Missing Pieces

by Joy Fielding

  In the second dream, I’m walking alone along a sunny strip of sidewalk, my steps propelled by a feeling of buoyancy, of being almost lighter than air. In the next instant, I am absolutely convinced that with a little effort, I can actually take flight, and so I start flapping my arms wildly up and down, angling my body to forty-five degrees, my chin thrust forward and leading the way, my neck and shoulders following, as if skiing off a high jump. And suddenly my legs actually leave the ground, and I am suspended in the air, maybe a foot or two off the sidewalk, and I flap my arms even more furiously, trying to sustain the momentum, to increase my speed, to gain greater height, to fly through the air. I’m so close. “Let me,” I cry, even as I feel my feet returning to the ground, my flight aborted, my energy spent.

  It’s not hard to figure out what these dreams mean: the perceived loss of control, the outside forces keeping me down, my desire to break free, to escape the underpinnings of my life, the oblique references to Larry and Robert, the not so oblique reference to my sister. Even my dreams are transparent, it would seem.

  The dreams became a constant, alternating with one another on a nightly basis, occasionally doubling up, like an old-fashioned double bill at the movies. They interrupted my sleep, woke me at three in the morning, like a colicky infant, and hung on till it was time to get up. Occasionally, I awoke from one of these dreams dripping with perspiration, the skin between my breasts glistening with sweat, the sheets around me damp and cold. I forgot what it was like to sleep through the night.

  Interestingly enough, it was during this time that Larry and I started making love again. I woke up one night, sweaty and breathless from my attempts to take flight, and he was sitting up in bed beside me. My thrashing had awakened him, he said matter-of-factly, and I apologized, which he said wasn’t necessary. I smiled gratefully, and told him I loved him. And he took me in his arms and told me he loved me too, that he was sorry for his part in our recent estrangement, and I apologized for mine. And we made love. And it was nice and familiar and comforting, and I hoped that would put an end to the dreams, but it didn’t.

  The subconscious, it would appear, is not so easy to fool as our waking selves, and the truth was that I didn’t want lovemaking that was nice and familiar and comforting. I wanted lovemaking that was furious and unfamiliar and exciting. The kind of lovemaking that transports you, makes you think that anything is possible, the kind of lovemaking that can save your life. Or destroy it.

  I wanted Robert.

  Don’t fuck this guy, I heard Larry say, even as I fucked him daily in my mind. Robert was everywhere around me, his voice in my ear, telling me what to say, his eyes behind mine, showing me where to look, what to see, his hands at my breasts, dictating the beat of my heart. I made love to my husband, but it was Robert who slept inside me at night, who guided my hands when I showered in the morning, and if I tried scrubbing myself free of him, which I did only rarely, he clung to me stubbornly, coating my body, like a soapy residue, refusing to give way.

  As for Robert himself, he was mercifully out of town, first at a media convention in Las Vegas, then reluctantly, on some sort of cruise, organized on behalf of one of his wife’s pet charities. He’d be gone just over three weeks, he told me over the phone before he left. He’d call as soon as he got back. By which time, I assured myself repeatedly in the interim, I would have returned to my senses.

  I kept hoping the same would hold true for Jo Lynn, who, during the month of January, made weekly treks to Starke, driving up on Friday and staying at a motel not far from the penitentiary, then spending the allotted six hours with her “fiance” on Saturday, before making the five-hour drive back home. She had few kind words to say about how the state prison operated. What could possibly be the harm, she demanded indignantly, in allowing the inmates visitors on both Saturday and Sunday, and not forcing them to choose either one day or the other? And talk about cruel and unusual punishment, did we know that the state of Florida didn’t allow conjugal visits? Not that this would stop her from going ahead with her wedding plans, she insisted.

  Probably it was that blind, stubborn insistence that propelled me into action, although I had no idea what I was doing, or what I thought I could accomplish. One afternoon, I simply picked up the phone, punched in 411, and waited for the recorded voice to come on the line.

  “Southern Bell,” the cheery voice obliged. “For what city?”

