopened bottle of Bailey’s Irish Cream, a gift from one of my father’s business associates.
“Wait!” my mother said, and she scampered up the stairs. I glanced uneasily at the bare space where the clock used to hang above the sink. I suspected that it was around ten o’clock; I was supposed to sing in two hours. But when my mother came back with two long-stemmed champagne glasses from the attic, I let her fill them up with Bailey’s, and after a while she filled them up again.
“These glasses are great,” I told her. “Where did you get them?”
“The Quick Stop. They were free with a ten-dollar gas purchase.”
“You can’t even tell,” I said.
“I can tell,” my mother said. “Everything I own came free with something else. Or it was on sale or it had a crack or stain somewhere. Or it was cheaper than the one I really wanted.”
She licked her finger and rubbed it around the rim of her glass. It didn’t hum; it squeaked. “What am I going to do?” she said. After Mass, she and my father and I were expected for Christmas dinner at my grandmother’s. Thil and Olaf would be there, and Monica and her fiancé, Ray. Only Harv, who was on retreat, would be missing. And Sam, of course. And, it seemed, my father. And now my mother and I. We’d broken our fast with fruitcake, pancakes, whiskey, and Bailey’s—how could we show up for Mass and not take Communion? Besides, my mother was still in her robe and slippers, and when we looked at the living room clock we discovered that, somehow, it had become eleven forty-five, and Oneisha was ten miles away.
My mother was crying, little sneaky tears, which she furiously wiped away. “What will your grandmother say when she hears about Gordon?”
“We don’t have to tell her today,” I said. “Half the time, Dad makes some excuse and stays home anyway. She probably won’t even notice.”
“But the offertory. Oh my God, think of all those people sitting there, waiting to hear you sing. They’ll think you were in an accident or something, they’ll think you…” My mother was searching for the worst thing she could think of, and I winced as I saw the options march across her face. “I’ve made you commit a mortal sin,” she said. “Missing Mass.”
I took a deep breath. This seemed as good a time as any to tell her my life was falling to pieces too. “Mom,” I said, not looking at her. “I haven’t been going to Mass. And I haven’t been practicing either. I don’t think I want to stay at Peabody.”
“Do I seem drunk to you?” she said. “I’ve never been drunk before. Well, maybe tipsy once or twice. But not like this.”
She hadn’t been listening. I didn’t know whether to feel disappointed or relieved.
“You seem drunk,” I assured her, and she beamed at me as if I’d told her she was beautiful.
“You get drunk too,” she said.
“OK.”
“But not too drunk. Because you’ll have to call your grandmother later. I don’t think I can do it. You’ll have to tell her something. Tell her we overslept.”
“OK.”
“Why is everything falling apart?” my mother said.
“It isn’t,” I said, although it was.
“Maybe your grandmother is right,” my mother said. “Maybe this is all my fault. Maybe I should have stayed home with you kids and kept house and agreed with everything your father said. Maybe that should have been enough.” She stood up, weaving, and headed toward the stairway. “I’m going to take a little nap.”
“You need help?” I said, but she didn’t answer. I could hear her moving down the upstairs hall, the creak of the springs as she sank into bed. Then silence. Where’s Mom? I heard Sam say, and I jumped up, shivering, and poured the rest of my drink back into the bottle, something my father had always done, saying, Alcohol kills germs—even mine. It was noon. In Oneisha, the Mass was beginning without us. My grandmother was sitting in her usual pew, with Auntie Thil and Uncle Olaf and Monica beside her. Father Van Dan was pacing up and down the hall, two nervous altar boys trailing him like woebegone angels. How long, he was wondering, should we wait for Abigail? Somewhere, my father was listening to the radio, steering with his knees the way he liked to do, muttering about gas mileage and shortcuts. Somewhere, my brother was thinking of us or not thinking of us, my brother was alive or he was dead, and it didn’t really matter because there was no one to know which it was except maybe God, and God had His hands pressed over His mouth, sucking on the truth like a sour-apple candy, smug as any spoiled child refusing to share.
By the time he was in high school, my brother stopped asking for my mother; it was my father who asked after Sam. Where is he? my father would say, coming home from work, coming in from the shed. Perhaps Sam was kept after school? Or maybe he was in his room? Or studying at a friend’s? In fact, nobody knew where Sam went on those nights he didn’t come home until dawn, those days when he left for school and the principal called to say he had never arrived. Often, we’d sit down to eat without him, because Sam would come home late or not at all. “Where is he, goddamnit!” my father said one night, jabbing his fork into his peas so hard the plate seemed to chime the late hour. “Six-thirty sharp we eat. How many times do I have to tell him that?”
He pushed back his chair and stood up. “I’ve got work tonight at Fountain,” he said. “I’ll be home by nine, and Sam better be here.” But minutes after he’d left the house, he came back inside. His hands were shaking; his arms and jaw were shaking. “That little fucker,” he said. I had never heard him use that word before; I never heard him use it again.
“What happened?” my mother said, but my father did not answer. He opened the refrigerator and stared intently into that cold blue light.
I followed my mother outside. It was dusk, September, and each step shouted with leaves. My father’s Ford was parked with its nose to the shed, and my mother stopped behind it. “Sam,” she said. “Get up now, honey, get up,” but I still didn’t see him. Then the darkness behind my father’s back tires took shape, and my brother crawled out. He was sixteen years old, drunk and laughing. Red and gold leaves were pressed like pleading hands to his face and hair and chest.
It was almost four in the afternoon by the time we finally left the house, my mother walking too carefully over the ice. When we reached the car, she handed me the keys, though I didn’t feel very well either. “I am never going to make it through this,” she said. She’d been chanting these words like a prayer ever since my grandmother phoned early in the afternoon, worrying about what had happened to us. “We overslept,” I said, and this was partially true. I’d decided to lie down on the couch for a few minutes and had fallen asleep for two hours. When the phone rang, I’d been vaulted into the air by the sudden charged clarity of knowing exactly who was calling and why.
“Well, come for dinner at least,” my grandmother said. “We’re happy to wait till you get here.”
I could hear my mother vomiting in the bathroom upstairs.
“Actually,” I said, “Mom’s kind of sick. I think she picked up the flu.”
“It could be food poisoning,” my grandmother said. Then, “Does she have a fever?”
