TWO

When she was alive, my mom drove a blue Volkswagen Scirocco. There was rust around the wheel wells, and inside it smelled like marzipan and cigarette smoke. I remember that car. I remember standing outside that car while my mom chatted with neighbors. I remember being lifted from the backseat of that car by a man in a uniform one rainy night when we drove through a puddle and the engine stalled. Was he a policeman? A tow truck driver? I don’t remember that.

On the night my mom disappeared, October 18, 1984, she attended a Simchat Torah celebration with my grandmother at Temple Sinai, and then said she was going to meet a friend named Debbie. She promised to be back before eleven, and she reversed her sweet-smelling Scirocco out of the driveway at 65 Midland Drive, turned down the cul-de-sac, and was gone.

At nine thirty the next morning, she was still gone and my grandmother called the Cranston police. Officer Derrico drove to 65 Midland Drive and wrote the facts in his police report: We’d been living with my grandparents for the last month because my parents had separated. Last winter, my mother went to Edgehill for drug rehabilitation, but my grandmother was positive she’d since been behaving herself to the fullest.

Her daughter Joan would not, according to my grandmother, stay out all night without calling. She did not have any boyfriends. And she wouldn’t leave her baby daughter without contacting my grandmother to tell her where she was. My grandmother could give a description of her car: a turquoise Volkswagen Scirocco, but she could not recall the plates. They were Rhode Island plates. Maybe they were KC-??? Or maybe they were PB-??? She tried, and had been trying, unsuccessfully to contact my father.

The officer patrolled the streets of Cranston from Knightsville to Meshanticut but was unable to locate any vehicle matching my grandmother’s description. He took down my mom’s description: Joan B. Carroll… DOB 4-6-54… 5’1” tall… 100 lbs.… short brown hair… scar over one eye… LSW maroon print dress and tan heels.

The next day my grandmother called back. Officer Palmer reported to her house. She’d made contact with Joan’s estranged husband, my dad, Kevin Carroll. The vehicle was registered in his name with RI plates KC38. A 1975 Volkswagen Scirocco, color blue. The officer put out a broadcast to all cars in regard to the plate. Officer Davies reported that he knew the car, he knew the female, he had, in fact, stopped this female in her car several nights before. She was known to frequent the Atwood Avenue area, in particular Sonny Russo’s Restaurant at Atwood and Fortini Street. An officer was dispatched to the location but neither the vehicle nor the female could be located.

There was no more information to report at that time except this: “Attention: Investigators… Mrs. Goldman is quite concerned as to possibly what might have happened and fears the worse [sic] about her daughter.”

THIRTY YEAR LATER I sit on the back porch of my grandmother’s house with my mother’s childhood best friend, Audrey. She was interested in the Goldmans from the moment they moved to 65 Midland Drive. It was the early 1960s. Kennedy was president. My mom’s family was the only family on the street without a Christmas tree in the window.

“My world,” Audrey says, “was very white. It was very normal. Everyone was the same. I was fascinated by your mother. No Christmas tree! Everybody talked about the Jews next door.”

Audrey is reluctant to go inside my grandmother’s house. She doesn’t feel like she can talk freely inside. So we sit on the back deck holding enormous iced coffees from Dunkin’ Donuts. The plastic cups of Dunkin’ Donuts coffee sit inside a Styrofoam one. It’s called a hot cup and you get one whether you ask or not in Rhode Island. One nonbiodegradable material inside another. The Styrofoam keeps your iced coffee cold and drip-free. I tried once to explain the hot cup to someone, laughing at how provincial it seemed. “But does it work?” they asked.

“Yeah,” I said. My instinct had been to dismiss it. But it does work, really well.

We hear the cars speed by on Phenix Avenue, to the Warwick Mall maybe, or to the beaches, where you need to steel yourself for a full-body plunge—inch by inch is the fool’s way into this part of the Atlantic. The moment the cold salt water slaps your belly, grown men shriek and make for the shore. But here on the porch, sweat drips down the back of my neck in the summer heat and everything smells like baking asphalt.

