Waiting to Vanish

by Ann Hood

Ursula frowned, disappointed with the story. She bent her head and avoided his eyes while she finished her meal. He watched her eat the green Jell-O with white grapes, her bites small and precise. She had, he expected, wanted a story of abuse. Jay’s father beating up on the boys or the dog, maybe. But despite her disappointment, Jams felt exhilarated. The story had unfolded in his brain like a home movie. The dog, Tops, licking his lips and growling softly, the way the bam smelled, a horse’s tail swishing against its stall, and then the sound of more rain, falling hard and smelling like springtime.

  There were times when he could completely recall his childhood room, right down to the bed with the scratchy white sheets that smelled of bleach and the sheer curtains against a window that had one cracked pane forever.

  But from the day he arrived in South Station in Boston to help his Uncle Andrew with his liquor stores until the day that Alexander died seemed like a pleasant, fuzzy dream. Images and events blurred together and he could not distinguish one from the other. Certainly he had felt love for his wife, and joy when his children were born, and pride as his business grew, but all the emotions seemed jumbled to him.

  He could recall easily the phone call and what followed became marked and clear, like his boyhood memories. One Christmas, Daisy had given them a cribbage board that was like a maze, the holes a twirling spiral, and that was what they were doing when the call came. He and Cal were playing cribbage with that board. They had eaten pork roast stuffed with apricots and prunes for dinner. Or perhaps it was roast beef. A roast, anyway.

  “Let’s have a big barbecue here on the Fourth of July,” Cal had said. “Sam will be up and Mackenzie will be back from New Zealand.”

  Maybe he had suggested the barbecue. Jams wasn’t really sure. He remembered someone suggesting it, looking at his cards, and the phone ringing. All of that as if it were one movement instead of three separate ones. A man’s voice, high and thick with a Boston accent, told him then that Alexander was dead. “Do you,” the man had said, “know one Alexander Porter.” The r’s had come out like sighs. Ah.

  In that instant, Jams’s senses woke up, as if from a long sleep. They jumped to life and assaulted every part of him. The taste of the sweet fruit he had eaten turned sour in his throat. The pendulum on the grandfather clock swung in slow motion, its large black hands pointing to eight-twenty. Cal leaned toward him.

  “What?” she said. “What?”

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Porter,” the policeman said. Behind the voice, Jams heard a typewriter clacking.

  And then Jams thought of all the things he hadn’t told his son. How, when he was a boy in Pennsylvania and he worked in his father’s hardware store, his hands would turn black from counting and sorting nails. They turned black and smelled like metal. And that once his family had been snowed in for a week. Just when they managed to get out, an ice storm came and turned the entire town into a crystal palace.

  When Alexander was in junior high, he entered a statewide social studies fair. He had chosen Italy for his project. For weeks he’d researched it, bringing every new piece of information to Jams like it was a wonderful discovery. The largest cities. Its imports and exports and natural resources, ITALY, he had stenciled on the poster board, RICH IN ART AND HISTORY. Jams had helped him make the map, using colored rice to make it 3-D. Italy was a pale yellow boot, the Alps rose red and high in the north, and the Mediterranean stretched out. in grains of food colored blue.

  “I have to know everything about it,” Alexander told him every night, “for the oral presentation.”

  And Jams quizzed him, over and over. Capital city, largest city, bordering nations.

  In the end, Alexander won first place along with a girl whose map of Hawaii included a bubbling volcano.

  For years, like a ritual, Jams would ask Alexander when he called, “Capital city?”

  “Rome. Roma.”

  “Language?”

  “Italian.”

  “Founders?”

  “Romulus and Remus.”

  But never, Jams thought, had he told him the things that mattered.

  He considered saying this to Ursula, telling her about the unimportance of Italy, the importance of snow and metal. But she had slipped away, unnoticed. A smear of green Jell-O lay on the table.

  Jams hated going back to the house. But once a month he had to go there to pick up the rent check from Patty. He feared that he would walk in and horrible memories would come to him in vivid detail. Tonight he drove over after dinner.

