In between the GP and the imaging center, they visited two other victims’ addresses. The second of these structures no longer existed, the house by the university razed in the eighties. At each, Catherine said what she knew, the woman’s name and the way she had died. The unexpected brother of one, a witness like the three small children, yet left with bullets in his face, brain damage. Her mother said nothing, but the silence was acquiring an interesting texture. Her mother had been annoyed, at first, probably at Catherine’s unsurprising and disappointing interest in things tawdry or ordinary. But now Dr. Harding seemed to be trying to make Catherine’s pilgrimage into a more edifying preoccupation. This was her mother’s way, abstracting the individual into some larger paradigm. When Catherine had been socked in the face by a black girl in junior high, her mother had insisted that Catherine not hold the girl herself responsible; history had led to this confrontation, shameful history. While her mother tried to lecture away the hurt—the literal bruise, the more profound wounded feelings—her father had handed Catherine a frozen bag of lima beans to hold to her temple.
“I wonder if the people who buy these places know what happened in them?” Her old friend Misty, real estate agent, might have had an answer.
This year, for the first time, the assistant to the anesthesiologist asked, in one long rehearsed impersonal rush, if Professor Harding had an advanced directive or living will, if she was an organ donor, and what faith she practiced. As if the answers did not involve flesh, blood, sentiment, sacrifice. Catherine had never been more grateful that her mother could no longer give lectures. The girl didn’t look up from her clipboard, so she missed Dr. Harding’s steely glare. Catherine affirmed the will and organ parts, declined to name a religious preference.
“Everybody’s getting so sensitive to litigation these days,” Catherine explained after the girl had gone. “I’m sure it’s some new formality, just official ass-covering. You’re going to be fine.”
Her mother shook her head in annoyance. Atheist, Catherine understood finally, as they reached the smaller waiting room, the hard expression on her mother’s face having been summoned as if by rope from the depths of a well, spilled uselessly here for Catherine’s benefit. As if Catherine didn’t already know all about it.
“Remember, it’s the day of humiliation,” she told her mother, hoping they could retain, or resuscitate, the thin veneer of humor about the day. Her father had been more naturally ironic; missing him came upon her suddenly, a surprising pain, a quick pinch, that always resulted in tears. The colonoscopy was the last procedure; Catherine’s head ached from mediating: at each office she had to delicately balance her mother’s silent demand to be accorded respect, in the form of mind-bendingly thorough information, against the doctor’s or nurse’s or receptionist’s or technician’s indifference and/or irritation concerning this particular patient’s not-very-unique situation. If Catherine didn’t fully explain her mother’s worries (the same every year, identical in every way to what she’d noted many times before), her mother would fume in the car afterward, yank her arm out of reach, labor dangerously to pull herself from the vehicle, or attempt to fill in the endless paperwork with her functioning left, wrong, slow, sloppy hand.
Her former physicians had been of the old type: friends with Grace Harding, Wichitans who’d come of age as professional peers, people whose circles of acquaintances weren’t exactly the same but whose orbital revolutions brought them into contact every now and then outside the office, wearing nice clothes. There was overlap, a colleague married to a partner, a son or daughter who’d taken a class, a mutual acquaintance whose recent symphony performance had impressed, so that medical appointments were more like social visits, pleasantries first, ailments discussed as secondary business, handshaking and fond wishes all around. Now the physicians were one or even two generations younger than Grace Harding, indistinguishable from each other in their multicolored scrubs, and her inability to speak allowed them to pretend that she had nothing to say. They were either solicitous (as if dealing with a child or foreigner, loud and simplistic and smiling) or brusque (as if encountering another in a long line of widgets on a tiresome conveyor belt); Catherine preferred the former, her mother the latter. All day long, from one depressing strip-mall office to the next, Catherine had to endure her mother’s furious eyes, those fiery blue peepholes, those stormy portholes behind which a furnace raged.
Better rage than despair, she supposed. The Weeping Woman, she recalled. The woman chanting the children’s book text like a sound track to a horror movie. Far better to rage.
Before her father died, before her mother had been ruined by stroke, they’d taken each other on these excursions, trading at playing patient and caretaker, passenger and driver. His death was shocking, her perfectly fine-seeming father picked off as if by a sniper, struck by that expedient aneurysm, still sitting upright in his reading chair when his wife had returned home from an afternoon seminar.
Catherine’s familiar fantasy appeared in her head, her mother in her adjoining reading chair, hand clasped in her husband’s, the lightning bolt hitting him, its sizzle pulsing down his arm to include her.
Orphan, Catherine thought. Her husband would die before her, too. And so would the dogs …
“Hardy?” called the girl with the roll sheet.
“Harding,” Catherine corrected.
“Right,” the girl said, snapping her gum, shuffling along in what looked like bedroom slippers, pushing open the door before them and passing through without holding it. Because there was anesthesia involved, because the procedure demanded that Grace Harding be absolutely removed from her own oversight, because it required total relinquishment of control, this was by far the worst of today’s indignities. Her mother had never happily handed over control; she refused to fly on planes, always tartly replying when told of the statistically proven safety that if she were behind the wheel, she would always be able to judge the wisdom of continuing or jettisoning the trip. She did not trust that others would be so scrupulous in their considerations.
