Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name (6 page)

Two detectives came to our house that afternoon. I described for them what my mother had been wearing at the mall: a black sweater covered in cat hair and a pair of brown suede pants that, at the knees and lap creases, had faded to the color of butter.

They asked if anything had been taken from the premises. “Everything’s here,” Dad said. “In order.”

“Has she ever done anything like this before?”

Dad turned to me. “Clar, can you excuse us for a second?

Maybe go check on Jeremy?”

I stared at him and then went upstairs to Jeremy’s room. A friend of my mother’s had given him a karaoke machine. Jeremy was watching the “Moon River” tape.

I crept back out to the landing above the stairway.

“She was married before,” Dad was telling the detectives. “She left him without warning.”

I had never heard of the first husband.

“Where does the ex-husband live?” one of the detectives asked.

“Finland. The northern part. He’s a priest there. Or he was.

A Sami man.” “A what?”

“Sorry. A native. Part of the native population. Like Eskimos.” “Any chance she went back to the priest? What was his

name?”

“Eero. Eero Valkeapää.” He spelled it for them. “And no, there’s no chance. She was very unhappy with him. It’s been more than a decade. Fifteen years since she saw him.”

“Any reason for you to expect your wife might have been having an affair?”

“Out of the question,” Dad said. “She wasn’t . . . how do I say this? Olivia wasn’t a sexual person.”

I knew things Dad didn’t.

I was eleven when my mother gave me her earrings. I was watching Jeremy one afternoon when he had a tantrum. He had carried anything with an electrical cord—the toaster, the blow dryer, the small TV from my parents’ bedroom—into the center of the living room.

I looked all over the house for my mother. I found her outside in the garden, kissing a man under the bird feeder. Like mistletoe, I thought. The man was Mr. Wells, the owner of the art-house theater in town. He was a drunk who attempted to disguise the stench of bourbon with an excessive application of Ben-Gay. I tried to sneak back into the house without them seeing me, but I’d locked the door.

“Here you go, baby,” she said later that night. “The earrings are a tradition among the women in our family.” She said her own mother had given her a pair of earrings when she was my age, and now she wanted to give them to me. “I can’t wear them anyway,” she said.

My mother had slits in her ears where her piercings once were. Years had caused the rips to split and separate, each one an inverted
V
, like the door to an unzipped tent.

“Here,” she said. “Take them.” With pinched fingers, she

held the gold hoops out to me, as if holding dead mice by their tails.

Mr. Wells left town the following spring—most likely, his wife had found out about my mother—and moved to Texas. Shortly after he left, a package showed up at our door. The return address was in San Antonio.

Without opening it, my mother placed the package inside two of Jeremy’s plastic bags—he kept his collection in the hall closet—tied the bags in a knot, and threw the bundle in the trash.

“Wrong address,” she said to me.

Later, I ripped open the plastic bags. Inside was a miniature horse and a T-shirt that said
DON
’
T MESS WITH TEXAS
.

A scarecrow stood in the center of the small garden Dad had helped me plant. I dressed it in the
DON
’
T MESS WITH TEXAS
shirt. If my mother noticed, she never said a word.

Two days after my mother vanished, I came home and her car was in the driveway. I ran into the house.

“The police found it parked at the Rhinecliff train station,” Dad said.

I returned to the bakery in the mall and found the fried-egg lady. Now she was wearing an apron over a solid black shirt. I asked her if my mother had bought bread the evening of December 16. I wanted to know if she’d been planning on coming home for dinner, and then changed her mind.

The egg lady shrugged. “Sure,” she said. “Sure, she bought bread.”

Two weeks after my mother disappeared, Virginia took me to see a psychic. She said she’d found one that specialized in my situation.

“You know, lost people,” Virginia said.

The psychic had asked that I bring a photo. I’d selected

one of my mother standing in front of the movie theater. One day, as I was coming home from school, I saw her exiting the theater and I asked her to pose. In the picture, she was wearing white culottes and looked like she was forcing herself to be patient. “Why didn’t anyone tell me how unbecoming those are on me?” she said when she saw the photo. She stared at me accusingly, and later donated the culottes to a charity clothing drive.