“I don’t know. I mean, I don’t think so. I think she just needs to rest,” I said. “You go ahead and eat. I’m sorry about all this, Grandma. I’ll apologize to Father Van Dan. I—”
“Let me speak to your mother.”
“She’s getting sick,” I said, truthfully.
“Your father, then.”
“He isn’t here.”
My grandmother sighed, and when she spoke, her voice shook with terrible sadness. “Olaf heard a rumor that Gordon was moving out.” My mother was coming down the stairs. Her eyes were red, wet-looking. Grandma? she mouthed, and when I nodded Yes, she held out her hand for the phone, but I turned away.
My grandmother said, “Is it true?”
I didn’t say anything.
“It’s all right,” my grandmother said. “Your mother’s standing right there, isn’t she?”
“Yes.”
“Do you think she’ll feel better later this afternoon?”
“I think so,” I said.
“Then come over when you’re ready,” my grandmother said. “Abigail, please, it’s Christmas. I’ll be expecting both of you.”
I hung up, and when I told my mother I’d promised we would come later, her face took on the expression people use to face the inevitable: surgery, birth, death. “Do you think I’m still drunk?” she asked.
“Hungover.”
“Drunk is the better part,” she said, and she turned back toward the bathroom.
Now, as I drove down our long gravel driveway, my mother pressed her forehead against the cold window, gulped the damp winter air. It was that delicate time between daylight and dusk when the least brightness seems an exaggeration and the landscape loses its depth. Farmhouses twinkled with red and blue and green Christmas lights, intimate and warm, and they looked almost close enough to touch. We passed a manure spreader outlined in white lights; a mailbox transformed into an elf’s toy shop; a stand of young pine trees, each with a gold star lashed to its tip, so that it seemed like a small constellation was hanging only inches above the snowy fields. Just before we crossed the railroad tracks into town, my mother finally lifted her head.
“‘Welcome to Oneisha,’” she said, reading the sign that Uncle Olaf had made years before. Now it was riddled with bullet holes, spackled with ice.
“Oh, God,” I said, and I started to laugh because the Hornleins’ rooftop was bustling with its usual arrangement of reindeer, and—look!—there was the faded grinning Santa at the Klopps’, and, at the Pfiels’, the electric-green swing set, quarreling with elves. Over the years, I had come to know each of these decorations by heart, and I loved them because they were familiar to me, because I had been taught to admire them. Now I saw them with the eyes of an outsider. The town looked like a carnival—garish, sparkly, a child playing fancy in rhinestones and glitter.
My mother was laughing too, a bit ruefully, as if it hurt her head. “Let’s drive by the crèche,” she said, and I turned into the Saint Ignatius parking lot. The crèche was life-size, made of wood, and it stood on a cordoned-off section of asphalt beside the front entrance to the church. There were real bales of hay, evergreen boughs for the floor and the roof, and metal poles for the stanchions. Every few years, all the figures were repainted: white sheep, brown mules, a dark-haired Joseph, a blond and blue-eyed Jesus. The animals wore exaggeratedly human expressions of piety, while the wise men looked at their feet like shy boys at a dance, wondering what to do next. As I pulled up close, my mother’s face was bathed in the light of the floodlamps. Together we stared at the crèche. How deliciously warm and sleepy Baby Jesus looked!
“Where’s Mary?” my mother said suddenly. “Look, they moved her all the way to the back!”
It was true; Baby Jesus was alone in the foreground, while Mary knelt, open-armed, beside three candy-pink pigs, a brilliant red rooster. Even Joseph could have touched Jesus from where he stood, his arm resting on the back of a steer. “Can’t let a mother get too close. Might sissify the boy,” my mother said. She was imitating my father’s voice. I had never heard her so bitter. “Let’s go,” she said, and I pulled away and continued up the street to my grandmother’s house.
It was truly dark now, the gunmetal blackness of winter. As we pulled into the driveway, my grandmother opened the front door, waiting. Behind her, the light from the hallway blazed like flames, and yet there she stood, untouched. I thought of a story she’d told me once about a saint who had been thrown into a room of fire. There he’d lived for three days and three nights before emerging, healthy and whole. “Thank goodness,” my grandmother said when we came up the walk. “I was afraid you wouldn’t come.”
“Merry Christmas!” my mother said, accepting my grandmother’s kiss.
The remnants of the meal were still on the kitchen table: the half-eaten carcass of the turkey, a few slaughtered pies, green beans congealing in margarine. Why weren’t the dishes already done? Where was Uncle Olaf? Where were Monica and her fiancé? Auntie Thil was there, but she was flushed, nervous. Her hands shook as she took our coats and carried them down the hall to my grandmother’s bedroom. “Here, sit,” my grandmother said, leading us into the living room. “I’ve sent the others home. I thought we could pray together, come up with a solution to all of this.”
“To all of what?” my mother said.
“I know that Gordon’s left you,” my grandmother said, and my mother stepped back as if someone had struck her. “First your child, now your husband. What’s next—I suppose a divorce?”
My mother glanced over at me, a brief terrible look that said, Traitor. Then she turned and walked out of the house, leaving the door open behind her. After a moment, Auntie Thil walked down the hall and closed it softly. I thought about my mother’s coat, lying limp, dormant, across my grandmother’s bed. I thought of the car keys, a cold lump in my pocket, and I wondered where my mother would go. My grandmother reached for my hand, and I pulled it away without thinking, staring at her as if she were someone I’d never seen before. What right do you have to judge her or anyone? I wanted to say, except that I was actually saying it, each word torn from my throat.
“Abigail?” my grandmother said. “What did you say?”
I ran down the hall, grabbed our coats, and I left my grandmother’s house. Outside, the frozen darkness was pulsing with Christmas lights, bloody red, sickly green. The familiar street looked sinister, a fun house of mirrors and lights from which there was no escape. Where had my mother gone? I checked behind my auntie Thil’s house, where the iced-over pond gleamed like an eye. I could see my uncle Olaf watching TV in the den, and I stared at him through the window the way once, at a county fair, I’d stared—fascinated, horrified—into a cow’s stomach, which had been fitted with a transparent panel. I walked behind my grandmother’s house and came up the side yard and onto the street, where I started toward the hazy glow of the floodlights surrounding the crèche at the church.
