Vanished

CHAPTER 4

Sitting in the sunny perfection of her tiny mock- Mediterranean villa, I stared at my mother. “What?” I felt like someone had punched me in the chest and pushed me off a cliff and I was hanging in the air like Wile E. Coyote, waiting to fall. I stammered, shook my head, and kept repeating myself. “What, what, what?” It just didn’t make sense. My mind rejected it and everything sensible screamed in my head that it wasn’t—couldn’t be—true.

My mother grabbed my nearest arm and shook me. “Baby, stop that! You’re a trouper—we just go on; we don’t go to pieces over this sort of. thing.”

“ ‘ This sort of thing’?” I shouted, yanking my arm out of her grip. “What sort of thing? Suicide? Holy shit, Mother!”

She slapped me. “Don’t you talk like that, Snippet! I won’t have it! You’re not a filthy little street urchin to be using words like that. Buck up!”

I knew that phrase, that tone. What she meant was “Shut up and don’t embarrass me,” but I didn’t see anyone around who needed to be impressed by my restraint. I articulated with venom and care through my confusion and a sudden flare of rage. “I will not buck the fuck up, Mother. This is not an audition. I don’t need to be a little lady. You just said my father killed himself! Don’t you think that deserves a bit more explanation than ‘buck up’? You always told me Dad’s death was an accident!”

She rolled her eyes and waved my upset away. “Drama, drama, drama. He was a dentist. Dentists don’t have accidents. What would they do? Slip with a drill? Die from a leak in the laughing gas? He blew his brains out. It was just so. nasty, I never wanted to tell you. There. Is that awful enough for you?”

I just kept gaping at her. “What the hell.? My God, Mother. Do you know why? Did he say? Did he leave a note? Something?”

“He left a note, but it didn’t make any sense, and I don’t know why he did it. He was depressed. All dentists are depressed. If I’d known, I’d have married a plastic surgeon.”

I was flabbergasted. What could I say? I didn’t remind her that husband number threehad been a plastic surgeon. No doubt a contributor to the fact she looked closer to forty-nine than fifty-nine. I didn’t scream or throw things, even though they both sounded like more reasonable reactions than her unreal calm.

“He had nightmares,” she went on. “Your father was losing his mind. I should have seen it coming. ”

I was still staring, shaking my head, and not sure what to think, but my investigator instincts started kicking in. “How?” I asked in a quivering voice. “What did he do?”

“He stopped talking to me.”

I couldn’t fault him for that. I’d stopped talking to her for years.

“He got quieter and quieter and sometimes he’d just. leave.”

“Go out of town without telling you, go on benders. what?”

“No, I mean he’d sneak away. He’d just leave the house and I didn’t know he’d gone. Then he’d come back and sometimes I didn’t know he’d come home. He was so odd. spooky even, by then.”

“He wasn’t always odd?”

“Oh, yes, but I thought it was kind of charming at first. Like the way Lyle was charming—you remember Lyle?”

“The guy with the dogs? The TV writer?”

“Yes. That Lyle.” At least she hadn’t married him.

He had been a very funny guy—he’d made me laugh even when I was still crying over my dad and on the days my whole body ached from dance classes and dieting—and he’d had two ridiculous retrievers he’d called “the labradork twins.” We’d moved in with Lyle and the labradorks about six months after my father died. Normally the dogs had the run of the house, but Mother had put the dogs in the yard when one of them started using the carpet as a toilet, and that, for some reason, had been inexcusable to Lyle—the expulsion, not the piddling. When he’d come home from work and seen the dogs in the yard, he’d hauled back and smacked her hard enough to knock out one of her front teeth. She’d packed both our bags and we were gone within fifteen minutes, me carrying her knocked-out tooth in a glass of water while Lyle ran after us, babbling, “I didn’t mean it, Verry! I’m sorry, Verry!” She’d mailed the glass back in one of my tap shoe boxes two days later. The Lyle incident had cemented her aversion to pets; we never had another dog, cat, bird, or even a fish after that.

It had been the first time we’d lived with a man who wasn’t my father, but it wasn’t the last, though she’d held off on marrying any of them until I was in high school. I’d always been a better judge of their characters than my mother had, which hadn’t made our relationship any easier. But no matter how rough it had gotten or how horrible the man-of-the-moment had been, I’d stuck it out. And to give her credit, she never let any of them physically abuse her or me again.

