Tommy suspects distress calls fail to lead to search and rescue. There’s the matter of encryption and current conditions. His ship is in the Mariana Trench and nobody is listening.
When he was in second grade, he realized his parents didn’t actually speak to one another. They only appeared to inhabit the same house on Lincoln Street. But they broadcast on separate frequencies in encrypted codes that changed every day. That’s when he recognized the futility of distress calls. There’re actually posthumous messages. By the time you say May Day May Day it’s too late.
Six months later, his grandfather, Horace Bowen, telephones. The Captain and Horace aren’t on speaking terms.
“Well, son,” Horace begins. There’s a pause, as if his grandfather is taking a deep breath. “Seems your mother got a touch of malaria in Africa. She called me for money. They flew her to Germany. She’s OK now.”
So she didn’t go to New Mexico after all, Tommy is startled to realize. She joined the Peace Corps instead and they sent her to Arusha in Tanzania. She was teaching girls to use sewing machines in a village called Mosquito Creek. They were making aprons with Mt. Kilimanjaro stenciled on the front. They’d sold 231 at the airport when she became infected.
His grandfather, Horace Bowen, has a northern accent with rolling a’s that are languid but defined, like smooth sandstone boulders slowly sliding down a hill. He lives in an Amish village in Manitoba, Canada. That’s where his parents are from. They grew up on adjoining farms. His mother won the Governor General’s Gold Crescent and was going to Berkeley, California. But she had somehow detoured and married Captain instead. She was sixteen.
“Is she coming back?” Tommy asks.
He hasn’t spoken to a relative before. He doesn’t know what the boundaries are. Should he tell his grandfather that his heart is broken and his father ignores him? And they just eat pizza and canned soup? Should he say he needs his mother with her Democratic Club, clay classes, and stained Betty Crocker cooking book with the pages falling out?
Everything is unfathomable and abstract. Manitoba. Tanzania. Germany. And suddenly a man who is his mother’s father has appeared.
“Is she coming back?” Tommy asks.
“She didn’t say,” his grandfather tells him.
“Why did she run away?” he wonders.
“That’s not for me to know,” Horace Bowen replies.
“Did she have a message for me?” Tommy is urgent.
There is a pause in which his grandfather seems to make a decision. “It was a short call and went by fast,” his grandfather says. “Bad weather here. I have to go.”
It’s the second Christmas since his mother departed. Tommy no longer believes she was kidnapped by a band of marauding killers, or struck with a rare amnesia. Nothing fell on her head from the sky. She wasn’t stolen or abducted by extraterrestrials. He recognizes that she deserted him.
Over a million women disappear every year. It’s a phenomenon. Sometimes cars with wallets and passports and antique bracelets are found on abandoned country roads. Suitcases with nightgowns, photographs, wedding rings and ski jackets are discovered in airports and bus stations.
It’s possible to triangulate location from accidental remnants. A red taffeta dress with ruffles, hoop earrings and castanets wrapped in tissue paper next to a book titled Spanish Basics suggests a certain trajectory. A wedding gown, flannel baby blankets and a two-hundred-year-old lace communion dress made in Belgium indicate other possibilities. But his mother didn’t leave a trace.
Tommy is stunned. He realizes history isn’t absolute. It’s flexible and offers competing narratives subject to editing and deletion. He has trouble falling asleep. He hypnotizes himself by deriving rudimentary mathematical theorems that can be solved and replicated. This is the prayer that works. This is grace.
Tommy finds the Christmas decorations in the attic and brings the boxes to his father. Captain has appropriated his mother’s bedroom for a study. He’s moved in a desk and bookshelves, a new sofa, his stereo and TV. He’s put a lock on the door. Tommy has to knock.
Captain doesn’t look at the box he’s holding. Strands of green and red bulbs and his mother’s childhood ornaments are inside — the miniature gingham dolls with yellow yarn braids and brass button eyes, the cotton snowflakes, each distinct in size and embroidery and the fifteen angels with her name rendered in pink thread. One for each Christmas. Someone who loved her sewed her name in twig-like stitches. Tommy senses they intended to impart a further message in a deliberate script like hieroglyphics.
“Let’s give it a rest,” Captain says.
They don’t put up the Christmas lights or drive to Mike Moretti’s lot with its hundreds of freshly cut trees that are fragrant with some dusty, distilled essence of pine. They don’t buy a Christmas tree for his mother’s ornaments or put a wreath on the front door.
Captain closes the clinic just after Thanksgiving and doesn’t plan to reopen until mid-January. He pauses on his way to the Buick and counts out five crisp hundred dollar bills. He indicates the table where ten silver dollars are arranged to form a squat pyramid. His suitcase and doctor’s bag are already in the car.
His father hasn’t cut his hair since his mother left. It’s so long he ties it in a ponytail with a rawhide string. Wind knocked off his ivory shantung straw hat that hides his forehead and part of his left eye. His father doesn’t want anyone to see what he’s thinking.
Tommy has retrieved the hat and his father puts it in the cardboard box he’s carrying toward the Buick. The hat rests on top of packages wrapped with rows of inordinately festive reindeer tied with pink and blue bows.
“I’ve got bloat and colic from Pittsburgh to Harrisburg,” his father says. “I’ve got Grass Fever and Nile Fever and widows and orphans in 12 counties. Ho ho ho.” He doesn’t smile.
“What about me?” Tommy asks. He expects his father to tell him to dial 911. That’s what he said last Christmas.
“Something happens, I expect you to take care of it,’’ Captain said. “Time you man up.”
Caroler’s from St. Mary’s and St. Stephens United Methodist offer an unenthusiastic truncated version of “Santa Clause is Coming to Town.” As if sensing the desolation within, they quickly move on through thickly falling snow. The porch light is burned out and the only illumination in the house is the lamp in his bedroom. When the carolers arrive, he turns off the lamp.
The house is a black hole on the street. It’s a mouth with the front teeth knocked out and it’s snowing hard.
Mrs. Riggs, the mailman’s wife who lives two houses down Lincoln Street, brings him plates with leftover dinner — sometimes it’s turkey and mashed potatoes with gravy, ham and cornbread, or beef stew and biscuits. When the pharmacist’s wife, Mrs. Sissick, bakes, she sends one of her sons to deliver pieces of pie and bags of ginger snaps.
Sheriff Murphy passes in his pick-up and issues a blizzard warning through a bullhorn. Then he parks and walks in through the front door. Tommy hadn’t realized the sheriff had a key.
“Got a bulb?” Jimbo asks. “It’s creepy dark. Probably scared away the preachers. You hiding?”
The sheriff puts in a new bulb on the porch. Then he opens kitchen cabinets and counts soup cans.
“No tree?” the sheriff observes.
“Mom’s got the best ornaments, too.” Tommy says. “The snowflakes and dolls.”
“And the angels with her name in pink thread? I loved them,” Jimbo says. “Hey, I’m looking for power lines going down. Maybe people trapped in cars. Want to help out?”
Tommy shakes his head no.
“It’s your civic duty. I’ll deputize you,” Sheriff Murphy offers. “Come on. Let’s go.”