Looking for Me (21 page)

Glancing over my shoulder, I spoke to my mother’s urn. “This is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. Why didn’t you ever wear it, Mama?”

From the finely made lace stitched on the bodice to the ribbon straps to the silk rosebuds with seed pearls sewn into their centers, the gown was exquisite. I lifted my hair, wound it into a knot, and held it on top of my head. From side to side I swayed, the silk gliding across my legs.

But when I saw my reflection in the mirror, I stopped. Opening my fingers, I released my hair, feeling its weight fall down my back like a theater curtain. I slid the straps off my shoulders, wiggled the gown over my hips, and watched it puddle at my feet.

I pulled on my robe and gave the belt a tug, and while folding the gown into its box, I whispered, “This was private, wasn’t it, Mama? I’m sorry, I had no right to put it on.”

Though I had no idea why I felt as I did, it was as real as anything I’d ever experienced. Yet when I sat on the bed and opened my mother’s suitcase, my reaction was entirely different. One by one I removed each item—a yellow linen blouse, a blue cotton dress, lavender slacks—each one resembling a carefully wrapped gift. As I spread them out on the bed, a rainbow of folded clothes revealed the message my mother had left behind:
Yes, Teddi. I really was planning to come to Charleston.

A
low-slung fog played hide-and-seek with the headlights. Every so often a barn or a silo would appear on the horizon, but little else. Eddie was asleep on a blanket in the passenger seat, his paws occasionally twitching. Driving to Kentucky in the dark of night was something I’d never done before, and I’d enjoyed it. The roads had been virtually empty and I’d made record time.

It was 6:05 on Saturday morning when I arrived at the farm. The house had taken on the look and smell of abandonment. The air was damp and musty, and a thin layer of dust had dulled the linoleum floor. Even the curtains looked bewildered.

After opening all the windows, washing the kitchen floor, and making a big pitcher of iced tea, I grabbed a broom and walked outside. While Eddie explored the backyard, I swept the porch and thought about my life, my family, and the farm. Now that Joe was buying the crop fields, I’d been toying with the idea of hanging on to the rest of the property, but no matter how I looked at it, it didn’t make much sense. The house was in need of renovation, especially the kitchen and bathroom, and though the barn was in good shape for its age, it needed work, too.

I had always taken for granted that Josh would run the farm after he graduated from high school. Often I’d watched him work Daddy’s fields, smiling to myself at how naturally he performed even the most difficult tasks and how much he enjoyed the physical demands of harvesting season. I imagined him marrying a spunky, bright-eyed girl and having a passel of giggling children and a yard filled with all sorts of pets.

Not a day passed that I didn’t think of my brother, but being at the farm spun me back in time until I felt his presence everywhere. Memories of him were both fierce and fragile. It was impossible to look beyond the barn and not hope to see him step out from the woods.

The human mind holds tightly to those things it can’t reconcile.

Off in the distance, a red-winged blackbird sent his full-throated song into the air, the sun peeked above the trees, and the grass glistened with dew.

JULY 1975

It was the year I turned twenty-one, and I had come home to spend a long weekend with my family. A cold front had begun passing through and was blessedly taking the oppressive heat with it. The evening was lovely and cool, and I decided to sleep on the back porch. From the linen closet, I pulled a stack of quilts, made myself a reasonably comfortable mattress, and settled in. While I enjoyed the fresh air and listened to the sounds of night, Josh stepped onto the porch wearing plaid pajama bottoms and a white T-shirt.

“Hey,” he said softly. “You awake?”

I patted the blanket, and he lowered himself next to me. His voice bubbled with amusement when he said, “So I guess this is your version of camping out?”

“Yeah. I wanted to soak up as much country as I could before going back to Charleston.”

“You really like it there, don’t you?”

“Yes, but not the way I love it here.”

My brother smiled, as if glad to hear my allegiance to the farm. While we listened to the soft twitters and trills of night, Josh shook my leg. “Look, you’ve got a friend.”

