All That Is Mine I Carry With Me, page 2
“No, thanks.”
“Good. I don’t have any.”
She patted the stool, gesturing me over.
On the belly of her right arm, I glimpsed her old tattoo, which I had forgotten. In small letters, now a little blurry, it read Omnia mea mecum porto, Latin for “All that is mine I carry with me.” She got this tattoo when we were just out of college, in the mid-1980s, when she was feeling quite lost. This was before the current fad for tattoos had got going, and I hated it at the time, not because I disagreed with the sentiment (I do not) but because I hated to see Miranda deface such a lovely arm. It was like scribbling with a Sharpie on Michelangelo’s David. Now the tattoo struck me as quite modest. It was placed in such a way that only Miranda herself could read it comfortably: on the underside of her arm, in a single line of letters running from the middle of the forearm up to her elbow. It was like a little note that Miranda had written there just for herself.
She sat on her desk facing me.
“I was sorry to hear about your father.”
“Were you really?”
“Well, no. I was sorry for you. Jeff said you’re taking care of him.”
“I am. It’s complicated.”
“I bet.”
“Are you still writing, Phil? Where’s the new book?”
“It’s complicated.”
“Why? Tell me.”
“Nothing to write about.”
“There’s a whole world to write about.”
“Meh. The world is such a mess right now. The whole novel thing—it feels trivial, telling little stories when everything is falling apart.”
“Everything is always falling apart. We still need art.”
“I know. It’s just, I want to write something real, something complicated.”
“So do it. Write something real. Write something complicated.” She gave me a weary, mischievous smile. “Maybe I can help.”
* * *
—
It was Miranda who first discovered her mother’s absence, on Wednesday, November 12, 1975. She was about to turn eleven years old, a fifth grader. No shadow had fallen over her then. She was a curly-blond pixie, the sort of bright-faced child adults are drawn to.
She walked home from school that day carrying in her arms a bulging three-ring binder, a bulky math textbook, and a paperback novel, Sounder. She wore her favorite teal miniskirt and the bone-white ribbed turtleneck that went with it, her “school clothes.”
She went to the back door of her house and, clutching her books against her chest, she twisted to press the doorbell. No answer. Someone was always home to meet Miranda, usually her mother, but that day the house was dark.
She put her books neatly on the stoop, then tested the doorknob. Locked.
She fetched the spare key from the garage, where it was hidden in an empty flowerpot, unlocked the door, and immediately returned the key to its hiding place, as she had been taught to do.
Inside, she called, “I’m home!” When there was no answer, she went to the foot of the staircase and aimed her voice up toward the second floor: “I’m hooome!” Still no answer.
She wandered through the first floor, up the stairs, checked every room. She called out, “Mom! Mom!” for a while, but the house was empty.
It did not occur to her to be frightened. Mom’s pocketbook was in the front hall. She had probably just run out for a moment. Far from panicking, Miranda felt a little thrill of independence at having the house all to herself. She could not remember ever being left completely alone like this.
She took three Oreos from the kitchen, turned on the little black-and-white TV in the first-floor den, and settled in contentedly to watch The Mike Douglas Show. The Jackson 5 was on the show that day (Miranda would always remember this detail) and she luxuriated in the fact that Alex and Jeff were not there to change the channel to The Three Stooges or some stupid cartoon.
At four, when Mike Douglas ended, she turned off the TV and drifted around the house. In the quiet, it was easier to notice the house itself. Empty, it was not Miranda’s home; it was just a building that, for now, her family happened to occupy. The house was eighty years old, very boxy and plain, with four flat, featureless sides, unlike the many grander wedding-cake Victorians in the neighborhood. Every surface had the patina of years, of human touch—the dark wood, the tarnished brass hinges and knobs, the wavy horsehair-plaster walls. The very age of the house prompted a troubling idea: Other families had lived here, had passed through the house. Other children had stood on these same chipped, creaking bird’s-eye maple floors. And other families would occupy it after the Larkins were gone too.
The empty house made little breathing noises. The radiators knocked as they filled with steam, the pipes creaked inside the walls as they expanded and contracted, the boiler thunked on and off in the basement.
She shuffled into her parents’ bedroom, crossing the usual borders. On Dad’s night table there were only three objects, a Sony digital clock with little hinged cards that flipped to show the time, a copy of Newsweek, and a Horatio Hornblower novel with a sailing ship on the cover. Miranda opened the night table drawer, peered at the few neatly arranged things inside: a small box of Kleenex, a tube of cream, a few magazines turned facedown. Miranda turned the top magazine over. It was Penthouse. The glossy cover showed a woman in soft focus with her naked back to the camera. The model looked over her shoulder with a blank expression. Miranda studied the magazine cover, wishing she hadn’t seen it, then replaced it precisely and closed the drawer.
In a high chest where Dad kept his clothes, there were stacks of dry-cleaned shirts, all folded and wrapped in plastic bags. She opened his closet, where business suits were arrayed neatly on matching wood hangers, grouped into blue suits and gray suits. His wingtip shoes were lined up on the floor, cedar shoe trees in all of them, black shoes and brown shoes and oxblood shoes.
