by Andrew Roe
“For now I’m classifying it a stage-four moderate,” the director explained to me.
I waited. The phone line clicked every five seconds or so. He wasn’t going to elaborate.
“Is that bad?” I asked. “A stage whatever?”
When the phone rang I had been in my bedroom. Late morning but still in bed. Lightnin’ Hopkins, that patron saint of the lonely and bluesy, on the stereo. Contemplating the black hole of another Sunday. The blinds closed, but I didn’t have to open them to know what the weather was like: gray gray gray. Whenever the sun appears it’s like a mirage, something that can’t be trusted to last.
“Could be better, could be worse,” he said.
“Okay.”
“Middling.”
“Sorry?”
I’d never actually met or spoken to the director before. According to A.A.’s brochure (featuring glossy shots of well-adjusted white-haired ladies giggling like school girls and an Olympic-sized swimming pool I’d yet to see), he had a Ph.D. in something called Advanced Modern Geriatrics. He also offered a thirteen-part series of motivational learning tapes and interactive CD-ROMs, which were available for a significant discount to the family members of clients. That’s what my mother was: a client.
“Middling,” he repeated. “If you’re after a succinct one-word description, I’d go with middling.”
I pressed him for more details (it was my mother after all, and fuck, she was missing), and he rattled off information and facts like an anchorman reading his lines. A staff person had entered her room (to wake her, help her get dressed, and ensure she took her multiple meds, all of which was very routine, the director assured me) only to find an empty, unmade bed and the TV on. All standard procedures and follow-up were being performed. The director promised to keep me informed of the situation as it developed (again, like an anchorman). When I realized he was about to hang up and leave it at that, I started to stammer. Had the police been contacted? I asked. The director paused and let several seconds of purposeful silence pass, to remind both of us who had the Ph.D. and infomercial contract. At last he said he hoped to avoid jumping to any drastic conclusions and that things would no doubt be remedied in a timely and efficient manner. His exact words: “remedied in a timely and efficient manner.”
Clients, the director continued after another prolonged breath, often wander away, especially at night, especially after the holiday season, a time when depression soars. The next day they usually get picked up by the police or a concerned motorist, or they wander back themselves out of fear and hunger and purposelessness. Why bother the authorities, who are busy enough already? I agreed that this was a good point. The director seemed pleased at my concession. Besides, he added, the home had had a recent spat of bad publicity: lawsuits, suspicious deaths, health violations, immigration raids, other disappearances.
“But surely you’ve heard all about that in the news,” he said.
“Yes,” I lied.
“Well then I’m sure you understand my situation.”
“Yes, of course.”
“Good. That’s settled then. I’m making a note to make a note of your cooperative attitude.”
“Thank you,” I said, stupidly. My mother was gone, possibly dead. Why was I thanking him?
“Not to worry, Mr. Ormsby. People don’t just vanish into thin air. Here at A.A. the well being of the client is our first and fundamental concern. We’ll get to the bottom of this, I assure you. We’re not the McDonald’s of assisted living facilities for nothing you know.”
Before I realized it, I’d thanked him again. And not only that: After I hung up the phone it occurred to me that I’d forgotten to ask a very important question. Namely, when, exactly, had my mother disappeared? The director said that the people at the home usually turn up the next day. Did that mean my mother had disappeared last night? Or could it have happened days ago? There was no way to be sure. I tried to call the home back, but the line was busy. When I finally did get through a half hour later, a woman’s prerecorded 900-number voice thanked me for calling Arcadian Acres, a division of the Fletcher Corporation, and said that my call was very important and to please hold for the next available service representative. Then Muzak. Then click. Disconnected.
My last visit was Christmas day, over two months ago. The staff had decorated the home with nothing but strands of shabby tinsel and a handful of skeletal poinsettias. Other guilty offspring lurked about, checking their watches and carrying packages. A group of teenagers from the nearby James Danforth Quayle School for Boys sang carols, bitterly. Most of my mother’s brethren appeared tired and skeptical, like they’d given up on the youthful facade of Yuletide cheer and peace on earth years ago. I didn’t stay long, just enough time to see my mother, give her a present, and down a glass of watery eggnog.