“I want you to know,” Audrey says, “your mother and I, no matter how she died, no matter any of that, we were just giggly girls. We had the same sarcastic sense of humor. In a way, we thought we were better than everyone else. We didn’t care about painting our nails or shaving our legs.”

Audrey has fared well. Her face is the same kind one I remember from when she babysat me as a young girl. Her dark-brown hair has turned silver and is cut to her chin. “I didn’t get clean right after your mom died. I knew I should, but I couldn’t.”

The sound of cars in the distance. We sit silent. And then, “Your mom had the rare ability to be one hundred percent honest. I could tell her anything and just by listening, somehow she made it better. When she was gone, I lost that.” Audrey’s crying now, big tears that cling to her chin before they splatter onto her knees.

“She was, and I mean this, she was a real person. She was a rebel, a kindred spirit. She was… she was delightful. For years I thought about her every day. But I haven’t thought of her in a long time.” She looks guilty when she says this.

If I were a better person I would tell her not to feel guilty. I would tell her that I hadn’t really thought about my mom in thirty years. Not as a real person anyway. I would tell her it took me thirty years, thirty selfish, callow years, to realize my mom had been a human being, a woman, a person on her own and not an extension that ended where I began.

If I were a better person I probably would have also told the teenage girl at Dunkin’ Donuts that I didn’t need that hot cup and right then I’d be holding a sweaty, melting iced coffee and the whole world would continue to spin. But I’m not. Instead, I’m jealous of Audrey. I’m jealous of this woman and the grief she feels because I don’t know the Joan Goldman Carroll she’s talking about: my mother.

ON OCTOBER 20, 1984, according to the police report, they located my mother’s car. It was parked in front of 17 Mill Street in Johnston, Rhode Island. The engine was cold. One neighbor told them she remembered the car had been there at least since Thursday afternoon. Another neighbor said he didn’t recognize the vehicle, did not remember seeing it in the past, and had not seen anyone leaving or returning to it.

My mother’s pocketbook was in the car. In the pocketbook was a license and a ten-dollar bill. Inside the car there was also a NJ Registration 374 MXU license plate, which came back as “nothing in file” from the New Jersey Registry. The little blue Scirocco was taken to the police garage awaiting BCI for fingerprint examination.

Once the police released it, nobody knew what to do with the car. My father and my aunt covered it in a tarp and parked it behind a friend’s garage so I wouldn’t recognize it.

“I GOT THAT car, you know,” Audrey tells me, sweating on the porch behind my grandmother’s house. “The Volkswagen—your dad gave it to me. It smelled like almonds. Something to do with the engine or transmission or something.” This memory makes her weep but I feel vindicated. I knew I remembered that smell.

In all likelihood it’s the heater core that gave it that smell. A leaking heater core that spilled onto the floor of the passenger side where the scent would linger long after the problem itself was actually fixed.

IN THE MARCH 9, 1977, edition of the Providence Journal’s Evening Bulletin, two stories appeared side by side. Separating them are two photographs of my mom, the newly appointed Warwick dog officer. She’s wearing a surprisingly official-looking uniform: heavy jacket over a crisp white dress shirt, buttoned to the top and fastened with a neat black ribbon. It’s topped off by a black-brimmed hat to which is fastened a large gold badge. I can’t make out the insignia but the badge is huge, almost comically oversized, replete with eagle wings spread across the top.

In the bottom picture my mom stands, hands on hips, in front of a cage marked NUMBER 4. It looks as if she has been snapped in the middle of speaking—she’s looking into the cage, her hands are on her hips, and she seems, more than anything, uncomfortable. In the upper photo, the hat and badge loom over her downturned face as she looks down at a puppy she’s cradling against her chest. In that photo, it’s as if she doesn’t realize anyone else is there.

