The Disappeared Geraldine McGowan After my mother came back from Washington State that final time, and some months after the various authorities stopped calling, Kent's name wasn't mentioned. It wasn't as if he was forgotten, it was just that no one said his name. But I knew that Kent was somewhere in the world, because I sometimes saw my father stare off into space and sigh, and I would then think, that is my father remembering him and he must believe Kent is somewhere out there, too. After her initial treks back and forth from Tacoma, where my brother disappeared, and Chattanooga, where we lived, my mother resisted staying put for very long and continued to come and go and meet with people. She went to California to visit people I never met but recognized from names on Christmas cards. She spoke with a psychic in France with some regularity, although only when my father wasn't home. She called the Thurston County Sheriff's office when she thought I couldn't hear her. Locally, she became friends with Father Rob from St. Philip of Neri, who had a remarkably good singing voice and a cherubic certainty that life after death really was more beautiful and wonderful than anything we here on Earth could imagine. But there was no evidence that's where Kent was either. My brother had been living in Washington during the summer of 1978 with two roommates. He was to go to Washington State College that Fall. It would be his third college in four years and he was always positive that the next school was the right school. He took a job with the Forestry Service but then quit because his supervisor was a "redneck asshole." He called my parents to borrow money. My father was furious. My mother told Kent that she understood why he had to quit. Several days later my brother told his roommates he was going for a day hike. He took his lightweight hiking boots and knapsack, and never returned. He was not reported missing for a week until his roommates decided to become concerned that he hadn't returned to the house. They called my parents thinking that my brother had gone home for a visit, perhaps to have it out with my father about the money, and had not bothered to tell them. Within eight hours of reporting Kent's disappearance to the local police , the Seattle police reported finding his car, abandoned, out of gas, stereo ripped out, in a rundown neighborhood near the downtown docks in Seattle. That’s when my mother flew out to Washington and helped hang missing person posters all over Tacoma and parts of the Mount Rainer State Park. She stayed in a Holiday Inn for two weeks; gave interviews to newspapers and appeared on the local television and radio news programs. The State Police and the Forestry Service sent out people to search the area; although most of the searching was done by volunteers; for which, my parents said, they were very grateful. The Seattle Police pulled in drug dealers, and shady characters of other sorts, for questioning. But nothing came of it. We were all interviewed as part of the process of tracing missing persons; deep background, if you will, even those of us left in Chattanooga. We were urged in these interviews not only to describe everything we could remember but also things we wouldn't tell anyone else. Did my brother have friends? Did I know any of them? Did he take drugs? Did I think he was happy? Did he seem happy? “No,” I said about the drugs. "Yes," I replied to all those questions. How did I KNOW he was happy, they asked me? What were the names of his friends? And it seemed to me they were all missing the point. Why did any of these things matter? I was nine years old when my brother seemingly evaporated from the surface of this planet and he was just 20. I wept when I spoke to the police because I was losing him and they were losing him, too. Because all the things that made him him – his hair color, his happiness or misery, how he smelled and laughed were getting smaller and smaller until his disappearance threatened to become the biggest thing about him. At home, my brother's being missing went so deep that the surface of our lives seemed barely to ripple. My father did not sell his business immediately but gradually, one dealership that first year, another dealership the next. My mother went to see monks and swamis. She spent days, and sometimes weeks away from home. She spoke to people who believed in re-incarnation and to people who spoke to the dead – there were no messages from the other side and I think that gave her hope. Or maybe it did not. As for me, it seems as if one morning I was watching Scoobie Do and the next I had switched to soap operas and after that nothing really moved. The summer I was 11 I was still home watching TV. I did not go into the pool, I did not invite anybody over, and I did not accept any invitations to go out with friends. I had no friends. And I did not answer the phone when it rang. I just let it ring. There was no one I wanted to talk to. On my mother's returns from her trips, she would stop down in the rec room and ask me, "So