Then it hit me like a brick that I’d fallen into a similar pattern with boyfriends for a while myself, not drawing the line until one finally belted me. At least I’d stopped putting up with that. Mother didn’t seem to have learned to stand on her own feet and refuse to take that treatment just so she could have someone around. Even as I steamed at her, I felt terrible and even more confused and upset. Was I supposed to feel better or worse at discovering our mutual flaw? Enlightened? I didn’t feel better, that was for sure. I was still angry and I still didn’t like her.

While we’d been staring at each other and remembering the past, the sun had moved higher into the sky. Now its rays hit the glittering white stone of the terrace from a harsher angle, reflecting glare into our eyes and doing unkind things to my mother’s face. She cupped her hands over her brow and glanced around as if searching for shade, pursing her lips in disapproval at the sun’s temerity.

“Let’s go inside,” she said. “I think I have some of your father’s things still, down in the junk room. We can talk while you go through them.”

I glared at her. She ignored me as she flitted out of her chair. I hadn’t come to help her clear out her collection of boxes. I hadn’t come to help her at all, and I wasn’t feeling any more generous now than when I’d arrived—maybe less. I wasn’t just bewildered by this revelation; I was pissed off at being lied to for years. I longed to tell her off, but I was piqued by the thought that there might be clues inside the dusty cartons in the basement—such as it was. Dad committing suicide, while it was shocking and upsetting, didn’t seem like much of a triggering event for what had happened to me. How were they connected, if at all? And what had he been doing in my dream? Suicide couldn’t be the deciding factor—could it? — but what about the motive? Or perhaps some other event associated with it was the key.? Those might be worth discovering, even if it meant a day or two sifting through the accumulation of castoffs. It couldn’t be any worse than the days I spent in the County Recorder’s Office, trolling for information on witnesses or other people’s prospective spouses and employees. Except that I would have to deal with my mother while I did it.

I trailed her inside and down a switchback staircase to a small room at the bottom of the house. It was almost isolated from the rest of the structure, stuck on like an afterthought that had been cobbled up and jammed on at the last minute when someone realized they desperately needed a place to put the construction supplies. It was such an oddly shaped space that I couldn’t imagine it had ever had any other purpose than being a place to stash unused items. Or overworked maids. Mother unlocked the door and groped for the light switch, leaning in through the doorway as if something inside would leap at her if she stepped over the threshold.

The light snapped on with a pop, revealing several dozen heavy-duty cardboard boxes. They were stacked a bit haphazardly from wall to wall, two or three high, taking up most of the room except for a ragged triangle starting at the door.

My mother made a vague wave of her hand at the room. “Your father’s things are in here someplace.”

I sighed with irritation. She acted like he wasn’t a person, like he was nothing but this collection of junk that she’d shoved down here and forgotten. I was being irrational, I knew. Dad had been gone for twenty-two years and this really was just a load of things, not a human being. I told myself to let go and start digging.

I hung my jacket on a hook beside the door and walked deeper into the room, taking mental stock of the piles and labels on the boxes while I scanned for any sign of something Grey and gleaming among the heaps. Mother walked out and returned with a handful of white cloth towels. She used one to dust off a small stepladder, which she then unfolded and perched on, setting the rest of the towels on the top platform beside her. She put her elbows on her knees and rested her chin on her hands like Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. All she needed was a long cigarette holder and a little black dress.

I kept turning my head side to side, looking for the telltale gleam from the corner of my eye that would indicate something Grey in one of the boxes. I saw something blink and die out and then blink again. I pushed deeper into the maze until I found a stash of three old boxes shimmering with an edge of Grey. Two of them were marked PHOTOS. The other was marked ROB’S OFFICE. That was my father’s stuff, I thought, and felt a quiver of indecision. There was no guarantee that whatever had winked at me was important—lots of things have a trace of Grey—but I had to start somewhere, and this looked more likely than most of the boxes, if I really wanted to know. And I did, didn’t I? Cary had said I should look.

“You know,” my mother suddenly declared, “your father was an odd duck.”

“Yeah, you said,” I replied, flipping open my pocketknife to cut the tape on the box of office paraphernalia. “If he was so weird, why did you marry him?”

I could almost feel her frown before she dismissed my hostile tone as flippancy.

“Why? Sweetie, I lived in Montana! I wanted out of that place so badly I’d have married a serial killer to get away. Your father—who adored me—had a professional degree and was heading somewhere far away from three hundred acres of cow flop. I have never been one to look gift horses in the mouth.”

“Until they clock you one,” I muttered.

“What was that?” she snapped, narrowing her eyes to glare at me from her perch.

