White Bird in a Blizzard (25 page)

Mickey nods at Beth, then at me, in mock reflection. “Sounds reasonable,” she says.

“A bird up the sleeve is worth two bushes at least,” Beth says. “Or so they say.”

We laugh harder, and for a long time. Then, when the laughter’s faded, I lower my voice. I say, “No, really, you guys, he says my father knows where my mother is.”

“Hmmm.” Mickey strikes a match and lights another cigarette, and her tone changes. “Does that surprise you?” she asks, looking at the tip of her cigarette to see if it’s lit. She drags on it, then says, “Personally, I’ve always wondered about that.”

Beth nods, looking at me seriously.

“Really?” I stand up quickly with the unopened bottle of champagne in my hand. “Why haven’t you ever said anything?”

Beth looks at Mickey, who looks at Beth, and then at me. She says, “I think I did. Once. Right after she left, Kat. But you didn’t seem to want to hear it.” She continues, “I remember asking you if you thought maybe your dad had something to hide, if maybe he knew something you didn’t and wasn’t saying, and you just blew it off. You said he was too transparent to hide anything. You said he’d taken a lie detector test, and they’d decided your father lacked the ability to lie.”

I stand there with the bottle, and they look up at me uneasily in the silence. Finally, Mickey pours herself some more champagne. She says, “I’ve been drinking all week. I just
hate
Garden Heights.”

“Maybe I should put this bottle in the freezer,” I say.

I feel groggy, and confused, as if I’ve just hit my head hard on something soft. I hold the champagne bottle like a skinned chicken, by the neck, and go into the unfinished part of the basement, and flip the light switch.

One bare bulb blazes from the ceiling, a terrible brightness.

I feel tired, blinded by it, as if I’ve been sleepwalking and have just woken up with a searchlight in my face. I can hear Mickey and Beth laughing in the other room, my father and May talking in a muffled singsong upstairs, but I can also hear myself breathing, and the breath sounds as palpable as wings, or water, in my lungs.

I head for the back of the basement, past the washer and dryer, across the drain hole, into the shadows, to the freezer. I can hear it purring, a contented vibration that hums through the whole white length of it, humming into the cement floor, into the earth under that. My father’s piles of old newspapers, bundled, are tied up tightly, efficiently, with twine on top of them. Years’ and years’ worth of old news. He must have planned to take them to the Board of Education’s annual paper drive one of these years, and forgot, and keeps forgetting, as the piles grow higher.

I set the bottle of champagne on the floor.

The bundles are heavy, and yellowed, and the twine cuts into my fingers when I start heaving them off of the freezer. They make a lifeless
whoomf
as they hit the cement, and the headlines seem strange, hopelessly innocent and outdated, even a little insane, staring up at me.

U.S. DOWNS TWO LIBYAN FIGHTERS. SURROGATE MOTHER MARY BETH WHITEHEAD SOBS IN COURT
. Ronald Reagan’s colon cancer. George Bush looking weary, jogging in Kennebunkport in the rain. And, at the very bottom, a bundle that must have been there since the year my mother disappeared. A photograph of the Challenger making its last, crazy zigzag through the sky as it loses its challenge with space.

When all the bundles are off, I put the palm of my hand on top of the freezer, and feel the warm motor of it running. It must get hot, working so hard to keep the things inside it cold. I haven’t opened it since before my mother left, and when I try to lift the lid, I can’t. It’s as though something’s holding it closed from inside, or as if a huge, invisible weight is resting on it.

I try harder, my fingers under the white rubber lip, straining. I can feel the frost on my knuckles, but I can’t lift it, and I quit trying. I pick the bottle of champagne up, start back to the other room, turn the light off as I leave.

“The freezer won’t open,” I say, still holding the bottle by the neck.

“Forget it,” Mickey says. She lifts her empty glass for more champagne. “Let’s just crack it now.”

I sit back down on the floor, handing it over to Mickey, who struggles with the cork as Beth and I look on, holding our breath, waiting for the bright, foaming shot that doesn’t come. Instead, I hear my father at the top of the stairs. “What’s going on?” he shouts down to us. “What are you doing down there?”

Mickey puts the bottle between her knees and grinds out her clove cigarette in the ashtray, looking surprised.