You could say our relationship is cordial, one of mutual disinterest and tolerance. It’s always been that way, even before she went to live in the home, before my father died suddenly, without drama or distinction, the summer I turned twelve and first discovered cannabis and Pink Floyd. I remember him as small, timid, ghostly, marginal; a morsel of a man who kept to himself (we all did) and voted Democrat and slurped his soup. Whenever I encountered him—in the garage, in the kitchen, out on the back porch that looks down into the valley and, on rare clear days, beyond—he always seemed a little surprised to see me, as if I was a foreign exchange student, not his son, and he could never immediately place my name or country of origin. If there was ever a time when he didn’t have his own room down in the basement, I couldn’t say.
After my father other men lived with us as well: Tom the auto parts salesman, Reg the real estate guy, Jack the investor, Ellis the retired cop. Each one, it seemed, brought more distance between my mother and I, yet another barrier that we instinctively steered ourselves around. They were always wanting to arm wrestle or play one-on-one in the driveway, calling me pussy or fag if I didn’t accept their manly challenges. At some point I went to college at Portland State, tried to grow a beard, flirted with Stoicism, developed severe asthma, dropped out with only a semester to go before I graduated, came back home (it was Jack by then, I think), gained twenty-five pounds, and started working at the hospital. Cut to today. That was the vague chronology. There were periods when I drank too much and tried too hard to fall in love. But that was a long time ago.
Eventually the men stopped arriving and departing. It was just the two of us, more like fellow boarders than mother and son. We spoke less and less. I had a TV in my room, she watched in the living room or in her room. Then one night after Matlock she fell and broke her hip. She was getting older and more feeble and I was unremarkably approaching thirty. The illnesses escalated. Her bones were weak, lacked density. Cataracts, arthritis, low T-cell counts. Tests, procedures, operations. She heard voices. Her bladder faltered. Insurance was maxed out. There was the time she peed right there on the kitchen floor and began to cry. Something had to be done.
She didn’t resist the idea of the home. In fact, she accepted it with great dignity and grace. There were times, however, when it was difficult to tell if she truly knew what was happening. We’d been over everything numerous times, but when I loaded up the car with her belongings and drove her to A.A. she was under the impression that we were visiting a friend.
“You mean I’m staying?” she asked as I unpacked her bags in the sparsely furnished room and then lined the shelves in her closet with a cheery floral-patterned paper. It smelled like cat piss in there, despite the no-pets rule.
“This is where you’re going to live now,” I said. “Remember? Remember we were here last week and we walked around and you said how much you liked the colors and that big giant painting in the dining room, the one of the ship out in the sea? And the nice ladies, the ladies playing Boggle in the dining room who said hi?”
She looked past me, as if trying to conjure one of those images in the distance—the painting, the Boggle-playing women—for clarity, for
explanation of her current situation. But whatever she saw did not illuminate. She shook her head.
“This is where I’m going to live?”
“That’s right,” I confirmed.
“I don’t think I like it. I don’t think I like it at all.”
We stood there for a while. What else was there to do? She glanced around the room, intense, silent, starting to understand. Her eyes turned back to me, her son, her only child. She had lost a lot of weight by then, was extremely weak, and I thought that she might fall to a heap at any moment. I imagined that I would have to catch her and how utterly weightless she would be in my arms. Her eyes continued to search mine for meaning; they were like two green open wounds.
When I returned home that afternoon, I walked through the empty house as if for the first time, surveying every room like I was a prospective homeowner.
But my life did not significantly change, not like I thought it would. For more than two years she’s lived in the home and I’ve continued to live here. During that time my health has worsened while hers has actually improved. And now she’s missing.