how are Noah and Bobbie doing?" They were a doctor and a nurse in a soap opera that I watched, and I would fill her in on what she had missed, while she sat beside me on the arm of the sofa. It was during that summer, on a hot, oblique day, when my mother was at home, that I heard her answer the phone. I raised the sound on the television to block out her conversation. It was only later, at dinner that my mother told my father and me that the psychic in France had called her with a dream about my brother. My father looked about the dining room with fatigue, marshaled by some minor contempt that seemed to fill him. Yet, whatever it was he felt or meant to say, he could only get out one word: my mother's name. "Ann," he said. The psychic felt that we should try one more time to bring my brother's disappearance to the public's attention. My mother reminded my father that he had some leverage at the Chattanooga Times. She said she normally did not like to go about things this way but that we had to try. She pointed out unnecessarily that its parent company was the New York Times. A story like my brother's might be reprinted in another paper, maybe even in the real Times, my mother concluded. It really made no difference what my father thought. My mother had already called my father's connection, had asked him to do whatever he had to do to get someone there to do a story. Anything could result from this: Someone who might have seen Kent, or any one else who might remember something, could come forward. Anything was possible. Then my mother also pointed out that maybe nothing would happen. The psychic said to not get our hopes up. The psychic only had a feeling something positive could turn out from this. My father did not eat as he listened, and when my mother was through, he took a few bites more from his plate and folded his napkin as if to leave the table. "Weren't you going to have a tennis lesson today?" he asked me. My mother had enrolled me in swimming and tennis lessons, to get me out of the house. "Yes," I told him, "but I forgot." "You're watching too much television," he snapped and I looked down at my plate. "Oh, good heavens," my mother smiled, "it was my fault. With all the excitement – I didn't remember either." She smiled at my father and smiled at me. My father looked at the both of us, again he wanted to say something but didn’t. He left the table and went to his study where he was spending increasing amounts of time. My mother took a sip of iced tea from her glass, her eyes focused on some far-off point beyond my comprehension. "It's all set," she said without looking at me. "It's all set." And then, "'A salesman is a salesman is a salesman. Ick.' That's e.e. cummings," she added. "Did I ever read you that poem?" "No." "Ah," she said, still looking beyond me. "You know your father has a temper about things like that. You should have reminded me about your lessons. You're getting big now." "I know," I answered, "but I forgot." And so it was, the following day, about 10:00 in the morning, and I was still in my pajamas. When Marnie left the kitchen I'd snuck in and taken a bag of chips from the cupboard and brought it to the rec room to eat for breakfast. I loved watching soaps. I had my favorites but actually I loved them all. I loved the way people were so involved with each other, the way they seem to notice things about one another all the time. The way they always used each other's name. "You haven't been the same, Jessica," one character would tell another. Or, "Tell me, Clive, what is it that I've done wrong? Don't you understand I love you?" I especially loved when people on soaps died. I loved the way they died and then came back as a twin or something, or had a miraculous recovery, or a wrong diagnosis, or a mistaken identity. I knew that was silly, of course. Real life didn't resolve itself with a miraculous anything; real life didn't even have that many twins. But what I really loved about death in soaps was the transformation it brought to the living: Alcoholics stopped drinking; mothers came back to the family; fathers realized the mistakes they made. Death always brought good some how; brought something out in people that made them better. Death was at its best when young people died. Beautiful, young people whose dying was tragic but never senseless – they were sacrifices to the people around them. The young people who died on the soaps, never seemed to mind dying. They took it well and were kind and understanding. The surviving characters cried or got angry, and very emotional but eventually learned something important and found some peace. And sometimes, if you watched a show long enough, sometimes a character would make reference to another character that had been killed off. I thought that was kind of neat. I thought it was like we were one big happy family. That summer when my mother was at home, she swam fifteen laps in the pool each morning to stay trim. But it was my father who was actually the athlete. My father could pick up anything – a tennis