“Drinking champagne, Dad. We’re just talking and drinking champagne,” I call up to him. “Why?”

“I want those girls to go home,” he says. His voice sounds strained. “Right now.”

Beth frowns at me, puzzled. I shrug. I stand up and head toward the stairs to ask him what’s wrong, but when I get to the foot of them, he’s already gone. I hear him stomp across the kitchen, through the living room, where I hear him say something in an angry tone to May, and she replies, also unintelligibly, in a high, apologetic whine. Then I hear them head together up the stairs.

“Jeez,” Mickey says, slipping her leather coat back on. “What do you suppose that was all about?”

L
YING IN BED
, I
THINK OF
M
RS
. H
ILLMAN WANDERING
through her house in the perpetual dark, arms outstretched, feeling her way to the bathroom, the sink, the sofa, the refrigerator.

Born blind, what if, one morning, she opened her eyes and could see?

I imagine Phil finding Mrs. Hillman in her bed that morning when she doesn’t get up, doesn’t shuffle down to the kitchen for breakfast. Phil finding his mother lying on her back in her own bed, eyes bulged out of her head, mouth a gaping hole of surprise—

She’d seen it all too fast, for the first time, and had died.

Maybe, I think, when you’ve waited a long time to see something, you need to find your way to it in glimpses.

A tatter of color.

A sharp triangle.

A glimpse of smudged light shining off the coffee table on a summer afternoon.

A leaf, a wing, a swaying branch, a fragment of black trunk, a brushstroke of bird’s nest before the whole tree’s illuminated—shrill, and undisguised, filling your empty eye with its dazzling razors and knives, an explosion of edges and circles and straight lines shivering.

Green.

Brief.

Movement.

Screaming.

You’d have to be ready for that.

T
HE SNOW HAS MELTED, AND THE MUD HAS COME TO LIFE
: Trees and tulips, muskrats and possum are sucking up out of it with a sluggish sound, like some beast giving birth to a whole world—the sound of lactation, phlegm, and swimming, while in the muck something swampy and furred licks its blind young with a long sloppy tongue
.

In the garden, there are hundreds—thousands—of baby snakes, sexual and twisting, stickling at wet nests of broken eggs and the fresh shoots of new leaves in the branches over my head, still damp and curled into fetal fists. I’m barefoot, looking up at the sky, which has begun to shed a fleshy, gray rain, then down at those snakes, eating their own tails now, when suddenly I notice my mother
.

She’s under me, clawing herself slowly out of the thawing ground. Naked, writhing, she’s being born, sitting up, and it’s her hair I notice first, strung with the sludge of January, melting. Then she wipes the mud from her eyes, looks up at me, and says, “I’m glad to be alive.”

When I wake up, May, wearing a white nightgown, is standing in the dark of my bedroom doorway. I realize I’m drenched in sweat, and naked. In my sleep, I’ve pulled my flannel nightgown up over my head and thrown it to the floor. The sheets and blankets have been stomped down to the end of the bed—shed. May’s mouth is open wide, looking at me, and I am screaming and screaming and screaming.

I
N THE MORNING
I
HEAR
M
AY TALKING TO MY FATHER IN
the kitchen. She says, “Something’s terribly wrong.”

My father grumbles, guffaws. “She has a nightmare,” he says sarcastically, “and there’s
‘something terribly wrong
.’ Haven’t you ever had a nightmare before?”

“Not like that,” May says, hushed and serious. “Not like that.”

“Well, I have,” he says, dismissing her. “Plenty.”

I hear something slam. Maybe he’s pounded his fist on the kitchen table. “I told you not to sleep over with Kat here. I told you.”

May starts to whine. “I don’t see why you’re so upset. I’m just expressing concern about your daughter.”

He’s shouting now. “My daughter does not need your concern. You are not Kat’s mother.”

“You’re right,” May says, resigned. I hear hangers in the coat closet. She’s getting her coat. She says, “I have to go to work. Call me tonight if you still want me to drive Kat to Ann Arbor with you tomorrow. Otherwise, I won’t bother you.”

“Good,” my father grunts.

“Oh,” May says.

“What?” he says.

“Nothing,” she says, and I hear the front door slam behind her.

