The older woman sniffed. “Such a lot of foolishness.” She wiped her forehead with the back of her wrist, turned on the tap and rinsed the sink, then wrung out the dishcloth, and her motions were as crisp and businesslike as the edges of her personality, the parts of herself she would let people see. But who knew what underlay that? Who could know the mysteries of another’s heart?
Annie cleaned the counters, dried a dozen coffee mugs, and set them on a tray. She made a fresh pot of coffee in case someone wanted it, although it being the dinner hour, the center was mostly deserted.
“Would you like to come home with me?” Madeleine spoke in a rush.
Annie looked at her, startled.
She was flushed pink, diffident, stammering. “You—you’ll be alone otherwise.”
“That’s very kind of you,” Annie began.
“Never mind. I don’t know why I asked.”
Annie started to protest or apologize again, she didn’t know which, but Madeleine held up her hand. “Let’s say no more about it.”
“All right,” Annie said, but she was disconcerted. She slipped into her jacket, shouldered her purse, and together they walked out the back door of the community center and into the alley, where they’d left their cars. The sun was gone, the air chilled. The prospect of the coming night pressed down hard on Annie’s shoulders. She thought of Bo’s bare ankles. She thought of the man in the lab coat at the morgue, his blistered-looking, bone-white wrists.
“You’re welcome to come anytime.” Madeleine paused near the battered, rear bumper of Annie’s BMW. “To my house, I mean. Bo comes sometimes. Did you know?”
Annie hadn’t known. “He never told me.”
“He asked me not to tell you.” Madeleine pulled her keys from her purse. “He likes to sit in the garden. I’ve been teaching him the difference between the perennials and the weeds.”
“Huh.” Annie was flustered. The number of Bo’s secrets kept mounting.
“He’ll make a good gardener one day. I told him I’m happy to pay him for his trouble. You, too. We could talk about it once this is over, the three of us.” Madeleine cast out the suggestion, not looking at Annie, and she seemed to brace herself, as if for rejection.
Not that Annie knew how to reply or even what Madeleine was offering. Extra income? A larger role in their lives, that included financial support? A place for Bo to find shelter? Had Madeleine and Bo discussed this? Anything was possible, Annie guessed. She thought of asking for further clarity and couldn’t; she couldn’t think of one thing to say, and after another moment or two, Madeleine seemed to draw herself up. She retreated a step and said, “All right then” and “Good night,” and turning, went toward her car.
Annie watched her go, still unable to find her tongue, the breath for speech. Wait. The syllable sat mired in confusion at the back of her throat. She looked up at nothing, upset with herself. She’d hurt Madeleine’s feelings, letting her go without a word. Was it so farfetched that Bo would find solace in Madeleine’s garden, that he would find a friend in her, that she would care for him and consequently care for Annie, too? Was it such a mystery that Bo kept aspects of his life private? Annie didn’t tell him everything, either.
Where are you? She might have been asking the sky, its vast empty arc.
Annie started her car. The question felt eternal; it felt branded into the wall of her brain.
On her way home, she ran what had become a familiar circuit since Friday, going by the library first. But Bo wasn’t there, and no one had seen him. She shouted his name through the train switchyard and, in response, heard only the lingering resonance of her own voice, the whish of an errant breeze. She called for him softly along the pathways of Greenlove Park, where he liked to lie in the grass under a particular wide-canopied bur oak and write in his notepad. There was no answer there, either, other than a cricket’s uncertain song.
She drove home, but once there, she couldn’t stand the silence, the emptiness. She needed her mother, and all that was left of her was at JT’s. So Annie went there, and for all the sense it made, as she entered the house, she was filled with a hope that was as unreasoning as it was foolish. Because a quick search of the rooms turned up nothing. Bo was no more present in this house than he was in her own, no more present in either place than her mother.
There was nothing of them left other than Annie’s memory of them, and that was fading, slipping from her mind like water through her fingers. The remembrance of their voices, the sound of their laughter, their fragrances—mixed notes of morning toast and spring flowers, laundry soap and sunshine; some wonderful smell that made Annie feel safe, made her feel she was home—all of it was going now, hour by helpless hour, becoming as ephemeral and distant as an echo.
