Three Ways to Disappear

by Katy Yocom

  “You’re too close to the TV, runny babbit,” Mother said. “Scoot back.”

  The monsoon came, and the power flickered on and off every day, and sometimes the house went dark right in the middle of Born Free. Marcus pestered Sarah to go outside and play with him, rain or no rain. At least once, they did go outside together. Quinn knew because she saw them sneak back in.

  Their parents had hosted a party the night before. From the nursery window, the children watched guests arrive, their cars gleaming in a steady rain. Partygoers disappeared through the front door, drivers around the side of the house to the kitchen, where the cook was preparing them dinner.

  After the arrivals tapered off, the children slipped out of the nursery to watch the goings-on from between balusters on the staircase. Grown-ups filled the living and dining rooms and central foyer, women dressed in fashionable shifts, men in slacks and short-sleeved dress shirts, everyone chatting and sipping drinks. There were doctors and nurses from Daddy’s clinic, tennis-playing ladies from the club. There was bald Mr. Chatterjee, who ran the international school, eyes magnified behind thick horn-rimmed glasses. Servants slipped unobtrusively through the rooms, collecting empty glasses and replenishing appetizer trays. Vikram, their housekeeper’s son, had been assigned the role of disc jockey and stood proudly at his station by the credenza with the built-in record player.

  Quinn had a ten-year-old’s crush on Vikram. He was fourteen and cute and seemed to be concentrating hard, the tip of his tongue sticking out of his mouth as he pored over album covers: Aretha Franklin, Stevie Wonder, Paul McCartney, ABBA. The children danced on the staircase, Sarah and Marcus trying to knock each other down the stairs while doing the bump. Mother circulated, looking beautiful in her Pucci minidress with its swirls of pink and green. Daddy stood by the bar, talking with Dr. Rao and Dr. Upadhyay from the clinic and the young Irish nurse with the pixie cut, whose name the children couldn’t pronounce. Mother and Daddy smiled and laughed with their friends but didn’t talk to each other. There’d been raised voices in the master bedroom before the guests had arrived.

  Gradually the sound of rain grew to an insistent hush, overpowering the voices and music in the house. Vikram turned up the volume and played “Rainy Days and Mondays,” winning nods of appreciation for his cleverness. Egged on by the approval, he followed with “Who’ll Stop the Rain” and then, in a moment of triumph, “It Never Rains in Southern California.” Appreciative laughter swept the room. Partygoers clapped and danced and sang along. On the stairs, the children grinned into one another’s bright faces and bellowed out the lyrics until the song finished and Mother emerged from the crowd on the arm of Pastor Mark from First Presbyterian.

  She seemed unsteady on her feet. The pastor steered her to the staircase and sat her down. She spotted the children on the steps above her and shooed them back upstairs. A lock of blond hair partially hid her face, but when their eyes met, Quinn saw her mother’s anguished expression and wet cheeks.

  The next morning, Mother didn’t appear at breakfast. The children ate with Ayah at the dining room table amid the dregs of the party. The house reeked of cigarette smoke. Vikram and his mother, Leela, moved in and out of the room collecting dirty dishes and paper napkins and colored toothpicks. After breakfast, Ayah sent the children to play in their rooms so the servants could finish cleaning up.

  In her bedroom, Quinn rummaged for the book she was reading. Slowly she registered a sound coming from down the hall. Mother was crying.

  Quinn tapped on her parents’ bedroom door. No answer. She pushed open the door and peered inside. Mother lay in bed, disheveled, her cheeks streaked with last night’s mascara.

  “Why are you crying?”

  “It’s nothing, honey. Go back to your room.” Tears clogged her voice.

  “But why are you crying?”

  “I had a fight with a friend.” It sounded like a lie.

  Quinn returned to her room as instructed just as Leela appeared at the top of the stairs, looking nervous. The servants did not fare well when Mother was upset. She didn’t like being seen to cry, and inevitably she turned angry. Through her bedroom doorway, Quinn watched the flow of traffic in the hallway: first Leela, who entered the master bedroom only to flee ten seconds later with a look of alarm; then Vikram, clearly unhappy that he’d been charged with delivering a cup of tea. When he entered Mother’s bedroom, she said something harsh. He emerged teacupless, looking shaken.

