Three Ways to Disappear

by Katy Yocom

  Or maybe the universe didn’t make it its business to pay attention to naughty seven-year-olds, or to anyone else, for that matter. In her adult life, Sarah had seen plenty of evidence to support that hypothesis. In which case, the adults should have been paying vastly more attention.

  She sat down on the low sofa with a pad of notepaper and began composing a classified ad to place in the Times of India.

  It was 1974, she wrote. We were three American children. You were our ayah.

  Quinn

  Go save those tigers, she’d told Sarah.

  She should have begged her not to go back there. Especially not now, with Quinn’s own twins the worrisome age of seven. It was inauspicious, Ayah would have said. A terrible idea.

  Go save those tigers. What a coward she’d been.

  Three days after Sarah left for India, Quinn checked her email and found a long letter waiting. A vivid description of a close-up tiger sighting, and then a surprising, thoughtful summation: That the tiger’s untamed nature does not exempt him from routine and responsibility. That wildness and freedom are not the same thing.

  Spoken like a woman in the act of contemplation. Like a woman finally settling down.

  So maybe India was what Sarah needed after all. Maybe Quinn should be happy for Sarah to find her feet on the ground, even if she was half a planet away.

  She spent the afternoon in her studio, working on a commissioned piece for the city’s Olmsted Parks Conservancy. She’d chosen to paint a beech tree from a low perspective, looking up through a canopy of branches as would a picnicker, or a child. She wanted to evoke a feeling of steadfastness and protection, of being enfolded in strong, maternal arms.

  Downstairs, Pete and the kids swirled into the house. The twins galloped upstairs and poured into her studio like a pack of puppies. She hugged and kissed them, asked about their day, followed them into their bedroom, and plopped down on Alaina’s bed. They piled on top of her for a snuggle. “Airplane ride!” Alaina shouted, and Quinn planted her feet under Alaina’s stomach and lifted her into the air. Another year or two and they’d be too big for this. She set Alaina down and lifted Nick up. He made motor noises, and they grinned at each other.

  Something about his coloring caught her eye. She set him down and peered into his face. And there it was: the white ring around his mouth.

  He coughed.

  “Go get your peak flow meter,” she said.

  “It was one cough.”

  “But your mouth. You’re turning white.”

  The meter read 112 liters a minute: 80 percent of Nick’s personal best, the boundary between his green and yellow zones. His next two tries didn’t make it out of the yellow.

  “Let’s get you on the nebulizer,” she said.

  But Pete called up from the kitchen, and Nick turned and raced downstairs. “I’ll do it after we eat.”

  “What’s going on?” Pete asked from behind a cloud of white steam. He was draining a pot into the sink. Bad timing. The nebulizer took fifteen minutes.

  “I don’t like cold spaghetti,” Nick announced. “Or reheated spaghetti, either.”

  “He blew eighty percent,” Quinn said.

  “Let him eat. He’ll be done in ten minutes anyway.”

  Pete believed their children were safe, always had. He moved through life convinced that on any given day, they would live to see the sun go down and wake safe in their beds in the morning. Most days, Quinn tried to pretend she shared his conviction, if only in the hope that it would become self-fulfilling.

  Alaina bounded into the steamy kitchen and declared herself starving. The air hung rich with the aroma of tomato sauce. So, for the sake of convenience, and because 80 percent was borderline green, and because Quinn’s magically secure husband had said everything would be all right, she said, “Fine. Let’s eat.”

  They sat down to dinner, and Quinn ate in silence, willing everyone to finish quickly. But Nick only picked at his food, and in the space of ten minutes, the white ring around his mouth turned gray, and he began struggling for breath. Quinn ran upstairs to grab the albuterol inhaler while Pete had Nick blow into the peak flow meter again, and this time it showed 55 percent: five points from a medical emergency.

