He's Gone (31 page)

Our own porch light is on, but it’s obvious that Abby has already gone to bed. I open the front door. I try to be quiet about it. Pollux, my dear dog pal, my forever friend, little sugar boy, he sleepily trots up to greet me. I drop my purse by the door, that meaningless cuff link still inside.

Bed, sleep—how I crave it, even if that dream is there waiting for me. Fine, come. Let me look. I’m running out of options, aren’t I? It’s time to face the facts, no matter what they are.

“Dani.”

The voice and the figure startle me. I let out a little scream. I put my hand to my heart.

“Dani, it’s only me.”

“Jesus, Ma,” I say. “What’re you doing here?”

“How can I not be here? You went to the police station today, baby kid. You met that woman. A girl needs her mother.”

I can see a couple of my quilts on the couch. A pillow. A mug. Abby has set her up comfortably. “You’re staying over?”

“Yes, I’m staying over. Well? Does she know where he is? That Desiree woman?”

My mother looks small in the dark. Without her boots on, she’s shorter than I remember. It’s age, I realize. She’s shrunk. Who would have thought it was possible? She’d always been so commanding.

“Nothing,” I say. “It was a dead end.”

“Your father called. He said he put some missing-person ads in the classifieds. Who reads the classifieds anymore?”

“He’s trying to help.”

She grasps my arm. “Dani,” she whispers intently.

“What, Ma?”

“There’s something I have to tell you.”

“Tell me, then.”

“I went to a psychic.”

I groan. “I can’t do this now, Ma. I can’t.” Dear God, she loves that stuff. Any hint of the mystical, and she’s in with both feet, wallet in hand. She’s had every kind of brief spiritual fling over the years, with Reiki and past lives and even with an ancient spokesman from beyond. What was his name? Something Indian. An old woman channeled his voice, which must have been a ton of laughs. My mother still has a crystal hanging from her rearview mirror, and it glints dangerously on sunny days. In my opinion, it’s more likely to cause an accident than provide good energy. A few years ago she told me my aura was yellow, but I’m sure it was just her cataracts.

“You need to listen.”

“I’m so tired. I’ve never been more tired in my life.”

Her grip tightens. Her hand is a claw on my wrist. “It was that place over on Eighty-fifth, have you seen it? I’ve always been curious about it. They have that sign with the big painted eye? F
ORTUNES
T
OLD
.”

“Ma, it’s above an espresso place. I don’t see how you can commune with the spirits above the noise of grinding coffee beans.”

“She doesn’t commune with the spirits. She reads tea leaves.”

“Perfect. Regular or decaf? I hope it’s one of those teas that promise a new mental state. Calm or Refresh or Awake. Have a cup of tea, gain a new outlook,
and
tell your future.”

“Don’t make fun. You don’t know.”

I’m losing patience. “Ma, please. Can’t we discuss this tomorrow?”

“It can’t wait. She told me that I was keeping a secret. That it’s not healthy. I need to say it before it gives me a heart attack.”

“Your heart is fine. Your doctor told you that three weeks ago. The heart of a fifty-year-old.”

“All night, I’ve felt these flutters.”

“Caffeine, Ma. Anxiety. I’m going to bed.” I pull away, but there’s that grip again.

“Wait.”

“Ma,
please
.”

“I
have
been keeping a secret.”

“What?”

“I have.”

I sit down at the edge of my couch, on top of my quilt. I rub my eyes, making dark circles of mascara, but so what. “All right, okay. You know, so you don’t have a coronary tonight.”

She sits down, too. She takes my hands. Her eyes are piercing. They glow keen and urgent in that dark room. “What?” I say. “I’m adopted. My father is not really my father. That milkman we had back in California—”

“This is serious.”

“Fine. Go ahead.” I don’t want to hear it. I am suddenly nervous. The thought in my head, the one that’s screaming loudest, is:
What has she done?

“I saw them,” she says.

It isn’t what I’m expecting. Something in my rib cage falls. My heart accelerates. Maybe I’ll have the coronary tonight. “Them?”

