NOT LIKE WHAT YOU SAID by Debbie Urbanski
I.
Joan called the first private investigator listed in the directory. A man picked up the phone after the third ring and she did not ask the man any of the questions she knew she should. His voice was hoarse and tired and it sounded like he was reading off a script. “There are about five reasons why somebody disappears,” the detective said. “You might think there’s more but there’s not. There’s what we call ‘hanky panky.’ There’s family. There’s insanity, there’s foul play, I’m including accidents here, and then there’s adventure. The first thing, we have to figure out which reason it is. The second thing, we have to ask do they want to be found? Could they, in fact, be found?” He wanted to tell her about her chances – to be honest with her, for he was not one who sugarcoated the facts – but she cut him off. Such information was unnecessary here. She wished to keep certain things out of her head. The phrasings of certain things. Kidnappings. Gang rape. Knife wounds. Gun shots. Gutters. Ditches. Deserted lots. The investigator gave his name, Mr. George Simmons, and she hired him because he would do, anybody would do. He suggested, if convenient, that she come down to meet with him that very afternoon.
Joan drove to a small office park on the south side of the city. “Please, come on in,” George said, motioning to a chair. He was an obese man with thinning hair who found it difficult to get up from behind his desk to shake Joan’s hand. He wore a salesman’s clothes. When he sweated, as he was sweating now, because the room where they met was warm, almost stifling in fact, he picked up a red handkerchief from his lap and mopped the sweat off his neck. To be honest, Joan had expected someone less ordinary. But the world was not the place you pictured in your mind. Just because you pictured something, or someone, in your mind, it did not mean that such a thing appeared in front of you. Her husband Max did not know she had come.
George handed Joan a clipboard and asked her to fill out the paperwork. He had just sprayed an aerosol freshener around the room, so the air smelled of fake oranges and, more faintly, of cigarettes. Joan signed the contract without reading it. Beneath the contract was a questionnaire asking about Emma, Joan’s oldest daughter: marital status, the number of her children, employment history, close friends, addictions. Joan filled out the little she knew. Many questions she left blank. “My daughter was a very private person,” she explained. “She never discussed her personal life, she just didn’t.” She returned the clipboard to George, who told her there was nothing to be ashamed of here. He said children drop out of touch all the time these days, they just do.
“If she was a ten-year-old, we would have done something sooner, but – my husband, Max, he kept telling me, she is not our dog. We can’t go chasing after her like a lost puppy. And I thought, any day now. I just assumed.” Joan pulled out a thin stack of papers from her purse. “She refused to call us after a while or email, she just sent these letters.” She set the letters on the desk and George read through them. He asked if mental illness ran in the family.
“These letters are – they’re unusual.” He tried smiling at Joan, exposing his little stained teeth.
“She was always an imaginative child, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“That’s not what I’m asking.” For a while, neither of them spoke. He didn’t even have a clock in the room. Nothing even was ticking, though George breathed through his mouth loudly. “Was there trouble between you and your daughter?”
There wasn’t much for Joan to gaze at in the office. A yellow rug with flowers on it. The ancient Newsweeks stacked on a side table. The oak desk. “Everybody has their problems,” Joan said. On the desk, a laptop. Beside the laptop, a framed photo of a girl with a terribly scarred face. In addition to the scars, the girl appeared to have lost her right eye. Perhaps before she had been pretty, it was difficult to tell, as she did not look wholly human anymore. George noticed Joan staring at the picture.
“There’s the first girl I ever saved,” he said. “And they thought it was my fault. The family, not the girl. The girl gave me the photo.” The girl was looking at Joan. The girl’s good eye, her left, peered out bright and unbroken from the mess of her skin. From the picture, she looked right into Joan’s own eyes. I’m fine, the girl was saying. I have seen terrible things, but I came back from the terrible things to forgive you. George said, “Joan. Joan? I get it. I get that this is hard for you. But every secret you’re keeping will slow me down. I think you’re hiding things from me. Am I right?” The room was becoming unbearable. Joan put her hands over her eyes. In the dark, she saw Emma: vivid and meaningless.
“I just need some air,” Joan said. She was sweating through her blouse. Humiliating patches of sweat spread through the silk.
George said, “Well, the goddamn windows are painted over.”
We used to call Emma ‘my little shadow,’ she could have told George. After she learned to walk, she refused to leave my side. She thought she was me, she assumed we were the same person, and she would not see me abandoned. Then she grew up because that’s what children do. You know how these things go: one’s values are not their children’s values. Or rather, she thought us valueless. She thought, we should not be the parents, and she should not be the child! She found our happiness distasteful. Things were, in fact, difficult for a time. But how responsible are we for who our children choose to become?
The last time they saw her, it was almost two years ago on a Memorial Day weekend, all the charcoal barbecues and limp flags, the grass particularly green, as if that had been important. Emma’s visit had been planned, she was driving in from Indiana to stay a few nights, but she brought a man with her, which was not planned. They didn’t know who the man was or why he stood there beside Emma, his hand around her waist like she might bolt.
“And who is this?” Joan asked. “Who are you?”
“I’m Caul, ma’am,” the man said.
“Caul is my husband,” Emma explained. She made the introductions: Adele, Emma’s younger sister; Max, her dad; and mother, Joan.
Max asked, “Is this a joke?”
“That I’d be married, Dad? That I’d find someone to marry?” Emma said.
“I don’t remember invitations to a wedding. Do you, Joan? Did anyone here receive invitations to a wedding?”
“That’s because we eloped, sir,” Caul said. He wore wrinkled khakis and a faded t‑shirt and he was larger than Max, taller, better built, with biceps and a thick strong neck. He thought he was somebody special, that was obvious from the way he stood there, like he thought he had light all over him, though he didn’t. They had driven there in Emma’s red Corolla, a car which Emma once kept impeccably clean but now there were dirty cardboard boxes stacked in the back seat, bugs in the front grill, and mud all over the doors.
Joan forced herself to speak. She said something about being happy. How they were all happy, how everybody was so happy. Happy, happy, happy. In fact, they needed to have champagne with dinner! She told Adele to run out and get some kind of fancy bottle, cost was not an issue here. They would have a party. There needed to be a celebration. “You are married, Emma!” she told her daughter.