  Patty insisted he stay for a drink. “To warm you up,” she said. She had thick curly hair that extended outward and formed a triangle in the back. She had hung studio portraits of her wedding and the children at various stages of their lives so far, all over the family room walls. As Cal would have said, Patty was not a woman of taste. Jams hated to sit there, surrounded by those pictures of strangers. In one picture Patty stood in front of a silver jet in her stewardess uniform. It was bright blue with tiny airplanes on it. Her hair was cut like some ice skater’s he had seen once. “That was right before my first flight,” Patty said. “Don’t I look terrified?” He nodded. “And this is Jolie when she was two …” She took him through a tour of each picture, wedding and children’s bath time, vacations and picnics. All the time Jams smiled and nodded, waiting for the perfect moment to get out of there, away from Patty and her smiling family.

  It wasn’t until he got back to his building that he realized he’d forgotten the check. He stood in the parking lot, paralyzed. He did not want to go back to that house. He inhaled, smelled snow. Across the lot he watched two figures approaching and sighed with relief when he saw it was Mackenzie and Sam. Good, he thought, happy for the reason to skip the trip back to Patty’s.

  “I smell snow,” he said to them.

  Mackenzie looked beautiful, he thought, in the cold air and lamplight.

  He held a hand under Sam’s chin. “We’d get snow up to here when I was a boy. In Pennsylvania.”

  “He needs stimulation,” Mackenzie said.

  “Like a good snowfall?”

  She frowned at him. “To talk. He needs stimulation to talk. Daisy leaves him alone, by himself. That’s not going to get him talking. He needs to be shown things. Reminded of things.”

  Jams shrugged. Sometimes, he thought, it’s not such a good thing to be reminded of the past.

  “I believe with the right stimulation, Jams …”

  “Do you think,” Jams said, “that nuclear explosions could affect the snowfall?”

  “When I take him back I’m going to talk to his speech therapist. I know what he needs.”

  Sam started sliding on the ice, his arms held out into the air.

  “All he needs,” Mackenzie continued quietly, “is to be stimulated the right way. When he saw Alexander’s grave—”

  “You didn’t take him there, did you?”

  “He wanted to go. We can’t keep pretending that Sam doesn’t have feelings about his father. About Alexander.”

  “When my grandfather died,” Jams said, “they showed the body right in our living room. My brother and I were told to stay in our rooms. But of course we crept downstairs in the middle of the night, after all the people had gone home. He was there in a coffin lined in powder-blue silk and he looked like a statue in a wax museum we had gone to in Philadelphia. That museum had wax statues of Benjamin Franklin and all the presidents. ‘He looks like John Quincy Adams,’ my brother whispered. Then we ran back upstairs and put all the lights on because we were so afraid.”

  “Well, Sam wasn’t afraid. He was emotional.”

  Sam had slid away from them, and now he made figure eights back to them.

  “I know,” Jams said to Mackenzie, “how hard it’s been on you.”

  Sam reached them and bowed elaborately.

  “Wonderful,” Jams said, applauding.

  Mackenzie looked at him, impatient. As a child she used to ask him every morning, “Is it tomorrow now?”

 
; “I’ve got something I want to show you,” he said. “Upstairs.”

  “So what do we do?” Mackenzie said.

  “You’ll tell Daisy when you see her. About stimulation. About Alexander.”

  “A lot of good that’ll do,” she said.

  Mackenzie hung back for a moment. Jams turned to her.

  “I hope it’s so,” he said. “I hope he’s getting ready to talk. I want to know what happened that day. Just like you do.”

  The ride in the elevator was silent. Sam closed his eyes and felt the numbers in braille.

  “This came in the mail today,” Jams said once they were inside his apartment.

  Mackenzie and Sam stood in the little hallway. Jams could smell the sea on them.

  “You were at the beach,” he said.

  Sam stood on tiptoes to see the postcard he had handed Mackenzie.

  She turned to the back immediately.

  “Nothing,” she said, holding up the blank message space. “Only her initials again.”

  Sam took it from her and studied the front. There was a picture of the arch in St. Louis. Sunlight sparkled off it. In red letters it said, GATEWAY TO THE WEST. A fat red cardinal perched on the word WEST, a baseball bat poised for a hit in his wings. In the distance, the Mississippi River curved.