On her mother’s dresser was a wedding photo from seventeen years before, Dad in a short haircut, Mom in her white gown, hair piled high on her head like a top hat, both of them smiling. Miranda opened her mother’s jewelry box, looked inside it. On a silver tray were coins, mascara, lipstick, a small tub of blush, and an irresistibly soft makeup brush. A Mason Pearson hairbrush with Mom’s hair snarled in the bristles. An open pack of Larks (red with silver foil) and a ceramic ashtray filled with cigarette butts marked by her lipstick. Miranda swirled the makeup brush on her cheeks, nose, and forehead to feel its sensuous bloom of soft bristles.
By 4:30 daylight was faltering, the house became gloomy, and Miranda got very worried very quickly.
She considered calling her father at work. His office number was in the kitchen, in the address book. But Miranda had never called his office before and she was too shy to try it now. Who would answer the phone? How would she ask for her dad, what would she call him? “Mr. Larkin”? “Dan”? Anyway, he was at work, and Miranda understood, without ever having been told, that she was not to disturb him during the workday. Mom and the three children regarded Dan Larkin’s work with reverence. The Law—that was what her mother called it—was demanding, abstruse, noble. No one in the family ever spoke cynically about it, except Dan himself.
There was no trusted neighbor or friend Miranda felt comfortable calling, either. Her parents had few friends, and none of those adults penetrated the Larkins’ circle.
There was Grandma Lil, but she would surely overreact and rush right over in a flutter, when the truth was Miranda did not even know whether there was a problem.
There was Grandma Mildred, too, but that was much too scary an option.
So she waited. What else could she do? In the deepening gloom, Miranda turned on a single lamp in the little den on the first floor, and in the shelter of that warm light, she read Sounder, determined not to look up from her book until her mother got home. She was a good reader, but that day it was difficult. In the back of her mind, an idea tugged at her attention—as sometimes a stray thought will distract you from a book—that it was possible her mother would never come home again.
* * *
—
Forty years or so later, when Miranda described this part of the story, in her cluttered studio, she paused here.
“Isn’t that weird? Why would I think my mother was gone forever? It’s like I already knew.”
“I don’t know. Maybe it’s natural for a kid to think the worst.”
Miranda accepted this and went on with the story: Jeff’s return home from school, carrying his crimson football jersey with the shoulder pads inside so that it resembled a torso. Then Alex, towering over the two younger kids, reassuring them it was probably nothing. Dan’s return home from work to discover his wife missing, the kids alone, no dinner on the table. The increasingly frantic phone calls to friends and, later, to the police, who refused to investigate that night because Jane could not be considered missing until she had been gone for forty-eight hours. Miranda lying in bed in a low panic, listening to her father’s voice on the phone downstairs, frightened by his tone even when she could not make out the words, yearning for her mother to come lie beside her.
She told me, “I thought it was my fault. I thought I did something to make her go. That’s how I knew she wasn’t coming back.”
“What could you have done?”
“I don’t know. It makes no sense. But I still think it sometimes.”
* * *
—
The next morning, Miranda woke up early. The light in the house was dim, foggy. It was Thursday, a school day, but everything was wrong. It did not feel like a Thursday. It did not feel like any day at all. The day had come unmoored from the calendar.
There were voices speaking in the kitchen but they were all men’s voices.
Miranda sensed right away that her mother had not come back. If she had, Mom would have come straight to her, to her room, to her bedside. Miranda was almost sure of it.
She had to pee but could not take the time. Barefoot, wearing her pink-striped Lanz flannel nightgown, she made her way down the stairs.
Three people were in the kitchen, framed in the doorway: Dad, wearing the previous day’s starched blue dress shirt, uncharacteristically wrinkled and untucked; Alex; and a third man whom she had never seen before.
This third man might have been very handsome—he had square features and an appealing, level way of looking at you—but his face was marred by a large port-wine stain on the right side of his forehead. Miranda had never seen a face marked this way, and the surprise of the man’s appearance, compounded with the off-kilter atmosphere in the house, left the little girl gaping.
Her father stepped forward to say, “Mom hasn’t come home yet. We don’t know anything. We’re still waiting.”
“But where is she?”
“I’m sorry, sweetie, we just don’t know. That’s all I can tell you.”
Miranda absorbed the news and, with a quivery feeling, she stood frozen.
“This is Detective Glover. He’s a policeman. He’s going to help us.”
The man gave her a half-hearted smile.
Her dad made no move toward her, to hug her as she yearned for him to do, so she turned and floated back up the stairs.
In her parents’ bedroom, the Big Bed was rumpled but the sheets were still tucked in. Dad must have spent the night on top of the covers. On her mother’s side of the bed, Miranda tugged the sheet open and climbed in. She snuggled down in the little hollow that Mom’s body had impressed into the mattress, laid her head on the flat pillow Mom used, felt Mom’s presence still on the sheets, her smell. She did not cry; it was not clear yet that a tragedy had occurred. She just lay there, luxuriating in her mother’s lingering, ghostly companionship in the bed.
