Dangerous Women

by Unknown

  Richard wasn’t there that Thursday. She sat with the man who lived in his body, showing him pictures of when they went camping, of their first days of school, and of their parents. He nodded and smiled and said they were lovely photos. That was the worst, that even in his confusion, his gentle courtesy remained. She stayed the one hour she always stayed with him, no matter how heart-wrenching it was. When no one was looking, she gave him sips of her coffee. Richard wasn’t allowed liquids anymore. Everything he ate was pureed and all his drinks, even his water, were thickened to a slime so that he wouldn’t aspirate them. That was one of the problems with Alzheimer’s. The swallowing muscles at the back of the throat weakened or people just forgot how to use them. So doctor’s orders for Richard were that he could no longer have coffee. She defied that. He’d lost his books and his pipe smoking and walking by himself. His coffee was his last small pleasure in life, and she clung to it on his behalf. Every week she brought him a cup and helped him surreptitiously to drink it while it was still hot. He loved it. The coffee always won her a smile from the creature who had been her big, strong brother.

  Cup empty, she went home.

  Linda’s disappearance was in the Tacoma News Tribune the next day. Sarah read the article. They had used an older photo, a calm and competent woman in a power suit. She wondered if it was because they had no snapshots of a wild-haired old woman. But then, no one had pictures of the grin she had worn when she’d turned her garden hose on the ten-year-old Thompson twins for squirting her cat with Super Soakers. It could not capture her smothered giggles when she had called Sarah at two in the morning and they’d both crept out to let the air out of all the tires of the cars parked outside Marty Sobin’s place when her teenager had the drunken party while Marty was out of town. “Now they can’t drive drunk,” Linda had whispered with satisfaction. Linda from the old days. Sarah remembered how she had stood in the street, flat-footed, her teeth gritted, and forced Marsha Bates to screech to a halt to avoid hitting her with her dad’s Jeep. “You’re driving too fast for this neighborhood. Next time I tell your parents and the cops.”

  That Linda had hosted neighborhood Fourth of July barbecues and her house had been the one where the teenagers voluntarily gathered. Her Christmas lights were always first up and last down, and her Halloween jack-o’-lanterns were the largest on the street. That Linda had known how to start up a generator for the outdoor lights at the soccer picnic. After the big ice storm twelve years ago, she had taken her chain saw and cut up the tree that had fallen across the street when the city said no one could come for three days. Russ had opened the window and shouted, “Heads up, people! Crazy Norwegian lady with a chain saw!” and they had all laughed proudly. So proud that they could take care of themselves. But that Linda, and the cranky old woman she had become, were both gone now.

  Her family put up posters. The police brought in a bloodhound. Robbie came by to visit and ask what she had seen that night. It was hard to meet his eyes and explain why she hadn’t called the police. “I called your house. Twice. I let the phone ring twenty times.”

  “We turn the ringer off at night,” he said dully. He’d been a heavy boy when he played goalie for the soccer team, and now he was just plain fat. A fat, tired man with a problem parent who had turned into a missing parent. It had to be something of a relief, Sarah thought, and then bit her lip to keep from saying it aloud.

  As the days went by, the nights got cooler and rainier. There were no reported sightings. She couldn’t have gotten far on foot. Could she? Had someone picked her up? What would someone want with a demented old woman with a baseball bat? Was she dead in the blackberries in some overgrown lot? Hitchhiking down Highway 99? Hungry and cold somewhere?

  Now when Sarah awoke at two or three or four fifteen, guilt would keep her awake until true morning. It was horrid to be awake before the paper was delivered and before it was time to brew coffee. She sat at her table and stared at the harvest moon. “Boys and girls, come out to play,” she whispered to herself. Her strange hours bothered Sarge. The pudgy beagle would sit beside her chair and watch her with his mournful hound eyes. He missed Russ. He’d been Russ’s dog, and since Russ had died, his dog had become morose. She felt like he was just waiting to die now.

  Well, wasn’t she, too?

  No. Of course not! She had her life, her schedule. She had her morning paper and her garden to tend, and her grocery shopping and her TV shows at night. She had Alex and Sandy, even if Sandy lived on the other side of the mountains. She had her house, her yard, and her dog, and other important things.

  At four fifteen on a dark September morning, it was hard to remember what those important things were. Steady pattering rain had given way to silence and rising mist. She was working the sudoku in yesterday’s paper, a stupid sort of puzzle, all logic and no cleverness, when Sarge turned to stare silently at the back door.

  She turned off the light in the kitchen and peered out the back door window. The street was so dark! Not a house light showing anywhere. She clicked the switch on her porch light; the bulb was still burned out. Someone was out there; she heard voices. She cupped her hands around her face and pressed closer to the glass. Still couldn’t see. She opened her back door softly and stepped quietly out.

