On the sidewalk out in front of the used-furniture shop, a taped-up poster read HELP FIND MARY RAE SWINDAL and below that bold type was a photograph of a young woman wearing a formal dress, her dark hair styled into pinned-up curls that fell beyond her shoulders, like a prom queen or a princess. Her expression was droll, as if she knew the satin sheen of the dress, the bright smear of lipstick, provided only the impression of a beautiful woman. MISSING SINCE FEBRUARY 14, the poster announced. More of these posters, encased in plastic sleeves, flapped on telephone poles all along the street.
Driving in, we’d passed stretches of desolate space, open and wild-seeming, the trees dense on the removed hillsides, the occasional collapsed structures with weathered gray wood siding. I’d grown up surrounded by acres of professionally kept grounds, stone walls, and wild grapes. There’d been the rejuvenating smell of the sea. Here lay a landscape of despair. My mother sensed it, too. Her voice rose in pitch, into a false cheeriness that made her sound manic. My idea of a new start had quickly reverted to a keen sense of abandonment, similar to the feeling I’d had when I was first separated from Del. I’d had other friends, but none could take her place. We’d shared a bedroom our entire lives. She knew me better than anyone. And I’d found it difficult to sleep with her empty bed two feet away. Del’s absence had been like a death. I’d been left behind, grieving and lost.
We stopped at Wegmans grocery store for staples, and the same plea to find Mary Rae Swindal was tacked to the bulletin board in the entryway. If my mother noticed the posters and their unnerving portent, she didn’t mention it. The store was filled with students, young people who despite their familiar appearance—T-shirts, shorts, battered flip-flops—seemed entirely unlike me. In the car again, my mother commented on the number of young people we’d run into in the checkout line.
“Any one of them might be a new friend,” she said, halfheartedly. While I had never been able to tell her why I felt so removed from the rest of the world, she understood that I did, that I was. Just as she’d named Del “exceptional,” I was “introverted” or “reserved.”
On the way out of Wegmans I’d paused at the flyer of Mary Rae Swindal tacked to the bulletin board, and as I reached up and touched the image, the bright glare of the grocery store, its heat, its smell of baking bread, gave way to the cold narrow room with the iced-over window, the nude girl on the bed. The cold struck me. My breath fanned out. My mother had already passed through the automatic doors, and I heard her calling—Martha, she called, as from a far-off place, and then she was beside me and had pulled my hand away.
“Martha,” she said, sharply.
In my great-grandfather’s manuals, there were passages about the psychometrist, how she perceives her images by touch, holding an item—a coin, a letter—in her hand, and how after a minute or two the external surroundings disappear and a series of pictures begin to appear. Sounds, too, are heard. Perfumes smelled, and even the sense of heat and cold, dryness and moisture, are reproduced with surprising clearness.
Back at my new apartment, the landlord, Geoff, came out of his place across the hall to meet us and introduce himself, almost bashfully, to my mother. They were nearly the same age. He had a British accent, unruly gray hair, and a dog named Suzie, a black-and-white setter that I shied from, and which, sensing my fear, Geoff kept on its leash. My mother, as if to prove to me that dogs were friendly, reached out to pat her, and the dog burrowed her head into my mother’s crotch.
“I see you’ve purchased your bits and bobs,” Geoff said.
He called my apartment a bedsit, and he charmed my mother with an easy, guileless smile and a pipe-smoking persona. After he’d gone she said he seemed just as friendly as he had on the phone.
“We know nothing about that man,” I said. “Jack the Ripper had a British accent, too.”
She opened the refrigerator and bent down to look into its depths. “You won’t agree with me about anything, will you?”
“I’m here, aren’t I?” I said.
She bustled up and down the staircase, hauling my boxes, revealing a sturdy stalwartness I’d never fully noticed before. We’d brought the basics—pieces of my grandmother’s old Limoges china, some scarred copper-bottomed pots, and utensils.
“What more could you need?” my mother said, putting cups and saucers away in a cabinet above the sink.
We’d brought back a lamp and a small, ornate mirror that she hung beside the door.
“Now you can check what you look like before you go out,” she said, like an indictment.
“I can ask it who is the fairest in the land,” I said.
I wandered over toward the window and looked out at the tree-shaded street. I pressed my lips to the glass and closed my eyes.
My mother’s plan had been to stay the night in a motel nearby, but she checked her watch and I knew she wanted nothing more than to leave me entirely and be on her way.
“This hasn’t taken nearly as long as I thought,” she said. She hefted her leather bag onto her shoulder and crossed her arms, resolute.
“What about our tour of the campus?” I said, hating myself for sounding so desperate.