Missing Pieces (28 page)

“Oh my,” my mother and I both said, almost as one. Immediately, I flipped to another page. More breasts. Some barely covered, some simply bare. And still more: here a breast, there a breast, everywhere a breast-breast, I sang silently, flipping quickly through the entire magazine. A seemingly inexhaustible supply.

What every well-dressed woman is wearing, I thought, turning my attention to the forms the receptionist had handed me, starting to fill in the blanks. Name, address, phone number, place and date of birth. “Mom, what year you were born?” I asked without thinking, then bit down on my tongue. She had trouble remembering what she had for breakfast. How was she going to remember what year she was born?

“May 18,” she said easily, “1921.”

I felt strangely elated by the fact my mother knew the date of her birth. Maybe she wasn’t in such bad shape after all, I rationalized, even though I knew that Alzheimer sufferers often had no trouble recalling even the minutest details of their distant pasts. It was their short-term memory that deserted them. I tried another question, deciding that short-term memory was vastly overrated. “Are you allergic to any medications?”

“No, but I’m allergic to surgical tape.”

“Surgical tape?”

She leaned against me, as if about to confide something highly confidential. “We didn’t find that out until after my cesarean with Jo Lynn.” She laughed. “The doctors put regular surgical tape across my stomach to hold the stitches from the operation in place, and of course, nobody thought a thing about it until a few days later, when I started to itch something terrible, and they took off the bandages, and discovered that my stomach was covered in these horrible, angry red welts. Oh, it was terrible. I thought I’d die, I was so itchy. And there wasn’t much the doctors could do for me, except to lather my skin in cortisone cream. It was months before those welts went down. I looked terribly ugly, what with this big scar and those angry red welts covering my stomach. Your father hated it.”

It was the most I’d heard my mother say in months, and I couldn’t help but smile, despite the mention of my stepfather. “Do you think much about him?” I heard myself ask.

“I think about him all the time,” she answered, surprising me, although I’m not sure why. She’d been married to the man for fourteen years, had a child with him, been regularly beaten to a bloody pulp by him—why wouldn’t he still be part of her thoughts? Hadn’t I held on to my memories of Robert all these years?

“He was such a handsome man,” she continued, without prompting. “Tall and dashing and very funny. You inherited your sense of humor from him, Kate.”

It was then that I realized she was talking about
my
father, and not Jo Lynn’s. “Tell me about him,” I said, partly to find out how much she recalled, but mostly because I was suddenly hungry to hear news of him, as if I were a small child waiting for word of her handsome and brave father, off fighting a distant war.

“We met at the end of World War II,” she said, repeating
a story I’d heard many times before. “My father gave him a job in his textile factory, and Martin eventually worked his way up to foreman. He was so smart and ambitious, he would have become foreman even if he hadn’t married the boss’s daughter.” Her eyes suddenly clouded over. “But then my father lost the business, and my parents had to sell their house, and my mother never forgave him. Do you remember your grandmother?” she asked.

An image of a heavyset old woman with strawlike hair and thick ankles flashed before my eyes. “Vaguely,” I said. I was only five years old when she died.

“She was a very strong woman, your grandmother. There was no gray in her world, only black and white. Something was right, or it wasn’t. If you made your bed, you had to lie in it.”

“That couldn’t have been very easy for you,” I heard the therapist in me reply.

“We learned. If you made a mistake, you had to accept the consequences. You couldn’t just pack up your things and run away.”

“Is that why you stayed with my stepfather even after he started beating you?” I knew the question was too simplistic, but I asked it anyway.

“Your father never beat me,” she said.

“My stepfather,” I repeated.

“Your father was a wonderful man. He was a foreman at my father’s textile plant until my father lost the business, then he took a job with General Motors during the day and went to law school at night. He’d always wanted to be a lawyer. Isn’t that interesting? We’ve never had a lawyer in the family. But he died before he could graduate.” She smiled sadly at the receptionist.

“It shouldn’t be too much longer,” Becky Sokoloff automatically replied.

