You Remind Me of Me (4 page)

——

If she lives long enough her life will have a story, and the story will begin at this moment. Once upon a time, there was a girl who didn’t want to have a baby, but she did. Once upon a time, there was a baby who lived in the body of a girl, and there was nothing that she could do about it. Once upon a time, there was a girl who thought her life would be different.

4

June 4, 1997

A child disappears from his grandmother’s backyard on a morning in late spring. He is there one minute—the grandmother glances out the window while she is washing the dishes and she sees him standing by the cyclone fence near the copse of lilac bushes, his hands clasped behind his back, talking to himself, as he likes to do.

And then he is gone.

It is a morning in early June, tranquil and warm, and the town of St. Bonaventure, Nebraska, has reached its greenest moment. By July the prairies that surround the town’s clutch of houses and trees will have faded to a grayish-tan, the color of lichen, and even the fields of corn and alfalfa will seem artificial, desperately verdant beneath huge, insectlike irrigation systems that stride over the fields on long metal legs. Dust devils as high as churches will rise up in the stubble fields and churn their way across the roads and highways, right into the walking sprinklers as if attacking. Dust will settle on the crops’ damp leaves.

But this particular morning the hot, dry, rainless days still seem far away. It is truly, purely spring. School is out. Children play in yards and ride bikes on the sidewalks. Discount City has set up rows of bright pink and blue kiddie pools, in three sizes, along its outside wall. Farmer’s Co-op displays planters full of seedlings—tomato plants and jalapeño peppers and watermelon vines and garden flowers—spreading them out on folding tables in the sun.

On such a day the grandmother is not particularly concerned that she doesn’t see the child when she looks out the kitchen window. He’s playing, she thinks. The boy, Loomis, is six years old, and in fact is a kind of miracle of restraint and politeness for a child of the late twentieth century. He’s the type of child who still consistently presents himself to her to ask, “Grandma, may I use the rest room?” and who will pause to take note of the time on the plastic wristwatch his father has given him because he likes to be in bed at exactly eight-thirty. When she looks out again and sees that he is no longer by the fence she doesn’t think much of it. He is a quiet boy, almost aloof in his elaborate pretend games, and she likes that about him. She respects his sense of privacy.

Another twenty minutes pass. The grandmother, Judy, finishes the breakfast dishes, dries them, puts them away in a cupboard. She is watching—half watching—an old musical on the small television she keeps on the counter for company.
Carousel,
very sad. “You’ll Never Walk Alone,” a woman sings, and she purses her mouth against a welling of sentimental emotion.

——

She is tired today; she didn’t sleep well. Recently she’s been troubled by strange fluctuations of her pulse as she lies down to sleep, and then, once her pulse stops accelerating and she begins to drift off, her heart seems to stop. It is as if the body has suddenly forgotten that it is necessary to keep blood pumping, and she rises with a jolt into consciousness, like a cork from the bottom of a bucket of water. Her whole body tingles for a moment.

This happens irregularly, but it had frightened her badly last night, and she had paced gingerly through the kitchen with a cup of warm Ovaltine. She wondered if something was wrong with her. The doctors would blame her weight, she thought. Her blood pressure, probably—she had escaped it up until now, but she saw ahead a whole series of adjustments: pills, diets, tests. She would begin the slow and futile ritual of staving off her own mortality. She had seen this happen with her own mother—the way the maintenance of health began to occupy more and more of her mother’s daily life, until most of her waking hours were consumed in a kind of endless tennis match with her own body. Prevent one thing and the ball would come whizzing back over the net: a cold she couldn’t shake, another organ failing, another limb hard to move, or painful. Eventually her mother died from shingles—a ridiculous and almost comical-sounding ailment that had beaten Judy’s mother simply by virtue of her weakened immune system.

Judy had been thinking of this, pacing through the darkened house, when a noise came from outside—a rattling, the soft echo of a jar rolling over a hard surface. She heard what at first she thought was a high-pitched, raspy voice—a voice not unlike her mother’s in her last years—and she shuddered. Out the window, she saw the raccoon. When she flicked on the porch light, it stood up. It held its front legs against its chest like palsied arms, hunching there, cringing. Its eyes glinted, and when she opened the screen door to holler at it, the creature stared at her like a malevolent and senile old person—like one of those old men who glare from their wheelchairs as you pass them at the nursing home. Abruptly, the raccoon dropped from its standing position and trotted to the corner of the yard. On all fours, the animal looked grotesquely swollen, its wide hindquarters jiggling as it ran. She watched as it smoothly slipped through a gap under the fence, near the lilac bush, and vanished.

