“Pillsbury?” said Joan, now trying desperately to sit up. “Patty, we didn’t get Pillsbury until after”—she glanced uncomfortably at Rachel—“until after you and...Mr. McNeil stopped, well, you know what I mean.”
“Thanks Mother,” she sighed. “But tell me, how can you remember something like that when you can’t even remember your granddaughter’s birthday?”
“I do so know my granddaughter’s birthday,” she countered indignantly. “If you remember, I’m the one who baked her cake this year, the one with poppy seed frosting and—”
“And how many candles did we light, Mom? How many candles were on that cake?”
As Joan stared at her daughter, a smile barely broke the surface of her face, then disappeared, then a tiny ripple again, like a wily trout plucking mayflies. But just as her smile remained elusive, a sort of comical frustration grew more and more evident within her eyes.
Duncan thought it looked an awful lot like denial. Maybe shock. Probably both.
“How many, Mother?” Patricia demanded.
Joan was now wringing her hands with such conviction that she might have been demonstrating to a bunch of upstart surgeons the proper way to scrub. Then that elusive smile broke through. She clasped her hands together in front of her chest and said, “Who would like some nice iced tea?”
Chris, sitting in the living room in front of a blank television, raised his hand. “Got any non-decaf herbal?”
Joan hobbled over to Chris and took him by the elbow. “You just follow me straight into the pantry, and I’ll show you the menu.”
As they both entered the kitchen, Patricia’s mother hummed Nat King Cole’s “Unforgettable.”
“Proud of yourselves?” Patricia said, plopping herself down at the dining room table. Directly across from her sat Juanita, as still and quiet as a trained Doberman, appearing every bit as harmless.
“Patricia?” Duncan said. “I’m really sorry we came unannounced, but it was the only way—”
“Only way to what? Drive me and my mother to the funny farm?”
Rachel stepped forward. “We knew this was going to be a shock. It’s a shock to us, believe me. But once you see that she’s—”
“Where did you find her?” Patricia said, pointing at Kathy. “And isn’t this creepy enough without her staring at me like that? Just stands there and stares. Jesus, she reminds me of those kids in Village of the Damned.”
“She’s just being polite,” Duncan said. “Now listen, the natural course for you or anyone is to start in Denial, then Anger, etcetera, etcetera, until you eventually come to Acceptance. Now, because we’re kind of strapped for time, we need you to skip from Denial to Acceptance, and leave the cream filling alone.”
Patricia clucked. “You haven’t changed a bit.”
“Just give her a chance,” Duncan said.
“This isn’t all about Kathy,” Rachel said, “or someone who you think just looks like Kathy. This is about something infinitely bigger.”
“We are on a mission from God,” Juanita boasted.
Patricia buried her face in her hands. “Oh, shit. It’s Revival Ministries Hour.” Then she looked at Duncan. “What is this, some kind of cult? Wait, don’t tell me! You want me to chuck all of my belongings, rent a room at the Ramada, make myself a nice strychnine sandwich, then wait for either Hale Bopp to come back around, or those little gray guys to take me home, right?”
“Listen,” Duncan urged, “we’re not here to push the Watch Tower, or tell you why Jesus Christ died for your sins. We’re here because our daughters want us here.” He gave Juanita a scolding glance. “We don’t know or pretend to know why we’re in Rock Bay. We only know that we have to be here. The answers will be coming soon enough.”
“We really need you, Mommy,” Kathy said.
Patricia turned in her chair and stared at the girl. “I am not your mommy. So, from now on you’ll address me as Mrs. Bently. Understood?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Rachel stepped behind Kathy and put a hand on her head. “I gave birth to this child. I nursed her. I bathed her. I read her Cinderella and The Pokey Little Puppy and Jack and the Beanstalk and a million others. I sent her off to school and was a lot more frightened that first day, I can tell you, than she was. I helped her with her homework. I took her to ice skating and ballet lessons. I took her to the park and let her feed the geese. And I watched her grow into this fine young lady.” Then she stepped away from Kathy, renouncing her. “But I am not her mother. You are.”
