The Vanishers: A Novel

by Heidi Julavits

  I consulted Professor Yuen, who was sympathetic.

  “It’s not easy to do what you do,” Professor Yuen said. As far as she was concerned, I was still attacking Madame Ackermann.

  She recommended that I visit Patricia Ward.

  Patricia Ward lived in a winterized cottage, part of a twenties vacation development called the Occum that included a pond, a shingled club house used for staid second weddings, and a five-hole golf course.

  “Patricia Ward,” she said, giving my hand a hard, efficient shake.

  Patricia Ward was too tall for her own house, her hyperbolic blond hair near-skimming the rafters as she walked me to her office, a small room off the kitchen that looked out, through multipaned windows, at a tangle of burdock. She wore severe black glasses, jeans, and a shrug made of linen and tie-dyed in a muted way that whispered, “pricey tribal.”

  My resistance to Patricia Ward intensified when she led me into her study.

  Two black Barcelona chairs faced off over a glass coffee table.

  “Sit,” she said, gesturing to one of the Barcelona chairs. The leather cricked when my bottom hit it. I winced.

  “Are you comfortable?” she asked.

  “Very,” I said.

  She smiled.

  I smiled.

  I noticed the video recorder on a tripod.

  “Is that on?” I asked.

  “It can be,” she said.

  “But it’s not currently on,” I said. I wanted no more recordings of me that I could not control.

  “Not currently,” she said. She turned it on to demonstrate. She turned it off.

  “See?” she said. “I do, however, prefer to videotape my clients. It’s a process thing with me. Also a legal thing.”

  “Maybe we can work up to it,” I said.

  She flipped through my Workshop medical file, sent to her by Professor Yuen.

  “Do you mind if I ask what you do?” I said.

  “Do?” she said. “Didn’t Karen tell you?”

  Professor Yuen had not.

  She handed me a business card that read PATRICIA WARD, SPIRITUAL MIDWIFERY.

  “I’m not pregnant,” I said, trying to return the card. Patricia did not accept it.

  “I’m a spiritual midwife,” she said. “Primarily I birth stillborn emotions, the fetal remnants of bad pasts. But sometimes I help people birth their true self from within. Sometimes the person you are now is the mother to the future you.”

  A tiny mobile device rang on her side table. She picked it up, glanced at the screen.

  “Excuse me for a moment,” she said. She texted with her thumbnails.

  “Thank you for your time,” I said. “I don’t think spiritual midwifery is for me.”

  Extricating myself from the Barcelona chair required me to roll to my right side, lift my ass in the air, push to a standing position. Among the countless hostile design elements of the Barcelona chair, it featured no armrests. These fucking chairs.

  I straightened my legs. A wave of nausea knocked me back down.

  (I tried not to get too excited about this; a stomach flu had been making the rounds.)

  Patricia replaced her phone on her desk.

  “There!” she said. “Do you need some water? You’re green.”

  “No water,” I said. “I just need to go home.”

  “You know what Robert Frost wrote,” she said, opening a door to a half bath. “ ‘Home is where, when you go there, they have to let you in.’ ”

  Water battered a tiny basin.

  “The cheap platitudes of art,” she said. “Home is the oven where you stick your scared little head.”

  She reappeared with a Dixie cup.

  “Then again,” she said, waving my file, “when the home teems with emotional vermin, sometimes it’s best to return and hire an exterminator.”

  “That would be you?” I asked.

  She flipped her glasses into her hair.

  “Your mother,” she said.

  “My mother is the exterminator?”

  “No,” Patricia said. “Your mother is the gift. Your stillborn gift. Death is a gift to some people. Death was a gift to your mother. But is death a gift to you? It might be, if you can’t give birth to this dead baby mother. But my point: you have options.”

  The urge to vomit tsunami-rushed my esophagus. I tamped it back.

  She flicked on the video camera.

  “Tell me about her,” she said.

  I stared into the camera’s eye, determined to give it nothing.

  “She’s dead,” I said.

  “But not really,” Patricia said.

  “Yes, really,” I said.

