“Good. Here, suck on this,” Jules said, passing Joanne the cherry Popsicle. Joanne had always loved cherry Popsicles when she was little. They turned her lips red, like her mother’s—“Popsicle lipstick,” she had called it. She swallowed and smiled, loving the coolness on her throat.
“I had to change my health insurance plan after leaving Al,” Joanne began, but her voice was whiskey sounding, like her mother’s. So she wrote instead: My medical costs are too high. There is a large deductible and a cap. I’m maxed out.
She didn’t write anything else; she didn’t feel anything else was necessary. Jules would help her. She’d been bailing out their parents for years. She wouldn’t fail Joanne either.
Joanne tried to read her sister’s face to calibrate her reaction. Jules gazed back steadily.
“We’ll talk about your doctor bills when you’re stronger, Jo. Not now.” Her sister’s voice sounded warm and caring, but weary, too. “We’ll get through this together. This sort of thing must happen all the time. Hospitals understand, I’m sure. They must.”
Joanne wrote on the pad: “I want to visit you. To recover.” She had thought about going out there all week. How they could hang out together the way they had as kids. Sometimes her sister drove her crazy, but she could use the change in routine.
I’m so lucky to have a sister like you, she thought. She wanted to say that aloud, but all her meds were confusing her. So she wrote it down, but she wasn’t sure how Jules received what she’d written. She’d expected at least a smile, but Jules’s face looked grim.
“Now’s not a good time for a visit,” Jules mumbled.
“Thanksgiving is around the corner, and now is a better time for cheap tickets,” their mother said, appearing at the foot of the bed. “Right before the Thanksgiving holiday frenzy. Jules, how can you be so selfish?”
How could their mother call Jules selfish?
“Why don’t we talk about all of this later?” Jules said, and Joanne could tell she was relenting.
I really am looking forward to visiting you, Joanne wrote in the notepad. To getting away from everyone and everything, she thought to herself. To unloading the details of her ordeal onto her sister. No one else bothered to listen, and she couldn’t tell her friends—they would worry too much. But their mother was wrong about Jules—she wasn’t selfish. Their mother was.
A CORPSE IN THE CLOSET
Jules slept fitfully. Her sister’s operation had drained her. Dreaming of her toddler self. Bump, bump, bump on her tummy, going backwards, feeling free and fast.
“Can you be Mommy’s helper right now? Take this milk bottle downstairs, hon, and put it in the box. You know, near the front door. Outside.” Her mother’s words sounded furry, like her lovey—her Velveteen Rabbit. The bottle was so heavy and slippery to hold, even with both hands. Lying on her tummy, cradling the bottle in her arms like her rabbit, she started down. That was all—she only made it down the first two steps. Then, looking up, there was Andrew falling, sliding, his feet in her face. Then she didn’t see anything at all.
Silver flecks on the ceiling. Stretched out on the red Formica dinette table in the kitchen.
“Now, little darling. Don’t cry, you hear me? You are a big girl now. Mommy’s big girl. This isn’t going to hurt,” her mother said as she stuffed a red-and-white-checkered kitchen towel—one that matched the color of the table—into her mouth. It tasted like old spaghetti sauce.
Her father stood over her with shiny steel rods and thread. Eight stitches. Jules peed herself. But she shed no tears.
“What in God’s name was she doing going down the stairs with a milk bottle?” her father asked, turning towards her mother so stiffly Jules wondered if his body had become steel, like the legs on the dinette table.
“Turned my back for a split second, that’s all. I don’t have eyes in the back of my head,” she answered back, quickly hiding her pretty glass, the one Jules saw her with every day. Her mother then teetertottered—or was that her own head wobbling from being held down so she couldn’t move?—out of the room.
The next day she had to be x-rayed. All that pushing down on her in the kitchen, she supposed. Two protruding bones jutted out below her neck, below her throat. She got to wear a cross-your-heart bra—or so she called it—at bedtime until her collarbone healed. She felt really grown up wearing it. It was like a mommy bra.
Her mother was right about stairs: they could be dangerous.