In 1977 my mom is not yet my mom. She’s Joan Goldman, twenty-three, who has “taken a veterinary assistant’s course at Rhode Island Junior College and has had more than two years’ experience as a dog groomer and kennel supervisor. Before she became dog officer, she cared for research animals at Roger Williams General Hospital in Providence.”

In March 1977 my mom is still a few months away from meeting my dad. She has a real job for the first time in her life and it’s a hard one: She has had to explain to the police chief that the dogs’ kennels need to be papered or their joints will ache, that they need higher-quality food and stainless-steel dog bowls. She has had to beg a man not to surrender his black puppy, only to discover once he has left that the puppy’s hind leg is broken.

Her fifth day on the job she has had to deal with controversy when seven dogs were nearly taken to the Providence facility to be gassed in violation of a city ordinance that says animals must be held at the pound for fifteen days before they are killed. She has had a confrontation with the president of Concerned Citizens for Dogs, “the city’s most strident pound critic,” who was able to have the van full of dogs halted only after an anonymous member who “keeps an eye on the pound” notified her of the violation.

And, while it doesn’t say it in the article, on top of all that, my mom has shown up at my grandparents’ house with seven dogs in need of adoption and she will slowly, over the course of several weeks, cajole and persuade friends and strangers to take them in. My grandfather winds up with a black puppy with a broken back leg that he names Spot, which is a joke, they’ll explain to me later, because he doesn’t have any spots. The last to go is an older dog, a large mutt. He’s suspicious and not particularly pretty with long legs and short fur. He’s territorial and bares his fangs and is devoted, utterly and completely, to his new owner, Joan Carroll, the Warwick dog officer. She names him Brandy.

IF I FOLD my photocopy of this article in half it’s almost like seeing photos of two different women. On the bottom is the woman in the uniform, slightly uncomfortable in front of the camera but faking it with her hands on her hips. On the top is the woman cradling the puppy—that’s who I thought my mom was growing up.

My family rarely talked about my mom once she was gone. It was my grandmother who most often brought her up. My mother loved animals. She led the other kids in funeral processions for all the pets—the hamsters and turtles and fish—that died in the neighborhood. She would deliver a solemn eulogy and all the other kids listened, even though she was the youngest.

My mother smiled all the time. She was so happy and so friendly and everywhere she went the room lit up and people exclaimed, “Joanie!” This is why—my grandmother would explain to a sullen twelve-year-old me—I should smile more. I used to think my grandmother was foolish for her constant ingratiation, the way she smiled even at surly pharmacists and drivers with the misfortune of being stuck behind her. I realize now it’s how she survived. It’s how she survived my mother’s death, and my grandfather’s mental illness, and fifty years at the same job, smiling and clicking away at her adding machine. And even today when she walks into a room, pale and unsteady, her brain all but wrecked from Alzheimer’s, it’s true that everyone rushes to greet her. “Ruthie!” they say, delighted by her.

But most important, my grandmother told me, my mom was smart. She was so clever and she read books all the time. Once, my grandmother showed me a story my mom had written for school. It was about four pages long, handwritten, and it was about a man who murdered a child. When I got to the final page it was revealed the man was the child’s father, and he was horribly deformed and he had passed that deformity on to his son. The last line read, “It was a case of euthanasia.” And then beneath that was a picture of the grotesque man, rendered in green and brown colored pencil. I wished that one day I could be that talented. I asked my grandmother what euthanasia meant. She wasn’t sure.

My mother inherited my grandmother’s petite frame with tiny wrists and large breasts. Before I was born my grandmother had a breast reduction. “They took out four pounds of flesh from one side and six from the other,” she once said. She explained that when you were large-breasted you had to dress to cover it up or it’s all anyone would notice. They were a curse, really. She hoped I wouldn’t get them too. I’ve waited my whole life for those breasts to show up, but my grandma got her wish. And still I find I take fashion cues from her—shirts buttoned to the top and accented with a big necklace, maybe a brooch at the throat. I remember watching her in the mirror, taking off one necklace and holding another up to her neck, matching the accent in her paisley blouse to the amber beads.