  They buckled the kids into the car and sped to the ER—five minutes away, quicker just to go than call an ambulance. Nick coughed uncontrollably in the back seat as the skin at the hollow of his throat sucked in with every breath. When Alaina asked if he was okay, he couldn’t answer. Quinn rode facing backward, staring into her son’s pale, panicky face. The late-afternoon sunlight threw it all into high relief: the sweat beaded on his upper lip, the fear in his bulging eyes. At a red light he coughed so hard he vomited up what little food he’d eaten, spattering his shirt with bits of spaghetti and sauce. His eyes brimmed with tears, Alaina began shrieking about the vomit, and Quinn found a napkin and tried to wipe up the mess. The skin around his mouth turned blue, like the underside of a storm cloud, a blue more dreadful than she’d ever seen. When the light changed, Pete accelerated so fast the force threw them all backward.

  At the ER, the admitting nurse ordered them straight back, and another nurse put Nick on a nebulizer and hooked him up to a hydrocortisone drip. With the mask covering his nose and mouth, Quinn couldn’t monitor the color of that sullen blue ring, which was her son’s body speaking directly to her eyes. She stood helpless, listening to him gasp, watching medicine escape the nebulizer with every racking cough.

  The IV machine began beeping. Pete and Quinn locked eyes.

  “What’s that?” Alaina asked.

  Quinn’s heart galloped past the implacable beep. No one came.

  In the hallway, three nurses in blue scrubs stood at the station, singing “Happy Birthday” to the nurse at the desk. Quinn stormed up to them, her rage turning to sweat and tears as it hit the air. For a moment they looked at her stupidly. Then one of them sprinted to Nick’s room, Quinn close behind. When they got there, the nurse said “Oh” in an ordinary voice. She pressed something on the IV machine, and the noise stopped. She turned to leave the room, but Quinn begged her to tell them what the beeping had been.

  “Nothing,” she said. “Just an indicator to add another medicine if we needed to, but we don’t.” Quinn wanted to weep. Her ignorance about how to save her son’s life was total. Maybe fatal.

  The adrenaline ebb left her muscles shaky-weak. The nebulizer hissed with Nick’s breaths, a loud, white, comforting noise. His coughing had subsided. Over the mask, his pebbled eyes met hers, and she smiled at him. That blue ring around his mouth. She’d never seen anything more terrifying.

  As a child, she’d asked Ayah why Krishna’s skin was blue, and Ayah explained that someone had wanted Krishna dead when he was a baby. A demon assassin named Putana fed him poisoned milk from her own breast, and though Krishna survived, his skin turned chalky blue.

  She pictured Nick at her breast, pink and healthy. Breathing in and out while he looked into her eyes with utter trust.

  She ran her thumb down her son’s pallid cheek. Its earlier hues of rose and apricot had drained away, leaving his skin the color of skim milk. A nasty, bruised purple arced underneath his eyes. But when the nebulizer stopped and she slipped the mask off his face, the blue ring had disappeared. Thank God.

  And now came the part where they waited four hours to see if the treatment held. Pete took Alaina home. Quinn stayed with Nick, her body aching in the hard plastic chair. Nick, keyed up on hydrocortisone, bounced his leg against the thin mattress as the fluorescents flickered and buzzed.

  She stroked his arm. “Doing okay, buddy?”

  His eyes went bright with tears. “Mom? I couldn’t breathe.”

  “I know, babe. Can I get in there with you?” He scooted over, and she climbed into the bed and cuddled him close, thinking about Krishna. After the demon tried to poison him, he killed her
in revenge.

  Sometime after midnight, a resident with her hair in a bun showed up and unloosed a torrent of words at Quinn. She took notes, but nothing she wrote down held much comfort. Just watch him, she wrote. Keep the emergency inhaler handy.

  In Delhi, when Sarah and Marcus had been babies in the house on Cornwallis Road, Ayah used to scatter salt in the corners of the nursery to protect them from ghosts. “Nothing but an old wives’ tale,” she told Quinn, “but why not? It’s just a little salt. What can it hurt?”

  So salt, maybe.