After a while, Jeff came upstairs to check on her. He was already dressed, in jeans and a T-shirt. Jeff was twelve and a half, and something had happened to him recently, a quickening in his body. Miranda thought he seemed suddenly much older than she was. The eighteen-month gap between them seemed to have widened. He was becoming a junior adult like Alex, leaving Miranda alone in little-kidhood.
“Hey, Mimi.”
“You need to brush your hair.”
“Yeah?”
“You look like the wild man of Borneo.”
This was her mother’s phrase. The kids had no idea where Borneo was or who was its wild man, but apparently he had messy hair.
“You okay, Mimi?”
“No.”
He sat down on the floor beside the bed, knees up, back against the wall. “It’s gonna be okay.”
“Who’s that guy downstairs?”
“He’s a cop.”
“Duh. I mean, what’s he doing here?”
“Dad made the cops send someone.”
“Why?”
“Cuz he’s worried about Mom. Duh.”
“You shouldn’t call them cops. I don’t think they like it.”
“They don’t care. They call each other cops, I think.”
“What’s that thing on his face?”
“It’s just a birthmark. He can’t help it.”
“It looks weird.”
“You look weird.”
She smiled. “Where’s Mom?”
“They don’t know.”
“Where do you think she is?”
“How should I know?”
“They must think something bad happened. That’s why there’s a cop here.”
“No, Mimi. You shouldn’t think like that. You’ll make yourself sad. We need to stay cool.”
“Stay cool.”
“That’s right. Stay cool.”
“What if she had a car accident and she’s out there somewhere waiting for us to come get her?”
“She’s not. They checked all the hospitals and all the police departments. There weren’t any accidents.”
“Maybe she’s hurt.”
“Maybe. We just have to wait, Mimi.”
“Maybe she’s dead.” Miranda grinned then covered her mouth, surprised at the weirdness of her own reaction, and buried her face in the pillow.
But Jeff laughed too. “She’s not dead, you idiot. Why would she be dead?”
They waited a moment, listening for a sign that the adults in the kitchen, Dad and this weird-looking cop, had heard their inappropriate laughter.
“Maybe she just went away.”
“Went away where?”
“I don’t know.”
“Why would she go away, Mimi?”
“I don’t know. Maybe she was sad.”
“Sad?” His tone became quite certain: “Mom wasn’t sad.”
“Maybe she had a boyfriend and they ran away.”
“A boyfriend! What?”
“Yeah. Only, if she had a boyfriend and she ran away with him, she’d take us with her, wouldn’t she?”
“No! Miranda, if you have a boyfriend, you don’t want your kids around. You go off to, like, a hotel or something.”
Miranda knew he was talking about sex and she could not bear to look at him. She knew what sex was, in a general way, but she did not like to talk about it, certainly not with her brother, and she certainly did not like to think of her mother doing it.
“Are they going to get a divorce?”
“I don’t think so.”
“How do you know?”
“Cuz they never fight.”
“Oh.” A pause. “What if she doesn’t come back?”
“She’s coming back.”
“But if she doesn’t. Will they still be married?”
“She’s coming back, Miranda.”
“Okay, but what if she doesn’t?”
“Why wouldn’t she come back?”
“Cuz maybe she doesn’t want to.”
“Of course she wants to!”
“You don’t know. Maybe she doesn’t want to be with Dad anymore.”
“Well, she’d still come back to be with us.”
“Maybe not. If she wanted to be with us, she wouldn’t have run away.”
“If she doesn’t want to come back? I don’t know. I guess they’ll get divorced. It’s okay, though. Lots of people get divorced.”
“What would happen to us?”
“We’d go live with Mom, I guess.”
“Why not Dad?”
“It’s just not the way it works.”
“Where would we live?”
“I don’t know where! None of this is going to happen, Mimi. She’s coming back, they’re not getting divorced, there’s nothing wrong. You just have to wait. Be cool. Be. Cool.”
“What if she doesn’t want to be our mom anymore?”
Jeff growled at her.
Miranda nuzzled her face into the pillow, thought about it. “Do we still have to go to school?”
“I’m going. I don’t know about you.”
“Do I have to?”
“Yeah. You’re not sick.”
“Maybe Dad will let me stay home.”
“He won’t. You have to go. You’re not sick.”
“If I go, what do I tell people about Mom?”
“Nothing. It’s none of their business.”
“None of their beeswax.”
“That’s right. I don’t think we should tell anyone. It’s none of their beeswax. Okay?”
“Okay.”
“Really, Miranda. You have to promise, okay? It’s embarrassing.”
“Okay, I promise.”
Jeff squinted at her, then decided to trust her. “Okay, good. I promise too.”
Jeff did go to school that day, and the next day, Friday, as well. His behavior was normal in every way. He even played in his football game after school on Friday afternoon. I saw Jeff in school both days, and I did not have any idea his mom had gone missing until Saturday morning, when there was a story about it in the Herald American, which my own mother noticed. When I came down to breakfast Saturday, she held up the paper, showed me the story. “Isn’t this your friend’s mother?”
