JENNA
My grandmother stares at me as if she’s seeing a ghost. She grabs me tight, running her hands over my shoulders and my hair as if she needs to do an inventory. But there’s a viciousness in her touch, too, as if she is trying to hurt me just as badly as I’ve hurt her. “Jenna, my God, where have you been?”
I kind of wish I’d taken Serenity or Virgil up on their offer to drive me home, to smooth the path between my grandmother and me. Right now, it’s like Mount Kilimanjaro has sprung up between us.
“I’m sorry,” I mutter. “I had to do some … stuff.” I use Gertie as an excuse to break away from her. My dog starts licking my legs like there’s no tomorrow, and when she jumps up on me, I bury my face in the ruff at her neck.
“I thought you had run away,” my grandmother says. “I thought maybe you were doing drugs. Drinking. There are stories on the news all the time about girls who get kidnapped, good girls who make the mistake of telling a stranger what time it is when they ask. I was so worried, Jenna.”
My grandmother is still wearing her meter maid uniform, but I can see that her eyes are red and her skin is too pale, like she hasn’t slept. “I called everyone. Mr. Allen—who told me that you haven’t been babysitting for his son, because his wife and baby are visiting her mother in California … the school … your friends—”
Horrified, I stare at her. Who the hell did she call? Short of Chatham, who doesn’t even live here anymore, there’s no one I hang around with. Which means my grandmother contacting a random kid to find out if I’m at her house having a sleepover is even more humiliating.
I don’t think I can go back to school in the fall. I don’t know if I can go back in the next twenty years. I’m mortified, and I’m mad at her, because it’s hard enough to be a loser whose mother’s dead and whose father killed her in a fit of crazy without becoming the laughingstock of the eighth grade.
I push Gertie away from me. “Did you call the police, too?” I ask. “Or is that still a sticking point for you?”
My grandmother’s hand comes up as if she’s going to hit me. I cringe; this would be the second time this week I’ve been hit by someone who is supposed to love me.
But my grandmother never touches me. She has raised her hand to point upstairs. “Go to your room,” she tells me. “And don’t come out until I say you can.”
Because it’s been two and a half days since I last showered, the bathroom is my first stop. I run the water in the tub so hot that a curtain of steam fills the tiny room, and the mirrors fog up, so that I don’t have to look at myself as I strip off my clothes. Then I sit in the tub, my knees pulled up to my chest, and let the water keep running until it is almost level with the edge.
Taking a huge breath, I slide down the slope of the tub so that I am lying on the very bottom. I cross my arms, coffin-style, and open my eyes as wide as I can.
The shower curtain—pink with white flowers—looks like a kaleidoscope. There are bubbles that escape from my nose periodically, like little kamikaze warriors. My hair fans around my face like seaweed.
And this is how I found her, I imagine my grandmother saying. Like she’d just fallen asleep underneath the water.
I picture Serenity sitting with Virgil at my funeral, saying that I look so peaceful. I figure Virgil might even go home afterward and tip a glass—or six—in my honor.
It’s getting harder to not burst upright. The pressure on my chest is so strong I have a quick flash of my ribs snapping, my chest caving in. My eyes have stars dancing in front of them, underwater fireworks.
In the minutes before it happened, was this how my mother felt?
I know she did not drown, but her chest was crushed; I’ve read the autopsy report. Her skull was cracked; was she struck in the head before that? Did she see the blow coming? Did time slow down and sound move in waves of color; could she feel the motion of blood cells at the thin skin of her wrists?
I just want, once, to share something she felt.
Even if it’s the last thing I feel.
When I am certain that I am going to implode; that it is time to let the water rush into my nostrils and fill me so I sink like a stricken ship, my hands grab the lip of the tub and haul the rest of me into the air.
I gasp, and then I cough so violently that there is blood in the water. My hair mats my face, and my shoulders convulse. I lean over the side of the tub, chest pressed against the porcelain, and I vomit into the trash can.
