by Barbara Hall
We were so little. We were so incapable of doing anything much. But your consciousness, it always feels big, doesn’t it? It always feels exactly the same.
Anyway, she wasn’t part of the search party. She was in the basement playing cards with the younger kids and she said I came into the basement with Charlie, but I don’t remember it. She said she remembered it because her sister Sandra was there and she immediately got a crush on Charlie and wouldn’t stop talking about it.
There’s no point arguing about it. It’s strange enough that we were so close to each other. And neither of us knew that we were going to meet soon, that I was going to move there and our lives were going to be forever changed because of what was happening that weekend.
She told me that she was sitting in the basement feeling a vague sense of dread, something like a stomach flu, and she didn’t know why and she did. She knew what she knew but it was all fading, she said, like a dream, and she couldn’t tell the real parts from the unreal parts and decided to make up her own reality. Later she put me into that reality because she liked it better that way.
We didn’t find Jackie and the police didn’t find her; nobody found her.
We sat in my aunt Charlene’s house and she cried and drank and my mother tried to take her drinks away. Dad and that guy Bo sat in the kitchen and talked in low voices and wrote things down on pieces of paper. Charlie and I watched TV and pitched a football around in the yard. That’s all I remember.
Except on the way home my mother looked crazy and she didn’t eat anything and she started chain-smoking. Dad would take the cigarettes out of her hand and she would just light another one. Eventually he gave up.
After that, nothing was the same.
Charlie went off to college and that made my mother even worse. She stopped getting dressed until around dinnertime and then she made me and Dad frozen meals in the microwave, and when he complained she told him there was no point in cooking for three people. Dad looked at me and said, “John’s still here, Ella, and we’re still a family.”
“You have a family,” she would say to him. “Mine’s all gone.”
That didn’t make me feel great. But I was a boy turning into a man and I had to act like it didn’t matter. I started hanging out on the streets of Manhattan with my friends, and we’d get into innocuous kinds of trouble—shoplifting and throwing fire-crackers into the East River and trying to run over tourists with our skateboards in the park. We rode the subway from one end to the other and we snuck into bars and we tried to pick up French girls in museums and we rode the Roosevelt Island tram for no reason and we’d hang out on the island for no reason and pretend we had run away from home.
Then my friends had to go home. But I never had to go home. My mother didn’t know what time it was and she didn’t care.
When I turned fourteen my father had had enough. I was already getting suspended from school and my grades were dropping and my mother never left the living room of our apartment. He decided only a move could save us. Only a move to Union Grade.
• 4 •
I saw your mother almost as soon as we landed. Our house was across town from where they lived. We were in a neat little housing development called Pinewood Park (even though there were no pines and no park) and she lived on Carter Street, near the town, in one of the many Victorian mansions. Though the houses were big there, the whole area was in a state of slow decay. It was where the up-and-coming moved to make their mark, or where the ancestors of the rich stayed, trying to keep up appearances. The really well-to-do people lived in Pinewood Park. A division was created. My father was a wealthy professional and hers was a self-made man trying to prove himself.
It was almost impossible to live in Union Grade and not know who her father was. He was on the town council and he was a prominent businessman and he was a deacon in the church. He was well-respected, but there was an aura of, what do you call it, otherness about him. He was a powerful person in the town, but everyone regarded him with a certain degree of suspicion. There were rumors about him. He had made it big by making certain deals with the devil. Nobody knew what those deals were. Nobody cared. He had established himself and everyone had to contend with him.
The area where they lived bordered the poor part of town, and that was where Jackie and her family had once lived. By the time we arrived, Jackie’s family had moved away, leaving no forwarding address. My father had talked my mother into moving there with the vague promise that maybe we would find them all again. At the very least, we would be nearby in case Jackie should ever resurface. He knew she wasn’t going to come back. He knew she was gone. But he held this promise out to my mother because he wanted to save her, and he knew nothing else could reach her. So he moved her to Union Grade and she lived there with the porch light on, waiting, like a crazed widow who leaves the light on for her husband killed in the war. Everyone knew but Mom, and Dad used her unwillingness to know against her. Or maybe for her. He only wanted her to be normal again.
I went along because there was nothing else for me to do and I missed Charlie. He was at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, playing football and baseball for them, and he kept in touch because he liked us well enough, but we all knew he had left. He was on his journey to greatness. He got married right out of college to a girl named Lane. I only met her a couple of times, once at their wedding. They both went on to become landscape architects and now they travel the world designing the grounds for major resorts. They never had children that I know of. I’ve lost touch. I lost them when I lost the rest of my family, but I’m getting ahead of myself.