At first, I mistook my mother for one of the statues around the Baby Jesus, but then she moved, came closer to the cradle, closer than Joseph, the animals and wise men, until she stood right beside it. Her arms were wrapped around her shoulders, and when I saw her kneel down in that makeshift manger, I realized she meant to stay there for good, to curl herself up and rock herself, rock herself warm in that cold yellow light.
In the fall of my third year living in Baltimore, two and a half years after I’d left the conservatory, my mother called to say she’d received a letter from my father. He said that he was being watched. He said that he’d been awakened one night by someone trying the locks on his windows and doors. He said he had developed six of the Seven Deadly Warning Signs of cancer and was making out his will. Would she like the Ford?
“I suppose it’s none of my business anymore,” my mother said. Their divorce had been final for over a year. A priest at Saint John’s had told her that as long as she didn’t remarry, she was not in a state of mortal sin. “But he doesn’t sound like himself.”
“Maybe he’s drinking.”
“Or getting Alzheimer’s or something.”
“Or maybe it’s just age.”
“He’s only sixty-two, Abby.” She sighed. “And I certainly don’t want his Ford. He knows what I really want.” My father had gone through Sam’s bedroom, through the house and the shed and the attic, collecting everything of Sam’s that would fit into his car. Even now, my mother didn’t know what, exactly, was missing, and this bothered her as much as the missing items themselves. My father, of course, denied he’d taken anything. “I’m entitled to half,” my mother said. “I deserve more than that ashtray.”
I’d heard all this before, but I was relieved to have a conversation with my mother that wasn’t focused on what she referred to as my lifestyle. Adam and I were living together in a one-bedroom apartment near the basilica. We’d met in a Laundromat. He’d dropped out of the Baltimore School of Design the semester before I left Peabody, and now he worked as a carpenter. “All that abstraction,” he said, “was starting to give me nightmares.” I had a full-time job at a thrift shop and a vague idea about returning to school. But the longer I was away from it, the harder it was to make plans to go back. And I wasn’t sure what I wanted to study.
“Well, what would you really like to do?” Adam said. “I mean, in your wildest dreams.”
“I’d be like that woman who studies gorillas.”
“Jane Goodall.”
“That’s her.”
“Biology, then.”
But that wasn’t what I meant. I wanted a misty morning in the jungle, the cries of strange birds, the solitude of my tent. A place where my grandmother couldn’t mail me prayer cards and religious medals and books on prayer; a place where my mother couldn’t reach me with yet another far-fetched scheme to find Sam. As each month passed, and there was less and less chance that he’d be found alive—if at all—she became increasingly, unbearably optimistic. She’d enrolled in Christian counseling, encouraging me to do the same. She believed Sam’s disappearance was a test of faith, one that she would endure and eventually pass with stained-glass colors.
Two nights later, she called again. This time, my father had phoned her, his voice so soft she barely recognized it. He wanted to know if she’d heard from Sam.
No, she said eagerly. Have you?
Wouldn’t you like to know that! he said, and then he told her about senior citizens in Arizona being drugged and carried off to experimental labs against their will.
Is Sam there? my mother said. Have you seen him? Gordon, please! But my father hung up, and she had not been able to reach him since.
“Did you call the police?” I asked.
She had. They’d contacted the police department in Cape Coral, the nearest city of any size, and Homicide sent a detective to visit my father. She judged him a lonely eccentric who knew nothing more than anyone else did. She advised my mother, through the Horton police, to forget about the incident.
“I think it might be better if we handled this ourselves,” my mother said. “The police down there don’t know your father. They don’t realize how he can be.”
“What are you going to do?” I said.
“Well,” she said, “what if you were to visit him? You could post flyers. I looked at a map, and there are lots of little towns around there. I’d pay your bus ticket, if you’d go.”
“I don’t know if I can get the time off,” I said. But I couldn’t help imagining myself as the hero, the one who—against all odds—rescued her brother, returned him safely home, redeemed herself in the eyes of a mother who, for months, had been telling her she’d thrown away her future, who gave her gift subscriptions to The Catholic Digest, Leaves, Guideposts, who warned her that God has ways of making stubborn people listen to His voice.
“For all we know, Sam could be there right now,” my mother said. “Maybe Sam’s the one who’s been watching him. Maybe he saw himself on TV.”
“Maybe,” I said.
A few weeks earlier, my mother had been interviewed on a talk show, along with other parents whose lost children—if alive—would be adults by now. There, on national television, Sam’s face was displayed, first as a seventeen-year-old, then aged three years by forensic experts. They showed him clean-shaven, mustached, bearded. They showed him wearing different styles of hair.
“You can ask the neighbors if they’ve noticed any visitors. You can post a flyer, in case he shows up nearby.”
“What if Dad doesn’t want me to visit?” I said. “I mean, we haven’t exactly kept in touch.” In fact, I’d sent him cards on his birthday, but he’d never acknowledged them, or sent me anything on mine.
My mother paused. I could hear her clicking her tongue against the roof of her mouth, a habit that meant she was formulating a careful reply. “I just wouldn’t tell him you’re coming,” she said. “And while you’re there, if you wouldn’t mind, you could ask him what he’s done with Sam’s things.”
The next day, the owner of the thrift shop gave me a week off without complaint. “You’ve been with us over a year,” she said, and I felt the long, gray winter of my failure. If I wasn’t careful, I might end up spending the rest of my life in that same dark shop, collecting my minimum-wage check twice a month, worrying because I had no health insurance. That night, desperate for any kind of change, I cut my long thick hair in front of the bathroom mirror and, afterward, buzzed it with my Lady Bic. “Good God,” Adam said when I came back into the living room, but I liked how it made me look: knowing but indifferent. The sort of look my father would despise on any woman. The sort of look that Sam would recognize.
Now I was tired, catching a cold, cramped by the duffel bag I’d wedged into the tight space between my feet and the seat ahead of me. It was October, one week before Halloween, and the bus—the last in a series of complicated transfers—was hot and sour-smelling. The cutout paper jack-o’-lanterns in the windows we passed seemed too vivid, frightening in a way I’d never noticed up north. Gaping mouths. Glowing orange teeth. Faces as round as the souls we used to draw in Sunday school, rising from their unsuspecting bodies. Halloween night was followed by All Saints’ Day. Still sick from trick-or-treat candy, we dressed as saints and marched into the church holding candles, singing “When the Saints Come Marching In.” My mother would be sitting on the outside edge of the pew so that she could wave to me and Sam as we walked past, hot wax nipping our fingers. I always chose to be Saint Cecilia, the patron saint of music, who was beheaded after she refused to marry a wealthy man. For three days and nights she lay dying in her cell, while beautiful music filled the air. As a teenager, I’d sit at Elise’s piano with my hands spread over the keys, praying to hear what Cecilia heard as she was drawn up into heaven by the force of God’s desire.
