It’s unbelievable,” Tina was still saying once we’d landed back in Seattle and gotten into her Cadillac. “How could she just disappear into thin air like that?” I had filled her in on my conversation with Gail in the elevator.
“It’s what happened to the University of Washington student earlier this year,” I recalled. “The one who read the ski reports. She went into her room, and in the morning she wasn’t in her bed, and no one has seen her since.”
Tina and I drove along in mournful contemplation, thinking about the impossibility and the possibility of something like that happening to us.
“You know,” Tina said bashfully as she exited the highway and braked for the stop sign at the bottom of the off-ramp, “you’re always welcome to come stay with me for a while. I would be grateful to you, really. Being in that big house all alone? I’m feeling spooked.” She saw my mouth tighten and insisted, “You’d be doing me a huge favor, Ruth. I know it’s a lot to ask, but I just figured I’d put it out there.”
She was doing that rich-person thing again, begging me to take pity on her by accepting all her charities. The clothes, the trip, a six-bedroom mansion in which to crash. Yet there I was, wearing her clothes, having returned from her trip. It was a very effective ploy.
“Thank you,” I told her, and I did mean it, “but my mom really needs my help right now.”
Tina took her time turning onto my street, in case I changed my mind mid–tire rotation. Quietly, she asked, “With what?”
The question threw me. I had to rack my brain for a satisfying answer, and all I could come up with was “Stuff around the house.”
“I see,” Tina said in a tone that conveyed the opposite of seeing.
“Cleaning. Cooking. Paying bills,” I added, beefing up my role. “My dad used to do all that for her. She’d be a wreck on her own.”
“My mom was pretty depressed when I left home too,” Tina said. “I mean, when I really left. Like never-coming-back left. But you know what?” She pulled into my driveway, and we sat facing the small rambler I called home. The headlights of the Cadillac illuminated the stains on the aluminum siding that I’d been meaning to scrub off all winter.
“What?” I asked finally, because Tina had turned to look at me, waiting for me to engage.
“She’s fine, Ruth. She survived it.”
For a moment we tracked the silhouette of my mother in a window, puttering around the kitchen.
“She’ll be okay too,” Tina said.
* * *
“I’m back!” I shouted, and held my breath. My mother would have heard the car in the driveway and the front door close behind me, but I had learned long ago to announce myself when I entered the house. I was good at gauging my mother’s mood based on the tenor of her response, and I preferred to step into her arena prepared.
“In here,” came my mother’s barely audible reply. She was angry with me, but she didn’t have any reason to be, meaning she would have to find one. I walked into the kitchen knowing it would end brutally.
I found her on her hands and knees, the refrigerator door open, wiping the cold shelves down with wet tissue paper and leaving little wadded pellets behind. There was a half-eaten brown apple on the counter, and I knew I was done for. I couldn’t believe I’d forgotten to throw away that apple half before I left for the weekend. I had no appetite in the morning, but if I took my Acnotabs on an empty stomach, I got queasy. On Friday, before I left, I’d saved the other half for Saturday morning out of habit.
My mother carped, “There were fruit flies everywhere, Ruth.”
“It won’t happen again,” I assured her as I disposed of the rotted produce, then decided I better take out the trash for good measure.
“Don’t go anywhere yet,” my mother said as I tied off the top of the garbage bag. She climbed to her feet, wincing painfully when she bore the entirety of her weight on one knee. “Sit down. Something I want to talk to you about.”
I propped the garbage bag against the refrigerator door and lowered myself into a chair gingerly, as though it were lined with rows of invisible tacks. My mother sat down across from me and sort of reeled back when she realized I wasn’t wearing my own clothes.
“Where did that sweater come from?” she asked.
“Tina let me borrow it,” I said. I saw the disapproving tug at the corner of her mouth and quickly concocted a fib. “I spilled something on myself.”
“You didn’t pack anything else?”
“Nothing that would work for what we were doing.”
My mother laughed in a way that filled me with dread. “I didn’t realize it was a fancy weekend.” She picked up her mug of tea and took a sip, smacking her lips with displeasure when she tasted it. She’d steeped the tea bag in boiling water, I bet. Burned the leaves.
“Do you want to hear something wild?” I offered up. I told her about the missing woman before she could answer one way or another.
I could tell my mother was intrigued by the story. She listened with a blasé expression, but her lips were twitching with curiosity. There were questions she was dying to ask, but she had too much pride, so I provided as many details as I could to sate her.
“I’ll have to keep an eye out on the news for it,” she said when I finished, and I relaxed for the first time since I had entered the house. I was sure she just wanted to talk to me about my father’s garden ceremony, about convincing CJ to attend so that she didn’t have to explain our divorce to all his old colleagues at Issaquah Catholic. But instead, she folded her pudgy, childlike hands on the table and bowed her head, as though what she had to say wouldn’t be easy for either of us to hear. “I spoke to Dr. Burnet this morning.”
My mouth went dry. “About what?”
“Oh,” my mother said with a weary sigh. Where to begin? “I’ve been concerned. About how much time you’re spending with that woman. A grown woman inviting another woman away for the weekend? It’s queer, Ruth. I felt funny the whole time you were gone, and finally, I couldn’t take it anymore. I wanted to know if Dr. Burnet thought I had a right to be concerned.”
I sank down lower in my seat.
“We both agreed it might be in your best interest to start seeing him again.”
My voice came out quavering and small. “You want me to go back to Eastern State?”
“Dr. Burnet wants you to. Never mind what I want. He’s the doctor.”
I nodded, indulging her, though it was just a matter of semantics. “Can I have a few days to think about it?”
My mother placed her palms flat on the table and hoisted herself up with an involuntary grunt. “I think you’d better.” She shuffled into the den, and a few moments later, I heard the TV go on. I sat for a long time, slumped down in my chair, watching the fruit flies halo the garbage bag, thinking about the women’s ward at Eastern State, the sound of the orderly locking my door before I fell asleep at night.
Eventually, I hauled myself to my feet as well. I seriously considered leaving the bag of garbage to decay in the kitchen but decided I could spare my mother one last kindness.
* * *
My bike was rusty from being left out in the damp, and it took me nearly an hour to pedal to Tina’s house, the bottle of Acnotabs rattling like a tambourine in my coat pocket. Those and the journal Frances had given me were the only things I took. There was nothing else I could carry; nothing else I would miss.
Tina opened the door, a flag-sized bedspread draped over her shoulders and pooling around her bare feet like a medieval cape. Her blond hair was pulled back into a ponytail, and the dark slashes above her eyes were raised in alarm. She opened the door wider for me, and I stepped inside, where it was homey and warm. Sweat instantly broke out on my upper lip and I lifted a shoulder to wipe it away.