You Remind Me of Me (9 page)

But once they had been admitted into her house, the old man became emotional. “It’s so much the same!” he’d said. “I remember looking out of that window!” And then, when they walked into the living room, he started crying. “Oh!” the old man said. “I can picture mother sitting there in her chair, right there. I haven’t thought of that in years.” And he’d had to sit down, to get a grip on himself.

“Ugh!” Troy said. “How creepy!” And Crystal looked at him oddly, as if he’d missed the point of her story, or misinterpreted it.

“Not really,” she said. “I just thought it was . . . interesting. You know, about the passage of time and all.”

“I guess,” Troy had said then. But now, thinking of it, he still doesn’t think the “passage of time” is interesting. It’s invasive and spooky, and he thinks he will tell that to the adoption people if they call him again. “Look,” he’ll say. “You guys gave up your claim on me a long time ago. Signed, sealed, and delivered. That’s the end of the story, as far as I’m concerned.”

Sitting at the kitchen table, sleepless, he writes this down on a scratch pad. “Signed Sealed Delivered. End of Story.” He draws a cartoon talk bubble around the words, and then frowns, his tongue between his teeth, drawing a skull head, like he used to do when he was a kid. It’s a happy skull, and he attaches the talk bubble to its smiling mouth. He gives the skull a bow tie and a porkpie hat. Then he crumples up the paper and throws it away. He gets up and fishes around in a drawer for a particular glass pipe that he likes. He takes his personal stash of marijuana out of the freezer, and sorts a pinch of it free of seeds and branches.

He has done nothing wrong, he thinks, but he feels like a bad person. He feels like
something
is his fault, something that he cannot even name but which sits like a heavy bird in a branch overhanging his mind, and he would know what it was if he only thought about it long enough.

9

March 1966

A girl has disappeared from the Mrs. Glass House. Escaped—that’s what people are saying. Nora listens to the muttered bits of gossip in the cafeteria and the television room. She nods as Dominique repeats a version of the rumor, watching Dominique’s cold-looking, red-palmed hands at work on her knitting. “I guess they’ve called her parents,” Dominique says softly. “I hope Mrs. Bibb gets fired.”

“Mm-hm,” Nora says, and glances toward the window. Outside, the snow is knee-deep and dense, the first week of March, and no one seems to be able to explain how the escape was accomplished. They say, for example, that the girl left in the early morning, that her footprints were found in the snow, a soft series of indentations that led to the cast-iron fence, then ended. She must have climbed over the fence, people say—a six-foot fence with arrow-spikes at the top of each metal rail—and then perhaps jumped into the bed of a truck that was waiting for her, idling on the other side. Though there were no tire tracks. And though she was eight months pregnant, huge-bellied, not built for climbing fences and jumping into trucks.

“They don’t know how she did it, that’s the thing,” Dominique says, and Nora can see the way doubt and hope are struggling with each other in Dominique’s mind. “She must have been very clever,” Dominique says, uncertainly.

Nora is quiet. What is there to say to such stories? They seem ridiculous but beautiful. Who wouldn’t want to believe that a girl could plan such a gambit, worthy of a spy? Who wouldn’t want to believe that there was a boyfriend out there, an eternally faithful boy perhaps with a flatbed pickup, the exhaust pouring out as you poised yourself over the sharp spines of the fence, the boy calling
Jump! Jump! I love you, baby!
as your legs coiled and you prepared to leap into the crisp snowy air like a horse across an impossible chasm.

——

Now that a month has passed, Nora finds that she is no longer surprised when she wakes up. There is no momentary gasp of unfamiliarity when she opens her eyes and discovers herself once again in this room, in this place. She lifts her eyelids: The pillow curves away from her vision like a landscape, and when she rolls over, the ceiling spreads out above her, a textured plaster ceiling with blurry yellow smoke stains running across it like the waves of a mirage; a tiny pill of cobweb quivers in an air current. She is no longer sick in the morning, no longer weak with fatigue or sudden gripping hungers. In the low, early-morning light her desk and chair have emerged from the shadows to become solid, and the bare walls are dim but visible. Outside, the blizzard continues unabated—not fierce, but relentless. Fat snowflakes the size of her thumb flatten themselves against the windowpane and pile up against the sill, and she tries to picture that heroic girl trudging determinedly, fleeing in nothing but her smock and a thin autumn coat. It doesn’t seem likely.

The girl’s name, the missing girl, is Maris.
Maris,
another wishful pseudonym, Nora thinks, the kind of odd, awkwardly lovely name that parents never really give to their children but that girls wish for when they are a certain age, imagining that a name will make them a different person, a princess, an exotic island. It is a good name for a girl who has, supposedly, vanished into the night.

