You Remind Me of Me (25 page)

“I know it seems weird,” Jonah had said. “But it’s something that means a lot to me. I’ve been wondering about you for my whole life. I know that probably doesn’t make any sense.”

And Troy had looked at him bleakly. “It makes sense,” Troy said. “I just don’t know whether I can deal with it right now. To tell you the truth, I don’t really need any more complications in my life.”

“I can imagine that it’s a lot to take in,” Jonah said, but it wasn’t until that next day, with the letter unfolded in front of him, that he truly realized what Troy meant.
Please, Mrs. Keene, I am Loomis’s father and I love him. Have mercy on me.

Jonah recognized that kind of desperation perfectly, and sitting there in his trailer, with the pale morning light slanting in through the smeary windows of his trailer, it was almost as if Troy was sitting there beside him. Confiding. It was almost as if the letter had been meant for Jonah rather than Judy Keene.
Have mercy on me,
Troy said, and Jonah pictured himself reaching out and closing his hand over Troy’s wrist.

“I know you may not believe this,” Jonah imagined saying. “But I understand what you’re talking about.” He had lain his palm across the words on the letter. Could he say, “I really want to help you”? Could he say, “I want to be a brother to you”?

Probably not.

——

But he likes to think about it. Standing in the steadily ticking snow outside of Loomis’s window, he can vaguely see the shape of the child lit by a dim night-light, Loomis under the covers in his bed, his sleeping head peeking out of the spaceship-patterned comforter. Jonah puts the pad of his fingertips against the glass, watching the flowers of snow crystals catch against his knuckles and turn to water. He’s aware of the accumulation on his shoulders and hair, and he likes to think that at some level Loomis knows that his new uncle is watching over him.

Have mercy on me,
he thinks, and he wishes that the glass could turn liquid beneath his touch, that his hand could pass through, that the walls and windows of the world would give way to him. Just for this one time.

24

June 4, 1997

At three in the afternoon, four hours after Judy first noticed that Loomis was missing, the trail dogs arrive. There are several police cars parked in front of her house, and two heavyset men stand on the sidewalk with their arms folded hard against their chests, talking to Kevin Onken.

Judy is sitting on the steps in front of her house, very still. She feels a drop of perspiration slip from her hair and along the back of her ear, leaving a slow, cool track behind it like a snail. She shudders, watching as a man with a Doberman pinscher crouches on his haunches to look the dog in the eye, to speak to it, stroking its muzzle. Some of the neighbors have come out to stand on their front steps as well, shading their eyes; the few that have come up to inquire have been turned away, but she is aware of a circle of watchfulness around her. She observes as the dog man presses one of Loomis’s T-shirts to the Doberman’s nose, whispering to it. The dog’s ears lift into triangles, and its bobbed tail vibrates enthusiastically.

Soon she is going to get up and walk over to the men and ask for information. But right now she just needs to sit here for a moment.

——

Her arm has stopped working. She tries to lift it and nothing happens. She stares at her hand and wills her fingers to curl and grip. They don’t. The arm rests on her knee, and she reaches out cautiously to prod it with her finger. There’s no feeling in it.

She tries to assure herself that it’s just stress, that it’s some odd psychosomatic reaction to the situation. If it was a stroke or a heart attack, wouldn’t it hurt?

If she tells someone, they will call an ambulance, she knows. She will find herself in an emergency room, tended by condescending nurses. Whatever is happening back at home—whether Loomis is found, or whether he is dead, or whether clues to his whereabouts are discovered—all of this will be kept from her as she is poked and attached to monitors, as she becomes a body that is being examined and cared for. They will turn her into a willful child—as a grammar school teacher, she knows all their tricks, all the things about her personality they will want to control and subdue.

——

What is happening? A thick, balding man walks past her, stepping around her and into her house without saying a word, without a simple “May I?” And then she hears him talking to someone on a walkie-talkie.

