Bound (10 page)

His trophy, her mother had disagreed. His plaything. His unserious living doll.

The newspaper headline reported yet another dispatch from the serial killer. He was ready to claim yet another victim, offering as evidence of his authenticity the medallion she had been wearing when he killed her. The dead woman’s fingerprints were on it. He’d not been credited with this murder, now thirteen years a cold case, because he’d not bound her. Nonetheless, she was his, his letter said. Braggart, Catherine thought.

The BLT, she and Misty had named the killer, that minor character in the saga of her youth, that mad jokester who punctuated and titillated the dark age of her sexual awakening. Recently, Miriam had exhibited rare enthusiasm when she asked Catherine about the guy; she’d printed up a guide of his kill sites, a kind of lurid Map to the Stars for their town.

“I’d probably recognize him if I met him,” Miriam claimed. What alarmed Catherine was that she thought it might be true.

She sought out the Valium Oliver had offered, but could not find it. She actually did not know where he kept his pills or what, exactly, he took them for. They appeared every morning in a colorful little pile beside his wheat toast as if fairies delivered them. No arsenal of orange bottles on their bedside table or kitchen windowsill. Only when her mother’s body had become unavoidably available to Catherine had it occurred to her to wonder about her husband’s health. He was young for his age, everybody would agree; still, wasn’t it strange not to have a clue about what that clutter of medication held at bay? She could see that he wasn’t overweight, didn’t overindulge, and spent a lot of his day walking. As a profile, his was utterly public. The only detail she alone knew for a fact was that he had no trouble getting an erection.

Plus: he was fanatical as a surgeon about hand-washing.

“Want to come with?” Catherine asked the dogs. Unlike Oliver, they never said no to coming with.

And they were such emissaries of goodwill, such reliable icebreakers, the two of them crowding through the nursing-home doors and greeting all the lounge chair occupants, sending those lazy kitty cats fleeing down the halls. Professor Harding was waiting, standing with her walker before her, wearing a wool dress and hose. Zippers, buttons, shoes with laces. Catherine sighed, helping her with her coat and hat. Her mother despised the Day-Glo tennis balls that had been attached to her walker, and Catherine removed them as she loaded the device into her car trunk, tossing them into the back seat with the dogs. Her mother flinched as the animals scrabbled and bumped against her seat. It was going to be a long day.

But Catherine had brought with her Miriam’s map of where the BTK’s victims had lived. And died. Since she was driving all over town anyway, she might as well drive past these infamous locales. Her mother couldn’t object. It wasn’t the sort of thing her mother would ever have wanted to do, but for how many years had Catherine been the one whose desires went unconsulted? Had she wanted to take piano lessons? Attend lectures by visiting scholars? Spend every Saturday morning at the public library?

First, phlebotomy. And Catherine geared herself for the role she would have to play: demanding interrogator, on her mother’s behalf, of the professionals. They naturally assumed that it was she who doubted their abilities. “This is what I do,” the man taking blood informed her, cutting her off. “You do not have to tell me my business.” Later, as he jabbed for the third time into her mother’s desiccated arm, he complained about her rolling veins. Catherine sighed. “I was trying to explain before. Her veins roll.”

“She should drink water,” he replied. Professor Harding’s eyes shot daggers at them both.

On the way from bloodletting to the GP, Catherine took a detour through a neighborhood where a tornado had touched down not too long ago. When she slowed the car in front of the decrepit little white house, the dogs leaped to look out the back windows. Her mother studied her crookedly, her right eye these days lower than her left. “This is one of the victim’s houses,” Catherine explained. “It doesn’t look like anybody lives here, does it?” Not a soul appeared on the street; the only sign of life was the parade of rolling trash bins that had been pulled to the curb. He had locked the woman’s three children in the bathroom and savaged their mother in the room next door. They’d stood on the toilet and watched through a transom, the eldest boy all of six or eight. Catherine tried to imagine their faces in the dirty window, tricycles in the yard, broken plastic swimming pool. “He showed one of the boys a picture,” she told her mother, pulling away from the place. “Supposedly he was looking for his dog.”

