White Bird in a Blizzard (23 page)

Another big, dumb, muscled man with a gun.

I will never come here again, I thought, and curled my toes into the carpet, and my feet became as blunt as clubs. “How could she have known that?” I asked, “How could she have dreamt that?”

My voice was brittle. Maybe I was shouting. The detective sounded defensive when he answered, and he got out of bed, pulling his boxer shorts up. The water bed gulped.

“Obviously, she saw that truck at the park and some part of her registered that the kid had crawled in there. She was too hysterical to consciously understand that, so it came to her in dreams.”

“Oh,” I said. “Then what’s up with
my
dreams, Detective? Where’s my mother?”

Detective Scieziesciez zipped up his jeans, and looked down at me. He looked a bit confused. He began to flex the bicep of one arm and feel it, knead it with his fingers, as if to remind himself that he was strong. Then he sighed. “Well, do you really want my opinion?”

I pulled the sheet around me, hiding my nakedness. “Of
course
I said. “Since the very beginning we’ve been asking for your professional opinion.” I raised one of my eyebrows ironically as I said
professional
.

He began to look angry and worried, a man having to defend himself for the first time in his life. “Well,” he said, “in that case, in my opinion, your mother is dead.”

There was whining in my lungs, but it had nothing to do with me. It sounded like knives being sharpened on ice. I knew he was going to say this. I could tell he would want to hurt me. “Why?” I was interrogating
him
now.

“Because an extensive and very well-handled search for her has been taking place for the last three years, and she has not been found.”

I could see blood rising up his neck, and I knew suddenly, clearly, that there had been no search at all, that he was lying, or incompetent, or both.

“
‘Extensive’
and
well-handled
’?” I asked. “You never even spelled my mother’s name right in your letters. That photo you used on the flyers was so blurry, she could have been anyone. You never looked
anywhere
for my mother. You never even looked in our house!”

He pulled his leather belt quickly through the belt loops around his waist, and it made a windy sigh.

“First of all,” he said, “my secretary types up the letters. The spelling errors are hers. Second, your father provided the photo we used, and he said it was the best he could do. And third, we can’t search a house without a search warrant, and we can’t get a search warrant without some reason to conduct a search. I had to assume that if your mother was in the house, you’d have been able to find her yourself. She wouldn’t exactly be
missing
if she was in the house.”

“Okay, Detective. Where is she?”

“Well, you yourself indicated that she was probably having an affair, which was confirmed by that woman, that Mrs. Blindman, next door—”

“Mrs.
Hill
man.”

“Whatever. The blind lady. She said your mother had a boyfriend.”

“What would Mrs. Hillman know?
How
would Mrs. Hillman know
anything
about my mother?”

“She lives next door.” He smirked when he said this.

“But she can’t
see
.” I felt afraid that I might cry. I took a deep, painful breath. “Besides, wouldn’t that just make it even more likely that she was off somewhere with this boyfriend”—the sarcasm caught like a sob in my throat—“not dead?”—and so did
dead
.

“Well,” he said, pausing, staring at the bedroom wall, narrowing his eyes. It looked as if he were reading his lines off a cue card he couldn’t quite see. “Well,” he said again, “several people interviewed told us that your father is a jealous and impulsive man.”

The detective’s stomach looked like stone covered with skin. He was buttoning up his white shirt.

“Who? Who was interviewed? Who said my father was ‘
jealous
’and ‘
impulsive
?’ My father, if you couldn’t tell this for yourself when you interviewed him, is one of the dullest men on the planet. Obviously, whoever was interviewed never met him.”

I imagined my father then, wearing a clown suit, having a pie thrown in his face by Detective Scieziesciez. There was pie in my father’s eyes, and he was wiping it out, and the image made me grimace with protective rage.

“That’s not what their former neighbors at the Ramblewood apartment complex had to say. Bob and Mattie Freelander. They said your father suspected your mother had a thing for Bob Freelander, and that your father set a trash can on fire and tossed it onto their patio.”

“
What? What?
” I gasped. I was standing now, fastening my bra behind me as quickly as I could. “Who are these people? My parents lived in that apartment
two decades
ago.”

The detective shrugged. “So? A man’s nature doesn’t change in two decades.”