“I didn’t want to tell you. I didn’t want you to be hurt, and then once I didn’t tell, it became harder to tell. I
couldn’t
tell after I
didn’t
tell! But now it might be important. She might know something. I saw them the day before he went missing.”

“Who, for God’s sake?”

“Mary. I saw Ian and Mary. Together. I’d been walking around Target, looking for birthday gift ideas for Stephanie—what do you get a sixteen-year-old? I was in there for hours.”

“You saw Ian and Mary in
Target
?”

“No, I was starving after I was in Target that long, and I went over to that bakery, you know, over by the car place. The one with the good butter cookies? They make sandwiches now. First, it was only a bakery, but now they do lunch. Aunt something? I can’t think of what it’s called.”

“I don’t know. It doesn’t matter.”

“Aunt … Aunt what?”

“Never mind! Just tell me.”

“It’s going to drive me crazy. Starts with a
B
.”

“Auntie Bee’s, Mom. That’s the name. Auntie Bee’s.”

“Right! That’s it. I knew it was
Aunt
. I ordered my sandwich, and I’m waiting for them to wrap it up, and I see them. Ian and Mary. Well, obviously I know him, but I recognize her from that time we saw her at your old grocery store, remember? She got in line right behind you. It was supposed to be intimidating.”

“I remember.”

Mary.

Here it is. After all this time, after it seemed like the past was receding and the girls were at least coming to our house, his new life still can’t compare to his old one.
How
could it? I believe that, I’ve believed it for a long time. His criticisms of me are all the evidence I need. I’m glad there’s an answer here, but I’m sick, too, sick with hurt and regret.
He’s with Mary
. They wouldn’t keep such a thing from their children, though, would they? They wouldn’t let their daughters worry. But this—it’s another possibility now; there are more questions to be asked, and with that comes relief. I think,
Thank God
.

“Her hand was over his, Dani. They were sitting at a table together, and I saw it. I can’t tell you how furious I was. I said a loud
ahem!
and he looked up.”

“He never told me this. He never mentioned it. Are you sure he saw you?”

“Oh, I’m sure, all right. He took his hand back. Snatched it back, the prick. I got my sandwich, and I told the cashier, I said, ‘Once a cheat, always a cheat.’ Loud enough for them to hear. I was so damn mad, Dani.”

“He didn’t tell me.”

“Well, no wonder. Of course he didn’t mention it! I slammed out of there so hard, the bells bashed against the glass door. I’ve never been so angry. I had my keys in my hand.…” She purses her lips together tight. She shakes her head, reliving her fury.

“What are you saying?”

“Well, maybe I shouldn’t have done it, but I did. He deserved it.” She mimes slicing the air with something pinched between her fingers.

“Don’t tell me.”

She slices the air again. “Mr. Perfect’s perfect car.”

“No.” I am hoping for a denial, but she only folds her arms and raises her eyebrows in challenge. “You keyed his car? Oh, Mom, tell me you didn’t key his car.”

“He’s lucky I didn’t do worse, the bastard.”

I moan. “Oh, Mom … Oh, God. You shouldn’t have done that.”
There’s a scratch on his car. It wasn’t there when we saw him last
.

“No? Wait until Abby is treated like that by some asshole. Mark was bad enough—”

“Mom.”

“Mark, now,
he
should have had his balls cut off.”

“I can’t believe you keyed his car.”

“I couldn’t stand looking at that thing. Sitting in the lot all shiny and just so, without even a fucking crumb in it. Everything so flawless on the outside, exactly like him. But inside? Ugly. One ugly motherfucker. I’m sorry, Dani, but the way he talks to you? And then there he is with
her
?”

I’m silent. Her bravado is quickly disappearing with my disapproval, I can tell. She looks down at her hands. Pollux puts his paws up on my knees, and I gently push him back down.

“Oh, Mom,” I say finally.

“Maybe I shouldn’t have done it.”