  “She lives in you,” Patricia said. “Decomposing in you. Poisoning you. Attacking you.”

  I flashed to that rainy afternoon in the Carpathians, and my encounter with the wolf that had peripherally revealed a dark-haired woman.

  “Attacking you,” Patricia repeated. “And yet you blame innocent people for your illness. Why? Because she’s your mother. She would never do anything to hurt you. She doesn’t even know you. A person so uninterested in you couldn’t be the cause of your sickness. In order to want to hurt you, a person has to care.”

  “Fuck you,” I said.

  “Consider it,” she said. “Consider how you’ve brought this on yourself.”

  “I’m leaving,” I said.

  “The sick are never blameless,” Patricia called after me. “Remember that when you stick the pistol in your mouth.”

  I stumbled toward the front door. Why would my mother attack me? Neglect was one thing, but targeted hostility? Then I heard in my head—you’re the hostile one. And maybe I was. Maybe what I’d interpreted as her inattention, she’d interpreted as mine. And wasn’t it true? My search for her had never been a search for her; I’d been searching to feel what I knew I should, by biological rights, feel, but couldn’t. Grief, basically, or a variety of grief—one that didn’t involve missing a person, one that was far more self-involved. A grief over a grief.

  I made it as far as the road before vomiting. I did so discreetly, behind a tree. Afterward I covered the vomit with dirt. Because I was polite even when incapacitated, I thought. Because I was such a decent person that I didn’t want to inconvenience anyone, not even Patricia Ward. But as I scuffed the dirt over my vomit, my patch of shame, I felt less like a highly evolved human than a dying animal, covering its tracks so that it could expire with dignity under a rock, alone.

  Toward the end of September, I received an e-mail from Colophon. He’d landed at a university in Lyon, a yearlong scholar-in-residence position at their film studies department, a sinecure he seemed to find beneath him.

  He included a link at the bottom of his message. No explanation.

  I didn’t follow the link, and soon forgot about it. I had a faculty meeting that day. That night I was hosting a student party at my apartment and I’d been tasked to find eclectic bitters for my volunteer mixologist, a scholarly alcoholic named Klaus.

  The following day, I was busy being hungover, a state of self-induced illness I’d been experimenting with more and more. My father and Blanche arrived that afternoon for a weekend visit, the two of them in a throbbing marital huff. That night we ate dinner at a French inn-restaurant. After the wine arrived, my father handed me a skinny box.

  “What’s this?” I asked.

  “I found it,” he said.

  “He didn’t find it,” Blanche said.

  My father glanced at her stonily.

  “What?” Blanche said. “You didn’t find it.”

  “It was mailed to me,” he said.

  “By whom?” I asked.

  “It arrived in the mail after you moved back to East Warwick,” Blanche said. “No return address.”

  I opened the box.

  Inside was the pendant made by my mother, purchased by Varga, stolen by Irenke, returned to Varga. The surfaces had a molten rumple to them, like metal just pulled from the forge.


  “Your mother made it,” Blanche announced. “See? Ugly.”

  Each sinew furled to a menacing point. I pushed against one with my fingertip. Hard. I didn’t break the skin. But I could have.

  It was as hostile an object as I’d ever touched, and yet I experienced with it an instant kinship. Despite the long line of tragic women who’d owned it, it seemed to have always belonged to no one but me.

  I slipped my head through the chain. The pendant hung to my navel, and was so heavy it pulled on my shoulders, dragging me downward. I closed my eyes and imagined: this is what it felt like to be her, or to be around her, or both.

  “Was she always unhappy?” I asked.

  “Depression ran in her family,” Blanche assured me.

  “I could never tell if she was happy or unhappy,” my father said. “I suppose that says something not very flattering about me.”

  My father stared into his wineglass.

  “She was emotionally remote and impossible to read,” Blanche, the old dog, said.

  My father made a wall of his hand; he showed it to Blanche.

  “I’m sorry,” he said to me. “I can’t ever seem to tell you what you want to hear.”