  Five young men, three abreast and two following. She didn’t recognize any of them, but they didn’t look like they came from her neighborhood. The teenagers hunched along in heavy coats and unlaced work boots, moving like a pack of dogs, their eyes roving from side to side. They carried sacks. The leader pointed at an old pickup truck parked across the street. They moved toward it, looked into the bed of it, and tried the locked doors. One peered through the side window and said something. Another one picked up a fallen tree branch and bashed it against the windshield. The rotted limb gave way in chunks and fell in the littered street. The others laughed at him and moved on. But the young vandal was stubborn. As he clambered into the bed of the truck to try to kick out the back window, Hello Kitty looked back at her.

  Her heart leaped into her chest. A coincidence, she told herself. He was just a macho youngster wearing a Hello Kitty backpack to be ironic. It meant nothing, no more than that.

  Yes. It did.

  She was grateful that her porch light was out and her kitchen dark. She eased quietly inside, pushed the door almost closed, picked up her phone, and dialed 911, wincing at the beeps. Would he hear them? It rang three times before the operator picked up. “Police or fire?” the woman demanded.

  “Police. Some men are trying to break into a truck parked in front of my house. And one is wearing a pink backpack like my friend was wearing the night—”

  “Slow down, ma’am. Name and address.”

  She rattled them off.

  “Can you describe the men?”

  “It’s dark and my porch light is out. I’m alone here. I don’t want them to know I’m watching them and making this call.”

  “How many men? Can you give a general description?”

  “Are the police coming?” she demanded, suddenly angry at all the useless questions.

  “Yes. I’ve dispatched someone. Now. Please tell me as much as you can about the men.”

  Piss on it. She went to the door and looked out. He was gone. She looked up and down the street, but the night was hazy with fog. “They’re gone.”

  “Are you the owner of the vehicle they were attempting to break into?”

  “No. But the important thing is that one of them was wearing a pink backpack, just like the one my friend was wearing when she disappeared.”

  “I see.” Sarah was sure the dispatcher didn’t see at all. “Ma’am, as this is not an immediate emergency, we will still send an officer, but he may not arrive immediately …”

  “Fine.” She hung up. Stupid. She went to the door and looked out again. Upstairs in the dresser drawer under Russ’s work shirts there was a pistol, a little black .22 that she hadn’t shot in years. Instead she took her long, heavy flashlight fr
om the bottom drawer and stepped out into the backyard. Sarge followed her. She walked quietly to the fence, snapped on the flashlight, and shone it on the old truck. The beam barely reached it. Up the street and down, baffled by the fog, the light showed her nothing. She went back in the house with Sarge, locked the door, but left the kitchen light on and went back to bed. She didn’t sleep.

  The officer didn’t come by until ten thirty. She understood. Tacoma was a violent little town; they had to roll first on the calls where people were actually in danger. He came, he took her report, and he gave her an incident number. The pickup truck was gone. No, she didn’t know who it belonged to. Five young men, mid- to late teens, dressed in rough clothes, and the one with a pink backpack. She refused to guess their heights or their races. It had been dark. “But you saw the backpack clearly?”

  She had. And she was certain it was identical to the one that Linda had been carrying.

  The officer nodded and noted it down. He leaned on her kitchen table to look out the window. He frowned. “Ma’am, you said he hit the window with a fallen branch and it broke into pieces?”

  “That’s right. But I don’t think the window broke.”

  “Ma’am, there are no tree branches out there. Or pieces in the street.” He looked at her pityingly. “Is it possible you dreamed this? Because you were worried about your friend?”

  She wanted to spit at him. “There’s the flashlight I used. Still on the counter where I left it.”

  His eyebrows collided. “But you said it was dark and you couldn’t see anything.”

  “I went out with the flashlight after I hung up with 911. To see if I could see where they had gone.”

  “I see. Well, thank you for calling us on this.”

  After he left, she went outside herself. She crossed the street to where the pickup had been parked. No pieces of branch on the ground. Not even a handful of leaves in the gutter. Her new neighbor had a lawn fetish. It was as groomed as Astroturf on a playfield, the gutters as clean as if vacuumed. She scowled to herself. Last night there had been dry leaves whispering as the wind blew, and there had definitely been a large, heavy rotten branch in the street. But the young apple trees in his planting strip were scarcely bigger around than a rake handle. Too small to have grown such a branch, let alone dropped one.

  Sarah went back in her house. She wept for a time, then made a cup of tea and felt relieved that she hadn’t called Alex about it. She catalogued the work she could do: laundry, deadheading the roses, taking in the last of the green tomatoes and making chutney of them. She went upstairs and took a nap.

  After three weeks the neighborhood quit gossiping about Linda. Her face still smiled from a “missing” poster at Safeway next to the pharmacy counter. Sarah ran into Maureen there, picking up pills for Hugh, and they got Starbucks and wondered what had become of Linda. They talked about the old days, soccer games and tux rentals for proms and the time Linda had hot-wired Hugh’s truck when no one could find the keys and Alex had needed stitches right away. They laughed a lot and wept a little, and worked their way back to the present. Maureen shared her news. Hugh was “holding his own” and Maureen said it as if being able to sit up in bed was all he really wanted to do. Maureen invited her to come pick the apples off their backyard tree. “I don’t have time to do anything with them, and there are more than we can eat. I hate to see them just fall and rot.”