Suddenly I remember being in a tub when I was tiny, when I could barely sit up by myself without toppling over like an egg. My mother would sit behind me, propping me in the V of her body. She would soap herself and then soap me. I slipped like a minnow through her hands.
Sometimes she sang. Sometimes she read journal articles. I sat in the circle of her legs, playing with rubber cups in a rainbow of colors—filling them, dumping them over my head and her knees.
I realize then that I’ve already felt something my mother felt.
Loved.
? ? ?
What do you think it was like for Captain Ahab, in the seconds before that harpoon line wrenched him out of the boat? Did he say to himself, Well, bummer, but that damn whale was worth it?
When Javert finally realized that Valjean had something he himself didn’t—mercy—did he shrug and find a new obsession, like knitting or Game of Thrones? No. Because without Valjean to hate, he didn’t know who he was anymore.
I’ve spent years looking for my mom. And now, all signs are starting to point to the fact that I couldn’t have found her if I’d crawled every inch of this earth. Because she left it, ten years ago.
Dead is so final. So done.
But I’m not crying, like I thought I would, not anymore. And there’s the tiniest green shoot of relief breaking through the wasteland of my thoughts: She did not willingly leave me behind.
Then there’s the fact that the person who killed her is most likely my own father. I don’t know why this is less of a shock to me. Maybe because I don’t remember my father at all. He was already gone when I knew him, living in a world his own brain had created. And since I’d already lost him once, I don’t feel like I’m losing him again.
My mom, though, that’s different. I had wanted. I had hoped.
Virgil is all about crossing the t’s and dotting the i’s, because so much has been screwed up in this investigation already. He said that tomorrow he’ll figure out a way to test the DNA of the body that everyone thought was Nevvie’s. Because then we will all know.
The funny thing is that now that this moment is here—the one I’ve pegged as my high-water mark for years—does it matter? Here’s the thing: I may finally have the truth. I may have closure, which is what the school counselor was always talking about with me when she corralled me in her stupid office. But here’s something I don’t have: my mother.
I start to reread my mother’s journals, but I can’t; it makes it hard to breathe. So I take out my stash of money, which is literally down to six individual dollar bills, and fold each of them into a tiny elephant. I have a herd marching across my desk.
Then I turn on my computer. I log on to the Nam Us website and click on the new cases.
There’s an eighteen-year-old boy who disappeared after dropping his mom off at work in Westminster, North Carolina. He drove a green Dodge Dart with the license plate 58U-7334. He had shoulder-length blond hair and fingernails filed into points.
A seventy-two-year-old female from West Hartford, Connecticut, who takes medicine for paranoid schizophrenia and who walked away from a group home after telling the staff she was going to audition for Cirque du Soleil. She had been wearing blue jeans and a sweatshirt with a picture of a cat on it.
A twenty-two-year-old girl from Ellendale, North Dakota, who left her house with an older unidentified male and never came back home.
I could click on these links all day long. And by the time I was done, there would be hundreds more. There are an endless number of people who have left a love-shaped hole in the heart of someone else. Eventually someone brave and stupid will come along and try to fill that hole. But it never works, and so instead, that selfless soul winds up with a gap in his heart, too. And so on. It’s a miracle that anyone survives, when so much of us is missing.
For just a moment, I let myself imagine what my life might have been like: my mother and my baby sister and I, cuddled under a blanket on the couch on a rainy Sunday, her arms around us, one on each side, as we watched a chick flick. My mother yelling at me to pick up my sweatshirt, because the living room is not my hamper. My mother doing my hair for my junior prom, while my sister pretends to put on mascara in the bathroom mirror. My mother taking too many pictures as I pin the boutonniere on my date, and me pretending to be annoyed but, in reality, being psyched that for her this moment is nearly as monumental as it is for me. My mother rubbing my back when that same boy breaks up with me a month later, telling me he was an idiot, because who couldn’t love a girl like me?
