White Bird in a Blizzard

by Laura Kasischke

  “Sure,” I said, too fast, and shrugged.

  She put the dishes down on the kitchen counter, looking serious—as serious as a woman with a corkscrew perm and dimples, wearing a Christmas tree on her chest, can look. She said, “I want to ask you a question,” lowering her voice—though my father, by now, in his post-dinner ritual, had moved from the toilet upstairs to the bed, where he was dead asleep and couldn’t hear us.

  “Go ahead,” I said. I picked up a sponge just to have something in my hand.

  “Well, Kat.” May cleared her throat. “You and I have never talked about your mother.”

  I squeezed the sponge. It felt like the sea creature it used to be—animal, and rank, dyed plastic orange to disguise it. “Not much to talk about there, I guess,” I said.

  May thought about that, then she said, “Your father doesn’t say much either, but I can’t help but have questions. Kat, do you have, you know, any theories at all about what happened?”

  I pretended to think, sucking in the side of my cheek and chewing on that. “Midlife crisis,” I said. “Or a boyfriend.”

  May nodded slowly, pensively, then asked, “But where is she?”

  I said, “I do not know,” pronouncing the words carefully, emphatically, as if May had already asked me this a hundred times.

  “WHERE DID SHE GO?” MAY WANTS TO KNOW. SHE’S balanced a stack of white plates precariously at the edge of the kitchen counter. Outside, the wind howls. The windows rattle in their frames like loose teeth.

  “I don’t know,” I say, watching those dishes, waiting for them to fall. I have my hands in the kitchen sink, which is filled with soapy water, and I can see something eel-like swimming in it, near the tips of my fingers. Suddenly, its tail licks out of the suds, orange and twitching, and then it’s in my hands—a live thing, tentacled. I hold on to it as tightly as I can, and push it back under the soapy water, press it down to the bottom of the sink. I don’t want May to see it, but she’s watching me closely with a worried look on her face.

  IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT, I WAKE UP DRENCHED—THE salty heat beneath my sheets and blankets like a fire that’s been doused with sweat. Physical. Sexual. Oceanic. My legs are tangled in those sheets and in my flannel nightgown. Everything is wet.

  I get out of bed, rocking, as if I’ve just stepped off a ship, and I feel my way in the dark to the bathroom for aspirin. From his bedroom, I can hear my father snoring, a human foghorn, a warning snoring across an ocean. I remember how my mother hated that snoring. How, over breakfast nearly every morning, she’d complain. How once she’d even said, a serious look on her face, as if she’d been thinking about it a long, long time, for two decades maybe, “I just want to put the pillow over your father’s mouth some nights, and let him suffocate.”

  I flip the light switch, and the row of bright round bulbs above the medicine chest glows all at once, blinding me. My eyes ache with fever, too wide and dry for their sockets, as if they might bulge right out of my head like those small bulbs themselves.

  The bathroom still smells like my mother, disinfected. Her perfume, too.

  But, for the first time, I notice that the little mirrored tray where she kept her bottles and lipsticks and wands of this or that—mascara, shadow, concealer—is no longer on the counter beside the sink. The guest towel with her initials, EC, embossed in blue, no longer lies beside the other, the one with his, BC.

  I open the medicine chest to look for the Bayer, and in it I see a prescription bottle that wasn’t there when I left for college. I take it down and read the label:

  “Elavil. Refills (3). TAKE 1 EACH A.M. FOR MIGRAINE.”

  The prescription is in May’s real name: Maybel M. Engberg.

  I put the bottle of pills back on the shelf and laugh a little to myself, thinking of May sleeping, regularly, with my father, keeping her A.M. prescription here because she’s here in the A.M.—trying to sweep the evidence of my mother away, the perfume bottles, the monogrammed towel. Why? Is she jealous? Does she think, perhaps, my mother might come back? And what if she does? Had May thought about what she’d do then? What if my mother comes home some night, turns her key in the lock, and climbs the stairs to her bedroom, where May snores beside my father—tight curls arrayed on my mother’s pillow, bony feet poking out beneath the lace of a white nightgown, maybe touching with affection the cold, hairy ankle of my father?