He pointed to a luna moth resting on the porch rail. I rose to my knees and leaned forward, moving so close I could see the fuzz of its antennae. “Lunas are so gorgeous,” I whispered. “I swear they don’t seem real.”

“Did you know they only live about seven days?”

“Really? That doesn’t seem fair. All that beauty gone in such a short period of time.”

As if hearing our words and deciding to get on with what little life was left, the moth flapped its wings and lifted into the air, evaporating into the moonlight like a shimmering green soul.

Josh rose to his feet. “Don’t be sad. Maybe one day to a luna is like ten years to us. G’night, Teddi.”

I reached out and gave the hem of his pajama bottoms a tug. “Good night, brother.”

It was just before dawn when I awoke to the sound of a dog barking off in the distance. A blue haze hung over the farm, blurring the woods into a dreamlike sculpture. As I lay waiting for the sun to rise, a light flashed across the kitchen window. I sat up and peered inside.

Josh was standing in front of the open refrigerator, his face awash in silvery white light and his hair a mess of curls. I watched him make two peanut-butter sandwiches slathered with a thick layer of jam. He folded them into a bandanna that he tucked into his knapsack along with an apple. After pouring lemonade into a metal canteen and sliding it into a loop on his utility belt, he flipped the strap of his knapsack over his shoulder.

Wanting to observe the rest of my brother’s early-morning ritual, I lay down and pretended to be asleep.

The screen door barely squeaked when he opened it. From one eye I watched Josh creep across the porch and down the steps with the stealth of a cat. He made his way across the lawn and headed toward the hay field. Then
poof
—he was gone.

Pushing back the blanket, I rose to my feet so I could watch him, but he wasn’t there. I scanned the field for his red shirt, yet he was simply gone. For a brief moment it felt as if I’d imagined it all, but proof of my brother’s passage was there before me in the line of footprints he’d left in the dewy grass.

Blocking that memory as best as I could, I finished sweeping the porch, and set the broom aside.

I whistled for Eddie and we set off for the barn. Turning the dial, I snapped open the combination lock and hooked it through a belt loop of my jeans. After flipping the door latch, I wrapped both hands around the handle and gave the door a yank. The steel rollers let out a rusty squeal as the door reluctantly slid open.

Entering the barn was like stepping into a sepia-tint photograph of the past. Daddy’s old tractor was parked off to the side, its front tires gone flat. Draped over the steering wheel was a raggedy blue bath towel, and on the seat lay an old pair of his leather work gloves. I wandered deeper into the barn and stopped by the ladder to the hayloft. I hadn’t been up there in years. The ladder groaned beneath my weight as if awakened from a deep sleep. Startled by my noisemaking, a pair of swallows swirled high into the rafters and vanished through a hole in the roof.

After opening both the front and back loading doors to let in some light, I walked around the loft. It was a beautifully built, cavernous space with hand-hewn beams that towered over my head. Everything about the barn was thick and sturdy and spoke of a time when craftsmen skimped on nothing.

Had it not been for the stream of sunlight pushing through that hole in the roof, I never would have noticed. But there was a faint outline of something on one of the lowest cross timbers. Thinking it might be a raised split in the wood, I stood back and tried to make out if that’s what it was. But I couldn’t. I dragged three moldy bales of hay across the floor, stacked one on top of the other two, and climbed up.

Still I couldn’t see it.

Rising onto my toes, I stretched my arm as far as I could and ran my fingertips along the edge of the timber. Just as I touched something that felt like a stick or perhaps an old dowel, the hay bales wobbled and began breaking apart. I jumped up and grabbed the object, then fell to the floor as it dropped from my hand.

I sat in a swirl of hay dust, stunned at what lay in front of me. Pushing myself up onto my knees, I grabbed it from the floor, my heart beating a series of wild thumps as I descended the ladder. The moment my feet touched the lowest rung, Eddie barked and I heard someone call my name.

From the open barn door, I saw a white pickup parked in the driveway with the words
WOODARD TUCKER LIQUIDATIONS
painted on the driver’s-side door. Standing on the porch was a stoop-shouldered older gentleman wearing a Stetson-style hat. Next to him was a young man.