Wandering back into the kitchen, her eye caught on the answering-machine light that was blinking on the telephone at her elbow, the landline JT insisted on keeping because phones were his business, his profession. She hadn’t noticed it before, and watching it now, she was somehow mesmerized. No one called the landline anymore; no one who would leave a message anyway. It wasn’t her phone; who called, the messages they left weren’t her responsibility or even her business, but she picked up the receiver anyway and dialed into the system. The canned voice announced there was one new message, and retrieving it, she heard a human voice, a woman’s voice, sounding hesitant and somehow agitated, introduce herself as Constance McMurray from Rose Hill in Morro Bay, California. She was calling for JT or Sandy Laughlin, she said.
Sandy? Annie’s heart paused. Sandy was her mother’s name.
Constance McMurray described her need to speak to either Mr. or Mrs. Laughlin as most urgent. “Please return my call as soon as possible,” she said.
In anticipation, Annie yanked open a kitchen drawer, found a pen and a scrap of paper and jotted down the number where Constance McMurray said she could be reached. The message ended; the machine voice came back, advising Annie what she could do now, but she only stared at the telephone, unable to choose among the options that were offered: save, delete, listen again. She cradled the receiver when the machine started to repeat her choices, and picking up the note she’d made, she studied the name and telephone number.
The memories were too hard for us. That was how JT had explained moving himself and Bo across the country after Bo’s mother died. Annie looked at her note again. Rose Hill sounded like the name of a cemetery.
She went into the den and turned on the computer, an old IBM PC, a relic leftover from her and Bo’s school days. The desk where it sat was big enough that they’d often done their homework at it together, one on either side. When the home page appeared on the screen, she typed in Rose Hill, a plus sign, and Morro Bay in the search bar and clicked “Return.” Her fingertips registered the faint stickiness of the keys, raising a memory from the floor of her mind of the day that Bo, in a childish fit, overturned her Dr. Pepper on the keyboard. She’d been working on an essay for her sophomore English Lit class, something loosely based on Jonathan Swift’s, “A Modest Proposal,” and Bo had been doing stupid tricks with a yo-yo he’d gotten for his birthday, needling her. Lookit, lookit! His voice was like a dart in her ear. Shut up! She ordered. Get out of here, you little nerd, she said.
In one half second, he upended her soda can. Who’s the nerd now?
His long-ago taunt, rough with an edge of something very like tears, rattled off the walls of Annie’s brain.
Why hadn’t she given him the attention he’d craved? Two minutes, maybe less. Would it have been so hard? She remembered spending nearly an hour drying out the keyboard and feeling lucky and relieved to find it still worked.
She remembered she never would have passed algebra that year or geometry the next without Bo’s help.
Rose Hill Community Center was the first entry on the search page, and from the sketchy verbiage that was included there, Annie gathered it
wasn’t a cemetery but a mental-health facility. A knot tightened in her stomach. She clicked through to the home page, dotted with photographs, many of them showing people—amazingly normal-looking people—engaged in a variety of ordinary activities. Some were of groups seated in a circle, chatting or playing instruments. There was a shot of a youngish man lying beneath a tree on a grassy knoll, reading a book. Rose Hill’s landscape was vintage university fare. Ivy-covered walls included a couple of turrets. It was bizarre, really, the resemblance that the hospital, or whatever it was, bore to a college campus or a quaint out-of-the-way hotel. The information Annie read made it sound like a spa, a haven, a retreat for the agitated and emotionally distressed. It talked about restoring wellness of mind, body, and spirit. She kept looking for the place to sign up.