Rachel sat back down.
“I help raise her, too,” Juanita said. “Amy, I mean.”
“That’s right,” Rachel said. “Juanita’s been with Amy from almost the very start.”
Patricia was shaking her head, looking like she didn’t know whether to laugh or start pulling out fistfuls of hair. “But that’s just not possible.”
“Of course it isn’t,” said Duncan. “But that’s the way it is.”
“Look,” Rachel said, “we don’t expect you to just take our word for it. So do whatever you think is necessary to either prove or disprove to yourself this little girl’s identity. But please hurry because Duncan’s right, we don’t have a lot of time.”
Duncan began to rise. “Look, we’d planned to take a motel in—”
“No!” Joan blurted, eavesdropping from the kitchen doorway. “Absolutely not! I’ll have no such thing! You are our guests and will be treated as such. Right, Patty?”
Patricia rose from the table, disgusted. “Fine, Mom, whatever,” she said. “Make yourselves right at home.” Then she sneered at Duncan. “Anybody wants me, I’ll be upstairs scooping out my ‘cream filling.’”
Juanita said, “Okay to bring in some luggage, Mrs. Bently?”
“Knock yourself out, Maria.”
“Excuse, but my name is Juanita.”
“My mistake.”
Patricia stormed by just as Chris was leaving the kitchen.
“Twinkie?” he offered.
“Shove it.”
4.
Patricia slammed her bedroom door hard enough to evict an expensive cloisonné vase and two ivory figurines from their pinewood retreat on the south wall. Directly below, on her grandmother’s French coffer, the red, lily-like flowers of a beautiful amaryllis plant failed to cushion their falls.
“Fuck!”
This. Is. Insane.
How could that bastard McNeil after almost twelve years show up on her front doorstep with his cutesy wife, a fat Guatemalan lady, a lowlife hood, and some little girl who thinks she’s Katherine Bently incarnate?
The very nerve of him!
The little girl downstairs was not her daughter. Not her at all. And to even entertain such possibilities, she reminded herself, could quickly find a person finger painting old pill charts with a bunch of groping, weenie-wagging perverts.
She began pacing back and forth.
They brainwashed her, the little girl. That’s what happened. Picked her up somewhere in a mall, a shoe store maybe, that playground inside McDonald’s...They kidnaped her, Duncan and his gang, his cult, just because she looks a little—okay, a lot—like Katherine used to look. Then they forced her to learn all about Rock Bay and Pillsbury and everyone’s middle names. And they were so successful that now the little girl really believes it herself, that she’s my daughter. They’re here to extort me, threaten to take Katherine away if I don’t cough up the money.
The money Duncan never got. Not a penny.
She reached under her bed and brought out two photo albums, then sat them on the forest green comforter. As she reached to open one, her hand hesitated above the leather binding. It hung there for a moment, quivering, then she called it back.
Well, Duncan isn’t going to get away with it. He’s had twelve years to claim his share of the loot, and if he feels it necessary to go to these extreme measures...these crazy measures to...these crazy, insane, absurd, outlandish means—
“—th
at are even more unbelievable than having Katherine back!” she blurted, then buried her face in her hands.
“Oh my God, I’m losing it,” she bawled. “I’ve lost my baby girl, I’ve lost my self respect, and now I’ve lost my mind.” She yanked back a corner of the comforter and pulled it across her face.
Still hitching, she rolled onto her side and stared at the busted heirlooms on the wood floor. Well, at least now she had an excuse to shitcan the ivory pieces. Her father had passed them on to her, but she’d always felt guilty for having them, knowing that some majestic elephant had been slaughtered just so someone could fill their curio cabinet. Or her bedroom.
Nope, in the ground they would go. She’d give them a proper burial. Dad would understand.
As for the cloisonné vase, well...Good riddance to bad rubbish. She never liked that aunt anyway.
The intercom on her night stand transformed her normally emollient mother into a loud, nasally waitress from the Bronx. “Patty, honey?”