“Seems kind of mercenary. If you thought he was a freak and only saw him as a meal ticket, why’d you stick around?”

“That’s not what I meant. I liked your father. But he had strange ideas sometimes and they got stranger after you were born. That’s when he started being mysterious and sneaking off. And what was I supposed to do with a baby to care for? I had to quit dancing when I got pregnant and I didn’t have a fancy education like he did. I had nothing!”

“Cry me a river.”

“Don’t smart mouth me, Snippet.”

“Then don’t play the martyr,” I replied, looking up. “You seem to be doing pretty well for a woman who claims she had nothing and was practically a prisoner at home with a baby. You did everything you could to have the career you wanted through me, and I don’t recall you being so broken up over my dad’s death that you didn’t find someone else to promote your dreams as soon as he was gone.”

She looked shocked. “Baby, how can you say that? Everything I did was for you! You needed help, direction, discipline. I got that for you. I got you a career. I got you a place!”

“You got me your place! You got me what you wanted, not what I wanted. I was a doormat. A doll for you to wind up and set onstage.”

“You were happy—!”

I barked over her, drowning her voice under mine. “About ten percent of the time. The rest was hell. Why do you think I ditched the dance gig at my first opportunity?”

“Because you’re an ungrateful brat!”

That was enough. I picked up the box and started toward the door. “Then I’ll take this and get my ungrateful self out of your house.”

She jumped down from the ladder and blocked the door, spreading out her arms in a rage of red fury. “Don’t you dare! Don’t you dare talk to me like that. And don’t you dare take my things!”

I fought to make my voice calm and reasonable. “Mother, it’s not yours. It’s Dad’s. And you clearly don’t want it. Nor do you seem to want me—at least not as I really am. You want a Shirley Temple doll.”

“I–I want a daughter. who won’t get herself killed by some idiot. I just want. ” She trailed off, shrugging helplessly.

“Hollywood. You want glamour and movie magic. I just want to go back to my job.”

“Oh! I just don’t understand you.” She stomped her designer-clad foot. “How can you do that? It’s such an awful job.”

“Not to me,” I replied. As I said it, I felt better, because it was true and I wasn’t unsure or bewildered for the first time since I’d entered her house. “I love doing what I do and I love being the person in charge of my life.” The box was poking into my hip, but I’d be damned if I’d put it down. “When I was a kid, I wasn’t in charge of anything. Even when I went to college, I was someone’s student or someone’s girlfriend or some director’s chorus girl. Someone’s whipping girl. Someone’s doll. I was Veronica’s daughter. I wasn’t Harper Blaine.”

My mother let out a scream and lashed her fists at the box, knocking it out of my hands. “How can you say that?”

The box went down like a sack of flour, sending up a cloud of paper and small objects and the smell of dust. Grey whorls spun from it as it struck the floor, gushing its contents from split sides.

“Look what you’ve done!” Mother shouted, sweeping her arms around.

I sighed and crouched down to pick up the pieces. A piece of paper glimmered like silver and floated in the air, drifting with unearthly languor toward the ground. I reached for it, feeling the buzz of Grey before I even closed my fingers on its yellowed surface.

It was old. Twenty-two years old, in fact. The cream-colored paper was stained with splatters of brown and the writing had faded to a dirty spiderweb scrawl. “There must be no more,” it read. “I’m sorry, Harper.” It was signed “Robert.” Not “Dad,” though it was clearly him.

I felt sucker punched once again—he wrote it to me? Signed his name as if I were an adult? Why? I’d been twelve! I gaped up at my mother. Unable to say anything else, I blurted, “You kept the suicide note?”

She glanced aside and shrugged. “Everything was just shoved in a box when we moved.”

“Bullshit. The cops would have kept it with the file unless you requested it. Why did you ask for it back?” And why didn’t I remember any of it? There must have been cops around, asking questions. They must have asked why he’d apologized to me, but I had no memory of any of that. It was as if there were a yawning hole around everything connected to my father’s death, and I could not recall anything of the time or the circumstances.

My mother flapped her hands in the air, as if distancing herself physically from the sheet of paper. “I didn’t ask for that. I just wanted the property they took. When I asked, they just gave me everything.”

“The gun, too?”

She didn’t reply; she just looked away, wan faced.

I pawed through the heap the box had spilled forth, stirring and sorting until I found it: an old-school Smith & Wesson revolver. It was still in an evidence bag, gritty and smeared. No one had cleaned it off. I felt sick and swallowed bile. But the gun had no glimmer of Grey to it. It was just a dead object, less active than most. The note was Grey, but not the instrument my father had used to end his life. That was strange.