My words sounded more like a scream when I called out, “I’ll be right there!”

I was so panicked that I couldn’t think straight.
What should I do with this?
My hands trembled as I yanked the old towel from the tractor. After taking a moment to collect myself, I stepped from the shadows of the barn and walked across the lawn with Eddie trotting at my heels. I tried to appear calm with the towel held firmly in my left hand. I imagined it looked odd, like a flag made of terry cloth. But what was I to do?

“Thank you for coming, Mr. Tucker. I’m Teddi Overman.”

He tipped the brim of his hat. “Pleased to meet you. This is my grandson, Gabe.”

Tall and lean, with sandy brown hair and clear blue eyes. I guessed him to be in his mid-twenties.

“Where would you like to start?” I asked as the edges of the towel began to unwrap.

“Well, I’d like to take a look in the barn. You said everything goes, is that right?”

“Everything but the tractor and lawn mower. And there’s a workshop on the side of the barn. It’s filled with lots of tools. The barn’s open. I’ll get the key and unlock the workshop in a minute.”

When they turned toward the barn, I all but raced up the porch steps and into the house. After gulping a glass of water, I took the towel and went upstairs.

Josh’s bedroom door was closed. It was always closed. I rested my hand on the knob for a moment and thought about how many times I’d walked into this room to see my brother sitting on his bed reading a wilderness book or sorting through his rock collection, how many times he’d looked up and smiled at me.

For the first time in nearly ten years, I gave the doorknob a turn. The latch released,
and the door slowly swung open. My brother’s bedroom looked surreal—a filmy, shapeless memory tinted with hues of blue. Grainy threads of light seeped around the edges of the closed window shade.

Even after so many years, his absence was incomprehensible.

The room was cool, the atmosphere unreadable—as if I were gazing through an eggshell. His bed and dresser were draped in white sheets that had grayed over the years. The closet door stood open. On the rod hung a lone wire hanger.

I moved to the window, feeling so frail I thought I might shatter. Reaching out, I grasped the cord of the roller shade and gave it a pull. Strands of cobwebs flew into the air, and sunlight pushed through the dingy window, filling the room with a peculiar yellow haze. I released the latch, and it took all my strength to push open the window. A white moth with brown-speckled wings was splayed out across the screen. I reached out and touched him, expecting him to fly, but he fell to the sill, stiff and dead.

In his early teens, my brother began to study Native American culture. He was particularly drawn to a Dakota Sioux proverb, liking it so much that he wrote it on the wall above his bed. Two years after he disappeared, Mama tried to scrub it away with steel wool, and even now I could see the scour marks she’d left on the pale blue paint. But Josh had used a green permanent marker, and the words, though drastically lightened by my mother’s attempts to erase them, still remained:

We will be known forever by the tracks we leave

Not long after Josh disappeared, Jeb and two other officers came to the farm, their faces somber and their eyes downcast and apologetic. They were looking for possible clues as part of their ongoing investigation, and Daddy readily gave them access to the property. Though they went through the barn and the house, they concentrated their search in my brother’s bedroom. It was something they had to do, we all understood that, but it was a terrible experience for my family.

And then came the questions:

Drugs?
No.

Alcohol
? No.

Trouble at school?
No.

And on and on . . .

Josh’s classmates and teachers were questioned, and they all said the same things: My brother was quiet and introspective. Gentle. A loner. Thoughtful. A girl he’d been paired with for a history report said he was an enigma, and a few students mentioned how rarely he spoke. One boy said he was afraid of my brother. When questioned further, he admitted that Josh had never given him reason to feel such a thing—he was simply uncomfortable with the intensity of my brother’s eyes.

The summer following my brother’s disappearance, I was in the drugstore and bumped into a local farm girl named Molly Ferguson. I had known a bit of the story from a conversation I’d had with Mama, but it wasn’t until Molly talked with me that I got the full picture of what had really happened.