  May’s sweet mouth would be gaping open in the dark. Asbestos, lunar ash, and whatever leftover dust of my mother still floated over that side of the bed would film May’s pink tongue. I imagine my mother hooting at that, and I laugh a little, too—a hushed, painful laugh—imagining May and my father trying to hide the evidence of their nights together before I came home for vacation. I imagine my father hurrying around the house, packing up May’s things, which would have begun to accumulate, as these things do—her women’s magazines and earrings, her extra pair of reading glasses—stuffing them under the bed, maybe. Checking the house one last time for the details that might give them away.

  And here, plain as day: May’s Elavil, waiting.

  Sneaky, I think, and picture my father in a bathrobe, wearing slippers, tiptoeing through a garden of white tulips, lopping their heads off with a golf club. Whop is the noise they make as he lops them.

  I sleep like someone thrown into the river with weights chained around her when I go back to bed.

  But I wake up sicker. Pure fever. The bedroom is humid with it—sweat diffused with furnace dust. My sickness smells like a jungle: close, and overgrown. My head and limbs ache with the kind of dull physical pain that seems to come from far away. Not stabbing or stinging pain. Radiating pain. As dull as longing.

  My father sits on the edge of my bed, and, with the thermometer in my mouth, I can’t talk, and he says nothing. The silence embarrasses me. It’s embarrassing to be his grown daughter, home on vacation from college, with a child’s fever. And I think he can probably smell me—bodily, intimate, the smell of something private, swabbed. I remember the look on his face when he found me with Phil in my bed. It was as if someone had thrown a cup of milk in his face, that chalky look of surprise. I saw my father over Phil’s shoulder. My legs were spread. Phil had a hand on one of my breasts—

  Seeing that look on my father’s face, the word copulation came to mind.

  Something clinical and as humorless as botany, as cauliflower.

  I can’t remember my father attending to any of the minor illnesses of my childhood. Croup. Flu. Strep.

  It had always been my mother who’d held the glass thermometer up to the light, reading its flimsy red vein of rising blood. When my temperature was normal, she always seemed delighted, as though she’d caught me in a lie. “Get ready for school,” she’d say, slipping the thermometer back into its vinyl sleeve.

  But when it was high, she’d ministrate—cool compresses, clean sheets, ginger ale, tepid tea. She’d bring me a cup of chicken broth to sip, and it would have a waxy half heart of fat floating on the top.

  That pale yellow of a chicken was like forbearance, boiled down to oily water.

  After a minute, my father takes the thermometer out of my mouth. “A hundred and three,” he says, and his eyes get wide. He’s wearing a suit, ready for the office, and each one of his silver hairs is combed into place. He thinks, and then he says, “I’ll stay home from work, but I think we should call May.”

  I laugh, but stop short. My throat hurts—little beestings all around my tonsils, and the epiglottis feels swollen, like a fleshy fishhook in my throat. I say, “Dad, it’s okay with me if May sleeps over while I’m home. I’m old enough to deal with that, you know.”

  “What do you mean?” he asks, and his impression of an innocent, accused, is good. His black eyebrows are raised in a startled line.

  “I saw her prescription in the medicine cabinet. ‘Take one each A.M.’ So I assume it’s here because she’s here each A.M. And that’s okay with me.”

  “Oh, that,” he says.
“Oh, well, yes, sometimes she spends the night. But . . .”

  “Dad, it’s really okay.” I try to sit up. He hurries to fluff the pillows behind me.

  “Let me get you some juice,” he says, “and then I’ll call May to see what you do about a fever like this.”

  I SPEND THE NEXT MORNING AND AFTERNOON IN BED, sipping orange juice, which stings bitterly going down. But my father brings me glass after glass and, after it’s swallowed, it feels good. It cools me.

  I fall asleep for a few hours, and the fever drags me in and out of a dream in which I’m trapped in a burning building, standing outside an elevator under a sign that reads IN CASE OF FIRE USE STAIRS.

