I'll Be Gone in the Dark Read online

  But there’s something familiar. He bears a strong resemblance to the family who lived in the house when I was growing up; some of the kids were close to my age, and I knew them from around town. He must be an older brother, I realize, and either bought or inherited the house from his parents.

  The man looks at Terry with no recognition. I see Terry is undeterred, and unease washes over me. I have a mother’s instinct to reach out, redirect, and quiet down. But I can see Terry wants to distinguish himself in the man’s memory. They are old neighbors after all.

  “I’m one of the boys that found the body!” Terry shouts.

  The man stares at Terry from the side of his car. He says nothing. The blankness is emphatically hostile. I look away, directing my gaze at a tiny Virgin Mary statue planted in the northeast corner of the front lawn.

  It’s Saturday afternoon, June 29, 2013—an unusually cold and windy day for midsummer Chicago. In the sky, a block to the west, I can see the steeple of St. Edmund Catholic Church, my family’s old church, where I went to school from first through third grades.

  The man returns to tinkering with his car. Terry peels off to the right. He spots me thirty yards down the sidewalk. I light up at eye contact and wave furiously at him, compensation for what just transpired. Terry was a year above me at St. Edmund’s. The last time I remember seeing him was thirty-five years ago. I know little about him aside from the recent discovery that the same night in August 1984 changed both our lives.

  “Michelle!” he shouts, walking toward me. “How’s Hollywood?”

  We hug awkwardly. His manner brings me back immediately to the Oak Park of my childhood. The flat vowels in his thick Chicago accent. The way he announces later that he has to “haul ass.” He’s got a cowlick, a raw, pink color to his cheeks, and an utter lack of artifice. No calculating mechanism filters his thought from speech. He starts in right away.

  “So yeah, what happened was,” he says, leading me back toward the house. I hesitate. Maybe it’s fear of the already unhappy homeowner’s reaction. Maybe it’s my sense that walking might help transport us to that muggy summer night when we still rode bikes but had tasted our first sip of beer.

  I look south down the alley.

  “How about we retrace the path you guys took that night?”

  Oak Park borders the West Side of Chicago. Ernest Hemingway, who grew up there, famously referred to it as a town of “wide lawns and narrow minds,” but that wasn’t my experience of the place. We lived in a drafty three-story Victorian on the 300 block of South Scoville, a cul-de-sac in the center of town. North of us was the Frank Lloyd Wright Home and Studio and an affluent neighborhood of prairie homes and liberal professionals intent on staying hip. My friend Cameron lived in one of the Wright homes. Her stepfather was a civil rights attorney, and her mother was, I think, a potter. They introduced me to vegetarian salt and the word “Kabuki.” I remember the stepfather recommending that Cameron and I, who both tended toward black smocks and confessional verse, cheer ourselves up by going to see the Talking Heads’ concert movie Stop Making Sense.

  South of us was mostly blue-collar Irish Catholic families. The houses were always a few degrees too cold and the beds lacked headboards. Occasionally a father would disappear with a twenty-year-old, never to be seen again, but there would be no divorce. A college friend who spent sophomore year spring break with my family was convinced that my father was doing a comedy bit when he began updating me on the local gossip. The last names, she said, were so exclusively, defiantly Irish. The Connellys. The Flannerys. The O’Learys. And on and on. I overheard a weary Irish Catholic mother from Oak Park field a question about my family once. “How many McNamara kids are there?” she was asked.

  “Only six,” she said. She had eleven.

  My family had a foot in both sides of Oak Park. My parents were natives, members of the tribe commonly referred to as West Side Irish. They met in high school. My father was gap-toothed and jolly. He liked to laugh. My mother was the teetotaling eldest daughter of two hard partiers. She loved Judy Garland and had a lifelong fascination with Hollywood. “People used to tell me I resemble Gene Tierney,” she told me shyly once. I didn’t know who that was. When I saw Laura years later, the mysterious central character who shared my mother’s cascade of golden-flecked brown hair and delicately cut cheekbones mesmerized me.

  The story is that my parents got together when my father knocked on my mother’s door looking, allegedly, for a friend of his. I believe it. The indirect approach to emotional matters suited them. They both had enormous eyes, my father’s blue, my mother’s green, that expressed with great feeling what they frequently could not.