  Quinn motioned him over. “What’s going on?”

  He shook his head. “Ma’am is really upset. She turned over a chair.”

  Quinn blanched. “She didn’t throw it at you, did she?”

  “No, no. It was upside down when I went in.”

  Mother yanked her door open and glared. Vikram disappeared down the stairs. Quinn ducked into her bedroom and pressed her ear to the door in time to hear quick footsteps descend the stairs. Mother’s voice in the hallway, not loud, but focused to a sharp point. Someone else weeping. The back door thumping open and closed, open and closed. Then quiet.

  Quinn padded down the hall to the nursery. A scuffle of footsteps told her Marcus and Sarah were hiding themselves behind the half-open door. Quinn knew they were there by the dull gleam of their eyes and the sound of their breathing. They watched her through the crack. She thought she should say something but didn’t know what. She turned and left them there.

  Downstairs in the library, she found her copy of The Cricket in Times Square. The cigarette smell was not so bad in here, and the room felt pleasant. Watery squares of sunlight fell onto the carpet through the tall windows overlooking the backyard. She settled into a chair and opened the book.

  She didn’t know how much time had passed when something brought her back—a noise, a sudden movement. When she looked up, there were the twins, tiptoeing past the doorway, soaked and covered in mud.

  Later she couldn’t reconstruct the logic behind her actions. She knew the twins had been somewhere forbidden, not just the courtyard but somewhere much worse and wilder, somewhere dangerous. A gully ran behind the house, dry and dusty most of the year, but running with filthy water during the monsoon. Even in the dry season, the children were absolutely forbidden from going there because bad men liked to roam such places, just waiting to snatch children. Quinn had always dismissed the warning about bad men, given that the gully lay within the walls of their property; even the waterway itself was fenced to keep intruders out. Still, dirty water was a terrible danger, and there was a cholera outbreak going on. They’d been in the gully, she felt sure of it; it was the only place on the property they could have gotten so muddy. They would be in extreme trouble as soon as the adults found out.

  Even so, when she looked back, she couldn’t fathom why she felt responsible for fixing the situation by herself, why she felt compelled to keep this transgression a secret even from the servants. Whatever her reasons, the sight of the twins jolted her into action. She caught them on the stairs, rushed them to the bathroom, and stared at the faucet. Ayah or another servant always ran their baths. But she had seen it done. She twisted the handle experimentally and watched, mesmerized, as water came gushing out of the faucet in a twisting silver stream.

  It took her a minute to realize the level wasn’t rising. She seized the rubber stopper and shoved it into the drain.

  “Take off your clothes,” she ordered, and, shockingly, the twins obeyed. Quinn read alarm in their faces. Her stomach hurt. One of the servants would come rushing in any minute to see what was going on, and Quinn would be in unimaginable trouble. How many times had she heard Ayah say, “It’s my duty”? All the servants said it anytime they were thanked, and it wasn’t just a way to say, “You’re welcome.” Duties belonged to one person only. You didn’t step into someone else’s territory.

  Marcus dipped a finger into the water. “It’s freezing,” he complained, and Quinn’s despair mounted. Hot wa
ter came from the kitchen, carried down the hall by a servant and dumped into the tub to mix with cold water from the faucet. Defeated, she twisted off the tap and rushed to the kitchen, skidded through the doorway, and pulled up short. The room was vacant. No cook. No Vikram. She’d never seen the kitchen empty. It looked fake, the silent appliances staged as if on a movie set.

  She ran from room to room, calling for Ayah, ready to confess and beg for help. Any adult would do, even Mother. Quinn couldn’t imagine her fury when she found out what was going on.

  No one came. The twins yowled doleful complaints from the bathroom.

  She ran back to the kitchen and stood before the stove, confronted by a confusing set of knobs. She’d never once bothered to figure out how they worked. Even if she’d wanted to, the cook would have shooed her away. With a sweaty hand she grasped a knob and twisted. A hiss, a smell of gas. A series of loud clicks that went on and on. The gas smell grew stronger.