“I know, Mom,” Emma said. Had there been a crack in Emma’s voice when she said this? Or did Joan merely imagine the crack? Or was the crack only visible when looking backwards? In any case, Joan held open the screen door and ushered everyone inside.
For dinner they ate pork chops and roasted potatoes. Or rather, Caul, Adele, Emma and Max ate the pork chops and potatoes, Joan ate only a salad because there wasn’t enough food to go around, she had not planned for an extra guest to appear on their doorstep. They ate on the fragile plates, the ones reserved for special occasions, and they talked about the wedding. Apparently Caul and Emma had eloped to Jamaica. Apparently, in Jamaica, all the weddings were bargains, it was like your wedding was on sale when you had it there. The ceremony was free after a week’s stay, and everything you needed was also included: flowers, cake, witnesses, the justice of the peace, a hair stylist, the champagne toast, even two ukulele players.
Joan pestered for more details – her oldest daughter for God’s sake, married! But the answers were oddly vague. Max and Emma claimed they took no photographs. They said the cake was fine, it was white. Emma wore some kind of purple flower in her hair. She wore her hair up. The ocean was pretty. Their room was large. The sky was blue. They answered like they were guarding something. Even how they met. Joan asked, so how did you two lovebirds find each other? A simple question.
“It isn’t much of a story. It’s actually boring,” Caul said.
“I don’t care if it’s boring, ” Joan insisted. “Tell me the boring story, I don’t care! Did you meet in school? A bar? On the street – where?”
Caul said they hadn’t met in school because he didn’t go to college. Back then he had better things to do with his time. But as for now, he explained, as for their plans now, they intended to both keep working for a while, Emma as a buyer for a plastics company, he as a security guard – “Do you carry a gun?” Adele asked, and he said no, he didn’t carry a gun. They’d have a family, and once they had a family, Emma would stay home with the children. They planned to home school.
Joan turned to Emma. “So this is why you majored in economics? This is what all those student loans were for? I think we need to talk about it.”
“We already talked,” Caul said.
Caul would not leave Emma and Joan alone in a room, not for a minute. If Joan asked Emma questions – how work was going, did she still see her old roommates – he answered those questions for her. Work for Emma was busy. They weren’t paying her what she was worth. “Emma?” Joan said. Emma looked down, absorbed by the stitching of her dress, its tight flowers. There wasn’t a lot of time for old friends. Caul explained they had new friends now.
In the middle of the night, Joan heard voices from the family room, where Caul and Joan were sleeping on the sofa bed: a hushed voice, angry, hissing, followed by whimpering and the violent creakings of the mattress springs. “Jesus Christ, get away from the door,” Max mumbled. “What are you, a peeping Tom? Just let them be.”
Caul cut the visit short. The next morning he announced he had to get back to Indiana for work. There were emergencies to deal with. He made himself sound very important. He wore a uniform. He had a lot of papers on a clipboard he had to carry around. So after a hurried breakfast, Joan made up two turkey sandwiches, which she put into a paper bag along with a handful of chips and green apple slices. Caul refused the lunches. “Actually, we have everything we need,” he said.
Joan asked, “What’s going on here?”
“We’re fine, Mom,” Emma said. She kissed Joan on the cheek, then she kissed Max and Adele, and they drove off, Emma’s slender arm extended out the window, the only visible part of her. “Good riddance,” Max said. He left for the golf course. Adele returned to her condo in the city, and after Joan flung the lunch bag into the trash, she found herself unsure of how to spend the rest of the day. In the now empty house, she sat herself down on the couch and tried an old magazine. The articles were all about the war. She didn’t care about the war. It was far away and she knew no one in it. She put away the magazine and in the kitchen now, she began to sift flour for bread. In her mind, she told Caul, Listen to me, love begets love, love makes more love, and she told Emma, in her mind, Sometimes I bet you feel like you’re in this tunnel, and you can’t see the end, and it’s dark, but there’s always an opening. Trust me. She soon put the flour aside and changed into a t‑shirt and old shorts, and she went into the backyard to garden. Things were unsurprising there. Things grew there as they grew every year. The daffodils flowered, as expected, while the azaleas did not flower because of the shade. From a neighbor’s yard, the birds were singing, and the song – you could hardly call it a song. In her mind, she told Emma, You a person of great strength. I know you can figure this out. Look at everything your father and I have been through and we’re happy now. We came out of it.
They were supposed to go back home to Indiana. That’s what Caul said they were going to do, he and Emma were driving back to Indiana to work at their jobs and then they’d start a family. But they didn’t return home. Emma did not show up to work the next day or the next week or the week after that. Joan called up Emma’s office mate and this was what the girl told her. The girl said, in fact HR was boxing up Emma’s stuff that afternoon. “Is Emma okay?” Joan answered of course my daughter is okay, though she had no idea. Emma no longer answered her cell phone. The number got disconnected, then eventually transferred to a Chinese take-out. “No Emma!” shouted the man whenever Joan called. “No Emma, only food!” A week or two later, the letters began.
In the initial letter, Emma wrote that she and Caul were now traveling. We’re like vagrants! We shower at truck stops and in the morning we take out the road map to figure out where will we go today. They had already traveled through Iowa and Nebraska and the Badlands and now they would stay for two weeks in the Black Hills. Well, I guess there is the sky out here, and also the soil and the road but sometimes there is not a lot else. We are sleeping on the ground. Don’t worry, it’s more comfortable then you think! Last night we slept on a bed of pine needles and I woke up in the dark. People think there would be all these stars out here but there weren’t. There aren’t. I couldn’t see anything. At first we kept stopping off the highway to check the buffalos out and the dinosaurs – do you remember them? The plastic ones – and we went inside a cave, but Caul said those kinds of things aren’t what we came to see. The letter ended with a request for a money order, sent immediately, please, to the following address in Silver City, care of a friend, as there wasn’t enough food.
The letters were written out onto ruled paper with a blue ballpoint pen. Their intimacy surprised Joan and, at first, pleased her. They came around the first of each month, postmarked from isolated towns nobody had heard of. In response to each letter, Joan mailed back a chatty correspondence of her own, where she talked about their garden, or the affairs of their neighbors. With her letters, she always enclosed $50. She wanted to send more money but Max asked was she crazy? After three months of such correspondence, Joan told Max enough, they should drive out and find Emma and bring her home. This was when Max brought up the puppy. How Emma was not one. She was not their puppy nor was she their little girl anymore. They would not go off rescuing her like she was a helpless dog. When Joan said fine, she’d go herself – packing a bag that night with a change of clothes and her toothbrush – Max took away her car keys for a time. So that was that.