Jules woke up. She had had that dream too many times to count. But this time she wasn’t covered in sweat. Her fear was concentrated somewhere else. On Zoë. On wondering where she was, and whether she was okay. It was clear now that Mike no longer knew where their daughter was. And the only contact Jules had had with her recently was a text Zoë had sent asking her to send her money to a Palo Alto post office box. Jules had texted back, pleading with Zoë to give her a real address where she could stop by to see her, but she had heard nothing else.
I’ll go to Palo Alto tomorrow and look for her, Jules decided. What else could she do?
Jules’s eyes hurt from the glare of the monitor. Too bright in stark contrast to the darkness outside her study. Her cursor went right for her sister’s e-mail.
Hi Big Sis:
It’s 4:00 a.m. I can’t sleep. Worry, alcohol, and meds keep me up. I don’t know why—they’re supposed to make me sleep. My bank balance is minus $9.30. I asked Al for money. He says: “What am I supposed to do? I have to pay a mortgage.” But I had to pay for all the child care, food, and children’s clothing out of my meager paycheck. As if Megan and Sarah belong only to me! But that is the past. That can’t be undone. I’m your only sister, and you’ve always been there for me. You never disappoint! My loan’s coming due now. And my store rent’s going up.
I know you don’t want to hear this, but tough. Neither you nor Mike know what severe depression is like, or bipolar disorder. Yesterday I slept most of the day since I had been cleaning all day Saturday. Went to bed again in the afternoon, got up four hours later. I couldn’t cook dinner. I eat saltines with cheese most of the time. I have lost the desire to cook or eat. And I used to love to do both. Now nothing makes me happy. I just cry and cry. Sometimes I go to sleep just to reset my mind, so the crying will stop.
Depressed means unable to move. It takes me all day to do the simplest task—like make the bed—and then I get more anxious and the crying starts all over again. After a couple of days, I stay up all night to get something done. And the cycle repeats itself. My happy pill doesn’t help anymore. The world is closing in on me. I feel I could fit into an urn—one that matches one of my favorite dresses in color and pattern. Try not to throw this in the garbage with “what does she expect from me.” I will not be hospitalized, period.
Love you,
Your little sis
Jules’s heart raced as she read the e-mail over and over again. The computer glow was the bluish-green color of the Magritte painting she had viewed with Zoë a few months before. That same Ghostbusters color Uncle Wilson’s check had been. A bad-luck color to her, associated with death.
How she missed them. Her family.
She remembered that gallery visit to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Zoë still had that girl-boy quality: beautiful with her dark chocolate–brown eyes, girlish but athletic and frenetic. And such beautiful, curly, jet-black hair. Like most teenagers, she had concealed her feelings as best she could from her parents. But she’d exposed herself anyway. Wandering through the rooms, hesitating and weaving through the crowds, not saying much, her daughter had eyes only for paintings done by Magritte, the artist who had created the man in the bowler hat, apple perched on top—the piece of art she’d seen and fallen in love with in the movie The Thomas Crown Affair.
Magritte’s most famous paintings were happy, whimsical fantasies—clouds floating across living rooms, fruits in the sky, floating doorways. A crowd gathered around Homage to Mack Sennett—a woman’s headless corpse, transparen
t nightgown draped over the hanger, in a closet. Her nightgown was Ghostbusters-colored. A radical departure from the joyful images that Magritte created thirty years later: bowler hats in the sky, birds cut out of clouds.
“Something very bad must have happened to Magritte when he was very young, before he painted this,” was all Zoë had said.
They read the accompanying placard. Magritte had been thirteen years old when his mother committed suicide, and in his early twenties when he painted Homage to Mack Sennett. It wasn’t until his fifties and sixties that he blossomed, literally painting blossoms and fruits floating in the sky.
“If you can’t forgive or forget, you’re a corpse in the closet. Magritte wanted to live again,” Zoë said in that offhand fashion a teenage girl sometimes has with her mother. Then her daughter came over to give her a powerful hug. “I love you so much,” she purred, knowing exactly what her mother needed. And the cells in Jules’s body softened in return.
Where is my daughter now?