  My father briefly considered the seminary while away at Notre Dame. They called him Brother Leo. My mother considered other suitors and doodled alternate possibilities of her future last name. But Brother Leo decided the seminarians didn’t drink enough. Their friend, Rev. Malachy Dooley, officiated their wedding the day after Christmas, 1955. My eldest sister, Margo, was born the following September. Tease my mother with a raised eyebrow about the math and her cheeks burned. Her nickname in high school was Goody Two-Shoes.

  After Northwestern Law School, my father went to work for the firm Jenner and Block downtown. He stayed thirty-eight years. Most days began for him in a chair on our screened-in front porch, one hand holding the Chicago Tribune, the other a cup of tea, and ended with a very dry Beefeater martini on the rocks with a twist. When he decided to get sober, in 1990, he announced the news in his usual quirky way. Each child received a typewritten form letter. “To my favorite child,” it began, “I’ve decided to join the Pepsi Generation.” He later claimed that only two children believed the salutation. I was one of them.

  My siblings arrived in quick succession, four girls and a boy; I was the youngest, born after a six-year gap. My sister closest to me in age, Mary Rita, was too much older than me to be a real playmate. Looking back now, it feels as though I was born into a party that had started to wind down. By the time I came around, my parents had matching La-Z-Boy armchairs. Our front door was partly glass, and standing there you could see the back of my mother’s beige armchair in the living room. When any of the kids’ friends rang the doorbell, she’d stick her hand up and make a circling motion. “Go around,” she’d shout, directing them to the unlocked back door.

  The families on our block were close, but the kids were all the same ages as my older siblings. They ran in a pack and returned home at dusk. I have a keen memory of what it was like to be a teenager in the seventies because I spent a lot of time with them. My sister Kathleen, ten years older, was and is the most extroverted of our family, and she toted me around like a beloved toy. I remember teetering precariously on the back of her banana seat as she pedaled to the Jewel grocery store on Madison Street. Everyone seemed to know her. “Hey, Beanie!” they called, using her nickname.

  In Beanie’s freshmen year of high school, she developed an all-consuming crush on Anton, a quiet blond-haired boy who ran track. She took me with her to one of his meets. We hid high up in the bleachers to peek at him. I remember the love-wrecked expression on her face as we watched him explode forth from the starting line. I didn’t realize it then, but I was losing her to the complexities of high school. Soon I was sitting alone on the top of the back stairs that connected our kitchen to the second floor, watching teenage boys in sideburns chug beers in our breakfast nook as the Steve Miller Band’s “The Joker” played too loud.

  Everyone in my family speaks mock reverently about the day in 1974 when the Van sisters—Lisa, my age; Kris, a year older— moved in across the street.

  “Thank God,” they tease. “What would we have done with you?”

  MANY OF MY PARENTS’ CLOSEST FRIENDS WERE FROM GRAMMAR school and high school. That they’d maintained such close bonds in an increasingly unmoored and transient world was a point of pride for them, as it should be, but it also had the effect, I think, of insulating them. Take them out of their
comfort zone, and they became a little ill at ease. I think an undercurrent of shyness ran through them both. They gravitated toward bigger personalities. They used humor, sometimes sharply, to deflect tension. My mother especially seemed always in a state of suppressing— emotions, expectations. She had small, freckled hands and a habit of tugging her fingers when things got unpleasant.

  I don’t mean to give the wrong impression. They were bright, curious people who traveled the world once they could afford to. My father argued, and lost, a case in front of the Supreme Court in 1971 that’s still studied in constitutional law classes. They subscribed to the New Yorker. They always had an interest in popular culture and what was considered good, or cool. My mother allowed herself to be taken to see Boogie Nights. (“I’m going to watch The Sound of Music twenty times in a row to forget that,” she said.) They were Kennedy Democrats. “Politically progressive,” my mother liked to say, “but socially conservative.” My father took my older sisters when they were ten and eight downtown to see Martin Luther King speak. They voted for Mondale in ’84. But when I was nineteen, my mother once woke me at dawn in a panic, shaking a handful of unfamiliar (to her) pills. She couldn’t bring herself to say “pill.”