racket, a baseball bat, or a golf club and just play – he was like that. Neither my brother nor I took after him in that regard, I often wondered if he felt bad about that. I suppose he loved baseball best. He had a ball signed by all the guys in his barracks, when he had been in the Army, where he had been the catcher on the barracks' team. He told me the catcher was the most important position on the team. Because the catcher was the only player who could see the entire field, was the only person in the position to know where everybody was. The catcher, he used to say, controlled the game. Marnie delivered the news that my father was coming home that afternoon to take me to my tennis lesson, and I detected a victorious tone in her voice – as if she too was tired of my sitting around the house doing nothing but watching TV and eat. And so, when I did get into the car with my father, dressed in shorts, sneakers and one of my brother's tee shirts, I was sullen with anger, and did not bother to even say hello. He must have been angry with me as well, because we drove in silence, although he put the windows up and the air conditioning on for me. He didn't like air conditioning, he preferred driving with the windows open, and I noticed for the first time that his left elbow was tan from driving. It seemed to me as we drove that day that I began to remember how much I used to like driving with him – I used to like going to the store with him. Or going out to pick up pizza or medicine from the pharmacy on weekends, when they didn't deliver. He enjoyed driving. Before my brother disappeared, my father traveled to the different dealerships, driving nearly all day only to circle on back and return home late at night. His car was clean and yet comfortably messy. There were brochures in the back, a carton of key rings with Crawford Cadillac printed on them. He had a little wastebasket and I could see the snacks he'd eaten while on the road. An empty bottle of Pepsi (he didn't like Coca-Cola), the wrapper to a Snicker's bar or a beef jerky. It was funny about my father. He lied about his age to join the Army and liked to tell the story about the time he was digging a ditch in Germany on a hot day, and he'd taken off his shirt and helmet. Patton came barreling down in a jeep fining everyone who wasn't wearing a helmet. "Son of a bitch fined me five bucks," my father said. "Hell of a lot of money to me back then," he'd add. My mother would smile at this story when he told it, although I don’t think she liked it. She'd met him after the war, when he was working for another dealer. Not everyone needs a Caddy. But if you want a damn fine car – well, it speaks for itself. My mother never liked cooking very much, but after Kent, she took to doing things extravagantly – having Maine lobsters over-nighted for Christmas Eve dinner, filets of Nova Scotia lox and bagels from New York for Christmas brunch with capers that she sent for from a magazine. I was once with her when she mentioned this to a friend or an acquaintance – I no longer remember who – and she explained to this person that it was our family tradition. I remembered those words for a long time. "A family tradition," as if we'd always lived this way. I don't recall being angry at her for saying that – perhaps the person was a newer friend, perhaps the person didn't know that my mother had lost one of her children. But it wasn’t always like that and I wished she’d say so. That day, when my father picked me up to take me to tennis, I secretly began to feel happy, having him next to me, driving me somewhere. Yet, I felt somehow that I was betraying my brother and my mother. He dropped me off at the town tennis courts and I got out without thanking him for the lift. My brother's absence went so deep. And this is the only way I have of getting him back again. To remember that my father drove me to tennis and in the way memory works, the reporter came by the next day. I don't think that is true. But that is how it always feels. The closest truth I suppose would be this: One day that summer Martha Ann Kulik just appeared. She parked at the bottom of the drive. I had a nearly perfect view from the front window of my room. It was a long driveway, and I could see her as she walked around the curve that led to the house. She walked slowly, taking things in, I thought. Her dark hair was very shiny, even from the distance, and I watched as she put one foot forward in front of the other, she was sure-footed, athletic in her movements and yet utterly feminine. She turned almost imperceptibly from side to side, moving her upper body only slightly to look at the tall pine trees along the rise, cutting cleanly through the sky. I was still young enough to think I might be beautiful like that when I grew up. And so, even before we spoke, I admired her; wanted to be her in some way. She was to me, then, and perhaps even now, the Beautiful Girl Reporter – like Brenda Starr –and I perceived that there was no pity in her. She was wearing a dark blue skirt, above the knees, and