In between the GP and the imaging center, they visited two other victims’ addresses. The second of these structures no longer existed, the house by the university razed in the eighties. At each, Catherine said what she knew, the woman’s name and the way she had died. The unexpected brother of one, a witness like the three small children, yet left with bullets in his face, brain damage. Her mother said nothing, but the silence was acquiring an interesting texture. Her mother had been annoyed, at first, probably at Catherine’s unsurprising and disappointing interest in things tawdry or ordinary. But now Dr. Harding seemed to be trying to make Catherine’s pilgrimage into a more edifying preoccupation. This was her mother’s way, abstracting the individual into some larger paradigm. When Catherine had been socked in the face by a black girl in junior high, her mother had insisted that Catherine not hold the girl herself responsible; history had led to this confrontation, shameful history. While her mother tried to lecture away the hurt—the literal bruise, the more profound wounded feelings—her father had handed Catherine a frozen bag of lima beans to hold to her temple.

“I wonder if the people who buy these places know what happened in them?” Her old friend Misty, real estate agent, might have had an answer.

This year, for the first time, the assistant to the anesthesiologist asked, in one long rehearsed impersonal rush, if Professor Harding had an advanced directive or living will, if she was an organ donor, and what faith she practiced. As if the answers did not involve flesh, blood, sentiment, sacrifice. Catherine had never been more grateful that her mother could no longer give lectures. The girl didn’t look up from her clipboard, so she missed Dr. Harding’s steely glare. Catherine affirmed the will and organ parts, declined to name a religious preference.

“Everybody’s getting so sensitive to litigation these days,” Catherine explained after the girl had gone. “I’m sure it’s some new formality, just official ass-covering. You’re going to be fine.”

Her mother shook her head in annoyance.
Atheist
, Catherine understood finally, as they reached the smaller waiting room, the hard expression on her mother’s face having been summoned as if by rope from the depths of a well, spilled uselessly here for Catherine’s benefit. As if Catherine didn’t already know all about it.

“Remember, it’s the day of humiliation,” she told her mother, hoping they could retain, or resuscitate, the thin veneer of humor about the day. Her father had been more naturally ironic; missing him came upon her suddenly, a surprising pain, a quick pinch, that always resulted in tears. The colonoscopy was the last procedure; Catherine’s head ached from mediating: at each office she had to delicately balance her mother’s silent demand to be accorded respect, in the form of mind-bendingly thorough information, against the doctor’s or nurse’s or receptionist’s or technician’s indifference and/or irritation concerning this particular patient’s not-very-unique situation. If Catherine didn’t fully explain her mother’s worries (the same every year, identical in every way to what she’d noted many times before), her mother would fume in the car afterward, yank her arm out of reach, labor dangerously to pull herself from the vehicle, or attempt to fill in the endless paperwork with her functioning left, wrong, slow, sloppy hand.

Her former physicians had been of the old type: friends with Grace Harding, Wichitans who’d come of age as professional peers, people whose circles of acquaintances weren’t exactly the same but whose orbital revolutions brought them into contact every now and then outside the office, wearing nice clothes. There was overlap, a colleague married to a partner, a son or daughter who’d taken a class, a mutual acquaintance whose recent symphony performance had impressed, so that medical appointments were more like social visits, pleasantries first, ailments discussed as secondary business, handshaking and fond wishes all around. Now the physicians were one or even two generations younger than Grace Harding, indistinguishable from each other in their multicolored scrubs, and her inability to speak allowed them to pretend that she had nothing to say. They were either solicitous (as if dealing with a child or foreigner, loud and simplistic and smiling) or brusque (as if encountering another in a long line of widgets on a tiresome conveyor belt); Catherine preferred the former, her mother the latter. All day long, from one depressing strip-mall office to the next, Catherine had to endure her mother’s furious eyes, those fiery blue peepholes, those stormy portholes behind which a furnace raged.

