You Remind Me of Me (13 page)

——

Both Kevin Onken and Judy Keene remember this as they watch the dog handler putting his Doberman through its paces. The dog smells an item of Loomis’s clothing, and then begins to explore the backyard area where Loomis was last seen, its bobbed tail stiff and quivering, its pointed ears erect.

He’s dead, Onken thinks, suddenly. He has read studies. In seventy-four percent of the cases involving children, the child is deceased within three hours of being kidnapped. It’s not just the studies though. It’s an intuition.

Someone has him, Judy tells herself. Maybe he’s with her daughter, who has performed a cruel trick. Maybe he’s with Troy Timmens after all; they haven’t been able to reach him by phone. Maybe he’s simply inside someone’s house, a friend, a neighbor, a stranger. But she is certain that he is somewhere. She has never been a superstitious person, but she is certain at this moment she can sense the presence of the child. His little soul. It is a small, steadily blinking pulse, like the light of an airplane moving across the sky at night.

PART TWO

13

April 16, 1993

A week before she died, Nora began to notice activity in the house again. Spirit activity. It was only little things at first: a pulse in the air, a feeling of being quietly observed, a quiver of movement behind her back. Late at night, she opened the door to the refrigerator and a cantaloupe fell out, rolling decisively across the kitchen floor as if guided, perambulating slowly across the tile before coming to a stop at the lip of the living room rug. During the day the telephone would ring and then stop—and not the usual sort of ring either, but strangely extended, the bell mechanism rattling and strangled, like an elderly singer trying to hold a high note for many measures. Of course, it stopped abruptly when she picked up the receiver. She stood there, holding the phone, and the bathroom door clicked open, hesitantly, as if a dog were gingerly nosing at it with her muzzle.

“Elizabeth,” she said.

The past had been imposing itself heavily upon her lately, so it didn’t seem so improbable that the dog might appear again in some form: a ghost, a presence. Or merely a feeling—tender, female, sad-eyed, tail tucked down with shy shame. Still sorry for what she’d done. Nora supposed that if she had any decency she would be horrified by such a visitation. If she were a real mother, she would have hated Elizabeth. But all that came was a soft melancholy. “Elizabeth?” she murmured, as the bathroom door swung open. She was prepared.

But there was nothing. Nothing she could see, at least, and she was aware again of the foolishness, the perversity of her feelings. An ache had opened up inside her as she thought of Elizabeth, an overwhelming and unaccountable longing. There was no way to account for love, she thought, or for sorrow, no way to account for the ridiculous thought that in some ways Elizabeth had been her first baby. Her practice baby, she supposed. Even after all these years, she could vividly recall holding Elizabeth in her arms—a shy, lethargic puppy her father had brought home for her on her fifteenth birthday, and she had cradled the dog in her arms until it had gone to sleep, its paws limp and turned inward, the bare pink stomach heaving gently with breath. “Elizabeth” had been the name of a doll she had loved as a child, and also the name that she’d always hoped to christen a future daughter with. “That’s not a name for a dog,” her father had laughed, but she’d only shrugged.

“Well then, she’s not just a dog,” Nora said.

——

“She didn’t mean to hurt you,” she told Jonah after the accident. She sat by his bedside in the hospital, but she didn’t look at his bandaged face, the single uncovered eye that glided vaguely in its socket, scoping the objects in the room indiscriminately. “She was just confused,” Nora murmured, as if this would be a comfort to him. He may have heard her voice through the haze of painkillers, but ultimately she knew she was only talking to herself. Mumbling, reassuring herself. Years later, she would see a murderer’s mother interviewed on TV, and she recognized that pinched quiver of sorrow and guilt and protective anger. “It was an accident,” the woman said. “He’d never . . . on purpose,” and Nora understood. She remembered the way her heart had clenched at the thought of her father beating Elizabeth to death, the way she’d sat dully in her chair in Jonah’s hospital room, feeling her soul compressing into a wafer, a thin, meaningless cardboard lozenge. Jonah had looked at her—one eye covered, the other, roving aimlessly, raking a blur across her face. “It’s locked,” he whispered feverishly, and she would never know what he meant, though it ever after felt like an accusation. Her hands wavered over him, but she didn’t know where—or if—to touch him.

