World Gone Missing

by Doyle, Laurie Ann;

  “Well then.” She reached for her backpack.

  On the front steps, Flagg kissed him behind his ear.

  “That’s so much easier now,” she said, smiling. Lowell smiled, too, a little. His fingers went to the slippery skin of his head. He watched her drive away in the scratched up Ford, the car he once so desperately wanted to get rid of. It turned at the corner and disappeared.

  Next Door

  She walked into the kitchen, crumpled to her knees, and died, her daughter said.

  Our houses have stood side by side for more than a century. The walls are so close I can reach out and almost touch her windowsill. We share a narrow driveway. Standing at the kitchen sink for the first time sixteen years ago, I saw the face of the woman next door appear at her window in our mutual slice of morning sun. She was plucking out chin hairs. From upstairs, I watched her reposition pots of white cyclamen on her front porch, sop up rainwater with thick towels. At ten every night, the bedroom light switched off. At six in the morning, the toilet flushed.

  Her name was Esther. She was tall and thin and wore hats. Big beige bowls for gardening, tightly woven black straw for opera and church. If I stopped to say hello, she’d complain that weeds from our side had spread, that maple leaves were littering her yard—her blue river-stone and moss, grass-free front yard. The wrought iron fence surrounding it rose to sharp black points.

  “My husband put in this fence, you know,” she told me more than once. “My husband, you know, was chief of staff at the hospital before he passed. So if you ever need any medical attention, let me know.” I took to parking our car on her side just so we’d have something else to talk about.

  Three years ago, Esther phoned out of the blue. “You like martinis? Because if you’ve got the olives, I’ve got the Bombay.” My husband and I drank Blue Sapphires and watched the A’s game on Esther’s new twenty-four inch TV. Big, she bragged. Her house smelled like cat litter and cough syrup.

  “That was fun,” she said afterward as we stood out on the porch. “But bring a light bulb next time, would you? I could use an extra.” We laughed, but there was urgency in her voice. As if she wanted to make certain we’d be back—soon. When our son was born, she gave him a silver cup with his name engraved across it. “Every boy needs one,” she said with no further explanation.

  Six months ago I suddenly saw hands in Esther’s bedroom window, pale arms reaching but no head. Cars I didn’t recognize parked in our driveway. A sister, one neighbor said. Then, a nurse. Another nurse. Doors slammed. The toilet flushed at all hours.

  The last time I saw Esther, she stood inside her black fence. “Hello shoes,” she said as I walked closer. She’d piled stones in the corner of her front yard, only half burying the yellow-flowered sour grass that had sprung up. Her face was so wrinkled it looked scarred. When she asked me when her birthday was, I made something up. She smiled, waving to my feet as I left.

  Two days after Esther died, a different daughter came to clean out the house. A son rode up in a white motorcycle, put the cat in a crate, and drove off. I watched cardboard boxes being carried down the steps, handmade pottery bowls and flabby cushions. After the daughter left, we went through the pile left out on the sidewalk for pick-up. When no one was looking, I took the Christmas present we’d given Esther years before—a stainless cocktail shaker still in its red box—and an unraveling roll of fleur-de-lys shelf paper.

  Two weeks ago, a couple with a baby due next month moved in. An upright piano sits on the front porch and the bedroom light comes on and goes off whenever it wants. This morning I caught the woman next door—the one I’ve never met—staring at me as sun filled the glass of the window. I looked away, looked back, but still she was staring. As if my face, too, might suddenly go missing.

  Lilacs and Formaldehyde

  Late at night I heard my mother cleaning, the roar of the old Hoover, the sound of chairs scraping across the floor. Smells of Lemon Pledge and sudsy ammonia wafted into our bedroom.

  “Zach, do you hear something?”

  “Not really,” my boyfriend grunted. “Maybe.”

  “What’s going on?”

  “Beats me.” He rolled over and fell back to sleep.

