When You Come Back

by Webb, Debra

  My gaze shifts toward the closet door. Maybe later. I look away.

  I can just imagine what else is in there and under the bed. I was quite the collector—hoarder, Mother would say—when I lived at home. College dorms, city apartments and long assignments in tents at digs in the middle of nowhere taught me to pare down to the bare essentials and most beloved of keepsakes. The constant traveling—at least until eleven months and thirteen days ago—guaranteed no dependent pets, not even a goldfish, found their way into my life. As a kid there were a couple of cats and there was Sam. Natalie loved Sam, the cats not so much. Since college the one possession to which I am most attached is my duffel bag. The thick canvas bag lies on the floor where I tossed it last night. More often than not my world is crammed into that bag.

  I draw in a big breath, my olfactory instantly reacting to the scent of frying bacon and browning biscuits wafting through the thin walls and narrow cracks around the closed door. My mouth waters. Mother loves to cook so Dad took special care with renovating the kitchen. He ensured the stained glass in the door leading onto the porch and the glass cabinetry that lined the walls of the small butler’s pantry were restored rather than replaced. New cabinetry was blended carefully with the old elsewhere. The kitchen is Mother’s favorite room in the house. I hope she’s not going to too much trouble. I rarely bother with breakfast. Maybe the nurse is here and cooking. She did mention having one who pops in a couple of times a day.

  Because she had a heart attack and didn’t call me. I could have come. I could be the one helping her.

  Frustrated, I go through the motions of preparing for the day, dragging on a favored pair of worn soft jeans—the straight leg kind that keep dig site critters from crawling up a pant leg. This has happened to colleagues and to me far too often. Over my head I pull a BU tee given to me as a welcoming gift by a fellow faculty member at the beginning of the semester. Considering my current standing, she might want it back.

  To further delay my departure, I brush and braid my hair and even make the bed. At that I point I run out of excuses to linger in my room. I descend the staircase that lines the turret walls in a wide circle, my hand sliding down the smooth wood rail. Small windows along the journey allow morning light to spike into the round room. A few steps along the hall on the second story, wood floors creaking, and I reach the main staircase. This one flows down to the first floor, landing right in the center of the front entry hall.

  Every room on the first floor begins in that hall. From the front door, French doors on either side open into large twin parlors. The one on the west is the living room and the dining room is on the east. Move straight ahead, beyond the staircase with the coat closet tucked beneath it, and the front hall empties into a small, narrow back hall. A discreetly tucked door where the entry hall and back hall meet leads to a powder room that once served as a hiding place for confederate soldiers. On the west side of that little hall is my dad’s study.

  Straight ahead is the kitchen that occupies most of the back of the house and opens onto the wrap around porch. Both the front rooms do as well. Between the massive windows and all the French doors there is enough glass in the house to keep Windex flying off the shelves at the local Piggly Wiggly.

  In the kitchen the petite woman placing the covered basket of biscuits on the table alongside the plate of bacon, bowl of fluffy scrambled eggs and boat of gravy looks vaguely familiar. Her red hair is shot through with gray and smoothed into an efficient bun. The purple scrubs lead me to believe she is indeed a nurse. Though I doubt this morning’s menu is on any health conscious diet plans—particularly not Mother’s—this was my dad’s favorite breakfast. Mine, too—when I was growing up.

  On the table in front of my mother sits a small bowl of creamy white stuff, that is no doubt yogurt, surrounded by raspberries and blueberries. A tall, sweating glass of ice water flanks her cup of hot tea. I sigh. I would die if forced to eat that way. To her credit, she has always gone out of her way to serve more palatable meals when I visit. No tofu or chia seeds.

  I’m the one who should be worried about heart attacks.

  “Well look who’s finally up.” Mother smiles. “Tricia, you remember my daughter Emma.” She gestures to the woman in the scrubs. “Emma, I’m certain you haven’t forgotten Tricia Hayes from Dr. Collins’s office. She gave you and Natalie all your vaccinations growing up. When I came home from the hospital the other day I was very fortunate she was available to take care of me.”

