Miss Me When I'm Gone

chapter 26



“The Rubber Room”

Dunkin’ Donuts

Emerson, New Hampshire

A first for me today:

Talking about my mother’s death to someone who at ten-minute intervals appears to think I am my mother.

His name is Dr. Skinner. He was with my mother when she died. He tried to save her, and heard her last words. I’ve come here to talk about those words, and anything else that Dr. Skinner can tell me. The trouble is that Dr. Skinner has midstage Alzheimer’s disease. He’s still basically functional, but conversations about the past can be hit or miss, his wife tells me. I am welcome to try. She certainly understands why I would want to, she adds kindly.

She asks me what kind of tea I’d like, then leaves me alone with her husband in the sweet living room, all cherry and colonial but for Dr. Skinner’s leather recliner.

In the beginning of the conversation, the doctor seems quite lucid.

“I heard you’re a writer now,” he says. “You write about music.”

I tell him about my book and he seems excited. He tells me about his fiddle and calls for his wife to bring it to him. She calls back that it’s upstairs, and that she’s sure this young lady has more important things to talk about than his fiddle.

He accepts this response, shrugging.

“So what are the more important things?” he says, half smiling, not sure if he’s said something funny.

“I wanted to talk to you about Shelly. Shelly Brewer?”

“Oh. Shelly. Yes. Diane’s friend.”

He studies me and his eyes widen.

“I’m her daughter,” I say, even though I know his wife already told him this.

“Oh,” he says. “Oh, yes.”

“I wanted to know what you could remember about the morning she died.”

“Oh, dear.”

“Can you remember much about that?”

“Oh, dear. Yes, yes. Very much. But why would you want to hear about that? It’s very sad.”

“I think it’s important,” I say, “that I know all the facts. To make peace with it, you know?”

He pauses, then nods. “I see. I understand. Yes.”

“So are you okay talking about this?”

“I think so, Shelly.”

I am stunned, although I shouldn’t be. I know how much I look like her.

“I’m Gretchen. Shelly was my . . . my mother.”

“Oh.” His eyes are blank. I start to wonder about the wisdom of this interview.

“You remember Shelly, don’t you?”

“Yes. It’s so sad. And I saw her just the other day. We were chatting.”

“Just the other day?” I say.

“I mean, a few days before she died.”

“Oh. I see.”

His wife comes in with a tea service then—cream-colored cups and saucers with roses and golden rims.

“It’s hard to remember Shelly like that,” he adds.

“Of course you remember Shelly,” Mrs. Skinner says to him, handing me a teacup. “She was over here all the time when she was a little girl, always playing tag with Diane. And in the pool. And of course you remember the morning you tried to help them save her. I know you remember that. A very sad day, George, but I know you remember it.”

“Yes, yes, I do,” he says, seeming to brighten. “That fellow Frank came pounding on our door early in the morning. My wife said, ‘What in the world?’ He was screaming and yelling that he needed a doctor, so I went over in my pajamas. I put my shoes on and went in my pajamas.”

Mrs. Skinner nods approvingly and hands him his teacup. Then she sets out a plate of sugar wafers—the kind that come in vanilla, pink, and chocolate, that I didn’t realize still existed.

“I went down there and I followed him into the house and she was there in the living room. It was terrible. Bleeding with a tablecloth all tied around her head. I said to him, ‘What happened here? What HAPPENED?’ ”

“You did?” I ask.

“Yes, and he didn’t have an answer. He said he didn’t know. He started yelling at me to do something, do something. I was the f*cking doctor, do something.”

Mrs. Skinner sighs.

“Well, that is what he said.”

“I know,” Mrs. Skinner says.

“So he was maybe more angry than upset, you think?” I ask.

“I don’t know. Maybe.”

“So what did you do?”

“I unwrapped her head and her neck, to look for the source of the bleeding. I asked him to bring me some clean cloths.”

“Did he?”

“Yes. She had several injuries. She was bleeding from a laceration in the back of her neck, and there was a deep wound in the back of her head. Also, her collarbone was broken, her shoulder bleeding. After I made sure nothing was obstructing her breathing, I focused on the head wound, because that was where she seemed to be bleeding out.”

