Waiting to Vanish

by Ann Hood

  From downstairs, she heard a little girl’s voice. “WHY? WHY? WHY?”

  Mackenzie held the box in her arms. As if she could see through its lid, she pictured the prints inside, each carefully matted in white, and negatives beneath them wrapped in tissue paper. Although for years she had worked as a travel photographer, had shot the Great Pyramids, the Wailing Wall, the Bridge of Sighs, Alexander had loved the fact that she’d always had her own projects too. “My sister,” Alexander had told her, “keeping art alive.” She’d had small shows in galleries around the country. A study of trees, from gnarled oaks to delicate cherry blossoms to massive redwoods. Then, a study of hotel lobbies, a grand, gilt-trimmed one in Bangkok, the check-in station at the LA-Z-DAZE motel on Route 1A. In this box was the project she’d been working on when Alexander had died. A black and white study of brothers and sisters. The developed prints were of strangers—a young sister and brother in Beijing, dressed in identical Mao jackets and standing as straight as soldiers, twins in a stroller in Rock Creek Park, an old man being wheeled down a city street by his ninety-year-old younger sister.

  The negatives were of Mackenzie and Alexander. She’d taken them only last Christmas. A year ago, she thought. How can so much change in just one year? She didn’t open the box. She remembered holding the negatives up to the light when Alexander had first died, as if these images could recreate him, bring him back to life. In one, their heads were such that her hair bled into his. They looked like they were one person, connected.

  “Recorded for posterity,” she had told him the day she’d taken the shots.

  “Like the Beatles,” he’d said. “‘Strawberry Fields Forever.’”

  As children, they’d worshipped the Beatles. Mackenzie had a red wallet with a picture of all four in collarless suits on the front, and a charm bracelet full of gold records and guitars. She still remembered all their birthdays.

  “Gee,” Alexander had laughed, “do you think they’ll ever get back together?”

  Mackenzie remembered she’d hit his arm playfully. “Not funny,” she’d said.

  For one picture they’d worn moppy black wigs and crooned like their childhood heroes. YEAH, YEAH, YEAH.

  She couldn’t do it. She could not open this box. Back in New York she’d started a new project. Doorways. It had seemed, when she’d started it, like a way to stay calm, open. Jason had told her she had to let go. Close one door, he’d said, and open another. She still refused to say Alexander’s name out loud most of the time. It was too painful. She could not look at these pictures. The ones that haunted Aunt Hope’s mantel were older, distant. A boy in a Little League uniform, her grandmother frozen in 1962. But the photographs in this box were real. This was who Alexander had been when he died.

  Back downstairs, Patty was in the kitchen, mixing mayonnaise into a bowl of tunafish.

  “Find it?” she asked.

  Mackenzie shook her head. She knew with certainty that she would never find what she had really come for.

  The radio played an easy listening version of “Lady Madonna.”

  “Did you look in the attic?”

  “It’s gone,” Mackenzie said.

  “Do you want to stay for lunch?”

  Mackenzie thought of all the meals she’d had in this house. She thought of her grandmother’s veal stew, with round pearl onions and a touch of curry.

  “I’ve had so many—” Mackenzie started. Then, “No. Thank you.”

  She zipped her jacket. Behind her, as she closed the door, she heard a little girl. “I hate tunafish.” “You do not,” Patty said. “You love tunafish.”

  Mackenzie sat again in the car and stared at the house, the way she had the night before with Sam. Then she pressed her eyes shut, tight. When I open my eyes the present will vanish, she thought. Grammie will be in the window sipping tea. Alexander’s car will be in the driveway. She didn’t open her eyes for a very long time. Not until Patty called to her from the doorway.

  “Car trouble?”

  Then Mackenzie waved and smiled and shrugged, all at once, and drove off. She kept her mind focused on Sam, whose eyes were just like Alexander’s and nothing like Iris Bloom’s. Sam, who was sitting and waiting for her to come to him.