Patricia ignored her. Years ago, when her mother’s arthritis had gotten so bad that she couldn’t climb the stairs for days at a time, she had an intercom system installed throughout the entire house. This was one of those many moments when she wished she hadn’t.
Her voice trembling with excitement, Joan said, “I know you’re upset, darling, but I think you should come down and listen to what these people have to say. It’s incredible!”
She wriggled up to the headboard and let her face sink into a pillow.
“Patty? Are you in there? Are you in the toilet, honey? Okay, I’ll just try there. Bye.”
Patricia lay there, engrossed with the smell of fabric softener. She brushed her cheek across the linen, caressing it, nuzzling it like a man’s chest. That smell was so...something; so...
She sat up suddenly and held the pillow at arms’ length. She wanted desperately to pitch it across the room, yet was unwilling to let it go.
“Leave me alone!” she spat at the pillow, then shook it as if it were a possessed child. “Just leave me the fuck alone! You’re just a pillow, you’re nothing!” Now she was punching it. “They all have it! Not just mine!”
Rocking on her knees, she pulled the pillow to her chest, folding and squashing and mashing it with an anger she hadn’t known in years.
“They all have it!” she admonished the ceiling, and whatever gods might have been eavesdropping from the rafters. Her tears came so hard it was difficult to see. “Every last one of them! Right down to their Barbie socks and matching underwear! So why are you reminding me now? Why?”
She mashed her face into the pillow and kicked her feet. “They all have it! All of them!”
Then she threw the pillow across the room, shouting after it, “They all have it! All little girls have that smell!”
5.
Patricia descended the stairs with two photo albums, although she was sure one would suffice.
Everyone was gathered at the dining room table. Her mother must have had Duncan put in the leaves, as it had grown considerably longer since her last visit. A large coffee maker was brewing on the server, beside which were stacked enough Styrofoam cups to see the local AA meetings through to Christmas. Packets of sugar and creamer filled a small wicker boat, and the napkins and plastic spoons had been artfully arranged. A pitcher of iced tea and another of lemonade were off to the side, both sweating on the white linen. The scene reminded Patricia of the days back at the VFW where she, her mother, and several volunteers had met every morning before going out and pasting practically all of New England with Katherine’s fliers.
She’d first lost Charles, her husband, then Katherine in the space of sixteen months. While preparing for his funeral, she’d gone ahead and bought two additional plots, hers on one side of Charles, Katherine on the other. Then two years ago, when she’d finally given up hope of ever seeing her daughter again, she had the headstones placed for Katherine and herself.
Although more profound in some aspects, it was only one day in countless many when she’d truly felt dead.
The air conditioner blasted, and three large floor fans, situated throughout the large dining room, whirred, their combined efforts barely touching the heat.
The little girl who looked like her daughter sat next to the Guatemalan lady, eating cookies from a round silver tray. Duncan and Rachel sat together on the opposite side of Katherine and appeared to be having a sobering conversation with her mother. The junkie, parolee, whatever the hell he was, sat at the head of the table, rockin’ to some heavy tunes piped in through his Walkman CD player.
She sat down between the girl and the wired weirdo.
Removing only one of his earphones, Chris leaned over and quietly said, “Someone was looking for you in the john.”
“How thoughtful of you to say.”
“I mean, all of a sudden this unworldly voice was filling the can,” he continued. “Scared the living you-know-what outta me. It was like a damned good thing I was already parked, or I might’ve had to chuck the briefs.”
“I’ll alert the press.”
“It’s just that I’m not used to getting hit like that. It just kept saying, ‘Patty? Patty dear? Are you in there, honey?’ Normally, I’m in the kitchen when I hear the voices. Audibly, I mean, not just inside my head. Like, I hear voices in my head all the time, but the ones that come from my refrigerator are special.” He replanted the earphone, leaned back, and closed his eyes. “It’s wild. I mean, how many times do you have to have a philosophical discussion with your vegetable crisper before you start feeling really stupid?”