I believed these stories in a way my brother never did. I hoped that I too might be chosen, God’s capricious wishes revealed, my life irrevocably changed. When Sam first disappeared, I was strangely envious that he’d been singled out, the prodigal son who’d come back to a grand celebration. But now, ironically, I was the one returning to my father.
The bus finally arrived in Pineland, which was no more than a dozen houses, a gas station, and a fruit stand. We stopped at a crossroads, where several people got off, before continuing on toward the Pleasant Acres Adult Community, two miles down the road. I carried my duffel up the long crushed-shell driveway, past the trailers with their birdbaths and plaster rabbits and windmill ducks, until I reached number 26, solemn and plain, its curtains pinched like wary eyes. I saw the Ford in the carport, and I knew my father was home. Slick with sweat, I climbed up the porch steps, dropped my duffel and rang the buzzer. Immediately I heard footsteps moving away from the door. The light behind the front curtains dimmed. The rooms seemed to hold their breath.
I leaned on the buzzer again, imagining the sound like a needle, stinging the tender back of my father’s neck. I pictured him flattened in his La-Z-Boy, the volume on the TV turned down to a hum as he waited for me to go away. Or perhaps he was crouching below the kitchen counter, the way Sam and I once did, warned not to let anyone into the house while our parents were at work. We’d take turns peeking out the window over the sink, popping up like startled jack-in-the-boxes, knees cracking. Eventually, the stranger—a girl selling cookies, a woman with a Mary Kay smile—would go away, though we always worried someone might think to lift the welcome mat and discover the spare key.
That was an idea. I lifted the braided plastic mat that grinned the same Welcome, and there it was. I picked it out of the diamond pattern of dirt and rang the doorbell one last time. “Dad,” I called, and the front curtains moved slightly. He’d seen me. He wasn’t going to let me in.
The sun was starting to set, sending orange streamers across the crushed-shell driveways, and I noticed that faces had begun to appear in the windows of the neighboring trailers. A man came out onto his porch to give me a hard stare. I unlocked the door, but it would not open. Furious, I threw my weight against it. I pounded it with my fists. More people appeared on their porches, and I was yelling at them to mind their own goddamn business when the sirens, no longer in the distance, distracted me. Two police cars fishtailed up the driveway, skidding to a halt in a spray of shells. I picked up my duffel bag as doors popped open, uniformed men launching into the air like springs. “Drop it, man!” one of them yelled. “Hands in the air, move, move!” Man? They weren’t kidding. They had guns. I leaned against the door, arms and legs apart, the way I’d seen people do in movies.
I’d forgotten about my haircut. In Georgia, two little boys had run over as I opened the door to the women’s room. “That’s for girls,” they said, and even when I spoke, they were not sure what to make of me. “My name is Abigail Elise Schiller,” I called over my shoulder. “This is my father’s house.”
When the officers heard my voice, they seemed to relax a little, but they cuffed me anyway. The cuffs were hot, like everything else. They led me to one of the squad cars, which, mercifully, was air-conditioned. In the front seat, an officer was punching my name into a computer. On the porch, two more officers were opening my duffel bag, rifling through the manila folder of flyers my mother had sent me. They opened the map she’d marked with red circles—one around each town where she hoped I’d post the flyers. The officer rattled the cage that separated us from each other, and I squinted at him pleadingly, remembering the long interviews after Sam disappeared, the scribbling pens that meant no one believed what you were saying.
But all he asked was, “Do you know that man?”
My father was standing on the porch, gesturing grimly. The officers followed the movements of his hands, as if he were hard to understand. He’d lost most of his hair and at least twenty pounds; his blunt chin was hidden in his collar. Only dogs look at the ground, he used to say, his chin pointing at you, a challenge. “Gordon Schiller,” I said, trying not to sniffle. “That’s my father.”
“He doesn’t seem real glad to see you,” the officer said reflectively.
“We don’t get along.”
By the time I was allowed to step out of the car, most of the neighbors had accumulated on their porches, smoking, sipping cool drinks, exchanging comments. The men wore polyester pants held up with broad leather belts; the women reclined in floralprint dresses, nylon hose, cracked white sandals, floppy hats. They looked past me without curiosity, as if they’d seen my type before and knew exactly what to make of it. It was my father they were all staring at. He ignored them, watching closely as the officers removed my handcuffs, wearing the expression he always wore when observing anything vaguely mechanical.
“You called the police,” I yelled. “I don’t believe this.”
“I didn’t know it was you.” He scratched at the seat of his pants unselfconsciously, the habit of someone accustomed to being alone. A few thin, greasy strands of hair had fallen across his forehead.
“You looked out the window!”
“With that hair, you look like a goddamn boy.”
Furious, I rubbed my wrists, more for show than because they hurt. “What if I’d been Sam?”
I recognized the haughty look he always got when someone said something stupid. “You and Sam look nothing like each other.”
I picked up my duffel and started to walk down the driveway, back toward the road. A woman followed me, carefully lifting her feet as if she were walking through several inches of water. The sandals she wore had three-inch heels, and her face creased with makeup when she spoke. “He’s missing a few pieces to the jigsaw,” she called to me.
“What?” I stopped. Back on the porch, my father was going through all his gestures again, the officers nodding, shifting their feet. I wiped my nose with the back of my hand. My eyes watered, and for a moment the woman’s face blurred into a clown’s colorful leer.
“He’s cuckoo.” She twirled her finger near one ear. “We’ve been worried over him. You family?”
“Daughter,” I said, and, for the second time that day, “We don’t get along.”
“Well, somebody’s got to do something about him.” The rings she wore were attached to one another by a delicate web of gold chains. “My name’s Lily,” she said, and she encircled my wrist with her fingers. “You come by and visit me tomorrow. Number thirty.”
I waited for her to release me. A flock of iridescent grackles landed on the single grassy plot, where there were park benches and a fountain spouting colored water. They argued in their wheezy voices, gobbling up things I couldn’t see. It occurred to me that I didn’t know where I’d go and how I’d get there once I reached the foot of the driveway. And what would I say to my mother? Lily, as if sensing my change of heart, let me go with a little wave in the direction of my father, as if to say Shoo! I turned around and walked back up the driveway to his trailer.