Joan put each letter in a shoebox in her closet on the top shelf.
After the Black Hills, Emma and Caul returned to Iowa, then up to Wisconsin, then Minnesota, then Wisconsin again, then back to Iowa. It appeared they were driving around the Midwest in circles. Each town that Emma mentioned, Joan looked it up in her road atlas. She put her finger gently onto the dot of each small town, and also she searched online for photographs of what the town looked like. They were flat and treeless places. Maybe there was a cafe, or not. A creek, or river, or not. Joan ended her own letters with a string of questions which Emma ignored.
There is a lot to do when a person’s child leaves them. Well, for one, they must busy themselves. There are the hobbies to pick up, for one. They can make bread. They can make their own yogurt and also their own pickles, which is a lot of fun and also very useful. Also they can garden. They can pull out the roots of weeds or grind earthworms between two rocks. Even if the worms are good for the dirt, they can, if they want to, kill every worm they see. The world looks the same as it did. This is important to remember: the sky remains blue! There are leaves still on every tree! And at times, when they’re gardening, or killing the worms, a person whose child leaves them might play a game of make-believe. They tell themselves all kinds of good things must be happening to their daughter. They talk to her in their heads. They remember the shape of their daughter’s mouth, then they put their words into her mouth, only happy words, so it’s like she’s talking to them. They pretend they did not know certain things.
They do not dream. At least, when people, people such as their husbands, ask them, “Have you had dreams since . . .”, they say no they do not dream. But they’re just saying this. In their dreams, their daughter is touching the hair on their heads and running her fingers through their hair, and they are touching their daughter’s hair also, and her hair is in their hands. This is all they need. The daughter could be turning away, she could be walking quickly away from them in the dream, she could be running from them, but they reach out and they touch the ends of her hair and there, they have touched her.
A lot of people do not have daughters, you know. Having a daughter is not a right. Knowing where their daughter is, and whether she is safe, or happy, is not a right.
And not all mothers are needed forever. This is what they tell themselves. Certain mothers are needed, like they were needed once, and now they are not needed.
July. Emma wrote, We’re trying to have a baby! We are supposed to have a boy first and then a girl so I’m eating apricots and figs all the time. Tonight Caul came into the tent and asked me, are you really eating them or just saying you are? But I’m really eating them. In fact, I’m getting so sick of apricots! We are camped beside a little lake. I don’t think the water is clean enough to drink but Caul thinks it is so we drink it. It probably looks like we’re on vacation. Somebody in fact at the gas station (where we get our bread) they asked us if we were on our honeymoon, and Caul said he guesses we are. Then Caul grabbed me by the arm and kissed me hard in front of everybody for a long time. The people in the gas station cheered. By the lake, where I’m sitting now, you can see the other side. It looks just like this side only farther away, but you can see the fish in the water. The fish didn’t sound like anything special. They sounded like sun bass or something, but Emma went on and on about the fish. You think they’ll go off in one direction, but they go the other way. I can watch them forever. They don’t care whether they’re floating in the sun or not.
August. Emma found a church in Minnesota. She did not give the name of the church or explain its beliefs though she sounded happy. Ecstatic, actually. This is it, Mom, all my joy and my possessions are right here in front of me. FINALLY! This surprised Joan because Emma was an independent thinker. At least that’s how they raised her: smart enough, or so Joan thought, not to be lured in by an organization’s convenient stories. The church did not meet in a building. It met in a clearing in the woods and instead of God, Emma wrote of “passions” and “bliss,” and one’s own power, and the trees. Sometimes Caul came with to the services, but usually he did not, he stayed behind and is stomping his feet again like a two-year-old. I feel bad for everybody who thinks life is about keeping things, and people, and locking them up. You know how before there were always the shadows and the light? It’s not like that anymore. Emma wrote about it all in a vague way.
September. It appeared Emma’s church had moved north and Emma went with them. The letter’s postmark came from Brimestone, Minnesota, but Emma mentioned they were at least a hundred miles from the nearest town, in a place she described as a green paradise. There was no longer any mention of Caul. Yesterday, Dina went out to the garden where she found a deer in the lettuce–no, actually it was several deer, it was a herd! – so she raised her arms above her head and chased the deer away like a wild woman! Well, that’s what you get for LIVING in the woods! You get deer in your morning lettuce. But it was something to see, as Dina works harder than anybody to maintain her solemnness and suffering. She is always on my case to get control over my passions etc. Then today at meditation, Esme told us she leveled all her acceptance, so we gave her hugs, and it was like a party all of a sudden. I was happy for her (and a little jealous). We brought out the cups and the tea, and we stopped the work we were doing. Afterwards, we were supposed go back to task, but Alden took me to the rock beside the lake, and we sat beside each other and watched the sun on the water. Alden said, “You have been hurt.” He told me to give him the hurt so I took it out of me, and I gave it to him, and he tied a rock around it, and it drowned in the lake, we watched it drown. My arms felt very light. Things which once held me down were cut away – do you understand what I’m saying? Alden lay his fingers on my chest. He said the sunlight on the lake was my goodness, that’s why we could barely look at it. If you saw me on the street, Mom, and I was walking past you, I don’t think you could recognize me. I don’t think my eyes are even the same color.
Joan wrote back, Are you staying healthy? How much sleep are you getting at night? How is Caul? What do you eat for breakfast there? Do you still have your car, how is it running? What is your room like? What did you put on the walls to make the room your own? Do you have time to read books? If so, what have you been reading, anything good? What are the names of your new friends? Is it safe where you are? Do you feel safe? Can you see the stars? If so, do you remember the names of the constellations Dad taught you? What’s your job there? Do you feel like you’re able to use all your talents? Are you taking care of your body (remember it’s your only one!)? What’s your favorite part of your new life?
Max said, “Hello? Hello, Joan, I’m still here. Remember? Look at me. I said look at me. There are people standing right in front of you.”