  The first thing Mackenzie noticed when she and Sam got to her father’s that night was his shoes. They were white, the kind old men in Miami wore. Pat Boone shoes, Alexander would have called them. For as long as she could remember, Jams wore either oil-stained Topsiders or, for dress-up, black wingtips. In her childhood there was a Friday night ritual in which Mackenzie polished her father’s shoes and he paid her fifty cents. Jams would spread out part of the newspapers from the Sunday before on the kitchen floor. With a big glass of Pepsi beside her, Mackenzie would open the shoeshine kit and spread its contents on the papers—the smudged chamois cloth, the metal tin of wax, and the bottle of black shoe polish with the tip of squishy foam. Once, while Mackenzie was carefully unlacing the wingtips, Alexander took the bottle of polish and painted Groucho Marx eyebrows on Babar, the family dog. Mackenzie had felt like a holy ritual had been ruined. She felt the same way now, looking at the unfamiliar shoes, white with long tassels.

  “Where are your shoes?” Mackenzie said.

  “On my feet,” Jams said, laughing.

  They were sitting in his room at Oakdale. It was sunny and small, like a motel room. On the walls were paintings of clown faces that looked as if they were done with a paint-by-number kit. The rug was a scratchy shag. The television was on a swiveling pedestal. Mackenzie and her father sat on white wicker chairs, sipping iced tea. Jams had crushed fresh mint in it like they always did at home. In a small bowl on the table were assorted nuts—cashews, almonds, filberts.

  Jams had moved to Oakdale just a few weeks after Cal left Rhode Island. There was therapy for his shoplifting habit, for dealing with Alexander’s death. “The people here aren’t crazy,” a nurse had assured Mackenzie when Jams first went there, “they’re just troubled. Or lonely. Think of this as a social club, not a hospital.” On the bulletin board in the lobby, Mackenzie had seen sign-up sheets for bus trips to Plymouth Rock, Mystic Seaport, Sturbridge Village. A bookshelf in her father’s apartment was cluttered with cheap souvenirs, plastic domes with fluorescent colored scenes inside—a neon green Plymouth Rock, a shiny pink lobster. When the domes were shaken, glittery snow fell.

  “I have a whole drawer full of your letters,” Jams said. “And the clippings you send me of your work.”

  Mackenzie hesitated, then asked, “Any word from Mom?” She tried to make her voice sound casual.

  Jams shook his head.

  Sam picked up one of the domes and shook it, watched the silver snow fall.

  “Auntie Hope gets these postcards,” Mackenzie said. She kept her eyes fixed on her father’s white shoes. A glimpse of pale yellow showed above them.

  “So I hear,” Jams said. “Blank postcards.” He shook his head again.

  “Those shoes are awful,” Mackenzie said.

  Sam gasped slightly. He was peering into one of the domes, nodding. Mackenzie went over to him and looked inside too.

  “Boston,” she said, reading the name that sat below a pot of fluorescent yellow beans and a bright blue Prudential Center.

  “He remembers,” Jams said quietly. “He remembers visiting Alexander there. Don’t you, Sammy?”

  Mackenzie took the souvenir from Sam, shook it, and watched the sparkling flakes fall onto the Boston baked beans.

  “Alexander had him there for Memorial Day weekend right before—”

  “I know,” she said quickly.

  “Your mother and I met them at Durgin’s Park for lunch. Last time I saw Alexander, sitting at one of those long tables there eating strawberry shortcake.”

  “Why did you go and buy those shoes?” Mackenzie said angrily. She felt like she was standing on ground that was shaking loose from an earthquake, more and more of it crumbling into a chasm.

  “It’s bett
er to talk about it,” Jams said. “Everybody’s just running away from it.”

  Sam took the souvenir from Mackenzie.

  The room was silent.

  “These shoes,” Jams said finally, “reminded me of some I use to have a long time ago, back when I first met your mother. I swapped them for three Izod shirts at a swap meet we had here.”

  Sam moved to the next shelf, this one lined with row after row of miniature liquor bottles like they sold on airplanes. Sam unscrewed the cap of a Grand Marnier, smelled it, and wrinkled his nose.

  “Spitting image,” Jams said.

  Mackenzie nodded.

  “Just the other day,” he continued, “I read about a boy in New Jersey who died talking on the telephone. Did you read that?”

  “No.”

  “It happens sometimes. It really does.”