Bo, who had been diagnosed at one time or another with nearly every mental aberration this center treated—schizophrenia, schizo-affective disorder, bipolar disorder, and the catchall, other, often hard-to-place psychosocial profiles—had never looked as carefree as the people shown in the photographs. He was clean, obsessively clean, and his clothes were clean, but he was stiff in them. He moved in them like the Tin Man from The Wizard of Oz. He bent to the right as if the string on that side was pulled too tight; he talked to himself. His cheeks were hollows, and his eyes burned as if with fever for which no one, not even the most gifted therapist, had found a source or a cure. Scrolling back through the pages, studying the photos, Annie felt dismay, the sourer taint of derision.
She couldn’t picture Bo in any of them.
Annie got her cell phone and bringing it back to the den, she sat down in front of the computer again and dialed the contact number Constance McMurray had left in her message, noting that, except for the last four digits, it was the same as the main number for Rose Hill.
“Constance McMurray,” the woman answered, sounding breezy, as breezy and carefree as the website models.
Annie mentioned the message.
“Oh, yes.” The woman was instantly grave. “I’m afraid I don’t have good news, Mrs. Laughlin.”
“Is Bo there? Is he all right?” Annie didn’t bother correcting Constance McMurray’s misapprehension about her identity, and she would wonder later how it might have altered the conversation if she had. She would think Mrs. McMurray probably would not have been so forthcoming.
“Bo? No, he isn’t here. I’m calling about Lydia, Bo’s mother, Mrs. Laughlin. Since I spoke to your husband last week, her condition has been downgraded to critical.”
“His mother?” Annie frowned. She was on the verge of saying, His mother’s dead; both our mothers are dead, but Constance didn’t leave enough of a pause, and Annie didn’t have breath for speech anyway.
“She’s in acute renal failure, not responding to treatment. I’m afraid she’s—well, her prognosis isn’t good. As I explained to Mr. Laughlin before, she came to us too late this time. She’s receiving the best of care, of course. She’s as comfortable as we can make her, but the doctors aren’t encouraging. Will you tell Mr. Laughlin that if he’s changed his mind about Bo seeing his mother a final time, he should come quickly?”
“Are you sure you have the right—?” Annie stood up. “I mean—that is, I thought—” Dead. Bo’s mother was dead. JT had said she was. Annie’s mother had said she was. Bo listened to her through his earmuffs—
“Mrs. Laughlin?” Constance McMurray prompted.
“No, I’m her daughter. My mom—Sandy died two years ago.”
“Oh. Oh dear, I didn’t know. Mr. Laughlin never said—I’m afraid they—I mean, Mr. or Mrs. Laughlin—are the only ones authorized to receive information about Lydia.”
“Bo is missing, Mrs. McMurray. Did you know?” Annie wasn’t sure why she chose that question to ask rather than any one of the overwhelming number of other questions she might have asked.
“What do you mean, he’s missing?”
“He disappeared last Friday. The police are looking for him. Does he know his mother is still alive?” Was I the only one who was lied to?
“Well, I don’t know if I should—”
“Look, if he knew, there’s a chance he’s there or trying to get there.”
“Well, honestly, I don’t believe he did know. I think when they moved from here, Mr. Laughlin decided the boy would be better off if he was told his mother had died. Because of her condition, you know. She was hardly capable of—”
“What was—is—her condition, Mrs. McMurray? I mean, besides kidney failure?”
“I shouldn’t—” She faltered. “But given the circumstances—” She hesitated again, and then, seeming to cast aside her reservations, she said, “Lydia was first brought to us by her parents years ago when she was in her twenties and diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. She’s been in and out of treatment here at Rose Hill and at various other treatment facilities in the area and other locations ever since.”
“Is that where it comes from? Why Bo is—? You know he was diagnosed, not with paranoid schizophrenia, but—” Annie stopped, uncertain how to continue.
“My understanding is Bo’s issues have never been as severe,” Constance McMurray said.
“Why would JT not want him to know his mother was alive? It seems cruel.” Did it? Had she said it aloud? Cruel was such a harsh word, a judgmental word. She’d never known JT to be cruel, which only made the situation all the more confusing.
