by Katy Yocom
Three Ways to Disappear
A Novel
Katy Yocom
Three Ways to Disappear
A novel by Katy Yocom
Published by Ashland Creek Press
www.ashlandcreekpress.com
© 2019 Katy Yocom
ISBN 978-1-61822-083-7
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018964454
The excerpt of Jorie Graham’s poem “Prayer” is from Never. Copyright © 2002 by Jorie Graham. Used with the permission of HarperCollins Publishers.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. All characters and scenarios appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Cover design by Matt Smith.
To Jeff, with love
The longing
is to be pure. What you get is to be changed.
—Jorie Graham, “Prayer”
Quinn
In the year after marcus died, their mother stopped loving people, one after another. Her minister, her tennis coach, her friends. Daddy. On a day dripping with the end of the monsoon, she clicked shut the brass latches on her daughters’ suitcases and supervised as Ravindra loaded them into the car. In the courtyard, beneath the peepal tree, Daddy clutched the girls to his chest. Quinn, at eleven, was the responsible one; Sarah, at eight, the remnant twin: widowed by Marcus when he died, if widowed was the word for it, which it wasn’t. There was no word for it. Thin mud soaked their shoes as he kissed their cheeks and begged them not to forget him. It was a terrible thing to hear him say because it opened up the possibility that they could. His voice had gone high with pain, which embarrassed Quinn for him. She didn’t think men were supposed to feel that much.
Mother pulled the girls away, leaving their father to stand alone in the filtered sunlight, arms dangling at his sides as if he didn’t know how they operated. Daddy was a doctor, the reason they lived in India, and India, according to Mother, was the reason Marcus was dead. Daddy’s mouth curled down, and he cried silently as his daughters watched. Behind him, Ayah wept, rhythmic and soft like singing. Beyond Ayah, the watchman stood: the courtyard a chessboard, the adults the game pieces isolated in their separate squares. Ayah’s weeping turned ragged, and Quinn and Sarah ran and clung to her until Mother pried their fingers from Ayah’s damp turquoise sari and pushed the girls, stumbling and crying, into the car. Their shoes muddied the floor mats, but Quinn didn’t care.
Ravindra opened the wrought iron gate and nosed the car into the inchoate, horn-honking flow of Delhi traffic. In the back seat, Quinn turned around and watched their home grow smaller. Before it vanished altogether, she raised her hand to it and said goodbye. Goodbye to everything and everyone and everywhere. Goodbye to Daddy. To Ayah. To every friend, enemy, household staff member, shopkeeper, schoolteacher, gymnastics instructor, swimming coach. It seemed easy for Mother: She had shut down her heart. But she still loved her girls. The proof was that she took them with her.
The other proof was that she hadn’t believed Quinn when she tried to confess her role in what had happened to Marcus. Quinn said the words, but Mother had let them fall to her bedroom floor, where they scuttled under the bed and vanished. Which meant that the secret was still Quinn’s to carry. She had spent a long time considering the consequences before she told Mother what she’d done, but this possibility had never occurred to her.
“Remember, young ladies. Always be good,” Ravindra said at the airport curb, his eyes streaming. Sarah and Quinn hugged him hard. They cried. But when Mother told them to leave him, they left, dutiful girls. They boarded an enormous jet and flew west across India, Pakistan, Iran, Iraq, Turkey. Across all of Europe, to Paris. Over the ultramarine Atlantic Ocean and down the Eastern Seaboard to New York. From there to Louisville, Kentucky, the town where Mother had grown up. They were leaving their unhappiness as far behind them as the planet would allow.
Quinn thought she felt it happen. When the plane lifted off from the Delhi runway, she felt an invisible force push her body back into the seat and flow through her, a tide running in the direction of India and the ground. So Mother was right: It was possible to leave things behind, events and stories and history. With a sense of relief, as the plane shuddered around her, she lifted up her secret and offered it to the tide. She would go to America, and she would be free.
She was twenty-eight years old on the day she stopped believing in this magic. Twenty-eight and bare-bellied on an examining table, her husband’s fingers interlaced with her own. The ultrasound tech ran a wand over her midsection, and in a haze of black and gray, the two children inside her revealed their identities: a boy and a girl, just like Marcus and Sarah. Sarah was twenty-five at the time. Marcus was still seven, if he was anything at all.
As she looked at the hazy images of the children inside her, she felt it again: the weight of the plane lifting off and pushing her down. And she knew then that distance and years were nothing, that no matter what their mother said, their histories traveled with them, stitched into their DNA.
.
Peacock blue, she thought at first, but that was wrong. Mineral blue, like larimar. A sky color.
On a stool in front of Quinn, her son kicked his feet. It was the day before Nick and Alaina turned seven, and he was sitting for his portrait, to match the one of his sister that Quinn had completed that morning. Quinn’s eyes wanted to linger on the curve and color of his peachy little cheek, to slow everything down. She wasn’t ready for the twins to be seven. She had known it since the day of that ultrasound: She would never be ready for them to reach this age.