Back to your mother. I saw her the first day I went to town. I rode my bike in at Ella’s request. She told me she needed some time to unpack and I should go ahead and check out the place and try to make some friends. I took my ten-speed into town and locked it to a meter and walked around. I went into the drugstore and I saw a small pack of girls sitting at the counter, eating french fries and drinking Cokes. They were all pretty, but your mother was the prettiest. Partly because she wasn’t trying. The other girls were all made-up and flirtatious; your mother was plain and unapologetic. They all glanced at me as I wandered around, pretending to be interested in, I don’t know, magazines and batteries. I was dressing like New York back then, with my long hair and my hats and my torn jeans and my woven leather bracelets. I think I had an earring. She said I did but I don’t remember that. All I remember is that when your mother looked at me our eyes locked and she smiled, this openmouthed kind of smile, as if she were surprised to see me again. Maybe she really did remember me from the search party. Or maybe she saw me the way I saw her. Just as my dad described seeing my mother. Oh, I thought, there she is. I’m going to marry her. And then she looked away.
When school started I looked for her. I couldn’t find her in the halls, but to my great delight we had English class together. I used to sit in the back of the room and watch her, willing her to look at me, and sometimes she did. She was always writing in a spiral notebook. At first I thought she was taking down what the teacher said. Much later I realized she was writing the letter. But I knew, without knowing, that she was paying attention to me even when she turned her back, and I wanted to know what it was about.
A couple of times, leaving class, I tried to start a conversation with her, and even though her expression was warm and I could tell she liked me, she avoided talking to me and went for days pretending as if I didn’t exist. I befriended Jimmy English, a boy she had known since she was little, hoping to get some information about her. Jimmy was understandably protective toward her, but I had P.E. class with him and I remember showing off, running as fast as I could, being the only guy who could climb the rope to the top of the gym, just so he would go back and tell her. Which he did. It made me happy to see that part in the letter.
I didn’t try very hard to make friends. What your mother said was accurate. The girls were intrigued by me, but I paid them no mind, and the boys circled m
e with curiosity and agitation, and I eventually made friends with some of them by making the track team and trying out for baseball. (I was the relief pitcher. I wasn’t any good. Looking back, I realized I didn’t want to surpass Charlie, not that there was ever any chance of that.) When I realized your mother wasn’t going to date me and I wasn’t going to be the kind of athlete Charlie was, I focused on schoolwork. I had to. I wasn’t going to spend my life in Union Grade. My mother was going crazier by the minute and my father was struggling to make it all okay, and I knew that if I didn’t get busy, I’d be in that place for the rest of my life.
I didn’t hate Union Grade. I didn’t like it, either. I just didn’t understand it. Here I was, a kid who had spent most of his adolescence running around the streets of Manhattan. Now I was confined to this pseudo-Colonial monstrosity in a gated community, where everyone’s lawns and cars and basic floor plans were the same. We couldn’t get noticed. We didn’t want to get noticed. My mother didn’t want anyone to know her connection to the place. No one remembered her and she liked it that way. Every now and then she’d leave the house and go to the grocery store or even attempt to join something like the garden club, and she would overhear the talk of the girl who disappeared so long ago, that wild girl Jackie, and she would hear the rumors of her being a hooker in Richmond or being a famous movie star or being dead. She never offered an opinion and she never revealed who she was. She just listened.
No one, including my father, knew what I knew in those days. My mother had lost her basic connection to planet Earth. I would come home in the afternoons and she would be sitting in the kitchen in front of a fan, even though we had air-conditioning, wearing a slip and smoking cigarettes and listening to the radio. She would look at me when I walked in and say, in her melancholy way, “Oh, look at you, you’re so handsome.”
And I would go to my room and she wouldn’t talk to me again until dinner.
Sometimes during dinner, while my father was talking about his patients or about the new health clinic that was opening, or the block party they should probably attend, my mother would suddenly get a dose of consciousness and say, “Daddy, this is where I grew up. I know this place. Why are we here, Ray?”
My father’s name was Ray. My mother didn’t always remember it. Sometimes she would call him Charles or John and he would answer to anything she called him. He just loved her and he was eager for her to hold on to something, anything, that was remotely real.
Because of my isolation I kept studying and I started to get good grades and my mother decided I would be a lawyer. She would say, “Just think of it, John. If you became a lawyer you could solve Baby Jackie’s disappearance.”
My father would say, “It’s fine for John to be a lawyer, Ella. But no one is going to find Jackie. Jackie is gone.”
“I didn’t say find her. I said solve her disappearance.”
She would smoke and roll her eyes at him. My father would look at me, seeking out a partner, someone who might understand. I understood but I didn’t want to. I just wanted the chance to be a normal teenager. Long before I read the letter, I knew your mom and I shared that connection. We just wanted to be normal, and circumstances were conspiring against us.
Maybe it was because Ella said the word lawyer to me. Or maybe it was because I sensed their loss and their frustration over never having found Jackie. And maybe it was that Jackie’s family had been run out of town because of their loss, because of their low stature, and maybe their daughter had gone missing precisely because she could, because no one else on earth felt obligated to find her…maybe it was for all those reasons that I became obsessed with a sense of justice. But I knew I was going to be a lawyer. I was going to be on the right side of the law. I was going to be the person who solved the puzzle that was left unsolved.
But that was a long time in the future. In the meantime, I was just the guy at the back of Ms. McKeever’s English class who stared at a girl named Cat and drew pictures of her and dreamed.
