eaten the first real meal my mother had cooked since my disappearance. My mother was stunned. She had donned her blue dishwashing gloves, filled the sink with sudsy water, and was preparing to do every dish. Lindsey would dry. Her mother, she assumed, would call upon Jack to pour her an after-dinner drink.
“Mother, that is so nice of you.”
“Don’t mention it,” she said. “I’ll just run out to the front hall and get my bag o’ magic.”
“Oh no,” I heard my mother say under her breath.
“Ah, yes, the bag o’ magic,” said Lindsey, who had not spoken the whole meal.
“Please, Mother!” my mother protested when Grandma Lynn came back.
“Okay, kids, clear off the table and get your mother over here. I’m doing a makeover.”
“Mother, that’s crazy. I have all these dishes to do.”
“Abigail,” my father said.
“Oh no. She may get you to drink, but she’s not getting those instruments of torture near me.”
“I’m not drunk,” he said.
“You’re smiling,” my mother said.
“So sue him,” Grandma Lynn said. “Buckley, grab your mother’s hand and drag her over here.” My brother obliged. It was fun to see his mother be bossed and prodded.
“Grandma Lynn?” Lindsey asked shyly.
My mother was being led by Buckley to a kitchen chair my grandmother had turned to face her.
“What?”
“Could you teach me about makeup?”
“My God in heaven, praise the Lord, yes!”
My mother sat down and Buckley climbed up into her lap. “What’s wrong, Mommy?”
“Are you laughing, Abbie?” My father smiled.
And she was. She was laughing and she was crying too.
“Susie was a good girl, honey,” Grandma Lynn said. “Just like you.” There was no pause. “Now lift up your chin and let me have a look at those bags under your eyes.”
Buckley got down and moved onto a chair. “This is an eyelash curler, Lindsey,” my grandmother instructed. “I taught your mother all of these things.”
“Clarissa uses those,” Lindsey said.
My grandmother set the rubber curler pads on either side of my mother’s eyelashes, and my mother, knowing the ropes, looked upward.
“Have you talked to Clarissa?” my father asked.
“Not really,” said Lindsey. “She’s hanging out a lot with Brian Nelson. They cut class enough times to get a three-day suspension.”
“I don’t expect that of Clarissa,” my father said. “She may not have been the brightest apple in the bunch, but she was never a troublemaker.”
“When I ran into her she reeked of pot.”
“I hope you’re not getting into that,” Grandma Lynn said. She finished the last of her seven and seven and slammed the highball glass down on the table. “Now, see this, Lindsey, see how when the lashes are curled it opens up your mother’s eyes?”
Lindsey tried to imagine her own eyelashes, but instead saw the star-clumped lashes of Samuel Heckler as his face neared hers for a kiss. Her pupils dilated, pulsing in and out like small, ferocious olives.
“I stand amazed,” Grandma Lynn said, and put her hands, one still twisted into the awkward handles of the eyelash curler, on her hips.
“What?”
“Lindsey Salmon, you have a boyfriend,” my grandmother announced to the room.
My father smiled. He was liking Grandma Lynn suddenly. I was too.
“Do not,” Lindsey said.
My grandmother was about to speak when my mother whispered, “Do too.”
“Bless you, honey,” my grandmother said, “you should have a boyfriend. As soon as I’m done with your mother, I’m giving you the grand Grandma Lynn treatment. Jack, make me an aperitif.”
“An aperitif is something you…” my mother began.
“Don’t correct me, Abigail.”
My grandmother got sloshed. She made Lindsey look like a clown or, as Grandma Lynn said herself, “a grade-A ’tute.” My father got what she called “finely drunkened.” The most amazing thing was that my mother went to bed and left the dirty dishes in the sink.
While everyone else slept, Lindsey stood at the mirror in the bathroom, looking at herself. She wiped off some of the blush, blotted her lips, and ran her fingers over the swollen, freshly plucked parts of her formerly bushy eyebrows. In the mirror she saw something different and so did I: an adult who could take care of herself. Under the makeup was the face she’d always known as her own, until very recently, when it had become the face that reminded people of me. With lip pencil and eyeliner, she now saw, the edges of her features were delineated, and they sat on her face like gems imported from some far-off place where the colors were richer than the colors in our house had ever been. It was true what our grandmother said – the makeup brought out the blue of her eyes. The plucking of the eyebrows changed the shape of her face. The blush highlighted the hollows beneath her cheekbones (“The hollows that could stand some more hollowing,” our grandmother pointed out). And her lips – she practiced her facial expressions. She pouted, she kissed, she smiled wide as if she too had had a cocktail, she looked down and pretended to pray like a good girl but cocked one eye up to see how she looked being good. She went to bed and slept on her back so as not to mess up her new face.