“Was this his?” I asked.

My mother shook her head and didn’t look in my eyes. “No. Rob never owned a gun that I knew of.”

So where had it come from? I had a lunatic thought and asked, “Was it yours?” My mother had grown up on a cattle ranch, after all. She’d been around guns and horses and hard men from the cradle. She’d flipped out because I had a pistol on me, but she’d been more upset that I’d brought a gun into her house than that it was a firearm per se. Was she just being a dramatic hypocrite or did she have some particular problem with the idea of guns now? Or was it me and guns?

She sighed. “Yes. It’s mine.” Her shoulders slumped as if the admission had taken something from her.

“Ah.” Once the case was determined to be a clear suicide, and not a homicide, the cops had given her the note as part of his belongings. But they’d given her the gun because it was hers.

My mother’s gun. My father’s death. And a dead boyfriend telling me it was time to figure out how it all made me what I was. Cold tripped down my spine. This just kept getting freakier.

I stared into the mess around my feet, searching for other glimmers of Grey. A general haze of silver mist lay over the pile like dry-ice fog. There was a lot of stuff to sort through, but whether any of it would present a clue or not, as a body, it already told me Dad had had something Grey going on. I’d have to find him, too, if I could. I didn’t relish the idea of hunting through the Grey, through layers of time and memory and horrors, until I found his ghost—if he had one. I shuddered.

“This room is always so chilly,” my mother said.

“What?”

“You shivered, sweetie. It’s because the room is cold.”

I let that pass. If my mother believed that, she was less canny than I’d given her credit for.

“Do you have another box I could put this stuff in? I want to sort through it at the hotel.”

“But you can do that here!”

“I’d rather take it somewhere else, out of your way,” I replied. I knew my tone was cold, but I didn’t care. Fear was creeping in and I wasn’t going to give in to it, not in front of her.

My mother frowned but surprised me by just going away to fetch another box and not arguing. Maybe she realized that it wasn’t an activity she was going to enjoy. She handed the flat-folded box to me along with a roll of tape and climbed back up on her ladder to watch while I repacked the contents of the split carton.

“You’ll bring the rest back when you’re done, won’t you?” she asked as I hefted the box up into my arms.

“Yeah. Tomorrow probably. There are a few other boxes I’d like to take a look at, if you don’t mind.”

“No, I don’t mind.” She sounded eager in spite of my frosty manner, and I supposed she was a little lonely—or just bored—during the day, while Damon was off doing whatever he did until dinnertime. I couldn’t imagine what she did all day. I knew she didn’t have a job; she lived on the proceeds of divorce and widowhood and whatever man she was clinging to at the time. Judging by her earlier comments, she saw other women as “the competition,” so I didn’t imagine she spent her days hanging out with them, lest she come off the worse by comparison.

I forced myself to unbend a bit. “Mother, what do you do all day?” I asked as she followed me back up the stairs.

“What do you mean, sweetie?”

“What I said. What do you do all day? You don’t work; you don’t cook and clean—or you never did after Dad died. How do you kill the time all day?”

“I play golf. I go to my yoga class. I shop. That sort of thing.”

I don’t know why her reply surprised me, but it did. “You don’t dance anymore? At all?”

“Oh, no, not other than socially. It’s just too painful to see all those skinny little girls prancing around the studio like dogs in heat.”

Another exasperated sigh escaped me. You just couldn’t win with my mother: you were either too fat to be pretty or too pretty to be borne. The philosophical aspects of yoga seemed not to have taken root in her angry little soul. Had she always been like that? I thought so, but I was not objective.

We walked up to the carport, and I put the box into the backseat of my rental car. I turned back to look at my mother, feeling strange at how much larger I was than this diminutive tyrant of my childhood.

“I’ll bring these back tomorrow, if you want them.”

“Of course, sweetie!”

“I may have questions. ”

“That’ll be fine. I’m just. so happy to see you!” she added, forcing a hug around my chest.

I didn’t know how to respond to this mercurial monster. Was she crazy or just controlling? I didn’t know. I squirmed away. “I may want to look in other boxes,” I reminded her.

“I don’t mind,” she said. “Call before you come, though—I might be out.”

I didn’t ask what she’d be doing. I didn’t care except that it might slow me from getting what I wanted and getting out of that smog-bound lotus land and specifically away from her.