After a while she finds herself drawn to the window. There is the bare tree and the fence beyond, dark charcoal etchings against the undifferentiated whiteness of ground and sky. Her fingers melt the ice at the edge of the glass, and she blinks slowly, thinking of that boy coming to Maris’s rescue, his face eager with love, his cheeks ruddy in the cold.

She knows that it didn’t happen.

It’s more logical, Nora thinks, to believe that Maris committed suicide. Most probably, she has hung herself in her room or taken some well-concealed pills or slit her wrists. Mrs. Bibb and the other authorities have spread the rumor of her disappearance themselves so as not to upset or alarm anyone. They are trying to cover up the poor girl’s death by creating a diversion, but the truth is that there is no “Maris,” really. There is just another Ann or Kathy or Joyce, a parade of not very bright farm girls who are all in the process of realizing that their futures are sad and pathetic and ugly. They are not “Maris” futures. They are not “Dominique” futures.

Of course that’s it, Nora thinks. The girl is dead. But still she has to admire the cleverness of the story, the image of those footprints leading out to the edge of the fence and then ending.

——

Still, the more she thinks about it, the more she realizes that it’s just a myth, just an echo of a local legend that she has heard a number of times. She recalls reading about it in the newspaper one year around Halloween time—a ghost story of sorts that involved the disappearance of a child.

The legend itself is always presented, even in the newspaper, as a “true-life mystery.” There are names, dates, places that suggest the sheen of fact. Apparently, for example, this incident took place on December 31, 1899, on a homestead located some seven miles east of Little Bow. The family who lived there was named Ambrose, a young couple with two sons.

On that particular night, a small group of friends had gathered at the Ambrose place to celebrate the coming new year. They sang songs and made toasts while the two boys, aged six and eight, popped corn over the fire. Outside, a heavy snow was accumulating.

At about ten o’clock, Mr. Ambrose asked his elder son, Oliver, to get some water from the well. The snow had stopped falling, and a gibbous moon was visible behind the breaking clouds, casting a pale light over the open yard and the fields beyond. Mrs. Ambrose watched as her son trudged out in his new Christmas overshoes, the silver bucket swinging lightly in one hand.

But the boy had not been gone more than a few minutes when the gathered party heard him cry out for help. “Momma!” he shrieked once, shrilly, as if he were being attacked, and then the sound stopped abruptly.

The adults rushed outdoors, Mr. Ambrose carrying a kerosene lamp, though the whole snow-covered prairie landscape seemed to glow, almost phosphorescent, in the moonlight. There was no sign of the boy, no sound, only the miles of treeless fields and snowdrifts, wafting into shadow. The boy’s tracks ended about halfway to the well. There were no other marks of any kind in the fresh snow, only Oliver’s footprints, and the bucket, lying there on its side. The wind sent a soft curlicue of powder around it.

According to the newspaper, a subsequent investigation only verified the adults’ account of the incident. No further clues were discovered, and eventually the mysterious case was “quietly dropped” for lack of evidence. The last time Nora had seen the story recounted in the newspaper, they’d added a “human interest” element by consulting several experts, who suggested possibilities that ranged from the boy being carried off by eagles to being abducted by a UFO. One man, a private investigator from Denver, debunked the whole thing. He said that perhaps the boy merely made his way to the well in some playful way, so his tracks didn’t show—along a fence, maybe—and then had fallen into the well and drowned.

——

When she was growing up, Nora herself had never thought too carefully beyond the chill left by those clear, abruptly ended footprints. There was an emotional reality to the story, a confirmation of what she’d always secretly felt—that there was something tentative about her own existence, something tenuous. She could remember her father sending her out to do some chore after dark—garbage she’d forgotten to haul, a sprinkler not turned off—and how the thought of that old story would spread across her skin as she hesitated in the doorway, the growing certainty, as she stepped out into the night, that she wouldn’t ever come back from her errand.

Even now, sitting alone in her room, thinking of the story gives her an uneasy feeling. She looks at her wristwatch—6:40 in the morning, which is not a time to be superstitious and skittish. But still. The silence suddenly seems uncanny, and she throws back the covers and pads in her nightgown, barefoot, to the door, which is open just enough to be uncomfortable, just enough to feel as if someone could be looking in.