a white and red striped shirt, like a sailor on a gondola. Her feet turned outward slightly in little black flats. She carried a large, dark bag, and walked with ease up the hill. In the distance, she was a small figure, walking without fear, and it suddenly seemed real to me that my brother was dead. I thought she must have felt me watching her because I remember she began to look up and I pulled back from the window. Then I ran into the hallway and waited on the landing, listening. She didn't ring the bell, she knocked, and I heard the clicking of my mother's knee, a little clicking noise her knee made when she walked that she wasn't aware of. ("Amanda, how do you always know it's me?" "I don't know." I didn't want to tell my mother the truth about herself, she would have been embarrassed.) There had been, at that juncture, so many people along the way that none of us or, rather all of us, learned to expect nothing: Not from officials or private detectives my father hired, not the U.S. Marshal my mother befriended early on. Even now, looking back, it is apparent that the psychic had always been careful to not to raise false hopes. But this time was different. Martha Ann Kulik, I think, got both my mother's and my hopes up, although we never exactly confided this to each other. There didn't seem to be much compassion on the surface at all. She didn't smile at my mother, although she shook her hand. While my mother was all Southern and gracious, with her lilting voice of river silt, as she enquired about the drive, commented on the heat, smiled as if she were meeting someone socially. My mother was rightfully proud of her smile. Her teeth seemed to be those of a much younger person; they were smallish and formed like perfect stones in a beautiful graveyard, comfortably in line, with only a hint of discoloration, while her gums still looked young and healthily pink. Neither of my parents smoked then, although my mother confessed that she had smoked like a fiend when she lived a bohemian life after college in San Francisco. Now my mother would have the occasional cigarette, with a cocktail at a party, or at a bar, with my father and me, waiting for a table in a restaurant. I thought my mother sophisticated and beautiful, although she really wasn't beautiful, at least not the way the reporter was; it now seems that my mother felt beautiful, and so registered as such in most people's eyes. There were not many people who did not respond to this, to my mother. My mother took Martha Ann Kulik out back, by the pool, not, I realize now, wanting her in the house, and I walked downstairs to the back of the house, where the rec room and Kent's room were. He had the best room. It had sliding doors that opened up to the pool, its very blue water, and the woods behind it. Some mornings he woke up to see a deer or a fox, one time, a wolf. It was a beautiful spot where my parents built that house; I forget that sometimes, how beautiful it all was. No one in the family ever went into his room, except Marnie, who twice a month entered it to vacuum and dust and, more surreptitiously, me. It wasn't as if my parents were keeping a shrine, it wasn't like that at all, it was just there, and the reasons why they left it would change as time went by. Those first two years, I would sneak into it, sit on his bed and think I smelled him, and believe he had come back. My mother asked Martha Ann Kulik if she wanted something cold to drink. I don't know what she answered but I could see she'd opened her bag and put a recorder on the table. I heard my mother laugh and say, "Oh, do we really need this?" The phone rang and my mother called for me to answer it, and soon as I heard my father's voice, I knew that he knew. That even from a distance, even outside the orbit of my mother's constant searching, he could not bear the idea of pity, which he saw, and I saw, in everyone's faces. Only my mother was willing to live through any and all humiliation. I called out for her and she came in and took the call in her room so that no one, especially me, could hear. I went back downstairs and stood by the glass doors of the rec room, watching this young woman until she looked up, and then I had a sudden feeling that perhaps she was lonely out there by herself. So I walked out, was drawn out, you might say, to her coolness. She smiled and for a brief moment, she looked like a normally happy person, and then that look disappeared just as quickly. "Martha Kulik," she said. Then she said, "You must be Amanda." Her voice didn't register in the same rises and falls as they did in the South. I didn't know what to say to her. I think she tried to hide her embarrassment because she rummaged around in the bag and took out a camera. All black and looking powerful and invincible, the neck strap wasn't the long thin plastic kind, but thick and embroidered in blues and whites. "You're not from around here." "New York," she said. I began to realize that she was immune to the laws of this place, my parents' house, the laws of the South itself. They