  Mackenzie thought of all the Saturdays she had spent with her father in the liquor stores he owned. There were two of them, as large as supermarkets. He would put her in a shopping cart and wheel her up and down the aisles, explaining the processes it took to make champagne and wine, what grains and fruits went into each liquor. She loved the bottles that had fruit in them best, black cherries or pears, and the liquor from Portugal that had a branch laden with sugary crystals inside. She was allowed to run free in the big cooler room full of beer in the back of the store. Mackenzie used to pretend she was traveling on an ocean liner, each case of beer a country. “I’m in Australia,” she’d say, sitting on a case of Foster’s.

  She watched as Sam rearranged all the bottles by their height, and wondered how many of those her father had stolen. The first thing he took, right after Alexander had died, was a miniature of Tanqueray from one of the stores he used to own, its tiny red seal and ribbon in place.

  Sam examined a bottle of gin.

  “Sloe berries,” Mackenzie said.

  Her father smiled at her. “Do you remember all of them?”

  “A lot of them, anyway.”

  “I remember when you were doing photography for the Smithsonian, you brought me liquors I’d never even heard of one Christmas. Made from plants I’d never heard of.”

  She remembered too. The last Christmas they were all together.

  “Last year,” she said.

  “That boy in New Jersey,” Jams said, “was talking to his girlfriend on the phone. She heard a loud crackle, like static, and then silence. No screams or anything. No pain. I was glad to learn that.”

  “I was thinking we’d go to the Barnsider for dinner,” Mackenzie said.

  “Key West.”

  “What?”

  “It’s not the Barnsider anymore. It’s a Mexican place now. Key West.”

  Alexander had taken her to the Barnsider on her eighteenth birthday and bought her her first legal drink. It was a Cape Cod, cranberry juice and vodka, and it came in an oversized tumbler. There were baskets of peanuts on the table and everyone threw the shells on the floor. Her brother had looked at her, and clinked his glass to hers. “Eighteen more,” he’d said. “And we’ll come right back here in eighteen years to drink to eighteen more,” Mackenzie had made him promise.

  “No more peanuts on the tables?” she asked her father.

  “Chips. Like Doritos. And salsa for dipping.”

  “I won’t go there, then,” Mackenzie said.

  “The food’s not bad,” her father said.

  Mackenzie began to cry. She wanted her father to put on his real shoes. She wanted to be in their house, to have Alexander drive up in his Mustang and take her to the Barnsider.

  “Hey,” Jams said.

  He got up and went over to her. She pushed her face against her father’s stomach, a small white button on his shirt pressing into her cheek.

  “I want Sam to know what it was like,” she said.

  “What?”

  “What it used to be like,” Mackenzie said.

  CHAPTER NINE

  THE NEXT DAY MACKENZIE and Sam ate chowder and clamcakes on the breakwall that stretched from the beach into the sea. Between the rocks, the water swirled a dark green. They huddled together, an old plaid blanket from Aunt Hope’s around them. A large ship sat on the water, as if frozen to the horizon.

  “I wish I had my camera,” Mackenzie said.

  Sam slurped his chowder.

  “Your daddy and I used to come and sit out here,” she said. “Grandma and Grandpa would wave to us from the shore. Every time we’d turn around, they’d be there waving. We used to try to see if we could catch them not looking. But we never did.”

  Sam turned toward the shore, as if expecting them to be there.

  “Do you know what a cocoon is, Sam?”

  He lifted his face to hers and nodded.

  “I feel like I lived in a cocoon. All of us did. And when Alexander died, it was as if we were all forced out. Grandma said that was the final straw. But to me, it was the first and most awful thing. Everything else was like an adventure. It didn’t seem so bad.” She thought of Aunt Hope and Ricardo Havana in his big convertible. They used to let her sit on the top of the back seat and wave to passing cars like she was a beauty queen in a parade.

  Sam looked out at the ship.

  “Come on,” Mackenzie said, helping Sam to his feet. “Let’s walk on the beach.”

  They made their way off the breakwall. Mackenzie kept her eyes on Sam’s sandy Nikes. He clutched the blanket around him like an Indian chief. Once off the wall, they followed the shoreline. The waves were small and gray. The sea foam soaked into the sand, eating their footprints as they walked.