  I do remember Ms. Hayes. My butt cheeks automatically clench. “I’m so glad you’re here,” I confess. “Lord knows she would never listen to anything I say.”

  “Oh my gracious, Helen,” Tricia says, looking from me to my mother, “she is just like you at her age.”

  For a moment I am taken aback. Folks always say I look like my father. I have his dark hair and eyes. Most of the time I keep it braided as it is now or in a French twist. It’s so thick and long that it’s more in the way than anything. I’ve threatened to cut it a thousand times but the stylist always talks me out of the idea. I also have Dad’s tall, thin stature. Mother, on the other hand, stands barely four inches over five feet and has the lush curves in the family. Her once blond hair is mostly white now and her blue eyes are still far too seeing. Natalie was the one who looked like her…who shared her many talents.

  Not me. Never me.

  “Well,” Mother laughs, “I’m sure Emma would argue that she looks very much like her father and nothing like me.”

  Tricia shrugs. “True enough but she carries herself the same way you always did. I guess that’s why she reminds me of you.”

  “If you mean arrogant and bossy,” Mother muses, “you might be right.”

  I force my lips into a smile. “Coffee.” I might survive this clashing of hormones and meshing of personalities if the coffee is strong and hot enough.

  I circle the large round table that functions as both in-kitchen dining and as an island and grab the mug on the counter next to the Bunn coffeemaker. I’m reasonably confident the Bunn is nearly as old as me. I sip the rich black brew and thank God Mother obviously instructed her friend on how to make coffee in addition to breakfast. No matter where I’ve traveled, I’m yet to find anyone who makes coffee the way my mother does. Or biscuits, for that matter. Neither of which ever crosses her rosy lips. She is a tea drinker, both hot and cold. The closest thing to a biscuit she consumes is the occasional scone.

  “They’re expanding the search.” Tricia stares at the reporter on the screen of the small television that holds court on the counter near the fridge. “I’ve got a mighty bad feeling about what happened to those girls.”

  She and Mother begin a conversation in earnest about the missing children. In Tricia’s opinion the few similarities in the two cases, of course, make this latest shocking disappearance identical to the one that occurred twenty-five years ago. Helen argues that the idea is simply not possible. Whoever took Natalie from us, and Stacy from her father, would probably be too old or maybe even dead by now. Helen has never said as much but I know she hopes if that person is dead that he died a slow, painful death. Unlike many of the neighbors Mother has never believed that James Cotton took Natalie and Stacy. My dad never did either.

  I know he didn’t. Letty’s father would never have hurt any of us.

  The choking sensation that tightens the muscles of my throat holds the far too familiar pain deep inside my chest. The cold from that long ago night invades my bones as if I was back in those woods and I feel the scratch of the underbrush against my skin as I run faster and faster through the darkness.

  I am lost.

  I was lost then and I’m lost now right here in the kitchen of my childhood home. How ironic is that?

  Stop. I blink away the glimpses of memory. “I have to go into the city.”

  Both women stare at me. Maybe because I spoke rather loudly, otherwise they certainly wouldn’t have torn their attention away from the television reporter. I don�
�t want to hear the words or see the images. I want to go…anywhere but here. The city will work. It isn’t necessary for me to specify that I’m going to Huntsville. Whenever folks who live in Jackson Falls say they’re going into the city, it’s Huntsville. If they mean Decatur, which is the second largest metropolitan area nearby, they say Decatur.

  “But you just got here,” Mother argues. “What do you need in the city?”

  Again, two sets of eyes analyze me, waiting for an appropriately humbled response to my mother’s not so subtle rebuke.

  To buy time for coming up with an acceptable excuse I sip my coffee. I feel fifteen again. Mother always interrogated me even when my only goal was to meet Letty at the movie theater or the bowling alley. She never trusted me. It wasn’t about Letty or her purportedly crazy ex-military white daddy who killed himself when folks pointed fingers at him after Natalie and Stacy went missing. Or her depressed mother who should have married a black man since she was black and maybe her life wouldn’t have gone to hell. Not at all. For my parents and most everyone we knew, those attitudes had been tossed out a long ago along with wingtip shoes and bullet bras.