couldn't touch her. She unscrewed the cap to the lens and held the camera up to her eye. She shot off a few frames, of the trees, I think, quickly. She placed the lens cap back on and put the camera on the table. "I'm going to take a few pictures of your mother. Do you want me to take yours, too?" I shook my head no. She nodded in response as if she, too, thought I had made the right decision, a wise decision, and I felt as if no one had ever quite respected me like that. I heard myself say to her, "Do you want to see his room?" Her eyebrows shot up for an instant as she met my eyes and nodded. "It's right there," I said, gesturing at the second set of sliding doors. The curtains were pulled closed from the inside and from the outside it looked vaguely black and for that reason almost terrifying. But I felt less terror with her there. "Sure," she said and she got up. I led her – I remember thinking it was funny that she was following me. "Wait. I'll let you in," because the sliding doors were locked from the inside, and I went quickly into the rec room and then through his door off of it. I unlocked the sliding doors and pushed the curtains aside and let her in, and she walked through those curtains, over the door tracks, like she was stepping over a log and entering into the deep part of the forest where all the little children go, and where some of them get lost, and she had come to find them. The rooms on the first floor of my parents' house were built into the side of a hill and the only natural light came in through the sliding glass doors. It was dark inside his room but I had been in it so many times, I didn't need a light. His bed, his desk, his crates filled with albums next to his stereo, all the posters on his walls of rock stars like Jimi Hendrix, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones had been taken down – by who I don't remember – my mother, perhaps; Marnie, maybe; but whoever it was left up Picasso's "Guernica." His bookcase was filled with books – most of them his, although, I suspect that over the course of his absence books were placed in there that he had never read – a large art history book I recognized from a class my mother had taken at the local community college. One of his guitars was leaning against it – but he had more than one and yet I don't recall seeing it ever again. The floor was covered in shag rug, in some muddy, orangey color that was so much a part of those times. His closet still had his clothes: jeans and jean shirts, two blazers, a couple of ties, white shirts, clothes going back to when he was younger. My brother was tall and thin, and the sleeves on some of the shirts hung down so far that they looked clownish, as if they had never fit him at all, as if he had never had the chance to grow into them. I let go of the curtains and the room turned dark again. "Can we turn on a light?" she asked. I couldn't talk to her really, a shyness, a fear that I was doing something my parents would not like, overwhelmed me. But I wanted her to see him, the way I saw him. I wanted to share him, so that he would seem real to me again. I walked over to his desk and turned on the lamp. And with the light on, Martha Ann Kulik turned to me and smiled, pointed out the black stripe he'd painted down one of the corners in the room. I remembered that day when he painted that stripe. I remembered sitting on his bed and watching him, interrupting him, laughing with him. Her interest turned to his bedspread, an Indian one, with the Tree of Life on it, although you wouldn't know that unless someone told you. "He was pretty cool, wasn't he?" And I remembered thinking that about him, too, so I nodded. And she nodded back. "Shakespeare," she said, looking at the books, "Kesey, Kerourac, Camus, both Wolfes," she tapped the spines as spoke. She crouched low and looked at the bottom shelf, "Robert Louis Stevenson, Rimbaud, and the Little Red Book." She smiled again. "Everyone's a revolutionary these days, eh?" I didn't think she cared if I answered or not, or maybe I didn't care if I answered or not. She walked over to his albums and said, "It looks like he really loved music." "Yes," I said. "The Beatles, of course. Cream, the Stones, Rachmaninoff, the Dead, Dolly Parton . . . ." She laughed. She didn't say his name. She got up from the albums and walked around the room again, slowly, easily, without fear. She stood beside his desk and again nodded at me, as if the two of us were in agreement about something, as if the two of us understood one another perfectly. "I wasn't allowed to go in his room unless he was home," I told her for no discernible reason. Her gaze held steadily on me, her dark eyes were frank and serious. "When he was home he always kept his door closed and I would have to knock." Martha Ann Kulik allowed a small smile at this. "I would knock and he would say, 'Hark! Who goes there? Friend or foe?'" The words came out faster than I could possibly imagine and brought me to yet another place I had avoided up until then. "And you were 'friend,'" Martha