“Thanks for sharing,” she said. But he clearly didn’t hear her.
Joan spoke up with maternal urgency. “Patricia, the McNeils have some interesting tales to tell about why they’re here, so I think it would behoove you to listen.”
“Before I listen to anything,” Patricia said, “I have something that I would like ‘Katherine’ to see.” She tapped her finger on the photo album as she went around the table, meeting everyone’s eyes. “Time to play Truth or Dare.”
Glaring now, Joan said, “I really don’t see why that’s necessary—”
“That’s because you’re temporarily insane, Mother.”
“It’s okay, Grammy,” assured the girl. “Mommy—I mean Mrs. Bently—just wants to show me some pictures.”
Patricia said, “Care to make any bets this time?”
The girl just shook her head, smiling all the same.
“No?” Patricia opened the album to a random page. She pointed to a color photograph showing two intense men in camouflage overalls. A dead doe lay at their feet. Off to the side, almost out of the picture, was another man looking on. He was older than the other two.
“Name everyone in this picture,” Patricia instructed.
She pointed to each as she called off their names: “Uncle Kelly, Uncle Richard, Bambi, and, um, Mr. Carlson from the a…the post office. Oh, and everybody called Mr. Carlson ‘Skipper’ because he used to have a lot of boats, or something.” She looked up at Patricia. “Next.”
As if she’d just sat on a kitten, Joan jumped up from her chair and cried, “Oh my God!”
Exceedingly calm, Patricia flipped the page. “Who’s the lady in the bottom picture?”
Crinkling her nose, the girl said, “That’s Toni, the babysitter. She was always mean to me. I don’t remember her last name...but I think it was like a nut.”
“Akhorn,” Patricia said, then closed the album; gently, delicately, as if she were a minister closing her Bible on the last words of an unusually poignant sermon.
Chris, tugging the rings on his right ear the way Carol Burnett used to, said, “Way to smoke ’em, dude!”
Duncan said, “Patricia, I know it’s the hardest damned thing in the world to believe, but you have to stay calm. Don’t go flipping out. There’s nothing wrong with you.” He turned to Joan. “Either one of you.”
“We know what you’re going through,” Rachel said. “
You have your Katherine back, but now it’s our little girl who’s gone.”
“The one who was in the hospital?” Patricia said. “Amy, right?”
“Yes,” Rachel said. “She suffered some kind of...seizure.”
Although their eyes locked, Rachel’s soul looked away after a moment, and Patricia saw in the vacancy a desperation so sharp, so relentlessly keen, as to be an unstoppable force. Patricia knew of another woman who’d been driven by such despair, but she hadn’t led the charge in years. Hope, like her rapiers, had dulled and rusted.
Patricia tipped her head toward the girl. “But—this is her, right? This is Amy?”
Duncan raised his eyebrows. “Not anymore.”
“She was Amy,” Rachel said. “Now she’s your daughter.”
Patricia held up a finger. “Um, let me see if I’m getting this: your daughter Amy, who is only ten years old, winds up in the hospital, believing her name to be Katherine Bently, my daughter from Rock Bay, Massachusetts. The very same Katherine Bently who disappeared from the boardwalk over eleven years ago. And, as it just so happens, Amy looks exactly like my Katherine looked when she was ten years old. And not only does she walk the walk, but she talks a good talk, too,” she said, patting the photo album. “And to top it all off, the biological parents of this little girl, out of the billions available, just happen to be our own Rachel and Duncan McNeil, the latter with whom I once shared more than just a motel room.” She cleared her throat. “How am I doing so far?”
“So far, so good,” said Duncan.
“What is this about motel rooms?” Juanita said.
The girl snickered.
Patricia slowly shook her head. “I...just...can’t...accept it.” She turned to the girl. “I’m sorry, but you are not my daughter.”
“Excuse me, but I think we can all appreciate just how unbelievable this all is,” Joan said, appearing as if she didn’t really appreciate the unbelievable at all. “But just remember, Patty, that God works in mysterious ways.”
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