Boy Still Missing

by John Searles

  I was looking down on the room like a camera on the ceiling. The scene came in flashes: On the floor was a woman. Facedown. Hair matted. Neck twisted. Hand holding the telephone. Towels between her legs. Blood running wild along the carpet. A pregnant woman trying to get rid of her baby. Only she had killed herself instead. The woman was my mother.

  FIVE

  She met him one night last spring when she set out on her own in search of her husband. After spying out all the usual places, she parked on the side of Hanover Street, wondering where to go next. That’s when he pulled up behind her, got out of his car, and tap-tap-tapped his sleek black flashlight against her window. She had failed to signal, he explained, and her brake lights weren’t working either. He could have written her a ticket. But if she promised to have her husband fix those lights first thing in the morning and to remember to signal the next time she pulled to the side of the road, he would skip all that and simply follow her home to make sure she got there safe and sound.

  She sat behind the wheel of her car and made that promise.

  She actually crossed her heart.

  He wasn’t at all the type of man she usually found attractive. Her first husband, before he died, had been a dreamer, always working odd jobs while coming up with a new way to hit it big. And her present husband was a free spirit, a trait she had been drawn to until it wreaked havoc on her life. But this man—a police officer—seemed solid and strong, despite what her husband always said. Like his squad car steadily trailing her home—secure, capable, watchful.

  She told herself that none of those feelings mattered. After all, she was a married woman. Given the way her last family had fallen apart, along with all the other lives she had traded in, she was determined to make this one work. If not for her sake, then for her younger son’s. But then she saw the officer again in the market on a Sunday afternoon in June. Her husband had been on a bender for days, and the sheriff walked alongside her, up and down the aisles of the grocery store, past the rainbow of cans and boxes, until they had both filled their carts.

  Not long after, she began meeting him at the motel.

  July. August. September.

  To be kissed.

  To be held.

  To close her eyes and listen to his deep voice.

  He left her with a sense of calm that wasn’t quite love but something almost more indelible, because there was none of the turmoil she had known in her other relationships. With him she still had the pieces of herself intact even when they were apart, whereas those other men had left her feeling shattered. Unglued.

  Then she missed her period.

  At first she lied to herself. She was nervous, and that had thrown off her body clock before. But her belly began to show, and she simply wanted to will it all away.

  October. November. December.

  She twisted the knob on the radiator until it stuck. The heat’s broken, she explained to her son, I’ll wear this coat until it’s fixed.

  Until I’m fixed, she kept saying to her best friend. Then it dawned on her: Couldn’t her friend use her hospital connections to ask someone for help? Couldn’t she sneak into a supply room and steal some ergot? But the nurses threatened to report her friend, and now she was worried for her job.

  It’s a hospital, she told her friend again and again with a false sense of calm. Trust me, people have asked that question before.

  Her husband called from the road and said he would be home in one week. He acted as if it were perfectly normal for a man with a wife and kid to be gone through the holidays. More than anything she wanted to shake off these last months the way he had. But when it came time to face him, her pregnancy would be impossible to deny. And since there was not a chance that it could be his child, she was afraid of what he might do.

  She made plans to go away.

  The officer had no money of his own, but he knew a friend who knew someone who could arrange for her to have a late-term abortion. She planned to use a few thousand dollars of the emergency money she had saved from her brother. She would fly to Mexico City. An expatriate doctor would take her to a house where he did this sort of thing all the time. It was safe. It was clean.

  She opened her jewelry box, and almost all of the money was gone.

  She peeled back her bedroom rug and pulled out coupons and singles tucked between two hundred-dollar bills.

  She lifted the top to an old shoe box and found only a handful of small bills inside.

  She was four and a half months pregnant and could not wait another day. The officer said a doctor friend had told him exactly how to do it. This doctor friend had given him the instruments. Her best friend came up with the latex gloves and sterilization kit. She unplugged the phone so people would think there was trouble with the line instead of wondering where she was if they called and didn’t get an answer. She met the officer in the parking lot of the motel where the child inside her had been conceived.