Inside, the living room walls were bare except for the owl shaped clock that had once hung in our kitchen. There was a short couch, covered with a plastic sheet, a glass coffee table, a squat porcelain lamp. In the kitchenette, there was a table with one chair. The countertops were empty. Spotless. My father’s black lace-up shoes were cuddled head to toe by the door; beneath the window was a stationary bicycle, its split seat held together with duct tape. There was no sign that anyone else was here, had been here, or would be coming. I didn’t see anything of Sam’s. I watched as my father wedged an iron bar between the doorknob and the floor, twisting and double-checking the door locks as if they were delicate controls on an unstable aircraft.
“Is the neighborhood that dangerous?” I said sarcastically.
“You never can be too careful.”
My nose was running again, and I searched my pockets for a tissue. He turned and stared at me suspiciously.
“You got a cold?” he said.
“Me and everybody else in Baltimore,” I said, and I waited for his favorite lecture, the one on Mind Over Matter that he always gave whenever Sam and I threw up or coughed or asked to stay home from school. Sickness, he claimed, was all in the head—after all, he hadn’t been sick a day in his life. But now, instead of lecturing, he seemed to shrink a little. “You keep away from me,” he said. “Come all this way to give me a cold.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, bewildered.
“I go to bed early,” he said. “You can sleep here on the couch. Wash your hands and don’t touch anything. That’s how a cold spreads, hand to hand.” He didn’t ask me why I’d come, how long I wanted to stay. He took a deep breath and walked down the hall to his room, and it was then that I realized he’d been holding his breath—afraid of my germs. My father, who had never been afraid of anything or anybody, was nearly paralyzed with fear.
I remembered him instructing Sam about bravery. Without warning, he’d strike out at my brother’s face with the back of his hand, stopping a bare whisker away from contact. “Made you flinch,” he’d say, and Sam’s thin shoulders hunched with the weight of his shame. He was eight, or nine, or ten, and always small for his age. “Try me,” I’d say, but my father never would. “You’re ready now,” my father would tell me. “It doesn’t count once you’re ready.” Our relationship wasn’t a physical one; my body was something delicate and, by implication, slightly inferior, something to be protected.
At fourteen, Sam was still small for his age. One morning, when my father came downstairs for breakfast, Sam whipped his fist into the cushion of air around my father’s chin. My father slapped him hard, a reflex. “Made you flinch,” Sam said. His cheek was already swelling like a yellow pear; my father knew how to hit a man so it would count. My mother started yelling at them both. “This has just got to stop,” she said. But it never stopped, it went on and on, my father and Sam like precarious lovers, testing each other until the time came when neither of them flinched, ever.
At the end of the hall, across from my father’s room, there was a single door, which was locked. Beside it was a bathroom, cramped with a toilet, a sink, and a shower stall. There were no towels, no soap—just a roll of white toilet paper. I stripped off my clothes and showered in the empty chamber, letting the water beat my chest like pointing fingers, you-you-you. In Wisconsin, my father’s clothes dominated the closet he shared with my mother; their bathroom was tangled with cords from his shaver, his electric toothbrush, his nose-hair clippers, toenail clippers, soaps, after shaves, tweezers, foot powders, tiny scissors and combs for his on-again/off-again mustache. And his smell—Old Spice cologne and something else, not unpleasant, but heavy, pungent, spilling out ahead of him, claiming space.
When I stepped out of the shower into the steam, I felt as if I were still underwater. My cold made me shiver, feverish. Dripping, I pulled my clothes back on and walked around the house, searching for…what? In the kitchen, I looked in each of the cupboards: empty, empty. I opened the refrigerator, and there I found a few plates and cups, pieces of silverware, pots and pans. The door was crowded with bottles of vitamins, white-capped rows like cadets. The only food was on the top shelf: bottled water, stone-ground bread, organic peanut butter, a paper bag of apples. Health food. I selected an apple and bit into it, the cold electrifying my teeth. The Florida detective had been right. There was nobody here but an eccentric old man, and I had arranged to visit him for a week. I lay down on the couch, put my head on my hand to keep my face from sticking to the plastic cover, and slept.
In the morning, I got up and ate another apple, waiting for my father until it became apparent that he wasn’t going to come out of his room. “I’ll be back for lunch,” I hollered through the door. I could hear a TV, the chatter of morning talk shows. Outside, the fine morning mist was already burning away. The heat felt good. I walked past the tiny grassy park toward the canal, eager to see the water. The trailers were like dolls’ houses, squatting exactly in the middle of their lots as if placed there by a child’s careful hand. Each was equipped with an air-conditioning unit, and the humming was like the sound of distant traffic, constant, dull, distracting.
It was quieter by the canal, except for the boats and, occasionally, an airplane passing overhead. I saw an anhinga—a bird I’d read about in books—spread itself over a clump of mangroves like a shiny black scrap of cloth. Woodpeckers rattled the palm trees, and tiny lizards scuffled in the dry fronds beneath them. There were only two trailers at this end of the park, and one, I realized suddenly, was Lily’s—number 30. The mailbox was shaped like a bullfrog with a wide-open hungry mouth. LILY ANN SWEET was painted in pink block letters down the side of the post.
I knocked at the door, and after a moment Lily appeared, in a satin nightgown. “Yes?” she said pleasantly. A matching sheer robe hung from her shoulders like a bridal train, and her slippers were covered with peach-colored feathers. “Oh!” she said then, recognizing me, and she pulled me over the threshold. Within minutes I was sitting in the sunny kitchenette, with an antique teacup balanced on my knee and my mouth full of English muffin. “Thanks,” I said gratefully. “My father doesn’t have much in his refrigerator.” Lily’s trailer was identical to my father’s, only here the windows were an explosion of greenery. Furniture turned the rooms into a flowery obstacle course.
“I’m not surprised,” Lily said. “It doesn’t seem like he’s taking good care of himself.”
I asked her if she had ever seen my father’s place.
“Oh, we all used to visit him, the way we do each other,” Lily said. “But now he won’t let anybody in. The death of a child, it’s hard on anyone, but he only makes it worse by shutting himself away.”
I must have looked at her strangely.