“A ‘
man’s nature
.’” I started to laugh, but it sounded like an animal heaving something up. “
My father hasn’t got a ‘nature
.’”

Detective Scieziesciez regained his composure as I lost mine. He sat on the edge of his water bed looking at me, distant and concerned, though there were already dark rings of sweat under his arms, and he’d just put on his shirt. I couldn’t find my panties. I had to get on my knees.

“Kat,” he said to me at his feet, “any man is capable of anything. Trust me. I know. Any man could kill his wife if he caught her with another man—a younger man, a richer man. Men kill.
I
know.”

“Oh,” I huffed at him. My panties were under his nightstand. I sat on the floor to pull them on. “You don’t know shit,” I said “If my father’s such a dangerous character, why the hell didn’t you arrest him,
Detective
?”

“You can’t arrest someone just because he’s
capable
of murder.” He stared blankly at my panties. They were lacy and white. “There wasn’t any evidence. And he passed a lie detector test. Your father’s a cool guy,
if
my suspicions are correct. He knew what he was doing when he got rid of her. In my professional opinion, your father caught your mother in the act, killed her, and dumped her. Maybe the Chagrin River. It was January. She’d have slipped right under the ice. By spring, she’d have washed to Lake Erie. We won’t be finding your mother. Hence,” he shrugged, “this case is closed.”

“But,” I tell Dr. Phaler, “that’s not what I wanted to talk about. I don’t really expect to hear from my mother, ever again. I’ve accepted that.”

“Still,” Dr. Phaler says, shaking her head, “that must be a fairly hard thing to accept.”

“Yes,” I say, waving it away with my hand, feeling annoyed. She’s leading me, like a horse. I will not drink. “But my problem right now is Phil. I want to break up with him. I don’t know how.”

Dr. Phaler runs her tongue over her top teeth. I notice that her glasses aren’t hanging from the usual chain around her neck and that her eyes, like her outfit, are green. Didn’t they used to be blue? She’s gotten contacts, I guess. “Tell me more.”

“Well, he’s been so good to me. But we’ve changed. Or, I have. I want to date another guy. I met this other guy.” An image of Aaron flashes, then, across the ceiling tiles when I look up—red bandanna around his neck, playing a guitar. I’m not sure, but I imagine Aaron plays the guitar, and badly. I imagine one day he’ll own a big, smelly dog—a black Labrador, and he’ll take it with him in his truck when he moves to Oregon.

Then I imagine Detective Scieziesciez holding a gun to Aaron’s head, forcing him to open the back of that truck.

“Do you have to break up with Phil to date someone else?”

I think about that. “Well. It doesn’t seem fair—”

“Has Phil treated
you
fairly?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well. Have you and Phil started kissing again? Or having sex? Is he making any plans for his future?”

“His mother—” I start to say.

Dr. Phaler waves now, and now she looks impatient, dismissive. “With or without his mother.”

“No.” I look at my hands.

“And has he ever come up with any satisfactory explanations for why that is?”

“Why what?” I ask. “You mean, kissing? I told you before, he says he doesn’t see any reason to kiss.”

“
Any reason to kiss?
” Dr. Phaler laughs out loud. “Who needs a reason to kiss?”

“You’re right,” I say, nodding. “But he’s been so good. You know. He was there for me when my mother disappeared.” She’s looking at my neck. Maybe she’s biting her tongue. The silence feels, when I swallow, like the white of an egg, or sperm, on the back of my throat.

Then she says, carefully, “Kat, have you ever considered that he might have been there for you when your mother disappeared because he felt guilty?”

“About what?” I’ve shouted it. I touch my throat. I’m surprised at how loud my voice has become, and I lower it. “What would Phil have to feel guilty about?”

“What do you think?” She says it calmly, without accusation. “Don’t you have
any
clues?” There’s an empty look on her face. A ceiling tile. It’s as if the Dr. Phaler I said good-bye to last August has been replaced by a fresh, more determined Dr. Phaler—a Dr. Phaler committed to scraping the ice off her windshield with an ink pen. All business. Ready to go. Chip, chip, chip. Jaw set in some direction I’m not sure I want to go.

“No,” I say. “But that’s not why I’m here.”

“I know,” she says. “But I think it’s something you need to consider. You need to consider why Phil might have stuck around all this time, despite the fact that he doesn’t even love you enough to kiss you.”

