The War for Gloria

by Atticus Lish

  She remarked that it was unfortunate for them to be paying rent on two different places. His house was really huge. She was preparing to tell him she was pregnant.

  In the middle of their lunch, he told her, “I’ve seen a girl who looks just like you go from being alive to being dead.”

  “Yeah right,” she said.

  “Get down on your hands and knees,” he told her. He wanted to have sex. She complied.

  During sex, he said, “How would you like it if I killed you?”

  Afterwards she asked if he’d been joking and he said of course he’d been joking.

  Shortly thereafter, back home in the city, she called him in Malden and told him she was pregnant and was wondering what to do with it.

  “If it’s mine, I expect you to keep it.”

  “Of course it’s yours. Stupid. That’s why I’m calling you.”

  She’d had a breakdown after that. The Friday night before Mother’s Day, she started acting strangely. Her Mission Hill roommates finally called the Boston PD. She argued with a cop while his partner stood out in the hall. She picked up a ruler and threw it and the cops restrained her. She screamed hysterically—as if in a vision of horror—when they handcuffed her. Paramedics carried her out of the four-story walkup strapped to a white stretcher. She screamed the whole way down, begging them to not restrain her.

  She spent ten days in a locked psychiatric ward and another ten days on a lower floor of the building with fewer restrictions after she had contracted for safety with the staff. In the dayroom, she played checkers with a strong broad-shouldered girl with a big jaw and a large beautiful aggressive face with vivid eyes and dark eyebrows and the clean, glowing skin and ponytail of an athlete, wearing a blue hospital gown, yellowing bandages taped around her wrists. At night, she slept so hard, she thought she had been surreptitiously drugged. When she asked one of the nurses about this, a polite burly man from down South, he told her that no one was ever drugged without their knowledge. She named him Bear because of his curly beard.

  She sat in group and declined to say anything besides her name and listened to a young man, who had gone psychotic, say that he could see a bouncing yellow ball.

  She put off calling home until she’d had a chance to see the head doctor, a tall man, who would give her her diagnosis. Carrying a clipboard, the tall doctor led her down the hall to his office, where she took a chair and he sat facing her from behind his desk. The first thing that occurred to her when he asked her to tell him what was wrong was to tell him that he was making her feel like she was in trouble, that this situation was threatening, like she was a little kid who had been taken to the woodshed for a scolding, and that it made her frightened and upset. She satisfied herself with saying that she “just felt bad.” Protectively, she folded her legs up onto her chair seat and sat with her arms hugging her shins, and she adopted a cynical stance with him.

  He said, with her permission, he’d like to keep her a little longer and talk again in a few days. “Try to talk in group,” he said. “See what happens.”

  Over time, she relaxed her view of the doctor, coming to feel that he was a lovely man, caring and humane, and she told him that she had “thought-slash-dreamed” of seeing him for coffee when she was out and healed, to show her gratitude.

  “Absolutely no thanks is necessary,” he said. “It’s its own reward to see you doing better.”

  She called home from a pay phone, and her mother asked if she had a feasible plan to pay back the part of her hospitalization cost that was not covered by insurance. During the phone call, Gloria broke down in a tearful rage. “Sure, Mom, don’t worry!” she sobbed. “You’ll get your money.”

  And for years, until she had come down with ALS and was forced to confront another authority, the one that lived inside her biochemistry, she had held on to the bitter view that a human authority was hurting her mercilessly.

  After she had gotten out of the psych ward, after the summer, in the fall, she’d had Corey at Mass General. School might have been over, but she’d been so in love with the child, had never felt closer to anyone in all the world than when she was giving it her breast.

  In the late afternoon, a woman called Corey on his phone. “Mr. Goltz? She’s gone.”

  He went to the home and saw her. He lifted her up in the bed where she lay. Her corpse was so light. What had happened to that backbreaking weight he’d had to wrestle with? It had been the magnetic tension in her spastic muscles. Now she was all gone, consumed. Grief burst out of him at the evidence of what had been done to her. It was precisely the kind of flowering at the crown that he had sought in enlightenment.

  “Mom, I’m so sorry!” he cried out, holding her.

  He felt possessiveness over her corpse. He thought he should have the right to take her from this room and dispose of her body as he saw fit, to create a private ceremony of honor to her. He imagined stealing his mother’s body, taking it by force.

  At the same time, in mid-grief, it occurred to him that the corpse in his arms was not his mother. The thing in the bed could have been a doll. He realized the falseness of embracing this thing and talking to it as if it were his mother. Her mouth was open—like a roadkill racoon. His mother was gone from the earth.

  He put her husk-light body down and stopped his crying. The nurses were appalled, shaken, maybe moved by his outpouring. He felt that he had attracted their attention through the door. Some were scared of him. Some were angry: He was too loud, he had grieved wrong. But some were sympathetic. As he left with his head down, he was aware of a nurse controlling her tears as she and a coworker whispered together. A security guard escorted him down in the elevator, standing with his hands gripped one over the other and his chin up, neck expanded, gun on the hip, watching Corey from behind, watching the numbers of the floors. But halfway down he cleared his throat and asked Corey, “Do you want a glass of water?”