October, November: no letter. December: I dreamed about you last night. Somebody dragged you into the woods then killed you then the birds began to sing. It was not unhappy or awful, that’s what the birds and everybody tried to tell me. I went running away down the road and a boy jumped on my back and stabbed my throat. I wanted to be martyred too, but the boy couldn’t kill me, he wasn’t strong enough, he was just a boy, so he took out my eyes with his knife. Then I woke up. The rooster said “cock-a-doodle do,” just like roosters used to in children’s books. It has been one fucking rough week. I refused to apply conditions, so this is paradise, and people are getting to paradise without me. They are leaving me behind again. So I asked them, is it better to be here or not here, and I was told, answers couldn’t be given out like that just because I asked. Knowledge isn’t free. They told me first it has to be lived then earned. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.
“Fucking brainwashed,” Max said.
Joan said, “They have these professionals we can hire. I’ve read about them.”
“If people make their beds, they have to lie in them,” Max said.
A second letter followed a week later. I bet you are worrying about me after that last one? Sorry about that. The good news is it doesn’t mean what you thought it meant. All it means is I have a lot work to do. I have to face forward. When you face forward, what you are seeing is your new reality. Whatever you can’t see, pretty soon it won’t exist for you and that’s okay. Dina says we are going someplace that’s like a paradise of light and we can’t take everybody with us. Mom, just be happy for me. Joan touched the paper. She traced the words with her fingers.
No letter came in January or February or in March.
April: a brief and incomprehensible letter, most of the lines scratched through. Joan could make out very little of it. Enough of this make-believe, Joan replied. It’s time you return to the real world, Emma. Come home right now. Nobody is angry with you. Nobody is going to get in trouble. Joan thought it only a matter of time. Any day now. Those sorts of things you tell yourself or that people tell you. In the garden, she turned, sensing Emma behind her. A mother’s intuition? Wrong. There was no one. There were no more letters.
George Simmons said he could mail the report but he preferred Joan come down to his office. “Now?” Joan said. A month had passed since their initial meeting. George said now or when convenient.
Joan drove down that afternoon. She half expected Emma to be there hiding under George’s desk – surprise! – everybody laughing at some simple explanation. Emma had merely gotten lost in the woods. Or she had gotten amnesia. Or she had been in a car accident. Or she had a temporary failing of good judgment. But Emma was not there. George was there, and on his desk, there was a stack of stapled papers; a closed envelope, large enough to hold photographs; and the picture of the scarred girl. The girl was looking out at Joan, as she had before – no, she was staring at Joan, staring right at her – only this time the girl saying sorry sorry sorry with her good eye, and with her bad eye – well, it wasn’t an eye anymore, was it? There was skin where that eye should be and underneath, a black and rotting panic.
The sun had dropped behind the other buildings so it was difficult to see well in the room, with the lamps unlit as they were. Joan did not touch the papers on the desk. There could have been things in the room that nobody was seeing. Things in the corners, or under the chairs. George went to the window. “It’s a lousy night,” he said. “There’s a fucking game tonight. It’ll go on you know for hours.” Outside, the sound of sirens. George glanced out at the street, as if he hoped to see something there, but he didn’t, so he sat down again. Joan did not open the envelope, though it had her name written on it.
“Look,” he asked finally, “do you want your husband with you? Where is he, working someplace? Can we call him?”
“My husband doesn’t know I hired you.”
The envelope was white and in one corner there was a spot of grease. French fries? Fried chicken? Someone had tried to rub the grease off but it hadn’t worked. George pushed the envelope closer to where Joan sat. He sighed. He said, “People think that as long as they don’t open the thing up, whatever it is, it won’t have happened. But it’s already happened.”
II.
Joan waited, as instructed, in her rental car, an ugly but practical white sedan picked up from the Minneapolis airport that morning. From the airport she had driven north for hours, speeding somewhat along the highways, past the towns, the trees, the lake when it appeared, then it disappeared. No time for the scenic overlooks or the rest stops. A few minutes before noon, the agreed upon time, she pulled into the North Country Quik Mart’s parking lot and followed the instructions she had jotted in her notebook. Park beside the men’s restroom. Shut off the ignition. Do not get out of the car. Turn on your headlights. She received these instructions during a phone call two weeks before, from a woman who ignored Joan’s every question and refused to give her name. “Really, Joan, you are draining all my good energy!” this woman at one point had laughed. “No. No, I’m joking. We don’t actually talk like that here. But let’s focus on what’s important. We will see you soon. That’s important. It’s important for you to understand this and hold this. We will see you on the 12th of August at noon. Someone will pick you up.”
Max had shouted, “What, do they think they’re living in a Hitchcock movie?” Theirs was no longer a home of harmony, was it now. Because for all things and all people who are gone, there must be reasons. The reasons and causes must be found out. “We should call in the cops and get them to shut the place down. I mean, these people we’re dealing with are not God. They don’t get to choose what sick person gets help, and who doesn’t, and then order us around like we’re a bunch of monkeys.” He insisted he travel to Minnesota along with Joan, who lied and told Max that they–whoever “they” were–would allow for just one person’s visit.
“And that special person must be you?” Max asked. “Oh, I forgot. Nobody’s grief can compare to the mother’s grief. Because she sat in your stomach for a whole 9 months. Because she came out from between your fucking legs, is that it?”
Joan replied, “I’ve been thinking. I think Emma was running away from something.”
“And what is that supposed to mean? You are, what, little Miss Perfection over there?”
Adele, their other daughter, counseled them to meditate each morning with the sun. She said a simple repeating word – now, here, yes – chanted into the dawn could hold great healing powers. Adele was finishing up a social work degree. She sat with Joan and Max twice a week for sessions, through which Joan nodded her head up and down. This was what mothers did, correct? Encouraged? Nurtured? Nodded? She nodded and dug her nails into her arm, trying to draw blood. How much harm can a person do to themselves? At the last session, Adele wanted to discuss blame. What happened was nobody’s fault. Therefore there was no blame. Nobody could be blamed. Not Max, not Joan, not Adele, not the PI Joan hired, not Emma, not Emma’s grade school teachers, not Caul, not the members of Emma’s “church” (Adele preferred to call them a “church”). All of them, blameless. Forgiven. Absolved.
The next morning, 5 o’clock, Max sat below on the deck in an enormous bathrobe, legs splayed open, facing the rising sun. He looked like an obese old man. Joan saw him there from their bedroom. His lips moving: on what word?