Mrs. Bethel Utemeyer was the only dead person my sister and I ever saw. She moved in with her son to our development when I was six and Lindsey five.
My mother said that she had lost part of her brain and that sometimes she left her son’s house and didn’t know where she was. She would often end up in our front yard, standing under the dogwood tree and looking out at the street as if waiting for a bus. My mother would sit her down in the kitchen and make tea for the two of them, and after she calmed her she would call her son’s house to tell them where she was. Sometimes no one was home and Mrs. Utemeyer would sit at our kitchen table and stare into the centerpiece for hours. She would be there when we came home from school. Sitting. She smiled at us. Often she called Lindsey “Natalie” and reached out to touch her hair.
When she died, her son encouraged my mother to bring Lindsey and me to the funeral. “My mother seemed to have a special fondness for your children,” he wrote.
“She didn’t even know my name, Mom,” Lindsey whined, as our mother buttoned up the infinite number of round buttons on Lindsey’s dress coat.
“At least she
It was after Easter, and a spring heat wave had set in that week. All but the most stubborn of that winter’s snow had seeped into the earth, and in the graveyard of the Utemeyers’ church snow clung to the base of the headstones, while, nearby, buttercup shoots were making their way up.
The Utemeyers’ church was fancy. “High Catholic,” my father had said in the car. Lindsey and I thought this was very funny. My father hadn’t wanted to come but my mother was so pregnant that she couldn’t drive. For the last few months of her pregnancy with Buckley she was unable to fit behind the wheel. She was so uncomfortable most of the time that we avoided being near her for fear we’d be thrown into servitude.
But her pregnancy allowed her to get out of what Lindsey and I couldn’t stop talking about for weeks and what I kept dreaming about for long after that: viewing the body. I could tell my father and mother didn’t want this to happen, but Mr. Utemeyer made beeline for the two of us when it was time to file past the casket. “Which one of you is the one she called Natalie?” he asked. We stared at him. I pointed to Lindsey.
“I’d like you to come say goodbye,” he said. He smelled of a perfume sweeter than what my mother sometimes wore, and the sting of it in my nose, and my sense of exclusion, made me want to cry. “You can come too,” he said to me, extending his hands so we would flank him in the aisle.
It wasn’t Mrs. Utemeyer. It was something else. But it
“Mother,” Mr. Utemeyer said, “I brought the little girl you called Natalie.”
Lindsey and I both admitted later that we expected Mrs. Utemeyer to speak and that we had decided, individually, that if she did we were going to grab the other one and run like hell.
An excruciating second or two and it was over and we were released back to our mother and father.
I wasn’t very surprised when I first saw Mrs. Bethel Utemeyer in my heaven, nor was I shocked when Holly and I found her walking hand in hand with a small blond girl she introduced as her daughter, Natalie.
The morning of my memorial Lindsey stayed in her room for as long as she could. She didn’t want my mother to see the still-applied makeup until it would be too late to make her wash it off. She had also told herself it would be okay to take a dress from my closet. That I wouldn’t mind.
But it was weird to watch.
She opened the door to my room, a vault that by February was being disturbed more and more, though no one, not my mother or father, nor Buckley or Lindsey, confessed to entering, nor to taking things that they didn’t plan on returning. They were blind to the clues that each of them came and visited me there. Any disturbance, even if it could not possibly be blamed on Holiday, was blamed on him.
Lindsey wanted to look nice for Samuel. She opened the double doors to my closet and reviewed the mess. I hadn’t been exactly orderly, so every time my mother told us to clean up, I’d shoved whatever was on the floor or bed into my closet.
Lindsey had always wanted the clothes I owned first-run but had gotten them all as hand-me-downs.
“Gosh,” she said, whispering into the darkness of my closet. She realized with guilt and glee that everything she saw before her was hers now.
“Hello? Knock-knock,” said Grandma Lynn.
Lindsey jumped.
“Sorry to disturb you, hon,” she said. “I thought I heard you in here.”
My grandmother stood in what my mother called one of her Jackie Kennedy dresses. She had never understood why unlike the rest of us her mother had no hips – she could slide into a straight-cut dress and fill it out just enough, even at sixty-two, to look perfect in it.
“What are you doing in here?” Lindsey asked.
“I need help with this zipper.” Grandma Lynn turned, and Lindsey could see what she had never seen on our own mother. The back of Grandma Lynn’s black bra, the top of her half-slip. She walked the step or two over to our grandmother and, trying not to touch anything but the zipper tab, zipped her