  “You shouldn’t worry about what I want to hear,” I said. “You should just tell me what you want me to know.”

  I placed my palm against his, the one he’d erected as a Blanche silencer, and our hands hovered there, supported by our elbows on the table. We might have been arm wrestling except we neither of us pushed against the other. We held our own weight.

  My request, I understood, was complicated; what you want a person to know is often the last thing you want a person to know. For example, I wanted him to know about the terrible war waging in my brain. For months I’d lived in terror of seeing Varga’s face again, because even that single glance, via a grainy photograph, had initiated a scary variety of override. I could no longer conjure my mother’s face without seeing Varga’s half-baked rendition, as though the two had been combined by a lenticular lens, resulting in a stereoscopic 3-D effect in which, depending on the angle from which I viewed them, my mother became Varga and Varga became my mother, a rapid alternation that risked a dangerous blurring, even an extinction.

  If I’d spoken to anyone about it, I would have spoken about it to him. But I never did. I’d made certain he never knew a thing about Dominique Varga. Given his general incuriosity about the aboveground world, and the fact that most of the press about Varga was in Europe anyway, it hadn’t been difficult to shield him from her.

  “I’ve always assumed that you could know whatever you wanted to know about your mother,” my father said. “Thus I never had to make the decision about what I wanted you to know. Or what she would have wanted you to know. I’m embarrassed to say—that you didn’t require me to do this for you, I found it to be a great relief.”

  “It’s OK,” I said. “I understand.”

  “There’s so much I can’t tell you,” he said. “No matter how much I might want to do so.”

  Then he did what he could bring himself to do so rarely—he looked me in the face. I saw there, surging to the surface of his pupils, an oily flash of shame so repugnant I had to force myself not to look away, to receive this confession he’d chosen, maybe involuntarily, to unloose. He was relieved she was gone. Maybe not immediately, but very soon after she’d died he’d realized—he’d been spared. In their marriage the bad had long outweighed the good, but she would never leave him, at least not by half measures. By dying she’d released him from a life of vicarious, and then increasingly not, misery. She’d been toxic, a chore. Then she died, and he’d never forgiven himself for getting so lucky. He’d been spared her worst, but allowed to keep her best in the form of me.

  I understood why he couldn’t share this with anyone. I doubt he’d ever shared it with himself.

  “In America today,” I said, smiling, because I knew when I smiled that I chased her resemblance away, “people overestimate the value of expression.”

  I meant it. If he was incapable of telling me that we’d been better off on our own, I was just as incapable of telling him that there was a woman living (last I heard) in Paris with my mother’s face.

  I stored the necklace in its box in the top drawer of Professor Blake’s wet bar, alongside his monogrammed muddler. For the obvious reasons, I never touched it. I came to view it as an unusual pet I had to keep in a cage, a small snake or lizard. One night I decided to wear it out.

  The party was being thrown by and for Professor Hales, whose manuscript had won a prestigious English prize, the occult equivalent of the Man Booker.

  I’d planned to drive with Professor Yuen, who came up to my apartment for a pre-party old-fashioned. She critiqued my outfit as I muddled the maraschino and the sugar in the bottom of her high ball.

  “A little meh,” she said. “Do you have a colorful scarf?”

  I didn’t do scarves. Scarves were risky for psychics to wear unless you were Madame Ackermann, the equivalent of accessorizing with a crystal ball and a shoulder crow.

  “How about a statement necklace?” Professor Yuen asked.

  Since I was, at that moment, replacing the muddler in the drawer beside my mother’s necklace, to claim I didn’t own such an item would be too much of a bald-faced lie.

  “Perfect,” Professor Yuen said, eyeing the pendant. “Is that some kind of a dog?”

  “Dog?” I said.

  She pointed to the pendant.

  “It’s abstract,” I said. “It’s nothing.”

  “That’s the eye,” Professor Yuen said, pointing to the red stone. “And the snout. A wolf, maybe.”

  I squinted. It had only ever resembled a mean alphabet to me.

  “I’m not seeing it,” I said.

