TODAY SHE’S WEARING GREEN. DEEP, CHRISTMAS GREEN. Evergreen. She smiles as she ushers me into her office.
“So,” Dr. Phaler says. “How are you? How have things been?”
“Fine,” I say. “College has gone well. I got three A’s and a B. It was a good semester. I’ve been sick since Christmas, though. Fever. Chills.”
She nods. “The flu,” she diagnoses. “Everyone’s got it.” Dr. Phaler smiles then with her lips closed. “I assume,” she says, opening her mouth in a tiny bullet hole before going on, “that you haven’t heard from your mother, or you’d have mentioned it when you called for the appointment.”
“No,” I say, and it hangs in the air. My own lips are pursed now like hers, as if my face is a reflection of Dr. Phaler’s. “Detective Shh-shh-shh called a few days ago to say they’d closed the case, for whatever it’s worth.”
It wasn’t exactly true, but also wasn’t a lie. Detective Scieziesciez had told me they were closing my mother’s case, but he told me about it in the water bed in his condominium. The water in the mattress was warm, and when I moved I felt embraced by its formlessness, its bodiless fluid.
We were talking about dreams again, because again he’d dozed off beside me after sex, and again I’d had to wake him out of his shouting.
So I told him about mine:
The dreams of my mother calling to me from the coat closet in our living room, and when I opened the door, there she was, lace veil over her pale face, maybe two great wings wrapped around her body. Shivering. And then she’d disappear.
He seemed to think about that for a long time.
“Why didn’t you tell me about these dreams before?”
“When?” I asked. “Why?”
“Sometimes dreams make a difference,” he said seriously. “Sometimes people know something they don’t know they know.”
“What do you mean?”
He thought. He said, “I had a case once where a two-year-old had been missing for days, had just wandered away from a picnic at a park. It was assumed to be a kidnapping, but the mother kept dreaming the baby was in the back of a truck being driven away while she watched. Sometimes she’d even get a glimpse of the license plate, and finally she woke up one morning and was able to write the state and number of the license plate down.
“We tracked the U-Haul down in Minnesota—it had been rented by a college student, he’d driven through Ohio on his way to California—and the kid was in the back. He’d crawled into it at the park while the student was changing a flat tire and eating a sandwich—crawled way far in the back. The guy threw the flat in the back, slammed it shut, and didn’t have any reason to open it again until we got there.”
I felt nauseated.
The water bed.
I could smell it—salty and old in the plastic mattress. Chlorine. Swamp. Small and soggy sweaters.
I sat up and swung my legs off the bed, and looked at my bony, cold feet on the beige of the detective’s bedroom rug. I thought of that little boy turned to milk and rags in the bed of a truck. All because Detective Scieziesciez wasn’t smart enough to find him before he’d sobbed and gasped and sucked himself to death.
But, I thought, the point of this story, as the detective told it, was how smart he was. What a good detective.
I kept staring, hard, at my feet, and I thought of the letters we used to get from his office, the ones with my mother’s name misspelled. I remembered him knocking so hard and efficiently on our front door that first time, months already since my mother had disappeared, and how he’d stumbled, bumbling, when I opened it. I remembered, suddenly, Officer McCarthy, that cop who’d visited our fifth-grade class to scare us about drugs, and pictured him wearing a dunce’s cap, sitting in the comer of a classroom as a lot of little children snickered.
Another big, dumb, muscled man with a gun.
I will never come here again, I thought, and curled my toes into the carpet, and my feet became as blunt as clubs. “How could she have known that?” I asked, “How could she have dreamt that?”
My voice was brittle. Maybe I was shouting. The detective sounded defensive when he answered, and he got out of bed, pulling his boxer shorts up. The water bed gulped.
“Obviously, she saw that truck at the park and some part of her registered that the kid had crawled in there. She was too hysterical to consciously understand that, so it came to her in dreams.”
“Oh,” I said. “Then what’s up with my dreams, Detective? Where’s my mother?”
Detective Scieziesciez zipped up his jeans, and looked down at me. He looked a bit confused. He began to flex the bicep of one arm and feel it, knead it with his fingers, as if to remind himself that he was strong. Then he sighed. “Well, do you really want my opinion?”
I pulled the sheet around me, hiding my nakedness. “Of course I said. “Since the very beginning we’ve been asking for your professional opinion.” I raised one of my eyebrows ironically as I said professional.
He began to look angry and worried, a man having to defend himself for the first time in his life. “Well,” he said, “in that case, in my opinion, your mother is dead.”
There was whining in my lungs, but it had nothing to do with me. It sounded like knives being sharpened on ice. I knew he was going to say this. I could tell he would want to hurt me. “Why?” I was interrogating him now.
“Because an extensive and very well-handled search for her has been taking place for the last three years, and she has not been found.”
I could see blood rising up his neck, and I knew suddenly, clearly, that there had been no search at all, that he was lying, or incompetent, or both.
“‘Extensive’ and well-handled’?” I asked. “You never even spelled my mother’s name right in your letters. That photo you used on the flyers was so blurry, she could have been anyone. You never looked anywhere for my mother. You never even looked in our house!”
He pulled his leather belt quickly through the belt loops around his waist, and it made a windy sigh.
“First of all,” he said, “my secretary types up the letters. The spelling errors are hers. Second, your father provided the photo we used, and he said it was the best he could do. And third, we can’t search a house without a search warrant, and we can’t get a search warrant without some reason to conduct a search. I had to assume that if your mother was in the house, you’d have been able to find her yourself. She wouldn’t exactly be missing if she was in the house.”
“Okay, Detective. Where is she?”
“Well, you yourself indicated that she was probably having an affair, which was confirmed by that woman, that Mrs. Blindman, next door—”
“Mrs. Hillman.”
“Whatever. The blind lady. She said your mother had a boyfriend.”
“What would Mrs. Hillman know? How would Mrs. Hillman know anything about my mother?”
“She lives next door.” He smirked when he said this.
“But she can’t see.” I felt afraid that I might cry. I took a deep, painful breath. “Besides, wouldn’t that just make it even more likely that she was off somewhere with this boyfriend”—the sarcasm caught like a sob in my throat—“not dead?”—and so did dead.
“Well,” he said, pausing, staring at the bedroom wall, narrowing his eyes. It looked as if he were reading his lines off a cue card he couldn’t quite see. “Well,” he said again, “several people interviewed told us that your father is a jealous and impulsive man.”
The detective’s stomach looked like stone covered with skin. He was buttoning up his white shirt.