  Mother’s champagne-colored Lexus waited for them outside the hospital. Quinn buckled Nick into the back seat and slid into the front seat with Mother, whose face shone with night cream, her blond coif slightly disheveled. Quinn thanked her for coming to get them so late. There was no telling what payment Mother would exact for this favor later. Quinn would have called a taxi except for the likelihood of a chemical air freshener dangling from the rearview mirror. As it was, the car smelled lightly of roses and cold cream: a potential trigger she had forgotten to take into account. She looked worriedly into the back seat, but Nick sat wilted, eyes closed, breathing peacefully.

  “Poor little fella,” Mother said. “Did they say what caused it?”

  Quinn shook her head, staring out at the black night as Mother pulled out of the hospital compound. “We told the doctor everything we could think of that he might have been exposed to. You know what she said? ‘Sometimes you never do figure out what caused an attack.’” It had seemed cavalier to Quinn. Offensive.

  “Could it have been your paints?”

  “Nope,” she said flatly and turned away to look out the side window.

  At home, she carried Nick upstairs, put him in pajamas, and tucked him into bed. He never woke; nor did Alaina. She watched him most of the rest of the night from the twins’ bedroom door. Pete got up at about four o’clock, took her by the shoulders, and steered her to bed. After thirty minutes of lying rigid with the effort of listening, she got up and dragged a pillow and blanket into the twins’ room, where she fell asleep on the floor. A couple of hours later, a sunbeam touched her face, awakening her. Pete stepped out of their bedroom, looked at Quinn without speaking, and went downstairs.

  In the kitchen, they barely made eye contact. Quinn surveyed the counter through a glaze of exhaustion. Pete had done most of the dishes but left the pasta pot unheeded. She scraped rubbery, candle-colored spaghetti into the garbage disposal and ran water into the saucepan to soak away red curls of dried tomato sauce. She poured a cup of coffee and stood staring into space. Pete fixed bowls of cereal. She ate half of hers, then went back to the twins’ room and watched Nick breathe.

  When she went back downstairs, Pete came into the kitchen and stood in front of her till she had no choice but to give him her gaze. Lavender tinged the skin under his eyes. He looked old. “I know you think this was my fault,” he said.

  She folded her arms beneath her ribs. Exhaustion had hollowed her out. “You couldn’t have known he’d go downhill so fast.”

  “You knew,” he said. “I know you did.”

  “Not really. I just had a bad feeling.”

  “Well, next time, insist, okay? Argue with me.”

  “When I argue with you, you tell me I’m overreacting.”

  “Next time I won’t.” The look on his tired face was all innocence.

  .

  When she was seven, Quinn had asked her father why he took care of poor people at his medical clinic. They were in the courtyard that fronted the house on Cornwallis Road, sitting on a wooden bench beneath the peepal tree, sharing an orange and spitting the seeds on the ground. “Because people need help,” he told her, “and I can give it to them. I can’t pretend they don’t exist.”

  “Yes, you can,” she said. “You can pretend anything.”

  They ate oranges as a ritual whenever they were available. “Never, ever eat an unwashed orange,” Daddy admonished them dozens of times. “And never, ever eat an orange that’s been washed with unboiled water.” The cook boiled water regularly for drinking and kept stores of it in the pantry.

  The oranges served as a survival mechanism. Every morning and evening, Delhi’s air turned gray and prickly with woodsmoke from millions of cookfires. In the DeVaughans’ neighborhood, it merely hazed the air, but elsewhere it got so thick, sometimes airplanes couldn’t land.

  Daddy held out an orange section but didn’t release it. “You’re right,” he said. “We could look away from people’s suffering. But that won’t make it go away. Do you understand?” Only when she nodded did he let her have the fruit.

  She had thought about his words afterward. Daddy couldn’t look away, but Mother could. Every Sunday, she ushered the children up the church steps right past people with their hands out. And nearly every time they went out into the city, a painfully thin Indian woman would tap on the car window, gesturing to her baby’s mouth to show their hunger. The children would clamor to help, but Mother vetoed them. “This country is overrun with poor people,” she always said. “We can’t help them all.”