Your mother gave me the letter in February. On Valentine’s Day in fact. I’ll tell you how it all went down. But something else happened first.
It was right after Christmas. Our first Christmas in Union Grade was odd and uneventful in the conventional sense. My father’s family was dead and Charlie was in Taiwan with Lane on a semester abroad, and my mother had no idea where any of her family was. Still, we had to put together a Christmas. I had finished final exams and was tired and wanted to spend my vacation staring at the walls and listening to music. My parents decided they needed to explore the party circuit. My father thought networking would help him build his practice. So he dragged my mother out to a couple of parties on Christmas Eve. I was happy to see them go, happy to see them making a run at a life, and happy to see my mother come down the stairs in a nice black dress with her Tiffany pearls and high heels. She was always funny, my mother, even when she was crazy. And while she was waiting for my father to get ready she sat in the living room and smoked a cigarette and I sat beside her.
She said, “Dear God, John, your poor father thought he was fixing it for me by moving me to Union Grade. I hate this place. I spent my whole life trying to escape it.”
“It’s not so bad,” I assured her.
She winked at me and said, “You’ve met a girl, haven’t you?”
I didn’t admit I had. To be honest, I hadn’t really met your mother. I was just admiring her from the back of the room.
“Well, yeah, there’s a girl.”
“Who?” she asked.
Ordinarily, a guy my age wouldn’t admit a crush if he were under torture. But because my mother was making an attempt to be normal, I wanted to meet her halfway. I said her name was Catherine. Catherine what? Pittman, I said.
My mother squinted and said, “Pittman.”
“Yes.”
She said, “Is her father Clyde Pittman?”
I didn’t know.
She said, “He’s on the town council. He’s a big man in Union Grade.”
“Oh,” I said.
She smoked her cigarette and thought and she didn’t say anything else.
They left and I probably watched TV and stole some of my mother’s cigarettes and pretended to be a hockey player in the living room. I went to bed before midnight and the next thing I knew, my mother was sitting on the edge of my bed. I woke up and saw her sitting there, still in her black dress and pearls, looking past me to the window behind my bed. I sat up.
“Mother, are you okay?”
She nodded and sighed.
“What happened? Did you meet people?”
“We met people,” she said.
“And you had a good time?”
She nodded and sighed.
I waited.
She said, “I talked to a woman who knew Jackie. It was Catherine Pittman’s mother. A nice lady, I can’t remember her first name. She said she was part of the search party. She said Jackie worked for them for a while. She loved her like a daughter, she said. Her whole family was broken up when Jackie ran away. Ran away, she said. I suggested that Jackie didn’t run away, that she was hurt or even killed. But that nice lady said to me, no, everyone looked for her and she was long gone. Maybe she really did run away, John. Maybe all this time I’ve been thinking she was dead. But she’s really alive and we’re not wrong to wait.”
I didn’t say anything.
That was when I first heard the connection between your mom’s parents and mine. I didn’t know what to make of it. To be honest, I was a selfish boy and I was just hoping that this connection that her parents made with mine meant that Cat and I would meet. We would meet and chat and become friends and I could convince her that I was going to marry her because it was stuck in my mind.
My mother improved after that. She got up every day and dressed and went out and even joined some clubs. She had coffee with Cat’s mother and she joined a bridge club and a swimming club, and soon she was part of Union Grade and she couldn’t even remember
Manhattan anymore. My father was pleased. My mother’s sanity was fragile. It was a bubble that we were all engaged in blowing and we all signed a secret pact not to break it for any reason.
Second semester at Union Grade High began and your mother and I had English class together again, still with McKeever. I sat nearer to her, across the aisle, and I tried to see what she was writing in her spiral notebook. She smiled at me and moved the notebook away and kept writing. I didn’t understand that she was writing her confession. I didn’t understand that it had anything, let alone everything, to do with me.
When February arrived, I was preparing to run track and I was training every day and sprinting against my own time in the backyard. My mother was happy to see it and I was happy to see her, wandering around the garden, with real clothes on, confronting the sun. I was a sprinter and a broad jumper and she sat very still, watching me prepare for these events.
I was stone in love with Cat and she was a tennis player. Half the time when I went out behind the school, I was hoping to see her hitting balls against the backboard, wearing her white shorts and a red and white striped shirt. She was exacting about tennis and if she missed a ball or simply hit one in a way she hadn’t intended she would swear, then look around to see if anyone had heard her. She saw me sitting there a couple of times and we locked eyes and smiled.
You have to understand this about your mother. She was great at appearing normal. What she called “playing at normal.” She had been doing it since she was a little girl. It was impossible for an average teenage boy in love to see anything beyond that mask. It was a lovely mask, a convincing mask.
I couldn’t tell what she was thinking when she looked at me. I didn’t know if she liked me or not. I certainly didn’t know what she was planning. She was days away from handing me the letter.
But February was a good month and I went to bed in the early days feeling that life was getting back on course, that the bubble was not going to break and it was all going to be fine.