It is this image that comes to her when she opens the back door to call Loomis. An image of that creature loping, waddling, into the bushes, like a heavily drugged person trying to crawl quickly. Its body was too slow and casual to express terror, but she could tell that it was actually quite desperate. “Loomis,” she says, and for a second she thinks she sees a flash of movement, a tail, a swatch of dark pelt disappearing under the lilac foliage.

This image unnerves her at first. She actually shudders—a shadow passes along the nape of her neck—and then there is the emptiness of the yard. “Loomis?” she says, uncertainly.

The yard behind Judy’s house is not a place a person could hide in. It is a simple square, a clean patch of grass with some dandelions and clover in it, enclosed by a metal cyclone fence. In the northwest corner is a lilac bush, near the end of its blooming; to the east, along the wall of the garage, is her small garden plot: two tomato plants, two zucchini, four rows of yellow wax beans, a cantaloupe vine she is experimenting with. There are some hollyhocks along the side of the house. But mostly it is open yard. A few of Loomis’s toys are scattered there—a Batman doll, a blue rubber ball with yellow stripes, a plastic bag full of dinosaur figurines and soldiers and matchbook cars.

“Loomis?” she says. There is a moment of disorientation, eyeing the yard again, when she thinks somehow he
must
be here, that there’s something wrong with her perception, her vision.

——

He could have climbed the fence, she supposes, though that seems so unlike him. Maybe he tossed something over the edge by accident and went to retrieve it? The wire of the fence crisscrosses in a diamond pattern, easy enough for him to fit his tennis shoes into the holes and hoist himself over. It seems foolish—he is not a particularly athletic or adventurous child, not liable to run off.

Still, she walks across the yard toward the north end of the fence, her thongs snapping under her bare feet in the warm grass. Here is the narrow alleyway that separates the rears of the houses on her block from the rears of the houses that line the block to the north, just wide enough for the beeping garbage truck to lumber down on Monday mornings. She looks to the right and left—nothing, just trash cans of varying shapes and sizes, plastic and corrugated metal, a few with stuffed garbage bags beside them. Weeds breaking through the cracked cement. Trees and poles, the branches and wire lines interpenetrating. At the far end, where the mouth of the alley opens into a street, a red truck drives past and vanishes. No sign of Loomis.

She is aware, for the first time in many years, of the way the world might look from the point of view of a small child. The largeness of it, the way a common alley might seem to be a mysterious tunnel, the way the back fences and gates of houses have an ancient, abandoned quality. She notices—remembers—the narrow strip of space between the fence and the rear of her garage: another tunnel, but one that doesn’t seem maneuverable even for a child, since logs are piled up there—pieces of an old tree that she’d had removed several years ago. For some reason she must have thought the wood would be useful, though now she can’t remember why. Now it is spotted with lichen and shelf fungus, wet, rotten, perhaps full of termites or ants.

“Loomis!” she calls, raising her voice for the first time, now not embarrassed for the neighbors to hear her. She lets herself bellow, once: “Loomis! Where are you?” And the dog in the neighbor’s backyard to her left begins to bark. He wouldn’t have gone there, of course. He hates and fears the dog, a moody and thickly muscled pit bull named Pluto. Nevertheless, she goes to the edge of the fence and peers over, and Pluto runs at her. He is leashed to a clothesline, and the eyelet of the leash makes a hollow sound, like a marble rolling down a pipe, as it passes along the length of the clothesline rope. At the sight of her, Pluto lets out a series of angry, territorial barks, his ears pinned back and eyes bright with outrage.