I see my hands in my lap as if from far away, and they are the hands of a stranger, shaking. Perhaps I sound angry when I say, “Maybe you should tell me what
you
think. Obviously, you think something.”

“Well, Kat, you’ve told me quite a lot about your mother’s behavior just before she left. Don’t you think Phil might have had something to do with that?”

“What do you mean?
What
did I tell you? All I said was that I thought they were flirting—that
she
was flirting with
him
. Why should he feel guilty about that?”

But I can tell Dr. Phaler’s done. Her arms have settled on her armrests, roosting, and her mouth is closed again. She nods. My hour’s up.

Where did it go?

I’m not done.

“Do you think there’s something I don’t know? Are you saying you think there was something between my mother and Phil? Why didn’t you say anything until now?”

Am I hysterical?

Is this what hysteria is? I picture a can of trash with wings landing on my shoulder in flames, and hear my voice coming out of a narrow hole, a rabbit hole.

I’ve shrunk, I think, looking at Dr. Phaler, who is too far away, now, to see.

I am a pinprick, a little piece of who I was. My whole face could fit on a postage stamp.

Dr. Phaler stops nodding. She seems to be thinking. I can tell by her voice that she hasn’t noticed how tiny I’ve become—a miniature of myself in her new, green eyes. She says, “I don’t know. But if you want my opinion, there’s no reason to feel guilty about breaking up with Phil.”

When I get back out to the car—my mother’s station wagon—I realize I’m holding a handkerchief with the initials
MP
in my fist—in cursive, black, in a corner of the white square trimmed with bric-a-brac. I have no idea how it got in my hand.

I take it back and leave it draped like a veil over the doorknob of Maya Phaler’s office.

P
HIL STOOPS TO TAKE OFF HIS BOOTS
. I
T’S THE FIRST WEEK
of January, but the neighbors across the street still have their electric nativity set plugged in. They leave it on all day and night and, in the afternoon, there’s a weak and artificial light rising from baby Jesus, as if he’s swaddled in glare, and the Virgin Mary sheds dreary bandages of blue into the cold fog. I shut the door behind him.

“Hi,” he says, a little surly, a little shy. He has thin white lines around his eyes—I’ve never noticed those before—where the sun must not shine. The rest of his face has a winter tan, a wind tan, a reddish bum just under the skin. It makes his hair look even blonder, oddly blond.

“Hi,” I say.

“You sound stuffed up,” he says.

“I’ve been sick,” I say.

I haven’t seen Phil for a few days, not since I went to visit him at Sears, where we had an argument in the break room in front of another salesman. It was Saturday, and Phil had been “working the floor” as he calls it, which means sneaking up on unshaven husbands as they look at the prices on power saws, lawn tractors, dehumidifiers.

The department Phil works in is metal gray. The shelves shine with buffed light and, from floor to ceiling, are filled with the kind of items you might find in a junkyard, or dumped at the side of the road, left in the woods. Wrench sets, claw hammers, hoses, rubber mats to throw on the floor of your car, levelers, flashlights, dolly straps, fireproof safety boxes. You could imagine a grown man in bed beside his wife, a stocking cap on his head—and, above him, in the cartoon bubble that reveals his dreams, a floating menagerie of those items from Sears.

In the bubble above his wife’s sleeping head, there would just be z’s.

I had been standing behind a shelf, among the hand appliances—the planers, strippers, sprayers, drills—when I heard Phil, on the other side, say to someone, “This is the best random-orbit palm-grip sander money can buy,” and I’d laughed out loud.

Phil sold it to the man, who was wearing an orange hunter’s vest and jeans that sagged down over his hips so that, when he leaned over the counter to sign his credit card receipt, I could see the two mounds of the man’s buttocks, and the sad crack between them.

I felt sorry for that man, who kept looking at his palm-grip sander over and over again as Phil rang it up, as though he knew, somewhere in his heart, having done this so many times before in his forty-nine years as a consumer, that he was making a terrible mistake. The palm-grip sander with its random orbit would not turn out to be what he’d wanted, or needed, but he would own it now for the rest of his life. It would hang above his workbench in the basement as another painful reminder of his gullibility, poor judgment, while the waste around him accumulated like rain in old tires, or rusty lengths of pipe in the countryside.