  It was a bitter, snowy night, and she wanted to say good-bye to her younger son just in case something went wrong. Things had been tense between them, and she wanted to make amends. When this was over, she might even tell him about the nightmare with her first husband and son. He was old enough now to know. But he had gone off for the day with his friend.

  A speculum. A smooth slim probe of steel.

  Her stomach convulsed. Her vagina bled. The officer kept trying to stop the blood, but it gushed, faster and faster. The towels became drenched, and the more he tried to help, the more the blood pooled around her. She looked up in a blur and saw that his face had gone ghost-white with panic. He had been trained for emergencies but never for an emergency like this one. He could be arrested for his involvement here. He could lose everything he had ever worked for. In a court of law, he would be treated no different than a murderer. She knew. He knew. They both knew. Be right back, the officer said, gripping the gold badge on his chest as if his heart ached beneath it, broken and hardened by fear.

  He left the room.

  She thought of her husband calling him a coward—a lazy, crooked coward—and something told her he would never be back. That’s when the unglued feeling overtook her. There on the floor, she felt as if a pack of wild dogs had been let loose inside her, trampling her insides, shredding her to nothing. She rolled her body over. In one last effort, she stretched her hand to the phone.

  Her best friend answered.

  Something’s wrong, she told her between breaths. I’m bleeding and it hurts. He said he would be right back. But I know he’s gone for good. How quickly can you come?

  MARNIE TOLD me again and again the story of how my mother died. As we drove inside the dry cockpit of her car on our way to the memorial service, she found it necessary to go over the details one more time. My mother’s first meeting with Roget, their secret rendezvous at the motel, her pregnancy hidden beneath that coat, and, of course, the missing money. Each time my mind bubbled with questions but only grasped them for a few fleeting seconds before letting go. The answers didn’t matter, because the end result was the same: My mother was gone, and I was to blame.

  When I looked over at Marnie, she was crying again, her face crinkled into a distorted blob. One hand held the steering wheel while the other dabbed a clump of baby-blue tissues at her cheeks. “How dare those policemen cover for that chicken bastard. If he had just stayed with her, called for help. . . ” Her hand smacked the steering wheel. Her tears kept coming.

  Your mother might still be alive, I thought, finishing her sentence.

  The more Marnie repeated that story, the more numb I became. My eyes bulged. My voice whispered. I spoke in one-word sentences, if at all. I stared out at the road, the double yellow line stretching before us and leading the way. Tree branches leaned over both sides of the street, tunneling us as we drove beneath. The sky had been full of glaring, after-the-storm sunlight for the last couple of days, but it had yet to melt the bulk of the snow. My mother couldn’t be dead, I kept telling myself as I stared out at
all that whiteness. I had just seen her two days before, asleep on the couch while I cranked on the radiator. But then my mind flashed on that image of her body in the motel. After I found her like that, I had blacked out, fallen to the floor. Right smack in the middle of my forehead I sported a plum-colored bruise the shape of South America. Not from the fall but from the door hitting me when the officers busted back inside. I reached up and touched that bruise as we drove. I winced at the sting, then finger-combed my hair forward to cover it.

  “How’s your head, Dominick?” Marnie asked, turning her red eyes away from the road toward me. No more “honey cake” or “sweet lips”—just plain old Dominick. She had ditched the Southern act the night my mother died.

  Whenever I tried to speak, it felt as if a giant metal fishhook were lodged deep in my throat. Yes. No. Okay. Maybe. That was all anyone got from me when it came to conversation. “Okay,” I said and looked down at the worn floor mats of her car. Another thing I couldn’t do: make eye contact.

  Even though her dogs, Fred and Ginger, had died over a year ago, I could still smell them from where I sat, dressed in the stiff blue suit Marnie had brought to me that morning. At my feet were scattered pennies, torn coupons, and newspaper clippings. When I was a kid, I used to collect that crap off her floor. Marnie would make like her tape deck was a candy machine and pull out red and white pinwheel mints for me to buy. A penny apiece. She accepted coupons, too.

