White Bird in a Blizzard (2 page)

Maybe it would be sweet there, but I’m not ready to go.

The walls begin to throb—electric, frozen. They are frost-furred, and contracting. I realize that if I can’t swim to the surface, these walls will embrace me to death—inevitably, but with affection. I struggle for a long time against them.

When I wake up, my father’s sitting at the edge of my bed.

“That was your mother who called,” he says, though I haven’t heard the phone ring. “She said she’s never coming back.”

I raise myself up on my elbows, “What?”

I ask it without expression.

He doesn’t answer.

He hides his face in his hands. “Oh, Kat,” he sobs, “what are we going to do?”

S
HE NAMED ME
K
ATRINA BECAUSE SHE WANTED TO CALL ME
Kat. She wanted to call me Kat because I was to be her pet. “Here, Kat. Here, kitty kitty kitty,” she’d call, and I’d come. Sometimes she’d even pat my head, scratch behind my ears.

Katrina. A kind of fancy cat. A Russian breed, perhaps. The kind of cat that decorates the couch just by sleeping on it.

So, for a while I thought I
was
my mother’s pet, and nothing but. When I got old enough to get the joke, I’d even purr for her, crawl to wherever she was sitting and rub against her legs.

But when I got even older, I’d glare at her in silence when she called me, and stand my ground. She’d hiss through her teeth, swat in my direction with her claws, and laugh. After a while, I couldn’t stand her. The sound of her crossing the living room in slippers made my head ache. And after I fell in love with Phil, just as I wanted less of her, she wanted more and more of me. I would sit across the kitchen table from her in the morning while she drank coffee and stared at me, and I thought, If I look up, this woman will swallow me whole.

But I was her pet for a long time, despite how quickly the time went by. I remember the sound of her voice, naming everything, when I still knew the names for nothing.
Woof
, she said, pointing at the neighbor’s dog scratching in our garden. It was big and blond, fur like polished straw, and wore a collar with tags that made silvery music under our kitchen window. It dug and dug. “Let it,” my mother said, even though it was ruining her petunias. “Let it figure out for itself there’s nothing there.”

Snake
, she said as she held me up to the terrarium at the back of the pet store where the air smelled of piss and vinegar and wood chips. The snake was asleep, coiled and breathing, like my father’s garden hose in the garage. I remember there were smudged fingerprints on the glass—round, human designs, perfectly reproduced, lines spiraling into tiny, receding eyes—as if someone had wanted to leave some evidence behind.

Bird
, she said as we were walking out of the pet store and one smashed itself against the bars of its cage in our direction—a pretty fist, white and screeching, something an old lady might wear on her hat to church on Sunday.

And I remember lying beside her in my parents’ bed one morning after my father had gone to work.

Frost had scribbled the windows, but I couldn’t read what it said. I couldn’t read at all yet. Whenever my mother opened a book, I had to trust that the story she told me was the one that was written there. And later, of course, when I could read, I’d find out that, more often than not, it wasn’t.

My mother had a sense of humor.

For instance, at the end of “Rumpelstiltskin,” the queen does not have to give her baby up to the manic, miniature man who demands it. The reason she’s wearing that beatific cookie-cutter smile is because she’s tricked him, learned his name, and gets to keep her firstborn, not because she’s just given the baby away.

She has black hair.

We are laughing.

It is a nest of feathered pillows here, both of us in white gowns. Silly, she pulls the bedsheet over our heads, and with the morning light streaming in, the sheet is a whole heaven above us, blinding me with brightness, and for a moment I’ve lost her in it. “
Mama
” I call, and the syllables rise from my mouth like small and cold balloons.

“Kat,” she says, “here’s Mama,” from somewhere beside me inside the nothing.

“Mama’s here,” she says, but I am lost in all that white, and have no idea where
here
is.

“W
HERE COULD SHE HAVE GONE
?” I
ASK MY FATHER OVER
dinner. I’ve broiled a piece of beef I bought this morning at the grocery store, a place I don’t remember having been since I was small enough to ride in the cart, and I’ve sliced it in half between us. He microwaved two potatoes, which hissed as they cooked. Together we’ve shredded some lettuce into a bowl and tossed black olives into it.