“Shut up!” Judy says sharply, and claps her hands, a gesture she remembers from childhood, from her mother, when they lived on a farm outside of town and sometimes encountered strange stray dogs. “Git!” she says, and claps her hands again. “Go on now!” And Pluto, impressed, stops barking and watches her warily. The neighbors, the Woodwards, are a childless and cordially unfriendly couple of whom she knows little. They are perhaps in their thirties. The woman, Bonnie, a secretary at the courthouse; the husband, Sherman, a worker at the feedlot outside of town. He is a hunter, and nearly every fall will bring home a deer that he skins and dismembers in the backyard. Beyond this, she knows little about them, and she is glad that they show no interest in her. She is an older divorced lady:
Mrs. Keene,
they call her respectfully. She suspects that they have probably heard some gossip about Loomis and his parents, some version of that unpleasant story, but they have said nothing, and she appreciates that.

——

She is beginning to get flustered now—somewhere between alarmed and annoyed. Where is Loomis? She is now of the mind that when she finds him she will give him a spanking, though she has never struck the child before. She unlatches the backyard gate—did he climb over it?—and walks into the driveway. The folding garage door is shut, but she peers in through the windows anyway, and then she goes into the garage and looks in the car. She remembers, in a suddenly vivid way, how her daughter Carla used to sit in the driver’s seat when she was a child, holding the steering wheel in her small fists and pretending to drive. But Loomis is not in the car. She calls his name, very loudly and angrily now. “Loomis Timmens!” she calls. “If you don’t answer me this minute, you’re going to get a spanking!” And she strides down the drive toward the sidewalk, her thongs making sharp clacking sounds as she walks. Otherwise, the street is enormously silent.

She
will
spank him, she thinks. She will have to now. He has disobeyed, he has frightened her, and a lesson will have to come out of it. She thinks forward to this: dragging Loomis angrily down the street by his arm, turning him facedown on her lap in the kitchen and bringing the flat of her hand down on his bottom. Ten hard slaps, no more, no less. Sending him to his room without lunch. He may or may not cry—he seldom does, but she hopes that he will this time. Tears will mean that she has been effective, that she has impressed herself upon him and that he has repented. No tears will mean, what? Something to worry about.

That’s the fear, she thinks, looking quickly to the right and left. That’s the fear. He has been such a good boy, and the idea that this might change makes her heart sink. Loomis’s mother, Carla, had been a good child, too, and look how she turned out.

Sometimes Judy tries to pinpoint the exact moment when things had gone wrong with Carla. Maybe it had been a simple moment, like this one with Loomis—willfully running off, without any concern for the consequences, without any concern for the feelings of others. She couldn’t remember anything so specific, but she knew that Carla had started out like Loomis: quiet, bright, easily pleased. But then, outside of Judy’s control, she had begun to transform. By the time she passed into her teenage years, she had become secretive, vindictive, addictive, in and out of alcohol/drug rehabilitation facilities since she was fourteen.

She pauses on the sidewalk. She has begun to perspire, and she looks up and down her street, Foxglove Road, the small one-story houses with their striped awnings and boxes of petunias and neat, tiny front yards. “Loomis! Loomis!” she calls, and her voice sounds like a parched hen crying for water.

——

Loomis has been in her care for almost a year now—the only stable year of his life, she thinks. Before that had been a series of trashy catastrophes, starting with his parents’ marriage. Judy’s daughter—Loomis’s mother—Carla, had never been a mature or responsible person. Even at age twenty-eight, Carla was not ready to be married, Judy felt, but her choice of husband was even more ridiculous than Judy could have imagined. The husband’s name was Troy Timmens, and he was some six years Carla’s junior, twenty-two years old when they married but still an adolescent in Judy’s estimation. Troy seemed to have no future plans beyond working as a bartender and turning his late father’s home into a partying den on the weekends. When Carla found herself pregnant a year or so later, Judy had tried to tactfully suggest that Carla consider other options, such as abortion. But this had only led to another of their typical arguments—and another period of icy coldness between them.

But Judy was right, of course. Carla was no more prepared for motherhood than she would have been to pilot a jet plane, and Judy found herself called upon to baby-sit for the infant regularly while the nominal parents partied and fought. The marriage had dissolved under the pressures of young parenthood, coupled with a decadent lifestyle. Things grew worse and worse, until at last, when Loomis was three, Carla left town with a man she was having an affair with, taking Loomis with her and this man to Las Vegas, where she proceeded to become involved in drugs again. Troy retrieved Loomis and brought him back home to St. Bonaventure, and then was shortly thereafter himself arrested for possession of marijuana with intent to sell. At which time Loomis came into Judy’s custody.