The rain clouds were clearing. Still sleepy, Jules sped down Highway 101—on her way to search for her daughter for the fourth time that week. Palo Alto was a two-hour drive from Carmel. Jules yearned to clear out the toxins, the insane anxiety she was feeling. She had read about a glymphatic system of mental mine sweeping, dumping the brain’s waste products so the mind could function more efficiently. She could use something like that.
No more bailouts. She had to make it up to her husband and daughter somehow, some way. Were those tears in her eyes, or floaters from being groggy? Maybe it was both. She clutched the steering wheel, staring straight ahead, slugging back Starbucks. Blinking. Spots before her eyes.
Jules pushed the visor down and pulled her baseball cap lower; the sun was starting to peek through. She fumbled for her sunglasses in the side compartment and unzipped her rain jacket.
Please, Buddha, Kuan Yin, the deities of the universe, let Zoë be safe and not come to harm, Jules prayed. Her little girl—now a phenomenal young woman—was still her sunshine. But did she know it? There was so much Jules wanted to say but never had. Only when Zoë was very little, more a sweet little pet, had Jules felt entirely free to share her feelings with her. Not when she had to really be there, when Zoë needed answers and a mother’s love.
Please, Zoë, don’t give up on me. She chanted the mantra to herself. This time I am going to find you. No more turning back. Her daughter had needed someone to watch over her. How could she have let this happen? What was she thinking? Maybe she needed to hire a private investigator if she didn’t find Zoë this time. If the police did nothing. How had she let her family come to this?
All those months they had talked about colleges—Berkeley, San Jose State, other UCs where Zoë could get in-state tuition. She had such good grades. She had been accepted at Stanford, so she certainly would be accepted at some of the other California universities. Just for a while. Until they developed a plan for how to pay for Stanford. Then she could transfer, and be where she really wanted to be.
I failed, Jules thought. An epic failure, Zoë would call it.
What had she been thinking? To leave her daughter swinging in the breeze, abandoned by her own mother? The road blurred. She rubbed her eyes and squinted until it came back into focus. Just a few miles to go. She was almost to campus.
She called Zoë for what must be the twentieth time that morning. Zoë picked up. Oh my God, she picked up!
“Hi, sweetheart.”
No response. Jules felt the silence. Loud and clear. The kind of silence she didn’t want to interpret.
“Oh, it’s you,” Zoë finally said.
Jules glossed over that. “Just wanted to check back with you.” She waited for some kind of response. More silence. “You know, you haven’t responded to any of my texts.”
Zoë was silent again. Then, “I’ve been busy.” Her daughter’s voice sounded slurred and amorphous. Wounded.
“Honey, are you all right?” Jules could hear voices in the background. Rough voices. Male. Tough. “I’m on my way. Driving as fast as I can to see you.”
“Don’t bother. Gotta go.” Pause. “Sorry about Grandpa. Grandma told me he’s been strange. Stranger than usual.” Pause. “I’ll let you know where I am. Could use some money, though.” Jules would have to check online. What could her daughter be spending so much money on? “Sorry about Uncle Wilson, too. Didn’t know his inheritance was a secret from Grandma.”
Jules heard shouts in the background, but couldn’t understand the words. Laughing. Fuzzy speech like her daughter’s. “But, wait …”
Click. That was the end of her contact with the light of her life. But Jules was not leaving her now. That light was not going out. She pulled off the freeway and dialed a second number.
“Officer Hyde speaking. Division of Missing Persons and Runaways.”
“Hello, Sergeant Hyde. You asked me to contact you within two weeks if there has been no contact with my daughter. But I still would like a ‘voluntary missing adult’ investigation report filed. The City of Palo Alto or East Palo Alto has got to help me.”
“I need to have the specifics, ma’am. We have so many inquiries a day.”
“Yes, I’m so sorry but I’m extremely worried and upset, Sergeant Hyde. I’m Julia Foster and we talked last week about my eighteen-year-old daughter, Zoë, who is somewhere in Palo Alto or East Palo Alto. She does not want to communicate with me. I have no forwarding address and only a bank account for wiring funds to her. The bank refuses to give me her address. But, as I said last week, she is almost certainly in danger. We just finished talking and she sounded inebriated or under the influence of drugs. You must help me. I don’t know what else to do.”
