The Dangers of Proximal Alphabets (5 page)

I
know my mother because my father has given her to me. As concession for her not being around, he racked his brain for details that would soothe the lack, that would give me proof beyond photographs that she had existed. As such, they are the closest I have to memories of my mother, and though I cannot attest to witnessing her as an obscenely messy eater, I can smile upon the discovery of ketchup on my blouse and insist happily on its passed-down origin.

There is one story my father could not tell me, so I told it to myself: my mother in a loose nightgown, her hair falling around her, groggy, looking out the window that morning. She opened the refrigerator and noted that like always, milk was low but butter in excess. She was troubled by a dream the contents of which she couldn’t recall, only the unsettling conclusion. I had just learned to crawl and her body was tired from chasing me. There are variables, of course—what, exactly, was different about the way she
took her coffee cup down from the cupboard so that her hip rubbed the knob on the oven? How long did it take before she knew, and did she, with a distance she recognized as strange, for a moment find the lapping of the flames beautiful?

The memory I have, which I know is not a memory but rather something my brain horrifically constructed over and over again during my childhood, shows my mother between the stove and counter, a tight space a foot and a half wide, trying to get a better look out the highest window, which was small and situated unusually high. In some versions she is spying on our neighbor, a lonely, funny man named Warren my father later befriended as a solitary man himself; sometimes she is watching our cat’s slow attack of a bird. She turns because she thinks she’s heard me cry out in my sleep, forgetting her proximity to the stove.

The fire travels up the light cotton to the neckline (the material stretched with my tiny hands), catching on its way her hair, which is almost the same color as the flames. Her first reaction is slow; she just looks down and watches as her body grows warmer than it’s ever been, than she ever thought possible. She holds her palms out incredulously, she calls for my father, she notices for the first time that the too-bright yellow they painted the kitchen is something she loves fiercely, not just pleasant but
exquisite
. She calls for my father, she whirls, she remembers vaguely to drop to the ground but it seems as if the heat is lifting her, she is overwhelmed by the smell her hair is making. The cotton is clinging to her as if another layer of skin; she is
impressed by how quickly something foreign has become a part of her. She calls for my father. At this point, I am crying.

She calls for him, but he cannot hear her. His great hands clutch at lilac flannel sheets as if clinging to a rope; the sweet smell of liquor clings to him cloudlike, fermenting. In the kitchen, the flames have reached around to heart and lung. His mouth forms an O, waiting for the dream’s punctuation. It is Warren, our neighbor, who smells the smoke rising from my mother’s flesh and climbs in through the bottom window always left a crack open for the cat and calls 911 and rises my father, whose dreams have left him with an erection that falls promptly while he holds my mother’s limp and growing limper hand.

Since then my father has had difficulty sleeping, no matter how high the dosage of the sleeping pills or whiskey or a brief phase of cheap white wine that I gently teased him about. I grew used to his silhouette in my doorway, his eyes squinting to make out the rising and falling of my chest. Sometimes, I would wake to see him sitting at my desk, tinkering with the loose knob on the third drawer down or straightening my schoolbooks into piles; once, he had opened my algebra textbook and begun solving equations. I pretended to keep sleeping and hoped, for his sake, that he could find
n
.

When he calls late at night and feigns that there was something he was supposed to tell me but can’t remember just now, I pretend, for his sake. For mine, too.

T
he fall that followed the circus, the kidnapped girl from around the corner came to me in dreams on a yellow bicycle with a banana seat and streamers of thousands of colors. I was always waiting on the porch for her, feeling the cool stone against the part of my thighs my shorts didn’t cover, but when she came she was anxious and I’d always forgotten to get my bicycle from behind the house where I kept it, or my father began calling me from somewhere inside only to deny it once I’d found him. By the time I was on my bicycle, she was at least a block away, looking back at me with the half smile in the picture on all the missing posters. But in the dreams my calves strained, as if I were riding up a steep incline; there was grit in the air that caught in my throat and settled on my skin, adding pounds. The streets I knew had different names or didn’t intersect like they should, and while I struggled to keep up she weaved effortlessly, waving at the people I didn’t recognize, riding with no hands, showing off.

Within two full days of her disappearance, the case attracted national publicity. I was eye level with the magazine rack in the grocery store, and her face looked back at me from all the magazines; it was hard to understand that these were glossy pages being sold across the country, that any pain or person could exist past the limits of the park at the corner or even the diner on the boulevard with high, spinning seats that took an eternity to drive to. I wondered what it felt like to be a girl everywhere; I thought that if I was in her place, I might feel lucky.

When I told my dad this on the way home from the market, he grew very quiet and turned off the radio. He didn’t even respond when I saw a red Volkswagen pass and punched him in the shoulder. At home he sat me on the couch without even unloading the groceries, and I tried hard to listen and not think of the milk sitting in the trunk growing warmer. Dear heart, my father said, Anna is not lucky.

Did I understand what kidnapping was? A very bad person had taken Anna. He had come into her bedroom with a knife during a slumber party. He had tied her two friends up and put pillowcases over their heads. He had told them to count to a very high number and carried Anna out of the bedroom. Was that lucky? His throat caught and he put his face in his hands.