“I really can’t say any more without the proper—”
“Mrs. McMurray, any information you can give me may help the police find Bo.” Annie paced into the kitchen, looking out the door for JT’s truck. The knot in her stomach was a small, heated coal, fueling the chaotic stew of her emotion, a blistering lash of words . . . all the things she would say to JT when she saw him.
Constance McMurray was explaining Lydia’s situation, but Annie only caught parts of what she said, that Lydia lived on the street when she wasn’t in treatment or in jail, that she could be violent, that, like Bo, she was prone to self-medicate with alcohol and whatever drugs she could find. That all of her history was bearing down on her now with enough force to destroy her.
Annie asked about Lydia’s parents.
“Her mother’s in end-stage Alzheimer’s. Her father died a few years ago. Massive coronary. I knew them through the years. They did what they could for their daughter, as much as parents can do. It’s a very trying and difficult situation when someone you love is afflicted in this way. They tend to not want to take their medication or to attend counseling sessions or do any of the things necessary to help themselves.”
“Yes,” Annie murmured, because she had experience, and because there was nothing else to offer other than the acknowledgment of a reality that was as grievous as it was inexorable. She thought of the people pictured on Rose Hill’s website. She doubted Bo’s mother resembled a single one of them.
“I’m sorry,” Mrs. McMurray said, “but I really have to go. If you’ll let Mr. Laughlin know I called—”
“If Bo comes there—”
“Of course, I’ll contact you immediately.”
“You mentioned you spoke to JT last week?” Annie asked.
“Yes.”
“What day? Do you recall?”
“Tuesday,” Constance McMurray answered. “I remember it because Lydia was much improved. Her vital signs stabilized; even her mind was clear. She was still weak, but we were optimistic, mistakenly, as it turns out. Anyway, she asked us to contact Mr. Laughlin, and I placed the call for her. She wanted him to bring Bo to see her. I think she knew—”
“You’re sure it was Tuesday?” I could tell you something. Bo’s words from last Wednesday circled Annie’s brain. But just listen, he’d said, I heard talking . . . Why hadn’t she paid attention? He’d been agitated and upset, not from a sugar overload or because he just got that way sometimes, no. He’d learned his mo
ther was alive. Somehow, he’d overheard JT on the phone, talking to her, and he’d put it together. What a shock it must have been. He would have been desperate to go to her. Annie knew, because that was how she’d feel if someone told her that her mother was alive. She would want to go to her. Nothing would stop her.
She looked at him again in her mind’s eye, seated across the table from her, pouring packet after packet of sugar into his tea, scattering grains across the table and onto the floor in his haste and his anxiety. He’d come to the café to tell her his mother was alive. If she’d given him the slightest encouragement, he would have said he wanted to see her; he’d have asked Annie for help getting there. He might even have wanted her to go with him. She didn’t doubt that had been his intention. Just as she didn’t doubt that if, instead of lecturing him about his diet, she’d asked him what was bothering him, it would have changed everything, and the enormity of her mistake took her breath.
She didn’t explain the reason for her urgency when she called JT and summoned him home, and when he appeared, she didn’t apologize, either, for scaring him half to death. She was too hurt, panicked, and angry to take much notice or care of his feelings. While he stood in the doorway to the den, she paced in front of him, letting him have it. He’d lied, she told him. “How could you?” she asked.
He took his head in his hands, clearly stricken.
Annie’s heart didn’t soften at the way he stumbled to his recliner, where he didn’t sit down so much as collapse into it. His frailty only riled her further. “She’s his mother, JT! And all this time, all these years, you lied to him and to me! You and Mama. I just don’t believe it—”
“You don’t understand. Lydia’s mental condition—”
“No.” Annie stabbed her finger in JT’s direction. “Don’t blame her. You took Bo away from her. You took them away from each other. My God, he was only five years old. You broke his heart! He was still crying for her when you married Mom and moved in here. You know he wore those stupid earmuffs just to hear her voice.” Annie crossed her arms, chest heaving, indignant. “I guess you thought you were doing what was best, as usual.”
Crooked Little Lies Page 19