  No, it wasn’t anyone else’s crazy that worried my mother. Helen Graves’s concerns were always about my actions, my craziness. Or maybe she simply never recovered from what I’d put her through getting lost in those woods and not being able to tell her what happened to Natalie. After all, everyone knew I’d almost killed her coming into the world in the first place.

  Even at age eight I think I understood her reasons for holding so tightly to me. If she let go I might vanish, too. I can only imagine how scared she must have been when the heart attack happened, and I suddenly want to hold onto her just as tightly as she held on to me for all those years.

  “My check engine light came on.” Giving myself a pat on the back for fabricating such a clever excuse I down the rest of my coffee. Need the caffeine in my veins and the heat in my icy bones. Then I deposit my cup into the sink. “I’m worried there’s an issue. You know those hybrids, they’re finicky.”

  Mother sniffs and I can read her mind as clearly as if the words are written across her forehead. She drives a Cadillac SUV. Anything that plugs in—even if it also operates on gas—is either an appliance or a garden tool, not an automobile, in her opinion.

  “Oh.” Mother frowns, most likely because my excuse is too reasonable for her to refute without sufficient notice for composing a logical rebuttal. “Be careful then. Let me know if you won’t be home in time for lunch.”

  Huntsville is half an hour away via interstate 565 but I intend to make a good half day of my outing. I need time to figure out how to lever myself out of this untenable situation. As if fate noticed my panic and wanted to amp up my misery another breaking news story about the missing girls interrupts Mother’s favorite morning show.

  Photos flash on the screen and my stomach sinks to the classic linoleum floor. Young, pretty. Big bright smiles. Oh, Jesus.

  “You have to eat first,” Tricia insists before I can drag my attention from the screen and exit the room. “Why you’re practically skin and bone and your momma had me make your favorite breakfast.”

  Rather than argue, I smile as she prepares a bacon and biscuit to go.

  5

  The Presbyterian Church on the east side of Huntsville serves as a meeting place for Alcoholics Anonymous at numerous times of the day on several different days of the week. This is one of those days, but it is not one of the scheduled times. Though I adamantly refuse to categorize myself as an alcoholic, I fully realize there’s a problem. I drink way too much far too often. I do it in bursts—binges, my therapist would say. I’ve only blacked out a couple of times—okay, three times. But that’s three times too many.

  For now, I still have control most of the time and I intend to keep it that way, which is why I’m here. Between the missing girls—their innocent faces posted on trees, street lamps, in storefront windows and splattered across the news—and worries about my mother’s heart I’m desperate. I cannot risk another meltdown—particularly not one that occurs in the state of Alabama. Not anywhere near my mother. She doesn’t need the stress.

  Give me a hole in the ground in an Iraqi desert any day of the week over this.

  Obviously having sensed my underlying desperation, the group chairperson agreed to meet me at an unscheduled time for a brief emergency chat.

  I find him under the enormous Crape myrtles not yet in bloom lining the west side of the mammoth church. We like big churches in the south. Where I grew up there are more churches than gas stations, supermarkets and traffic signals combined. The different denominations don’t mind being located next to each other or even just across the street from one another. It’s far easier to keep up with the competition that way. The Methodist ladies can keep up with what the Baptist ladies are wearing this season and vice versa. The men don’t usually care, their suits all look alike.

  The AA group chairperson is a couple of decades older than me, tall and thin. He wears his hair in a long skinny ponytail and sports a Rolling Stones tee. As I near he taps the fire from the tip of his cigarette, squeezes the end to be sure the heat is extinguished and then tucks the smoke behind his ear for later retrieval. For the first time in ages the urge to savor a smoke assaults me. I’ve never really been a smoker but occasionally when I’m poised on the edge I indulge some fantasy that the nicotine will somehow makes things better.

  This is definitely the edge.

  “Marty Griggs.” He offers his hand.