It’s the first real meal we’ve ever eaten at the dining room table without her, and it tastes good.

This afternoon, Detective Scieziesciez—whose name is pronounced, despite its hardness, despite the consonants hidden like barbs and thistles in it, simply,
shh-shh-shh
—called again, as he has every afternoon since we reported her missing, to ask if anything has turned up, changed, or suddenly occurred to us. Any more phone calls from her? Any postcards? Any lawyers serving papers?

But my father just shook his head sadly on the other end of the line, as if the detective could see him from the downtown Toledo office he works out of.

“Nothing,” my father said over and over, “nothing. Nothing.”

Then, hanging up, my father said, “Thank you, Detective
Shh-shh-shh
,” to the air, staring into it for a while like a man consumed with despair, a man wandering, lost, through a tunnel of despair wearing a gray prison uniform in his gray imagination.

My father shakes his head sadly now, as he did then, and grimaces at me across the table, a bloody thread of meat snagged in his front teeth. There is a familiar, watery-eyed expression on his face. He shrugs and looks down at his damaged dinner, torn to pieces on a plate.

“Your mother never loved me,” he says before he picks up his fork and stabs into it again.

T
HEY WERE AN ATTRACTIVE SUBURBAN COUPLE
. B
EFORE SHE
vanished, you might have seen them on a Wednesday night at Bob’s Chop House. As the hostess led you to your table, you passed theirs, shushing past their silence, glancing at their salads.

Both of them had dark hair only faintly tipped with gray. Hers was shoulder length and smooth. His was whatever length and style was fashionable then for men. Not too long in back, not too tall on top. Conservative, but in touch with the times. Perhaps he was wearing the dark slacks he’d worn to work that day—half a suit: He’d have left the jacket at home.

My father’s features were sharp—a sculpted nose and deep-set eyes. My mother’s cheekbones were high, and she was as slender as a girl. Flat stomach, narrow hips. Her face was always made up with a careful hand—the right tint of blush, maroon lipstick, brown eyeliner, and a beige base. The girls behind those makeup counters in the department stores she frequented knew her name, her favorite shades. Bisque, Berry, Chocolate Mousse—as if you could make a woman’s face into an elegant dessert eaten off a delicate plate. Good French perfume, too, eau-de-vie—you could smell it on her if you got close.

They were well-spoken. They seemed sincere.

Still, when you saw her seated across from him at Bob’s Chop House, both of them sipping rocky drinks, linen napkins on their laps, shiny silverware between them, she might look up at you as you passed by—her blue eyes flashing—and what you’d sense, if you sensed anything at all, was cold.

In truth, my mother disappeared twenty years before she did. She moved to the suburbs with a husband. She had a child. She grew a little older every day—the way a middle-aged wife and mother becomes ever more elusive to the naked eye. You look up from your magazine in the dentist’s office when she walks in, but you see right through her.

And the younger woman she once was, the one you might have noticed—she became no more than a ghost, a phantom girl, wandering away in a snowstorm one day.

Or she became
me
.

Maybe
I
stepped into the skin my mother left behind, and became the girl my mother had been, the one she still wanted to be. Maybe I was wearing her youth now like an airy scarf, an accessory, all bright nerves and sticky pearls, and maybe that’s why she spent so much time staring at me with that wistful look in her eyes.

I was wearing something of hers, something she wanted back. It was written all over her face. After I turned sixteen, I couldn’t bear to look at that face as it gazed into mine.

“Kat,” she said one early Saturday evening in September, standing behind me at the mirror in the hallway upstairs, “you look like I looked when I was you.”

I was wearing a tight black dress. Phil was taking me to homecoming. I was pinning my hair up over my neck, then letting it fall again. I had been thinking about him, how he might pull the pins out one by one in the backseat of his father’s sedan and bite my neck, unzip this black dress and slip it down over my breasts. I hated talking to my mother at all, but the worst was having to talk to her when I was thinking about sex—the sexual thought suspended, half exposed in the expression and smell of it on me. It seemed, those days, that my mother was always creeping up behind me just as I was leaning into an imaginary nakedness with him, as if she’d crept up after some wet trail I’d left. When there was long, moist kissing on the television, I had to leave the room. She was always looking too hard at that kiss.