She said quickly, “He told us about the accident when he first got here. He showed me the room where he keeps your brother’s things.”
I put down my teacup. “What accident?”
“The car accident?” Lily’s earrings and bracelets were jangling like alarms.
“Oh,” I said, trying to sound casual.
“It sounds like your brother was a wonderful young man. Makes it all the harder, I suppose, when you think of all the things he might have gone on to accomplish.”
I thought about that for a moment. “What did he tell you about my mother and me?”
She seemed to relax. “Why, nothing,” she said. “He never mentioned his wife. Or you. I didn’t even know you existed.”
It was worse than any lie he could have told. The sun had found its way through the plants and was warm on the back of my neck. “I’d better get back,” I said. “I don’t want my dad to worry.”
“Well, I’m sure you’re doing him a world of good,” Lily said. I thanked her, trying to gauge how quickly I could pack up my things and get on the next bus. But my father was waiting for me at the door. He was wearing the same clothes he’d had on yesterday: pants too big around the waist, a soiled white shirt buttoned all the way up to his chin. “You left the goddamn place unlocked!” he shouted. Sweat rolled down his face like tears; his hands clutched each other, slipped free, then fluttered at his sides. “Just waltzed right out, leaving everything wide open!”
“How else was I going to get back in?” I said, trying to step past him, but he blocked my way with his body; I realized he was offering me a key pinched between his thumb and index finger.
“The one under the mat is for the first lock,” he said. “This is for the second. For Christ’s sake, keep the house locked up or we’ll end up with our throats slit.” He dropped the key into my hand. “You can’t trust anybody,” he said. “You can’t let down your guard for a goddamn minute.”
“Why can’t you trust anybody?” I said. “Is that why you lied to Lily?”
He backed down the hall and pounded his fist on the door across the hall from his room as if he expected somebody would open it from within. “This is all I have left of him. All I have left!” It had to be the room Lily had seen, filled with Sam’s things, the things my father had taken. And I realized each of them was a clue that would help me to know the difference between what I remembered and what I’d been told, between the answers I’d given to neighbors and friends and detectives and the unspoken ones I’d learned to hide even from myself. You’re exaggerating, my mother said whenever I tried to talk about Sam. I don’t remember anything like that. But my father had the evidence, facts I could pick up and hold in my hand. I knew I wouldn’t leave until I’d been inside that room.
Over the next few days, my father and I settled into a wary routine, avoiding each other politely unless I happened to violate a rule, in which case he would come to me, shaking, sometimes too terrified to speak. The pots and pans and plates and silverware had to be washed in special detergent. The curtains could not be opened because someone, a stranger, might look in; also, the sunlight raised the temperature of the air, which made it more hospitable to bacteria. He kept his toothpaste in an army trunk beneath his bed, in case, he explained earnestly, someone spiked it with acid like what happened to that retired man in Punta Gorda.
“Maybe you should see a doctor,” I told him.
“I never felt better in my life. Remember how my back used to hurt me?”
I nodded, recalling his slipped disk.
“Cured it myself,” he said proudly. “High-protein diet. Low sugar, low fat.”
Mornings, he vacuumed, exercised on the stationary bike, and then scrubbed the kitchen and bathroom with ammonia. I offered to help with the cleaning, but it was clear I was not reliable—look at me, sick with a cold! I might miss a spot in my youth, in my carelessness, in my eagerness to get outside and into the carcinogenic sunlight. My father avoided sunlight, drafts, hot drinks, cold drinks, synthetic fibers, furry animals, and all situations where there might be spiders, mosquitoes, or flies. He rarely left the trailer more than once a day when, late in the afternoon, he walked to the Pleasant Acres Community Service Center to buy whatever food we needed for our evening meal. I trudged behind him like an uneasy pickpocket, hovering a bit too close. Once, we ran into Lily, but he scurried past her, leaving me to exchange pleasantries for us both. Lily didn’t take offense. “Poor man,” she said, shaking her head.
I spent most of my time sitting by the canal in the shade of the gumbo-limbo trees, dangling my feet over the concrete seawall. My hair was growing out quickly; the stubble had turned soft. A coral snake came to sunbathe every day on the same, sizzling rock. Pelicans glided past in groups, splashing down so close I could smell their fishy breath, and beneath the surface of the water their pouches ballooned, hideous as sausage casings. My cold had left me bleary-eyed, tired, and I convinced myself I wasn’t well enough to think about the flyers in my duffel bag, the map with its neat circles. My mother had printed thousands of flyers in the weeks after Sam disappeared, and now, whenever I tried to imagine my brother, I inevitably saw the picture on the flyer. The original had been taken on his seventeenth birthday. He’d been gone for two days, coming home just as my grandmother and Auntie Thil showed up for a Sunday afternoon visit.
“There’s the birthday boy!” Auntie Thil said nervously. “Good thing we brought a present.” Sam looked like hell. His T-shirt was torn, and blood caked the corner of one nostril. My grandmother held out a brightly decorated gift box; the wrapping paper boasted tiny boy angels blowing horns. Congratulations! the paper read, over and over. I watched the careful horror in Sam’s face as he reached across the table, gingerly taking the gift. Each movement released waves of cigarette smoke and the cloying sweet smell of marijuana.
“I’ll get the camera,” my mother said, and when she came back into the room she snapped the picture. The gift was a hand-painted china statue of Saint Francis. “It’s an antique,” I could hear my grandmother saying, her voice a broken whisper. My mother said, “Oh, it’s lovely,” and Sam turned the statue over and over in his hands, his fingernails black with dirt, a broken blood vessel blooming in the soft skin inside his elbow. But out of context, printed on a flyer, Sam merely looked serious, somber, reflective. My mother had chosen the picture for that reason. Sitting by the canal, I tried to remember my brother’s face when he smiled or scowled or laughed. I couldn’t—there was only the picture on the flyer, the pop of the flash, Sam’s red-rimmed eyes.
One night, just as my father and I were finishing our supper, the phone rang, a sudden, violent trill. My father leapt up. “Stay right where you are!” he said, pacing circles around the table as the answering machine kicked on, his own disembodied voice stating that no one could come to the phone. After the tone, there was a pause before the click of the receiver. “Who the hell was that?”