  I place my hand in his for a brief shake. I need an alias for this and for some reason the only name I can think of is Elizabeth Taylor’s because of that movie Mother was watching last night. “Beth Taylor.”

  I’ve grown quite adept at lying the past few months. Still, lying in a church parking lot is a new low even for me. I remind myself that I will be here for a couple of weeks and that I have no desire for anyone in my hometown to discover that I’m an on-again-off-again token carrying member of AA.

  Better to use an alias. What’s the harm?

  As if the devil himself wants to prove you can’t trust anyone—not even an AA group chairperson standing on hallowed ground—another vehicle pulls into the lot that is empty save for my silver Prius and the green Ford truck belonging to the man whose hand I just shook. The white Malibu rolls up next to the truck and parks.

  I turn to Griggs preparing to give him a piece of my mind when he says, “I took the liberty of asking a friend to be your sponsor while you’re here. He’s happy to do it.” Before I can say what he clearly sees in my eyes, he adds, “We both know how important it is to have someone to call.”

  The fight leeches out of me. Why quibble over the inevitable? Particularly if it’s true. This is a good thing. “Thank you.”

  The man who climbs out of the Malibu is mid-thirties, tall and very handsome…too handsome. I order myself to ignore those details. I’m thirty-three years old and completely career focused. I rarely have time for a date much less any sort of courtship ritual. Be that as it may, there is a downside to those hard and fast choices since I am only human. I sometimes drink too much despite my reasonably frequent AA meeting attendance and just as often have physical encounters with strangers I prefer never to see again.

  Something else my mother can never know. I have a theme going here. It started around the same time I found it necessary to wear a bra. My mother can’t hold against me what she doesn’t know. Growing up, being measured by the standard Natalie had set was hard enough.

  The man with coal black hair and searing blue eyes walks toward us and I fully comprehend that this is not a good thing after all. “Actually,” I say to Griggs, “I don’t need a sponsor. I may not be here as long as I thought.”

  “I hope I’m not late,” tall, dark and dangerously handsome announces.

  “Absolutely not,” Griggs says, already pumping his hand.

  Well, hell.

  “This is Beth Tayl
or. She’s visiting from New York. Beth, this is Joey Beckett.”

  The lies regarding my identity sound worse coming from Griggs. Like Griggs, Beckett wears well-worn jeans, but the tee is just plain white and mostly hidden beneath a gray hoodie.

  Reluctantly I offer my hand. “Mr. Beckett.”

  His long fingers wrap around mine and the sizzle of chemistry is immediate and razor sharp.

  Damn it.

  The flicker in his blue eyes warns that he felt it, too. Damn it, damn it.

  “Please, call me Joey.”

  “Joey,” I repeat though he looks about as much like a Joey as I do a Beth.

  We chat for a few minutes about the weather and how lucky I am that business brought me here now instead of in July or August. We laugh—I notice that his sounds almost as fake as my own—and then exchange cell numbers. As anticipated the conversation shifts to the missing children and I sink further into myself.

  At last, I escape to my Prius and drive away. I’m confident both men wonder why a woman from New York has license plates from Massachusetts.

  Secrets and lies. They always come back to bite you in the ass.

  * * *

  “You shouldn’t be on that ladder. You might be too young to remember, but Clare Tubbs fell off a ladder trying to paint her house. She was paralyzed from the waist down.”

  I have no idea who Clare Tubbs is. I glance down at my mother. “I’m perfectly capable of being on this ladder, Helen.”

  She rolls her eyes. “How many times have I told you not to call me Helen?”

  We’ve argued about this on numerous occasions. In fact, I can’t recall a single visit where these very words weren’t exchanged. The longer we are together, the more I lean toward using her given name. For the distance, I suppose. Admittedly, arguing with Mother is better than sitting in some bar getting shitfaced which is exactly what I wanted to do after leaving the church. No hard alcohol in Alabama, I remind myself. Too risky. Maybe tonight I’ll drive to a motel across the state line and drink myself into oblivion.