——

Did he sense, in those first days that he was in the hospital, that at some level she hoped he would die? Did he know how fiercely she would have loved him if he
had
died, that he would have become a jewel she held inside her? Did he know that she could have endured his death more easily than his survival, his constant, living reminder of her failures as a mother, as a person?

Who knew? Who knew what Jonah was thinking—before or after? He was an eerie child even as a toddler: solemn, slow-blinking, big-eyed. In those few years after his birth when she was well, she was constantly having to reassure people—
No, there’s nothing wrong with him. He’s just spacey!
Very funny. Everyone laughed. Aged two, he trundled along in the child seat of a supermarket cart, talking to his own hand as if it were another child. A cute little act. He made his hand talk, flexing his fingers so the lifeline crease in his palm opened and closed like a puppet’s mouth. People stared at them, smiling, but also a little unnerved. There was something forceful, odd, about his intensity of involvement with this game, and she remembered catching his hand—the hand he was talking to—and pressing it down, holding it tightly.
“Stop it,”
she said, through her teeth. “That’s enough.” And he hadn’t protested. He looked blankly at the hand he had been talking to. “You killed my friend,” he said, in his high, clear, toddler’s voice, and it had actually made the hairs on the back of her neck prickle. He gazed at her, his eyes expressionless and owlish, and she said again, “Stop it. Right now.” She knew it was wrong, but she dug her nails hard into the flesh of his limp hand. If only he had started crying—she would have picked him up, and held him, and stroked his hair, and rocked him against her shoulder. She would have said, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, Jonah, Mommy didn’t mean to hurt you.” But he just stared.

“Ow,” he said at last. “You’re pinching me.” And then she stopped. She let her grip relax.

——

Lately, the more she thought about finding a way to die, the more such memories came stalking her. She watched the bathroom door swing open of its own accord, stood there waiting, expectantly, and after a moment lit a cigarette. Her hands shook, but she managed it: brought the lighter flame to the tip, drew in breath, so that the ash began to glow. She breathed smoke, and that made her feel calmer. She didn’t feel calm enough to actually enter the bathroom, but she could stand there, her arm folded across her chest, looking at the dim interior of the room dispassionately. Jonah would be home from his job at the old folks’ home by seven-thirty. If he came into the house, the spirit activity would likely cease.

She was aware that she was trembling, shuddering like someone who had been out in the cold for a long time. She was forty-three years old. It was just after five in the afternoon.

——

Occasionally she tried to pinpoint the moment when she began to lose her mind. The psychiatrists she had talked to had wanted to discuss her mother’s death; they had wanted to talk about what happened to her at Mrs. Glass House, but she’d always felt impatient with such conversations. Yes, it was terrible to lose your mother. Yes, it was very traumatic to give up a baby for adoption. But back then she had been doing just fine. For over five years she had managed, she had even been happy.

Look at the years 1966 to 1971. She aged from sixteen to twenty-one without any real problem. They might even be called the best years of her life—those years after she’d left the Home, those years before Jonah was born. It was easy to vanish into the world in those days, when the world was changing so rapidly, everything transformed and made new again. She had been discharged from Mrs. Glass House on a Monday, about a week after the baby was born, and she had known then that she wasn’t going back to her father. She was already gone when her father’s pickup pulled into the curving driveway of Mrs. Glass House, and when she called him from a pay phone in Omaha a few days later to say that she was okay, she had tried marijuana for the first time and her new friend Maris was standing beside her, the two of them giggling as she pressed her mouth to the receiver.

“You’ve always got a room here,” her father said, earnestly, and she said, “I know, Daddy. Thank you, I know.” She’d looked outside the glass wall of the phone booth to where a boy with a shaggy bowl of dark brown hair was leaning against his knapsack, waiting to take them to a place he knew, a communal house where they could stay for free. “I’m just going to be staying with a friend for a while,” she told him. The glass of the phone booth was marvelously cool, almost liquid when she touched it, and the boy looked in at her and grinned. A few days later, she and the boy would hitchhike to Denver, and then she would ride with four girls in a blue 1955 Nash to San Francisco, and then she would live in Fresno for a while. She didn’t call her father again, after that one time, for almost three years. She sent him postcards, little one-page letters decorated with cartoon flowers in the margins: She was happy, she wasn’t thinking of anything, she was getting along fine.