  My mother was dead, and here I was thinking about Marnie and our stupid baby games. What kind of son was I? I didn’t let myself answer that question. Instead I thought of what Marnie had told me about my mother turning off the radiator so she had an excuse to wear that coat. If only I hadn’t been so caught up with Edie, I might have suspected. I thought of all the clues that I had let fly right over my head. The way my mother carried on about Roget at the auction. His phone call afterward. That night he had driven me home in my underwear. What was it he had said? She has a lot on her plate, so go easy on her, or something like that. Yeah, well, maybe he should have listened to his own advice and gone easy on her instead of leaving her alone to die. I wanted to kill him, to grab the pistol from his holster and shoot it into his stomach, to let him suffer a bloody death the way my mother had. But I told myself that as guilty as Roget was for abandoning my mother in that motel room, I was far guiltier for betraying her long before that.

  She needed that money. She needed me.

  We pulled up in front of the funeral parlor—a one-story white building that looked like an ordinary house, something a little old lady might own, if you took away the RINETTE FUNERAL HOME sign above the door. I saw my father standing beneath that sign shaking hands with everyone who entered. Ever since he showed up the day after my mother’s death, he had been acting as if we had all been one big happy family until tragedy struck. He had yet to address the fact—at least to me—that my mother had died from a botched abortion, never mind mentioning that the baby couldn’t have been his. He simply played his part as the brokenhearted husband. He made all the arrangements: memorial service today, a few words at the cemetery afterward, burial when the ground thawed. He had even gotten here early this morning to have “some time alone with my wife.” His perfect-father routine made me hate him more than ever.

  Inside, there were more people than I expected. Leon and Mrs. Diesel. Mr. and Mrs. Ramillo, the egg-shaped older couple from next door. A few of Marnie’s friends from the hospital, all gussied up in frumpy Sunday dresses. My father’s drinking buddies and Mac Maloney, the owner and bartender of Maloney’s Pub. The place smelled mothbally and used, like a library, only without the books. A bald-headed priest made a beeline for me the moment I stepped through the doorway. His name was Father Conroy, he told me. He was new to the parish in Holedo and deeply sorry for my loss. As he launched into a speech about God’s great plan for all of us, I looked away from his eyes, down at his hand shaking mine. The guy was missing a thumb, just like my woodshop teacher last year who had accidentally cut his off with a radial saw. I found myself imagining the far-fetched occupational hazards of a priest that could have led to losing a finger. Maybe he had sliced it off while cutting up a batch of holy bread. Maybe some hungry church lady had sunk her teeth into it as he lay a communion wafer on her tongue.

  “She’s with the Good Lord now,” he said and gave me the kind of watery-eyed, dull expression that made me think of a fish tank. Steady bubble. Zero surprise.

  That hook was still lodged in my throat, so I simply nodded. He couldn’t possibly believe what he was saying anyway. Ask every Catholic on the planet and they would tell you abortion was a sin. Never mind a priest, who was bound to believe that my mother had bought herself a one-way ticket to hell the night she checked into that motel room. I knew better. If there was a heaven, my mother would be there, the child inside her grown full-term.

  I’d be the one in hell.

  Father No Thumb led me to a chair at the front of the room, where I was bookended by my father and Marnie. My mother’s closed wooden coffin was buried beneath dozens of tight red roses like animal hearts, baby’s breath all around. I imagined the hushed silence inside, the thin breathless air, the stillness. There was a framed picture of her on top of the casket, smiling in that closed-lip way. Seeing it made my head feel thick and cloudy, used up. “How you doing, son?” my father said, clasping his hand on my shoulder and squeezing.

  I shrugged. Across the room a line was forming, and I kept my eyes on the crowd in hopes that my father would look away, too, and not say anything else to me. One by one, people began filing past my mother’s casket, doing a kneel-and-pray routine before moving on to my father, then me, then Marnie. Before I knew it, I was caught up in a blur of faces and whispered apologies.