“How come you’re using pastels instead of real paint?” Nick asked. By “real paint,” he meant acrylics. In art school, Quinn had loved oils, but she hadn’t allowed them into her studio since the day she’d learned she was pregnant. Too many noxious fumes in the paint thinners and brush cleaners: bad for the babies.
“I want to get you down fast so you don’t have to sit so long,” she said. The cerulean blue of his T-shirt reflected into Nick’s eyes, which were a cool, deep hue, nearly periwinkle, pebbled with white. She touched oil pastel to paper to add the reflected color, just a couple of tiny arcs. Barely there at all.
The work absorbed her as it always did. She registered only vaguely the aroma of applewood smoke that meant Pete was heating the gas grill on the deck below. Giggles from the twins’ room meant Alaina had commandeered her auntie Sarah, who was back in Louisville between reporting assignments. Sarah had come for a meal and to spend the night; Alaina had brokered the latter part of that deal. Quinn paused for a moment to listen. They were arguing playfully over whether their card game should be called Crazy Eights or Crazy Aunts. Sarah was advocating for the latter.
“What kind of cake are you making?” Nick asked.
“Chocolate with chocolate frosting. Just like you asked for.” She stepped back to assess the drawing. Getting close, although she wanted to do a little more around his mouth and nose. So many complicated curves in that part of the face.
“Mom? Can we be done?”
“Sure, kiddo. You did great.” Before she finished the sentence, he shot out the door, eager to fill Alaina in on the proceedings of the past half hour, no doubt. “Twin summit” was the family term for this mandatory briefing after every separation. “Like heads of state,” Pete had once said as he and Quinn stood watching their children, bemused.
Quinn had begun straightening her studio when Sarah ambled in. “My s
ervices were no longer needed,” she said, nodding toward the room across the hall. She straddled the stool and twined her long legs around it, giving the effect of a rider on horseback. “So my last assignment didn’t go so well.”
“No? Where were you?”
Sarah made an impatient noise. “Crappy little dictatorship. Continent beginning with the letter A.” Sometimes she answered questions that way, to avoid scaring her family, Quinn assumed. “I was doing a series on government reforms to help with the refugee crisis. It all looked pretty impressive. I filed a long story about how things were turning a corner, the aid initiatives were working, et cetera. But the day I’m supposed to leave, all the flights get canceled because of a coup attempt, so I come back to the city. On the way, something tells me to stop by one of the sites where I’d been reporting. And it’s gone.”
Quinn stopped cleaning and tried to gauge her sister’s expression. “Gone? Like a massacre?”
“Gone, like it never existed. Poof. They’d struck the whole damned camp like a movie set.” Sarah dismounted the stool and paced to the window. “I’m out there with my driver, walking around this empty field, and the only things I’m seeing are some tent stakes and a bunch of empty Pepsi cans. And I’m realizing I’ve been played. And then my so-called government liaison shows up, and the next thing I know, I’m being detained.”
“Holy hell, Sarah.” Quinn settled her hips against her worktable and glanced involuntarily at the door, but the Lego noises coming from the bedroom said the twins were otherwise occupied.
Sarah peered out between the mullions like a prisoner. “They took my cell phone and laptop and parked me in this hotel room with a guard outside my door. In the middle of the night, I hear a scratching at my window, and it’s two guys I know, journalists, and we sneak out of there to this little dirt-track airfield and take a puddle jumper to the next country.”
Quinn blanched. “What would have happened if they’d caught you?”
“By that point, the government had bigger things to worry about than me.”
This Year of Living Dangerously stuff: It knotted Quinn’s stomach. “You must have been terrified.”
Sarah turned around. “I’m pissed, is what I am. That”—she glanced at the doorway and lowered her voice—“that fucking little dictator used me as a mouthpiece. Turned us all into his propaganda whores.”
Quinn wiped her hands on a paper towel. “It’s not your fault. He set you up.”
“But who’s to say this is the first time? Every time I’ve gotten access to some site or some person who was supposedly off-limits, maybe it was the same thing. And the damage is done. The stories have already run.”
“You can retract them.”
Sarah shrugged one shoulder. “People remember the story. They never remember it got retracted. Anyway, that’s it for me. I’m done.”
“What do you mean, ‘done’?”
“Done. With journalism.”
“Because of one story? That’s a little impulsive even for you.”
“Because of that story, and the one before it, and the one before that. Like the boy soldiers this summer. People read a story, and the next day it’s forgotten. Nobody wants follow-up. Nobody cares. Or at least that’s what the people in charge of the budgets believe.”
Or they care, but they feel helpless, so they look away. Quinn considered the set of her sister’s mouth. “You’re shedding a lot of layers these days,” she said. Sarah’s divorce had been final less than a year. It had been a short marriage, but still, it had exacted a toll.
“You know me. I don’t like to mess around.”
Quinn recognized that breezy tone: a classic Sarah deflection. “It’s hard to imagine you without journalism. I’m really sorry,” Quinn said, and for Sarah’s sake, she wanted to mean it, but she couldn’t. No more wondering when she’d get the phone call saying her sister had been killed on assignment. “So you’re coming back home, then?”
