White Bird in a Blizzard Read Free

Nothing.”
    Then, hanging up, my father said, “Thank you, Detective
Shh-shh-shh
,” to the air, staring into it for a while like a man consumed with despair, a man wandering, lost, through a tunnel of despair wearing a gray prison uniform in his gray imagination.
     
    My father shakes his head sadly now, as he did then, and grimaces at me across the table, a bloody thread of meat snagged in his front teeth. There is a familiar, watery-eyed expression on his face. He shrugs and looks down at his damaged dinner, torn to pieces on a plate.
    “Your mother never loved me,” he says before he picks up his fork and stabs into it again.
     
     
     
     
    T HEY WERE AN ATTRACTIVE SUBURBAN COUPLE . B EFORE SHE vanished, you might have seen them on a Wednesday night at Bob’s Chop House. As the hostess led you to your table, you passed theirs, shushing past their silence, glancing at their salads.
    Both of them had dark hair only faintly tipped with gray. Hers was shoulder length and smooth. His was whatever length and style was fashionable then for men. Not too long in back, not too tall on top. Conservative, but in touch with the times. Perhaps he was wearing the dark slacks he’d worn to work that day—half a suit: He’d have left the jacket at home.
    My father’s features were sharp—a sculpted nose and deep-set eyes. My mother’s cheekbones were high, and she was as slender as a girl. Flat stomach, narrow hips. Her face was always made up with a careful hand—the right tint of blush, maroon lipstick, brown eyeliner, and a beige base. The girls behind those makeup counters in the department stores she frequented knew her name, her favorite shades. Bisque, Berry, Chocolate Mousse—as if you could make a woman’s face into an elegant dessert eaten off a delicate plate. Good French perfume, too, eau-de-vie—you could smell it on her if you got close.
    They were well-spoken. They seemed sincere.
    Still, when you saw her seated across from him at Bob’s Chop House, both of them sipping rocky drinks, linen napkins on their laps, shiny silverware between them, she might look up at you as you passed by—her blue eyes flashing—and what you’d sense, if you sensed anything at all, was cold.
     
    In truth, my mother disappeared twenty years before she did. She moved to the suburbs with a husband. She had a child. She grew a little older every day—the way a middle-aged wife and mother becomes ever more elusive to the naked eye. You look up from your magazine in the dentist’s office when she walks in, but you see right through her.
    And the younger woman she once was, the one you might have noticed—she became no more than a ghost, a phantom girl, wandering away in a snowstorm one day.
    Or she became
me
.
    Maybe
I
stepped into the skin my mother left behind, and became the girl my mother had been, the one she still wanted to be. Maybe I was wearing her youth now like an airy scarf, an accessory, all bright nerves and sticky pearls, and maybe that’s why she spent so much time staring at me with that wistful look in her eyes.
    I was wearing something of hers, something she wanted back. It was written all over her face. After I turned sixteen, I couldn’t bear to look at that face as it gazed into mine.
     
    “Kat,” she said one early Saturday evening in September, standing behind me at the mirror in the hallway upstairs, “you look like I looked when I was you.”
    I was wearing a tight black dress. Phil was taking me to homecoming. I was pinning my hair up over my neck, then letting it fall again. I had been thinking about him, how he might pull the pins out one by one in the backseat of his father’s sedan and bite my neck, unzip this black dress and slip it down over my breasts. I hated talking to my mother at all, but the worst was having to talk to her when I was thinking about sex—the sexual thought suspended, half exposed in the expression and smell of it on me. It seemed, those days, that my mother was