“We were finishing our dinner,” my mother continued,
as I watched the scene play out in my mind. “You were in your room, getting ready for bed. Your father and I were still at the dining-room table, taking our time over dessert. It was so rare, you see, that we got to spend a whole evening together, and so we were lingering over our dessert, just talking and laughing. And your father got up to get a glass of milk, and suddenly he said that he felt a hell of a headache coming on. Those were his exact words, ‘I feel a hell of a headache coming on.’ I remember because it was very unusual for him to swear, even a simple word like ‘hell.’ And I was about to suggest that he take a few aspirin, even though he didn’t like pills, but I never got the chance. He stood up, took two steps, then collapsed onto the floor.”

I said nothing, watching as her eyes flickered with the passage of time, as if she were watching an old newsreel.

“Do you know what I did?” she asked, not waiting for an answer. “I laughed!”

“Laughed?”

“I thought it was some sort of joke. Even after I called for an ambulance, even on the ride to the hospital, I kept expecting him to open his eyes. But he didn’t. The doctor told me later that he was dead before he hit the floor.”

I reached over and hugged her, felt the outline of her skeleton beneath the soft cotton of her blue dress. When had she become so frail? I wondered, as her body bent to my embrace. And how long before these memories, now so strong, ultimately faded, then disappeared?

So the past gets wiped clean?
Jo Lynn had demanded in the mall the day before Christmas.
She won’t remember it, so I might as well pretend it never happened?

Pretend what never happened?

She just gets away with it.

Gets away with what? I wondered, as I’d been wondering ever since that afternoon.

“Mom,” I began.

“Yes, dear.”

“Can I ask you something?”

“You can ask me anything, dear.”

I paused, not sure how to pose the question, deciding finally that the most direct approach was probably the best. “What exactly happened between you and Jo Lynn?”

“Something’s happened to Jo Lynn?” Her eyes flashed immediate concern.

“No, she’s fine.”

“Oh, I’m so glad.”

“I mean, what happened between the two of you a long time ago?”

“I don’t understand.” My mother’s eyes grew restive, flitting fearfully around the room.

“You two have never really gotten along,” I began again, trying a different approach.

“She was always such a headstrong little girl. You could never tell Jo Lynn anything.”

“Tell me about her.”

“Don’t get me started,” my mother said, and laughed, the fear in her eyes vanishing as quickly as it had appeared.

“She was a cesarean delivery,” I coaxed, waiting.

“That’s right,” my mother marveled. “I had a terrible time after she was born because I had an allergic reaction to the surgical tape.”

“And she was headstrong and you could never tell her anything …”

“She had a mind of her own, that’s for certain. I couldn’t get her to wear a dress for love or money. I’d put her in all these pretty, frilly little things, the kind you always loved, and she’d rip them off, wouldn’t have anything to do with them. No, she only wanted to wear pants. She was such a handful. Not like you. You were such a
good baby. You loved your little dresses, but not our Joanne Linda. No, she had to wear the pants in the family.” She laughed. “That’s what your father used to say anyway.”

“My stepfather,” I qualified.

“Jo Lynn could do no wrong as far as he was concerned. He let her get away with murder. Whatever she wanted, he made sure she got. Spoiled her terribly. Always took her side whenever there was an argument.” She shook her head. “She never got over my leaving him. I know she blames me for his death.”

“He died of pancreatic cancer. How can she blame you for that?”

“She blames me for everything.”

I looked toward the receptionist, then over at the two women waiting in the chairs across from us. “What else does she blame you for?” I asked.

My mother smiled and said nothing, her eyes drifting back to the bare bosoms on the pages of
Elle.
“Oh my,” she said.

“That’s what she told you?” Jo Lynn asked over the phone later that afternoon.

“She says you blame her for his death.”

“She would say that.”

“Do you?”

“He died of cancer.”

“That’s beside the point.”

“There is no point. Not to this conversation, anyway. What did the doctor say?”

“Not much. She’s going to run a bunch of tests. Apparently, Alzheimer’s is one of those diseases that they identify more by a process of elimination than anything else.”

“What kind of tests?”

“EKG, CAT scan, MRI, mammogram.”

“Mammogram? Where’d that come from?”