  But somehow I know there are no stairs, so I stand there, flames inching down the hallway toward me as I try to decide whether to take the elevator up or down—not knowing which button to push to get there because they’re side by side, and marked in Braille. Since I can’t read Braille, I’m afraid to make a mistake, afraid I’ll make the right decision, the one that will save my life—whether to go up or down—but push the wrong button. As the flames move inexorably toward me in a bright parade—a wall of vivid oxygen melting everything as they come—finally, out of desperation, I close my eyes and feel the raised bumps.

  Amazingly, I can read them with my fingers.

  One of the buttons is marked Now, and one is marked Later.

  I pause for a moment, then press Now, and the doors open immediately, but the elevator is filled with smoke. In the center of it is my mother. She steps out of the elevator calmly, not particularly surprised to see me, and says, “You’re getting warmer,” with an amused look on her face.

  MAY’S ALREADY LEAVING WHEN I WAKE UP. SHE MUST HAVE come over while I was asleep. I hear them at the front door. “No,” my father says, “I just don’t think it’s right with her here.”

  “But if Kat says it’s okay, I don’t see—”

  “I don’t care what Kat says.” He whispers loudly, sounding irritated.

  I sit up—rubber-limbed and warm, like a baby who’s been left by accident all afternoon in a very warm bath. “Dad,” I yell from the top of the stairs when I get there. “I insist that May stay over. May,” I shout, though my voice scrapes my throat, “I want you to stay.”

  “I—” my father says. I can see his face at the foot of the stairs, turned up to me, a big dog about to beg.

  “Dad,” I say, teasing him, “be good. May stays. I’m going back to bed.”

  May giggles. “Well, Brock, that settles that, I guess.”

  TODAY SHE’S WEARING GREEN. DEEP, CHRISTMAS GREEN. Evergreen. She smiles as she ushers me into her office.

  “So,” Dr. Phaler says. “How are you? How have things been?”

  “Fine,” I say. “College has gone well. I got three A’s and a B. It was a good semester. I’ve been sick since Christmas, though. Fever. Chills.”

  She nods. “The flu,” she diagnoses. “Everyone’s got it.” Dr. Phaler smiles then with her lips closed. “I assume,” she says, opening her mouth in a tiny bullet hole before going on, “that you haven’t heard from your mother, or you’d have mentioned it when you called for the appointment.”

  “No,” I say, and it hangs in the air. My own lips are pursed now like hers, as if my face is a reflection of Dr. Phaler’s. “Detective Shh-shh-shh called a few days ago to say they’d closed the case, for whatever it’s worth.”

  It wasn’t exactly true, but also wasn’t a lie. Detective Scieziesciez had told me they were closing my mother’s case, but he told me about it in the water bed in his condominium. The water in the mattress was warm, and when I moved I felt embraced by its formlessness, its bodiless fluid.

  We were talking about dreams again, because again he’d dozed off beside me after sex, and again I’d had to wake him out of his shouting.

  So I told him about mine:

  The dreams of my mother calling to me from the coat closet in our living room, and when I opened the door, there she was, lace veil over her pale face, maybe two great wings wrapped around her body. Shivering. And then she’d disappear.

  He seemed to think about that for a long time.

  “Why didn’t you tell me about these dreams before?”

  “When?” I asked. “Why?”

  “Sometimes dreams make a difference,” he said seriously. “Sometimes people know something they don’t know they know.”

  “What do you mean?”

  He thought. He said, “I had a case once where a two-year-old had been missing for days, had just wandered away from a picnic at a park. It was assumed to be a kidnapping, but the mother kept dreaming the baby was in the back of a truck being driven away while she watched. Sometimes she’d even get a glimpse of the license plate, and finally she woke up one morning and was able to write the state and number of the license plate down.

  “We tracked the U-Haul down in Minnesota—it had been rented by a college student, he’d driven through Ohio on his way to California—and the kid was in the back. He’d crawled into it at the park while the student was changing a flat tire and eating a sandwich—crawled way far in the back. The guy threw the flat in the back, slammed it shut, and didn’t have any reason to open it again until we got there.”

  I felt nauseated.

  The water bed.