  “I’m so sorry. . . ”

  “If there’s anything I can do. . . ”

  “Please call if you need help. . . ”

  Marnie got right down to wailing and carrying on. But I stayed stone-faced with each and every handshake. I told myself that I didn’t deserve their condolences, seeing as I was the one who had put my mother in that casket. I had led her straight to death’s door with all my lying and underhanded schemes, so I was the one who should have been saying how sorry I felt.

  As I sat, blank and stiff, letting their words slide right off me, my father sponged up every last bit of their attention. He kept saying the same thing over and over: “I loved that woman. . . God, how I loved that woman.”

  If you loved her so much, I thought, then why didn’t you bother to come home for the last month of her life? And why were you in Edie Kramer’s bed last June? That’s what got this doomsday ball rolling in the first place. But I didn’t bother saying anything, because I had a funny way of showing love to my mother as well. I just let him play his part and kept nodding and looking down at the red rug of the funeral home with each passing person.

  No tears, I promised myself.

  When I looked up, Leon was kneeling before me. Hair grown almost down to his shoulders. New sand-colored cords and a blue button-down shirt with metal snaps left unsnapped over his chest. A guy from school named Ed Dreary stood behind him. I hadn’t hung out with Ed since the fifth grade. He was so dopey and pathetic, with his dandruff-flecked hair, rhino nose, and Nixon cheeks, that guys in school had started calling him Special Ed a few years back, and the name stuck. Weird that he and Leon were together.

  “Hey,” Leon said.

  “Hey,” Special Ed said, too.

  “Hey,” I said back to both of them.

  “You okay?” Leon asked.

  I nodded yes. I was fine. I wasn’t crying, was I?

  “About that letter,” Leon said. He stopped and glanced at my father, who was busy professing his undying love for my mother to a stubby woman with windshields for glasses. Leon lowered his voice still more and said, “From your friend.”

  I cocked my head at him, confused. Sniffled because my nose was running. Must have been that library odor. All thos
e roses that looked like animal hearts.

  “Edie Kramer,” he whispered, close enough that I could smell the last cigarette on his breath.

  I felt that fishhook shift and dislodge itself in my throat, choking me as I tried to speak. “I don’t ever want to talk about her again. Ever!”

  My first full sentence in days, and it came out louder than I had expected. The woman with the Bozo glasses looked over, then turned back toward my father. “I loved her more than anything,” he told her.

  Leon cleared his throat and stood, let his hands fall near his crotch the way he always did. Like he was pointing to his package, or something perverted. “Okay,” he said. “Sure thing. Forget about it. I’m sorry.”

  I wanted to say something more to make sure he got the point, but I was afraid I might start bawling, so I held back. Leon and Special Ed walked off, and I let myself get swept up in the sea of long faces and condolences. The woman with the glasses was gone, but a pack of Marnie’s friends made their way over.

  Jeanette. Lois. Ruth. Carol.

  “I’m so sorry for you. . . ”

  “I lost my mother recently, and I know it’s hard. . . ”

  “All we can do is pray for her soul now. . . ”

  “She’s looking down on you. . . ”

  After they blew off, I sat there kicking at my seat and wondering how long this torture would last. I couldn’t stand people feeling sorry for me when I was the reason we were all here. I was the reason my mother was gone. “Hey, kid,” someone said, and I looked up.

  Uncle Donald. He had trimmed his beard back so it was just a thin shadow around the edges of his fat jaw, a dark line over his lip. He could have penciled the thing on. I had been so busy missing my mother and blaming myself that I hadn’t even planned on seeing him here today. I scanned the room in search of my brother, anyone who looked remotely like that boy at Laguna del Perro in 1955. Nothing. I stared back at my uncle, his large brown eyes behind wire-rimmed glasses. He wore a wrinkled black suit with a white shirt and a long thin tie. A folded yellow envelope stuck out of his pocket. This is my mother’s brother, I thought. If he’s alive, then how can she be dead?