Ann Kulik added. But that was not quite true. Sometimes Kent would say, "Friend or foe?" And I would yell back, "Foe." Sometimes I would say, "Pill!" Because he told me that I was such a pill when I bugged him to play with me, or fooled around with his stereo, which always got him mad. I did not tell her any of this but my face was burning hot and I placed my palms against my eyes – because no one in my family cried. She crossed the room over to me and I felt her hand on my shoulder, weighing me down. I thought I heard her say, "There, there." But I don’t think she actually said those words at all. She bent over to make eye contact with me with those eyes of hers. And all of it, that I had been holding inside of me, all the things I couldn't carry, she seemed to take from me, until I calmed down. There, there. No, she didn't say that at all. "Your brother, Kent," she said at last, "it must have really made him happy to have you for a sister." She wouldn't let me break eye contact. "I think he was really, really lucky to have you for a sister." I nodded and then she nodded along with me. I knew she was telling me the truth. I had loved my brother; I did love my brother, all of that was true. I was then, still young and small enough to mistake a small compensation for something larger than itself, and so I remained silent in agreement with her. Her hand left my shoulder, barely brushed across the top of my head, and just fell lightly across my cheek. She took one last look around, from floor to ceiling, from corner to corner, before she turned out the light. I walked a little ahead of her but she reached out before me and pulled back the curtains. I slid open the doors and stepped out and she followed, again bending slightly as if she were leaving the undergrowth of somewhere. "Don't tell my mother," I whispered. "I won't." "Don't tell anyone." "Right," she said and I could see that she was just about to smile at me, and suddenly all that warmth seemed too much for me, too much of what I wanted coming at me too fast, after so long living without it. I ran into the house. The last I saw of her was when she left a few hours later. I stood at the window and this time when she looked I didn't move back. She seemed to look directly at me but when I waved, she didn't return it. When the article came out, it was a disappointment, and a strange feeling of hopelessness about everything set into my mother. The photograph of her was a good one -- it showed a woman of a certain age, in the spotlight, pleased with being photographed. Her mouth was set in a certain way that seemed to indicate she was delighted to be interviewed, delighted to have such attention paid – which really wasn't the case at all. My mother's words, about the problems facing young people today, nuclear weapons, drugs, a country that had let them down, none of the words, even though they were true, sounded like a concerned citizen, and she was so much more than that. Martha Ann Kulik had included two photographs of my brother: his high school senior photo and a blurry one taken from a photo album, there were others she could have used my mother said in a dreamy way when she saw the article for the first time. There was a brief quotes about the rise in missing persons from someone in the FBI, and the Washington State Police said they never close a case when it involves someone so young. But my brother was 20 when he disappeared, no child. Then there was a line or two about who to contact if anyone knew of his whereabouts or might have any information about him. My father had a separate phone line set up and a bunch of calls came in, crackpots, more psychics, a drunken phone call from one of Kent's roommates, sobbing because he let so much time elapse between my brother's disappearance and calling my parents. I wonder now if she deliberately left my mother hung out to dry, or whether my mother, being who she was, had no choice but to be so misunderstood. Soon afterwards my mother got involved with saving the planet, a concern for protecting wildlife. My father began coaching Little League and picking up the boys who didn’t have rides and would not have been able to play unless he took it upon himself for all of that. And Martha Ann Kulik remained on my mind. I could conjure her up when I was scared -whether it was about going into junior high school or liking a boy or the unused, unchanging room in that house. For a long while, too, I scanned the newspaper to see her name. I thought that I would follow her career. I imagined her becoming a famous reporter or else I imagined that she went on to write beautiful novels and had married a handsome man and had wonderful children. I imagined her rich and kind. But as even more time went on I realized that I didn't want to know how Martha Ann Kulik's life turned out. I wished her well – although, I see now that I wished her mostly a life without small compensations. I wanted to leave her, as she was in my memory, wanted to imagine her now and forever, alive and well, and let her go.