“How should I know?” I said, but I thought I’d recognized my mother’s sigh. I could see her sitting at the kitchen table, her decaffeinated coffee chilling in its cup, her work pushed to one side. She was looking out the window toward the highway, the old pear trees lost in the fiery lace of autumn, the sunset a crimson line. She was wondering how to find out if I was OK, without my father discovering she had been involved in my visit. And as my father checked the locks on the doors, mumbling about thieves, I realized that even though the material things in his life had grown spare, he was still as large as he’d ever been. My week in Florida was almost up. Tomorrow would be my last full day, and I promised myself it would not go to waste.
In the morning, I got up early and went out to the carport. The Fords’ keys were under the driver’s-side floor mat, which was where my father had always kept them. I was surprised to see a quarter-size starburst on the windshield, a scratch that ran the length of one fender. In Horton, he’d babied his cars, purring to them in cold weather, oiling their dark, mysterious coils. He’d spent one summer working on an old Mustang, going from junkyard to junkyard like a crow, scavenging for that perfect piece of shining metal. He enlisted Sam’s help, but Sam’s aptitudes, much to my father’s disappointment, were not mechanical ones. His scold—“Goddamnit, son!”—rang through the apple trees on hot summer nights when Sam misunderstood an instruction or dropped one of my father’s pristine heirloom tools. By the time Sam started high school, the Mustang had become the hub of an argument that had circled for so long its track was worn permanent, private, deep. They never did get it running.
“What were you up to out there?” my father said when I came in for our breakfast of peanut-butter toast, which, according to my father, would boost our energy.
“I was thinking about spending a day at the beach,” I lied. “Would it be OK if I borrowed the car? I could stop at a grocery store, get you some things they don’t have at the center. I’ll be going home tomorrow,” I said. “So if there’s any other errand you want me to—”
“The beach!” my father exploded, his shock catapulting us over the issue of the car, my departure, his possible grocery store needs, and into new, dangerous territory. “No, definitely no.” His chin shook faintly; a diamond of saliva was caught near the corner of his mouth. Didn’t I know there were dirty needles in the ocean off the coast of Virginia, Massachusetts, New Jersey? “You could get hurt. Something could happen.”
After we’d finished eating, he scraped the crumbs from our plates, scrubbed the table and countertops vigorously with ammonia. I waited until he had gone into the bathroom for his shower, which I knew by now would last precisely ten minutes, and then I got the flyers from my duffel bag. Back by dark, I scrawled on a paper towel, and I left it on the table for my father to see. I eased myself out the front door and locked up the way he had shown me.
The Ford was like my father, suspicious, unwilling to move beyond its daily routine. When the engine caught, a thick black cloud drifted over the other driveways and lawns. I backed out and eased along the narrow lane toward the highway, expecting to see my father burst from the trailer, partially clothed, foaming cinnamon Crest. But he had three more minutes left to shower as I spread the map across the seat. The first town on my mother’s list was Matlache; it was on the way to Pine Island, where there were two more circled cities. Away from my father and the close, chilled air of the trailer, I became aware that my cold was finally gone.
Matlache was unincorporated, the small green sign like a chewed leaf, rough with bullet holes. The town was a parallel chain of stilt houses caught between Highway 78 on one side and the bay on the other. The bay bisected the east and west sides of the town briefly; they were tenuously connected by a long, narrow bridge, where people gathered to fish and smoke, staying close to Styrofoam coolers of beer. There was an ice cream shop, a turquoise store, a marina and fish market, surrounded by pickup trucks. There was also a small, tired-looking bar and grill, called The Mullet. The sign in the window said it opened at eleven.
I parked at the marina and walked down to the waterfront, where shrimp boats were docked. A group of fishermen had gathered around a giant stingray that hung from a winch, suffocating under the weight of its own body. Gulls squawked on the pilings, hissing at one another along the rotting docks. A great blue heron stood in their midst, evil-eyed, its long bill an eager spear. The birds, like the men, kept their eyes on the ray. Its beautiful body bucked once and was still. I shivered and crossed the street to the gas station, where I bought gas and then a Coke, craving caffeine. “You mind if I post a flyer?” I asked the teenage girl working the cash register.
“I don’t care what you do.”
“Have you seen this person?” I said. My voice didn’t sound like my own; it was pleading, the voice of someone who needs a favor. I struggled to lower it. “He’s my brother.” Now it sounded like a lie.
“I seen nobody,” the girl said, not looking, staring into her hands. Her nails were long and polished red, with a clear decal of a sunflower pressed to each tip. I posted the flyer and went back outside. The Mullet seemed like a more visible place, but it wouldn’t open for another hour. To pass time, I walked up the street to the group of little shops, each tended by a middle-aged woman in a similar floral smock. I explained that my missing brother might be in the area, and the women nodded, their lips narrowing sympathetically. One refused to let me post the sign; the owner might not approve: They catered to tourists who came to Florida to look at beautiful things, not the faces of missing people. But she took a flyer for herself, promising to post it at her church in Saint James City. Looking at it closely, she said, “I haven’t seen this man before, but I think I’ve seen this picture.”
“On TV?” I asked.
“At The Mullet!” she said suddenly. “You know the bar by the water? It’s up on the wall there as you walk in. They should be opening pretty soon.”
I thanked her and left, figuring she’d mistaken Sam for another missing person on another flyer. I often read the bulletin boards in laundromats, at bus stops, in grocery stores and libraries, scanning the litany of lost names, deliberate facts. Four feet tall. Brown hair; red hair. Green eyes; black eyes. Can’t speak. Answers to Sweetheart. The faces on the flyers were fuzzy, smudged, the eyes staring like the eyes of the dead.
The neon sign in the front window of The Mullet still glowed CLOSED, but the door was open, propped back by a straggly potted palm. There was a faint fishy odor of fry-grease lingering in the parking lot; two trucks and a rusted Chevy Nova were parked in the half-shade of the awning. I went inside, conscious of my shorts and bare arms. The air was cool and dark, stale with cigarette smoke, and it took a minute for my eyes to adjust.
“We’re not ready for ya, hon,” a woman called to me from the grill behind the bar. “Coffee’s making, but that’s all we got right now.”
“Coffee’s fine,” I said. There was no bulletin board, no place to pin a flyer. I sat down at the far end of the bar, wrapping my feet around the legs of the stool.