As I shave, swab deodorant, loosen my belt another discouraging notch, I try to picture where she might be: running (if that’s even possible), crossing the highway, crouching by an extinguished campfire eating beans straight from the can. It’s ridiculous, I know. But that’s the movie trailer that plays in my head. She’s talking to people, transients like herself. They huddle to keep warm. They tell stories because that’s all they have now. One by one they speak. Then it’s my mom’s turn. She tells them her story. But all that doesn’t matter now, she informs the crowd. I’m going to make it. For the first time in my life I’m truly free.
And they believe every word. Old bald women in bathrobes eating beans by a fire—well, they just don’t lie.
Outside it’s starting to rain, that perennial pissy mist that never fails to dampen my heart even though you’d think I’d be used to it by now. I go downstairs and into the living room to collect my thoughts. But there’s distraction. The TV is on. And my roommate Raymond is there because he’s always there.
“What do you mean missing?” he asks between bites of Nutter Butter, after I fill him in on the morning’s revelations.
“Missing as in absence. As in the opposite of presence. The director says he’s on it. They’re on it. It’s a stage something.”
“Well if it was me I’d call the cops, pronto,” advises a supremely confident, supremely stoned Raymond. “Fuck those amateurs at On Golden Pond. Call the cops. That’s what I’d do,” he says, sprawled on the sofa that’s mine watching the TV that’s also mine. “But hey, I’m just a take-charge Dirty Harry kinda guy. A man’s got to know his limitations.”
Raymond, who claims to be a successful seducer of the under-forty divorcées who frequent The Skinny Dip over in Falling Brook. I’m a freelance graphic artist, he tells them, and it’s what he tells me. But ever since he’s been living here he’s never worked, not as far as I can tell, freelance or otherwise; he’s always at home, either camped out in front of the TV or reading my magazines or smoking my pot. But he’s reasonably quiet and clean and somehow pays his rent (I don’t ask). Compared to some of the other roommates I’ve had since my mother entered A.A., Raymond qualifies as British royalty.
“Dirty Harry wouldn’t call the cops,” I say. “He’d go and take care of it himself.”
“That’s a good point,” Raymond concedes. “I guess I didn’t think that one through too well. Nutter Butter?”
Instead of calling the police I decide to drive over to the home. After that I’ll take it from there. Who knows. She might already be back. She’s creeping up on seventy, an old and frail woman who can’t stand it when the temperature dips below eighty degrees. How long could she hold out?
As I’m gathering my keys and wallet and jacket, Raymond glances up from the consuming radius of the screen. It’s either a game show or a talk show. People are laughing, applauding.
“I think we need some cereal,” he says. “And juice.” Then he adds, “If you happen to be going by a store, I mean.”
The drive is mostly a straight shot, fifteen, twenty minutes tops, taking me from one side of the valley to the other. In between there’s nothing but forgotten neighborhoods, occasional gas stations, the penitentiary-looking junior high school, a strip mall or two, vacant lots, dirt, mud. Along the way I try to ignore the gray funk massing steadily in the sky. Old Testament clouds are waiting ahead of me; the rain picks up. I click on my windshield wipers, wondering if my mother has been able to find cover, perhaps a barn or hunter’s shack.
Whenever it rains long enough and hard enough, our inadequate town of Rayburn floods. Water rushes down from both sides into the valley, wreaking havoc on our homes and streets, reminding us of our vulnerabilities. Over the years various attempts have been made to stem the flow of the rain, but no matter what we do—improvised dams, rain gutters, more culverts, Native American healing rituals—the water seems to win. You’re always hearing about a child or beloved family pet being washed away by an overflowing Jessup Creek. Little League season invariably gets scrapped, the Hound Dog Bar and Grill holds its annual flood party where beers are half-off and the jukebox is free. It’s just something we put up with. Weather. What can you do?