This is my mother in two minutes of one hellish evening, her whole self and her entire history laid bare. She had essentially raised herself under the roof of an aunt who didn’t give a shit about her, dropped there by a mother who didn’t give a shit, either. Abandonment and the self-sufficiency she’d had the guts to muster had left my mother with a don’t-mess-with-me toughness that would occasionally burn fierce and frightening. It was a monumental display but a trick of the eye. There was no fire, not really—only a child waving a plastic flashlight in her own dark night.

“Probably not,” I say.

“I’d do anything for you, you know that.” She takes my hand. I feel her small, complicated self doing its best to be there for me, and my throat tightens with tears. We make messes, but mostly we’re just trying to do the best we can with what we’ve got.

“I do know that, Ma.”

“You’re my girl.”

Now here is Abby, leaning in the doorway. Her hair is smushed up and coming out of its ponytail. She’s never liked to miss out. Even when she was a little bean sprout, she’d try and try to keep her eyes open long past bedtime, just in case. “Hey, is this where the party is?”

“Come here,” I say.

She pads over in her socks, reminding me of those plastic-footed pajamas she used to love when she was a toddler. Tonight, all of us are both young and old. Maybe everyone is both of these things all the time. It’s our biggest challenge, perhaps, being both. “If this is where we do female bonding, aren’t we supposed to put on an Aretha Franklin song? That’s what they do in the movies,” Abby says.

“Urethra Franklin,” my mother says, and Abby snorts.

“Just come here,” I say to Abby.

She shoves onto the couch with us. “Double hugs.”

I put my arms around them both, give two squeezes as the request requires. “You people,” I say, and oh, damn, my voice begins to wobble. In spite of everything, the reason I’m overcome right now is that I am so thankful for them. What is a life without your people? I pull the two of them close. One smells of Jean Naté and the other of apple shampoo. What would you do without your best ones?

“Grateful.” This is all that squeaks out. I hate to cry, but tears roll down my nose. I am a mess, and I’m making wet splotches on my mother’s robe, my daughter’s sweatshirt.

“Oh, Mom,” Abby says.

We stay in our huddle until my mother takes a Kleenex out of her robe pocket and blows her nose. “I hate to cry,” she says. I know that, of course. Abby hates to cry, too.

“Some party this is,” Abby says. Her own eyes are wet.

“R-E-S-P-E-C-T,”
my mother gives a lame try.

“Sing it, Grammy,” Abby says.

Cherished ones
, I think.

That night, I am afraid in my very own bedroom. You’re supposed to feel safe in your own room, your own house, knowing that the danger is
out there
, outside, somewhere-elsewhere in the dark. Of course, I’d been afraid in my own room before. Under my own roof. As a small child, I used to think that robbers were in the house, hiding in the closet or down the hall, blocking my way to the bathroom. When I was a married woman, the bad guys were inside, too. Here’s a funny but not funny thing that happened once. One night, Mark stayed up late to watch TV. When he came to our room to go to bed, I awoke from the depths of a dream and managed to scrabble together only these facts: dark, man figure, my room. I bolted to a sitting position, terrified.
Who are you and what are you doing here?
I’d said in alarmed half-sleep. When we recounted it in the morning, he wasn’t amused. Not at all. Sometimes your dreams speak more truth than you’d like to admit.

I was right to be afraid, wasn’t I, about what might happen to me? With Mark, and now. I lay awake, thinking about that scratch on the car. That key, dug into metal. I try to envision it: a white line, a thin scar. As the night goes on, it becomes wider in my imagination. A gash. A deep, screaming wound.

I need to see it. What I need to see, actually, is how it will look to Detective Jackson.

I get out of bed. My mother is asleep on the couch (the fluff of her hair is visible from where I stand), and so I step carefully, avoiding the creaks on the floor, same as I used to do when I was a teenager coming in past curfew. I knew just where those creaks were then, and I do now, too.

Pollux meets my eyes but stays in his crescent-roll shape on his bed, bless him. I turn the doorknob slowly, slowly, slowly. The final, opening click sounds as loud to me as a gunshot.