“Dr. Caffery feels we might as well do a complete physical. She wants me to have one too,” I added.

“You? Why? Aren’t you feeling all right?”

“She thinks I might be starting menopause,” I admitted.

“What?”

“It’s no big deal,” I lied.

“So, are you coming up to Starke with me this weekend?” The question was deceptively casual in its delivery, as if we’d been discussing this for some time and were simply tying up a few loose ends.

“You must be kidding,” I answered.

“I thought you might find it interesting.”

“Not a chance.” There was an awkward silence. “You could do me a favor, though,” I said, surprising myself.

She waited, said nothing. I could almost feel her body tense.

“You could ask your boyfriend what he did with Rita Ketchum.”

There was another pause, this one redolent with silent fury. “You know what?” Jo Lynn asked, her voice edgy and cold, like chipped glass. “If you have anything you want to ask my
fiancé,
I suggest you ask him yourself.”

W
hich may, or may not, explain what I was doing sitting beside my sister as she raced her old red Toyota up the Florida Turnpike toward the state prison outside Starke the following Friday night.

“Don’t you think you should slow down a bit?” I fidgeted in my seat, eyes darting through the darkness for state troopers along the side of the highway. “I thought the police had this area pretty well covered.”

“They never stop me,” Jo Lynn said confidently, as if surrounded by an aura of invincibility. “Besides, I’m not going that fast.”

“You’re doing almost eighty.”

“You call that fast?”

“I think you should slow down.”

“I think you should relax. I’m the driver, remember?” She lifted both hands off the wheel, cracked her knuckles, stretched.

“Get your hands on the wheel,” I said.

“Will you please calm down. You’ll make me so nervous, I’ll have an accident.”

“Look, you’ve been driving for almost three hours,” I said, watching the speedometer stubbornly climb, trying a
different approach. “Why don’t you let me take over for a while.”

She shrugged. “Sure. Next time we stop for gas, it’s all yours.”

I stared out the front window at the battery of signs that regularly interrupted the flat stretch of road along the ink-blue sky, most of them announcing the imminent arrival of Disney World, located just outside the city of Kissimmee, twenty miles southwest of Orlando.

“You want to go there?” Jo Lynn asked.

“Where?”

“Disney World. We could go on Sunday.”

I shook my head in amazement. The state penitentiary one day, Disney World the next.

“Or we could do Universal Studios. I’ve always wanted to go there, and it’s around here somewhere.”

“I think I’ll pass.”

“What about Busch Gardens? It’s supposed to be terrific.”

“We were there about five years ago,” I reminded her. “Remember? You went with the kids on that water ride and everybody got drenched.”

Jo Lynn squealed with delight. “‘The Congo River Rapids’ ride! I remember. That’s the place with all the animals. It was great. Let’s go there.” Her head snapped toward me, her eyes appealing longingly to mine.

“Would you please keep your eyes on the road.”

“Party pooper.” Her eyes returned to the highway stretching monotonously before us. “How about one of those alligator farms? You know, the ones you hear about where some poor kid always falls off the bridge and gets eaten?”

“You’re not serious.”

“Of course I’m serious. I love that sort of stuff.”

“I can’t,” I told her, watching the enthusiasm drain
from her face, like liquid from a straw. “I promised Larry I’d be home tomorrow night.” Actually I hadn’t promised him any such thing. In fact, Larry had encouraged me to wait until Sunday to make the long drive home. But I knew my tolerance level for my sister would take me only so far.

“You’re such a wet blanket,” Jo Lynn said, her mouth a pronounced pout.

“I’m here, aren’t I?”

She scoffed. “Colin doesn’t know anything about what happened to Rita Ketchum. You’ll see.”

What about Amy Lokash? I thought, but didn’t say. What about the scores of other women who crossed his path and disappeared? “Where is this place anyway?”

“It’s either in Raiford or Starke, depending on who you talk to,” Jo Lynn explained. “Between Gainesville and Jacksonville, in Bradford County. Another couple of hours and we should be at the motel.”

“I don’t think I’ve ever been to Bradford County,” I said.