“
What?
” I asked.

“I mean,” she said, “you look like I looked when I was your age,” and she wandered away, seeming dazed, as if Time had just snuck up behind her and knocked her on the head with a very hard pillow.

In December, she’d turned forty-six. There were a few gray strands where she parted her dark hair, and she plucked those out with tweezers at the bathroom mirror in the middle of the night when she couldn’t sleep. But she was still girlishly thin—still the same weight she’d carried down the aisle beside my father twenty years before.

There is a picture on their bedroom wall of them marrying each other. In it, my father looks sheepish and stiff.

But my mother already looks frantic, full of hate, wearing all that lightness—something white and exotic caught in an invisible net. That weight, or the absence of it, is draped in lace, and she drags a train of satin as long as winter, or the future, behind her.

And there is another photograph of her that has enjoyed a fleeting fame since she disappeared. Tacked to the bulletin board outside the supermarket, taped to the pharmacy’s plate-glass window,
MISSING
above the picture,
HAVE YOU SEEN ME
?:

Suburban housewife.

Mid-forties.

A whisper of frost wound through her dark hair.

My father took that photograph himself, the one on the flyers, the one they used on the local six o’clock news. It was Christmas Day, two weeks before she vanished. She’d just opened a gift he’d given her. She peered at it under the tissue paper, as thin as pared skin, and said, “Don’t worry, I’ll take it back.”

“Jesus Christ, Evie. What
do
you want?” he asked, the camera she’d just given him dangling around his neck.

“Surely not this,” she said. And he snapped her bitter smile.

Had they
ever
had any fun? Had they
ever
, as Phil and I did, groped each other in the dark, gotten lost swimming in each other’s bodies, that long kissing that turns your muscles to spilled milk, that numbness after hours of fucking, that blindness of eyes all over your body when the lights are out?

Whenever I tried to imagine it, I failed.

One early evening a few weeks before, when she and my father were out—perhaps at Bob’s Chop House—I went into their bedroom and stood looking at their bed for a long time. It was, of course, inconceivable that they slept together. Or, I mean, had sex. Their
sleep
was easy enough to imagine. My father like a snoring corpse beside her, his deodorized sweat sowing salt into their sheets. My mother’s tight lips parted loosely for a while, stardust gathering in the corners of her eyes before she bolted upright when the birds outside began to sing.

She was nervous, a light night sleeper who treated sleep as if it were an expensive dress that required many preparations to wear: glass of water on her nightstand, a room both warm and cool, a light on somewhere, but not on her—though, as I’ve said, all those afternoons right before she disappeared, there she’d be when I got home from school, folded up on her side, lost in the kind of sleep that swoops down on the sleeper in one big storm of wings and a funnel of feathers, hauling her off in its beak.

I knew what their
sleeping
beside one another for twenty years was like, but when I tried to imagine the two of them doing what Phil and I did, I saw naked statues in an art museum instead, a guard in an olive uniform standing in an archway warning you not to touch.

Their bedroom was as plain and orderly as a hotel room. A white spread, white curtains, oak chest of drawers. They had two closets, his and hers. Hers smelled like lavender soap. His smelled like leather.

I got down on my hands and knees on their gray carpet and looked under the bed. Nothing there. I opened the top drawer of the chest. Socks, a shallow dish of cuff links, a handkerchief with
BC
, my father’s initials, on it.

What had I wanted to find?

Some sign of their secret life.

A condom wrapper? A dirty magazine?

I knew where my father kept those—the dirty magazines, I mean: in a file cabinet in the unfinished part of our basement beside the horizontal freezer full of yellow chicken limbs and slabs of steak gone pale with cold—a chest full of frozen hearts—and his tool bench, with his bright and expensive tools, which had the dustless look of things not used.