  My mother died five months ago. She’d had high blood pressure, high cholesterol, high everything, doctor appointments all the time. Last January, she beat back double pneumonia and was her old self again. Calling me two, three times a day, wanting me to come over and fix the TV, check the checkbook, dust. The last time she phoned she asked me where the Kaopectate was and I told her in a not very patient voice. Then, feeling guilty, I offered to bring over chicken soup. She was my mother, after all. And I, her only child, my father long gone. She pulled in a raspy breath. “No, I’m fine. Really. It’s nothing.” She didn’t sound very happy either.

  That night my mother died in her sleep. Quickly, the doctor said.

  Now here she was furiously cleaning our apartment. I heard her humming “Stormy Weather” and talking to the furniture the way she always used to when she rearranged it. “Not bad,” I heard. Then, “Old friend.”

  I didn’t want to go see. Maybe her face was decayed and half crumpled in, maybe she was just a bodiless voice, a vacuum running through air. Maybe she looked the way I remembered her when I was a child, just five foot three, but huge to me, with a long, pale neck and eyes that went from brown to green in bright sun.

  In life, cleaning had not been her thing. Rearranging furniture, yes, but never cleaning. She’d sponge the kitchen counter in big, fast circles, leaving a thick rim of crumbs. Before Zach and I moved her into the senior facility, I had had to scrub congealed blood out of the refrigerator meat compartment. Now I heard my mother washing dishes with a vengeance at three in the morning.

  Something crashed. Then, something else.

  I was out of bed in my pajamas and bare feet before I knew it, heading into the kitchen. She had pulled out the garbage can and was standing alongside it, holding a Blue Onion plate up to the light. Soapy water dripped down her Playtex-gloved finger.

  “That’s my plate,” I said. Actually my grandmother had given it to my mother, who’d given it to me.

  “It’s cracked, Emma.” She threw it in the trash.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Can’t be eating off cracked plates.” She looked at me long and hard. Her hair was back to its original dark red. In the glare of the kitchen light, two flushed spots of mauve stood out on her blue-white cheeks. She wasn’t wearing the black pantsuit we’d buried her in, but turquoise slacks and a bright gold sweater still covered with Esmeralda’s cat hairs.

  My mother dragged on her Pall Mall until it glowed. Apparently she had decided in death she could start smoking again. The long ash tipped, but didn’t fall.

  “It was only chipped,” I protested.

  “Could have cut you.” Her voice had that stubborn Fresno twang it could get. She dunked a milky glass in the foamy water with the same intense energy I remembered.

  Growing up, when my mother had turned all her attention on me, life seemed magical. She’d take me to her office on Van Ness and proudly introduce me around like I was the smartest kid in the world, and to Golden Gate Park where we’d float silver balloons up until the treetops glittered. I would play dress-up in her evening gowns and pointy high heels, shiny fabric pooling around my feet. But long gray months went by when she ignored me. Babysitters picked me up right after school and stayed way past dark. Even my mother’s toothbrush was missing, away at the office.

  As adults, we fought and made up on a regular basis. Had I tipped the waiter enough? Was this really the best parking spot? Sometimes whatever I did wasn’t good enough. But we shared a closeness, too, from hours in bookstores where she’d head off to history, and me to art; holidays lost in shopping on Union Square.

  Right after my mother died, memories kept coming out of now
here: her sunburned hands setting a picnic table in Yosemite, the salty smell of Rice-A-Roni, her red-lipsticked mouth opening to the green olive of a martini. Sometimes I’d forget she was dead and pick up the phone to call. I missed her more than I’d expected.

  But lately, whole days went by when I barely thought of my mother at all. Zach and I started going to movies again at the Metreon, rediscovered the tacos at Señor Sisig’s. I thought I’d finished grieving.

  “Why are you here?” I asked.

  She held another heirloom plate up to the light.

  “Stop.” I reached out and touched her arm. My hand didn’t go through. Her skin felt cool and firm, something between damp clay and moist cement. Smoke drifted around her blue cheeks. My mother put down the plate, stubbed out the cigarette in an old rosebud ashtray she must have dug out from a box somewhere, and reached into the cupboard. She pulled out one of my favorite mugs, the one with Emma!and a green dog painted on it that she’d made for my eleventh birthday.

  “Not bad,” she said, “don’t you think?”