  I could smell it—salty and old in the plastic mattress. Chlorine. Swamp. Small and soggy sweaters.

  I sat up and swung my legs off the bed, and looked at my bony, cold feet on the beige of the detective’s bedroom rug. I thought of that little boy turned to milk and rags in the bed of a truck. All because Detective Scieziesciez wasn’t smart enough to find him before he’d sobbed and gasped and sucked himself to death.

  But, I thought, the point of this story, as the detective told it, was how smart he was. What a good detective.

  I kept staring, hard, at my feet, and I thought of the letters we used to get from his office, the ones with my mother’s name misspelled. I remembered him knocking so hard and efficiently on our front door that first time, months already since my mother had disappeared, and how he’d stumbled, bumbling, when I opened it. I remembered, suddenly, Officer McCarthy, that cop who’d visited our fifth-grade class to scare us about drugs, and pictured him wearing a dunce’s cap, sitting in the comer of a classroom as a lot of little children snickered.

  Another big, dumb, muscled man with a gun.

  I will never come here again, I thought, and curled my toes into the carpet, and my feet became as blunt as clubs. “How could she have known that?” I asked, “How could she have dreamt that?”

  My voice was brittle. Maybe I was shouting. The detective sounded defensive when he answered, and he got out of bed, pulling his boxer shorts up. The water bed gulped.

  “Obviously, she saw that truck at the park and some part of her registered that the kid had crawled in there. She was too hysterical to consciously understand that, so it came to her in dreams.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Then what’s up with my dreams, Detective? Where’s my mother?”

  Detective Scieziesciez zipped up his jeans, and looked down at me. He looked a bit confused. He began to flex the bicep of one arm and feel it, knead it with his fingers, as if to remind himself that he was strong. Then he sighed. “Well, do you really want my opinion?”

  I pulled the sheet around me, hiding my nakedness. “Of course I said. “Since the very beginning we’ve been asking for your professional opinion.” I raised one of my eyebrows ironically as I said professional.

  He began to look angry and worried, a man having to defend himself for the first time in his life. “Well,” he said, “in that case, in my opinion, your mother is dead.”

  There was whining in my lungs, but it had nothing to do with me. It sounded like knives being sharpened on ice. I knew he was going to say this. I could tell he would want to hurt me. “Why?” I was interrogating him now.

  “Because an extensive and very well-handled search for her has been taking pl
ace for the last three years, and she has not been found.”

  I could see blood rising up his neck, and I knew suddenly, clearly, that there had been no search at all, that he was lying, or incompetent, or both.

  “‘Extensive’ and well-handled’?” I asked. “You never even spelled my mother’s name right in your letters. That photo you used on the flyers was so blurry, she could have been anyone. You never looked anywhere for my mother. You never even looked in our house!”

  He pulled his leather belt quickly through the belt loops around his waist, and it made a windy sigh.

  “First of all,” he said, “my secretary types up the letters. The spelling errors are hers. Second, your father provided the photo we used, and he said it was the best he could do. And third, we can’t search a house without a search warrant, and we can’t get a search warrant without some reason to conduct a search. I had to assume that if your mother was in the house, you’d have been able to find her yourself. She wouldn’t exactly be missing if she was in the house.”

  “Okay, Detective. Where is she?”

  “Well, you yourself indicated that she was probably having an affair, which was confirmed by that woman, that Mrs. Blindman, next door—”

  “Mrs. Hillman.”

  “Whatever. The blind lady. She said your mother had a boyfriend.”

  “What would Mrs. Hillman know? How would Mrs. Hillman know anything about my mother?”

  “She lives next door.” He smirked when he said this.

  “But she can’t see.” I felt afraid that I might cry. I took a deep, painful breath. “Besides, wouldn’t that just make it even more likely that she was off somewhere with this boyfriend”—the sarcasm caught like a sob in my throat—“not dead?”—and so did dead.

  “Well,” he said, pausing, staring at the bedroom wall, narrowing his eyes. It looked as if he were reading his lines off a cue card he couldn’t quite see. “Well,” he said again, “several people interviewed told us that your father is a jealous and impulsive man.”