No one is, of course. The hallway is empty; it’s still almost an hour until breakfast and the quiet is perhaps even normal. Many of the girls here sleep so much they seem to be barely alive. Twelve, fifteen hours a day, she calculates. There is one girl in particular, “Ursula,” whom Nora has taken a vaguely scientific interest in—Ursula appears at lunch and dinner, groggy, eyes pinched, waddling with her enormous belly like a manatee. Nora thinks she is either carrying a grotesquely large infant or twins, but the point is that Ursula seems capable of sleeping anywhere. She sits in the TV room with her fat thighs spread open, her mouth ajar; she sometimes dozes over her food in the cafeteria, nodding with her fork and knife poised on her plate. Once, while they were in line to go out to a movie, Nora had seen Ursula asleep on her feet, waiting to be given her tin ring, her cheek nuzzled against her shoulder, her eyes fitfully closed, even as her feet shuffled forward in response to the other girls’ movements. Sometimes Nora wishes that she could be like this girl, that she could accomplish the next dreadful months in a kind of coma.

But it doesn’t work like that. Whenever she closes her eyes, there is something circling brightly, in the way that a june bug dive-bombs a lightbulb, swinging in unsteady circles and colliding with the side of the house, falling onto its back, buzzing wildly. There are thoughts of the dying girl in
The Collector
, thoughts of the other girls in the Home, Dominique and Ursula and the lost Maris, thoughts of Nora’s own unimaginable future. She sits at the desk in her room and tries to draw faces on a piece of paper, girls with big eyes and bow mouths, modeling contemporary clothing.

Despite herself, she thinks of her father, back in Little Bow. At 6:45, he would surely be up by now, drinking coffee, ready to leave for work.

In 1914, when Nora’s father was four years old, he was set aboard the Orphan Train. Nora’s grandfather was a beggar who pretended to be blind, and he brought his three sons into the New York Children’s Aid Society wearing gunny sacks, shoeless. Her father remembered that clearly: standing in a waiting room, aware of the stink of his own body, aware that the loose sack he was wearing was like a girl’s dress. The boys’ mother had died, but he didn’t know how. Maybe in childbirth, he’d said, musingly, as if she were the forgotten name of a town he had visited.
It all seems like it happened to someone else,
he told her.
It’s blurry in my mind.
He remembered, he said, that his father had hoped for money when he brought them to the Children’s Aid Society. His father was a crafty, bitter man, and had imagined that his sons might be worth something. He argued for a while with a horrified lady in a heavy blue-gray dress, demanding that the boys show her their muscles, show her they could work! And at last, she gave him some coins and he went away.

The lady had turned to them. “Oh, my poor children,” she had said. Nora’s father had flinched when she touched his head, but he recalled that her hand had been tender and slow, and that she had brushed back his hair.

“Are you to be my mother?” Nora’s father had asked, and one of his brothers had filliped him on the back of his skull.

——

As a sophomore in high school, Nora found the word
fillip
in
Webster’s New World Dictionary, 2nd College Edition
. It was a find that pleased her with its accuracy, a word she hadn’t known existed. “Fillip,” she said, and thumped her own head like a melon. She sat staring at the dictionary, filled with wonder. It was a word that her history teacher, Mr. Bosley, himself would have to look up. Nora jotted this down. She was doing this as a project for his history class, an extra-credit project that Nora had wanted to do well on, since she had been given a B on the last test. Mr. Bosley was the president of the local historical society, and had offered them a reprieve from his cruel tests if they presented him with well-documented interviews of elderly residents of the community. She had known that her own father’s story could help improve her standing in Mr. Bosley’s estimation. She was aware that she would need to attain a grade point average of at least 3.5 if she wished to attend the college of her choice. At the time, she was of the notion that her future hung in the balance. She wanted to be a famous and remarkable person—different from the rest of her family.

She wrote:

Starting in 1854, the New York Children’s Aid Society began the “placing out” or “free home” programs to give orphaned and deprived children a chance at a new life in the West. Among these children was my father, Mr. Joseph Doyle. In 1914, at the age of four, he traveled by train to the town of Brussels, Iowa. He had been one of thousands of New York street children which were called “street arabs,” but they were actually neglected and abandoned youths who roamed the city. The children made their way in the world by stealing, begging, and working as newsboys or bootblacks or coal shovelers. They spent their nights sleeping in alleys, doorways, and discarded packing boxes.

This is what she had been working on when she found out she was pregnant. The essay remains unfinished, a useless appendage, and she is aware that she will never know how it ends. She will never again interview her father about his experiences, she will never again get the chance to summarize his life and reach a conclusion.

But she knows she will always think about it. She will always wonder whether she would have discovered something about her father’s history that explained everything and she will imagine the essay that she could have completed for Mr. Bosley, an A+ essay, she feels. Her mind will pace in a circle around these little mysteries: her father, and the legend of that disappearing Ambrose child, and the girl at Mrs. Glass House—Maris.

Outside it continues to snow. Whatever escaping tracks had been left by Maris would have been covered a long time ago.