  Suddenly I was crying.

  My mother, Joan Frances Trotter, had been one of two women in her architecture class at Berkeley in 1958. She’d studied long and hard, but married quickly. “Turns out what your father really wanted was a homemaker,” she once told me, “which I had absolutely zero interest in becoming. So that was that.” I don’t even remember him. What I do remember is how invincible my mother had seemed. She’d been good at math, good at drawing, and so persuasive that she talked the principal at the best high school in San Francisco into admitting me, despite grades that were “fair to middlin,’” as she put it. As an adult, I wondered if I’d ever measure up. There seemed nothing my mother couldn’t do.

  Even rise from the dead.

  “Honey, it’s all right,” she said, wiping my tears away with a dishtowel. She picked up a spaghetti-stained dish and shooed me off to bed. Sniffling, I went.

  The next night I lay awake for hours, listening intently. I’d doze, wake up, listen. In the dark, the silence felt overwhelming.

  Zach wasn’t fazed by my mother’s reappearance. “Happens,” he said. He didn’t see my mother, but never questioned that I had. Zach spoke about life after death as fact, Elvis being just one example.

  As weeks passed, I wondered if in fact I’d really seen my mother at all. Maybe my mind had been playing tricks. Life with Zach slipped back to normal, breakfasts of oatmeal and English muffins, the rush off to work, dinners out occasionally, and concerts at The Great American.

  One morning, I caught the scent of Jean Naté cologne. There was my mother floating above our living room couch replacing the burned-out bulb in the overhead light fixture. The sun poured through our now dust-free blinds. Her hair was not red this time, but white, a bright, too-shiny white. Her sienna-colored fingernails were carefully manicured, something she’d never gone for in life. She was wearing a sleek, aqua pantsuit—she’d loved pantsuits since Katharine Hepburn first appeared in one—belted with a delicate silver chain.

  I hadn’t imagined a thing.

  Task completed, she drifted down, her black high heels digging into the couch cushions.

  I thought I’d be happy to see her, but all I felt was annoyed. “Mom, you can’t just waltz in here any old time you want. I have a life.”

  Without responding, she stepped off the couch and scrolled through her phone. In life, she’d never had a cell, just a big boxy PC, which she’d used well into retirement. She’d liked to redesign wings of famous buildings and email the plans to old colleagues. “Keeps my hand in,” she’d said.

  “Mom, you’ve come back after death,” I said. “Why can’t you just fix the light with a flick of the wrist? Pouf!”

  She kept scrolling.

  After my mother had died, I sat next to her for hours, waiting for the hearse. Esmeralda the cat slept pressed close to her body, even after she’d turned cold. I watched an earlobe turn pale blue, her cheeks sink. I felt grateful for how quickly she’d gone—without long months of suffering—not only for her, but for me, too. Her phone calls, though frequent, had never come in the middle of the night. She hadn’t taken to walking into the elevator wearing only her bra and panties, or leaving the gas on, like other women I’d heard about. My mother had organized garden tours, visited people in the hospital, and started a book club in the residents’ library. She had kept her wits about her until the end. Well, mostly. When I cleaned out her apartment, I did find a pile of gigantic half-eaten Baby Ruths and a wad of lipstick-streaked Easter napkins carefully rubber-banded together in a kitchen drawer. Sometimes her smile looked blank. But my mother had never socked me. Never slept with the gardener and written him five separate one thousand dollar checks, like her neighbor down the hall. My mother died quickly and easily.

  Or so I’d thought.

  Now she looked up from the phone. “Emma, I’m worried about you. I mean, what kind of life are you living?” she said. “Really?” When her tongue darted out to lick her lips, it looked moist and dark.

  “Mom, I’m fine. Zach and I both are.”

  She gave me one of her looks, the one that said I don’t believe a single word you’re saying. Okay, so at thirty-nine, I hadn’t quite hit my stride yet. I’d always loved art, had hopes of becoming a painter. But there was the matter of a day job. So far I’d cashiered at Whole Foods, stocked shelves at Amoeba Records, and sat huddled inside a cube inputting data in the netherworld of Bradford, Newton & Smith LLP. Long months sometimes stretched between gigs. Luckily, Zach and I lived in a rent-controlled apartment in the Haight. Beautiful, small, cheap.