Catherine would have happily turned over control. She was a very contented passenger; she never chose to drive if someone else offered. “If I could,” she told her mother, “I would go through this for you.” It was heartfelt, but her mother’s response was an impatient whiff of air. How had she earned such a dim sentimental daughter? “There you go off to Cloud Cuckooland again,” she had used to say when Catherine came up with an idea Dr. Harding found especially preposterous and therefore infuriating. Her mother’s disappointment could still derail her, still hurt her feelings in the lip-trembling way of a small child. And now there was no longer the solace of her sympathetic father, who had many times come to commiserate, nod knowingly, offer his patient platitudes. Catherine took a more firm than necessary hold of her mother’s arm and guided her down the hall to the chamber where she would undress her, again, and slip her into yet another soft hospital gown opening in the back, ties flapping uselessly. And when this was accomplished, she would come along as far as the procedure room itself, always reassuring her mother that she would be right here, on the other side of the door, waiting.
All day, waiting.
Into the silent fury her mother now generated like heat, Catherine posed a sudden question. “Mom, do you remember my friend Misty?”
Her mother blinked, annoyance subsumed by confusion. Catherine could practically see the recalibration, like watching a jukebox mechanism remove one little spinning platter to replace it with another. Her eyes said yes, she remembered Misty. Misty and all her baggage. Misty the bad girl. Misty the friend who would not do what powerful Dr. Harding wished and disappear.
“She died recently,” Catherine said, watching her mother’s disapproval now shift to surprise, perhaps shaded by shame at having felt anything negative. Her mother had been an unusual woman for her time, but she was still a product of her generation and geography, and those rules said that one did not speak ill of the dead. “In a
single-car accident, although I don’t think it was suicide. In Colorado.” Her mother looked curious now. It was with Catherine’s family that Misty had traveled to Colorado one summer. Until then, she’d never been out of the state of Kansas; Catherine could still remember her parents taking in this news, it being the deciding fact on their agreeing to Misty’s joining them. They could never resist broadening somebody’s horizons; their own daughter had been to many states, and a few foreign countries. And the summer trip had softened their opinion of Misty. She was a girl who might know how to roll her own cigarettes or change the oil of an American-made car, but Catherine’s parents had been pleased to teach her the difference between mountain and standard time, to identify raptors by their wingspan, to witness her appreciation of the short stories they read aloud while rolling along the highway.
The four of them had visited the old mining towns, staying at former brothels, panning for gold, riding a narrow-gauge train, hiking to the tops of mountains. Misty was the willing rube newly exposed to room service, to artichokes, to word games in the car and card games in the hotel. The photographs from that trip filled an album, one that was shelved in Grace’s room at the home, its label reading 1976, the bicentennial. On the Fourth of July, there’d been a morning parade in Ouray, thrilling military jets buzzing the crowd, then fireworks later in Crested Butte. Catherine and Misty had spent the day sneaking drinks and carving their names in whatever surface they could find. The highway Misty had fatally driven off had been on their Colorado tour, not far from Telluride, where they’d crept out during their overnight stay there and met up with some local boys, skateboarders happy to share their beer and cocaine. “The thing is,” Catherine went on to her mother, “it seems she has a daughter. A fifteen-year-old girl. And for whatever reason—I really cannot guess what reason, it is truly baffling—she named me as guardian.” Her mother’s lips had parted, as they did when she wasn’t vigilant, and her entire face appeared to melt. The effect was to immediately soften her aspect, make her vulnerability paramount, frightening, as if she might topple right over, as if the melting were general. Catherine pursed her own lips to alert her, and her mother quickly clamped her jaw back into place, blinking, taking in the news.
Now a rap came on the antechamber door. “I’ll tell you the rest later,” Catherine said, hoping this would prove sufficient distraction for her mother’s final hurdle in this day of humiliation. What would she be thinking as she slipped under the anesthesia, long-forgotten (good riddance, bad rubbish) Misty Mueller back in her head, reconfigured now as a person in the past tense (bless her heart, poor thing)? Misty on their Colorado tour, roughly the same age then as Misty’s daughter was now, and Misty dead, arriving there in advance of Dr. Harding, out of sequence?
Catherine pondered the connections, pins on a map, coincidences and repetitions, tenuous links, Catherine the fifteen-year-old girl: herself then, and someone else now.
It reminded her of the way she and Misty had met another group of boys, a group here in Wichita. The two of them had been on the telephone, Misty in her grandmother’s garage on the greasy wall-hung model, Catherine in the upstairs hall outside her bedroom, lounging on her back with her feet up the wall. Her mother had a special frustration with those black heel smudges. The girls talked; they’d been talking all day, passing notes, sharing lunch, meeting between classes at their next-door lockers, riding home from school in Misty’s car, then not an hour later, armed with snacks and a beverage, were back in contact. “What can you possibly have to say?” her mother would complain. “Can you conceive of no better way to spend your time?”