  “We could help this one!” the children cried. But Mother had already ordered Ravindra to pull away. As the adult, she could just decide to leave, and voilà, they were on their way, beelining it to some other, less accusing place.

  When Quinn was eight, Mother took the children on an overnight trip to watch the Taj Mahal transform from an ethereal predawn gray to glowing ivory when the sun came up. To the twins, at age five, it seemed plainly evident that before the first rays touched the Taj, it wasn’t quite there. The sun made it solid. In the evenings, their guide told them, the marble turned pink, or sometimes gold. “Psychedelic,” he added, this being the early 1970s. Quinn begged to stay all day and watch this magical building turn colors, but Mother said they’d have to come back another time.

  In the car on the way back to the hotel, Mother entertained them with a rhyme: “Hogamus higamus, men are polygamous. Higamus hogamus, women monogamous.”

  “Did you make that up?” Quinn asked.

  “Ha,” Mother said. “It’s old as the hills.”

  “Teach us,” Sarah said, and Mother did, till the children could say the words perfectly, even if the finer points of the concept eluded them.

  The next morning they took the train back to Delhi. On the railway platform, a tall, bone-thin man dressed in rags crawled past like a swimmer doing the freestyle in a shallow pool, his knees and elbows banging against the bottom with every stroke. The children were accustomed to seeing people who didn’t move like they did—just the day before, they’d been sitting at a café when a man with no legs had walked past, using his hands and muscular arms as crutches, plant plant swing, plant plant swing. But this swimming man was painful to look at, flailing spastically across the concrete platform at incredible speed, like an injured spider. Sarah and Marcus gaped at him, though they knew better than to stare. Quinn watched him because she thought she owed it to him to imagine his suffering, even though she couldn’t make it go away.

  “Stop gawking.” Mother’s tone brooked no dissent. And so the children snapped their eyes forward and marched along behind the man Mother had hired to carry their luggage to the car.

  Predictably, the incident piqued Sarah’s curiosity. She’d always been interested in questions of why. Now she asked why the man had been walking on his elbows and knees, and why he had a spine deformity. Quinn followed her questions with interest. The answers depended on the person asked. Daddy: Probably the root cause lay in a vitamin deficiency in the mother’s diet, followed by the lack of a simple surgical procedure when he was young. Mother: Because plenty of people in the world aren’t as fortunate as we are. We’re lucky to be Americans. Ayah: Because that man was unlucky. Most likely he did something evil in a previous life, and he’s now suffering the consequences. But if he’s virtuous in this life, then his next l
ife will be better.

  For weeks, when Quinn closed her eyes at night, she saw the elbows-and-knees man swimming on bent limbs, bone on concrete, his dark head dipping and rising. She included him in the prayers she had learned at First Presbyterian, though she knew it did no good. There were too many people in the world, too many poor and sick and suffering, and even at age eight she could see that God didn’t take care of everyone. After a few weeks she stopped praying for him. She told herself that such a misfortune would never happen to a family like theirs. That kind of thing didn’t happen to Brahmins, and it didn’t happen to families who were white and rich with parents from America.

  Of course, two years later, Marcus was dead, and a year after that, their family blew apart and landed on different continents. Daddy came to visit every couple of years until his car ran off the road during the monsoon, killing him. By then the girls were American, but that fact hadn’t saved them from anything.

  .

  “Mommy?” Nick said. She opened her eyes. They were curled up together on the couch, his skin pink and pearly as the inside of a seashell. “We fell asleep.”

  She made chicken noodle soup and sliced a Granny Smith apple for lunch. Goldfish crackers. She sat down with the children and folded her hands under her chin to keep her head up.

  .

  The year of the cholera outbreak, Doordarshan India TV network had shown Born Free over and over. It riveted Sarah. She gazed into the lions’ faces the way a baby gazes at its mother. When Joy Adamson crooned, “Elsa, Elsa,” Sarah said it right along with her, her seven-year-old voice rich with love and heartbreak.