  “Brooksville,” I heard myself say.

  “For what name?”

  “Ketchum,” I answered, spelling the name of Colin Friendly’s neighbor, the one who’d tried to help him, who’d supposedly taught him that all women weren’t like his mother. “Rita Ketchum.” Why did I want to speak to her? What good did I think talking to her would do?

  Seconds later, a human voice replaced the recorded message. “I show no listing for a Rita Ketchum,” the woman said, her voice decidedly less cheerful than the recording she replaced. “Do you have an address?”

  “No, but how big is Brooksville? There can’t be very many Ketchums.”

  “I have a listing for a Thomas Ketchum on Clifford Road.”

  “Fine,” I told her.

  The recorded voice returned, relayed the phone number, offered to dial it directly for a nominal charge. I accepted, not trusting my fingers to do the job.

  The phone rang once, twice. Assuming I had the right number, what was I planning on saying to Rita Ketchum? Hello, I understand you taught Colin Friendly all he knows about love?

  The phone was answered on its fourth ring. “Hello,” a young woman said, a baby crying in the background.

  “Is this Rita Ketchum?” I asked.

  The voice grew suddenly wary. “Who is this?”

  “My name is Kate Sinclair. I’m calling from Palm Beach. I need to speak to Rita Ketchum.” Except for the baby crying in the background, there was silence. “Hello? Are you still there?”

  “My mother-in-law isn’t here. May I ask why you want to speak to her?”

  “There are some questions I’d like to ask her,” I said, growing uneasy.

  “Are you with the police?”

  “The police? No.”

  “What kind of questions do you want to ask her?”

  “I’d rather discuss this directly with Mrs. Ketchum.”

  “I’m afraid that won’t be possible.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Because nobody’s seen or heard from her in almost twelve years.” In the background, the baby began screaming.

  “She disappeared?”

  “Twelve years ago this May. Look, I really have to go. If you want to call back this evening, you can speak to my husband.”

  “Thank you,” I said, too stunned to say anything else. “That won’t be necessary.”

  “So what are you saying?” Jo Lynn demanded over the phone only minutes later. “That just because some woman ran away from home, Colin had something to do with it?”

  “For God’s sake, Jo Lynn, what is it going to take to get through to you?” I said angrily. “The woman didn’t just run away from home. She disappeared. Of course Colin had something to do with it.”

  “Colin would never hurt Mrs. Ketchum. He loved her.”

  “The man is incapable of love. He makes no distinctions between feelings, between people. If he could kill the one woman who tried to help him, what makes you think you’ll be any different?”

  Her answer was to hang up the phone. I lowered my head into the palms of my hands and cried.

  On February 5, I took my mother to our scheduled doctor’s appointment. Dr. Caffery’s office, located on Brazilian Avenue in Palm Beach proper, is a small series of examination rooms off a larger waiting room, the whole area decorated in gradations of pink. Like the womb, I thought, ushering my mother inside and pushing her toward the receptionist’s desk.

  “Hi, I’m Kate Sinclair,” I announced. “This is my mother, Helen Latimer.”

  “Hello, dear,” my mother said to the recept
ionist, who was about twenty-five, with short black hair cut on the diagonal and half a dozen assorted gold loops and studs running up each earlobe. Her nameplate identified her as Becky Sokoloff.

  “We have an appointment,” I said.

  “Have you been here before?” Becky asked.

  “No, this is our first visit.”

  “You’ll have to fill out these forms.” Becky pushed several sheets of paper across her blond-wood desk. “Why don’t you have a seat for a few minutes. The doctor is a little behind schedule.”

  I took the forms and directed my mother to the row of bright pink chairs that ran along the pale pink wall. Several women were already waiting, and one glanced up from her magazine with a weary smile, her eyes indicating that the doctor was more than a little behind schedule. “Would you like a magazine, Mother?” I didn’t wait for her reply, just grabbed a handful of magazines from the long, rectangular coffee table that sat in the middle of the room, and plopped them into her lap.