In Joan’s notebook, underneath the instructions, she had written these questions.
Hospital – why not one closer?
Autopsy report – dehydration, cockroach bites, blood stains on back – what happened?
Her belongings – get them.
Whose decision to cremate?
Where are ashes? Bring them home.
Why?
When their kids were young, Max had not believed in sheltering them from the world, so Joan did not believe in it either. Emma and Adele were not children; rather, they were little human beings holding in their enormous souls. “We have nothing to hide from them,” Max said, so in their house, no one was allowed to lock a door, not even when shitting on the toilet. “What’s this?” little Emma asked, poking at the condoms and lubricant left out on their nightstand, and Max explained how a man and a woman used such things. “Jesus Christ, she’s five years old!” Joan said. The sounds of intercourse, Max’s grunts, Joan’s intake of air – both children must have heard, if not seen them in the bed, through the cracked door. Sometimes it is kinder to lie, to tell lies. Joan understood this. Max didn’t.
In their house there was no Santa Claus, no tooth fairies. She went along with it. He was not one to disagree with, not back then, their arguments already fierce enough, ending in occasional violence almost slapstick in its intensity and form. Joan would look up from Max’s contorted face to see the children, crouched on the top stair in their thin nightgowns, waiting for something more to happen. “Go back to bed, girls,” Joan said. Ridiculous, to expect that somebody, that people would be kind to each other all the time. During one particularly dark period, Emma refused to let either of them touch her.
The thing was, Adele was fine, playing contentedly at their feet, oblivious to what happened, or would happen. While Emma, on the other hand. The bed-wetting. The pulling out the hair of each of her dolls. The school sent home letters of concern. “She reminds me of a previous student,” Emma’s teacher told them at conferences, “who set fire to her family’s dog.”
Max said, “Well the apple never falls far from the tree.”
“And that means?” Joan asked.
He enjoyed truisms back then.
The bread always falls buttered side down.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Spare the rod and spoil the child.
Joan thought, I will lose this child somehow.
Finally she sat Emma down in the kitchen. “I want you to understand,” she told Emma. Parents make hundreds of decisions each day, they have to. So of course, on occasion, they screw up. Joan reached across the table. Emma hid her hands in her lap and stared at Joan like they all were animals. Joan tried again: the stresses of parenthood; tempers; how one’s own childhood – if working class and violent – left lasting marks; how it was always love; how love just looked different than you had expected. Emma covered her ears with her hands. We are not animals, Joan insisted loudly. Animals eat their young. Animals abandon their babies if there’s a broken wing. They push the baby birds out of the nest and they watch them fall. She yanked Emma’s hands down. “I know you can hear me,” Joan said through her gritted teeth.
Though such dark times came and went. Every family has them, correct? They come, you hunker down, they go, the sun comes out, your children are beautiful in the sun, in their bright dresses.
In the driver’s seat of the white rental car, Joan nodded off. She would have slept the whole afternoon, only at half past one a man tapped his fingers against her window, at first gentle taps but then, growing impatient, he slapped the glass and startled Joan awake. The man wore a brown shirt and brown pants cut from a sack-like material. He said his name was Noah and with his odd clothes and gaunt frame, he could have looked severe, perhaps even threatening, only he was grinning right at Joan, an enormous grin which softened his face. He had recognized her right away. “Because you look just like Emma!” Noah said.
“I don’t, actually. She looks like her father.”
He shrugged. “But I knew it was you, didn’t I?” Joan got out of the car and Noah hugged her with enormous warmth and feeling. He must have been around Emma’s age. He smelled of the woods and the undergrowth.
Max had said, These people are wackos. You have to use your head, okay? Which meant what exactly in this situation? Noah expected Joan to follow him to a black van parked on the far side of the lot so Joan followed him, bringing only her purse. The van was used and old with dark stained seats though it drove fine and Noah was a painfully cautious driver. Ten miles north of the Quik Mart, they turned off the highway onto a gravel road. Through the trees Joan glimpsed a brown roof. The sun splintered on the window of the small cabin. They were going to the place her daughter described as my heart’s green paradise. Joan had taped this particular letter to the inside cover of her notebook. In this letter, Emma also wrote, My life is expanding. And, This is the best thing that’s ever happened to me. And, Mom, I have magnificent power.
Later, they drove alongside a clear lake. At the end of the lake, a boy chopped firewood with a silver axe. He lifted the axe up and something glinted on the blade, something that might have held a great meaning, but Joan looked again and saw it was just light, actually. Just ordinary light reflected outward. Then the boy was gone. The lake was gone. “Who picked Emma up when she came?” Joan asked. “Was it you? Did she sit here in the van?”
Noah lowered his window and squinted into the narrow portion of sky not blocked by the trees. He checked the rear view mirror. He acted like he hadn’t heard her. Joan asked again. Emma, the van, this road. Noah rubbed his hand across his cheeks. He said different people come to them in different ways. “I’m not really supposed to discuss it, actually,” he said. The gravel changed to rutted dirt. He began to talk, though not about Emma. “You know, out there, they believe we’re savages. Heathens drinking blood or something to that effect, I don’t know. The stories we tell ourselves, you know? These stories. We have our gardens. I mean, we have our chickens running out back around our cabins making these really joyful noises.” Bugs splattered, one after another, onto the windshield. Noah flicked the van headlights on. Joan gripped the handle of the door to steady herself.
Also in that letter, Emma wrote, What good is somebody’s love if they don’t protect you?
Emma, Joan had written in return, that all was a long time ago, let it be.
There appeared a metal fence in the woods, 10 feet high and topped with barbed wire. That was how Joan knew they had arrived, because of this metal fence that now ran parallel to the road. Not long after, they came to a gate. Noah jumped out of the van and jabbed a key into the padlock then he pushed the gate open, the metal screeching in protest. They drove inside. He stopped the car, closed the gate, and locked it. “We’re lucky it’s not after the rain,” Noah said. “This road will get impossible if it rains.” Further down the road they came upon a circle of cottages: squat and tidy buildings with gray roofs. Certain cottages had porches with wooden benches on them. Beyond the cottages was a clearing for a garden where a dozen people, dressed in the same coarse brown clothes as Noah, were on their knees, hands in the dirt. Joan tried to glimpse their faces but the women wore wide bonnets that hid their eyes, and the men wore straw hats. Two of the women had dirty children clinging to their legs. Everyone looked down, even the children. Noah parked in the center of the cottages. At first all Joan heard were the birds and also the wind. “Dina’s waiting for you,” he said. The clouds formed indecent shapes above them. The thing was you could see anything you wanted in the clouds. Noah led Joan into the cottage on the right, the one with the monstrous red flowers winding around the railing.