They weren’t sure where she was now, my father explained. Her mom and dad and the police were looking very, very hard, and so were many other people. There was a candle lit in the window of her house that would stay lit
until she returned. We could walk by and see it anytime I wanted. Would I like to bring flowers?

In the days and weeks that followed, I as well as the rest of the children in the neighborhood lost that sense of ownership we’d felt over the summer. FBI agents came knocking at the door, searching for information, holding up the flyer that was everywhere already. We were not allowed to walk home from school alone; I was not to walk to James and Jackson’s without an escort; my bedroom window was to remain closed and locked at absolutely all times; my door was to be left open. We were taught the term “stranger danger.” All vans white or even close to white in color were viewed as ominous—they being the official vehicle of Kidnappers and Bad Men everywhere—and fictional reports of seeing them echoed excitedly before the bell that signaled the start of class.

Anna was four years older and had just begun junior high. Though she was too old to join in on our games, she would sometimes smile encouragingly when she walked or rode past. She was thin and lanky like I was, with unruly brown hair she always wore in unkempt waves and wide red lips that curved over the gap in her slight front teeth. She wore baseball shirts with three-quarter length sleeves; on the few times I was close enough, she smelled to me like soaked-in chlorine and the thick, unpasteurized apple juice my father bought in the spring. I had spoken to her only a handful of times, which I replayed in my head obsessively. On the Fourth of July two months before, I had shared a whole ten minutes near her: she had taken the empty canvas
camping chair next to me, placing a soda can in its mesh cup holder and adjusting her fascinating preteen body with little sighs. Eager to impress her, I had mentioned how one time Jackson and I had got our hands on some illegal fireworks from Chinatown in San Francisco, leaving out the fact that Julia had confiscated them almost immediately. Anna had beamed briefly, politely, and emptied her soda can, the last of the cola tinkling as it escaped into her lips. In the middle of the street, my father lit a foot-tall brick and held his beer bottle up triumphantly as it rained its bits of slow, mournful yellow lights twelve feet above.

“As much as I like the fireworks,” Anna said then, “I like the smell afterward,” and sniffed as if to demonstrate. I couldn’t think of any response, and soon after she got up, leaving the aluminum can and a wake of her scent.

It wasn’t just Anna that had been stolen. The drugstores raised their Halloween aisles from wherever they’d been hiding for a year, and our street bore less and less resemblance to the kingdom we’d galloped through laughing and planning wildly. Autumn was decidedly adult: the nuanced colors—muddled oranges and browns, the uncertain gray of the clouds—were much harder to love, to understand, than the sticky pinks of popsicles, the confident thick greens of happy grass and plants, the haughty blue of the sky above it all. I halfheartedly indulged my father’s conversations regarding my costume that year, and on the night when the boys and their mother came over to carve pumpkins on our porch, I was distracted and without my usual grandiose jack-o’-plans. I took pleasure, instead, in
making deep, sharp stabs, cutting only sharp lines and extracting simple shapes from the flesh of the pumpkin, and removing its guts in fistfuls.

The man who’d taken Anna had waved a knife at her friends: I wondered if somewhere he was making similar incisions, stealing her flesh in isosceles triangles and parallelograms. In my imagination this was not painful for Anna, only confusing; she would look at her body and watch the light coming through, then behind her at strange shadows she cast. As a child who’d lost her mother, I had developed a morbid and skilled imagination regarding death and human pain that I felt somehow entitled to use.

The candle went on burning in the window of the Martins’ house, and on the night of Halloween her parents sat on the porch with candies of every variety: nougat and fruit-flavored hard candies, peanut butter cups in milk and dark chocolate, lollipops with blue gum inside them. Instead of cauldrons of dry ice, ghoulish motion detectors that cackled on a trick-or-treater’s approach, or an excess of gauze spiderwebs, their stoop was a tribute to the possibility of actual death. The flowers had not stopped coming and the bouquets bled into each other among store-bought sympathy cards and ones made of construction paper in seventh-grade homerooms:
WE MISS YOU ANNA
. Photographs cataloging twelve years of life were papered to the windows, the same smile replicated in different poses and ages.

Parents had to drag their children up the stairs; some of the littler ones cried. It was strange that her parents had done this; it was courageous or it was insane. Anna’s mother wore
a sedated smile, clutching the hands of parents and hungrily eyeing the cowboys and grim reapers; her father distributed candy in businesslike gestures, nodding and drinking out of a red plastic cup. When we approached, my father offered his hand but I shook it off. I maintained eye contact with the mother of the stolen girl until she broke it; I felt Jackson staring from beside me and cast him a look of reprehension.

As per routine, I spent Halloween night in the boys’ bedroom, where we traded caramel apple pops for watermelon Jolly Ranchers. James, with his unusual taste for the unpopular black licorice, gathered a wealth of them in his corner. His plastic pirate sword lay forgotten as he counted and recounted, until finally Julia came in and gave us ten minutes to change and brush our teeth and turn off the lights. From outside came the whoops of teenagers, the sudden acceleration of cars driven by those with new licenses, the
wee-woos
of a mechanical ghost slowly losing batteries.