  She twisted the knob one way, then the other. A whoosh of blue flame made her jump back in terror. Her heart quieted as the fire settled into a steady ring. She adjusted the knob to its highest setting, filled a copper pot with water, and hoisted it out of the sink. Its weight shocked her. How did the cook manage to lift waterpots like they were nothing? She wrestled it onto the stove, soaking her shirtfront in the process.

  After an eternity, the water reached a boil. She grasped the handle, screamed, and snatched her hand back as the vessel teetered at the edge of the stove. She grabbed a dishcloth and shoved the pot back onto the burner. When she held up her hand, a red stripe ran across the insides of her fingers.

  She knew first aid. Cold water was what was needed. As long as she kept water running over her hand, the pain wasn’t too bad.

  “Hurry up!” Sarah yelled.

  Quinn found pot holders and lugged the vessel down the hall, her arms shaking with its weight. The twins sat naked on the bathroom floor, wrapped in towels and playing with little plastic monkeys they must have retrieved from the nursery. They glared at her as she set the pot on the lip of the tub and tipped its contents out.

  Sarah stuck her hand into the water. “It’s still too cold.”

  Quinn tried not to cry.

  Back in the kitchen, she filled three pots. She pulled a wobbly wooden chair to the stove and climbed up to maneuver the smallest saucepan to the back burner. Heat scorched her belly, and she realized she was leaning over an open flame. She startled and nearly fell off the chair.

  She wanted Ayah, the cook, anyone. She didn’t care if she got into trouble. While the pots heated, she sat down on the floor and cried.

  Somehow she managed to lift the scalding vessels off the stove and haul them, sloshing, down the hall. It took all three containers to make the bathwater hot enough. She wiped sweat and tears from her face and ordered the twins into the tub, and they climbed in and hopped from foot to foot, howling that now it was too hot. She washed them as if they were two bundles of filthy laundry, scrubbing them with Lux till red streaks welted out all over their fronts and backs, prophesying how angry Mother and Daddy were going to be.

  But when she dried them, she fell silent. In the nursery, she stepped back and watched as Ayah dressed them and bundled their dirty clothes.

  This was the part that, later, she could never work out. When had Ayah come? How had she just appeared, silently, like a ghost materializing? It felt like a dream. No tears, no shouting, not even a moment of outcry when she discovered the catastrophe. Just—suddenly, almost inevitably—Ayah.

  “You children,” Ayah said, her voice frightened. “You must never, never sneak out of the house again. If I tell your parents how very-very bad you have been, they will smack your bottoms like you have never been smacked before. You won’t know it was possible to hurt so much or cry so hard. Promise me, children.”

  Marcus and Sarah whimpered that they promised. Ayah turned to Quinn, her eyes searching. They both knew she was asking Quinn something different. “I promise,” Quinn said.

  Late that afternoon, Quinn came upon Mother standing at the telephone table in the hallway, stroking the cradled black receiver with one finger as if she couldn’t decide whether to place a call.

  “Where did you go?” Quinn asked.

  Mother looked at her. Even in the dim light of a monsoon afternoon, Quinn could see her eyes were puffy from crying. “Church,” she said in a scratchy voice.

  Two days later, the twins woke up fevered. Midmorning, Marcus leapt up from the dining room floor, where he’d been playing lethargically with his Matchbox cars, and ran into the bathroom. They heard him retch. Mother turned to Quinn. “Go check on Sarah,” she ordered.

  Quinn raced upstairs and found her sister in the bathroom, pants soaked. Footsteps thumped beside her, and Leela ordered Quinn aside, stripped off Sarah’s filthy clothes, and sluiced her down under the bathtub faucet as Sarah wailed and shivered. Mother appeared at the doorway, took in the scene, and vanished. A minute later Quinn heard her on the phone. “I need to speak to Dr. DeVaughan. It’s an emergency.”

  Within minutes, Mother and Ayah were bundling Sarah and Marcus into the car. Ayah and Quinn watched as Ravindra drove them away in the pale-yellow car, the twins visible as two little blond heads in the back seat, flanking their mother, her face white above them.