“I guess they’re bringing the father over right now. They don’t have any take on the whereabouts of the mother of the child,” he says. She can see his slacks, some kind of brown cotton with an ironed crease down the leg, made by an old-fashioned wife, no doubt, or a dry cleaner.

“No, it was just the grandmother who was watching him,” the man says, and glances at her without much interest. His shoes are black and shiny, slip-ons, with leather tassels hanging from the tongue.

“I don’t know . . . I don’t know . . .” the man says. His eyes turn sidelong at Judy, as if he is considering asking her a question. “No, they didn’t get divorced,” he says, and lowers his voice a little. He must believe that she is hard of hearing, or that she is too confused to realize what he’s talking about. “It sounds like she just up and left,” he says, in a judgmental voice that makes Judy stiffen. “Drug addict of some sort, apparently,” he says, and makes a short, snorting “heh” sound, as if the person he is talking to has made a snide remark. “No,” he says. “I don’t think so. I’m looking at her right now. She’s just sitting there on the step. She looks pretty out of it.”

She wants to respond to this, to glare at this buffoon and let him know she can hear his spittley voice, but she is afraid that her voice will come out slurred, like a drunk’s. She is staring at the unresponsive arm, thinking very hard at it. Her brain sends a signal to her index finger, to lift, just a little, and she imagines that she sees it shudder. But maybe not. For some reason, she thinks of that famous Israeli psychic from the seventies, who was said to be able to bend spoons with the power of his mind. She focuses all of her brain’s energy on the finger, and she can feel her face growing red, the flesh of her cheeks quivering a little.
Go on,
she urges it gently,
Go on,
she thinks, but nothing happens. A watery tremor trickles through her, and she closes her eyes.

——

She is struck by the premonition that Carla is nearby. There is, somewhere at the edge of the yard, the hint of Carla’s voice, and Judy thinks:
Oh!
Her mind clutches loosely at the sound, and she imagines that they have found Carla, or that Carla has simply appeared, joining the circle of men and dogs on the sidewalk, introducing herself, flirting. Judy can visualize Carla standing there with her hip cocked, drawing on a cigarette, her hard mouth and sly eyes. “Why do you always look at me that way?” Judy can imagine her saying, and there is the high, shimmering tine of insect music from the trees, the sense of something encroaching. A pattern of sun beats against her eyelids through the dappled branches.

——

She is aware of herself dividing. There is a reasonable self, floating above her perceptions, a practical mind that observes the sensual organism. She is aware of herself as muscle and fat wrapped in damp skin, aware of herself as a dry, yellow-tasting tongue, aware of the matrix of sounds that spreads out from the center point of her body, the interstate of blood moving, the grasping tendrils of the spirit, seeking purchase.

The reasonable self knows that nothing at all is happening. She is just an old fat lady, sitting on a stoop with her eyes closed. Carla is not here, and besides, even if by some miracle Carla suddenly arrives on the scene, even if Judy opens her eyes and Carla is staring at her from across the lawn, there will be only enmity between them. She has known for a long time now that there will be no resolution or last-minute deathbed reconciliation; she has known that their relationship is a closed casket, sealed and buried and irretrievable. It doesn’t matter if she opens her eyes or not. Carla, her real daughter, won’t be there.

And yet there is still the hint of a voice, still the thick flutter of illogic, and she finds herself picturing Carla not as she would be today, but Carla as she was, Carla, aged fourteen or fifteen, her hair teased and moussed, her makeup overdone, wearing a shimmering silver shirt and faux leather pants. A silly, reckless girl, Judy thinks, a girl without qualities, a girl who needs a stern hand. Her child, and yet so different from her that it seemed as if a mistake had been made.

“Do you know how much it hurts me when your teachers call to complain about your behavior?” Judy used to say. “Do you like humiliating me, is that it?” And when Carla had said nothing, Judy had continued, as if to herself. “It really makes me feel so depressed,” she said. “A lot of these people are my colleagues, do you know that? People I work with, people I’m friends with, and then to have you behaving in such a way in their classroom! It’s so disrespectful, Carla, and you know, I don’t feel like you love me very much, when you act this way. If you really loved me, you wouldn’t keep embarrassing me.”