  “No, thank you.” And he left the hospital.

  He drank himself sick drunk and threw up and woke up the next day in a house that stank of vomit.

  28

  The Nationals

  Two or three days later, he got an invitation to his mother’s funeral in the mail. The card was printed but wasn’t signed. His first thought was, How did someone get her body? No one had talked to him. He flipped the envelope and checked the return address: Springfield. So it had to be her mother, who had not been there for her in life.

  On the appointed day, he drove out to the forested western part of the state and into the gray, low-income city with its low profile of low buildings constructed in a river valley that looked up at the highway.

  He waited at a stoplight at an eight-lane intersection with one other car to keep him company. It was raining. The light changed and he drove on. He found the cemetery, went through the iron gate in the stone wall and parked under the overarching trees.

  He crossed the field of headstones on foot. At her grave, twenty or thirty people he’d never known existed were sitting beneath a tent, white-haired senior citizens, men in khaki pants and blazers. “Are you her son?” they asked. They had reserved a chair for him. It took him time to figure out that the elderly individual sitting by his side was Gloria’s mother.

  “We didn’t think you’d make it,” she said.

  The rain, which had waned, came back again, pattering on the tent.

  Someone introduced him to a person in a black-and-purple robe—the priest. “You’re the son?” The priest was narrowly built and had well-trimmed fingernails.

  “Gloria was my mother, yes.”

  “Do you have any special recollections of her?”

  “I remember I was really young and we were crashing in somebody’s house. We didn’t have anything of our own and she somehow got me a TV to keep me company, because I was sick and she couldn’t be there because she had to work, and she put
up prayer flags over me. I don’t know if you know what those are…”

  “Prayer tags?”

  “Tibetan prayer flags. It’s a Buddhist thing. Do you know anything about Buddhism?”

  “No.”

  “It was to pray for my health. She hung them up for me. And they worked, by the way. I was lying there watching TV while she was gone and I got better. And I’ve never forgotten what I saw while I was lying there. It was—”

  He was about to mention Action Man. His story got interrupted. A stranger came over and the priest turned away. Corey took his seat.

  The ceremony began. The priest began by welcoming Mrs. Goltz, the mother of the deceased. Mrs. Goltz pressed a handkerchief to her face, held it wadded in her fist, while the old women around her patted her hands. The priest recognized all of the departed’s family. He pointed around the audience. “Her cousin from right here in Chicopee…”—a woman in a hat dipped her head—“her son from Boston…”—the priest’s eyes skimmed over Corey.

  “So many people remember Gloria,” the priest continued, raising his eyes to the tent roof and cooking up a smile, “for the joy she brought others.” He began to throw out Gloria anecdotes. “Her cousin remembers ice-skating with her as a girl…Her son remembers special times in front of the TV…”

  Corey hadn’t been warned that his remarks to the priest would be used as material for a hastily thrown together eulogy.

  The coffin rested behind the priest, a giant wooden piece of carpentry that weighed so much more than the body in it. Corey saw that Gloria had been embalmed and dressed formally in a navy dress and a blouse with a bow. She looked mature and formal, like a young woman of a bygone era going off to college.

  They buried his mother on a hill.

  On his way back to Boston, he stopped in a valley and shadowboxed by the roadside while the cars blasted by him in the dusk.

  * * *

  —

  After the funeral, it rained. He was alone in the house, wondering what to do with his day. As he listened, the downpour became a storm. Through the blinds, he watched sheets of rain bowling down the street, hitting the window an inch from his eyes, turning the concrete seawall brown. He stayed inside, listening to the wind pry at the roof.

  After several hours, he tried Molly’s number. When she didn’t answer, he went back to wandering around the house from room to room, listening to it rain.

  The rain stopped for a little while on Monday, but he didn’t go outside. No one called him back. The entire day went by.

  That evening, he tried her one more time with no success.

  He finally called Tom, who asked about his mother.

  “We had her funeral out in Springfield. I was right next door to Amherst.”

  Tom said his daughter was away with her track team competing in the nationals in Texas. Corey took this to be the reason he couldn’t reach her.

  The night before it rained was Saturday, March 21. On Monday, on the UMass Amherst campus, Molly’s psychology class met in Tobin Hall, a concrete block with a honeycombed appearance, which strongly resembled a criminal justice building in Boston’s Government Center. The psychology instructor wondered aloud if anyone knew why one of her students had missed that morning’s test; she had been doing well. Someone said she was at the nationals in Texas. But one or two young people who were present, who knew members of the track team, had heard otherwise. Someone texted Molly’s roommates and reported that they hadn’t seen her either: She was neither here nor in Texas.

  The instructor said maybe one of them “ought to contact someone.” She never clarified if this someone was the police. Presumably, it was someone other than the professor.

  That afternoon, Molly’s classmates told the dean of students that a sophomore girl was AWOL. The dean emailed back that if this was an emergency, they needed to contact the police. Her friends weren’t sure: Was this an emergency? If it wasn’t, should they not contact the police? The dean’s response left them confused about what to do. It was written in such bureaucratic language, so heavily reliant on subjectless verbs in the passive voice, that they didn’t know who should do anything.