Sarah turned, planted her hands on the windowsill, and squinted up into the walnut tree. She was tall and blond like Quinn, but Sarah spilled over with half-contained energy. The way she walked, rangy and loose. People watched her wherever she went, a fact she never seemed to register. “Actually, I got a job.”
“Really! Where?” The local newspaper, Quinn hoped.
“India.”
Quinn dropped a tray of pastels, sending sticks of pigment skidding across the floor. She knelt to gather them and came up clutching gaudy fistfuls. “Why would you do that? Why would you go back there?”
“I’ll be doing media work for a conservation NGO. Getting their story out. Fundraising. Whatever they need me to do.” As if that were what Quinn had asked. “I’ll be in Sawai Madhopur,” Sarah added. “Ranthambore.”
“Ranthambore,” Quinn said. “Tigers?”
Sarah nodded.
“You always did love the big cats.” Quinn recognized the expression on her sister’s face: full of the future, in love with the next thing. It stung her that Sarah seemed perfectly content to remain a special guest star in the twins’ lives. She didn’t know how they idolized her, how they imagined her life the way some people imagined the lives of celebrities. “What the hell are you doing, Sarah?”
“I’m going where I’m needed.”
“You think we don’t need you?”
Sarah looked almost amused at that. She spread her arms to encompass the modest but lovely 1920s bungalow, the good husband making dinner downstairs, the two perfect children in the next room. The whole package: That was how it must look to her. “There’s a crisis going on.”
“There’s always a crisis somewhere. Did you ever once think about getting a normal job like a normal person? Like, here in the States?”
“How are the States any more normal than the rest of the world?”
Quinn smacked the pastels onto her worktable. “You think I’m small, don’t you? Living my small little life with my small little family while you’re out there risking your life and saving the world.”
Sarah laughed. “Come on, Quinnie.”
The twins appeared in the doorway. “Auntie Sarah, are you going to go live in India?” Nick asked.
Sarah scooped him up in a hug. “I am!” she exclaimed, as if it were the best news in the world. “But not till January, so we still have three whole months together.”
“How far away is India?”
“Do you have a world map? I’ll show you.” And the three of them disappeared into the twins’ room until Pete called up to say dinner was ready.
At the table, the talk was all India. “Will you get to pet tigers?” Nick asked.
“If I petted a tiger, it would probably eat me for dinner.”
“Whoa!” Alaina laughed through a mouthful of chicken. “Don’t do that.”
“I won’t. I promise.”
Pete said something about the guy he worked with from Bangalore at the tech start-up. Nobody mentioned the DeVaughan family history, or the years that would likely pass before the twins saw Sarah again. It was all just pleasant table talk.
After dinner, the children played with Sarah until Quinn sent them into Pete’s office to say good night. He turned away from his monitor and scooped up Alaina, then Nick, for a hug and kiss. “Almost finished,” he said to Quinn, turning back to his database as she ushered the twins from the room. When she and Sarah said good night at eleven, Pete was still clackety-clacking away at the keys. She went to bed and turned off the lights.
Later, she woke to the sound of Nick’s coughing. Pete lay next to her. She hadn’t heard him come in.
In the twins’ room, light seeped in, dim and blue, around the edges of the blinds. On the nightstand, the digital clock read 2:15. She touched her son’s cheek. “You okay, buddy?”
He nodded, covering a cough. She dosed him with the albuterol inhaler, wait
ed, had him blow into the peak flow meter. Seventy percent, middle of the yellow zone. They sat up together on his bed, her back to the wall. Nick leaned against her, dozing between fits of coughing. She ran her hand over his silky hair.
“Mom?” he murmured.
She kissed his head. “Yeah, sweetie?”
“You grew up in India, didn’t you?”
“Till I was eleven.”
“What was it like?”
“Oh,” she said. “Packed.”
“You mean crowded?”
“Yes, but … more like being inside a great big kaleidoscope. Everywhere you looked, there were a million things to see. Beautiful bright colors. People. A million things going on all at once.”
“Like that time we went to the carnival?”
“A lot like that.”
Across the room, Alaina slept on her back, arms flung over her head.
Nick fell quiet, his forehead wrinkling as he tried to puzzle something out. “Mom? Are you Indian or American?”
“I’d say I’m American.”
“What’s Auntie Sarah?”
She smiled. “Auntie Sarah is a citizen of the world.”
His readings stayed in the yellow zone. Just another interrupted night. At five o’clock, the meter showed 82 percent—back in the green—and he drifted into a sleep that held. Quinn slipped back to bed.
At seven, she pulled her blond curls into a messy ponytail and stumbled into the kitchen, where she found Sarah rummaging through cupboards, her duffel by the door. It was still dark out. The windows reflected back the overhead lights.
“In the freezer,” Quinn said.
Sarah threw her a glance. “You okay? You look like hell.” She pulled open the freezer, came up with a bag of Italian roast, and thumped the door shut.
“Nick was up coughing. He’s still asleep.”
“Sorry. I’ll be quiet.”
When the coffee finished brewing, they stood together cradling hot mugs of it, hips propped against the counter. It was a family trait, standing when other people would sit. “Hey,” Quinn said. “I’m sorry about that thing I said yesterday.”