  “Oh, no,” Jams said. “There’s a message there.”

  Sam looked at him, surprised. The boy turned the card over.

  “Take your coats off,” Jams said. “I’ll make some hot chocolate if you don’t mind the instant kind. Your mother would never stand for it. But …” He held his hands up.

  Mackenzie and Sam dropped their coats on the couch and sat next to each other. Sam held the postcard.

  “St. Louis,” Mackenzie said, then noticed the postmark also said St. Louis.

  Jams put three cups of hot chocolate on the table. A big marshmallow floated on top. The cups all said I LOVE BOSTON, with a red heart.

  “She’s going west,” Jams said.

  “She’s been out west,” Mackenzie said. “She’s sent Aunt Hope postcards. Mount Rushmore. Hollywood. All of it.”

  “Your mother,” he said, blowing on his cocoa, “is a poet. She likes to speak in symbols. Metaphors. It used to drive me crazy, trying to figure out what she meant. When she found out she was pregnant the first time, she told me by serving pickles and vanilla ice cream for dessert.”

  “So?”

  “So have I heard from her in months?”

  Mackenzie shook her head.

  “Now I get this postcard. Gateway to the West. It’s not a coincidence that it says that. It’s her way of telling me she’s going west.”

  “But she’s already been there.”

  Sam fished the marshmallow out of his cup and sucked on it. A thin stream of chocolate ran down his hand.

  “I think,” Jams said slowly, “that she plans on staying there.”

  He heard panic in Mackenzie’s voice. “Where? St. Louis?”

  Jams shrugged. “Maybe. Probably further west. I don’t know exactly.”

  “But she’ll come back,” Mackenzie said.

  “Mackenzie,” Jams said, “when she left I told you I didn’t think she’d be back.”

  “You’re wrong,” she said. She slumped back against the couch.

  Sam held his sticky hand into the air, waving it. Jams wrapped a paper napkin around it.

  He looked at his daughter, her hair tangled from the wind, her eyes blazing turquoise, and wished that she would never again be hurt. He wanted to keep her safe in that blurry world he’d created for them long ago. People used to say that she led a charmed life. “Everything she touches,” a college friend had said, “turns not to gold, but to platinum.” And suddenly everything was turning rusty.

  “Jams,” she said, “wouldn’t she call?”

  “She will, sweetie,” he said. “But I want you to be prepared.”

  Mackenzie smiled, a small, sad smile.

  “You’ll see,” she said. “She’ll come home.”

  In the air, Sam drew a big, invisible arch.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  DAISY HAD DEVELOPED A lot of marketing techniques to increase her sales of makeup. For one thing, she thought everything should be color coordinated to match the soft pink cosmetic cases and brochures. She always wore either a pink knit dress or fuchsia spandex pants with a satin blouse. She even served Entenmann’s raspberry coffee cake to carry through with the color motif. Another thing she did was, to dab the company’s own perfume on all the light bulbs,, which sent the aroma throughout the room. On a tour once of the mansions in Newport, Daisy had heard that Mrs. Vanderbilt always rubbed her perfume into the lights before a party. To Daisy, her makeup demonstrations were an event.

  Daisy smiled at the four women sitting at her dining room table. They all lived in her condominium unit.

  “For daytime,” Daisy said, “we can offer you an entire array of soft colors.” She opened a sample case of Rose Whisper blush.

  “Now this,” she continued, leaning toward one of the women, “is perfect for you.” Recently, Daisy’s voice had picked up the slightest hint of a twang, as if she really came from Maryland or Virginia.

  “I don’t know,” the woman said. “I usually only wear lip gloss during the day.” Her hair was cut like Dorothy Hamill’s.

  Daisy smiled. She knew the woman would end up buying the entire daytime line. She had a knack for sizing her customers up and zeroing in on exactly what they would buy.

  “I know you aren’t used to wearing a lot of makeup during the day,” Daisy said, “but just let me put a dab of this on you and I guarantee you will change your mind forever.” Daisy had on a gold headband across her head with tiny gold leaves dangling from it. The leaves chimed softly as she brushed the blush on the woman’s cheekbones. “Why shouldn’t you look beautiful all day long?” Daisy asked her.