The psychic was sixty, maybe older. She held my fingers in hers and told me I was a sad, sad person, with a sad soul. “I can see it in your eyes. What lonely eyes.” My hands were cold in her oily palms. I stared at her so long I thought I might start crying. I handed her the picture.

She held the photo up to her forehead and closed her eyes. Her lashes were beaded with blue mascara. “Someone has done harm to her,” she said. “She’s in a field and it was a bad man who did this to her.”

“Did what?” I asked.

The psychic said she’d need more money to try to see the man, and the exact location of the field. She pushed a large jade bracelet up and down her thick, hairless forearm.

I had already given her the money I earned babysitting. I unclasped my coin purse. Red, ripped lining.

“Your earrings would do the trick,” she said.

I touched my earlobes. I was wearing the earrings my mother had given me.

“They’re from my mother,” I stammered.

“Good,” the psychic said. “It might help.”

She reached for my ear. I leaned back in my chair and then jumped up. I found Virginia in the front of the parlor.

“Let’s go,” I said. “Let’s run.”

We sprinted down the street, hand in hand. We had never held hands before. We ran until we were out of breath, and fell laughing against the side of a grocery store. As Virginia laughed, she threw back her head, and her long hair brushed the rainbows on the pockets of her jeans. She had light eyes, good eyes—boys said they were bedroomy.

That night, I stared at myself in the mirror on the inside lid of an old jewelry box. I squinted my eyes, trying to make them look seductive, vague, distant.

A month after my mother’s disappearance, we hired Suzette. Suzette was an elderly Chinese woman who came in the afternoons to help us clean the house and look after Jeremy. Her own retarded son had died at the age of thirty. I couldn’t piece together all the details: a Circle Line cruise around New York, a fascination with a seagull, a fall from the top deck.

Suzette thought she could understand Jeremy. “He said he missed you today,” she told me one afternoon. I had just come home from school.

“Really?” I said. I’d never heard him speak. He could grunt when upset, but to my knowledge, he had never formed words.

I stood with my backpack still on, staring at Jeremy. He was sitting on the toilet, the door wide open. Suzette was trying to potty-train him. She paid a great deal of attention to his fecal matter: she’d serve him beef or large quantities of 7-Up if she thought he was having difficulty in either direction.

“Did you say you missed your sister when she was at school?” Suzette coaxed.

Jeremy said nothing.

“Did you miss me, Jeremy?” I said.

Nothing. I felt jealousy so intense I didn’t know what it was. I wanted to slap Suzette. I stomped to my room, closed the door, and hoped my mother was dead in a field.

Dad wrote letters to my mother. He wrote them by hand on long reams of old computer paper, the kind with the perfora-tions on the sides. Some days, his letters, in clean all-caps, covered one sheet, other days, three. He never separated a page from the one before it. Instead, they remained fastened, top to bottom to top to bottom. When I first came upon the stack on the floor, I lifted up the top page only to find the next one pulled up beneath it. I stood on his desk chair and continued lifting, the letters forming an escalator, rising.

Initially, the letters gave me hope: Dad thought she was still alive. But then I remembered that he had written similar letters to his mother after she was dead.

I let the papers collapse, each page folding obediently, and stepped down from the chair.

That March, I got lost while walking in the forest behind our house. I was plotting how I’d live out in the woods, surviving on berries, when Dad found me.

As we made our way back to the house, I tried to explain to him how I’d loved the thrill of thinking I was lost. He looked at me and nodded. “You’re the way I was when I was young,” he said, “when I traveled constantly and had no home.”

In his twenties and thirties, Dad had lived in Haiti, the Andes, Canada. He’d written a book, published by a small academic press, about extracts from plants, which some Haitians used to induce trances. At thirty-eight, Dad moved to the Hudson River Valley to take care of his dying mother. To pay the bills, he became a landscape architect.

“Don’t you miss it?” I said as he led me under trees, over a creek, back home.

“Miss what?”

“All the travel. It must be boring being with me and Jeremy all the time.”