Jules remembered her first trip to the East Palo Alto Police Department. Sergeant Hyde had explained that Zoë was not considered a runaway because she was no longer a minor. Plus, since she’d left of her own free will, she was a “voluntary missing adult.” He had taken the information and the photo from her, but Jules knew he was just being patient.
“I have a file number …”
“There is nothing more I can do for you, Mrs. Foster. Your daughter left of her own free will, after a domestic dispute with you, and your husband has had contact with her. She seems to be unharmed. If she is taking drugs, as you’re suggesting, we can search the premises, since that would be considered suspicious circumstances and a criminal act endangering the individual.”
“Yes, I want you to search for her.” Jules didn’t want a criminal record for her daughter, but what else could she do?
“Do you have an address?”
“But Officer Hyde, that’s the point. I don’t have any knowledge of her whereabouts.”
“Until you do, Mrs. Foster, we cannot proceed with an investigation. I am very sorry.”
The skies were as gray and moist as the underbelly of a fish. Jules grabbed her handbag, still open, and caught sight of Mike’s note, a stark white rectangle, like a small dead white thing against the darkness of the paisley interior lining. She reached for her keys and buckled it closed. She put the top of her copper-colored Le Mans Sunset Nissan 350Z down before pulling back onto the road. The wind cooled off her sweat, but it couldn’t blow away her panic.
No more bailouts. She had to make everything up to her husband and daughter somehow, some way. If only Zoë hadn’t told her mother about Uncle Wilson’s money.
Jules drove around and around down the main street, University Avenue, which joined Palo Alto with East Palo Alto. Where could her daughter be? She’d keep on driving in the hope against hope that she might find her. Young people liked to hang out. Maybe she was walking with friends window-shopping, hanging out near local coffee shops. Jules squeezed her car into a very tight parking spot—the kind of spot her Chilean friend called un suppositorio. Zoë always had advised her to make a circuit around her Nissan to remember the little scratches and the keyed scar some brat had made when she last parked the car. Some kind of class warfar
e, Zoë had told her. Young people who couldn’t afford nice cars deeply resented those who could, perhaps. Is that really true? Jules asked herself. Do people resent others’ happiness? She hoped not. She had felt a little foolish liking her car so much. Maybe it was some residue of growing up in Akron. Why hadn’t she realized what was really important in her life until now?
Jules thought of their credit cards, their line of credit, the past-due notices for their mortgage payments, the fines and penalty fees. This had to stop, and fast. She had been generous to the point of being ridiculous: taking out a second mortgage, using their daughter’s college fund for her parents’ recklessness. And now Mike and Zoë had left her. Jules couldn’t blame them. How had she been so blind, so stuck? Her parents didn’t seem to care what they were doing to her. I’m a good person. But this? Really? Did her parents even care about her? And if her actions were making Zoë and Mike suffer, how good could they possibly be? Was it dementia?
Joanne had benefited most from their mother’s addictive shopping and love of beautiful, expensive things. She’d helped support her when she wanted to open her store, A Real Gem. And then there were all those luxurious teenage treats for Sarah and Megan: the latest shoes, hats, cosmetics. For Zoë, though, only a birthday card with a crisp ten-dollar bill inside. Still, Zoë was always excited to receive these tokens, and never failed to call her grandparents immediately and thank them. And all of Uncle Wilson’s inheritance now gone. For nothing and everything. More baubles for her mother, exorbitant medical bills to pay for her sister, and her parents’ care at SafeHarbour. And now no funds left for Zoë.
She pulled out her phone. She had called five, six, seven times—during the day, night, middle of the night, twilight—but until now, Mike hadn’t answered. Sometimes it was hard to interpret his silence. But this time the meaning was unmistakable.
Still, Jules hoped he would answer—and he did. There was the sound of his familiar voice on the other end of the line. Maybe he was ready to talk to her now, to forgive.
Things Unsaid: A Novel Page 16