  “You’re on the . . . ,” she said.

  “Fiber,” I said, and turned back to sleep.

  BUT THEN OUR RELATIONSHIP WAS ALWAYS FRAUGHT. MY SISTER Maureen remembers coming home when I was around two and finding my mother pacing the front porch. “I don’t know if I’m crazy,” she said, fighting tears, “or Michelle.” My mother was forty then. She had endured alcoholic parents and the death of an infant son. She was raising six kids with no help. I’m sure I was the crazy one. Her lifelong nickname for me, only half-jokingly, was the Little Witch.

  We button-pushed our whole lives. She stonewalled. I glowered. She scribbled notes on envelopes and slid them under my bedroom door. “You’re vain, thoughtless, and rude,” a notorious one went, concluding, “but you’re my daughter and of course I love you very much.” We had a summer cabin on Lake Michigan, and I remember one afternoon as a kid playing in the waves as she read a book in a chair on the beach. I realized that the waves were just high enough so that I could remain underwater and then rise for a quick breath when the wave was at its highest, shielding me from view. I let my mother straighten up and scan the water. I let her put down her book. I let her stand. I let her run toward the water preparing to scream. Only then did I pop up nonchalantly.

  I wish now that I’d been kinder to her. I used to rib her about the fact that she couldn’t bear to watch certain scenes in movies or on TV shows. She couldn’t take scenes in which someone threw a party and no one came. She avoided movies about salesmen down on their luck. The specificity was what I found peculiar and amusing; I now see it as the mark of a deeply sensitive person. Her father was once a successful salesman whose career bottomed out. She witnessed her parents’ problems with alcohol and the insistent mime of merrymaking that went on too long. I see her vulnerabilities now. Her parents valued social success and dismissed signs of my mother’s quick, eager mind. She felt thwarted. She could be undermining and cutting in her remarks, but the older me sees that as a reflection of her own undercut self-image.

  We swim or sink against our deficits in life, and she made it a point to encourage me in ways that she had not been. I remember that she dissuaded me from trying out for cheerleading in high school. “Don’t you want to be the one cheered?” she said. She thrilled at any of my academic or literary successes. When I was in high school, I came across a letter she’d started to write years before to Aunt Marilyn, my father’s sister, who was a theology professor and accomplished archaeologist. My mother was looking for advice on how to best encourage me as a young writer. “How do I make sure she doesn’t end up writing greeting cards?” she wrote. I thought of that question often in future years, during the many periods when I would have been ecstatic to be paid to write Hallmark greetings.

  But I felt her expectations, the transference of hope, and I bristled. I both yearned for her approval and found her investment in me suffocating. She was both proud of the fact that she had raised a strong-minded daughter and resentful of my sharp opinions. It didn’t help matters that my generation was deep into analysis and deconstruction, and hers was not. My mother didn’t, or wouldn’t, navel-gaze in that way. I remember talking with my sister Maureen once about the severe short haircuts we all had as children.

  “Doesn’t it seem like Mom was trying to desexualize us?” I asked. Maureen, the mother of three, suppressed a laugh mixed with irritation. “Wait until you have kids, Michelle,” she said. “Short haircuts aren’t desexualizing. They’re easy.”

  THE NIGHT BEFORE MY WEDDING, MY MOTHER AND I HAD OUR biggest blowout. I was unemployed and adrift, not writing or doing much of anything, and I’d put a lot of time—too much, probably—into the wedding. At the rehearsal dinner, I seated small groups of people who didn’t know each other together; the only thing I told them was that they all had one thing in common and had to figure out what it was. At one table everyone had lived at some point in Minnesota. Another table was avid cooks.

  In the middle of dinner, my mother came up to me as I was making my way toward the bathroom. I’d been avoiding her because a friend had made the mistake of telling me that earlier in the evening she’d remarked to my mother that she thought I was the best writer she knew. “Oh, I know. I think so too,” my mother said. “But don’t you think it’s too late for her?” Her words stung and batted around in my head all night.