Dina said, “Let me tell you a story.” And she told Joan the story of the great Indian princess who is supposed to get married but she refuses to marry any of the local tribe boys. All the boys are much too short and they can offer her nothing more than what her own mother had: a single animal pelt on which to sleep; roots and meat in the summer, hunger in the winter; and fire. This isn’t enough. So the Indian princess waits around in the woods until one afternoon it grows very dark, right in the middle of the day it gets dark, then a prince appears, strong, tall, well robed. She says, “Finally!” and she goes off with him. He takes her to a grand hut where they could live well for a long time. Pelts are all over the floor. Baskets are overflowing with meat and fish. The prince says, you will have all you want here, only do not step outside. “Okay, okay,” the girl says. Each day, early in the morning, the prince leaves the girl, who tries to busy herself, though there isn’t much to do. Pile the pelts up. Unpile the pelts. Pile. Unpile. Then one evening, she hears a strange sound outside, a slithering sound, and in the doorway a snake appears. The snake in fact comes right in. It lays its snake head on her lap and says, in the prince’s voice, “Now you must check me for bugs.” The girl does this, she finds all sorts of terrible things on the snake’s skin, then the snake goes away.
Joan said, “I didn’t come here for stories. I came here to find out what happened to my daughter.”
Dina said, “You really should be listening more closely to this. If you knew anything.” Moments later, the prince returns. “It was I who came to you just now. Were you afraid?” “But I knew who you were,” the princess says. She is showered with gold objects, bracelets, necklaces, all these gold headpieces, yet more than gold she wants to see the sky, and the grasses and trees, she misses the sky. So one day, she opens the door and leaves the hut. Outside, she sees snakes, hundreds of them, maybe thousands. Their pulsing thick bodies are everywhere, sunning on the rocks, hanging down from the trees. At first she doesn’t like all those snakes, who would? Now she wants to go home. But it doesn’t matter because she can’t. She can’t go back to how things were after she’s seen what she’s seen. So she leaves behind her old skin and witnesses such wonders. The story goes on and on but at the very end of the story, “pay attention, this is the best part,” Dina said, the Indian princess is pulled out of the water, though she hadn’t even realized she was in water.
III.
“Let me get this straight, you go all the way out there,” Max said to Joan, “and then – what exactly did you do, sit down to tea with them? You made a promise. We agreed on the goals, remember?” He counted out on his fingers. “One, figure out what the hell happened. Two, secure accountability for their actions. Three, the ashes.”
Joan had returned from Minnesota last night. Max already knew the whole story because she had told him in the morning: her van ride into the woods; the conversation; the van ride out of the woods; the overnight in a rundown Motel 6; the nightmare she had, where she watched a sparrow peck out Emma’s eyes and the thing was she just stood there watching. Now Max wanted her to say it all over again with Adele there, so Adele could witness Joan’s inadequacies herself. “I told you, Emma wanted her ashes scattered under this particular tree, this very sacred tree to them. They did it a long time ago. Not anybody could go see the tree. It’s sacred. They wouldn’t let me.”
The family sat in a corner booth in their neighborhood deli. Max’s idea: in times of crisis, eat. His weight had ballooned since Emma’s disappearance. Perhaps their daughter was hiding now in the soft curve of his gut. “Are you attracted to me?” Max had asked Joan sometime before, and she told him it didn’t matter anymore what people looked like, what the stupid body looked like. The deli was one of those themed places: red vinyl seats, a checkered floor, striped paper straws, a jukebox stocked with oldies. The waitresses walked around in costume, snapping their gum like waitresses must once have done but it didn’t fool anybody. They were all just pretending. Max said, “I knew I should have gone.”
“There was barbed wire. There were fences and gates and for all I know they had guns. What would you have done?”
“If I could speak,” Adele said. “I think, Mom, you did everything you could.”
“Jesus Christ, Adele, let me finish. You were going to bring back some of her things. Do you remember how we talked about her things?” Max tore into his pastrami sandwich, smearing the mayo off his lips with a paper napkin.
“But Emma didn’t own anything. When she died she had nothing. They told me whatever she had, it all belonged to the community.” Joan had grilled Dina about this, asking after Emma’s diamond earrings, and her grandmother’s ring, and a bag of tiny pebbles Emma used to keep at her bedside, even Emma’s underwear – she must have worn underwear? One could assume people there at least kept their own underwear? Dina explained, unlike the rest of the world, they did not believe in possessions. The word obviously distasteful to her. Dina said, “It’s all very nice to think we can hold onto whatever we want and never let it go, but that isn’t the truth, is it now?”
“So ‘community’ is what we’re calling them? How pleasant sounding.” Max said.
“In fact I offered to join them,” Joan said. “I told Dina I wanted Emma’s ashes back no matter what. Dina said no, they’re in this sacred place, so I said fine, if that’s what it takes, I’ll become one of you. What do I have to sign? Just let me go and touch what’s left of my daughter, I’ll do whatever you want me to do: physical labor, or I’ll shave my head – ”
“You didn’t tell us they had shaved heads,” Adele said.
“No, I’m just – it’s just something that people say. I meant I’d do whatever they needed. And this woman, Dina, she told me no. She said I couldn’t do the hard work. She said they weren’t a hostel for my grief.”
“Mom, that was dangerous and also very brave.” Adele put her arm around Joan’s shoulder. Max rolled his eyes. Was this all they had to teach you in social work school? Adele’s arm felt like dead weight. They let Max rage on for a while: wait until the police hear about this, and the newspapers, the FBI, whoever, he was going to tell everybody, and as Max carried on, a young man – why must all young people suddenly be Emma’s age? – picked out an old Elvis song on the juke box, then he slipped himself behind an older woman and began grinding himself against her. It was obscene, what he was doing, but also full of longing. Elvis’s voice cracked and behind the counter, waitresses gathered in a tight knot and glared.