  * * *

  —

  A rumor began going around campus that a few impulsive girls on the track team had pooled their money to go on a last-minute spring break trip before the NCAA championships; Molly had gone along with them to Mexico and gotten left behind.

  The members of the UMass women’s track team, deplaning now in Texas, were under a different impression altogether. They thought they were going to have to do without one of their better sprinters because she was sick at home in Massachusetts, having come down with a sudden illness during their weekend celebration.

  The source of the sudden-illness story was Amanda Fiorelli, a hurdler from Dracut. But no one, including the coaches, had been able to confirm it by speaking to Molly directly.

  Molly’s roommates, Danielle Baskys and Heather Bishop, hadn’t seen her since early in the weekend when she had gone out for pizza with her team. Since then, her dorm bed had been empty and unslept-in, as far as they could tell. If she was sick, she hadn’t told them. They hadn’t been worried by her absence, because they had known she was going to the championships in Texas.

  But on Monday night, after she was supposed to have left with her team, the roommates noticed that the bag she’d been packing for the trip was still in their room.

  * * *

  —

  The coach of the UMass women’s track team called Molly’s father, from Texas.

  “Are you Molly’s dad? Can you fill me in on what’s going on? She didn’t fly with us today and I didn’t have your number. One of my assistant coaches is telling me she’s home, sick.”

  Tom strode across the kitchen with the phone to his ear and looked in Molly’s room. He opened the garage and turned the light on, seeing bugs and cobwebs around the lightbulb.

  “She isn’t here.”

  Coach Kershaw said, “This is unusual. I hope she’s okay.”

  Tom found himself reassuring her. He knew his daughter would be okay. “She uses common sense.”

  After talking to Kershaw, Tom tried to call his daughter. She did not answer. He told himself she might have lost her phone. He tried to go to sleep.

  A few hours later, while it was still night, he got up and drove his route to work. He sat in the long white truck outside the plant in Norwood in the dark.

  At four a.m., he was hunched over the iPhone, listening to it ring. Rain was spattering the windshield. The lot had turned to mud. The phone rang and rang and clicked and went to his daughter’s voicemail. “It’s your dad,” he said. “Call me.”

  He reached down with his powerful finger and delicately touched the red Disconnect key and remained staring at the phone, which, along with the magnificent truck, had been a gift from his bosses.

  When the men arrived at daybreak, Tom got out and walked with his head down through the drizzle to the hangar. He worked the morning, directing technicians on a snorkel lift.

  At lunch, he went outside again. The rain had stopped and the sky smoked and boiled. He made his way through the wet mud to the truck and called the college. An administrator told him that, due to privacy rules, she couldn’t talk to him about his daughter.

  * * *

  —

  Tom hurried to his truck when the men went home and started driving and drove without intending it all the way to Amherst. He steered through the town with its quaint, ski-lodge-style chalets and onto the state school campus. A hockey player let him into his daughter’s dorm and led him to her room—Tom had never been here before—and eventually, after waiting ninety minutes, he managed to speak with Molly’s roommates, who told him that they hadn’t seen his daughter.

  “Do you know where she is? Did she say she was going somewhere?”


  “We thought she went home. We figured she had a personal issue.” A whippet-thin girl, Danielle Baskys wore pancake makeup and hunched when she talked. Heather Bishop parted her hair with a barrette, was short, had a childish face, and her blouse was covered in embroidery. “I tried to text her,” Heather said. “Both of us were worried. We told the dean.”

  At eight o’clock that night, Tom made the decision to call the police. When speaking to the dispatcher, he stipulated that this was not an emergency.

  An Amherst police car met him in front of Molly’s dorm. Students in Minutemen sweatshirts stopped to watch their classmate’s father being interviewed by a young patrolman.

  “Has your daughter run away before?”

  “She’s never run away before.”

  “What was the name again? Hubbard?”

  “Hibbard.” Tom spelled it. “Do you want my number so you can reach me?”

  “You can give it to me,” the officer said.

  The policeman went away, the onlookers dispersed, leaving Tom alone amid the playing fields, in the middle of the campus, against the black backdrop of the woods. He checked his phone: Still no word from Molly.

  He got in his truck and drove back to the shore.

  The next morning, the cold woke him. He had fallen asleep in his clothes. He got the iPhone and looked up the number for the UMPD, called and spoke to Police Officer Jessica Ventra and said he wanted to report a missing student. Ventra said that a report had already been taken.

  Two days later, News Center 4 reported that the UMass police were declaring Molly Hibbard a missing person and the detective bureau of the Amherst Police Department was investigating her disappearance. Tom called Officer Ventra to ask if he should give his statement to a detective. Ventra told him to call Amherst Police Detective Dale Herrick. Tom did so. Herrick said he wasn’t in charge of the case; a detective named Paul Costa was. Tom tried to reach him, but Costa didn’t answer his phone, so Tom left a message. Costa didn’t return his call.