The door to my room opens, and my grandmother walks in. She sits on the bed. “I thought at first you didn’t realize how worried I could possibly have been, when you didn’t come home that first night. Or even try to get in touch with me.”
I look down at my lap, my face hot.
“But then I realized I was wrong. You could understand it perfectly, better than anyone else, because you know what it’s like to have someone disappear.”
“I went to Tennessee,” I confess.
“You went where?” she says. “How?”
“Bus,” I tell her. “I went to the sanctuary where all our elephants were sent.”
My grandmother’s hand flutters at her throat. “You traveled a thousand miles to go to a zoo?”
“It’s not a zoo, it’s like the anti-zoo,” I correct. “And yeah. I went because I was trying to find someone who knew my mother. I thought Gideon might be able to tell me what happened to her.”
“Gideon,” she repeats.
“They worked together,” I say. I do not say: They were having an affair.
“And?” my grandmother asks.
I nod, slowly pulling the scarf from around my neck. It’s so light that I imagine it would not even register on a scale: a cloud, a breath, a memory. “Grandma,” I whisper. “I think she’s dead.”
Until now, I hadn’t realized that words have sharp edges; that they can cut your tongue. I don’t think I could utter another sentence right now if I tried.
My grandmother reaches for the scarf, wrapping it around her hand like a bandage. “Yes,” she says. “I think so, too.”
Then she rips the scarf in half.
I cry out, I’m that shocked. “What are you doing?”
My grandmother scoops up the stack of my mother’s journals that are piled on my desk, too. “It’s for your own good, Jenna.”
Tears spring to my eyes. “Those are not yours.”
It hurts, seeing her with all that I have left of my mom. She’s ripping away my skin, and now I’m raw and exposed.
“They’re not yours, either,” my grandmother says. “This is not your research, and it’s not your history. Tennessee? This has gone too far. You need to start living your own life, instead of hers.”
“I hate you!” I scream.
But my grandmother is already on her way out the door. She pauses at the threshold. “You keep looking for your family, Jenna. But it’s always been right under your nose.”
When she leaves, I pick up the stapler on my desk and throw it at the door. Then I sit down, wiping my nose with the back of my hand. I start plotting how I will find that scarf, and sew it together. How I will steal back those journals.
But the truth is, I don’t have my mother. I never will. I don’t get to rewrite my story; I just have to stumble to the end of it.
The case of my mother’s disappearance glows on the laptop screen in front of me, full of details that don’t matter anymore.
I click on the settings of the Nam Us profile and, with a single keystroke, delete it.
One of the first things my grandmother taught me when I was little was how to get out of the house during a fire. Each of our bedrooms had a special emergency ladder stacked underneath the window, just in case. If I smelled smoke, if I felt the door and found heat, I was supposed to throw open the sash, hook the ladder into place, and rappel my way down the side of the house to safety.
Never mind that as a three-year-old I couldn’t lift that ladder, much less pry open the window. I knew what the protocol was, and that was supposed to be enough to ward off the possibility of any harm coming to me.
The superstition worked, I guess, because we’ve never had a fire in this house. But that dusty old ladder is still underneath my bedroom window, having served as a shelf for my books, a rack for my shoes, a table for my knapsack—but never as a means of escape. Until now.
This time, though, I leave a note for my grandmother. I will stop, I promise. But you have to give me one last chance to say good-bye. I promise I’ll be back in time for dinner tomorrow.
I open the window and hook the ladder into place. It doesn’t seem sturdy enough to hold my weight, and I think about how ridiculous it would be if you were trying to survive a house fire but wound up killing yourself instead in a fall.
The ladder gets me only to the sloped roof over the garage, which really isn’t a help at all. But by now I’m quite the escape artist, so I inch myself over the edge and hook my fingers into the rain gutter. From there, it’s only a drop of about five feet to the ground.
My bike is where I left it, balanced against the front porch railing. I hop on and start pedaling.