Carla used to cry a little, after these incidents. She would go to sleep with her stuffed animals encircled in her arms, a blanket pulled over her head. Quick to blame others.
I never did anything. It’s not my fault. They’re lying. They’re trying to get me in trouble.
And then shortly afterward, there were the drugs, and the arguments about that, and the concealment of the drugs, and the drug rehab clinic that she’d finally decided on.

“Mom,” Carla said, “please don’t make me go.” That was the last time Carla had called her Mom, Judy thinks. “I’ll do better,” Carla said. “I swear I’ll listen to you from now on.”

——

Judy can say nothing now. She just sits there on the stoop with her eyes closed, with her arm motionless, pressing her tongue between her teeth, remembering that drive to the clinic—Carla in the passenger seat, her face turned toward the window, occasionally making the small, froggy sounds of swallowed weeping. Judy had believed, at the time, that the treatments at the clinic would remove the drugs and the alcohol and the recalcitrant desire for them the way chemotherapy burned away a cancer. She believed that her daughter would be returned to her, whole and clean and grateful, and thinking this she had hardened herself to Carla’s whimpering.

She never would have expected that her daughter would, instead, become worse. In rehab, Carla would meet a new friend, a girl who’d teach her easy pathways to new types of drugs; in rehab, Carla would stubbornly refuse to admit that she was “powerless” against addiction, and the therapist would call Judy in, and they would both sit there, explaining and insisting and steadily beating her with their words, until she admitted, at last, her eyes blazing and puffy with tears, that she was “powerless.”

For a flash, Judy can feel Carla’s fingers against her wrist, her flushed face against Judy’s neck. She holds a three-year-old Carla in her lap, reading to her, singing to her. Television is limited, in their house, to educational programs. They drive all the way to Denver, to go to art museums, listening to tapes of classical music in the car. Her IQ was tested—well above average, not quite genius level but close.

“You can be anything you want,” Judy said. “I just want you to be happy.”

And Carla, perhaps age ten, had gazed at her suspiciously. Even then, Judy had known that things between them would end badly. “You’re capable of so much,” Judy said. “That’s what I don’t understand about you. Why do you enjoy sabotaging yourself?”

——

“Mrs. Keene?” someone says. “Are you all right?”

——

She doesn’t say anything.
Admit that you are powerless,
Judy thinks, and even now it is not something she could bring herself to do. She
will
get up, she thinks. She
will
tell them that Loomis’s disappearance has nothing to do with her daughter, or, for that matter, her worthless son-in-law, who they are discussing in the living room, just at the edge of her hearing. She
will
open her eyes, she thinks. And maybe Carla will be standing there.

——

“Mrs. Keene?” someone says again, and she tries to pull her eyelids open.

——

She grimaces: a terrible headache. She is touching her left tricep with her fingers, and when she lifts her eyelids the light hits her in a sharp, painful flash. She is aware that her eyes are beginning to leak tears, blurring her sight. The left eye appears to be blind. A large black dot grows over her vision like an iris, dilating and dilating, a thickness of spots, like a swarm of bees. She shuts the eye and it seems to go away.

She can feel her body listing, slipping into the empty air beyond her shoulder.

What if she’s dying? she thinks.

What if she never knows the end of the story? She shudders, and her mind continues to lurch forward into the future, that simple expectation of time passing—another moment, and another moment. It seems impossible that it will abruptly cease. It seems impossible that you will never know what happens next, that the thread you’ve been following your whole life will just . . . cut off, like a book with the last pages torn out. That doesn’t seem fair, she thinks.

PART THREE

25

June 1966

Despite herself, Nora can’t help but imagine names for the baby. She likes boys’ names—old-fashioned, heroic ones: Agamemnon, Pyrrhus, Octavion, Aristedes. She has been reading a book about the ancient heroes of Greece and Rome, and it makes her sad that people can’t be given such names anymore.