  My mother promptly folded her hands on top of them, like a human paperweight, making no move to open them. I studied her for several seconds, deciding that she looked well. Her skin color was good, her dark eyes bright, her gray hair combed and curled. She seemed in good spirits. No one was plotting against her, nobody was following her, everything was “magnificent,” she’d trilled on the drive over from her apartment, then lapsed into silence, other than to ask how the girls were getting along, a question she repeated at least five times.

  “Mom, don’t you want to read a magazine?” I reached under her hands and extricated the latest edition of Elle, opening it to a page of naked breasts in quite an astonishing assortment of shapes and sizes.

  “Oh my,” my mother and I both said, almost as one. Immediately, I flipped to another page. More breasts. Some barely covered, some simply bare. And still more: here a breast, there a breast, everywhere a breast-breast, I sang silently, flipping quickly through the entire magazine. A seemingly inexhaustible supply.

  What every well-dressed woman is wearing, I thought, turning my attention to the forms the receptionist had handed me, starting to fill in the blanks. Name, address, phone number, place and date of birth. “Mom, what year you were born?” I asked without thinking, then bit down on my tongue. She had trouble remembering what she had for breakfast. How was she going to remember what year she was born?

  “May 18,” she said easily, “1921.”

  I felt strangely elated by the fact my mother knew the date of her birth. Maybe she wasn’t in such bad shape after all, I rationalized, even though I knew that Alzheimer sufferers often had no trouble recalling even the minutest details of their distant pasts. It was their short-term memory that deserted them. I tried another question, deciding that short-term memory was vastly overrated. “Are you allergic to any medications?”

  “No, but I’m allergic to surgical tape.”

  “Surgical tape?”

  She leaned against me, as if about to confide something highly confidential. “We didn’t find that out until after my cesarean with Jo Lynn.” She laughed. “The doctors put regular surgical tape across my stomach to hold the stitches from the operation in place, and of course, nobody thought a thing about it until a few days later, when I started to itch something terrible, and they took off the bandages, and discovered that my stomach was covered in these horrible, angry red welts. Oh, it was terrible. I thought I’d die, I was so itchy. And there wasn’t much the doctors could do for me, except to lather my skin in cortisone cream. It was months before those welts went down. I looked terribly ugly, what with this big scar and those angry red welts covering my stomach. Your father hated it.”

  It was the most I’d heard my mother say in months, and I couldn’t help but smile, despite the mention of my stepfather. “Do you think much about him?” I heard myself ask.

  “I think about him all the time,” she answered, surprising me, although I’m not sure why. She’d been married to the man for fourteen years, had a child with him, been regularly beaten to a bloody pulp by him—why wouldn’t he still be part of her thoughts? Hadn’t I held on to my memories of Robert all these years?

  “He was such a handsome man,” she continued, without prompting. “Tall and dashing and very funny. You inherited your sense of humor from him, Kate.”

  It was then that I realized she was talking about my father, and not Jo Lynn’s. “Tell me about him,” I said, partly to find out how much she recalled, but mostly because I was suddenly hungry to hear news of him, as if I were a small child waiting for word of her handsome and brave father, off fighting a distant war.

  “We met at the end of World War II,” she said, repeating a story I’d heard many times before. “My father gave him a job in his textile factory, and Martin eventually worked his way up to foreman. He was so smart and ambitious, he would have become foreman even if he hadn’t married the boss’s daughter.” Her eyes suddenly clouded over. “But then my father lost the business, and my parents had to sell their house, and my mother never forgave him. Do you remember your grandmother?” she asked.

  An image of a heavyset old woman with strawlike hair and thick ankles flashed before my eyes. “Vaguely,” I said. I was only five years old when she died.

  “She was a very strong woman, your grandmother. There was no gray in her world, only black and white. Something was right, or it wasn’t. If you made your bed, you had to lie in it.”

  “That couldn’t have been very easy for you,” I heard the therapist in me reply.

  “We learned. If you made a mistake, you had to accept the consequences. You couldn’t just pack up your things and run away.”