  The night was clear and cold. I smelled woodsmoke as I walked to Professor Yuen’s Saab, parked in a handicapped space in front of the vegan pizza parlor. The full moon shone with arctic intensity over East Warwick, reflecting off the tin roofs of Main Street, glaciating the landscape. We drove past the Workshop buildings, glowing in the woods, and took the scenic route along the river, sinuous as mercury between its banks. The night assumed a déjà vu creepiness that intensified when Professor Yuen turned off the river road and started to climb up the hill that led to Madame Ackermann’s A-frame.

  “Where does Professor Hales live?” I asked.

  “Top of this ridge,” Professor Yuen replied.

  We passed Madame Ackermann’s driveway with its hinged For Sale sign. Through the woods it appeared as though the house was brightly inhabited, but really it was just the moon’s reflection in the windows.

  The party was like every other Workshop party. Martinis and oven-warmed hors d’oeuvres, high-pitched congratulatory chitter-chatter ballasted by sotto voce bitching. Professor Hales gave a toast to himself—“there’s no one better qualified to tout my many virtues”—and a cake the size of a dollhouse was served. I’d drunk too much Prosecco and decided to take a breather in Professor Hales’s study, one wall of which was glass, affording a helicopter’s-eye view over the White Mountains. I pulled a chair close to the window and stared out at the mostly wilderness. Here and there signs of civilization blinked—windows, a cell tower, the sweep of car headlights on an unlit road—but primarily the scene promoted emptiness and loneliness, an ocean void of lifeboats.

  I massaged my neck and between my shoulder blades, which had begun to ache. I lifted the pendant in my other hand, relieving myself of its weight. I was buzzed and trying to relax. Maybe I honestly did fall asleep, and maybe I only dreamed that I stood at the threshold of my parents’ old bedroom, the door in front of me a square outlined in light like an e-mail attachment I could click open by touching my hand to the knob. I waited. I heard wind. I touched the door. It opened. The interior was obscured by clockwise-swirling fog.

  I entered.

  A shadow at the back of the room took on volume and shape. My mother. She lay on the bed
. I said nothing, not wanting to disturb her, not knowing if I was welcome—nor if I wanted to be. I took a step closer. Then another. She watched me approach; she did not, like some uncertain bird, flee.

  Why now? I wanted to ask her. Why now, after all of these years? But I didn’t dare talk. Words had no place in this foggy cocoon. We were, for the first time, meeting. We were only bodies.

  But as I drew alongside her bed, she died. Before I could grab her hand and expect it to grab mine back. She closed her eyes and she died. Her body vanished. On the bed there was no trace of her, not even a fossilized rumple of sheets.

  This was astonishing. Stunning. Then a boiling, obliterating rage burst from my mouth. The words ricocheted like bullets shot by a person sealed inside a shipping container. Trapped velocity. These words could hurt no one but me. This did not stop me from saying them. Couldn’t she have waited until I reached her bed to fucking die? Was that too much to ask? I was sorry that she’d been so miserable. But I did not accept this as an excuse. She’d had a duty to be interested in me; that alone should have kept her alive, at least until my first Christmas, or until my first day of school, or until my first heartbreak, or until my first bad haircut, or until the first time I had a stomach bug and needed someone to hold my head out of the toilet. I had never blamed her for this failure. Not once. Nor did I blame her for possibly sickening me for over a year, or for my entire life. If I had never properly grieved, was that my fault? I couldn’t miss her because there was no one to miss. Which made me confused, it scrambled my emotional compass, this magnetic craving toward norths that didn’t exist. It was like missing a missing. So the least she could do was wait until I’d reached her bed to die. The least she could do was give me one experience, one, so that I could grieve her—not her absence, her—every single day of my life.

  The necklace choked me. It was a drag, an unhealthy attachment. I freed my head from its noose. I threw.

  Professor Hales genially chalked my misbehavior up to drunkenness, and asked that I pay for the cost of replacing the giant window, which would run me $2,000. Professor Yuen confiscated the necklace from me as though it were a mace I might use to brain an innocent party guest.