I pass through Rayburn’s equivalent of a downtown, a three-block cluster of economic woe. Most of the businesses have folded. Everyone goes elsewhere to shop, to see a movie, to eat out. Lately there’s been talk of renovating the downtown area, of trying to lure in some chain stores. Our mayor, Larry, has even used the term “renaissance” and commissioned the community college’s part-time art instructor to draw up the proposal. But we’re all pretty doubtful. We’ve seen too much already. Too much hasn’t happened for too long.
By the time I make it to the home the rain is pouring like hell, verging on the biblical. I sprint from the parking lot into the main building, getting drenched in the process. No one is around, the front desk unoccupied, so I shake off some more water and head down the hallway toward the dining area and first-floor rooms. A.A. always freaks me out. I feel like a traveler, crossing one country’s border and entering another. Language, customs, currency—everything changes. Plus I usually get lost. It’s like a large maze, full of fun-house wrong turns and stairways leading nowhere. Take a left instead of a right and you’ll spend the next fifteen minutes finding your way back. Stop paying attention to where you’re going and next thing you know you’re in a room full of senior citizens singing “The Hokey-Pokey,” or you come upon a hallway lined with people in wheelchairs and clutching walkers and you won’t want to turn tail because they’ve already spotted you and it would be a huge snub, and so you keep walking, and as you do so they reach out to touch you and say something like “I don’t belong here. There’s been a terrible mistake.”
Still walking and still I don’t see anyone. Muzak drifts in through overhead speakers, barely audible but enough to annoy. I hear the clanking of cutlery and dishes, some ambient moaning. It’s hard to believe that people live here, day to day. But before I get much farther a hand descends on my shoulder.
Turning, I behold a Sasquatch of a man. He’s dressed in a yellow windbreaker, the kind security guards wear at rock concerts. His hair is buzzed and the hint of a goatee circles his unamused mouth. He’s big. Insanely big. That’s about all I can register. His bigness.
“I’m Michael Ormsby,” I say. “My mother lives here. Muriel Ormsby. I was told she’s missing.”
“Missing?” the man repeats, his meaty paw of a hand still vise-gripped on my shoulder. “Jesus, not another one. What’s with these damn fucking old people?”
I’m escorted back to the entry area. Now there’s a woman at the front desk, hunched over a computer keyboard like a mad scientist, tapping furiously. Rows and rows of bricks fill the expanse of the screen. Tetris.
“I’m listening,” she says without removing her eyes from the monitor.
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“We got another runner,” reports the windbreaker man.
“Name?”
The windbreaker man turns to me.
“Ormsby,” I say. “Muriel Ormsby. The director called me this morning.”
“There’s no reason to shout, sir,” snaps the Tetris woman. “Violence and intimidation will get you nowhere in this facility.”
I hadn’t shouted at all. Hadn’t been violent. Hadn’t intimidated. I was beginning to regret the half-assed research I did about this place. It was nearby. It was convenient. It was cheap. Well, cheaper.
“I’m just trying to find out what’s going on with my mother,” I say. “That’s all. She’s a client here.”
“Just a—shit.” And she thwacks the keyboard in disgust. “Stupid addictive game,” she tells the screen. “So your mother has gone missing. Ormsby. I think I saw a memo earlier today. Or was it yesterday? Yeah. Ormsby. Actually I think there’s a posse getting ready to head out pretty soon. You probably can still catch them.”
“A posse?”
“Just a couple of local fellas who do a little freelance work for us when it comes to client searches. They’re real good about it. They get sensitivity training and everything.”
“And the director. Could I see him first?”
She laughs. “I don’t think so. I suggest talking to Carl and Dale. They’re the posse guys. Malcolm here, he can show you the way.”
Malcolm extends a Schwarzenegger forearm to show me the way. I’m about to thank the Tetris woman, but this time I catch myself. How could I have put my mother in a place like this? Where is she? How far has she gone by now? Has she hitched? Jumped a train? Twisted an ankle? Fallen and can’t get up? It’s several miles into town. After that there’s nothing but forest and mountains and the army base; after that, the Pacific Ocean. I’m starting to hope that she makes it to wherever it is she thinks she’s going, that she stays disappeared.