Riding is different, in the middle of the night. I move like the wind; I feel invisible. The streets are damp because it’s been raining, and the pavement shines everywhere but the trail left by my bike tires. The zooming taillights of cars remind me of sparklers I used to play with on the Fourth of July: how the glow hung in the darkness, how you could wave your arms and paint an alphabet of light. I navigate by feel, because I can’t read the signs, and before I know it, I’m in downtown Boone at the bar beneath Serenity’s apartment.
It’s hopping. Instead of a token few drunks, there are girls squeezed into Spandex dresses, hanging on the biceps of bikers; there are skinny dudes leaning against the brick wall to have a smoke between shots. The noise from the jukebox spills into the street, and I hear someone urging Chug! Chug! Chug! “Hey, baby,” a guy slurs. “Can I buy you a drink?”
“I’m thirteen,” I say.
“I’m Raoul.”
I duck my head and push past him, dragging my bike into the entryway to Serenity’s house. I lug it up the stairs and into her foyer again, careful not to upset the table this time. But before I can knock on the door softly—I mean, it’s 2:00 A.M.—it opens.
“You couldn’t sleep, either, sugar?” Serenity says.
“How did you know I was here?”
“You don’t exactly float up the stairs like a fairy when you’re dragging that damn thing around.” She falls back so that I can step into her apartment. It looks the way I remember it from the first time I came here. When I still believed that finding my mother was what I wanted most in the world.
“I’m surprised your grandmother let you come here this late,” Serenity says.
“I didn’t give her a choice.” I sink down on the couch, and she sits beside me. “This so sucks,” I say.
She doesn’t pretend to misunderstand me. “Well, don’t jump to conclusions just yet. Virgil says—”
“Fuck Virgil,” I interrupt. “Whatever Virgil says won’t bring her back to life. Do the math. If you tell your husband you’re pregnant with another guy’s kid, he isn’t going to throw you a baby shower.”
I’ve tried, believe me, but I can’t summon up hate for my father—only pity, really, a dull ache. If my dad was the one who killed my mom, I don’t think he’ll wind up going to trial. He’s institutionalized already; no prison is going to be more punishing than the confines of his own mind. It just means exactly what my grandmother said—she’s the only family I really have left.
I know it’s my fault. I know I’m the one who asked Serenity to help me find my mother; who got Virgil on board. This is what curiosity gets you. You might live on top of the biggest toxic waste dump on the planet, but if you never dig, then all you ever know is that your grass is green and your garden is lush.
“People don’t realize how hard it is,” she says. “When my clients used to come to me, asking to talk to Uncle Sol or their beloved grandma, all they were focusing on was the hello, the chance to say what they didn’t say when the person was alive. But when you open a door, you have to close it behind you. You might say hello, but you also wind up saying good-bye.”
I face her. “I wasn’t asleep. When you and Virgil were talking, in the car? I heard everything you said.”
Serenity freezes. “Well, then,” she says. “I guess you know I’m a fraud.”
“You aren’t, though. You found that necklace. And the wallet.”
She shakes her head. “I just happened to be in the right place at the right time.”
I think about this for a moment. “But isn’t that what being psychic is?”
I can tell that she never thought about it that way. One man’s coincidence is another’s connection. Does it matter if it’s gut feeling, like Virgil says, or psychic intuition, if you still get what you’re searching for?
She pulls a blanket up from the floor to cover her feet, and casts it wide so it will cover me, too. “Maybe,” she concedes. “Still, it’s nothing like what it used to be. Other people’s thoughts—they just were suddenly there in my head. Sometimes the connection was crystal clear, and sometimes it was like being on a cell phone in the mountains, where you only catch every third word. But it was more than stumbling over something shiny in the grass.”
We are cuddled under a blanket that smells like Tide and Indian food, and rain is striking the windows from outside. I realize this is very close to the image I’d conjured earlier, of what my life would have been like if my mother had survived.
I glance at Serenity. “Do you miss it? Hearing from people who are gone?”
“Yes,” she admits.
I lean my head on her shoulder. “Me, too,” I say.