Octavion Doyle,
she thinks as she walks down to the cafeteria for supper.
Jupiter Doyle,
and she smiles vaguely to herself.
Zeus.

She is aware of the other girls moving with her down the hallway but she doesn’t acknowledge them. They are dressed as she is in cheap smocks, their old perms and hairdos now growing limp and fading; they smell of sleep and old cigarettes, and the acrid musk of their private parts.

She has watched the girls who have gone before her; she has seen how it works. They fade and fade, until at last they begin to go into labor, and then they are never seen again. She knows: They give birth to babies, babies that childless parents are already waiting for. And then, pregnant no longer, they are returned to their former lives, or to new lives in distant towns, where they can forget. She knows this is what happens, but it’s becoming harder and harder for her to believe. Once they’re gone, it feels as if they are dead.

As they close in on the cafeteria, her baby tells her that he is hungry. She puts her hand to her belly as he lolls, moving his limbs inside her; she feels the anxious urgency of his squirm, his eagerness, and she whispers under her breath:
shhh.
For a moment, he quiets, though he continues to send tingles of anticipation through her, eager for the food.

She can’t say why, but she knows that it’s a boy inside her.
Hector? Alexander? Theseus?
Whatever his name, he is a clearly masculine presence, and in some ways that is a comfort. She wouldn’t want to have a girl, she thinks. There’s too much trouble, too much sorrow that goes along with it.

——

She eats in silence at the end of the table, not even thinking about the food, really—a patty of meat in gravy, a side of canned green beans, a dollop of whipped potato, applesauce—she shovels it in, automatically, and the baby’s urgency calms. At the other end of the table others are chatting, something about rock bands, but she sits there with her face lowered, steadily spooning the potato whip and applesauce into her mouth, making small involuntary sounds, muted sighs of satisfaction.

Across the table one of the newer girls regards Nora warily, with a reserved air of disapproval. Table manners, Nora thinks. She’s been making sounds in her haste to get the baby satisfied, smacking and chewing and grunting: disgusting. She lifts her head long enough to give the new girl a direct, baleful stare. She watches as the girl twitters silently, unnerved, but she doesn’t maintain eye contact. The new girl looks down at her own food deliberately, her lips pursed, and brings a small spoonful of applesauce to her mouth as if she is eating a pearl.

Nora doesn’t care. She has given up on even the simple basics of social contact. After Maris vanished, after Dominique had gone into labor, after the baby itself had become her primary human connection, she didn’t feel the need to engage in the empty rituals of greeting and polite time-passing. It seems pointless, she thinks. She can spend her time more fruitfully reading, or simply communing with the developing creature inside her—its movements, its pleasures and displeasures, the early rudiments of its thoughts traveling through her body. It says,
I’m hungry. I’m restless
.
I’m happy
. She can feel these things as clearly as if it had spoken to her directly.

Sometimes she will open her eyes at night and she will be aware that it is awake.

You wouldn’t really give me away, would you?
it thinks, curled up inside her, its limbs moving softly.

And she stares into the darkness.

Why are you so stubborn?
it murmurs, plaintively.

——

She doesn’t know the answer to such questions. Only a few months ago she would have wished this thing, this baby, out of existence without a second thought. She remembers punching herself in the belly; she remembers tasting bleach, which she had heard could induce a miscarriage; she remembers how adamant she’d been with her father, who’d argued with her, gently, sorrowful, befuddled. He thought she should get married, and he’d wept when she admitted that she hadn’t told the baby’s father. “Honey,” he said, “that’s not right. That’s not right. Believe me, he’d want to know what’s going on. You just have to give him the chance.”

And she’d looked at him sternly. Didn’t he get it? What would the future be for her? Married at age sixteen, two high school dropouts, stuck forever in Little Bow, South Dakota, everyone’s lives ruined. She felt her teeth clench. Why would she choose that for herself? Why would she force anyone else to accept that life?
I want what’s best for the baby,
she’d told her father,
and that’s not having me for a mother.