  Sam stopped and bent down to pick a stone out of the sand at the water’s edge. It was shaped like an egg. He brushed the sand from it. Veins of pink ran through the off-white. Sam held it up and licked the salt from it. Head bent, he ran ahead of Mackenzie and picked up more stones. Some, after he studied them, he threw back into the ocean. Watching him, Mackenzie remembered Alexander doing the same thing, on this very beach. He used to skim stones across the water’s surface. He could make them dance, touching down three or four times before they sank.

  She thought of Jason, back in New York. She had promised to bring him here someday, when her mother came back and things were normal again. She had told him about the famous Porter turkey dinners that they had on special occasions. Mackenzie made sweet potatoes with Kahlua and marshmallows. Jams had a secret recipe for stuffing with apricots, Grand Marnier, and raisins. “That’s what we’ll make when you come,” she’d told Jason, “our special Porter turkey dinner.” “I’ll bring string beans,” he’d said, “made in a casserole with Lipton mushroom soup and fried onion rings. That’s my specialty.” “That’s all right,” Mackenzie had said, laughing. “You don’t have to bring anything.”

  Sometimes, when Mackenzie thought about her family, she wondered if the warmth she had felt between them had been real. Or was it something she imagined now to sustain her? If it had been as wonderful as she remembered, how could it all fall apart so quickly? Mackenzie shook her head. Her breath came out in streams of whitish gray air. It had been real, she told herself. She looked around her at all the familiar things on this beach. The saltwater taffy shop. The seafood restaurant. The distant lighthouse. She had come here often to be healed, not only after Alexander had died, but earlier, for broken hearts, decisions, and lost friendships.

  Sam ran back to her, his red scarf coming loose from his neck, one end dangling longer than the other. Smiling, he dropped a dozen stones into her hands.

  “For me?” she said.

  He nodded.

  They were all worn smooth from the waves beating against them. Mackenzie ran her fingers over a black triangular-shaped one.

  “Stones,” she said, “are a wonderful gift because they last forever.”

  Mackenzie filled her coat pockets with the stones, and pulled Sam close to her. His cheeks were red and cold.

  They turned away from the ocean and began to walk back to the car. A seagull squawked overh
ead. Sam raised his head and watched as it cut into the gray winter sea air in a perfect arc.

  Mackenzie’s grandfather had died long before she was born. He appeared in his World War I uniform, sepia toned and starched, on the mantel, and in an oval wedding picture, standing straight beside Grammie, whose hair fell to her shoulders in soft ripples. Great-uncle Bill, Grandpa’s brother, spent his life winning and losing fortunes. There was a story that he had been in love once, but the woman had left him for another man. He lived a wild life, trying to forget her. The way Uncle Bill did that was by drinking too much and going to Las Vegas to gamble and pick up showgirls. Alexander had discovered this by finding a five-by-seven picture of Uncle Bill with a leggy blonde in a red sequined leotard and gold feathers in her hair. The woman’s name was Gigi and she sent Uncle Bill postcards. One of them had a donkey on the front and said “I lost my ass in Las Vegas.” That was Alexander’s favorite. Mackenzie liked the one that had a hot pink kiss imprint on the front. When he wasn’t in Las Vegas, Uncle Bill hung around with Ricardo Havana. “This behavior,” Grammie told him, “has to stop.” “We’re only going bowling,” he used to say.

  In the end, it had been Uncle Bill who told Aunt Hope that Ricardo Havana had another wife and three daughters in Miami. By then, the Havana Hoochie-Coo’s had split up and John-Glenn was born. Aunt Hope took the baby and moved into the basement of the Porter house. For a while, Ricardo stood on the front lawn and serenaded her, trying to get her back. But she never spoke to him again.

  Uncle Bill drove Ricardo back to Miami to meet up with his other family. Steamer trunks full of the Hoochie-Coo’s costumes—blue velvet tuxedos and ruffled shirts—and various musical instruments crowded the back seat. Despite the cold January morning, both Bill and Ricardo wore brightly colored Hawaiian shirts, decorated with parrots and hula girls.

  “They’re bombed already,” Alexander had said.

  He stood with Mackenzie and watched from an upstairs window as Bill and Ricardo packed the car.

  “We can all forget the name Ricardo Havana,” he added.