“Being with you guys . . .” he said. “I’ll never leave. You know that, don’t you?”

I nodded. I had taken the suitcases from his closet and hidden them under my bed.

On my sixteenth birthday, Virginia took me to a party in the next town. She dared me to lose my virginity that night. “I need to be able to talk to someone about what it’s like,” she said.

I felt too old to not have had sex. In every other way, I felt thirty. “How much do you dare me?” I said.

Virginia took a sip of beer instead of answering.

Two boys came into the kitchen. They asked if we wanted pot, and Virginia said sure, and I declined. I wanted to keep my brain fresh, alive, a note-taking classification machine.

“Oh my gosh,” I said, looking at one of their Tshirts. “That’s my dad.” At home, we had boxes of these Tshirts my father gave out to his clients. The boy looked down at his shirt. “Your father’s Richard of Richard’s Landscape?”

I nodded.

The two boys looked at each other and laughed. I had no idea what was funny, but I felt exiled by their laughter, so I laughed, too. The boy in my father’s shirt turned around, and I understood the joke. On the back, at the end of the list of services provided—
SOD
,
STONE WALLS
,
TREE AND STUMP REMOVAL
—it said
BUSH TRIMMING
.

I took a sip of my beer, and then another, longer one. To explain the tears in the corners of my eyes, I made an exaggerated pretense of choking on the beer, on the hilarity of it all.

It was someone’s idea that we go to the park. Christian, the boy wearing my father’s T-shirt, was leading me by the elbow.

As we approached the playground, my feet sank, and I collapsed in the sand by the swings. The voices of the others surrounded us, sounding alternately loud and absent, like a stereo with only one speaker working.

Christian led me to the small merry-go-round. I sat down, and he spun me. I lay on my back and saw the obsidian sky above and heard the quacks of ducks in the distance. Where were the others? Christian came and lay down next to me, and the spinning slowed slightly as my heartbeat quickened. He put his hands on either side of my face and kissed me. His fingers smelled of metal, of other people’s fingers.

I was wearing a vintage dress with butterflies, and he searched for the zipper. “It’s on the side,” I murmured. But by this time, he’d given up. He lifted up the skirt, and the breeze against my thighs felt almost wet. My hands were flat against the floor of the merry-go-round. Christian grabbed my left hand and put it on his crotch. He’d unzipped his pants. We were slowing down now, slow slow slow. I tried to pull my hand off, but he held it there, on him. I used the fingers of my free hand to poke him in the eye, the way my mother had taught me. Then I stuck my foot out and stopped the spinning; I pushed him off me and jumped.

As I ran through the park, I heard Christian calling after me. “Hey, crazy girl. You’re fucking insane.” I almost fell into the pond. Sleeping ducks awakened and scattered—the sound of a hundred decks of cards shuffled at once.

The next day, I walked by the psychic’s storefront window,

with my seductive bedroom eyes. I hoped she would see me and know she’d gotten me wrong.
Try to recognize me now
.

I went looking for my mother once, the summer before my senior year of high school. I convinced Virginia to drive to Texas with me.

“Texas?” she said.

“Yeah,” I said. “I think that’s where my mom lives now.”

Virginia looked at me, head tilted. “Okay,” she said, and picked something from between her small teeth.

I had convinced myself that my mother had gone to join Mr. Wells. I had kept the envelope in which the
DON
’
T MESS WITH TEXAS
shirt had been sent. The return address was in San Antonio.

Virginia and I saved up from our summer jobs, and at the end of August, we packed her brother’s Camaro. We brought a tent, sleeping bags, a cooler, old yearbooks, and a road map I’d gotten from AAA. Our route was highlighted in orange.

Every time we crossed a state border, we gave each other a compliment. “I like that you’re a loyal friend, a constant friend,” I told Virginia when we entered Oklahoma.

“I like that you think the best of me,” she said in return.

When we got to San Antonio, the sky was mustard-colored and heavy with impending rain. We bought baseball hats and big, dark sunglasses and parked across the street from the address I had for Mr. Wells. We sat there for two days, sipping Diet Cokes