——

But now, sitting in Mrs. Bibb’s office, less than a week before her due date, she is less certain. She watches as Mrs. Bibb looks at some papers on the desk, and then up, frowning.

“I’ve been concerned about you, Miss . . . Doyle,” Mrs. Bibb says. Nora sits in the large wing-backed chair across from Bibb’s desk, where once, long ago, Nora and her father had listened to Mrs. Bibb’s recitation of the rules of residency. “There’s been some concern about your comportment lately. Do you know what I mean by the word
comportment
?”

“Yes,” Nora says. She lets a thick lock of her hair obscure one of her eyes like a patch, and lowers her head.

“You’re a very bright girl,” Mrs. Bibb says. “I’ve always known that. And I felt that I ought to talk to you, because these next few weeks are going to be extraordinarily difficult.” She purses her mouth, folding her hands deliberately on the desk, left hand on top of right, so that her own, real golden wedding ring glints. “Your body is changing, Nora,” Mrs. Bibb says. “You’re going through a lot of physical changes that can also affect you . . . psychologically. And when that happens, very often girls will begin to have second thoughts.”

“Well,” Nora says.

But Mrs. Bibb clears her throat. “I wanted to say, Miss Doyle, that I admire your spirit very much. And I wanted to affirm once again that you are doing the right thing. I’m not at liberty to say much, but I can tell you that there are several very loving, childless couples who are waiting to give this child a real home. It’s such an act of generosity, Miss Doyle. Such a gift for this child. But I know that it must be a struggle for you.”

“Well,” Nora says again, and her throat constricts. “What . . . what if I’ve changed my mind?”

Mrs. Bibb smiles, benignly. “You haven’t changed your mind, Miss Doyle,” she says. “You may be going through some changes in your body’s chemistry, but that is natural, and it will pass, I can assure you. You’ll be able to get on with your own life, and you’ll have given this child you’re carrying an opportunity that it simply couldn’t have if it were being raised by an unwed teenager. We agreed on these points, I think, when you first came to the Mrs. Glass House. Didn’t we?”

“Yes,” Nora says at last, and the baby shifts reproachfully inside her.

——

Even though she has sworn to herself that she wouldn’t, even though she continues to make a concerted effort, she has been thinking about the boy again.

Wayne. She lets his name pass through her mind, and his face comes trailing after, unbidden. Wayne. His dark curly hair; his long face, handsome for a farm kid—the prominent nose, the earnest brown eyes, the uncertain mouth—each detail emerging from the darkness like the smile of the Cheshire cat.

She hadn’t thought that she was in love with him. Nevertheless, here he is again, a shadow leaning over her thoughts, a pang: Wayne Hill, sly-smiled wrestler boy who sat behind her in ninth-grade math. Younger than she was by almost nine months, not as tall as she was, unsophisticated. Why would she fall in love with Wayne Hill?

But she
was
in love with him, she thought. A little. At least it seemed so now, from this distance. Now, a hollow ache shudders through her as she thinks of him. It feels as if somehow he might have saved her, he might have saved her and their baby, if only she had told him.

——

She was not like her classmates, the other fifteen-year-old girls in her school who seemed to fall in love as if it were some sort of pastime, girls who spent hours and hours mooning over boys or photos of celebrities. She wasn’t the type, she told herself. For one thing, she wasn’t interested in the insular, clubby world of a small-town high school, with its after-school groups and cheerleaders and people “going steady”—all the fake rituals and social codes were vaguely repulsive to her; she preferred to remain outside such concerns, more interested in the lives of people she read about in books, more interested in art, in getting good grades, in the future—in which she might become an actress, or a painter, or a journalist. Each of these seemed like a real possibility, distanced from her only by hard work, and luck, and time. She had already begun to send away for information about various colleges, just so she could read their brochures and course catalogs.