  It had felt good to have coffee and a conversation, and it made Sarah realize how long it had been since she had socialized. She thought about it the next morning as she sorted the mail on her table. A power bill, a brochure on long-term-care insurance, an AARP paper, and two brochures from retirement homes. She set the bill to one side and stacked the rest to recycle with the morning paper. She found a basket and was just leaving to raid Maureen’s apple tree when Alex came in. He sat down at her table and she microwaved the leftover morning coffee for them.

  “I had to come into Tacoma for a seminar, so I thought I’d drop by. And I wanted to remind you that the second half of property taxes is due the end of this month. You pay it yet?”

  “No. But it’s on my desk.” That, at least, was true. It was on her desk. Somewhere.

  She saw him eying the retirement home brochures. “Junk mail,” she told him. “Ever since your dad signed us up for AARP, we get those things.”

  “Do you?” He looked abashed. “I thought it was because I asked them to send them. I thought maybe you’d look at them and then we could talk.”

  “About what? Recycling?” Her joke came out harder-edged than she had intended. Alex got his stubborn look. He would never eat broccoli—never. And he was going to have this conversation with her no matter what. She put a spoonful of sugar in her coffee and stirred it, resigned to an unpleasant half hour.

  “Mom, we have to face facts.” He folded his hands on the edge of the table. “Taxes are coming due; the second half of them is seven hundred bucks. House insurance comes due in November. And oil prices are going up, with winter heating bills ahead of us, and this place isn’t exactly energy efficient.” He spoke as if she were a bit stupid as well as old.

  “I’ll put on a sweater and move the little heater from room to room. Like I did last year. Zonal heating. Most efficient way to heat a home.” She sipped her coffee.

  He opened his hands on the table. “That’s fine. Until we start to get mold in the house from damp in the unheated basement. Mom, this is a three-bedroom, two-bath house, and you live in maybe four rooms of it. The only bathtub is upstairs and the laundry is in the basement. That’s a lot of stairs for you each day. The electrical box should have been replaced years ago. The refrigerator needs a new seal. The living room carpeting is fraying where it meets the tile.”

  All things she knew. She tried to make light of it. “And the bulb is burned out in the back porch light. Don’t forget that!”

  He narrowed his eyes at her. “When the beech tree dumps its leaves, we’ll need to rake them off the lawn and get them out of the rain gutters. And next year the house is going to need paint.”

  She folded her lips. True, all true. “I’ll cross those bridges as I come to them,” she said, instead of telling him to mind his own damn business.

  He leaned his elbows on the table and put his forehead in his hands. He didn’t look up at her as he said, “Mom, that just means you’ll call me when you can’t get the leaves into the lawn recycling bin. Or when the gutters are overflowing down the side of the house. You can’t maintain this place by yourself. I want to help you. But it always seems that you call me when I’m prepping a presentation or raking my own leaves.”

  She stared at Alex, stricken. “I … Don’t come, if you’re that busy! No one dies from clogged gutters or leaves on the lawn.” She felt ashamed, then angry. How dare he make himself a martyr to her needs? How dare he behave as if she were a burden? She’d asked if he had time to help her, not demanded that he come.

  “You’re my mom,” he said, as if that created some irrevocable duty that no one could erase. “What will people think if I let the house start falling apart around you? Besides, your house is your major asset. It has to be maintained. Or, if we can’t maintain it, we need to liquidate it and get you into something you can manage. A senior apartment. Or assisted living.”

  “Alex, I’ll have you know this is my home, not my ‘major—’”

  Alex held up a commanding hand. “Mom. Let me finish. I don’t have a lot of time today. So let me just say this. I’m not talking about a nursing home. I know how you hate visiting Uncle Richard. I’m talking about a place of your own with a lot of amenities, without the work of owning a home. This one, here?” He put his finger on a brochure, coaxed it out of the junk mail pile. “It’s in Olympia. On the water. They have their own little dock, and boats that residents can use. You can make friends and go fishing.”

  She put a stiff smile on her face and tried to make a joke of it. “I can’t rake leaves but you think I can row a boat?”
>
  “You don’t have to go fishing.” She had annoyed him, popping his dream of his mom in a happy little waterfront terrarium. “I’m just saying that you could, that this place has all sorts of amenities. A pool. An exercise studio. Daily shuttles to the grocery store. You could enjoy life again.”

  He was so earnest. “The bathroom has this safety feature. If you fall, you pull a cord and it connects you, 24-7, to help. There’s a dining hall so if you don’t feel like cooking that day, you don’t have to. There’s an activity center with a movie room. They schedule game nights and barbecues and—”

  “Sounds like summer camp for old farts,” she interrupted him.

  He was wordless for a moment. “I just want you to know the possibilities,” he said stiffly. “You don’t like this, fine. There are other places that are just apartments suited to older people. All the rooms on one level, grab bars in the bathrooms, halls wide enough for walkers. I just thought you might like something nicer.”

  “I have something nicer. My own home. And I couldn’t afford those places.”

  “If you sold this house—”

  “In this market? Ha!”

  “Or rented it out, then.”

  She glared at him.