  “Tempus fugit,” she said.

  “Mom.” It had been one of her favorite expressions. Time flies, is fleeting, is gone before we know it.

  “You know, that’s what I said, too. Right before. ‘I’m fine.’”

  I stared at her.

  “But I wasn’t. When I phoned you my heart was stabbing my ribs so hard I thought it’d burst out my chest. It wasn’t Kaopectate I needed, but an ambulance. I didn’t want to scare you. Scare myself, really. I was sure if I kept saying everything was fine, it would be. Surprise.”

  “Oh, Mom.” So dying had not been easy.

  “You think it’s fun lying around in a grave? I worry. I wasn’t the best mother in the world, but I’ll make it up to you now. Emma, you used to have dreams. Art, creativity. What happened?”

  “I’m fine, I told you.” The last thing I wanted was my mother bossing me around again, telling me how I’d fallen short. Zach had said he was a little worried, too—my insomnia, the way I walked around, distracted. But I wasn’t about to tell my mother that. “You can go ahead and die for real now, Mom.”

  “Hah!” She waltzed out the front door.

  

  Walking dogs in Golden Gate Park—my current job—wasn’t all that great, but it wasn’t all that bad, either. The park was lush year round, filled with luminescent tree-ferns and peach-colored roses, even in December. The fog smelled like ocean. Nonie, Duff, and Cleo, the pugs I was responsible for, were slobbery but sweet. Yes, it got boring sometimes. But the work also left me plenty of time to do other things. Not cleaning—I hated cleaning—but preparing paintings as big as walls. I had old sketchbooks filled with line drawings. But so far I hadn’t done much in my spare time. Judge Judy was a lot more interesting than people gave her credit for.

  Zach didn’t mind that I hadn’t found myself yet. He went faithfully off to the Sports Basement every morning, a job he said he loved, helping kids pick out sturdy shin guards and unpacking fresh A’s baseball shirts. I believed him. It was my mother I didn’t understand. After she died, I discovered a stack of overdue bills and scattered bank accounts. I’d always thought she was supremely competent, organized in every way. But after I’d paid all the bills and funeral expenses, not much was left. Enough so that dog walking didn�
��t have to be an everyday thing. For now, anyway.

  

  The smell was no longer Jean Naté, but lilacs and formaldehyde. Pall Malls. I’d see a flick of red hair, or feel a strong presence just over my left shoulder. I’d rush out the front door, peer down the diamond carpeted hall. “Mom,” I’d call. “Are you there?”

  Nothing.

  Small things started to seem significant: a quarter moon perfectly centered in our bedroom window, a line of black ants trundling along the edge of the sink. It was as if my mother were trying to tell me something. A cricket chirped behind the living room couch, the couch my mother had floated above a month before. I heard foghorns on clear days. My mother loved foghorns.

  Our mantelpiece was crowded with photos, but now I saw only the ones of my mother. I turned them face down. I didn’t want to look at the scalloped black and white of her standing at Berkeley’s Sather Gate, eyes serious, one arm thrown jauntily up in the air. Or see me pressed against her thigh on my very first morning of kindergarten, drowning in a much-too-big backpack. Or stare at a faded Polaroid of the two-story she’d designed on Potrero Hill. A house that no longer existed.

  No more middle-of-the-night cleaning extravaganzas, just strange little incidents. Books tidied on my nightstand with the one on Frida Kahlo jutting oddly out of place, an iridescent-eyed peacock feather stuck in a cracked vase—evidently cracked was now okay—a box of oil-pastels stacked among the dinner plates. I tucked the box away, promising myself I’d do some art soon.

  One afternoon a few weeks later, I arrived home from Golden Gate Park to find the kitchen wall a different shade of green. The air smelled like eucalyptus leaves.

  Zach swore he’d done nothing. He stood up, stared at the wall. “I can’t really see a difference, hon. Are you sure you’re okay?”