They had kept a file on Emma there. Dina held the file in her lap the whole time, a battered and ugly file, Joan wasn’t allowed to touch it, though Dina read out loud certain selections: “ ‘For all practical purposes, I have spiritually disconnected with my mother.’ Now tell me, why would Emma write such a thing?” The photos on the wall: young people in rows, wind in their hair, smiling placidly into the sun. Emma wasn’t in any of the pictures. At least Joan couldn’t recognize her. “Of course, you had the best intentions. I believe that about you.”
Elvis crooned on. Well I could love you all the time, baby, a jungle would be fine. Enough. Really, enough. The look of pleasure on the young man’s face: he bared his teeth. A manager stomped over, grabbing the boy’s arm and he told the boy and the woman to knock it off, this was a place for families. Adele asked, “Are you screaming on the inside too or just the outside?” Max said, “They killed my fucking daughter. Did you forget that part?” Joan tore the dark crust off all her bread. She had been expecting a mother figure, someone her own age, but Dina was in her 20s and pretty, with an eager and judgmental face. They talked in the back room of the cabin. Only an hour, Dina said, making it clear a lot of people considered her important. Soon she would be needed elsewhere. “What a private person Emma was. What a puzzle she was to us at first,” Dina said. “But you must know that. You’re her mother! It took me months before she confided anything, before she and I could talk about personal matters.” What exactly were these matters, Joan asked. Dina looked up at the ceiling and smiled at something only she could see. “Matters of the heart. Dreams. Family. The things that haunt us at night.” Joan looked up and tried to see it but she could not. Implications were made that Joan no longer knew her daughter. Or, rather, had never known. She could picture Emma and Dina sitting somewhere close, their shoulders touching, or their arms, beside a lake, on a log, under a tree, the secrets between them like white sparks.
Adele said, “I’m hurting too. But I’m not going to walk around the rest of my life holding a hatchet in my hand wanting to scalp somebody or a lot of people.” Max said it wasn’t a hatchet he was holding, it was something else, something larger. Outside it began to rain. Puddles collected on the warm concrete. Water on the window glass, and umbrellas opened up like bloated flowers.
“Do you get what state your daughter was in when she came to our doorstep?” Dina asked. “She was practically dying. The world had practically been killing her. The world and everybody in it. Let’s take her husband, for example. That man. Emma appeared to be, we might say, attracted to unkindness. To men ruling with their iron fists. I have a feeling you might know why. But do you understand what he, what her husband, that man, what he had been doing to her?” Joan pretended she understood. She blamed the elopement. None of them knew Caul, none of them had approved. “Emma wrote all of it down in her history. This was hard for me to read. For us all to read.” Dina flipped through the papers in her lap then read out loud what Caul had been doing to Emma. Objects shoved in the vagina. A wet washcloth stuffed into her mouth. Shaken awake in the middle of the night to have forced anal sex. Had this been going on when Emma last visited? Caul kicking down the bathroom door.
“All right,” Joan said. But Dina continued. The skin along the back of her spine he pinched. He told her, I can so easily replace you. Emma, forced to miss work again. The bedsheets spotted with blood.
Finally Dina put down the papers. “But you must have known this already? I hope there are no surprises. So we took her in. How could we not have taken her in? Such hurt. Such pain. We gave her tools to improve her life. She told me she always knew there was a place for her like this, she just had to find it.”
“That doesn’t sound like something Emma would say,” Joan said.
“Well, she said it.” One used to think, they would sense when their child was in pain. One thought, when their child was in pain, there would be something to be done about it. Dina was barefoot. She tucked her legs beneath her and sat on her bare feet in one of the armchairs. “Your daughter thought Heaven was right here. She told me when she died she wanted to come back to a place like this, with the same exact people in it, and I told her she could, she certainly could if she wanted, it was all up to her what she wanted.” Need you be part of a child’s happiness to have it be real? Let it be enough, the knowledge your child was finally happy for a time. The rumor of such happiness, let it be enough. There was Emma, a beacon of light, the light leaking out of her.
Joan waved down their waitress, Betty – was that even her real name? Who on God’s Earth was named Betty anymore? – and told “Betty” to please get her sandwich away from there and also take back the green pickles that leaked brine all over her plate. “Do you want it wrapped up?” Betty asked. Joan said just throw the whole thing away. Did Betty understand what that meant? In the trash, or whatever they did with uneaten sandwiches back in the kitchen. Feed it to the dogs, a homeless man, Joan didn’t care. “Honey, I can hear you, you don’t have to shout,” Betty said. Adele asked Joan was she okay. Betty brought the check. Max paid. Joan had said, there were the cockroach bites on Emma’s shoulders and blood stains on her back, she had been lying in her own blood for hours or maybe for days. “My daughter,” Joan said to Dina, “had these enormous holes in her arms from all the IV’s and God knows what else you forced into her.” The autopsy report declared it some kind of accident. It did not look like an accident. It looked like bribery, like money changing hands under the table. Dina stood up. She did so suddenly, raising her arm and Joan thought, bracing herself, I will be hit, until Dina let out a single deep breath. “You loved your daughter. I get that. Your love is a beautiful thing, it really is. But you haven’t been listening.”
Rain fell harder onto the shop awnings, onto the ground and the gutters. A woman hurried across the street, her white dress already soaked. You could see everything. Joan felt dizzied. Dina said, “I think you already know what happened.” A child in green boots attacked a puddle.
“No I don’t know.” Her voice begged: tell me.
They sat in the booth a little while longer. The rain wouldn’t stop. Perhaps there would be a flood. Perhaps they could all be washed away, good riddance. Adele was nodding now, her face anxious and concerned, so Joan nodded too, a reflexive gesture. “Are you listening?” Adele asked. “Sometimes there is nothing to be done. Sometimes you can’t do anything. That’s just how it is. So I want you and Dad, you two hold hands while I’m sitting here. Make up. Love each other already! You have to spend the rest of your lives in the same little room, okay? You might as well start enjoying it. Dad, take her hand. Do it. Don’t be stubborn, come on.”