  “Is that why you stayed with my stepfather even after he started beating you?” I knew the question was too simplistic, but I asked it anyway.

  “Your father never beat me,” she said.

  “My stepfather,” I repeated.

  “Your father was a wonderful man. He was a foreman at my father’s textile plant until my father lost the business, then he took a job with General Motors during the day and went to law school at night. He’d always wanted to be a lawyer. Isn’t that interesting? We’ve never had a lawyer in the family. But he died before he could graduate.” She smiled sadly at the receptionist.

  “It shouldn’t be too much longer,” Becky Sokoloff automatically replied.

  “We were finishing our dinner,” my mother continued, as I watched the scene play out in my mind. “You were in your room, getting ready for bed. Your father and I were still at the dining-room table, taking our time over dessert. It was so rare, you see, that we got to spend a whole evening together, and so we were lingering over our dessert, just talking and laughing. And your father got up to get a glass of milk, and suddenly he said that he felt a hell of a headache coming on. Those were his exact words, ‘I feel a hell of a headache coming on.’ I remember because it was very unusual for him to swear, even a simple word like ‘hell.’ And I was about to suggest that he take a few aspirin, even though he didn’t like pills, but I never got the chance. He stood up, took two steps, then collapsed onto the floor.”

  I said nothing, watching as her eyes flickered with the passage of time, as if she were watching an old newsreel.

  “Do you know what I did?” she asked, not waiting for an answer. “I laughed!”

  “Laughed?”

  “I thought it was some sort of joke. Even after I called for an ambulance, even on the ride to the hospital, I kept expecting him to open his eyes. But he didn’t. The doctor told me later that he was dead before he hit the floor.”

  I reached over and hugged her, felt the outline of her skeleton beneath the soft cotton of her blue dress. When had she become so frail? I wondered, as her body bent to my embrace. And how long before these memories, now so strong, ultimately faded, then disappeared?

  So the past gets wiped clean? Jo Lynn had demanded in the mall the day before Christmas. She won’t remember it, so I might as well pretend it never happened?
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  Pretend what never happened?

  She just gets away with it.

  Gets away with what? I wondered, as I’d been wondering ever since that afternoon.

  “Mom,” I began.

  “Yes, dear.”

  “Can I ask you something?”

  “You can ask me anything, dear.”

  I paused, not sure how to pose the question, deciding finally that the most direct approach was probably the best. “What exactly happened between you and Jo Lynn?”

  “Something’s happened to Jo Lynn?” Her eyes flashed immediate concern.

  “No, she’s fine.”

  “Oh, I’m so glad.”

  “I mean, what happened between the two of you a long time ago?”

  “I don’t understand.” My mother’s eyes grew restive, flitting fearfully around the room.

  “You two have never really gotten along,” I began again, trying a different approach.

  “She was always such a headstrong little girl. You could never tell Jo Lynn anything.”

  “Tell me about her.”

  “Don’t get me started,” my mother said, and laughed, the fear in her eyes vanishing as quickly as it had appeared.

  “She was a cesarean delivery,” I coaxed, waiting.

  “That’s right,” my mother marveled. “I had a terrible time after she was born because I had an allergic reaction to the surgical tape.”

  “And she was headstrong and you could never tell her anything …”

  “She had a mind of her own, that’s for certain. I couldn’t get her to wear a dress for love or money. I’d put her in all these pretty, frilly little things, the kind you always loved, and she’d rip them off, wouldn’t have anything to do with them. No, she only wanted to wear pants. She was such a handful. Not like you. You were such a good baby. You loved your little dresses, but not our Joanne Linda. No, she had to wear the pants in the family.” She laughed. “That’s what your father used to say anyway.”

  “My stepfather,” I qualified.

  “Jo Lynn could do no wrong as far as he was concerned. He let her get away with murder. Whatever she wanted, he made sure she got. Spoiled her terribly. Always took her side whenever there was an argument.” She shook her head. “She never got over my leaving him. I know she blames me for his death.”