  The other women craned to watch.

  Daisy opened more cases.

  “Now,” she said, “a touch of this.”

  The woman blinked rapidly as the brushes stroked her lids and lashes.

  “I can see a difference already,” Daisy said.

  One of the women stood close behind Daisy. She was pregnant, her face slightly blotchy. The skin care line, Daisy had thought when the woman arrived. Now she stood, spilling coffee cake crumbs onto the floor.

  “Meg,” she said, “you look amazing.”

  “Really?” Meg reached for the mirror.

  Daisy grabbed her wrist.

  “Not yet,” she said. “Not until I’m finished.” She could feel their excitement. When she finished with Meg, they would be like schoolchildren—“Do me next. Me next.” Daisy smiled at the women. “We want to really wow Meg,” she said.

  The tall one with long straight hair and tinted aviator glasses nodded.

  “Right,” she said.

  Daisy loved to work on women who wore glasses. She liked to use the disco line on them—glittery blush and copper eye shadows. Already she could envision how this one would look.

  “Not too much lipstick,” Meg said.

  Daisy wet a brush. “Lip gloss is for little girls,” she said. “Women need color. If you wear nothing else, promise me you will wear lipstick. Promise me you will never leave the house without putting on the lips.”

  The women laughed.

  “I mean it,” Daisy said. “You never know who you’ll run into, even at the supermarket. Why, I know someone who saw Richard Gere in a Safeway once and had to run the other way because she forgot her lips.”

  The telephone rang, startling all of them.

  Damn, Daisy thought. The mood was broken. She heard it break, in a series of sighs, chairs creaking as the women settled back down.

  She looked right at Susan, the one wearing glasses.

  “You have got to promise me that you won’t let Meg look.”

  “Please,” Meg said, “let me.”

  The phone rang a third time.

&
nbsp; “I need a promise here,” Daisy said, clutching the round silver hand-mirror to her chest.

  “All right,” Susan said.

  Daisy picked up the phone mid-ring.

  She knew, even before Mackenzie spoke, that it was her, checking in, being considerate.

  Daisy tried to picture Mackenzie, her blonde hair falling around her shoulders. She thought of a weekend she and Alexander had spent with Mackenzie when she lived in Washington, before they’d moved there. A short, pale peach kimono hung on a hook behind the bathroom door in Mackenzie’s apartment. Its sash hung down, as if pointing to the pair of frayed ballet slippers on the floor below it. The slippers were scuffed and worn, not from dancing but from shuffling around the apartment. The robe and slippers had seemed perfectly placed there, like Mackenzie herself. Daisy had seen them and put them on while Alexander and his sister ate nachos and drank piña coladas in the living room. The slippers had been too small for Daisy and she had been able to just press her toes into them. She had wrapped the robe around her. In its pocket, she found the silver back of an earring and an empty matchbook from a restaurant. F. Scott’s, it said in silver against a shiny black background. She tried to imagine herself at such a place. It conjured images of blue smoke and Sinatra music and beautiful people. Finally, Alexander had shouted to her, “Hey, did you fall in or something?” and she had scrambled out of the robe, dropping its sash to the floor.

  Mackenzie appeared to her now in that pastel kimono and worn slippers, even though those things had been very old when Daisy last saw them.

  “There’s snow everywhere and in town they’ve hung those awful Christmas decorations across Linden Street,” Mackenzie was saying. “You know the ones I mean? They’re made of that squishy green stuff and there’s bells hanging in the middle.”

  Daisy didn’t answer.

  From the other room she heard Meg say, “Will Brian think it’s too much?”

  And another voice, “He’s going to love it.”

  “Daisy?” Mackenzie said.

  “I’m here.”

  “Listen,” Mackenzie said, “I’ll bring Sam back Christmas Eve. Something’s come up.”

  “But you were going to keep him through the holidays.” Daisy struggled for an image of Sam. She could not even remember what his voice had sounded like. He had been a pilgrim in his first grade play. He had put a tiny black shoe topped with a construction-paper buckle on top of a papier-mâché rock and he had said something. But in her memory of that day, Sam only moves his mouth silently.