  After the car disappeared, Ayah took Quinn’s hand and led her down the hall to Ayah’s own room, where she stayed some nights when it was too late for her to go home. “Take off your shoes,” she said gently. In their sock feet, they stepped into the room, which Quinn had rarely entered before. It was simply furnished: a single bed with a white-painted iron frame, a tall dresser, a desk and chair. No decorations except two framed prints on the wall, a god and a goddess Quinn couldn’t name. From the corner Ayah pulled a small prayer rug and unfurled it onto the floor. On the puja tray on her dresser top, she lit the diya lamp and a stick of incense and rang a small brass bell, causing the smoke to part and curl. She sank to her knees on the rug. “Come,” she urged. “We’re going to pray to Lakshmi to keep the little ones safe from disease.”

  Quinn knelt. “Do Sarah and Marcus have a disease?”

  Ayah clasped Quinn’s hand. “Pray with me.”

  Night had fallen by the time the car returned from the clinic. The headlights swept across the face of the house, illuminating the peepal tree, washing through Quinn’s bedroom window. She and Ayah ran to the courtyard to meet them. Ayah whispered in Quinn’s ear, “Remember, they must stay very, very quiet. Your duty is to be gentle with them.”

  They emerged from the car in slow motion: first Ravindra, from the driver’s seat, moving as if underwater. He closed his door with a muted thump and opened the back-seat door, reached in, and emerged with the sleeping form of Sarah in his arms. As if an afterthought, he shifted Sarah to one side and held out his hand. Mother’s white hand emerged like a hooded cobra from the dark interior. Her pale fingers gripped Ravindra’s, and she stepped into the light, her face blank, hair in disarray. She moved toward the house as if her feet were not quite connecting with the earth.

  Ravindra’s arms were already full with Sarah, but Quinn thought he would reach into the car one more time. When he pushed the door shut, she felt a cold confusion, a dread she didn’t understand. “Ravindra,” Quinn called softly. “What about Marcus?”

  And then she saw Ravindra was crying. And Ayah’s hand tightened on her shoulder. And Mother glided past them like a ghost.

  Cholera is a deceptive disease: easily curable with a simple rehydrating solution, if caught early enough, but capable all the same of killing in a matter of hours. Children especially. First the diarrhea and vomiting, then convulsions, then death. That was what had happened to Marcus. That was what had happened to their family. Quinn still remembered the disbelief as Ayah and she clung to each other in the courtyard: that a thing so simple could have undone them.

>   It dawned on her gradually that this was what Mother had feared. All those times she had marched them along, eyes forward; all those prayers murmured in hard wooden pews; all the times she reminded them of their good fortune, she had been trying to protect them from the other India. She had realized all along what Quinn learned only as she stood in the courtyard that night: that their house on Cornwallis Road was such a small island, a speck, really, and all this time the other India had been a sea lapping at their shore, needing only the slightest rise in tide, the slightest ripple of wind, to rise up and bear them away.

  Sarah

  According to talk in the village, Sunil had injured his knee the day before the tiger found him. He could have asked for help climbing onto his sleeping platform that night, but instead he had spread his white blanket in the field and lain down on it wearing his white dhoti kurta. He’d chosen, in fact, to spend the night on the ground, looking—not that he would have realized it—like a slumbering bullock. A hungry young tiger had come along, and that was that.

  Sanjay told this story to Sarah on a cold, sunny morning the week after the accident as they drove to the village to check in on Padma, Sunil’s widow. According to the villagers, the entire sequence of events had happened because Sunil had taken to saying bagh, the Hindi word for tiger, aloud. That carelessness had attracted someone’s attention (someone being the villagers’ deliberately vague term for the tiger), and Someone had killed Sunil.

  “Not the most forgiving worldview, is it?” Sarah said.

  Sanjay moved his head in the distinctively Indian way, not quite a nod and not quite a shake. “When I was a boy, I used to wonder why tigers would ever hunt anything but humans.” He steered carefully around an oxcart entering the road from a field of millet. “Most of us are completely distracted ninety percent of the time, regretting the past or worrying about the future. We would be the easiest prey in the world.”

  “Funny, isn’t it,” Sarah said. “Every religion I can think of would have us think we’re higher than the animals, and yet look what we need to do to advance spiritually. Quit being so distracted. Be in the now. Be like the animals.”