My mother, though, had no need for fashion. She was a tomboy. She kept her hair short, she wore pants and T-shirts and plain blouses. I’ve seen two photos of her in a dress—one is her wedding day, in a beautiful empire-waisted ivory gown. In the second she is heavily pregnant with me and it must be one of those last few sizzling days that sneak up on you in September, because she’s wearing a waistless maternity dress and has bare legs and it is also, coincidentally, the only photo I have seen where she looks utterly and completely miserable. It’s the look of misery I’ve seen since on women in the last few weeks before they give birth, uncomfortable in any position, unable to sleep, everything swollen. It’s a picture I love, because for years my mom was described to me as practically beatific, a tiny woman cradling a lost puppy, a smiling sprite dancing into a room. But in this photo there’s no pretense. It’s hot. She’s huge. She’s not in the mood to mug for the camera. She wants me out of her.

“Your mom was wild,” my aunt tells me. She tells me how at night my mom would dangle from the sill of the second-story bedroom the sisters shared and plop onto the grass below, my aunt’s heart in her throat every time she did it. And then she was off.

“We were hippies,” Audrey tells me. “We wanted to hitchhike to the beach and we wanted to hang out in old-man bars and we didn’t want to do anything people expected us to.”

In 1968, the same year my father was dropping out of high school in tenth grade and signing up to go to Vietnam, my mom was fourteen. Everyone around her was getting high. I found a stash of letters in my grandmother’s closet once, the letters written in response to her letters to boys from her high school who’d gone off to war. They talked about the music they were listening to and what they’d do when they came home. They talked, more than once, about trying heroin, about how my mom should stay away from it.

My mom was also always a woman who took in strays. Stray dogs and stray people. The stories go that she one time clung to the side of a moving city bus, pounding on the door, after the driver refused to pick up a handicapped woman; that she was constantly on the lookout for injustice, volunteering to visit the patients at the Institute for Mental Health.

“We used to joke that we were social workers,” Audrey tells me. “Everyone would come to us because they thought we had our shit together. We’d be at a party doing God knows what and people would be coming to your mom for advice and she’d try to help them and then she’d say to me, ‘Audrey, I think I’m probably more fucked up than anyone else here, don’t they notice?’”

As the story goes, she met my father at a party. I try to imagine it, my dad home from Vietnam, his mustache and long hair, high-end stereo equipment, and Rickenbacker bass guitar. The two of them, like celestial bodies, partygoers orbiting around them until, inevitably, the two most charismatic people in the room collide in an explosion of wit, and charm, and no sense whatsoever that they were not invincible. The only thing my mom couldn’t believe was that a man as handsome as my dad would be attracted to a woman as plain as she believed herself to be. The cute one. The tomboy.

MY FATHER RARELY talked about my mom. I know now they were separated when she died, that they likely would have gotten a divorce. But there was something wistful in the way he talked about her on the rare occasions when it happened. My mom was smart, he told me. My mom was intellectually curious. One of their first dates had been to see A Clockwork Orange, and she loved it. She wasn’t put off by the violence at all. In fact, she was something of a true-crime junkie: Her favorite book was Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song. She wasn’t big on music, though. That was a passion they didn’t share. She fell asleep curled up in her seat when he took her to see Elvis Costello at the Orpheum Theater in Boston.

Mostly when my dad talked about my mom it was to remind me of my Jewish heritage. My dad converted to Judaism to marry my mom and he took it pretty seriously for a while, though after she died he never observed any kind of religious practice. He wasn’t entirely sure he believed in God, and he’d been a good Irish Catholic growing up and going to Mass at St. Michael’s in Providence. But he wanted me to understand the cultural importance of being Jewish, and I can only attribute this to how much it meant to my mom.