What Joan did not tell: this last part. Though there could have been a way to tell it. Joan might have said, it was almost time to go. This great big bell began clanging and Dina said she didn’t want me to leave there empty handed. She had a gift. But before she gave it to me, I needed to close my eyes. You have to understand, by this point I hated her. I hated her soft voice and her smile and her brown outfit and also I hated her braids. I said, “Why on Earth would I close my eyes, because you told me to? No.” She wasn’t used to hearing a word like ‘no,’ you sure could tell. She pitched her voice very low – like this – and said, “Do you know, I see your daughter every day.” She began to brag about it, how she’d see Emma walking in the garden, or resting under her favorite tree. Dina told me in fact Emma was there in the room with us. She wanted me to believe Emma was standing there beside me, grinning and full of love – not love for anyone in particular, no, it had be a love for everybody. Dina insisted Emma had stood there the whole time. And it was my fault I couldn’t see her, because of my stubbornness, or anger, or my past evils – blaming the victim, you know how they work. Oh she was crazy! There wasn’t incense or crystal balls in that room but there should have been. Dina told me, “It’s not like you’ll never meet your daughter again. Look, here she is!” What kind of person believes like that? Sure, it was tempting, but you can’t believe in something just because you want to. You can’t start believing in things simply because they’re convenient or because they would fill this gaping hole in your life. But Joan didn’t tell. Because there was something shameful, nearly cliché, about the whole thing: the pretty cult leader, her rich blue eyes, a sudden belief in things that had to be untrue. A breeze blew through the open windows of the cabin. To someone else it could all appear very pleasant, the breeze, the sunlight through the windows, the garden. Dina placed her hand on Joan’s chest, right above her heart. “Get away from me,” Joan said. Dina didn’t move. There were tiny brown moles on Dina’s arm, and the smell of her: stones, moss, something dark like that. “In fact, I am holding your daughter’s hand right now,” Dina said.
“You’re full of shit,” Joan said. “You’re shit.” The words sounded as pitiful as they were. Her hands in her lap, limp like two obedient dogs. Still, Joan looked to the left of where Dina stood.
“Can you see her, Joan?”
Emma are you here?
“There’s nothing there.”
Where are you Emma? Emma?
“She’s standing right beside you, can you see her now?” Nothing. Nothing. “The whole time she’s been there, you just have to pay attention. Try harder. It’s your choice, okay, whether you lose somebody or you don’t. Look, she wants to take your hand! You aren’t trying hard enough, Joan. You aren’t letting go of the anger and the blame. Now let it go. Open your mind. Believe in this, what have you got to lose?” This black buzzing of loss: the room grew numb with it. The shadows in the corners, and on the floor, like trapped birds. “I think she wants to tell you something. It’s okay. Joan, go ahead and cry. Everything is okay. Emma is holding nothing against you, nothing at all. That’s why her hands are open, look. She’s unhurt, she is holding onto nothing.” Dina spoke gently now, softly and gently, as if laying a blanket down over Joan’s face. “She’s happy, isn’t she? Isn’t that what she is telling you? She still wants to take your hand. Lean in closer. Good. Like that, yes. Let her, let her hold you.”
When a person’s child leaves them, they are left with memories. That’s all they have. It doesn’t matter what they almost believed in their grief, or what they thought they may have seen once. This is what Joan tells herself at least. Because, now home, Emma does not appear again, she is not in any room of their house, not in the bedroom, not the kitchen or laundry room or the creepy attic, though Joan tries to summon her after Max has gone to sleep and the house falls quiet and dark. Joan sits very still, just as Dina instructed, she lets go of her anger or any emotion that might keep Emma at bay, she slows her breathing, but – nothing. Emma, are you there? Emma does not appear skipping through the backyard, nor is she peeking through the kitchen curtains, or sitting outside beside the little pond. Emma is not there, not in the closets, or the pantry, or in the rocking chair. No one reaches out to touch Joan’s arms or pat the skin on the back of her neck. Emma? Dina had said, “Don’t expect her to follow you home. She won’t leave here. She doesn’t want to leave,” and Joan had made herself laugh, telling that smirking Dina, I don’t think you can boss Emma around anymore. I think Emma will do as she pleases.
But it turns out the mothers whose children desert them are left only with memories. Such memories must be good enough. So alone and awake in the dark house, Joan chooses this one: Emma in a yellow wrap dress, standing beside Caul at the curb, beside the red Corolla, her bag at her feet. It’s the last time Joan saw her daughter alive. The dress has flowers all over it. Emma also wears flip-flops. They look uncomfortable. Her toenails have been painted pink some time ago; the nail polish is chipping off by this point. There are birds in the trees and each bird sings a different song. No one pays attention to the birds but they are right there in the trees. Emma has put her hair up in a clip. Her long neck is exposed to the sun, which is everywhere that day. The back of her neck is freckled. She is not looking at Joan. She is squinting up at the house, at the roof of their house. She looks so alive. Look, she is breathing in and out – alive! They can hear, across the street, their neighbor’s children yelping as they splash around a wading pool. “When you girls were little,” Joan says, “we moved the slide into the pool –” But Emma interrupts. They have heard enough stories for a while. Caul’s arm is on Emma’s waist. He is full of his own importance, certainly, but also he is holding her like he loves her, why would Joan think otherwise? His fingers pressing into the skin on her side, so she is held like she is loved. And the sun is in Emma’s hair and on her shoulders and in all their eyes. Once, when Emma was very young, Joan picked her daughter up and carried her in the sun for as long as she could, arms aching, because Emma would not allow herself to be put down. “Emma,” Joan says. Joan cannot recall if she actually said this to her daughter or if it’s something she inserted afterwards, to make the memory more comfortable. In any case, in this memory, Joan says, “Emma, I love you. I have loved you more than anyone or anything. That was supposed to be enough. Even when you thought I wasn’t loving you, I was loving you.” In the sky, white vapor falls out of a plane headed who knows where, somewhere very distant. Emma’s thumb rubs against her ring finger, which means a certain degree of nervousness. Two silver hoops hang from each of her earlobes. The tilt of her head to the right. If there are limits to what love can do, nobody will admit this yet.
Emma looks away from the house and now she is smiling at Joan, who studies the smile for a long time, like it’s the clue to everything. At first, it merely looks like a smile, warm and hopeful – ah, but that was the mistake. The smile is obviously a clue: I will leave you. Or, I am leaving you right now. Or, I have loved you too, always, with all my heart. Or, it was enough.
Debbie Urbanski’s short stories have appeared in The Kenyon Review, New England Review, Southern Review, The Sun and in the anthology New Stories from the Midwest 2012 (Indiana University Press).