I notice him becoming slightly clearer in his tone as his words become a bit more medical.

“And I’ve heard she said something.”

“Yes.”

Dr. Skinner stares longingly at the sugar wafers.

“It’s okay, George,” says Mrs. Skinner. “Gretchen here’s a big girl. She just wants to hear what happened.”

“Gretchen?” Dr. Skinner gazes at me. “Oh, dear. Shelly?”

“What did Shelly say when you were with her, helping her?”

Dr. Skinner sighs, leans forward, and picks up a strawberry wafer. Then he eats it carefully, not looking at either of us.

“I’m sorry,” I say to his wife. “Maybe this is too upsetting.”

Mrs. Skinner shakes her head. “He used to talk about it all the time. I’m sure he remembers.”

“Are you two talking about me?” Dr. Skinner asks.

“We’re talking about the day Shelly Brewer died. Such a sad day, remember?”

Repeatedly hearing about the sadness of that day—without any actual information—is starting to make me feel dizzy. I decide I need a sugar wafer, too, and grab a vanilla one.

“It was sad,” Dr. Skinner says, nodding. “I wonder . . . if I’d gotten there earlier.”

“She was so badly beaten, George.”

“Yes, but maybe she could have said something more, too. Even if I couldn’t have saved her.”

Dr. Skinner is beginning to look very distressed.

“We don’t need to keep talking about this,” I say.

“Yes,” Dr. Skinner says. “Maybe we ought to take a little break.”

He pauses, then sips his tea. “Did you say you’re a bluegrass fan?”

“Well, country, yes. Country is what I wrote about. But I love bluegrass, too.”

We talk music for a little bit longer. His wife won’t let him go upstairs for his fiddle, but lets him play me a couple of Ralph Stanley songs off a CD. I tell him I was already a fan of Ralph Stanley, but he doesn’t seem to believe me.

Later, in the kitchen, his wife apologizes for him, saying he’s having a particularly bad day. I’m welcome to come back another time. She’s sure he would do better on another day. I wonder if this is a line she’s been telling herself for a while.

But she insists, further, that he’s always talked about that terrible morning a great deal—what he wishes had gone differently, what he thought of Frank’s behavior. And if I try again and it doesn’t go well, I can always ask her what I need to know. Do I have any questions for her now?

I say no and thank her for the tea and cookies. She seems disappointed to have me leave and asks if I think I’ll come back. I say probably I will.



I’ve chosen Porter Wagoner’s “Rubber Room” to write this to as I sip coffee at Emerson’s Dunkin’ Donuts. Not because I mean to poke sarcastic fun at Dr. Skinner’s condition, which I absolutely don’t—but because talking to him has made me feel like I’m in one.

Porter Wagoner’s song is about his experience drying out in Nashville’s Parkview Hospital (the same facility of “Committed to Parkview,” which Johnny Cash, once a patient there himself, wrote for his friend Porter). It’s one of the spookier songs of classic country, with an unaccustomed psychedelic feel to it. The final words of some of the verses echo dramatically, making the song very creepy, melodramatic . . . rubbery. That is, despite the obvious pain in it, there’s something ridiculous about it.

At the Skinners’, I felt myself losing all sense of what the conversation really was about—what was past for the doctor, and what was present? The “echo” for me in Dr. Skinner’s living room was hearing him call me Shelly more than once. Did he think I’d returned from the dead to talk about my death? Was that the unfortunate impression I’d given this poor man? And more personally, more selfishly, do I echo Shelly somehow? We look alike, yes, but I’ve always heard what a loose cannon she was, how messed up, how sadly destructive and out of control. (Though I will always maintain that that is not the person I remember from when I was seven.)

I was always a good kid and a good student and, aside from a little too much alcohol in certain social settings, stayed away from the drugs. I went to a snooty school and got married at the age I was supposed to (twenty-seven) and never did an unpredictable thing in my life till I got divorced and wrote a book—still relatively careful, buttoned-up rebellions when you look at Shelly.

