You Remind Me of Me by Dan Chaon Page A

But this had only led to another of their typical arguments—and another period of icy coldness between them.
    But Judy was right, of course. Carla was no more prepared for motherhood than she would have been to pilot a jet plane, and Judy found herself called upon to baby-sit for the infant regularly while the nominal parents partied and fought. The marriage had dissolved under the pressures of young parenthood, coupled with a decadent lifestyle. Things grew worse and worse, until at last, when Loomis was three, Carla left town with a man she was having an affair with, taking Loomis with her and this man to Las Vegas, where she proceeded to become involved in drugs again. Troy retrieved Loomis and brought him back home to St. Bonaventure, and then was shortly thereafter himself arrested for possession of marijuana with intent to sell. At which time Loomis came into Judy’s custody.
    Thinking of these details, she is always surprised at how grotesque and depraved they seem. They are the kinds of things that happen to poor people—to trailer trash, to Indians on the reservations or black people in their ghettos—people whose environments put them at a disadvantage. Carla was raised in a solidly middle-class home. Judy was divorced, it was true, but she was college-educated, an elementary school teacher. Judy’s life was supposed to be different. She had been the first person in her family to seek higher education; the first woman who didn’t regularly spend her autumn canning food; the first, as far as she knew, who had seen an opera; the first who read literature. She had read Virginia Woolf’s novels! And at the same time, she hadn’t ignored her family in their times of trouble. She had loaned her brother thousands of dollars. She had spent much of her savings to pay for a nursing home for her mother, who had died with extreme slowness. She had gone into debt to commit her daughter to a decent rehabilitation facility.
    Why should it be this way? Why should she have worked so hard to end up with so little, to end up fat and sixty-three, a divorced woman in a flowered shirt and tight shorts and flip-flops, a woman with a heart that palpitated irregularly at night and who was frightened by visions of raccoons? “Loomis!” she cried, and her voice broke, there was the edge of tears in it. There were times when she thought that this child, Loomis, her grandson, would make her life different, when she thought he was the child she should have been given all along, that he was a kind of reward for her hardship.
    Why didn’t he answer?
    She hadn’t yet let herself think of the bad things. The grown-up hand and the sack, the things she’d read about. The people who prey on children. The idea of disappearance.
    But the more she thought about it, the more she remembered the last time she’d seen Loomis. She’d looked out the window, and he had been standing there by the lilac bush, his hands clasped behind his back, talking to himself, as he always did.
    Talking to himself? She felt herself shrinking, even as she paced through the neighborhood, even as she hopefully expected to see him rounding a corner, running out of a bush in a yard, playing together with some group of neighbor children. In the alley, crouched behind a garbage can. In the house, somehow, sitting there and playing Nintendo and wondering where she was.
    No, she thought suddenly. And then she could picture it, as if it were a memory. Loomis wasn’t talking to himself.

5
    1993
    After Jonah’s mother died, he took the old car and drove to Chicago, the city of his birth. It seemed as good a place as any in which to become a different person. He was twenty-two years old, and his intention was that he would never think of his past again. He would forget his mother, his grandfather, the shacklike yellow house; he’d forget the long humiliating desert of high school and afterward, a job washing dishes in the cafeteria of an old folks’ home, a period of