My grandmother and grandfather grew up in a time when being Jewish did not mean being white. Until the 1960s, when they moved from South Providence to Midland Drive in Cranston, they were, more or less, observant Jews. (Though my grandfather, after years of service in the military, quickly made it clear theirs would not be a kosher household. He cemented the deal by giving my grandmother her first bite of bacon.) My grandmother’s married name was Goldman but her maiden name was Solinger and with her blue eyes and blond hair people told her all the time they were surprised to find she was a Jew. Why wasn’t her nose bigger? Why didn’t she smell weird, asked her childhood classmates.

They were a reform family, but celebrated the major holidays. What was most important to them was the culture. I’ve picked up the many Yiddish expressions that peppered my grandmother and grandfather’s speech. Sometimes it’s just the best way of explaining things. When I need to convey that something is a complete wreck, a disaster, a whole thing, it’s easiest to just explain, “Oy gevalt, a total mishigas.”

My dad made it clear, in the early years especially, that I’d go to the synagogue with my grandparents on the holidays, and even though he had no faith, I was born into one. In some sense I think my dad was proud of my Judaism. He equated it with intelligence, and nothing was more important to him than intelligence.

THERE’S A STORY that goes against the general mythology of my mom as a constant spritely ray of sunshine and maybe that’s why I love it so much. On Midland Drive my mom had gotten into a screaming match with a neighbor—nobody can remember about what. She picked up a rock and threatened to hurl it at the neighbor. Somebody called the Cranston police. When the officer arrived he put my mom in the backseat of his cruiser and Brandy, the rangy mutt, my mom’s fortuitous rescue dog, jumped inside with her and each time the officer approached the car to close the door Brandy let loose a fury of barking and growling. Over and over again, the officer tried to get back into his cruiser and over and over Brandy went wild. Eventually he shrugged. This was a neighborly dispute. He wasn’t going to risk having his jugular ripped out because a small young woman refused to back down from an older male neighbor. Exhausted, patience spent, he told my mom to get out of the car. She did and Brandy hopped out behind her, docile as a doe but with a look in his eyes that warned everyone else from coming close. And that was that. That’s the woman in the bottom photo, from the newspaper, I think. She was a force. “That dog was mean,” my aunt said, “but he loved your mom.”

MY MOM WAS also a drug addict. Specifically, she injected cocaine. She was in and out of rehab for many weeks at a time before I was born. But this aspect of her life was alluded to rarely in my family when I was growing up. My grandmother talked more about my mother’s kindness, how she’d become friends with bad people and that was how she got into drugs. Bad Men. The Bad Men haunted my childhood. I had to be more careful than my mom was, my grandmother explained. Because my mom had been fearless and that had cost her her life. A little fear was a good thing. Don’t put your trust in a Bad Man, she taught me.

THERE’S ANOTHER STORY about my mother’s drug use that I’ve heard repeated in various forms. It’s one of those things you look for: the repeating thing, the thing that after thirty years probably contains some nugget of truth, though it comes in different iterations, because at its heart it’s the same story.

It involves my grandfather, my mother’s father, whom she adored and who loved her back and who was completely broken by her murder. So this is not an origin story of blame but one of addiction, and opportunity, and war.

My grandfather, Louis Goldman, spent most of his childhood in the Jewish Home for Children, what would later become Miriam Hospital, in Providence, Rhode Island. By the time he was eighteen he was serving in World War Two. He met my grandmother at a USO dance in between his service in World War Two and his time in Korea. He was a cook, he played the bugle and the bagpipes, and he saw many, many people die.

Maybe my grandfather had post-traumatic stress disorder, or maybe he had that combined with some other form of mental illness, but he never held a steady job, refused to leave the house for years on end, and once had to be escorted, lying across the floor of the backseat of a police car, across the Newport Bridge because the drive over gave him a panic attack so severe he’d grasped his chest and cried, convinced he was having a heart attack.