“Shhh!” Misty had interrupted Catherine one day. “Listen.” And Catherine could hear another conversation, very faintly, two men talking and laughing. The girls began shouting into their phones, yelling at those men busy with their own call, screaming until the men finally heard and understood. They shouted back; numbers were exchanged. Other calls were made. And hence began Catherine and Misty’s long and crooked association with Lyle Skinner and his gang of locally grown cohorts. Of course such an alliance would begin with crossed wires.
She had not thought of Lyle in years. A meeting was arranged after that first conversation. Lyle. He was a slacker, a loser, a complete disaster. Yet Catherine and Misty couldn’t have been convinced of that, chirpily arriving at the appointed time and place, that spring evening at the 7-Eleven. He was better for having been found over the phone line, faint voice in the distance like the murmuring of the devil. To that voice they attended. Later met his dope-smoking friends, men who hadn’t finished high school and certainly weren’t going to college. Eventually, they would find jobs, shave their scraggly beards, quit selling weed and start selling, say, weedkiller, down at the Ace. But for then, they were the girls’ dark secret, their attractive nuisances. Those men believed Catherine and Misty were already in college. They believed they were of age. They believed, no doubt, that the girls were idiots for thinking so highly of them, as no girl their own age would give them the time of day.
Catherine and Misty began to join them every weekend at the grungy college bar called Lucky’s, across from the U, flashing their fake IDs. This bar was a couple of miles from Catherine’s house, a place where you threw your peanut shells on the floor, markered witticisms on the bathroom stalls, left deafened from the overloud live bands, and where Catherine insisted Misty park around back, since Professor Harding’s students lived in the neighborhood.
Also in that neighborhood was the victim whose house was plowed under, the absent address Catherine had just today driven past. Once a place in view of the bar’s parking lot. The BTK could easily have been among the lone men who were always drinking away their afternoons at Lucky’s, slumped there, waiting for dark; when he taunted the media, after the woman’s death, he claimed that he’d first spotted her picking up her mail, and he could have done that from the Lucky’s parking lot.
Again Catherine experienced the sensation she had for months now, the strange dreamy memory of the past, something that she had not really revisited in many years. That period of time when she and Misty had been friends, when the killer had been out there occasionally making an appearance in their world, and also Misty’s rights to the initial killings since he’d picked her neighbors to begin his campaign. Later, Catherine had been able to brag that it was Yasmin Keene whose class he had to have attended. Hints, threats, arrogance and menace. Together the girls were proud of his obviously having wandered the Lucky’s terrain, no doubt glancing at the two of them some evening, weighing their worth as future victims. Why hadn’t this truly scared Catherine, back then? Why hadn’t she wondered if the killer were Lyle, or one of his hopeless friends, those unsavory men whose ratty apartments and trailers she and Misty had so mindlessly visited? Perhaps the girls had been too far habituated to their own dramatizing and fictionalizing and exaggerating. Their conversations always escalated into wild speculations about their teachers and family members and classmates—they told themselves that the algebra teacher was sleeping with a cheerleader, that Misty’s parents were actually alive, that Catherine’s mother was a lesbian and loved her colleague Yasmin. Dr. Keene: they snickered helplessly about her and her horrible black walking stick. Was this how they’d been so cavalier concerning the serial killer? His extremity merely another wild tale to be told? Or was it the fact of their friendship, the two of them, unalone in the world, and somehow thereby impervious? Protected?
But maybe everyone in town felt some peculiar affinity with him? Certainly her stepdaughter Miriam was obsessed.
Catherine sat with others in the recovery area of the clinic, in a plastic seat near a bed, behind a curtain. This waiting was a living purgatory, its passage unregulated by the ordinary measure of minutes. They stretched, they expanded, they went backward. She felt her own tremendous solitude connect with that of the other waiters, her depressed boredom commingle with theirs. For her private entertainment, she imagined it was Oliver who was lying on the ta
ble in a flimsy nightgown, the tubular apparatus en route to his bony backside, prepared to make its snaking trek inside him. “I admire your optimism,” she could say later, blandly, when he came home woozy and sore, surely feeling thoroughly defiled.
Soon her mother would be wheeled to this makeshift stall, lifted to the bed, coming slowly out from under anesthesia while Catherine watched. Her mother was the only one to whom she could speak about Misty as a girl, yet even her mother had not known Misty, not really. She’d seen what a mother would see: her daughter’s unfortunate best friend, a casualty of many circumstances, including poverty, orphaning, and simple neglect. Genetically, she’d be inclined to addiction; socially, toward unenlightened attitudes. Her mother’s sympathy would not be for the girl herself, but for the larger doomed demographic the girl represented. Professor Harding, had she language, would announce to Catherine that it didn’t surprise her to hear of Misty’s end. She’d say, if she could, that it was upsetting but not unpredictable.
“Mom,” Catherine said, when the double doors flew open to reveal her on the wheeled bed. She was still asleep, her features pale and slack as death. Catherine recalled her father, his body at the mortuary covered by a sheet, leaving his head floating there; her mother looked just like that.
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