Sometimes she tried to think about those years more specifically. She once collected a stack of notebook paper and tried to write herself a timeline. She wrote “July 1966” at the top of one page, and “August” at the top of the next, and so on. Then she sat there at the kitchen table with all the blank sheets of paper before her, a dozen thin threads tangling and unraveling in her mind. She couldn’t put it in order, she realized. And even those things she thought she remembered, she found that she wasn’t sure of. She started to remember, for example, that she’d met a girl named Maris in the bus terminal in Omaha, a sleepy-eyed, witty girl with plaited hair, sitting beside an overstuffed knapsack. But then she remembered that “Maris” was the name of the girl who had disappeared from Mrs. Glass House one day in early March. Would there have been two girls named Maris? It didn’t seem likely, and yet she was certain that the girl she’d stayed with in the commune in Omaha was Maris. They’d been friends for . . . how long? When had she last seen this girl, what had become of her? She sat, staring at her blank sheets of paper.

It had troubled her all night. She’d been haunted, pacing the house at three in the morning, with the spirits sliding into place like shadows held for a moment under the beam of a flashlight. The house was full of ghosts, and she stood over Jonah’s bed and trained her flashlight across his sleeping face.

“Don’t . . . don’t . . .” he’d mumbled, his eyes pinched, brushing at the light with his hand as if it were a cobweb. “Quit it! I’ve got to sleep.” He didn’t know how bad things were.

——

She could stand it when it was only at night. But now that it was during the day again, she didn’t know. She stood outside the bathroom door for a long time, until her cigarette went out. Then she went back into the kitchen, thinking that she would make herself something to eat. She would feel better if she ate something, she thought. Some soup, maybe.

She found a can of soup in the cupboard and put it on the table. Then she found a can opener in a drawer and put it on the table beside the can. Then she found a pot and put that on the table, too. Here were three objects that were real. She didn’t look over toward the bathroom, where the door was still open. She didn’t hear the soft click of Elizabeth’s black nails against the kitchen floor.

“Okay,” she said. “Okay.” She looked at her palm. She moved her fingers, and the joint creases opened and closed like the chirping mouths of baby birds. A terrible notion. Why should the creases between her fingers remind her of mouths? Why should a thing be like another thing? A word came to her from long-ago days at school—grammar school? Junior high?

Simile,
she thought. You use the word
like
or
as
. My love is like a cherry. His cheeks were as red as apples.

It was a kind of craziness, she thought, that there were such echoes everywhere. It made the world indefinite, turning everything into a kind of cruel puzzle.

The handles on the drawer were like eyes.

The tree outside bowed its head like someone who was praying.

The top of a soup can was like a wrinkled, expressionless face.

Was it supposed to mean something? Was there a message in it? To receive these thoughts—similes, metaphors—was to draw closer to the spirit world. At least she hoped so. It was frightening to think that the world was simply a series of echoes, one object mirroring another randomly, emptily, a vast and multiform and mindless series of repetitions. The thought made her shudder, watching as a jellylike cylinder of cream of chicken soup slid into the little pot. She went to the sink and filled the now empty can with water, which she poured over the quivering gel of condensed soup. It eroded a little. There was a mouth she was thinking of, her fingers.

——

The question was, she thought, when had things started to go wrong? When had she started to lose hold of her mind?

In 1971, when Jonah was born, she had been okay. Twenty-one years old. Five years had passed since the first baby was born, and she was calmer. She was living with Gary Gray by that point, in Chicago. More or less stable. Gary had a job in construction, and they had a little place on the west side. She remembered her swollen belly, the difficulty she had kneeling down to plant petunias in the beds along the side of the house. She had been so big, she remembered, “a whale,” she called herself, and that was how they had first come up with the name—as a joke.

“I feel like a whale,” she said, and Gary Gray had made a quip about “little Jonah” in her belly. She’d called her father, to tell him that she was going to have a baby, and that she would probably be getting married. She just said this to make him happy. She wanted everyone to be glad for her. She wanted to be glad for herself. Being born, Jonah didn’t hurt her nearly as much as the first one had.