And so my grandfather had pills. I remember the pills, lined up on the table by his reclining chair, his entire day spent organizing which pill came next. In the 1960s and early ’70s, what would they have prescribed my big, tall grandfather, who was usually angry and filled at all times with a sense of terror? Seconal, maybe? Valium, certainly. And while my grandmother went to work each day in her neat blouse to keep the books at Klitzner Industries, my grandfather bought the groceries and he cooked all the meals, and he gave my mom some of his pills. Did my mom get high for the first time with her father? Some people insist upon it. They insist that he unwittingly got her hooked on something, that his collection of pills was a handy dispensary for my mom and that my grandfather gave her things to make her feel better because they made him feel better.

Maybe he said, “Calm down, Joanie. Have one of these.” Or maybe he said, “Why do you look so tired, Joanie? Have one of these.” But those who imply that my grandfather got my mom “hooked” clearly have no experience with the shrinking doom feeling of anxiety and depression, no experience with the power barbiturates and benzodiazepines hold, vise-like, over your body. They have no understanding of the way addiction exists, a little genetic blip in our DNA, and waits, waits, waits for an opportunity.

AND THEN THERE were the photos. My mother carried a Canon AE-1 with her nearly everywhere. At some point in my childhood I came into possession of a green three-ring binder, dated 1978 to 1981, filled with hundreds of contact sheets and negatives developed by my mom in the darkroom she’d rigged up in the closet next to our small bathroom. Three years of her life documented through her eyes. How long did I hold on to that binder before I did anything with the negatives? It was years I think. And in a way, I’m glad I waited so long to have the negatives developed. I’m not sure I would have realized how much they say about her otherwise.

She photographed everything: her friends, children, birthday parties, weddings. She also went out on her own and photographed the things that interested her. There are rolls and rolls devoted to a union strike at the Institute for Mental Health. She also photographed Claus von Bülow’s heavily publicized first trial for the attempted murder of his wife. In a state as small as Rhode Island, the von Bülow trial, and the national attention it brought, was practically legendary.

Claus was a Danish aristocrat and Sunny was an heiress and they lived with their children in the magnificent Newport mansion Clarendon Court. On the morning of December 22, 1980, Sunny was found unresponsive on her bathroom floor. She’d be in a coma for twenty-eight years before she finally passed away at the Mary Manning Walsh nursing home in New York. The prosecution argued that Claus had intentionally injected his hypoglycemic wife with insulin. Her death would have left him with twenty-one million dollars and the freedom to marry his mistress, soap opera actress Alexandra Moltke Isles. The defense argued that Sunny had overindulged in sweets and booze, celebrating the Christmas holidays, on the night she slipped into her long coma. Claus was found guilty and sentenced to thirty years in prison, a sentence that would be famously overturned by Alan Dershowitz a few years later.

I try to picture my mom there in the crush of the crowds and press with her camera. What was she hoping to see? Was she just fascinated by the spectacle? It’s rare for Rhode Island to make the news, and when it does, everyone wants a part of it. The von Bülows would have been everything she was not: wealthy, cosmopolitan, and urbane.

Her favorite subjects by far were dogs, children, and my dad. She photographed my dad playing basketball. She photographed him playing softball for the Providence Journal team. She photographed a close-up of his flexed biceps. She photographed him lounging in a Burt Reynolds–style pose on a hammock; him sitting on the front steps of our house, a Chai, the Hebrew symbol for life, dangling from a chain around his neck. He would have been a compliant subject, my peacocking, handsome father with his thick black mustache and blue eyes. And she took more shots of him than she did of almost anybody else.

She took selfies as well, her Canon AE-1 set to self-timer as she lounged hand on her chin in a wicker rocking chair. She photographed herself photographing herself in the mirror. In my favorite picture, she doesn’t get the shot quite right. She stands in front of the window of our living room in profile, naked, her belly round with me inside. Her head is cut off in the shot and she stands straight. She’s documenting, not memorializing. “This is me, pregnant. This is how my body looks.” It’s late August 1980. She’s twenty-six years old. She only has four years to live. My life has barely begun.