  I saw her out of the corner of my eye coming toward me. In retrospect, she was smiling. I could see she was pleased with everything; she was never good at giving compliments directly. I’m sure she thought she was being funny. She gestured at the tables.

  “You have too much time on your hands,” she said. I turned and faced her with what I’m sure was a mask of pure rage.

  “Get away from me,” I spit out. She was shocked and tried to explain, but I cut her off. “Walk away from me. Now.”

  I went to the ladies’ room, locked myself in a stall and allowed myself to cry for five minutes, then went back out and pretended that everything was fine.

  She was, by all accounts, devastated by my reaction. We never spoke of it, but shortly after the wedding, she wrote me a long letter detailing all the things about me that made her proud. We slowly rebuilt our relationship after that. In late January 2007, my parents decided to take a cruise to Costa Rica. The boat would leave from a port south of Los Angeles. The four of us—my husband, Patton, and I and my parents—had dinner the night before their trip. We laughed a lot, and I drove them to the dock in the morning. My mother and I hugged tightly good-bye.

  A few days later, the phone in the kitchen rang at four a.m. I didn’t get up. Then it rang again, but stopped before I could get to it. I listened to the voice mail. It was my father. His voice sounded strangled and almost unintelligible.

  “Michelle,” he said. “Call your siblings.” Click.

  I called my sister Maureen.

  “You don’t know?” she asked.

  “What?”

  “Oh, Michelle,” she said. “Mom died.”

  My mother, a diabetic, had fallen ill on the ship due to complications from her disease. They helicoptered her to San José, but it was too late. She was seventy-four.

  Two years later, my daughter, Alice, was born. I was inconsolable for the first two weeks. “Postpartum depression,” my husband explained to friends. But it wasn’t new-mom blues. It was old-mom blues. Holding my newborn daughter, I got it. I got the love that guts you, the sense of responsibility that narrows the world to a pair of needy eyes. At thirty-nine, I understood my mother’s love for me for the first time. Sobbing hysterically, almost unable to speak, I ordered my husband to go down into our dank basement and find the letter my mother had written to me after the wedding. He spent hours down there. Every box was overturned. Papers littered the floor. He couldn’t f
ind it.

  * * *

  SHORTLY AFTER MY MOTHER’S DEATH, MY FATHER, SISTERS, BROTHER, and I went to my parents’ apartment in Deerfield Beach, Florida, to sort through her stuff. We sniffed her clothes that still smelled like Happy perfume by Clinique. We marveled at her bottomless collection of bags, a lifelong obsession. Each of us took something of hers. I took a pair of pink-and-white sandals. They sit in my closet still.

  Afterward the seven of us went to an early dinner at the Sea Watch, a nearby restaurant overlooking the ocean. We’re laughers, my family, and we told stories about my mother that made us laugh. Seven people laughing loudly create a scene.

  An older woman with a bemused smile came up to our table as she was leaving. “What’s the secret?” she asked.

  “I’m sorry?” my brother, Bob, said.

  “To such a happy family?”

  We sat agape for a few moments. No one had the heart to say what we were all thinking: we’ve just been cleaning out our dead mother’s belongings. We dissolved into more shrieking laughter.

  My mother was, and will always be, the most complicated relationship of my life.

  Writing this now, I’m struck by two incompatible truths that pain me. No one would have taken more joy from this book than my mother. And I probably wouldn’t have felt the freedom to write it until she was gone.

  * * *

  I WALKED THE SAME HALF MILE TO ST. EDMUND’S EVERY DAY, A LEFT on Randolph, a right on Euclid, a left on Pleasant. The girls wore gray plaid jumpers and white shirts; the boys, a mustard-colored collared shirt and slacks. Ms. Ray, my first-grade teacher, had an hourglass figure and a thick mane of caramel-colored hair, and she was always upbeat. It was Suzanne Somers herding a bunch of six-year-olds. Even so, she’s not my most vivid memory of St. Edmund’s. Nor, curiously enough, is any Catholic teaching or time spent in church, though I know there were a lot of both. No, St. Edmund’s will always be welded in my mind with one image, that of a quiet, well-behaved boy with sandy brown hair and ears that stuck out a little: Danny Olis.