But now . . . here I am making a half-demented elderly doctor talk about such a sad and sordid thing. Stealing mail. Confronting my mother’s accused killer. All the strange things I’ve done in the last couple of weeks—how odd that I can know how deranged they might be but have no interest in stopping. I’m starting to think that I’m crazier than Shelly ever was.

I think there’s supposed to be a kind of horror in the echo, but I don’t mind it. Maybe I’ve been listening for it my whole life.



Bar at T.G.I. Friday’s

Plantsville, New Hampshire

Kevin is tall and thin with deep eye circles under soulful gray eyes. His clothing seems to contradict his boyish features and gentle voice. He’s got on jeans and a crisp, textured black shirt that strikes me as something a high-class pimp might wear. Over that is a black leather jacket with white stripes down the sleeves, which strikes me more generally as something an a*shole might wear.

While we talk about 1985, he drinks a Sam Adams. I sip on a weak margarita and munch on the stale bar popcorn.

He doesn’t remember me at all. He remembers being told that Shelly—the woman whose killer he was helping to put in jail—had a daughter.

Being a “witness” definitely affected his adolescent years, he says. Mostly in a good way. He felt a tremendous sense of responsibility, of doing something important that no one else his age usually got to do. Kids in school looked at him with admiration. He tried not to talk about it in a gossipy way—after all, a lady was dead. His mother always reminded him of that. It wasn’t something to brag about. He understood that and tried his best to act accordingly.

He tells me this with his eyes focused on his beer. No matter what he says, I’ll bet he got all puffed up and self-important about it. He doesn’t want to admit that to me, because the dead lady who made him a little Emerson celebrity is my mother. I want to tell him I don’t hold it against him. I remember what it’s like to be twelve.

We don’t talk much about the actual car in the driveway. Kevin was not, of course, so familiar with his customers that he’d know which was Shelly’s car and which was Frank’s. What is important is that he remembered, when asked, that there were two—Shelly’s little red hatchback and Frank’s large gray Chevy.

He knew about Shelly within hours of her ambulance ride away from Durham Road. Judy was a friend of the family—used to babysit him when he was very small—so small he doesn’t remember it. But she came over that very day in hysterics, sharing the news. It didn’t take long for the adults—and soon after that, the police—to start asking him what he might have seen by that little brown house that morning.

He only had a couple of encounters with Frank and Shelly, while collecting his paper-route money. Sometimes they remembered to leave an envelope for him. More often he’d have to knock.

He usually hoped Shelly would answer. Shelly always seemed surprised to see him, as if she forgot every two weeks that she received the paper at all. Frank tipped better, but he was “a little weird about it,” says Kevin.

He says Frank would always take out his wallet and pay him the exact amount first, then hesitate and say, “You want a little tip?”

And then after a chuckle and another pause: “Well, here’s a little tip.”

He’d hand Kevin a dollar. And sometimes, if he had an excess of quarters, he’d take out two or three and say, “And here’s another little tip. How about that?”

To which Kevin never knew what to say besides thank you, because it always felt like Frank wanted something more, some sarcastic exchange Kevin wasn’t sure he could pull off. Shelly was sweeter and less confusing, though she usually gave him exactly seventy-five cents extra.

I tell Kevin that other neighbors have mentioned Frank’s strangely ironic manner as well. I tell him my story about the Smurfs—really the only Frank story I have. Kevin seems strangely riveted by it.

“You actually remember him, then?” he says. “I didn’t realize. I can’t imagine.”

It occurs to me that I’ve not told this story to anyone. Not because it is particularly sensitive—but maybe because of how neutral it is. It’s just the Smurfs. Me and Frank and the Smurfs and breakfast.

I say to him that I wish it were more of a story. What I mean is that I wish it were a memory that told me better how I should feel about the man. I don’t tell Kevin that, of course. Too much.

But my abbreviated admission is enough. Kevin seems to relax a bit. I’m not a seven-year-old girl with a lost mother anymore. I’m a thirty-two-year-old with a dumb story. Dumber even than his. (Because frankly, “You want a little tip? Well, here’s a little tip!” sounds to me like something any old beer-guzzling doofus would say to his paperboy.)

Kevin was just a kid in 1985, just like I was. I don’t expect much from him.