“Bottomless cup,” the woman said, giving me my coffee and a quick smile before hooking the phone off the wall and dialing briskly. “It’s me,” she said into the receiver. “You better get your ass in here. I got customers.” She rolled her eyes at me. “I don’t want to hear about it.” When she hung up, she was laughing.
“My son’s got himself a little girlfriend. Makes it hard to get him up in the morning.”
I could see how it would be when her son finally arrived, the good-natured back-and-forth between them. “Could you tell me if you’ve seen this person?” I said, taking a flyer out of my bag. “He’s my brother.”
“Just a minute,” she said, turning down the grill. When she came back to the counter, she sighed, pushing her hair behind her ears, revealing tiny sparkling earrings, the brightest things in that room. “Haven’t found him yet?” she said. “So sorry, hon. I still got his picture posted at the waterside entrance.”
“This same person?” I asked, astonished. “How did you get his picture?”
“Some old guy brought it in a while ago. Maybe a year…was it that long?” She put one finger to her cheek, thinking. “He asked for a glass of water, and he drank it like this”—she pantomimed, mouth open, head back—“so his lips wouldn’t touch the glass. You could tell he had some sort of nervous problems. He thought your brother might be working one of the boats, but these are all our local boys. I’ll tell you what I told him—if this boy shows up, I’ll sure call.”
I wanted to touch my own face to see what expression I was wearing.
“Hon,” she said. I must have looked sad. “I am sorry about your brother.”
“Thanks,” I said, and after I finished my coffee, I ordered a beer. The woman’s son arrived and served it to me, rumple-headed, his face still faintly creased from the bedsheets. “Hustle up there, Romeo,” the woman said.
“Aw, Ma.”
She winked at me, bumped his hip with her own.
“Aw, Ma.”
“My Romeo,” she said. “My lady-killer.”
When I left, they were working at the grill, side by side, the son smiling back at her beneath the tangled curtain of his hair. I spent the day doing what my mother had asked, posting flyers in Saint James City, Bokeelia, swinging back inland to Cape Coral. Nearly everywhere I went, I found my father’s faded flyers. Eventually, I ended up in Fort Myers, where I walked along a crowded beach, stepping over sand castles, broken shells, the tanned feet of lovers. It was getting dark by the time I returned to Pleasant Acres, sunburned and thirsty, eager to put the week behind me. My father was waiting for me at the kitchen table. “Where’d you go?”
“Beach.”
“I remember telling you no.”
I felt as if I’d been sucked back into childhood: I saw myself standing before him, small, frightened, trying to keep my face impassive as I waited to be punished for whatever rule I’d broken. But then I came back into myself, into the present: I was not a child anymore. “It’s good to know you remember something right,” I said. “All that crap you told Lily Sweet about Sam.”
My father looked away from me, stared into the cup of his own clasped hands. “Sam was a good boy,” he finally said, so gently he could have been my mother. “Isn’t it something, how he could just disappear like that? How anyone of us”—he snapped his fingers—“and that’s it. That’s all.” He touched the tips of his index fingers together, over and over. “I worried about you all day.”
“I’m sorry.”
“All day long.”
“I’m sorry,” I said again.
He got up and went to the kitchen. I sat down on the couch as if nothing had happened. But the interaction had shattered the balance of caution and silence we’d woven between us. During supper, we made polite conversation. We watched each other, caught each other watching. Before he went to his room for the night, my father dug into his pocket and handed me another key. “You can look in Sam’s room if you want,” he said, in a voice I didn’t recognize. “Just don’t change anything, OK? I got it all laid out the way I like it.” And then, without warning, he started to cry, his arms at his sides, not hiding his face. I put my arms around him, and for a moment, he did not pull away.
The room smelled of cedar and the underlying odor of Florida tap water, mildewed, swampy, strange. The only light aside from the dull overhead fixture was the lamp that had once been beside my bed. It belonged to both Sam and me when we’d shared a room as children, arguing whether to leave the door open or closed, the night-light on or off. There was the tricycle that had first been mine, pink, with pink tassels streaming from the handlebars. I remembered how my legs had stretched to reach the pedals. When Sam was old enough to inherit it, my father had repainted it red, white, and blue. Now, in old age, its true color showed through. There were Sam’s old skateboards leaning up against the wall and, beside them, the baseball and bat and glove that he never used much, despite my father’s earnest lectures on How a Sport Builds Character. There were boxes of schoolwork my mother had saved, Sam’s and mine jumbled together; the childish drawings hanging on the walls were the ones I had given her because she said she liked them. The Horton Wildcats banner on the wall had been my father’s gift to Sam, but I’d never seen the football trophies before. I picked one up; it belonged to my father’s brother, my uncle who had died in the war. The plaques behind them were mine; I’d assumed they were still boxed up in my bedroom closet. Chopin Competition, Third Prize, Milwaukee. Contemporary Musical Festival, First Prize, Minneapolis. Milwaukee Conservatory Medal of Achievement. I touched them, remembering a time when I thought myself capable of great things. I touched the drawings, the schoolbooks, the fishing pole Sam hadn’t wanted for Christmas. I touched the padded varsity jacket hanging in the closet, the kind football players wore.
This was not Sam’s jacket. These were not Sam’s old-fashioned athletic shoes. Sam wore black leather jackets and combat boots, the tongues hanging out, obscene. Sometimes, at night, he wore eye makeup and bracelets studded with metal, his hair spiked tall and fierce. A car would be waiting, there was always a car waiting, with the radio thumping and the windows rolled up and tinted dark so you couldn’t see who was inside, and then Sam would be passing through the kitchen and out the door as if he were already invisible, safe, gone. Outside, a door would swing open like a welcoming arm, and for a moment the music would be crisp and sharp, and maybe we’d hear voices and the sort of laughter men use only among themselves. And then the car would squeal down the long gravel drive and roar toward Milwaukee, most nights not returning until dawn.
It seems to me now that the past belongs to those who have the self-possession, or the arrogance, or enough sheer determined longing, to stamp their own particular imagination history. It was no use wondering what I would have put in this room were it mine to fill, because it was not mine, it never would be. I remembered Phoebe telling me, People believe what they want. But there was also this: People want to believe. And somewhere in between wanting to believe and believing what we want, there is the story we call the truth.
I walked outside into the humid air and followed the path toward the canal and the sleepy sound of the gulls. My sneakers crunched the shells and stones that made up the path, and it was a brittle sound, a bitter sound, the sound of many small things breaking.