Of course, she was outside of the world of high school whether she wanted it or not. Her life, her family, was too complicated—she and her father lived a few miles from town, and, since her mother’s death, he was depressed; she took care of him, and even if she’d wanted to, she couldn’t stay after school for the extracurricular activities. Her father came home from work and ate the supper she’d made for him. He was tired, and usually wanted only to drink his beers and sit in his room. He wasn’t going to drive her into town for a football game, or a meeting of the Art Club, or to the movies where many of her peers went on their dates.

In any case, she wasn’t entirely sure what boys she might have dated. She was the only person in their school who was mixed race, and she thought that this, too, put her outside of the main body of students. Indians and white people kept separate for the most part. They didn’t date one another, certainly, and so, while boys of both races looked at her, appraised her, flirted sometimes, no one had ever asked her out. They weren’t sure, she thought, what category she fit into.

——

The summer after she’d turned fifteen, the summer between ninth and tenth grade, she had persuaded her father to take her into town on his way to work so that she could go to the library, or the swimming pool. It was only one day a week. It was boring out in the country alone, and he hadn’t objected too much to the idea. “Just stay out of trouble,” he would always say, but he’d trusted her. “You’re such a responsible girl, Nora. If it wasn’t for you, I don’t think I’d still be alive. That’s the truth.”

That was the summer she started seeing Wayne Hill. She knew who he was, of course. They’d had classes together, they even rode the same bus to and from school—Wayne lived on a farm a few miles beyond her house—but they’d never really spoken before. He was an athlete, somewhat of a smart aleck. The only thing that surprised her was that his name consistently appeared on the honor roll, along with hers.

And she was surprised, that day in June of 1965, to encounter him at the library. He didn’t seem like the bookish type, but there he was, running his finger along the spines of books in the Fiction section, in the same concave of bookcases she was standing in. He looked at her curiously, and their eyes met for a moment before she glanced back to the shelves. After a minute, she was aware that he’d moved closer.

“You look like you could be dangerous,” Wayne said, under his breath. “Did anyone ever tell you that? Like maybe you’re a spy, or an assassin.”

She didn’t say anything for a moment. Then she shifted, irritably. “I just want to look at these books,” she said, and he grinned at her, a wolfish grin, his lips jutting out a little, hearty and cocky and tinged at the edges with a hint of sadness.

“No problem,” he said, and his eyes seemed to glint at her. “Have you ever read any Ray Bradbury?”

“No,” she said, stiffly.

“You should,” he said. And he reached down, right at the level below her waist, and pulled out a book. “Here,” he said. “
A Medicine for Melancholy.
I bet you’ll like it.”

She hesitated for a moment, and then took it from him.

“I didn’t mean anything negative when I said you looked like a spy,” he said. “I just meant . . . you look like an interesting person. You look mysterious.”

And she’d met his eyes, frowning. He was a compact, broad-shouldered, muscular boy. His eyes were a very strange pale, milky blue, like one of those Alaskan sled dogs.

——

For a few weeks they had met at the library, just to talk. Then they’d met at the swimming pool. Then they’d gone out, trailing their towels and street clothes, into the bushes just beyond the swimming pool fence. To kiss—to touch arms and brush their legs against each other—their skin still damp and warm and smelling of chlorine.

“I want to tell you something,” he said. “I’ve been in love with you for a long time.” And he laughed, beaming his grin at her. “Ever since we started riding the school bus together, I’ve been wanting to talk to you. You know? Every time you got on the bus, I would just get this . . . glow . . . in my heart. I know that sounds corny. You know, I meant it when I said you look mysterious. That’s what I always thought.”

In July he began walking to her house during the day. His family farm was six miles from the little yellow house where she and her father lived, and he would make excuses for his absence from chores that he was expected to perform. He would usually arrive in the early afternoon—trudging along the sides of gravel roads, crossing the long pasture behind her house.

Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. Her father was still at work, and she was home alone with the puppy, Elizabeth. Nora had been trying to train the dog, to teach it tricks. She would bark furiously when Wayne came up the driveway, but then when Nora snapped her fingers Elizabeth would sit. And after a few times, Elizabeth didn’t bark anymore. She was used to Wayne.