Better rage than despair, she supposed. The Weeping Woman, she recalled. The woman chanting the children’s book text like a sound track to a horror movie. Far better to rage.

Before her father died, before her mother had been ruined by stroke, they’d taken each other on these excursions, trading at playing patient and caretaker, passenger and driver. His death was shocking, her perfectly fine-seeming father picked off as if by a sniper, struck by that expedient aneurysm, still sitting upright in his reading chair when his wife had returned home from an afternoon seminar.

Catherine’s familiar fantasy appeared in her head, her mother in her adjoining reading chair, hand clasped in her husband’s, the lightning bolt hitting him, its sizzle pulsing down his arm to include her.

Orphan, Catherine thought. Her husband would die before her, too. And so would the dogs …

“Hardy?” called the girl with the roll sheet.

“Harding,” Catherine corrected.

“Right,” the girl said, snapping her gum, shuffling along in what looked like bedroom slippers, pushing open the door before them and passing through without holding it. Because there was anesthesia involved, because the procedure demanded that Grace Harding be absolutely removed from her own oversight, because it required total relinquishment of control, this was by far the worst of today’s indignities. Her mother had never happily handed over control; she refused to fly on planes, always tartly replying when told of the statistically proven safety that if she were behind the wheel, she would always be able to judge the wisdom of continuing or jettisoning the trip. She did not trust that others would be so scrupulous in their considerations.

Catherine would have happily turned over control. She was a very contented passenger; she never chose to drive if someone else offered. “If I could,” she told her mother, “I would go through this for you.” It was heartfelt, but her mother’s response was an impatient whiff of air. How had she earned such a dim sentimental daughter? “There you go off to Cloud Cuckooland again,” she had used to say when Catherine came up with an idea Dr. Harding found especially preposterous and therefore infuriating. Her mother’s disappointment could still derail her, still hurt her feelings in the lip-trembling way of a small child. And now there was no longer the solace of her sympathetic father, who had many times come to commiserate, nod knowingly, offer his patient platitudes. Catherine took a more firm than necessary hold of her mother’s arm and guided her down the hall to the chamber where she would undress her, again, and slip her into yet another soft hospital gown opening in the back, ties flapping uselessly. And when this was accomplished, she would come along as far as the procedure room itself, always reassuring her mother that she would be right here, on the other side of the door, waiting.

All day, waiting.

Into the silent fury her mother now generated like heat, Catherine posed a sudden question. “Mom, do you remember my friend Misty?”

Her mother blinked, annoyance subsumed by confusion. Catherine could practically see the recalibration, like watching a jukebox mechanism remove one little spinning platter to replace it with another. Her eyes said yes, she remembered Misty. Misty and all her baggage. Misty the bad girl. Misty the friend who would not do what powerful Dr. Harding wished and disappear.

“She died recently,” Catherine said, watching her mother’s disapproval now shift to surprise, perhaps shaded by shame at having felt anything negative. Her mother had been an unusual woman for her time, but she was still a product of her generation and geography, and those rules said that one did not speak ill of the dead. “In a single-car accident, although I don’t think it was suicide. In Colorado.” Her mother looked curious now. It was with Catherine’s family that Misty had traveled to Colorado one summer. Until then, she’d never been out of the state of Kansas; Catherine could still remember her parents taking in this news, it being the deciding fact on their agreeing to Misty’s joining them. They could never resist broadening somebody’s horizons; their own daughter had been to many states, and a few foreign countries. And the summer trip had softened their opinion of Misty. She was a girl who might know how to roll her own cigarettes or change the oil of an American-made car, but Catherine’s parents had been pleased to teach her the difference between mountain and standard time, to identify raptors by their wingspan, to witness her appreciation of the short stories they read aloud while rolling along the highway.