“D
ID YOU ASK YOUR DAD WHAT THE FREAK-OUT WAS
all about the other night?” Beth asks over the phone. She’s leaving for Bloomington this afternoon. Mickey left for Madison yesterday without calling to say goodbye.

“This morning he said, I kid you not, ‘I won’t have girls smoking in my basement,’” I tell her.

“What?” Beth laughs. “We’ve been smoking in that basement for five fucking years, and he knows it.”

“I know,” I say. “I told him that, but he just walked out the front door, got in the car, and drove off to work.”

“Weird,” Beth says, drawing the word out.

“Well, it doesn’t matter,” I say. “I’ll be back at school tomorrow. I can smoke myself into a stupor if I want to. I can smoke my way to oblivion and back.”

“Yeah,” Beth says. “But not with me and Mickey. Not in your very own basement. Not in Garden Heights, Ohio.” She sounds sad, like someone who doesn’t want to be where she is, but knows she’ll never be back.

“Well, all third-rate things must come to an end.”

“Or,” she says, sounding cheerful again, “as Phil would say, ‘All’s swell that ends swell.’”

When she hangs up, I keep the receiver at my ear for a long time, listening to the dial tone until the recorded voice of the operator comes on and says, “Please hang up and try your call again.”

That voice sounds far away, echoing across the miles, like a woman who has been living at the end of a tunnel for a long time.

Then there’s silence.

“Beth?” I say into the phone, but she’s gone.

I
PACK MY CLOTHES AND SHOES AND BOOKS
. I
T’S AFTERNOON
. I leave for Ann Arbor in the morning.

This time, I’m taking more things back with me than I brought home. I’m taking things I thought I’d leave: my photo albums, my jewelry box, my summer shorts, a straw hat I bought long ago with a big plastic sunflower on the brim—a hat I wouldn’t be caught dead in now.

I’m taking the pink dress, three sizes too large, that I wore to the winter formal with Phil. I’ve been saving it for years, like a memory, and I don’t want to leave it here.

When the suitcase is full, I get another out of the guest room, then I go to my parents’ room and open my mother’s closet.

It is entirely empty.

I look at the emptiness a long time, and try to see into it. I try to see past it. The way Mrs. Hillman looks into the vast whiteness in front of her all day, stepping carefully into the snow on the other side of herself, sniffing the air as she goes.

But the longer I stare, the more empty the emptiness becomes, and brighter. It’s as if I’ve opened a closet into pure space—flat, but cavernous, and shiny—as if, if I stepped into it, I could fall into the future forever. I stare, and don’t breathe, and step closer, looking harder, until I think I recognize a face in there. A woman emerging. A grown woman with her mouth open, wearing a white scarf, a halo of light in her hair.

I gasp, leaning in. “Mom?” I say before I realize she is only my reflection. There’s a mirror in the back of my mother’s closet, and nothing else.

When I hear my father behind me, I turn around—

I had no idea he was home. He’s wearing a suit. His eyes are dark and narrow. Why isn’t he at work?

“What are you looking for?” he asks.

“Nothing,” I say.

“Well,” he says, “you found it.”

He goes back down the stairs, and the door closes behind him with a dry, sucking sound.

W
HEN MY FATHER COMES HOME AGAIN, IT’S FIVE P.M.
H
E
doesn’t say hello. I stay upstairs. We don’t have dinner together. May doesn’t come over. My father falls asleep in one of the green chairs in the living room, and I come downstairs to find him in it. He looks as stiff as a crossing guard, snoring. I go back upstairs.

It was a gray afternoon, but as the sun goes down tonight it lights up the horizon, dipping below the sky’s steel wool in an angry frown. From my bedroom window I watch it sink into the earth, making a black silhouette of Phil and Mrs. Hillman’s house. I think of them inside it, seeing and unseeing, sitting down to dinner.

A boyfriend. I remember. She told Detective Scieziesciez that my mother had a boyfriend.

And I remember calling them the Saturday after my mother disappeared, how Mrs. Hillman said, “I’m sorry to hear your mother left, but, no, I didn’t see anything unusual at your house yesterday.”

She’d been gone only one day. I said to Mrs. Hillman, “I’m sure she’ll be back soon, but we’re going to the police station this afternoon to make a report.”

There was silence on the other end of the phone.